20/20

by Carl Goodman

  ‘Medical facilities?’ Sutton drawled, foot on her desk and a look of irritable scepticism drawn over her face.

  ‘I know, ma’am,’ Eva said, ‘but think about it from the perspective of an absence of facts.’

  ‘What?’

  Eva slumped down in the chair in front of Sutton’s desk without being invited to sit. ‘There is damn-all evidence at the crime scenes apart from a body. No DNA, no secondary indicators aside from one droplet of blood found on the screw thread of a mineral water bottle. Okay, so we got bike tracks and a few footprints at the first scene but we haven’t even found out where he got the van from yet. This guy understands clinical hygiene, he is meticulous. It’s a risk assessment, ma’am. We will not catch him based on material already gathered before he kills again.’

  Sutton glowered. ‘You think he will?’

  ‘He’s running rings around us. Why wouldn’t he?’

  Sutton did not comment for a while. ‘Tell me about your medical facility idea,’ she said after she had time to think about Eva’s pronouncement.

  ‘It’s the women,’ Eva said, ‘the most recent two anyway. We can either say the killings are completely random, opportunistic in some way we don’t understand yet, or we can assume there is some connection between them that we simply haven’t uncovered. Irina Stepanov and Jodie Swain do have a couple of things in common. They were both in their mid-forties and they were both good-looking. They took care of themselves.’

  ‘The earlier three were all in their early twenties or thereabouts.’

  ‘Another point of difference.’ She held her hand up before Sutton could object. ‘I know. The most likely explanation is still that our killer’s progressed and that maybe he’s switched fixations. All the same he appears to be murdering to type. His current type is attractive women in an older age group.’

  ‘You’ve only got two murders to base that on.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am; we can review the theory the next time he kills.’

  Sutton sighed. ‘I’m not on your back about this yet, but Borough Command are going to be on mine. The media are sniffing around too. They don’t know anything yet, but it’s only a matter of time. I don’t want us to look like we don’t have anything, especially as we don’t. So where are you going with this?’

  ‘I’ve got Jamie Newton building a database of medical facilities in a twenty-mile radius. I’m taking a bit of a gamble, but I’ve got him looking at anything that involves elective procedures first,’ she saw Sutton’s eyebrow rise, ‘what you might class as cosmetic surgery, but in any event not NHS surgical procedures. Botox, facelifts, any kind of plastic surgery. That’s a guess, ma’am, just based on the fact both victims were pretty well off.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to get that sort of information from the victim’s families?’

  ‘It would be, and I have Raj on that. The problem is Grigori Stepanov has gone to ground and Jodie Swain’s partner is out of the country. We’ll contact him, but in fairness we need to get him back here with counselling support before we can start asking those kinds of questions.’

  ‘GPs?’

  ‘Wren says no reason they would know about elective procedures.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Sutton’s knuckles whitened as she gripped the handle of her crutch. ‘It’s a fucking nightmare. So what about the suspects from the previous killings?’

  ‘We’ve tentatively eliminated some of them. We have a few more to evaluate.’

  ‘Make it a priority.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Your priority,’ Sutton reiterated. ‘No, I’m not being a pain in the arse for the sake of it. I know you don’t think much of them as suspects. Truth is neither do I, but they’re all we’ve got right now. If they’re not in the frame then let’s know that and be done with them, because we need to move faster. Any day now the media are going to get their hands on this. And when they do, all hell is going to break loose.’

  Chapter Seven

  That night Eva forced herself to watch the movie again. She remembered the first time she had seen it, in a lecture on the psychology of cinema. The media studies module had turned out to be a distraction from her computing degree, and so she dropped it before her second year, but the classes she attended had proven thought-provoking.

  Un Chien Andalou had been called the most famous short film ever made, even though it was Luis Buñuel’s first movie. Along with Salvador Dalí and Federico Lorca, he had been at the heart of the Spanish surrealist movement, and released it in 1929 to unexpected acclaim. An unsettling and bizarre collection of sequences, it had no plot and relied heavily on Freudian symbolism. The narrative flow had been described as ‘dream logic’, although to Eva it seemed more like a nightmare.

  She could understand why somebody at the station had drawn a comparison between it and the earlier killings. Both seemed like the work of a madman. Buñuel had called it ‘basically no more than a desperate, impassioned call for murder’. What did it mean? Why did the sequence between the man, Buñuel himself, and the young woman provoke such revulsion? Perhaps it was the shocking detail. It seemed like a window into the mind of a psychopath.

  Eva searched online for an unedited version. It only took her a few moments. The movie appeared to have been restored. She settled down in front of her laptop to watch as a young man, dressed in a nun’s habit, fell off his bike for no apparent reason in front of the young woman’s apartment. When he next appeared, dressed in a more conventional suit, ants chewed their way out of a hole in his hand. In the street below a malevolent and disapproving crowd of onlookers surrounded a short-haired, almost androgynous woman, who turned over a dismembered hand with a cane. Eventually, a policeman dismissed them, but the woman, wearing a wistful expression, stayed standing in the middle of the road until a car ran over her. Clearly excited by the sight of death, in the apartment above the young man molested the young woman’s breasts and buttocks until she forced him away with an axe.

  More bizarre, incoherent sequences that served to both confuse and shock. A murder with guns where the victim reappeared by the side of a stream and pawed at a naked woman’s back. The corpses of two rotting donkeys stuffed into two grand pianos, two bound priests dragged by ropes, a death’s-head moth crawling the wall of the apartment, a man with no mouth stealing hair from the armpit of the young woman.

  Above them all though, the scene of Buñuel sharpening his cut-throat razor, watching the shadow of a cloud pass across the moon and then in close-up slicing in half the eye of the compliant young woman, camera lingering on the ooze of vitreous humour as it spilled down her face.

  Eva knew Buñuel had used a dead calf, skin bleached, to create the illusion. Of course it had shocked, she thought as she watched the razor split the eye, because emphasised by skilful editing it was still one of the most disgusting images in the whole of cinematic history. But did it tell her anything?

  She closed the lid of her laptop. More than ever, Un Chien Andalou left her convinced that, grotesque as the murders of Stepanov and Swain had been, they had been committed by a rational individual. The other women though, the earlier victims, those of the eye-slicer, as Moresby had called him. They were not the work of a sane person, not of anyone who even came close to that description. Somewhere, Eva thought as she turned out her light, a monster was hiding, waiting to be set loose once again.

  * * *

  At eight o’clock the next morning they gathered in the incident room once more. Although she still found it hard to agree with Sutton’s assertions about a connection with the old case, Eva could not fault the job the three detective sergeants had done in collating the available information. She stood in front of the boards and studied them. She made certain her satisfaction showed in her body language.

  Three victims. Before anything else Eva memorised the names. Kelly Gibson, Olivia Russell and Grace Lloyd, all killed in their homes, all mutilated, all approximately within a three-month time-frame which was slightly under four years ago no
w. Yes, to be sure the killer had sliced their eyes open, Eva noted as she looked at the photos, and the reference to Un Chien Andalou seemed accurate albeit in a frivolous way, but this killer had gone further. The murders themselves, the final act of killing, had been committed with a soft, blunt instrument. The forensics report had speculated that it might have been something akin to a rubber mallet. The victims had been pounded to death. How different could that have been to Irina Stepanov’s murder, Eva wondered? The careful, controlled sedation, stunning, and then binding her to prevent a struggle, the meticulous way in which she had been cut?

  And then, with the earlier cases, the mutilations had begun. When she examined the rest of the details she came to understand why Sutton believed the old murders might be connected to the most recent killing. She understood, although she still did not agree. Lengthwise cuts, striations almost, that ran in some instances from just below the eyes down to the feet. Aesthetic murders, Eva decided. Somebody had cut the bodies open in an almost artistic fashion. Sure, the approach might be confused with that of Irina Stepanov’s, but the motive was clearly not the same.

  Eva looked at the room. Three detective sergeants overloaded with work, under-resourced and under pressure. None of them were bad cops. She doubted Sutton was a bad cop despite Hadley’s vindictive investigation. She had already seen their records before she had come within a mile of Kingston. None of them were stupid. She needed to steer them. She would not do that by ordering them around.

  The room was large enough, and apart from the boards already covered with information, three more whiteboards were parked up against a wall. Eva dragged one over to where the team had set up the other boards, found a marker and drew a long horizontal line. She dropped her jacket on a chair and rolled up the sleeves of her blouse.

  ‘Before we get into the evidence,’ she told them, ‘I just want to think about our killer. For the minute let’s just assume the same guy did all these. What is he?’ She saw the look on their faces. They were not rejecting her approach, not yet anyway. They simply did not understand it. ‘I want us to profile the guy we’re looking for.’

  ‘We haven’t got a profiler,’ Flynn said.

  Eva grinned. ‘Are you telling me you’ve never wanted to figure out how a five-hundred-quid-a-day psychologist earns their keep? This isn’t rocket science. Let’s take a tilt. At this end of the line,’ she drew an asterisk on the right-hand side of the white board, ‘we have a total psychopath. Complete nut-job, away with the fairies, voices in the head, the full eye-slicer profile.’ She moved to the other side of the board. ‘So what’s at this end?’

  She saw Flynn’s eyes narrow. ‘Isn’t it just a nut-job, all the way across?’

  ‘Are you sure? Because I accept these killings,’ she waved at the images of the three girls, ‘look like the work of a psychopath. This one,’ she pointed at Stepanov, ‘was so meticulously planned it verged on the scientific.’

  ‘A professional hit?’ Jamie Newton wondered.

  ‘Maybe,’ Eva conceded. ‘Is a hit at the opposite end of the spectrum to the nut-job?’

  ‘I see what you’re doing,’ Raj said. ‘What’s the opposite to a psychopath?’

  She hadn’t expected Flynn to answer. Eva was surprised when she heard her reply.

  ‘Somebody with a reason, a specific reason that is. A hit’s close to that, but a hit is done for money. That’s about two-thirds of the way down the line. The opposite of a psychopath is someone with a rational motive. We just don’t get it yet.’

  ‘Absolutely spot on,’ Eva said, quietly impressed, ‘and that’s the spectrum. We need to put in a few steps in-between but this is what we need to test each piece of evidence against. Is this guy a psychopath or does he have a rational reason, however irrational it might seem to us at first?’

  Flynn glared at the board. ‘Jilted lover,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Extreme,’ Eva agreed, ‘but a good handle for the time being. Where would you put it?’ Eva deliberately held out the marker to her. Flynn hesitated, but then took it and made an asterisk about a quarter of the way along the line from psychopath.

  ‘Financially motivated,’ Jamie Newton said.

  ‘That’s pretty close to the other end, wouldn’t you say?’

  Within a few minutes they had filled their spectrum. Crude and impressionistic it might be, but at least it gave them a number of different perspectives on the murders, a set of filters through which to view the evidence. The psychopath end of the scale probably needed a few more variations, Eva thought, but she kept that to herself for the time being. ‘So tell me again about the first set of victims,’ she said.

  Gibson, Russell and Lloyd, ages, nineteen, twenty-one and twenty respectively. Attractive women, Eva thought. Sex, however twisted, surely had to be at least a consideration for a motive? Killed at home. In these cases home meant student accommodation. The one thing they all obviously had in common was that they studied at Kingston University. Gibson was reading history, Russell was about to finish a degree in graphic design and Lloyd was reading English literature. Eva skimmed the reports. It seemed as though the university connection had been thoroughly exhausted, but it would not hurt to revisit it.

  Despite the conversation she’d had with Wren, her original suspicion would not go away. It was two investigations. It had to be. She needed to inveigle that idea into the minds of the three detective sergeants, and into Sutton’s mind as well. The only way to do that was to build a case supporting a rational motive for Irina Stepanov’s killing. She was about to start exploring possibilities when one of the phones in the incident room rang.

  Flynn answered it. After a moment her face clouded. ‘A problem,’ she told Eva. ‘Grigori Stepanov is downstairs. It seems like he’s trying to tear the place apart.’

  * * *

  Never mind the killer; Grigori Stepanov looked like a complete madman. He has every right to, Eva thought as she walked up to the front counter, but it’s not helping anyone.

  Two of Moresby’s men were there. They looked ready to spread Stepanov all over the wall as soon as somebody gave them the word. Stepanov had thrown a chair at the glass screen that protected the support officer on the front desk. He was alone in the front half of the room, apart from the two constables. Anyone else who had been waiting had presumably fled when he went berserk.

  ‘I want whoever is in charge here,’ Stepanov screamed. ‘Now.’

  Eva did not flinch. She was not about to be intimidated by a grieving widower and anyway, Moresby’s men would not let any harm come to her. She leaned on the buzzer, unlocked the door and walked into the room. ‘Mr Stepanov,’ she told him, voice as cool as an autumn breeze and as formal as a judge’s verdict, ‘I’m Detective Inspector Harris. I am in charge of the investigation into your wife’s murder. Thank you for coming into the police station.’ Stepanov looked predictably incredulous. She could imagine some of the thoughts that must be churning away inside his head. ‘Would now be a convenient time to take your statement?’

  He did not know what to say, that much was obvious. She knew some part of his mind would be demanding an officer who looked more superior. He was looking for a male she expected, probably older than him, some sort of father figure to both turn to and rail against. ‘I want…’ he began, voice raised, but seemed unable to finish the sentence.

  Christ, she thought as she watched him. I know how that feels. Eva walked up to him, put her face close to his and lowered her voice. ‘I know. You want your wife back. I understand.’

  He slumped then; almost collapsed. Twenty-four hours of shock, confusion, fury and desperation exploded in that one instant and Stepanov went from raging brute to a wreck, sobbing like a child in the space of a moment. He wrapped his arms around his head and fell against the wall. He yowled. A long, almost feline cry of pain that wrenched at her gut. She reached over to him, ignored protocols and put her hand on his shoulders. He slumped again. For a moment Eva thought she would have to catch
him, but Stepanov managed to steady himself. She kept her face close to his. ‘Why don’t we sit down and talk?’

  They sat in an interview room with the door open. Moresby’s men stood outside. ‘I’m going to record this conversation,’ she told him. Stepanov glared at her, eyes wild and bloodshot like a wounded animal caught in a trap, but Eva shook her head. ‘You’re not under caution, this isn’t a formal interview. Even if you were a suspect, anything you said here would not be admissible in court. I just don’t want to miss anything, Mr Stepanov. We need every detail, every thought that crosses your mind. Can you understand that?’ Stepanov barely moved. A slim man in his forties, greying hair, dark suit that looked as though he had slept in it because he probably had, pale-lilac shirt that looked the same way. He hunched, Eva noticed. Coiled in his chair and tried to avoid touching anything as though his skin could not stand to be in contact with the world around him.

  ‘I don’t understand anything,’ he told her eventually. His breath came in fits and starts. He looked as though he were on the verge of hyperventilating.

  Of course he didn’t understand, Eva thought. Who the hell would? After a moment one of the constables brought a plastic cup filled with water, set it in front of Stepanov and then stepped outside of the room again. Stepanov stared at the cup as though it were some alien artefact. ‘What would you like to say to me, Mr Stepanov?’ Eva asked.

  A leading question, deliberately banal. She hoped he would see that. Stepanov hesitated, seemed almost ready to rant again, but then presumably realised why she had asked it. They had to start somewhere. He didn’t look up when he answered. ‘Find my wife’s killer,’ he told her. ‘Then let me alone in a room with the bastard.’

  Eva laced her hands in front of her. ‘Look,’ she told him, ‘I need to ask you the obvious questions first of all. Where you were yesterday, if you know of anyone who might want to do this?’