Skip forward eight years. To Bermondsey; the murder scene.
‘Good morrow, I am Resurrected Detective Constable Fillide Melandroni,’ said Fillide to the householder at number 33, Garton Avenue, two blocks away from the spot where Julia Penhall had died. ‘And I’m making enquiries about a suspicious death that took place near here last evening. May I ask, good madam, did you mayhap see or hear anything out of the ordinary, yesternight?’
Chapter 16
‘Is he rested? Fed? Briefed up?’ Dougie Randall asked Phil Matthews, the custody sergeant.
‘We’ve done him proud, guv,’ Phil said.
‘Who’s the brief?’
‘Sanders.’
‘Little shit.’
‘You bet.’
‘Have you –’
‘Yeah.’ Dougie had asked Phil to illegally tape the suspect’s private interview with his lawyer. ‘You want to hear it now?’ Phil asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Good night last night?’ suggested Phil.
Phil was grinning. Dougie guessed what the station gossips were saying. Last night was Wednesday, and Gina had stayed over. But in the morning she’d had engine trouble; so she and Dougie had arrived on shift together in Dougie’s car. And, of course, everyone had noticed.
Major tactical error. Damn.
‘For pity’s sake, man,’ remonstrated Dougie. ‘The bloody woman’s a dyke!’
That wasn’t in the least bit true. But it’s what most of the lads thought. And Dougie wasn’t above playing dirty to protect his own arse, if and when necessary.
Phil carried on grinning, suspecting the worst. Or, depending on your perspective, the best.
Three weeks had elapsed since Julia Penhall had been found dead in Bermondsey.
Normally Dougie didn’t take these things personally; but this time it had hit him hard. Julia’s death had depressed him. It also had made him angry. Uncontrollably so. Waves of rage swept over him relentlessly. He couldn’t focus on anything else. He wasn’t sleeping well either. Hardly at all in fact.
That’s why having Gina stay over was important to him. It meant that when he did wake up shuddering, there was someone next to him who understood what he was going through.
But though he mourned for Julia, he also admired her. Plucky bitch. To have done what she did! It took Dougie’s breath away.
Officially Julia Penhall was logged as a victim of the Embalmer, because of the spurious Facebook messages that had been posted. Textbook Embalmer MO. But she hadn’t been embalmed. Nor had she been murdered. Nor, in truth, was she a mere ‘victim’. In Dougie’s view, and in the view of most of Five squad, Julia was a hero.
Julia had died of injuries sustained while trying to escape. She’d jumped out of a fourth floor window and had crawled three blocks before the haemorrhaging in her brain had caused her to stop breathing. But before she’d breathed her last breath, she’d taken a leaf out of her sister Sarah’s book. In other words, she’d carved her killer’s name on the flesh of her own arm, in broken glass:
Gogartey kild me.
That was the clue Julia had left. Her message from the grave that had allowed them to finally crack the Love Chain Murders case.
It had taken Dougie and his team twenty days to interview and eliminate every Gogarty in Outer London and, indeed, in Demon City. It was agonisingly difficult work. But eventually, after hundreds of hours of interviews and alibi checks, they had - or so Dougie firmly believed - found their man.
Now their suspect was to be interviewed by the master himself. The man who had literally written the book on modern police interrogation techniques: Detective Superintendent Douglas Michael Randall.
It was Thursday the thirteenth of July, 2023.
‘Give,’ said Dougie. And Phil slipped him the memory stick. Dougie pocketed it.
Then he looked around the custody area, a bird peering for crumbs. Two drunks were slumped on the bench with boozy faces, nostrils clogged with blood after some late night fracas. They were flexi-cuffed and passive. A faint lilting sound could be heard from afar: a man was singing in his cell, something Welsh, it annoyed the hell out of Dougie. The big metal double doors to the custody area slid electronically open and two PCs entered. Tall bastards with broad shoulders.
They marched in, one each side of a huge sack of shit bodybuilder with bulging biceps, and a hazy smile of ecstasy.
Dougie nodded, remembering the names of the two plods – Jon Walters, and Gavin Jenkinson. Good lads.
‘Right, guv,’ said Gavin.
Dougie nodded. ‘Gav, Jon,’ he said, as if marking their register.
‘Who’s this?’
‘Docherty, Eamon,’ said Jon. He was aiming to impress. ‘Three prior convictions, two prior cautions. This bugger glassed a regular in the King’s Arms. Severe facial injuries. Victim was called Jude Phillips.’
‘Nice pub that.’
‘I never fucking meant it,’ said the bodybuilder, hazily.
‘You’re a bad boy,’ Dougie chided.
‘We can do him for steroid abuse as well as the GBH,’ suggested Jon.
‘Do you really want to?’ Dougie countered. ‘Paperwork’ll do your head in.’
‘Just the GBH then.’
‘Witnesses?’
‘CCTV.’
‘Good work.’ Dougie wagged a finger in the bodybuilder’s face. ‘Don’t do that again on my patch, okay? Not nice.’
The bodybuilder sneered. ‘Fuck you, copper.’
Dougie shrugged. ‘Send his file to me,’ he told Gavin. ‘I’ll keep a personal eye on this one.’
The bodybuilder had no idea how bad that was. He carried on smiling.
Dougie nipped into the fingerprint room and put the memory stick into his e-berry. He listened to the murmur of voices on his earpiece. It was just as he expected. Gogarty denying everything, his brief smoothly telling him to stay mute. Stay mute. Stay mute. That old refrain. But Gogarty would talk, Dougie was sure of it.
Dougie knew Sanders, Gogarty’s brief, of old. He was public school, toffee nosed, boundlessly self confident. Gogarty would hate that. Patronising too. Twice, in his private interview, Sanders suggested that Gogarty might have mental health problems and should seek a psychiatric assessment. That was a standard ruse of course, among slimy lawyers. But it wouldn’t, he was sure, work with Gogarty.
Dougie fast-forwarded until he was sure he’d squeezed the juice out of the illegal recording. Then he pocketed his e-berry, and stepped out of the fingerprint room. He saw the Chief Super at the desk, chatting to Phil Matthews. Dougie inwardly winced.
Detective Chief Superintendent ‘Roy the Boy’ Hall had once been a lean man, in his Carter Street days. But now he had a paunch which - as he often observed - he couldn’t shift. He was still elegant though, and silver-haired, and handsome, so many women said, to Dougie’s abiding dismay. He dressed well, too, in the style of an investment banker, and was always heavily cologned, though he also smelled of booze. His hands were slim and delicate and he even had manicured fingernails, which for a copper was really taking the piss.
Dougie and Roy nodded at each other, laconically, like gunfighters marking off a date in a mental calendar.
‘So. Finally! You half-soaked fucking div. You got the evil fucker,’ Roy said, in his trademark insulting manner.
‘Looks like,’ Dougie replied calmly.
‘Shooting’s too good for him,’ said Roy, inviting indiscretion.
Dougie kept a poker face.
‘Let’s just see if we’ve got the right man, eh?’ Dougie chided.
‘Whatever.’
‘I mean, we can’t take the law into our own hands.’
Roy shrugged, sceptically. ‘Need any help, Dougie?’
‘I’m fine. Let me do my thing, okay?’
‘Do I have a choice, my old mucker?’
‘Trust me on this one, guv.’
‘Just get me a result, eh? It doesn’t have to be the right one?’ Roy g
rinned, shamelessly.
Everyone knew that Roy the Boy would get a bonus if their clear up rates beat the London West tally. What’s more, cracking the Love Chain Murders case would be a major coup for him, regardless of his officially authorised bung.
But to his credit, Roy didn’t try and turn the screws on Dougie. He merely smiled and let his insatiable greed simmer as subtext.
‘I’ll keep you posted,’ Dougie said.
‘I got spies in your squad who do that. You just do your job.’ Roy’s smile didn’t falter.
Dougie knew he meant Fillide, but he had no worries on that score. Dougie never told that bitch anything.
‘As I say, I’ll keep you posted.’
Dougie walked off briskly, leaving behind him the Chief’s lingering aroma of eau de cologne, brandy, and bullshit.
Dougie exited the custody area, and briskly walked down the spartan corridor that led to the interview room. For a couple of years he’d used subsonic electronic subliminals in this area to induce paranoia in his suspects, till the legal profession got wise. Now the walls were clear of all such mind manipulation technology.
But if you looked carefully, you would observe that the wallpaper along this corridor was faintly embossed, forming several barely discernible trompe l’oeil shadows in the pattern. And if you were even more observant, you’d see that the shadowed embossments on the walls and ceilings cued perfectly to create an illusion of being trapped in a cage. Most people didn’t notice, but the just-arrested always felt subtly oppressed. It was a nice touch: décor as mind-fuck.
Furthermore the doors in this corridor were lined with lead and were frequently opened and slammed. Another cheap trick, but Dougie liked it. He’d always had a flair for showmanship.
Such mind-magic trickery wouldn’t work on Gogarty 432 though. Dougie was confident of that. This was no ordinary psycho; he was, in Dougie’s opinion, the Moriarty of serial killers.
Dougie had first clocked Gogarty 432 as potentially their man after reading a transcript of his routine interview under caution, conducted by two Whitechapel CID officers. It wasn’t so much what he said as the tone. 432 was laconic, arrogant, rude - and utterly fearless.
And, though initially he’d denied any knowledge of the Embalmer killings, Gogarty 432 had - in response to one question - listed them all in date order.
Furthermore, his psychometric questionnaire ticked every single box for latent or active psychopaths. That in itself was grounds for unease because even acknowledged serial killers would miss a box or two. Dougie deduced that 432 was showing off, by exaggerating his own psychopathy. Classic signs of a megalomaniacal manipulative mindset.
The clincher for Dougie was when they inspected CCTV footage of the Bermondsey area on the day of Julia Penhall’s death. They found an image of a man wearing a blue hoodie with the hood up hurrying through the streets, in a suspicious manner. The face was hidden, but the body language analysis gave a 62% correspondence with Gogarty 432, a prima facie ID match.
Furthermore a re-scrutiny of previous footage had revealed a man who bore a resemblance to Gogarty 432 – fat face, bags under the eyes, wearing a cap - driving a van near the Tube depot in Neasden where, two days later, the dead Matthew Baker had been Velcroed to a seat on a Circle Tube train. Two minutes after the driver in a cap had parked the van, the cameras flicked off, indicating that someone was using a surveillance jammer. Practice run: Dougie was sure of it.
All this was highly circumstantial. But Dougie had read everything there was to know about Gogarty 432. He’d accessed his emails. He’d listened to his phone calls - which were few, and none of them personal calls. He’d studied his book lists and his Kindle highlights. True crime was 432’s passion, the gorier the better. Dougie had also read the interviews with 432’s neighbours: they all considered him to be ‘creepy’ and ‘a loner’.
This was, in Dougie’s view, a sad, disturbed, potentially dangerous individual; and their best prospect by far. So Dougie had got the authorisation to make the collar.
Dougie had been there himself on the day, running behind the armed police boys as they smashed down the door of Gogarty’s gaff in Clerkenwell, after he’d failed to answer within three knocks. He’d been there to see Gogarty’s face as six burly officers in black Kevlar pointed automatic rifles at him and shouted: ‘Armed Police, Hands on Head! Get On the Floor!’
And he’d had the opportunity to study at close quarters his suspect’s response to the shock of capture, always a vital clue.
There had been no response whatsoever. Gogarty hadn’t even blinked. He’d just carried on chewing his breakfast and sipping tea.
Gina had read him the caution: ‘Brian Gogarty, I am arresting you for murder, you do not have to say anything but anything you do say will be filmed and may be shown in court.’
Gogarty sipped his tea, didn’t look up.
‘You’re under arrest, Mr Gogarty,’ Dougie informed him.
‘I guessed that much,’ Gogarty said, finally glancing upwards and casting a smile upon Dougie. ‘Listen, do you mind if I finish this? I don’t want my toast to go cold.’ And he chuckled.
Bingo, thought Dougie. You’re my man.
Once his breakfast was entirely eaten, two AFOs flexi-cuffed Gogarty. And they bundled him out of his chair.
‘You can’t prove it you know,’ Gogarty informed Dougie at the door.
‘Prove what?’
‘That I murdered all those people.’
‘Which people?’
Gogarty laughed.
‘Ah now you’re trying to trick me,’ he crowed.
Then he wept.
Tears rolled down his cheeks. His ugly fat face was red with grief and fear: ‘Oh please, please, I’m innocent, I’m an innocent man. I didn’t do it, I didn’t murder anyone, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve been fitted up.’ It was hammy as fuck but oddly compelling.
Then Gogarty lurched out of the grip of the AFOs and banged his head on the kitchen table. When he stood up his face was covered in blood. ‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me,’ he wept.
The PC with the camera kept filming, as the tears and the blood ran in rivulets down Gogarty’s face.
That would, Dougie conceded, look good for him in court.
‘Let’s go,’ Dougie said wearily.
Later still, when he’d been brought into the custody area at Whitechapel, Gogarty had visibly swaggered in front of the petty scrotes who were waiting their turn to be processed. He clearly thought he was in a different league to them all. All ears listened intently as Dougie read out the list of charges to Phil Matthews at the custody desk:
‘Seven counts of Murder, one count of Abduction, one count of Manslaughter, names as listed on your sheet, Phil,’ Dougie said.
Phil Matthews nodded, stony-faced.
Gogarty loved it. He was bloodstained, cuffed, reviled. Yet he wore a grin that threatened to split his skull. The spotlight was well and truly on him now, and he was happy as a pig in slurry. All this was symptomatic of the classic psychopathic personality mindset that Dougie knew so well.
But the interview was the key. They had no forensics, no CCTV, no witnesses, nothing to pin the killings on this particular Gogarty. They needed a confession. Without it, Gogarty would walk. And that was just the kind of challenge that Dougie relished.
Dougie slipped into Interview Room 2 and looked around. The room was a drab box, decorated in regulation magnolia with no posters on the walls, and no windows. But there were a series of small, barely visible cracks in the ceiling. Dougie had put them there himself. The cracks were a source of deep fascination if you happened to look up at them. For if you stared for long enough, you would subconsciously register they formed a sigil that was a symbol of entombment.
It’s hard not to look at a crack in the wall, if you’re trying to avoid the eyes of the bastard who’s interrogating you.
And hard, too, not to feel the psychic impress of symbols whose meaning is sta
ined in the collective unconsciousness of humankind; as Dougie, through his researches, knew such sigils to be. The overall effect was hypnotic and deeply disorientating.
Dougie stamped his way around the room, making it his own. A thing he always liked to do.
Dougie was a big man. Big feet, big hands. A large nose, what his dad always referred to as a ‘hooter’. He loomed over most people, even most coppers. His size was a great advantage to him in his line of work; suspects never expected a lumbering ox of a man like Dougie to be cunning and guileful and intellectually brilliant. But he was.
Dougie began to fiddle with the aircon. It was designed to be noiseless, so earlier that day Dougie had wedged a piece of plastic in the inner air vent to make it rattle. The rhythm of the rattling could be adjusted, by moving the bit of plastic. He moved it now, to set it at maximum rattle. Annoying as fuck. Just the way Dougie liked it.
Dougie checked the chairs. Gogarty was only five eight, so the chairs had legs that would have been well suited to a man of six foot. It would mean he couldn’t fully rest his feet upon the ground. Subliminally, it was like being suspended in air. A childifying effect.
No lawyer had ever noticed the chair trick. But then, lawyers never notice their surroundings. So clever, they are stupid; that was Dougie’s opinion of most lawyers.
Oh another nice touch: the seat of the suspect’s chair was padded with a thick cushion, but beneath the seat was a refrigerating unit. It was a chair designed to literally freeze your arse. Subliminally, of course. For the ghostly territory below the liminal was Dougie’s favourite battle ground.
The table was made of glass. It functioned as a table perfectly well in that you could put your papers on it. Or even rest your arms upon it. But no one likes a table made of glass when they are being interviewed for murder. It lacks comfort factor. And it’s reflective, too: so you can see yourself, oddly distorted, when you are trying to avoid difficult questions, and you’re tired of staring at the cracks in the walls. And the clear glass top means you have nowhere to hide your legs. Making it harder to assume a confident body posture.
The lawyer’s chair was normal size, but rested on a slight mound in the floor so as to match the suspect’s chair in height.
Hell on Earth Page 17
