The Scribe

by A A Chaudhuri

  Carver nodded and explained. ‘Professor, I need you to think. Is there anyone else, any woman you can think of, who might bear a grudge against you?’

  Stirling smiled wryly. ‘Chief Inspector, you know I’ve not got the best record with women. I’ve treated a lot of women badly over the years. Including my wife. I have a problem, an addiction, I’m not shy to admit it now. Plus, I do have temper issues, as you’ve seen for yourself on the recording. There could be any number of women who might want to get back at me. And now it appears I am paying the price.’

  His honesty was admirable. It was amazing what truths came out of men’s mouths when they were inside; no job, no marriage, no cloak to hide behind; just a man in prison clothes, suddenly craving the freedom he’d once taken for granted.

  ‘I appreciate all that, Professor Stirling. But think.’

  Stirling ran his hands through his hair, then fingered his stubble distractedly as he thought. He seemed a different man to when Carver had first met him. It was hard to believe that was less than three months ago. Finally, he shook his head. ‘I told you, I don’t know. There have been so many women over the years.’

  ‘What about larger women?’

  ‘Larger women?’

  ‘Yes. Have you ever slept with a larger woman? Suzanne’s killer was on the bulky side. With short dark hair, dark eyes. Does that make a difference?’

  The wry smile was there again. ‘Another thing I’m ashamed to admit is that I’m deeply shallow when it comes to women. I like them slim and pretty. I don’t notice the plain, overweight ones.’

  ‘I see.’ Having started to feel some sympathy for Stirling, on hearing this latest confession, Carver felt he probably deserved everything he got. If only Rachel had been there to witness his admission, maybe she’d realise her ex hadn’t been that bad after all. ‘But what about Suzanne? She didn’t exactly fit into that category.’

  ‘No, she didn’t. Suzanne was the exception, though. She was incredibly bright and witty. She made me laugh. She was a good friend. All these qualities drew me to her. She knew I could never be true to her, but she accepted that. We knew we could always rely on each other when the chips were down. We were each other’s rock, I suppose.’ He lowered his head to the floor. ‘I didn’t deserve her.’

  ‘Touching,’ Carver muttered.

  The door opened. It was Drake. ‘Sir.’

  Carver sprang up from his chair and went over to him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Turner’s team has managed to trace the virus to the same internet service provider, Virgin Media, somewhere in the Hyde Park area.’

  ‘That’s good news. They can’t narrow it down further?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What about the phone call made to Janis Stirling? Did a number show up on her statement?’

  ‘The number was withheld. BT won’t trace the call without authorisation from us.’

  ‘So, what are you waiting for? Give them authorisation!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  The killer woke early. She’d slept little, and even then, it had been patchy. It wasn’t just the howling wind and relentless rain battering her bedroom window that had caused her to toss and turn all night: it was the feeling that she was losing control; that the roles of hunter and hunted had been reversed; that Carver smelled blood and was coming for her.

  Until Suzanne, it had all been going so well; despite Maddy Kramer’s interference. She’d planned things to perfection, and her success had been exhilarating. A bit like her favourite classical composition of all time: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. His greatest piece of work as far as she was concerned. Like the great master himself, she had decided to seize fate by the throat, become a master in her own right, transform herself from a tragic, pitiful, uninspiring figure to a triumphant, venerable, talked-about one. How she’d delighted in her nickname: The Scribe. She was famous, feared, utterly fabulous.

  So unlike her life to date: dull, unremarkable. As a child, she’d spent so much of her time trying to please her hard-hearted father who had abused her from the age of three, perhaps as punishment for not being the boy he’d craved; telling her she was so unattractive, she might as well have been male.

  And then there was her beautiful, fickle mother, who’d stopped taking any interest in her only child when it became clear that looks would never be her forte. She’d had no more use for her then, preferring to lavish her attention on her stunning five-year-old niece – the spoilt little brat.

  It had made her resentful of beauty; caused her to believe that it distorted people’s perspectives; made them lose all sense of what was important; blinded them to the person behind the mask. Instead of dressing her Barbie dolls in pretty outfits, brushing their hair and painting their nails, she’d stick pins in them, twist their long blonde locks around their necks, deface their perfect faces with clown expressions, scratch their chests with the sparkly hair grips her mother had forced her to wear, but which she had loathed. Her mother had taken her to a child psychologist, but she had been as sweet as candy in his sessions, and he’d quickly surmised it was just a phase she was going through; that it would soon pass. The mutilation of Barbie dolls stopped when she was granted her wish to have cello lessons, and her mother soon forgot it had ever happened.

  After that, she’d spent most of her academic life trying to please her father and fit in wherever she went. But she’d never quite managed it. At school, she’d been bullied and teased by both sexes; at college, it was only the fat, desperate geeky boys who’d wanted to shag her; at uni, she’d retreated further into her shell – consumed by her studies and her love of classical music, fascinated by the complexities of the human mind, desperate to make sense of people, to understand what made them tick, what made them think the way they did, act the way they did. She would play her cello at night, alone in her university bedroom, while those around her got intoxicated with drink and drugs and had lots of sex. People could be so shameless, so disgusting, and it sickened her.

  She’d enrolled on the law conversion course at the academy because her lawyer father had insisted that psychology was not a proper profession. He’d indulged it as a first degree, but that was all it had been to him: an indulgence. He’d refused to finance the necessary postgraduate training for his daughter to become a clinical psychologist and had insisted that she get her act together, grow a spine and enrol at the academy. Resenting every second of her time there, she’d found herself mostly surrounded by women who made her feel inadequate, and young men who never gave her a second look.

  And then there was the handsome, charismatic professor, whom she’d developed a crush on from the first day. But who had humiliated her at the most public event of the academic year, through one of his many whores. And laughed about her behind her back with another.

  But life took a turn for the better when her mother called at the end of her first year to say that her father had died of a brain haemorrhage. She’d felt not an ounce of sorrow, just relief. And it had provided her with the chance to escape. After a few weeks of playing the grieving daughter, she’d gone to her mother, asking for the money to finance a postgraduate degree in psychology. Her mother didn’t care what her daughter did so long as she kept quiet and left her alone. She let her have the money, and three years later, the killer was a certified psychologist.

  But her time at the academy hadn’t been completely wasted. It had given her a brilliant idea, and it had led her to her partner in crime. It had inspired her to carry out a spate of murders so chilling, so brilliant, her genius would be forever etched in history. She was The Scribe, and she would no longer be the plain, dull girl in the background. She would have the last laugh.

  But Marcia Devereux blamed herself for choosing such an ambitious setting for her last kill. She’d grown cocky, and now she was paying the price. The problem was, the more she’d killed and got away with it, the more she’d wanted to push herself.

  And she h
ad wanted Suzanne to die spectacularly, because she couldn’t understand how someone like her – a fellow stout, plain spinster – had managed to stay in Stirling’s bed for so many years. The others had all been stereotypes: slim, beautiful heartbreakers; perfect women in the eyes of most men – the antithesis of her.

  She couldn’t fathom this. Psychologically, it made no sense.

  ***

  Wednesday, 10 February 2010

  ‘Why do you hang out with her? She’s so dull. Got the personality of a goldfish and, aside from her peculiarly well-manicured hands and nails, the looks of a bullfrog. She’s holding you back.’

  Sarah Morrell was sitting at a table in the far corner of the academy’s student canteen, along with Lisa Ryland, Paige Summers and Madeline Kramer. The table was strewn with annotated legal textbooks, A4 pads and several pens. Professor Stirling had split his tutor group into two groups of four for his latest assignment: a mock negotiation which both sides were to carry out in class as if they were two sets of lawyers thrashing out the terms of a legal contract in a meeting room.

  Sarah had kicked off by making her usual malicious comments, saying it was the clever hotties versus the struggling misfits, and that it didn’t take a genius to work out whose team Stirling would be keeping his eye on. While Paige and Lisa didn’t like Sarah’s remarks, they were intimidated by her, and felt it safer to keep quiet. But Maddy wasn’t one to take anything lying down. It was bad enough being forced to work with Sarah, but the day she let Sarah get away with bad-mouthing those who’d done her no wrong, was the day when hell would freeze over as far as she was concerned.

  ‘Just because Marcia’s not the smartest, or textbook beautiful, doesn’t give you the right to talk down about her. Does it, Lisa?’

  Maddy turned to Lisa and widened her eyes. ‘Er, no,’ Lisa replied half-heartedly. ‘But Marcia’s not really my friend. We happened to sit next to each other on the first day, and I sort of got lumbered with her from then on. I don’t think she’s ever had any real friends …’

  ‘Hmm, I’m not surprised,’ Sarah sniped.

  ‘And,’ Lisa said, looking at Maddy almost apologetically, ‘I kind of took pity on her. In truth, she’s a bit of a pain – so clingy. I wish she’d leave me alone sometimes; find someone more like her to hang out with.’

  ‘Why don’t you just tell her that? Or ignore her,’ Paige suggested. ‘If you let her down enough times, she’ll get the message.’

  Maddy looked at Paige crossly. ‘I can’t believe you. How can you be so heartless? Poor girl, she’s done nothing to any of you. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.’

  ‘Oh, please, pass the sick bag,’ Sarah yawned. ‘Let’s get on with this, shall we? I wish I’d fucking never said anything, particularly with you around.’ She rolled her eyes at Maddy. ‘Mother fucking Teresa. We all know you hang out with misfits.’

  ‘What misfits?’

  ‘Paul King.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Yes, P-a-u-l,’ Sarah mocked. ‘We all know he’s as gay as they come.’

  ‘So what?’ Maddy couldn’t believe she’d heard right. She tried not to explode.

  ‘I’ve got nothing against gays per se. But he’s so bloody obvious, eyeing up all the blokes on the course. Plus, I’ve seen the way he looks at Stirling. He’s got the hots for him, big time.’ She shuddered. ‘He gives me the creeps. Seems to have it in for women. Once, in the lecture room, I caught him staring right at me. His eyes were mad, like he wanted to kill me.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous.’ Maddy looked around the table for support.

  ‘Yeah, Sarah,’ Paige said. ‘I mean, I’m with you on Marcia, she’s a bit odd, but Paul’s a really nice guy. I consider him a friend, and you need to cut him some slack.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Sarah shrugged her shoulders. ‘Anyway, let’s stop wasting our time on those losers and get on with this. I don’t just want to win; I want to slaughter them.’

  The four girls put their conversation, and all thoughts of Marcia and Paul, to the back of their minds and knuckled down to the task Professor Stirling had set them. In fact, it was a conversation they soon forgot and never spoke of again.

  But it was a conversation the person sitting at a table the other side of the paper-thin wall would never forget; a conversation which had felt like a knife being plunged into her heart, causing her immeasurable pain and humiliation; a conversation which had enraged her, made her think back to all those airhead Barbie dolls whose chests she’d ripped apart with every morsel of hate and envy running through her veins.

  A conversation forever engraved on Marcia Devereux’s mind, and which she later relayed to the person whose help she needed to make sure those women never hurt women like her again.

  Or tempt men like the professor again.

  Or live to bear children who’d behave just like them, all over again.

  The vicious circle of victimisation had to be stopped.

  ***

  14 January 2015

  Wednesday morning. It was only 7 am but Marcia had been up for hours. She picked up the phone, dialled the number from memory. After six rings, it went through to voicemail. Damn. She left a message, her voice uncharacteristically fraught. ‘We need to get rid of the evidence. Quickly. I’ll be at the base from 10 am. Meet me there as soon as you can. And text me to say you got this and that you’re coming.’

  Everything needed to be destroyed: the hard drive, the printer, the phone, any tangible evidence that could possibly link them to the murders.

  ***

  Maddy listened to the message, then hung up, trying to make sense of what she’d heard.

  She’d felt guilty about faking a sickie the day before and had risen at 6.30 with the intention of being in her office by eight. She’d been making a coffee when Paul’s phone had started to ring. There wasn’t a peep from his room. He’d worked a late shift at the bar the night before, and so the sound of his all-too-familiar ringtone was not something she’d expected to hear at seven in the morning, shattering the silence.

  It had been coming from the hallway, and she’d gone to answer it, thinking he must have left it there by mistake when he’d got in. She’d also been curious to know who could be ringing at this early hour and had feared it could only have been bad news.

  Having followed its ring to where it was lying flat on the hall table, she’d hesitated to answer when she saw from the caller ID that it was “Marcia”. By the time she’d finally picked it up, it was too late, and the caller had rung off.

  Her conversation with Evelyn still fresh in her mind, Maddy had naturally assumed it was Marcia Devereux, Paul’s therapist, and the same strange girl who’d been in their tutor group at the academy. She knew it was wrong to listen to the message, but curiosity had overwhelmed her. There was so much Paul hadn’t told her, and he’d been acting so strange and overly secretive of late.

  And now, having heard Marcia’s message, Maddy was filled with alarm as she recalled Carver’s text of yesterday afternoon, informing her of Carroll’s death.

  What did Marcia mean by “evidence”?

  Carver had explained how Carroll had suffered a massive heart attack in hospital, that he believed the killer had got to her, and that he was now almost certain the killer was female, the last person to have seen her alive being a woman dressed as a nun. Almost certainly it was the same nun spotted in Hampton Court Maze shortly before Carroll was attacked. He’d told Maddy that for now, the police were keeping this information quiet, not wanting to alert the killer to the fact that they were onto her. Maddy had promised not to breathe a word to anyone – not even Paul.

  As she stood there, her conversation with Elizabeth Stirling came back to haunt her, as did Evelyn’s revelation about Paul needing therapy – the fact that he’d been a lonely little boy, resenting his mother, broken by his father’s death.

  And why did he lie to me about his mother’s marriage, about going to meet her? About meeting Justin fo
r a drink?

  The truth was too hideous to contemplate: that Paul might somehow be mixed up in the murders after all, responsible for ransacking their flat, killing Atticus.

  It just can’t be true … can it?

  Still holding Paul’s phone, she tried to calm herself down, pacing the floor, willing herself to think rationally. Marcia might have been talking about something else. It’s possible, isn’t it? She racked her brain, trying to come up with a plausible explanation when a voice stopped her dead in her tracks.

  ‘Why are you holding my phone?’

  Her heart stopped on hearing Paul’s voice. She looked up to see him standing there in his pyjama bottoms. She felt like a thief in the night caught red-handed, his eyes torpedoing through her.

  ‘Because it rang,’ she said. ‘I got up at six, planning to head to the office early. I was making a coffee in the kitchen when I heard it ring. I was surprised. You almost always keep it by your bed.’

  He looked grumpy, distracted.

  ‘I was knackered last night. Must have left it there by mistake.’ Another brutal stare. ‘You didn’t think to bring it to me?’ His tone was harsh, accusatory.

  ‘I would have done but it rang off before I had the chance to reach it.’

  ‘Is there a message?’

  Maddy felt her face flush. ‘I don’t know.’

  Paul continued to glare at her like a human lie detector. ‘You don’t know?’

  She swallowed hard. The room was suddenly caving in on her. ‘Why are you staring at me like that? What is this, the third degree?’ She gave an uneasy laugh, then walked towards him, offered up the phone, trying to stop her hand from shaking. She hadn’t saved the message, but neither had she deleted it. She prayed it wouldn’t be obvious that she’d listened to it already, but she was conscious of the symbol that popped up to say there was a voicemail, along with the call history.

  Paul’s gaze softened as he took it from her. ‘Sorry, it was a late night as I said. Plus, my mother really got to me yesterday.’ He leaned in and kissed her. For the first time, his kiss felt artificial.