by J. F. Kirwan
‘The Eclipse theory,’ Greg said.
Rickard nodded. ‘And in that moment, rationality is literally occluded, and rash judgement and actions follow.’
Greg waved a hand. ‘Applicable to certain suicides, maybe. Not murders.’
Rickard leaned forward, within reach of Greg. ‘Did you kill Fergus, Gregory, in a sudden pique of rage when you realised he was wasting your time, and had stopped you from joining your beloved Kate?’
Greg resisted the bait.
Finch shot back at Rickard. ‘You don’t get to ask questions like that, not when I’m around.’
‘I beg to differ. Adams is under my jurisdiction. And I have a professional duty of care if I believe someone is suffering from a potentially harmful psychiatric condition – towards himself or others.’
Shit. Was he serious? He hoped this was just Rickard flexing his muscles and getting the better of Finch for daring to suggest he was somehow involved. Greg’s pulse quickened. Rickard could section him. Right here, right now.
Finch stood. ‘We’re done here. And I want those soirée witness names and numbers on my desk this afternoon. You,’ she said to Greg, ‘are with me. We’re leaving.’
She walked out, pushing the doors harder than necessary, enough to convince Greg that there was definitely bad blood between her and Rickard, because he’d just been caught in the crossfire. And throughout the heated discussion the only useful fact that had emerged was that Rickard was writing a frigging book. Big bloody deal. But as he followed Finch he could see that there was already collateral damage. Rickard had raised a suspicion in Finch’s mind: this ‘schism’ bullshit. Greg knew he’d have to disprove it quickly or else their partnership would dissolve, and he’d find himself off the case.
And then the bullet might beckon again.
He slowed down. And if Rickard had heard that thought? Greg checked himself. Would he play Roulette again?
No.
Cooling down, he considered Rickard’s theory more dispassionately. Could there have been a schism? He searched inside himself. No. He was depressed, sure. But not psychotic. Having reassured himself, he now had to do the same with Finch. He reckoned that wouldn’t be so easy.
Finch asked Muriel to fetch them both a strong coffee as she lodged herself in Donaldson’s well-worn leather chair. Muriel looked from her to Greg. He shrugged. Muriel didn’t work for Finch, but she went to make them coffee anyway.
Greg felt uneasy. The idea of a split personality was embedded in the popular psyche. He had to hope Finch was more rational than that. She sat, stone-like, until the steaming coffee arrived with a couple of chocolate biscuits. She took one, dunked it in her coffee, savoured it a moment, her eyes closed. One of Greg’s school friends, Paul, had been stationed out in Afghanistan. He’d said that out there you have to focus on the little pleasures, because you’re always just one step away from a landmine. Paul had done two terms out there, but hadn’t made it home from the third. Paul and Finch would have got on well.
‘Disprove Rickard,’ she said, her gaze unwavering.
Greg took a few gulps of coffee, even though it was too hot. ‘Well, there are two or three ways.’
She took the second biscuit without asking.
He held up a forefinger. ‘One. Donaldson and I had fish and chips the other night. Cod, not haddock. His piece of fish was larger than mine. The batter wasn’t fully cooked but he prefers it that way. He had two pints of Directors bitter to my one pint of Stag. I bought eight assorted doughnuts for Donaldson’s crew that morning, at 0945, two vanilla, two chocolate, two plain, and two salted caramel.’
She paused, a crumbling, coffee-soaked biscuit moulding to her fingertips. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Mindfulness. Details. If the mind is split, or under great stress, you forget the small stuff. Something has to give.’
She waved with the soggy biscuit for him to continue. He did for a while, telling her about the drive to Reedmoor earlier that day. Then he held up two fingers. He told her about the encounter with The Painter, his theories about it, about the drawing, Bacon and Freud, the triptych, what it meant, counter-theories, laying them all out logically.
‘What is number two, exactly?’ she asked, wiping her fingers clean with a tissue.
‘Logical reasoning. Again, if your mind is split, it doesn’t work well. Your powers of deductive reasoning go first, because there are deep underlying emotions keeping you off balance, off course so to speak.’
‘Like trying to navigate a boat in a storm at night?’
‘That’s a pretty apt metaphor. Don’t tell Rickard, he’ll put it in his book.’
A smile broke through, then she recovered. ‘I don’t believe him, by the way, but Matthews might. It could also keep a jury amused. Number three?’
‘That’s… are you sure you want to do this?’
‘You said three.’
Greg nodded. ‘This one has no scientific basis whatsoever, but I learned it from a French clinical psychologist. Definitely don’t tell Rickard this one.’ He took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and sat up straight. In theory he should be naked… ‘I need a mirror, maybe you have one?’
She gave him a hard stare. ‘Why would I have one?’
Before he could wriggle out of his self-made man-trap, the hint of a smile re-emerged. She dug into a pocket and pulled out a small vanity mirror. Greg took it and opened it up.
He placed it on Donaldson’s desk, in front of him, at an angle so he could see the reflection of his eyes, then leaned forwards on his elbows, and stared.
‘What are you doing this time?’
Greg didn’t answer, he just stared.
What he was doing was this. He looked at his own eyes, and tried to see behind them, what was driving him, whether there was openness there, or something hidden. Whether he recognised himself. He did and he didn’t. There was sadness, pain, and the face that stared back at him seemed older and heavier than it used to be. Most of the light had gone. Was there anything else, anybody else, any darkness? Only a trace of the desire to end it all by killing himself, but even that was almost gone now.
He stayed in this zone a little longer because he was a psychologist, and what he saw in his reflection was somebody desperately in need. And then he felt her, Kate, staring back at him, because she was still inside him, and he had to blink and tear himself away from the view. He drew back, laid the mirror flat on the desk and gulped down some more coffee.
Finch showed no reaction, but she reached across and took back the mirror. ‘What was the result?’
Greg drew out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘Negative.’
‘You’re right. It doesn’t seem like science at all. Definitely don’t try that in court. First two methods are more convincing.’
Greg studied her. He had to know. ‘Why don’t you believe it’s me?’
She pursed her lips a moment. ‘I watched you closely at the mental hospital. In fact, I’ve been watching you closely since we met. I just don’t think you have it in you.’ She tilted her head a little. ‘You care too much.’
Greg nodded, slowly. It was time to switch tracks.
‘How did you know about Rickard’s visits?’ And who did you go to see while I was with The Painter?
She sat for a while, drumming the fingers of her right hand the way Donaldson did. There was an almost imperceptible sigh. ‘It goes no further.’
‘Okay.’
‘A friend of mine is in another wing in Reedmoor.’
‘A soldier?’ he said. Hopefully not such a wild guess.
Her eyes narrowed a fraction, then eased back into neutral. ‘He had a particularly rough time in Helmand Province, lost most of his friends during a month-long campaign of bombings. They wouldn’t send him home. One day he snapped. A small argument with a shopkeeper in a village flared up as it easily does out there. We don’t need an Eclipse theory. Life there has you constantly on the edge of reason.’ She produced
a bottle of water from a small bag at her feet and took a few sips, staring at the random scratches and coffee-stains on the desktop. ‘There was a court martial. There were only two options on the table: three years’ custodial sentence, and…’
‘A plea of temporary insanity.’ Another guess. Her face confirmed it. ‘What did his counsel advise?’
She met his eyes. No longer serene. Ablaze. Her hand squeezed the bottle, making a loud cracking noise as water rose out of the top and spilled over her hand onto the desk. ‘I was his counsel, and yes, temporary insanity, because that’s what it was, and that’s what I was advised by my CO.’ She looked away. ‘He’s been there ever since. Five years. Not getting out anytime soon.’
‘Fuck,’ Greg said. He didn’t believe in pacifying. Empathy was better than sympathy any day of the week, something he and Kate had agreed on. He took out his handkerchief to mop up the water.
‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘I clean up my own mess.’
He re-pocketed the handkerchief. ‘I need to see what Matthews left me in the Evidence Room,’ he said.
‘Be my guest.’ She didn’t look like she was going anywhere.
A thought struck him. More of a hunch. ‘The military tribunal; there must have been a psychiatric evaluator present. Someone back here, most likely.’
She said nothing.
‘It was Rickard, wasn’t it?’
He could hear her breathing, which until now he never had.
‘When this is done,’ he said, ‘I’ll do whatever I can to help get your friend released.’
She looked up at him, and for the first time he glimpsed vulnerability in her, and in that moment he knew that whoever was locked away in the hospital was more than a friend.
16
Greg wasn’t allowed back in the Evidence Room. He was on the board, and they had to explore the remote possibility that he was somehow involved in the killings, especially with Raj missing. It didn’t matter. They’d given him the case files, and the windowless, vacant room he currently occupied sufficed. His coffee had long since gone cold, and his appetite had deserted him because of what he was reading.
Matthews, a homicide detective who seemed to have an unusual but effective partnership with Finch, had prepared the past year’s unsolved murder files, and he’d done so meticulously. Greg had done his first-cut analysis and had already sorted them into three piles: green, blue and red.
The green pile was for those he could dismiss outright. Two were domestic violence cases, a crude knife attack, and blunt impact trauma caused by a steam iron. In both cases, the victim’s partner – a wife in one case, the boyfriend in a gay relationship in the other, had vanished afterwards. There had been a history of reported violence, and the neighbours had been ‘waiting for something like this to happen’.
The next two in that pile initially seemed like contenders, but turned out to be gang-related. The victims had both been carved, so the killings were technically in Dreamer territory. The first man had been held down by at least four other men when the carving had started, but whoever held the knife had clumsily sliced through an artery, and the guy had bled out in less than a minute. The second also involved a gang member, and the carving of a crude bull’s head was found on his back. It showed more ‘skill’, if that was the word, but sepsis had set in due to the use of a non-sterilised blade.
He paused a moment. In both cases there had been premeditation, malicious intent, and macabre methodology. But they weren’t true serial killer cases. They lacked the detached coldness, the planning that was part of the signature serial killer’s process, a sick kind of foreplay. And at the end of the day these were cases of extreme violence, but lacked an essential attribute of what a serial killer tried to instil in his victims: not merely fear, but terror. The Divine was the exception that proved the rule.
Greg moved on to the second pile, the blue one. This was the unlikely-but-not-totally-discounted pile. A man had been burned to death and his habitually battered wife had vanished afterwards. The case was easy to dismiss, except for two factors. The first was the method of burning, using a napalm substitute, not something you normally bought at your local hardware store. The result had been almost completely burned-away flesh, which was rare outside of industrial accidents or major fires. The second factor fell into the macabre category, as it had occurred in the bedroom, and the coroner had determined that the victim had originally been standing in the vicinity of a long mirror, which meant that the victim could have seen himself burn.
This one had attracted Rickard’s attention, and he’d gone there to determine whether it could be a copycat of The Torch, already dead three months before the killing. Apparently Rickard had been given a telling off by the DCI for contaminating evidence. Not surprising, given that Rickard rarely visited crime scenes, preferring ‘armchair detective work’. However, several interviewees, including the man’s sister, had all said the wife had threatened to kill him on account of alcohol-induced abuse, and had warned him once, in front of the sister, that alcohol was flammable. Greg left it in the ‘maybe’ pile, but tended to agree with Rickard, that it was probably premeditated but lacked the meticulous planning associated with serial killers.
The second case in the pile was something new. It involved death by slow suffocation, but appeared to be bondage-related, as the scene had all the trappings of a BDSM session gone badly wrong. What grabbed Greg’s attention was a footnote by the coroner that at no time during the session, which had lasted between one and two hours, had the victim been sexually aroused, and the autopsy had shown the man had been clearly afraid for most of the time. The partner or killer had not been found, which was also unusual, as experienced BDSM ‘players’ were typically part of a community where trust was crucial, and word about such events got around. Usually someone came forward with at least some leads the police could chase down. In almost all such cases solid detective work found the hapless killer, or else the person owned up through sheer guilt. The trouble was, this one had no prior, and no follow-up in the past year, which meant by definition that it was not, at least not yet, a serial killing.
He pushed the second pile away, then moved on to the third, the red one, the contenders. The first case had been the most obvious. A teenage boy with fatal neck wounds. Shoved head-first through a window in a deserted house by railway tracks, then held there, screaming, his cries heard from a distance by a blind man on walkabout with his Yorkshire terrier. The kid was a known bully. Initially the police presumed it was a revenge killing, but found no credible leads.
For Greg it was reminiscent of The Reaper, though he’d always gone for parents, usually those who had lost a child. This murder could have been an early copycat. The Reaper would never have done it that way, so it meant that someone copied him without having the right – if that was the word for it – motivation. And holding the kid there, listening to him scream and cry, as well as kick and fight for his life, suggested a different motive altogether: to cause suffering, to have life-ending power over his victim, a bully no less, though that could have been a coincidence. Causing pain was not the same as causing fear or terror.
Greg reflected on The Reaper, the only serial killer in Greg’s experience who had ever shown a glimmer of remorse, because his killing spree was ultimately borne out of traumatic grief. But that self-realisation had sent The Reaper into a near-catatonic state. He hadn’t spoken in the past three years, not a single word. The fact that Rickard had only visited him once at Reedmoor was further confirmation.
Greg was about to put the file away when he noticed the date of the teenage boy’s killing: 13 January. Three months after Kate. To the day. He considered it for a few seconds, then brushed it aside.
The next case file was of a thirty-two-year-old woman who’d become trapped inside a large industrial desiccator, a machine that looked like an oversized refrigerator, used for drying out something or other, the file didn’t specify. But what it lacked in technical detail it made up for in
graphic photos. It was never established that there had been foul play, since it was technically feasible to lock yourself inside accidentally, and the victim had been a night-time security guard rather than a factory operative, so would not have been familiar with the machine or its controls. But why on earth would anyone climb into such a machine?
Horseplay had been considered, as another guard had been on duty, but he’d vehemently denied it, adding that he’d taken a kip while she’d been alone in the security control room, a sackable offence in his line of work, which came to pass a week after the hearing.
In any case, the organic sensor and interlock designed to prevent this type of accident had been turned off, which went beyond the security guard’s skill set. For that part a hacker was suspected, though it was never proven. There were no other witnesses, as it occurred in the dead of night, and the woman had no family to speak of, or any enemies. The report stated that she liked Netflix and had an unused Tinder account. For a moment, Greg railed at the insanity that stole the lives of people who were not only innocent, but innocuous. But only for a moment, because he needed to inhale some of that insanity, to understand the killer’s state of mind.
He leaned back. It didn’t seem to fit anyone from his experience. He stretched his legs down the corridor to the coffee machine and got a ristretto. Not much coffee, more like a dark brown smudge at the bottom of the paper cup. But it was the only machine he could access that produced coffee tasting vaguely decent. He returned to the room, sat down, savoured the aroma, and took a sip. He began a mental tally: Kate was killed by The Dreamer, or by a copycat. Fergus’s murder was indicative of The Painter, because his face had been bashed in, reminiscent of one or two of Boris’s favourite paintings of people with imploded facial features. The victim who’d been a bully suggested The Reaper, or a poor copycat.
The desiccator murder didn’t seem to fit any of the profiles. He wracked his brains, but came up with nothing.
Matthews breezed in, dragging with him a potent smell of onions, cheese and beer. Greg checked his watch. Three o’clock. Late pub lunch.
