The Mermaids Singing

by Val McDermid

  He felt his ears tingle with a blush and turned back to the map. ‘So he’s a night owl,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’d like to take a look at the area tonight, if I can. Maybe you can get someone else to show me round so you can catch up on your sleep.’

  Carol shook her head. ‘No. If we can get through here by five, I’ll go home and grab a few hours’ shut-eye. I’ll pick you up around midnight and we can go then. Is that OK?’ she asked, belatedly.

  ‘Perfect,’ Tony said, getting to his feet and retreating behind his desk. ‘As long as you don’t mind.’ He picked up the photographs and forced himself back behind Handy Andy’s eyes. ‘He’s made a real mess of this one, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Paul’s the only one who’s been beaten up like this. Gareth has cuts to his face, but nothing as extreme. Paul’s face has been smashed to a pulp — broken nose, broken teeth, broken cheekbone, dislocated jaw. The anal injuries are horrendous as well; he’s been partially disembowelled. The degree of violence is one of the reasons why the Super felt we were looking at a different perpetrator. Also, none of his limbs are dislocated, unlike the other three.’

  ‘This is the one the papers said was covered up with bin bags?’

  Carol nodded. ‘Same variety as the scraps found under Adam’s body.’

  They moved on to Gareth Finnegan. ‘I’m going to have to give some serious thought to this one,’ he said. ‘He’s changed his pattern in at least two significant ways. First, the dumping ground moves from Temple Fields to Carlton Park. It’s still a gay cruising area, but it’s an aberration.’ He stopped himself short and gave a hollow laugh. ‘Listen to me. As if his whole behaviour isn’t wildly aberrant. The second thing is his letter and video to the Sentinel Times. Why did he decide to announce this body and none of the others?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Carol said. ‘And I wondered if it had something to do with the fact that it could have lain there for days, even weeks, otherwise.’

  Tony made a note on his pad and gave her the thumbs-up sign with the other hand. ‘These wounds to the hands and feet. I know it sounds off the wall, but it almost looks like he was crucified.’

  ‘The pathologist wasn’t crazy about going on the record with that one either. But the hand wounds, coupled with the dislocation of both shoulders, makes crucifixion a conclusion that’s hard to resist, especially when you remember this probably happened on Christmas Day.’ Carol got to her feet, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. She couldn’t manage to stifle a jaw-cracking yawn. She paced round the small office, shrugging her shoulders to loosen the taut muscles. ‘Sick bastard,’ she muttered.

  ‘The genital mutilations are getting more severe,’ Tony observed. ‘He’s virtually castrated this one. And the fatal wounds, the cutting of the throat. That’s getting deeper too.’

  ‘Does that tell us anything?’ Carol asked, almost unintelligible through another yawn.

  ‘Like your pathologist, I’m reluctant to speculate just yet,’ Tony said. He moved on to the final set of pictures. For the first time, Carol saw his professional mask slip. Horror swept across Tony’s face, widening his eyes, drawing his lips back in a hissed intake of breath. She wasn’t surprised. When they’d turned Damien Connolly over, a six-foot rugby-playing detective had keeled over in a dead faint. Even the experienced police pathologist had turned away momentarily, visibly struggling not to be sick.

  Rigor mortis had frozen Damien Connolly’s limbs in a parody of human gesture. The dislocated joints stuck out at crazy angles. But there was more, and worse. His penis had been severed and thrust into his mouth. His torso was branded from chest to groin in a bizarre, random pattering of starburst burns, none more than half an inch across.

  ‘Dear God,’ Tony breathed.

  ‘He’s really getting the hang of this, isn’t he?’ Carol said bitterly. ‘Takes a pride in his work, doesn’t he?’

  Tony said nothing, forcing himself to study the appalling photographs as closely as he’d done with the previous sets. ‘Carol,’ he eventually said. ‘Has anybody come up with any theories as to what he’s used to make these burn marks?’

  ‘Not a one,’ she said.

  ‘They’re odd,’ he said. ‘The patterns vary. It’s not like he’s used some random object and kept on using it. There are at least five different shapes. Have you got anybody who can do computer pattern analysis? To see if there’s any hidden message here? There must be dozens of these bloody burns!’

  Carol rubbed her eyes again. ‘I don’t know. Me and computers are about as compatible as the Prince and Princess of Wales. I’ll ask when I go back to the office. And if we don’t have someone, I’ll ask my brother.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Michael’s a computer genius. He works in games software development. You want a pattern analysed, manipulated, turned into a shoot-’em-up arcade game, he’s your man.’

  ‘And he can keep his mouth shut?’

  ‘If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t be doing the job he does. Millions of pounds depend on his company getting on the next rung of the ladder before anybody else. Believe me, he knows when to button his lip.’

  Tony smiled. ‘I didn’t mean to sound offensive.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  Tony sighed. ‘I wish to God I’d been brought in sooner on this. Handy Andy’s not going to stop here. He’s too much in love with his work. Look at these pictures. This bastard’s going to carry on capturing and torturing and killing until you catch him. Carol, this guy’s a career killer.’

  FROM 3½″ DISK LABELLED: BACKUP.007; FILE LOVE.005

  I walked boldly up the path and pressed Adam’s doorbell. In the seconds before he answered the chime, I composed my face into what I believed was an apologetic smile. I could see the fuzzy outline of his head and shoulders as he walked down the hall. Then the door opened and we were face to face. He half smiled quizzically. As if he’d never noticed me before in his life.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said. ‘Only my car’s broken down, and I don’t know where there’s a pay phone, so I wondered if I might use your phone to call the AA? I’ll pay for the call, of course…’ I let my voice trail away.

  His smile broadened and relaxed, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘No problem. Come in.’ He stepped back and I moved inside the door. He gestured down the hall. ‘There’s a phone in the study. Just on the right there.’

  I moved slowly down the hall, ears alert for the sound of the front door closing behind me. As the lock snapped back into place, he added, ‘There’s nothing worse, is there?’

  ‘I’ll just look up the number,’ I said, pausing in the doorway to reach in my backpack. Adam kept on walking, so that when I pulled out the Mace spray, he was only a couple of feet away from me. It couldn’t have been more perfect. I let him have it full in the face.

  He roared in pain and stumbled back against the wall, hands clawing at his face. I moved in swiftly. One foot between his ankles, hands on his shoulders, a quick twist and down he went, face crushed into the carpet, gasping for breath. I was down on top of him in seconds, gripping one wrist and twisting his arm up his back while I snapped the handcuff over it. He was struggling against me by now, tears streaming down his face, but I managed to grab his other flailing arm and snap the other half of the cuffs on it.

  His legs were thrashing under me, but my weight was enough to keep him pinned to the floor while I took a ziplock plastic bag from my backpack. I opened it, extracted a pad soaked in chloroform and clamped it over his nose and mouth. The sickly odour drifted upwards into my nostrils, making me feel slightly light-headed and queasy. I hoped the chloroform hadn’t gone off; I’d had the bottle for a couple of years, ever since I’d stolen it from the dispensary on a Soviet ship where I’d spent the night with the first officer.

  Adam struggled even harder when he felt the cold compress cut off his access to the air, but within minutes his legs stopped their pointless thrashing. I waited a little longer, just to
be on the safe side, then I rolled off and fastened his legs together with surgical tape. I returned the chloroform pad to its secure bag, then I taped Adam’s mouth shut.

  I stood up and took a deep breath. So far, so good. Next, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and took stock. I am familiar with the theory of the French forensic scientist Edmond Locard, first demonstrated in a murder trial in 1912, that every contact leaves a trace; a criminal will always take something away from the scene of his crime and leave something behind. With this in mind, I had carefully chosen my wardrobe for today. I was wearing Levi 501s, the same brand I’d seen Adam wear often. I’d topped it with a baggy V-necked cricket sweater, the exact double of one I’d watched him buy in Marks and Spencer a couple of weeks before. Any stray fibres I left behind would inevitably be ascribed to the contents of Adam’s own wardrobe.

  I took a quick look round the study, pausing by his answering machine. It was one of the old-fashioned ones, with a single cassette tape. I opened the machine and helped myself to the tape. It would be nice to have a memory of his voice sounding normal; I knew that the soundtrack on the video wouldn’t have that same relaxed quality.

  The door to the garage was locked. I headed off up the stairs, where I found the jacket of his suit tossed over the back of a chair in the kitchen diner. The bunch of keys was in the left-hand pocket. Back downstairs, I opened the garage door and unlocked the hatchback of his two-year-old Ford Escort. Then I went back for Adam. He had, of course, come round. His eyes were filled with panic, muffled grunts came from behind the gag. I smiled down at him as I pressed the chloroform pad over his nose again. This time, of course, he couldn’t struggle effectively at all.

  I pulled him into a sitting position, then brought a chair through from the study. I managed to get him on to the chair, and from there I was able to sling him over my shoulder and stagger through into the garage. I dumped him in the luggage space, and slammed the tailgate shut. Not a trace of his body was visible.

  I checked my watch. Just after six. It would be another hour till it was dark enough to be certain none of the neighbours passing casually would notice a stranger driving out of Adam’s garage. I filled the time by browsing through his life. Packets of photographs revealed friends, a family Christmas dinner. I would have fitted into this life perfectly. We could have had it all, if he hadn’t been such a fool.

  I was startled out of my reverie by the phone. I let it ring, and went through to the kitchen. I helped myself to a bottle of creme cleanser and a cloth and carefully washed down all the paintwork in the hall. I put the used cloth in my backpack, then fetched the vacuum cleaner. I went over the entire hall slowly and carefully, erasing all traces of the struggle from the hard-wearing Berber carpet. I trailed the vac behind me, right into the garage, where I left it in a corner, looking as if it had always lived there. Satisfied I’d removed all traces of me, I climbed into Adam’s car, pressed the remote-control button on his keyring and started the engine as the garage door rose smoothly before me.

  I shut the door behind me, and drove off. I could hear muffled noises from the back of the car. I raked around in the glove box till I found a Wet, Wet, Wet cassette. I shoved it into the player and turned the volume up high. I sang along with the music as I drove out of the city and on to the moors.

  I’d been worried that Adam’s car might not make it all the way up the track, and I’d been right. About half a mile from home, the road became too overgrown and rutted. With a sigh, I got out and walked up to collect the wheelbarrow. When I opened the tailgate to tip him into the barrow, his eyes were wide and staring. His muffled calls were wasted on me, however. I dragged him unceremoniously out of the car and into the barrow. It was a hard half-mile up the track, since his constant struggling made steering more difficult. Luckily, Auntie Doris had had the foresight to buy a proper builder’s barrow, one with two wheels in front.

  When we reached the farmhouse, I opened the trapdoor. The cellar below looked dark and welcoming. Adam’s eyes widened in terror. I stroked his soft hair and said, ‘Welcome to the pleasure dome.’

  5

  As to… the mob of newspaper readers, they are pleased with anything, provided it is bloody enough. But the mind of sensibility requires something more.

  After he’d seen Carol to her car, Tony walked across the campus to the general stores and bought a copy of the evening paper. If publicity was what Handy Andy craved, he’d finally achieved it. Fear and loathing stalked the pages of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times. Five of them, to be precise. Pages 1, 2, 3, 24 and 25, plus an editorial, were devoted to the Queer Killer. If the nickname was anything to judge by, the police were already leaking like a Cabinet committee.

  ‘You’re not going to like being called the Queer Killer, are you, Andy?’ Tony said softly to himself as he walked back to his office. Back behind his desk, he studied the paper. Penny Burgess had had a field day. The front page screamed, QUEER KILLER STRIKES AGAIN! in banner headlines. In smaller headline type, readers were told, POLICE ADMIT SERIAL KILLER STALKS CITY. Beneath was a lurid account of the discovery of Damien Connolly’s body, and a photograph of him at his passing-out parade. The turnover on pages two and three was a sensationalist summary of the three previous cases, complete with sketch map. ‘Bricks without straw, right enough,’ Tony said to himself as he flicked through to the centre spread. GAYS TERRIFIED BY QUEER KILLER MONSTER left the reader in no doubt who the Sentinel Times had decided were at risk. The copy focused on the supposed hysteria gripping Bradfield’s gay community, complete with interior shots of cafés, bars and clubs that made the scene look seedy enough to pander to the readers’ prejudices.

  ‘Oh boy,’ Tony said. ‘You’re really going to hate this, Andy.’ He turned back to the editorial.

  ‘At last,’ he read, ’police have admitted what many of us have believed for some time. There is a serial killer on the loose in Bradfield, his target the young, single men who frequent the city’s sordid gay bars.

  ‘It’s a disgrace that the police have not warned the city’s homosexuals to be on their guard before now. In the twilight world of anonymous pick-ups and casual sex, it cannot be difficult for this predatory monster to find willing victims. The police’s silence can only have made it easier for the killer.

  ‘Their reluctance to speak out has probably increased the gay community’s existing suspicion of the police, making them fear that the authorities value the lives of gay men less than those of other members of the community.

  ‘Just as it took the murders of “innocent” women rather than prostitutes to make the police pay full attention to the Yorkshire Ripper, it is wrong that a police officer has had to be murdered before Bradfield Metropolitan Police takes this Queer Killer seriously.

  ‘In spite of this, we urge the gay community to cooperate fully with the police. And we demand that the police investigate these horrific killings diligently and with compassion for the concerns of Bradfield’s homosexuals. The sooner this vicious killer is caught, the safer we all will be.’

  ‘The usual mixture of self-righteousness, indignation and unrealistic demands,’ Tony said to the Devil’s Ivy on his windowsill. He clipped the articles and spread them across the desk. He switched on his micro-cassette recorder and spoke.

  ‘Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times, February 27th. At last, Handy Andy has made the big time. I’m wondering how important that is to him. One of the tenets of profiling serial offenders is that they crave the oxygen of publicity. But this time, I’m not so sure he’s too bothered about that. There were no messages after the first two killings, neither of which received that much publicity after the initial discovery of the bodies. And although there was a message directing the police to the third body via a newspaper, that note made no claims about the earlier killings. I had puzzled over that until Inspector Carol Jordan offered an alternative explanation for the note and accompanying video, namely that without direction, the body may have lain undiscovered for some time. So, w
hile Handy Andy may not be obsessive about creating headlines and panic, it’s clear he wants the bodies found while they are still recognizably his work.’ He switched off the cassette with a sigh. Although he’d turned his back on the academic circus years before, he couldn’t escape his training; every stage of the process had to be on record. The prospect of this investigation providing the raw material for articles or even a book was something Tony found hard to resist.

  ‘I’m a cannibal,’ he said to the plant. ‘Sometimes I disgust myself.’ He shovelled the clippings together and tucked them into his press-cuttings folder. He opened the boxes and took out the stacks of document wallets they contained. Carol had labelled them all neatly. Fluent capitals, Tony noted. A woman comfortable with the written word.

  Each victim had a pathology report and a preliminary forensic report. The witness statements were divided into three groups: Background (victim), Witness (scene of crime) and Miscellaneous. Selecting the Background (victim) files, he walked his wheeled chair across to the table where his personal computer stood. When he’d arrived at Bradfield, the university had offered him a terminal linked into their network. He’d declined, not wanting to waste time learning a new set of protocols when he was perfectly at home with his own PC. Now, he was glad he didn’t have to add data security to the list of worries that kept him awake at nights.