by Val McDermid
If he’d worked out like Adam had, the pleasure would have lasted longer. As it was, his screams of agony mingled with my groans of pleasure. I came like a Guy Fawkes rocket, fire flashing through me and erupting in an orgasm that had me buckling at the knees.
He tried to pull free, but the barbs just cut deeper into his tender flesh. I lay back in the chair, savouring the waves of pleasure that flowed through me after my orgasm, Paul’s moans and screams an extravagant counterpoint to my sexual satisfaction.
As time passed, he sank lower on the spike, and his screams moderated to whimpering groans. To my surprise, I felt sexual desire rise in me again. After the exquisite pleasure of my first orgasm, I wanted my excitement matched again. I reached for the control box for the electrical current to the spike, and pressed the button that completed the circuit. Even with a relatively low current, Paul’s body convulsed in an arc that wrenched him almost clear of the spike, a fine spray of blood spattering the floor for a couple of feet around.
I matched the rhythms of our two bodies, the speed and intensity of our mutual excitement keeping perfect pace. I felt my muscles quiver like his as I thrust against my hand. As I came, my body arched in sync with his, my gasps echoed by his last agonized cries before unconsciousness came.
I have to confess I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Paul’s punishment. Perhaps because he had deserved so much more than Adam, perhaps because I had had higher expectations of him in the first place, or perhaps simply because I was getting better at what I had to do. Whatever the reason, my second excursion into murder left me feeling as if I’d found my true vocation at last.
9
We dry up our tears, and… discover that a transaction which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.
‘OK, Andy, it’s showtime,’ Tony said to the blank screen of his computer. After Carol had dropped him off, he’d stumbled upstairs, kicking off his shoes and letting his quilted baseball jacket lie where it fell on the landing. Pausing only to empty his bladder, he’d burrowed under the duvet and fallen into the deepest sleep he’d known for months. When he’d woken, it had been after noon. But for once, he felt no guilt about the work he should have been doing. He felt refreshed, excited, elated even. Searching Stevie McConnell’s house had given him a new certainty that he really did understand what he was doing. He had known, with absolute clarity, that Handy Andy did not live like that. And although it wasn’t something he could admit to anyone outside the tight circle of fellow profilers, there was a real rush in realizing that he could probably find his way into Handy Andy’s head and map a path through the tortured labyrinth of his unique logic. All he had to do now was find the key to the door.
In the office, Tony powered his way through the remaining piles of documents, making notes as he went along. Then he closed the blinds and told his secretary to hold all his calls. He moved his own chair round the desk so that it faced the visitor’s chair. On the desk to one side, he placed his tape recorder, still switched off. He walked over to the door and stood with his back to it, contemplating the room. Some poem he’d once read echoed in his mind. Something about a road that divided in a wood, and the importance of choosing the branch less travelled by. For as long as he could recall, his fascinations had led him down the road less travelled by. It was the road that his patients walked, the dark path that led into the undergrowth, away from the dappled sunshine of the broad path. ‘I need to understand why you chose that road, Andy,’ Tony murmured. ’This is what I do best, Andy. You see, I know what draws me to that road. But I’m not like you. I can go back when I want to. I can choose the sunny path. I don’t have to be here. All I’m doing is studying your footsteps. Or at least, that’s what I tell the world.
‘But we know the truth, don’t we? You can’t hide from me, Andy,’ he said softly. ‘I’m just like you, you see. I’m your mirror image. I’m the poacher turned gamekeeper. It’s only hunting you that keeps me from being you. I’m here, waiting for you. Journey’s end.’ He stood for a moment longer, savouring the admission he’d made to himself.
Finally, he sat down in his chair and leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands loosely linked. ‘OK, Andy,’ he said. ‘It’s just you and me. We’re going to skip the preliminaries; all that stuff where we do the verbal arm wrestling and you eventually decide to talk to me. We’re going straight for it. First off, I want to say how impressed I am. I’ve never seen a cleaner job. I don’t just mean the bodies, I mean the whole thing. Sweet as a nut, you did it. Never a witness. Let me rephrase that. Never anybody seeing any significance in what they saw or heard, because there must have been people who saw or heard something, but they didn’t make the connection. How did you manage to be so invisible?’ He pressed ‘record’ on the cassette recorder, then stood up and stepped across to the other chair.
Tony took a deep breath and deliberately relaxed his body. He used breathing techniques to put himself into a light state of trance. He instructed his conscious mind to let go, to allow his higher self to access directly all he knew about Handy Andy and to answer for him. When he spoke, even his voice was different. The timbre was rougher, the tones deeper. ‘I blended in. I took care. I watched and I learned.’
Tony swapped chairs again. ‘You obviously did a good job of it,’ he said. ‘How did you choose them?’
Back into Andy’s chair. ‘I liked them. I knew it would be special with them. I wanted to be like them. They all had good jobs, a nice life. I’m good at learning things, I could have learned to be like them. I could have fitted into their lives.’
‘So why kill them?’
‘People are stupid. They don’t understand me. I was the one they always laughed at, then they learned to be afraid of me. I don’t like being laughed at, and I’m tired of people being wary of me, like I’m some animal that’s going to go for them. I gave them a chance, but they didn’t give me any choice. I had to kill them.’
Tony sank back in his own chair. ‘And after you’d done it once, you realized that was the best thing in the world.’
‘I felt good. I felt in control. I knew what was going to happen. I’d planned it all out, and it worked!’ Tony surprised himself by the degree of enthusiasm that came out. He waited, but nothing more seemed to emerge.
He returned to his own chair. ‘Didn’t last for long, did it? The pleasure? The sense of power?’
In Andy’s chair, he felt at a loss for the first time. Usually, he found role play loosened up his ideas, let his thoughts flow free. But something was clogging this up. That something was clearly at the heart of the issue. Tony moved back to his own seat and thought about it. ‘Serial killers act out their fantasies in their crimes. The crime itself never lives up to the fantasy, so it has limited power. Its details are incorporated into the fantasies, which are then realized in a second, often more ritualistic killing. And so on. But as time goes by, the fantasies have less and less staying power. The killings have to get closer and closer together to keep the fantasies fuelled. But your killings don’t get closer together, Andy. Why is that?’
He moved across, not hopeful. He allowed his mind to blank, letting his consciousness drift off, hoping it would come up with an answer that might satisfy his idea of Andy. After a few moments, Tony felt himself slipping away from consciousness. All at once, from what felt like a long way away, a deep chuckle rumbled through him. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ his own voice mocked him.
Tony shook his head like a diver coming to the surface. Dazed, he got to his feet and snapped the blinds open. So much for alternative techniques. What was interesting, however, was the point at which his brain had snagged. This was one of the factors about Handy Andy that was unique. The gaps stayed constant. Even allowing for his use of a camcorder, it was still remarkable.
The line of thought restored Tony’s earlier vigour and he decided to take a side trip to the u
niversity library’s media-studies section where he went through the back numbers of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times for the appropriate dates. A careful scrutiny of the entertainments pages revealed little in common between the four evenings in question, unless he was prepared to consider that the local art cinema always showed classic British black-and-white comedies on Mondays. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine Passport to Pimlico fuelling homicidal sexual fantasies. Finally, just after seven, he was ready to start on the profile.
He started with the usual caveat.
The following offender profile is for guidance only and shouldn’t be regarded as an identikit portrait. The offender is unlikely to match the profile in every detail, though I would expect there to be a high degree of congruence between the characteristics outlined below and the reality. All of the statements in the profile express probabilities and possibilities, not hard facts.
A serial killer produces signals and indicators in the commission of his crimes. Everything he does is intended, consciously or not, as part of a pattern. Uncovering the underlying pattern reveals the killer’s logic. It may not appear logical to us, but to him it is crucial. Because his logic is so idiosyncratic, straightforward traps will not capture him. As he is unique, so must be the means of catching him, interviewing him and reconstructing his acts.
Tony continued the profile with a detailed account of the four victims. He included everything he’d gleaned from the police reports about their domestic circumstances, employment history, reputation among friends and colleagues, habits, physical condition, personality, family relationships, hobbies and social behaviour. Next, he wrote a short résumé of the pathologist’s report on each man, the nature of their injuries and a description of the crime scenes. Then he began the crucial process of organizing and arranging his information into meaningful patterns so he could start to draw his conclusions.
None of the four victims had any history of homosexual relationships, as far as can be ascertained. (We cannot exclude a secret homosexual/bisexual orientation, but there is no evidence in any of the four cases to suggest this.) Yet each body was dumped in an area known primarily for its use by the gay community. In particular, the bodies were dumped in spots which are notorious for the consummation of casual sexual encounters. What does this say about the killer?
1. He is a man who is not comfortable with his own sexuality. He deliberately chooses men who are not openly gay-identified. It may well be that he has made a sexual approach to his victims in the past and has been rebuffed. The killer is almost certainly not an out gay; he probably represses his own sexuality at some personal cost. He probably grew up in an environment where masculinity was highly prized and praised and homosexuality condemned, possibly on religious grounds. If he is in a sexual/domestic relationship, it will be with a woman. And he will almost certainly have sexual problems within that relationship, probably ones of potency.
Tony stared bleakly at the screen. Sometimes he hated the way his job constantly forced him to confront his own problems. Did his own sexual failings mean he was really stuck on the road less travelled by? Was there going to be a night when some woman went too far, when her determination to translate his problem into a comment on her womanhood tipped him over the edge? For Tony, it was a scenario that was all too vivid. That’s why Angelica was safe. When she drove him to distraction, he could slam the phone down, rather than slap her face. Or worse. Best stay out of risk, he thought. Don’t even think about thinking about Carol Jordan. You’ve seen it in her eyes, she’s interested in more than your mind. Don’t even think about it, fuck-up. Get back to work.
2. He despises those who express their homosexuality openly. At least part of his motivation in using these dumping grounds is to show his contempt for them, as well as to frighten them. He’s also demonstrating his superiority; ‘Look at me, I can come and go among you and none of you know me. I can desecrate your places, and you can’t stop me.’
3. He is nevertheless familiar with areas where gay men go to socialize and to pick up sexual partners. It may be that his job takes him into the Temple Fields area from time to time, perhaps to make deliveries or to provide some service to businesses. He is fascinated with the gay culture, to the extent that he has scouted out the specific area in Carlton Park where gay cruising goes on.
4. He has a high degree of self-control. He is driving into a populous area and dumping bodies without behaving in a way that draws attention to himself.
‘Tell me about it,’ Tony said bitterly. He got up and stalked a path from the window to the door. ‘I could have written the manual.’ Ever since the bullies had started to pick on him, the smallest boy in the street and in his class, he’d learned the harsh lessons of self-control. ‘Never show you’re hurt, it only encourages them. Never show they’ve hit the mark, it only reveals your weak points. Learn to be one of the lads. Learn the vocabulary, learn the body language, acquire the attitude. Mix it all together and what do you get? You get a man who hasn’t got the remotest idea of who he is. You have a consummate actor, a human impostor who can take on local colour like a chameleon.’ The miracle was that it fooled so many people. Brandon clearly thought he was a good bloke. Carol Jordan obviously fancied him. Claire, his secretary, thought he was the best boss she’d ever had. He was passing for human, all right. The only one he couldn’t fool was his mother, who still treated him with the thinly disguised contempt which was all he’d ever known from her. His fault his father had left them, and no wonder, according to her. She’d have dumped him in some children’s home if it hadn’t been for her need to keep in with her parents, the ones who held the purse strings. As it was, she’d dived head first into a career as soon as she’d been able to persuade her mother to mind little Tony. He’d done his best to be good, as Granny had instructed him, but it wasn’t always easy. She wasn’t a bad woman, just constrained by her own upbringing into the belief that children should be seen and not heard. His grandfather’s response to domestic tyranny was to escape to the betting shop, the bowling green and the Legion. Tony had swiftly learned self-control the hard way. Was that what had happened to Andy, too? Rubbing his hand across eyes surprisingly damp, Tony threw himself back into his chair and started typing frantically.
5. His domestic and work situation allows him to be free on Monday evenings, and he does not expect to be spotted in Temple Fields by anyone who knows him. This throws up several possibilities: he may have chosen Monday nights specifically because it’s his night off work or because his wife/girlfriend is away from home on Monday nights; he may have decided to kill on Mondays because the first time was a Monday and it worked out for him and now has superstitious power; or he may have decided to keep on killing on Mondays in the hope that it will skew the investigation. He is obviously intelligent, and such careful planning should not be presumed to be beyond him.
Tony paused for thought, flicking through the pages of notes he’d made. He wasn’t thinking like Handy Andy yet, but the elusive mind was getting closer and closer. He wondered again if his involvement in the twisted logic of killers was a surrogacy, the only thing that prevented him from joining their number. God knows, there were times when the inevitable drive that surged through their heads seemed attractive. And there were times enough when he’d felt murderous rage, though it was usually turned against himself rather than the person he was in bed with. ‘Enough, already,’ Tony said aloud, and returned to the glowing screen.
The offender is an organized serial killer, who is managing to maintain a constant eight-week gap between killings. This consistency is unusual in itself, since the normal pattern is that the space between murders decreases as they lose their power to satisfy the killer’s fantasies. One reason for the maintenance of this gap may be that he spends so long stalking his victim before the kill. Thus the delights of anticipation, coupled with the savour of his previous kills, acts as a brake. I also believe that the killer is using his camcorder to record his activities and that this is also fue
lling his fantasies between kills.
Tony stopped to consider what he had written. The stumbling block. His analysis probably looked good enough to convince the lay person, but he was far from satisfied with it. But no amount of dredging of his mind or his data could come up with a better explanation. With a sigh, he continued.
What is the primary intent of his killings? We can rule out killing in the course of criminal activity, such as armed robbery or burglary. We can also rule out emotional, selfish or cause-specific killings, such as self-defence, compassion, assassination or domestic disputes. This places the killings in the category of sexual homicides.
The chosen victims all fall into the low-risk category. In other words, they all had occupations and lifestyles that didn’t make them vulnerable targets. The flip side of this is that the killer has to take high-level risks to capture and kill them. What does this tell us about the killer?
1. He is operating under extremely high stress levels.
2. He plans his kills very carefully. He cannot afford to make mistakes, because if he does, his victims will escape and put him at risk, both physically and legally. He is almost certainly a stalker. He chooses his victims carefully, and studies their lives in detail. Interestingly, so far he has not been thwarted in his choice of evening. Is this a result of careful planning, prearrangement or just luck? We know that the third victim, Gareth Finnegan, told his girlfriend he was going on a lads’ night out, but none of his male friends or colleagues seemed to know anything about it, and it is not clear whether he was abducted from his home or if the contact took place at a prearranged point. It may be that the killer has had prior arrangements to meet each of his victims, either at their homes or elsewhere. He may even be posing as an insurance salesman or something similar, though I feel it’s unlikely that he would have the people skills to do such a job successfully for a living.
