by Val McDermid
With his policeman’s eyes, Merrick slowly scanned the room, classifying the drinkers. Hooker, dealer, rent boy, pimp, rich man, poor man, beggar man, wimp. He was jolted out of his scrutiny by Carol’s voice. ‘What do you think, Don?’ he caught.
‘Sorry, ma’am, miles away. What do I think about what?’
‘That it’s about time we developed some of our own snouts among the toms, instead of having to rely on the Vice Squad’s girls. They’ve been round the houses so many times, I’d go outside to check if they told me it was raining.’
‘Never mind the hookers,’ Merrick said. ‘We need to know a damn sight more about how the gay community works. I don’t mean the lads that are out of the closet and down the Hell Hole. I mean the secretive ones. The ones that don’t flaunt it. They’re the ones who might have come across this guy before. I mean, from all I’ve ever read about serial killers, sometimes they don’t actually kill the first time, they just have a go. Like the Yorkshire Ripper did. So maybe there’s some frightened little guy in the closet who’s been on the receiving end of a bit of violence that got out of hand. That might be the road to a break.’
‘And God knows we need a break,’ Kevin said. ‘But if we don’t know how the connections are made, how do we connect?’
Carol said thoughtfully, ‘When in doubt, ask a policeman.’
‘Do what?’ Kevin asked.
‘There are gay officers in the Job. More than most, they must know about keeping a low profile. They’d be able to tell us.’
‘That doesn’t answer the question,’ Kevin protested doggedly. ‘If they’re so busy keeping it quiet, how do we know who they are?’
‘The Met has an association of gay and lesbian police officers. Why don’t we get in touch with them, in confidence, and ask for their help? Somebody must have some contacts in Bradfield.’
Merrick stared at Carol with admiration, Kevin with frustration, both wondering silently how it was that Inspector Jordan always had an answer.
Tom Cross glanced down at the front page of the Sentinel Times, a smirk of satisfaction twitching his cigarette up and down. Ms Burgess might have thought she was in control of their little encounter the night before, but Tom Cross knew different. He’d played the spider to her fly, and she’d done exactly what he expected of her. No, credit where it’s due. She’d done better than he’d expected. That line about the police staggering lamely in the wake of the Sentinel Times when it came to seeking out Dr bloody Hill was a corker.
There were going to be a lot of angry men in Bradfield police today. That was the revenge element of Tom Cross’s game with Penny Burgess. But someone else was going to be angry too. When he read tonight’s paper, the killer was going to be more than a little put out.
Tom Cross stubbed out his cigarette and slurped from his mug of tea. He folded his paper and placed it on the table in front of him and stared out of the cafe window. He lit another cigarette. He’d set out to provoke the Queer Killer. Provoked, he’d start to get careless, to make mistakes. And when Stevie McConnell did that, Tom Cross would be ready and waiting. He’d show those sorry bastards in command how to catch a killer.
Tony was back in the office by ten to three. Even so, he wasn’t early enough to beat Carol. ‘Inspector Jordan’s here,’ Claire said as soon as he opened the outer office door. She gestured with her head towards his office. ‘She’s in there waiting. I told her you’d be back.’
Tony’s responding smile was strained. As he gripped the door handle, he clenched his eyes tightly and took a deep breath. Nailing what he hoped was a welcoming smile on his face, Tony opened the door and stepped into his office. At the sound of the door, Carol turned away from the window she’d been staring out of and gave him a cool, appraising look. Tony closed the door behind him and leaned against it.
‘You look like a man who’s just stepped in a puddle that’s deeper than his shoe,’ Carol remarked.
‘That’s an improvement, then,’ Tony said with more than a trace of irony. ‘Usually I feel like I’ve stepped in a puddle that’s deeper than my head.’
Carol took a step towards him. She’d rehearsed what she was going to say. ‘There’s no need to feel like that with me. Last night… well, you were less than candid and I misread the signals. So can we please forget the whole thing and concentrate on what’s important between us?’
‘Which is?’ Tony sounded impersonal as a therapist, his question conversational rather than challenging.
‘Working together to nail this killer.’
Tony pushed himself away from the door and made for the safety of his seat, careful to keep the desk between them at all times. ‘That’s fine by me.’ He gave a crooked smile. ‘Believe me, I’m far better at professional relationships than the other kind. Think of it as a lucky escape.’
Carol walked round to the opposite side of the desk and pulled up a chair. She crossed her trouser-clad legs and folded her hands in her lap. ‘So let’s have a look at this profile.’
‘We don’t have to behave as if we’re strangers,’ Tony said quietly. ‘I respect you, and I admire the way you’re so open to learning new aspects of the job. Look, before… before what happened last night, we seemed to be moving towards a friendship that went beyond work. Was that such a bad thing? Couldn’t we settle for that?’
Carol shrugged. ‘It’s not easy making friends after you’ve exposed your weaknesses.’
‘I don’t think showing someone you’re attracted to them is necessarily a weakness.’
‘I feel foolish,’ Carol said, not quite sure why she was opening up like this. ‘I had no right to expect anything from you. Now, I’m angry with myself.’
‘And with me too, I expect,’ Tony said. This was proving less traumatic than he had imagined. His counselling techniques hadn’t rusted over from lack of use, he thought with relief.
‘Mostly with myself,’ Carol said. ‘But I can deal with that. The important thing for me is that we get the job done.’
‘Me too. It’s pretty rare for me to find a police officer who seems to have a grasp of what I’m trying to do.’ He picked up the papers on his desk. ‘Carol… This isn’t about you, you know. It’s about me. I have problems of my own that I need to deal with.’
Carol stared at him long and hard. He felt a quick twitch of panic as he realized he could not read her eyes. He had no idea what she was feeling. ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ she replied, her voice cold. ‘Speaking of problems,’ she added, ‘haven’t we got some work to do?’
Carol sat alone in Tony’s office with his profile of the serial killer. He had left her to read it while he worked next door with his secretary, catching up on the correspondence that had piled up since Brandon had hijacked him only a handful of days before. She couldn’t remember ever having been so fascinated by a report in her entire career. If this was the future of policing, she desperately wanted to be part of it. At last, she came to the end of the main body of text and turned to a separate sheet.
Points to pursue:
1. Had any of the victims ever mentioned to a friend/ relative that they had been the subject of an unwanted homosexual approach? If so, when, where and from whom?
2. The killer is a stalker. His first encounter with his victims probably takes place quite a long time before he kills – weeks rather than days. Where is he encountering them? It may be something as banal as where they take their dry-cleaning, where they have their shoes heeled, where they buy sandwiches, where they have tyres or exhausts put on their cars. Given that they all lived close to the tram network, I think we should check whether the victims regularly used the trams to go to and from work, or to go out in the evenings. I suggest that in-depth background checks are done, going through bank accounts, credit-card statements and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, girlfriends and family members. This may help develop suspects.
3. Is there any indication that the victims were keeping the night in question free for any particular purpose? Gareth F
innegan lied to his girlfriend about it – did any of the others?
4. Where is he doing his killing? It’s unlikely to be in his home, since he will have calculated the possibility of being arrested, and will have taken pains to avoid leaving forensic traces there. It’s also got to be big enough for him to build and use the torture engines we are assuming in these cases. It may be an isolated lock-up garage, or a unit on an industrial estate which is deserted at night. Bearing in mind that he almost certainly lives in Bradfield, it’s possible that there exists an isolated rural property that he has undisturbed access to.
5. He must have found out about instruments of torture somewhere so that he could construct his own. It might be worth checking with bookshops and libraries to see if any of their customers has enquired about or ordered books on torture.
Carol flicked back a few pages, rereading a couple of paragraphs which had particularly struck her first time through. She found it hard to credit how quickly Tony had assimilated the stacks of files she’d delivered. Not only that, but he’d drawn out of them the key points that created for the first time in Carol’s mind a picture, albeit shadowy, of the man she was hunting.
But the profile raised questions in her mind. At least one of those questions didn’t seem to have occurred to Tony. She wondered if it wasn’t referred to because he had dismissed it out of hand. Either way, she had to know. And she had to find a way of asking that didn’t sound like an attack.
F ROM 3" DISK LABELLED: BACKUP. 007; FILE LOVE. 013
I hated to keep Gareth hanging on, but I had to leave him for one little errand. In his car, I’d found a few of the Christmas cards his company sent out to favoured clients, already signed by all the partners. Inside one, with a fountain pen, a stencil set and Gareth’s blood, I’d written in block capitals, ‘ A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL YOUR READERS; YOUR EXCLUSIVE CHRISTMAS GIFT IS WAITING IN THE SHRUBBERY OF CARLTON PARK BEHIND THE BANDSTAND. COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON FROM
SANTA CLAWS.’ It wasn’t easy to write with the blood; it kept congealing on the nib, which I had to clean every few letters. Luckily, there was no shortage of ink. I addressed a Jiffy bag to the editor of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times and put the card in it, along with a video I’d made a couple of weeks before, when I’d started to plan what to do with Gareth. I’d already decided to change my modus operandi slightly. Temple Fields was bound to be risky now; even if the queens were too drunk or stoned to be vigilant, the police would be keeping an eye open for more than the occasional cottaging poof. But the nature trail through the shrubbery of Carlton Park is almost as notorious a pick-up area.
Early on a rainy Sunday morning, when there was nobody about, I’d driven out to Carlton Park with my camcorder. I started off by the wrought-iron bandstand. I walked around it, filming it from every angle. It wouldn’t take long before somebody in the BEST office recognized the landmark. After all, Carlton Park is the biggest park within the city boundaries, and there’s a brass-band concert there every Sunday from April to September. I deliberately kept the camcorder at chest level rather than on my shoulder; I’ve read of instances where correct estimates of height have been made simply from the angle photographs have been taken from. If some forensic scientist was going to draw any conclusions from this video, I wanted to be sure they would be the wrong ones.
Leaving the bandstand behind, I walked down the nature trail towards the shrubbery. I panned across the general area where I thought I’d dump the body, then stopped filming. I passed nobody on my way back to the jeep. That was probably just as well, since I was grinning from ear to ear at the thought of the news editor puzzling over my Christmas message.
The message would also serve two other functions. It would minimize the time it took to identify Gareth’s body, which meant the publicity machine would have plenty of fodder to keep it going through what was always a slack news period. Secondly, it would send the police on a wild goose chase, working out who could have had access to the Christmas cards.
The police might even decide that someone connected with Gareth through work had decided to bump him off and make it look like a copycat killing by dumping the body in a gay cruising area. Just the sort of thing a deranged and disillusioned client would do. If I got really lucky, they might even give the bitch a hard time, too.
I drove into the city centre to post the packet at the main post office. There were enough last-minute panicking gift-givers for me to be unremarkable. I stopped at an off licence on the way back to buy a bottle of champagne. I don’t normally drink when I’m working, but this was a special occasion.
When I got back, Gareth was semi-conscious, mumbling incomprehensibly. ‘Santa’s here,’ I said cheerfully as I came down the stairs. I popped the cork on the champagne and poured two glasses. I took one over to Gareth and, standing on tiptoe, I gently lifted his lolling head. I held the glass to his lips and tilted it. ‘You’ll enjoy this,’ I said. ‘It’s vintage Dom Perignon.’
His eyes snapped wide open. For a moment, he looked bewildered, then he remembered and he fixed me with a look of pure hatred. But he was parched, and couldn’t resist the champagne. He swallowed it greedily, not savouring it at all. Then he belched in my face, a look of strange satisfaction in his eyes.
‘Wasted on you,’ I said angrily. ‘Like all the fine things in life.’ I stepped back and slashed the glass across his face. It shattered against his nose, cutting his cheek to ribbons. I was glad Auntie Doris wouldn’t be coming back. She’d had that set of six fragile crystal glasses as a silver-wedding present, and she’d never used them, terrified that someone would break one. She’d been right to be concerned.
Gareth shook his head. ‘You’re evil,’ he slurred. ‘Pure evil.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said softly. ‘I’m justice. Remember justice? It’s what you’re supposed to stand for.’
‘Twisted, evil bastard,’ he replied.
I couldn’t believe he still had the stamina for bravado. It was time to show him who was boss. I’d already pinned his hands to the cross with a couple of cold chisels. The blood had congealed around them, black and hard. Now it was the turn of his feet.
When he saw me pick up my tools from the workbench, he finally cracked. ‘There’s no need for this,’ he said desperately. ‘Please. You could still let me go. They’d never find you. I’ve no idea where we are. I don’t know who you are, where you live, what you do for a living. You could move away from Bradfield and they’d never find you.’
I took a step closer. Tears welled up in his eyes and spilled over, trickling through the blood on his cheek. They must have stung, but he never flinched. ‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘It’s not too late. Even if you killed those other men. Was it you who killed them?’
He was smart, I had to give him that. Too smart for his own good. He’d just earned himself some more suffering. I turned away and dropped the chisel and club hammer on the workbench. Let him think I was having second thoughts. Let him spend the night convinced I was going to have mercy. That would make Christmas Day all the sweeter.
I shut the cellar door behind me and went upstairs to bed, armed with my videos and the best part of a bottle of vintage champagne. I was having the best Christmas I’d ever had. I remembered all those years of desperate hope, praying that this would be the year my mother would buy me presents like other children got. But all she’d ever done was let me down. Now I’d worked out that the only person who could give me what I craved was myself; I knew that for the first time in my life, I could look forward to the kind of Christmas other people have, filled with surprises, satisfaction and sex.
13
Reading his acts by the light of such mute traces as he left behind him, the police became aware that latterly he must have loitered. And the reason which governed him is striking; because at once it records – that murder was not pursued by him simply as a means to an end, but also as an end for itself.
The Wunch of Bankers was one of the few city-centre watering h
oles where Kevin Matthews felt safe meeting Penny Burgess. A fun pub with blaring rap music and decor modelled on soap operas – the Rover’s Return Snug, the Woolpack Eaterie, the Queen Vic Lounge, and the Cheers Beer Bar – was the last place he was likely to see another copper or Penny another journalist.
Kevin made a face as his taste buds clenched on the strong bitter coffee that lurked under a swirl of foam that looked more like industrial effluent than a cappuccino. Where the hell was she? He glanced at his watch for the twentieth time. She’d promised she’d be here by four at the latest, and now it was ten past. He pushed the half-empty cup away from him and grabbed his fashionable raincoat from the banquette beside him. He was about to stand up when the pub’s revolving door hissed round and disgorged Penny. She waved and headed straight over to his table.
‘You said four o’clock,’ Kevin greeted her.
‘God, Kevin, you’re getting really anal in your old age,’ Penny complained, giving him a peck on the cheek as she subsided on to the seat beside him. ‘Get me one of those mineral waters with a hint of fruits of the forest, there’s a love,’ she said, her voice mocking the pretensions of her chosen drink.
