The Mentalist

by Rod Duncan

  ‘Do you want to expose me as a fraud?’

  ‘This is a murder investigation.’

  ‘You said it was a suspicious death a few moments ago.’

  Morgan reached out and gripped Gysel’s wrist, turning it to reveal the underside of the card. And there, written in a shaky hand, was the name. ‘Emily.’

  *

  Davina’s name card gave the address of an office in Nottingham, but in the two years Harry had known her, he’d never seen it. She conducted most of her business in pubs and on station platforms. The tools of her trade were mobile phones and rolls of cash each of which she kept in that red handbag of hers. She always seemed to know what needed to happen next, though he’d never seen her write anything down.

  Today their meeting place was a coffee shop on the corner near Leicester Market. He’d drunk most of his espresso by the time she arrived. She didn’t order but came directly over and sidled into the seat next to his.

  ‘I’ve sent out a press release,’ she said.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘Of course it is darling.’

  It was an optical illusion — the afternoon sun catching her forehead in that way. But with the dark interior of the shop for a background, she looked as if she was glowing like a medieval icon.

  ‘I’ve called someone who works for one of the tabloids — I can’t say who or which, but he owes me a favour, so he returned my call. But he’ll be owing me an even bigger favour after this. Because this story is going to run big. He’ll call you. He needs to know the name of the detective who interviewed you. That’s a whole extra slant to the story — psychic helps police murder hunt. My God it’s going to be huge. You’re going to be huge.’

  ‘Davina…’

  ‘I told you — you should have done something like this before.’

  ‘A girl died.’

  ‘And you predicted it.’

  ‘She was murdered.’

  ‘It’s almost like you willed it to happen.’

  Davina sat looking at him for a moment, smiling. She opened her mouth and closed it again. He’d never seen her speechless before. Then she leant in and kissed him on the cheek. Real contact this time. She hadn’t done that since she signed him up two years ago.

  ‘I’ve done something else, Harry. And this shows how much I believe in you. I’ve got a filmmaker interested. Documentary. Fly-on-the-wall. You won’t need to do anything different. Just be yourself. He’ll follow you round. Cameras are so small these days.’

  ‘I don’t want…’

  ‘Think David Blaine. Think Channel 4.’

  ‘I’m not comfortable with that.’

  ‘He wants to start tomorrow. Just give it a go. For me.’

  She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek again. This time the corner of her mouth overlapped with his.

  She winked. ‘You didn’t thank me for fixing you up the other night.’

  ‘You want me to thank you?’

  For a moment Davina frowned and the glow seemed to fade from her skin. ‘Oh. She said it was good. And it’s given you an alibi.’

  Harry felt stung. Alibi was a word that belonged to criminals. But she was right. During the interview, Morgan had asked where he’d gone after the show. The question came out casually, as if he needed to ask it for the sake of completeness. As if it was a standard box in a standard form.

  Harry had told him. He’d been with a girl, someone who’d come to see the show. No, he wouldn’t have called her a groupie. He wasn’t a rock star. Yes, it had happened before — one-night stands with women who’d seen him on stage. Sometimes they did get a bit obsessed with him.

  He gave Morgan the address. Harry could feel the man’s distaste. Or was it jealousy?

  ‘I wish I was psychic,’ Davina said.

  Her words jolted Harry back to the present. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’d read your mind.’

  ‘I need her number,’ he said. ‘Your friend, I mean.’

  ‘So it was good. I’ve got other friends you could meet. You’ll be a popular boy now. Your star is rising.’

  ‘I just need to warn her,’ Harry said. ‘In case the police call. And…’

  ‘Yes?’ Davina was enjoying herself.

  ‘…and I need her name. I can’t remember her name.’

  ‘You bad boy.’

  She took out a mobile, tapped a couple of keys then turned it to face him. The display showed the name Chloe and a number. He took out his own phone and keyed the details into the address book. When he’d finished she stood up and looked down at him, and for just a moment he thought he could see pride in her eyes.

  After she’d gone, Harry sat staring out through the window at the people moving past. He still had choices. He didn’t need to do everything just because Davina told him to. He dialled Chloe’s number and put the phone to his ear. It rang three times before the pickup.

  ‘Hi, this is Chloe. I’m not here now so speak after the beep.’

  The tone sounded. ‘Uhhh… Hi. It’s me, Harry. Listen, I… uhhh… I need to see you. Have you seen the news today? The police talked to me. I guess they might want to talk to you as well.’

  The phone clicked and she was there. ‘Don’t bring me into this.’

  ‘Chloe… they need to know where I was.’

  ‘You can’t tell them you were with me.’

  ‘Are you married or something?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Just don’t give my name to the police. I’ll say you weren’t with me.’

  There was a click and the connection was cut.

  Chapter 2

  Morgan was standing half way up a hillside, dressed in white scene of crime overalls, surrounded by rust-tinged bracken. Here and there, outcrops of grey rock poked through the thin soil. A hundred yards up-slope he could make out the stone folly known as Old John. A hundred yards the other way, and far below him, was a path along which a few visitors to the park wandered on this autumn morning, passing the police cars, vans and ambulance.

  And at his feet, the body itself — a young woman, fully clothed, face down, one arm underneath, the other splayed to the side. Two wounds were visible. The first, on the left knee, had bled extensively before death stopped her heart. The second was on the back of the head, where angular fragments of bone protruded through a mess of caked blood and hair.

  This was Morgan’s second visit. The first had been at 07.30, an hour after the body had been discovered by an early morning walker. But since talking to Harry Gysel he’d felt the need to come back and see her one more time before she was removed to the morgue.

  He reached down and touched the skin of her neck. There was no warmth left in her. He squeezed his fingers underneath her waist, checking again that the ground there was dry. He stood and stepped away, rubbing the small of his back to ease the joint pain.

  Hearing a scuffling of loose stone, he turned to see a woman with coppery hair stepping over the cordon of incident tape that stretched between boulders and clumps of bracken, running in a wide circle around the body. She looked younger than him by a decade at least. In her mid-thirties, he thought.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said. ‘Chief Inspector Morgan?’

  Morgan nodded and pointed to a box of white plastic over-shoes. She stopped to slip a pair on then picked her way through the bracken to join him.

  ‘Dr Fields,’ she announced, offering her hand.

  And then, when he didn’t take it: ‘The forensic psychologist.’

  ‘I’ve been touching the body,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She was dead before 11.30 last night,’ he said. ‘That’s when it started to rain.’

  Dr Fields tilted her head to look at the victim. ‘Too young to have her head staved in.’

  ‘There’s a better age?’ Morgan asked.

  Dr Fields’ eyes flicked to him and back to the body.

  Morgan pointed towards a ma
rker some thirty metres down the slope. ‘The attack started somewhere over there. We’ve found blood, presumably from the leg wound. It all ended with a frenzied attack here. At least two blows to the head.’

  ‘Frenzied,’ Dr Fields said, as if trying the word out for size. ‘What about the murder weapon?’

  ‘No sign yet. Probably a rock though.’

  Dr Fields pursed her lips. ‘And the body was left face down?’

  ‘We’ve not moved it,’ Morgan said. He watched her turn a slow circle, as if trying to divine something from the autumn hues of the bracken and the distant trees. He hadn’t asked for a forensic psychologist to be sent.

  He cleared his throat. ‘This is a chaotic killer,’ he said. ‘The body left where it fell. An opportunist weapon. A disorganised crime scene.’

  Dr Fields was facing him again. ‘I’d say he’s killed before.’

  For a moment, Morgan considered denying it, just to see the confidence leave her face. ‘A year ago,’ he said, ‘there was a body found in Swithland Woods. That’s a couple of miles from here. A woman in her forties. Face up that time. This one is what — nineteen? And face down.’ He pulled the latex gloves from his hands. ‘A year before that there was a girl in Victoria Park. That one was twenty-two and left face up. In some ways they seem different, but they were all head injuries, and all in October.’

  ‘That shows control,’ Dr Fields said. ‘A highly organised pattern. The killer waiting for an entire year before killing again.’

  ‘But the crime scene is chaotic. It doesn’t fit. What made you think this wasn’t his first killing?’

  She started walking down the slope towards the marker. Morgan headed after her.

  ‘You’re thinking like the killer,’ she said. ‘Try thinking like the victim. She’s slight. Vulnerable.’

  They’d reached the marker now, a triangular plastic flag hanging limp from stiff wire. On the earth below it were the remains of a blood splash that must have dried before the rain started.

  ‘Somewhere down there,’ said Dr Fields, pointing, ‘the killer did something to make the victim believe she was in danger. It was night. Think how scared she’d have been. Which way would she run?’

  Morgan looked back up the slope towards the body. It was a steep climb. ‘She’d run away from him.’

  ‘A terrified victim tries to move as fast as possible — even when that isn’t the logical thing to do. Animal panic. She’d naturally run parallel to the slope or down it. And escape lay back down there on the road where a motorist might have seen her. So you have to ask yourself what made this fragile little girl clamber up the slope, away from safety?’

  Morgan watched Dr Fields, fascinated by the woman’s confidence in her own conclusions — reached after such a brief examination of the scene. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘He was shepherding her,’ she said. ‘She must have been limping with that knee injury. He could have killed her right away. But he was enjoying it too much. Ever watched a cat playing with a mouse? He had to have confidence to take his time over it. That kind of confidence means he’s done it before.’

  Morgan wouldn’t have admitted it to her face, but he could picture it all in his head, just as she described — the woman scrambling up the uneven slope, blood running down her leg, looking black in the near dark, the killer following with a rock in his hand, easily keeping pace. He could hear the panic in her breath. Driving her up the slope, prolonging the chase.

  ‘Mornings like this, I hate my job,’ Dr Fields said. ‘Don’t you?’

  Morgan chose not to answer. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.

  *

  Harry woke from a sleep so dead that he had no sense of time having passed since he lay down. He was still tired. Someone was hammering on the door of his bed-sit.

  ‘Wait!’ He slurred the word.

  The hammering stopped. He pulled on yesterday’s trousers and was buttoning a new white shirt as he stepped across the room.

  ‘Who is it?’

  The answering voice was a man’s. It was too muffled to make out the words. He slid the bolt and opened up.

  On the landing outside stood a middle-aged man wearing blue jeans, a black t-shirt and an army surplus coat. Two boxes with handles rested on the floor, one on each side of him. They were black and battered, with scratched steel reinforcing on the corners.

  Harry rubbed away a grain from the corner of his eye. ‘Uhhh… who?’

  ‘Davina sent me.’

  Harry looked at the boxes.

  ‘My equipment,’ said the man.

  ‘Your name?’

  The man started searching through his inside coat pockets. His hair was an inch too long to be tidy and was thinning from the crown of his head. He extracted a name card, slightly dog-eared, and handed it to Harry.

  Peter Pickman

  Pickman Films

  In the corner of the card was a small picture of a movie camera. It was the sort of thing that could have been put together on one of those vending machines in stations and airports.

  ‘The fly on the wall man?’ Harry asked.

  Peter Pickman seemed uncertain about agreeing to the title, but nodded anyway. He picked up his boxes by their handles and stepped inside.

  ‘You won’t notice I’m here,’ Pickman said. ‘Not after the first few days.’

  ‘Days? How long is this going to take?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. Just ignore me.’

  So Harry went to the kitchenette and spooned instant coffee granules into a mug. Behind him he could hear the snap of catches as the boxes opened.

  He forced his mind onto the purely sensory experience of pouring boiling water and inhaling the steam. It occurred to him that Pickman could be filming already. What, Harry wondered, did it say about him that he took two sugars in his drink?

  When he turned around, the camera was on him. It was smaller than he’d expected. Most of the space inside the carrying boxes was taken up with padding, spare batteries, chargers and the like. Pickman was holding the camera at waist height, looking down towards the viewfinder. ‘Just act naturally,’ he said. ‘What are we doing today?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You won’t notice me.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘Can’t you start tomorrow?’

  ‘Your manager said…’

  ‘She’s my agent.’

  ‘She said we’d start today. It’ll be fine. Trust me.’

  Harry didn’t trust him. Neither did he like the thought of ringing Davina and complaining about her plan. So, when he set out for the supermarket at 10.00am, it was with Pickman following. He found himself taking a long time over each choice, aware of the camera just behind, aware of people turning to watch. At the end of the trip his shopping bags had none of the usual comfort food and ready meals for one, but were stuffed with raw vegetables that he had only the vaguest idea of how to prepare.

  He loaded up the car and closed the boot. ‘I’ve got some business now,’ he said. The camera was aimed at his face so he stepped to the side. The camera followed. ‘Turn that off please.’

  Pickman complied, but he was frowning. ‘Please don’t talk to me. It doesn’t work that way.’

  ‘I need a break from it, that’s all.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘It’s personal.’

  ‘I should be with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your agent said I’d have full access.’

  ‘She was wrong.’

  Pickman looked hurt. ‘She said you’d say that.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And she told me to get you to call her when you did.’

  The call did not go well. Harry complained that Pickman didn’t seem professional enough, that the camera looked too small, that he needed privacy. The excuses seemed lame, even to him. Davina’s reply was quiet. She sounded hurt. She didn’t want to lose him as a client, she said. Bu
t if their working relationship broke down completely…

  Half an hour later, Harry was driving towards his ex-wife’s house with Pickman filming from the back seat. Or not filming. The camera made no sound and there were no lights to tell him when it was on.

  ‘Can you point that thing somewhere else, please?’

  ‘You’ll not notice it soon,’ Pickman said.

  But the more Harry tried to not notice it, the more he felt the back of his head itching where the lens was aimed.

  As he pulled up the car, the sun came out from behind a cloud. The sun always seemed to shine on his ex-wife’s house. It had a U-shaped gravel drive and a semi-circle of lawn with a striped mowing pattern.

  He rang the bell and waited. Then he rang it again. At last the door opened and he saw his ex-wife standing in the hall, blouse neatly pressed as always, a small silver cross at her neck.

  ‘Hello Angela,’ he said.

  ‘You’re early.’ She was looking at Pickman as she spoke. He stood a few paces away, eyes fixed on the viewfinder.

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ Harry said. ‘You’re suggesting I wait in the car?’

  ‘It’s half an hour. Who’s this?’

  ‘This is… uh… Peter Pickman. He’s…’

  ‘Don’t mention me, please,’ said Pickman. ‘It spoils the scene.’

  ‘He’s making a documentary.’

  Angela’s mouth made an ‘O’ shape. Somewhere behind her a girl’s voice called out. ‘Mum, where’s my bag?’

  Angela called back into the house. ‘You stay there.’ Then to Harry: ‘This wasn’t in the agreement.’

  ‘Look,’ Harry reasoned, ‘it’s my access time. I decide what we do. If I want to have a cameraman around, then…’

  ‘No!’ Angela was shouting.

  ‘Send her out,’ Harry said.

  ‘Not with that thing on.’

  ‘You want to take this back to court?’ Harry was shouting too.

  ‘We have an agreement. She’s not to be involved with your… your work.’

  ‘He’s only a cameraman for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘And you’re not to swear in front of her!’

  ‘Send her out and I’ll stop!’

  For a moment there was silence, and then Peter lowered the camera. ‘I’m not filming,’ he said.