The Murder Code

by Mosby, Steve

  ‘Unfortunate choice of words, but yes. We are.’

  On the screen, the same WPC who’d given us the bad news entered the interview suite, preparing to escort Tom Gregory out and back to the holding cell.

  ‘One killer,’ I said. ‘Two victims. The connection between them as yet unknown.’

  ‘I agree.’

  I turned to her. ‘But there will be a connection, Laura. Nobody kills two people at random like that. There’s a reason. Something we’re not seeing.’

  ‘Ah. But you said before it was unlikely there was a connection between them.’

  ‘It was unlikely before. Now it’s the most likely explanation. You see how this works, right? It means I’m not technically wrong. I’m just altering my theory to fit the presently available facts. You should try it.’

  Laura smirked. ‘What about him?’

  I looked back at the screen. Tom Gregory was gone now, so I reached out and flicked off the feed switch, and the screen went blank.

  ‘No reason to keep him in,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  I checked my watch.

  ‘But we’ve got another sixty-eight hours before we need to charge him with anything. So let’s keep him for a bit.’

  ‘Why? What’s the point?’

  ‘Because I don’t fucking like him.’

  I turned away and walked towards the door.

  ‘That’s the point.’

  Five

  THE GENERAL SURVEYS HIMSELF in the bathroom mirror.

  His short hair is combed and gelled neatly; his face blank but stern. It is the face of a capable man: not someone to catch the eye of, not a man to be crossed. A soldier’s face—finally.

  Below the shaved-red flesh of his throat, the uniform is green and straight; the red tassels at the shoulders stand out as bright as berries on sunlit grass. He holds the cap in his hands, clasped before him, and stands with rigid legs, feet shoulder-width apart. His black boots are polished enough to glint back the overhead light.

  He can stand for hours like this on a night. He stares at his own reflection for so long that the face dissolves and reforms, becomes that of a stranger. Until, in fact, he feels oddly threatened by the man looking back at him. Frightened of the figure he sees, but also in thrall to the superiority there. Other times he feels disgust for him.

  Often, the feelings vacillate, and that mixture of sensations, that internal conflict, can send him curling towards an unfathomable part of himself. He becomes lost in this image that encapsulates him. Hypnotised by the half-glimpsed, winking face of his soul.

  But tonight, it is getting late. He has work to do.

  So the General nods to himself—dismissed—then leaves the bathroom and moves through the silent house to his office. It is a small room. At one side, there is the terrible, half-formed thing that both repulses and fascinates him, but he ignores that for now and turns his attention to the opposite wall instead, where he keeps his desk and computer.

  Work to do: always more work. But although it has been a busy day, he has enjoyed the clamour his actions have created. He is excited that his plan—finally—is beginning to unfold. Everything, so far, is going as it should. Why would it not, though? He has been careful. He deserves to succeed. He is a soldier.

  The General slips on gloves and retrieves the document he typed and printed days ago from the locked drawer in the desk. Then he places it on the computer table beside the monitor, and reads the first few lines, even though he already knows them off by heart.

  Dear Detective

  I don’t know who you are yet. And at the time of writing this letter, you don’t know who I am either. You have no idea of my existence and no inkling of what I am about to do. The truth is, I still don’t know quite when it will begin myself. That is why it’s going to work. That is why you’ll never catch me.

  And the rest of it.

  It is all true. It’s beautiful, actually.

  On the floor by the desk, he has today’s evening paper. He picks it up now and scans the news report on the first killing, finding the section he’s interested in. There it is. The man who will fail to crack his code. His opponent, as much as the figure in the mirror is. The General takes a blue fountain pen and amends the printed letter.

  Dear Detective Hicks.

  Six

  ‘YOU WERE IN THE paper today,’ Rachel called through.

  ‘I was? Shit.’

  ‘It’s over there on the table.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I could hear her moving pans, occasionally wincing as an ache travelled through her. Even so, I knew better than to offer to help. This far into the pregnancy, I had a tendency to fuss—attempting to lever every possible task out of her hands as quickly as I could—and it annoyed her immensely. I’m not an invalid, she kept telling me. I’ll be off my feet soon enough. I kept trying though; it seemed the least I could do. The kitchen was one area she refused to give up, though. With my culinary skills, that was probably a good thing for both of us.

  ‘Smells great,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I picked up the copy of the Evening Post.

  Vicki Gibson was front-page news. There was a full-colour photograph of her smiling face on the right-hand side. You can say what you like about reporters, but this was impressively fast work. We hadn’t even released her identity officially yet, although I suppose it wouldn’t have been too difficult to get it from neighbours, or some officer on scene in need of keeping a press contact sweet.

  I scanned through the article. There was no mention of the second victim we’d found; that had either come too late for filing or had not been considered newsworthy enough for the moment. No mention of Tom Gregory either, thank God. It just gave the typical line that we were pursuing a number of possible leads. I wished that were true. My name was mentioned in passing as lead officer on the investigation, along with a departmental phone number that, thankfully, wasn’t mine. Small mercies.

  I put the paper back down and went through to the kitchen.

  Rachel was standing with her back to me at the counter, illuminated by the overhead spot bulbs, intent on slicing and chopping vegetables. She used the edge of the knife to scrape diced peppers from the chopping board into the sizzling frying pan beside her.

  For a moment, I just watched her. Her brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. The back of her neck, before her blouse began, was pale and slightly mottled. Occasionally the light glinted off the side of the thick black glasses she wore.

  Thok thok thok.

  Chopping mushrooms now, either oblivious to my presence or pretending to be.

  From behind, you could hardly tell she was thirty-four weeks pregnant. She hadn’t put on much weight at all in the first few months, and even now, although her belly had ballooned out in front, the gain was almost invisible from the back.

  And aside from the occasional wince of discomfort and the trouble she had sleeping, it was impossible to tell from her behaviour either. Rachel had always been so resilient. Nothing ever seemed to faze her; she was a practical, can do person. She’d dealt with pregnancy in the same calm way she dealt with everything else, appearing incomprehensibly matter-of-fact all along about carrying a child and, now, about the fact that he would shortly be here. That it would then be our heady responsibility to look after him, care for him, shape him.

  But then, unlike me, Rachel probably wasn’t worried about that at all. Certainly, if she had to cope with raising the baby on her own, she would do so, and she would do so very capably indeed. This much we’d established over the last few months, as things had become increasingly difficult between us. As we’d grown apart, separating steadily out from the tight unit we’d always been.

  She said, ‘I can sense you there, you know.’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘Yes. The back of my neck is tickling.’

  ‘You’ve always been ticklish.’

  It wa
s a stupid thing to say, because the exact opposite was true. I was ticklish; she was—annoyingly—totally immune. In happier times, she’d been able to reduce me to a helpless wreck on the floor or the bed—although that level of carefree intimacy was unthinkable now. I was just fumbling for something to say, and the reversal was something that would have brought a smile to her face in the old days, maybe even prompted her to prove me wrong, dinner on the go or not. Tonight, it didn’t work at all. The silence that followed was flat and stiff, like I’d tried to embrace her when she didn’t want me to.

  After a moment, she said, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking you’re beautiful.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes. You don’t believe me?’

  She was still working at the chopping board, her shoulders moving with the knife, so I barely caught the shrug. It hurt when I did. Indifference always seems much worse than outright hostility. At least hostility implies that someone still cares.

  She said, ‘I don’t really know what to think any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s been a rough day.’

  ‘Yeah, I gather. From the paper. You want to talk about it?’

  ‘Not so much.’

  She nodded to herself, expecting the answer. I’ve never been the kind of detective who takes his work home with him. I don’t dwell, not normally; as sad as most crimes are, my days are so full of them that I’d go insane if I kept hold of them. A handful stay, of course, but I’m not built to carry much more weight than that, and anyway, what is there to dwell on when it comes down to it? The fact is that things topple and break; in my line of work, it’s people and their lives. Most of the time, all you can do is try to sweep up afterwards and move on. What else is there to say? Somebody did something ugly for very dull and mundane reasons. We’ll punish them for it if we can, and for all it will ultimately be worth.

  The end.

  ‘It is what it is,’ I said. ‘It is what it always is.’

  ‘It’s not really that anyway—how you’ve been tonight, I mean. It’s not like you’ve been markedly different from any other night.’

  That took a moment to settle, and when it did, it hurt even more than the shrug. In my head, I still saw the decline in our relationship over the last year as a blip—a rocky patch we’d weather, coming out stronger together on the far side—and I’d been imagining Rachel felt the same. But there it was: the truth. To her, this had become normal. It wasn’t a dip in our life together; it was our life together. The way I was every night.

  ‘And how is that?’

  ‘Like you’re not really here.’

  I didn’t reply. It suddenly felt so cold and empty in the kitchen that it seemed a miracle the pan on the hob was still sizzling. As Rachel stirred it, I said:

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She shrugged again, and then, after a moment’s silence, she sighed. When she spoke, she threw my own words back at me, but so half-heartedly that they barely reached.

  ‘It is what it is.’

  After we’d eaten, Rachel went to bed early.

  She tended to have trouble sleeping for useful lengths of time, even lying on her side with the maternity pillow curled around under the bump and then between her legs to support her hips, so she grabbed as much as she could. She was on maternity leave from the laboratory now, so could catch up during the day. In lighter moments, she said her body was just getting in practice for what it would be like when the baby arrived.

  I wasn’t ready to sleep, so I took a beer on to the small patio out front of our house and listened to the neighbourhood. Tonight, it was quiet. No cars along our road at all, and I couldn’t hear any human voices. In the distance somewhere, a dog barked, the noise echoing slightly between the low buildings.

  It was grey and flat here: a spread of architectural convenience illuminated only by street lights and the occasional bright yellow windows of occupied houses. The roads were wide; the grass verges neat and buzz-cut. Our house was a police-issue residence on what had formerly been a barracks. Although it hadn’t been in use by the military for more than twenty years now, it still retained its bearing.

  But then, everywhere does. I remember, as a boy, seeing the huge trucks moving the rockets and aircraft constructed in the steel factories north of the river. The steelworks are still there, but now they put the same smelted pipes and hinges and computer chips into other things instead. Borders, technology, politics, behaviour small and large—looking back through history, all of it’s shaped by violence of some kind.

  In our region it’s even more obvious, because military supplies form the basis of the economy, and half the men you meet over fifty will have seen service of some kind. My father was in the army, until he was invalided out. Everyone lives under the shadow of the last war; it presses us all from behind, nudges at us. Even though we’re not at war now, it sometimes still feels like guerilla country—as though the arms are all just pushed under bushes, and everyone’s ready to down tools at a moment’s notice, pick up their weapons again, return to fighting.

  Just looking for an excuse.

  A reason.

  I took a swig of beer.

  I should have been thinking about Rachel, and working out some way to bridge the distance that had opened up between us. Before going to bed, she’d reminded me I had material to prepare for the next counselling session. We had to list what we’d loved about each other originally, and the things we loved now. I said I was on top of it, although right now I had no idea what to write, or how it was supposed to help. As if a list could achieve anything.

  So I was thinking about the day instead: about Vicki Gibson and the as-yet-unidentified homeless man we’d found. And I couldn’t shake what Laura had said.

  It doesn’t always make sense, Hicks.

  It would, though. It had to—because here’s the thing: crimes are always totally explicable. I refuse to believe in evil. The act of murder, however apparently heinous, always turns out to be squalid and small and human. There’s always a reason.

  In this case, Vicki Gibson’s murder had all the hallmarks of a bedroom crime.

  It does help to think of it like a building. You have the boardroom, the bedroom, the bar and the basement. Murder always originates in one of those rooms. Always. People kill each other for money; they do it out of jealousy or desire; they get angry and lose control. Every once in a while, a killer has something wrong with him underneath it all—down in the basement—and grows up malformed. But it’s always explicable. It comes from somewhere in the building, and buildings are human constructs. That’s my architecture anyway, and I’m clinging to it.

  No evil. Nothing weird.

  Glancing across the road, I thought I saw someone standing beside the street light. I made out a woman’s face, framed by black hair, with skin that was fish white and bruised, one eye swollen to a slit.

  But then a breeze took the figure away again, changing the way the light had been falling on the bushes behind, which was all it had been.

  I took another sip of beer.

  Tomorrow, I thought.

  Tomorrow we’d nail it.

  Seven

  LEVCHENKO CHECKS HIS WATCH.

  It is half past nine in the evening, and he needs to be ready for ten o’clock precisely. Of course, there is no way the client would ever know if the order was completed late, but Levchenko is scrupulously professional about the special work he takes on—God is watching him, after all, even if the client, Edward Enwright, is not.

  And so it is time to begin.

  He checks the shop is locked, then turns off the light and retreats to the work area in the back room. Along one side are his stoves and benches, scattered with scissors, clipped wicks and opaque plastic cases of various shapes and sizes. Opposite, rickety wooden racks support hundreds of candles: blocks and cylinders, arranged in rainbow rows. There are too many smells in here to count, as though the air is made from pressed flowers.

  L
evchenko selects a small metal saucepan. It is battered, as though by countless hammer blows, and the base is soot-black from the soft blue flames that have licked at it from the gas burner over too many years to remember. He sits at the bench and clicks the burner on now, then lights it with a crackling match. The smell of the gas mingles with the flower scents; a gentle hissing burr touches his ears.

  From below the bench he retrieves a crumpled plastic bag of thin white pellets. Nearly empty. The wax rattles into the pan, then gradually begins to dissolve into something that looks like greasy water. He adds dye with a pipette from the bench, and the liquid turns a beautiful shade of blue. Even after all these years, he is amazed by how magnificently wax takes its colour—so clean and pure. Staring into the steaming pan, he might be looking into a perfect sea or up at a cloudless sky. Not everyday examples, but the ones people see in their imaginations and their dreams.

  There is a large clock on the wall, the second hand ticking silently around. It is just after quarter to ten.

  Levchenko reaches out and prods a cautious fingertip into the pan.

  At first, there is a mild sensation of pain: the initial half-second of burning you would get from boiling water. But wax is a precarious substance; it melts and solidifies over a smaller fulcrum of temperature, and the contrast of his flesh is enough to tilt the liquid touching his skin, so that when he lifts his finger out a moment later, the tip is covered in a soft blue case. Should he so desire, he could make himself the most brittle of gloves.

  It is nearly ready.

  He unrolls the wax from his finger and brushes away the rubbery scraps that cling. Then he stands up and ponders the candles on the racks behind him, finally selecting a tall white one—a cylinder. Back at the bench, he uses a nub of putty to stick the candle to the base of a small circular metal dish, using just enough to hold it upright.

  There is a cracked porcelain sink in the workshop. Levchenko fills an old plastic washing up bowl with ice-cold, frothing water to a depth of about eight inches. Then he places the bowl carefully on the bench beside the gas burner, allowing the rolling water to settle.