by Adam Baron
‘Thought I’d escape the crime and violence in Perth by coming to live with you genteel Poms.’ I asked him if he was sure he hadn’t heard anything more that the two men were saying and he replied he thought he heard Teddy asking the other guy if he wanted a lift. He remembered that Teddy had paid for all of the drinks.
After a while the bar manager began to give me significantly pissed-off looks – probably because she was actually having to do some work herself for a change. I smiled at her sweetly. I thanked the barman for his time and asked him to phone me if he remembered anything which he thought might be useful. He looked down at the card in his hand and said he would do. Then he slid the card into the pocket of his shirt as he walked back round to his usual side of the bar. I offered to pay Alex for the Perrier, but he told me to forget about it, and expertly flipped the empty bottle into the bin. This really annoyed his manager who pursed her lips into a tight O at the profligate liberty taken by one of her minions. I thanked Alex again, smiled to myself, and walked back to my car.
The drive back to Islington only took forty minutes. As I was cruising along the now deserted Westway I thought about what the barman had told me. I tried to conjure up a picture of a man, a man who seemed to have things on his mind. A man who slouched but seemed important, who knew nasty things. None came. I drove past the place again but this time very quickly and the only thing I was worried about was a traffic camera. I drove along the Euston Road and up to the Angel. I turned off Upper Street behind a 38 bus and stopped at the bottom of Cross Street in a red zone.
I made a quick visit to the library just across from the fish shop. I have a friend there who lets me take out back copies of newspapers even though this is not strictly permissible. I always take them back, often the same day. I just like sitting in my office with them, near the phone. I dumped an armful on to the back seat, got into the car again, and drove up Highbury Grove to the Studios. I parked and walked up to my office.
When I got up to the fourth floor I found Andy Gold sitting in the cafe, drinking coffee and quite obviously eyeing up Ally.
And looking pleased with himself.
Chapter Six
We were in my office. I couldn’t put Ally through any more of Mr Gold’s smoulderingly sensual glances and anyway the place had started to fill up for lunch. Andy was seated across from me and was taking a file out of his briefcase. I noticed that there were a couple of messages on my machine but I didn’t think about playing them. Playing your answerphone messages with a policeman in the room is not what I’d call a good idea.
Andy placed an A5-size photograph on my desk. It was obviously taken from a security video – it was a slight downshot and the definition was poor. It wasn’t a reproduction of the whole frame, it was a blow-up of one section, but the date and time could still be seen in the bottom left corner. It showed a man’s face, in profile. Alongside but obscured by him, was another man wearing what looked to be, or at least could have been, an airline pilot’s hat.
‘That’s our man,’ Andy said, turning the picture round towards me.
I looked at the picture some more. It wasn’t very clear, not clear at all, but it was a person. Only one person. It was a profile which somebody might recognize. I asked Andy when he had got hold of it.
‘Last night,’ he replied. Andy was happy. I got the feeling that he was about to tell me something which illustrated how clever he was.
‘We’d been through all the airport security vids and we did get a shot but from directly above. No use, you couldn’t even see hair colour. Then we went through the ones from the stores with open fronts but there was no sign of our Edward or if there was it was too crowded to make him out. We went through those vids frame by frame for days but didn’t get anything. I even took some copies home with me and you know how I like to leave my work at the office. We gave up on the vids weeks ago but yesterday, after I’d seen you, it suddenly struck me that our Mr Ed might have stopped off for something in one of the stores that are completely contained, for some mints or some johnnies or something.’
He broke off to take a sip of the coffee he had brought through with him and also, I suspected, for me to take in the magnitude of his investigative prowess.
‘Well, we checked, but naturally enough Edward and friend didn’t stop for refreshments, they had other things on their minds I presume. But they did walk pretty close to the Body Shop.’ Andy leant forward with a smile on his face.
‘Want to know how I know?’
I sighed. I wished I had a book in the office. Andy’s chirpiness depressed me; as usual it had nothing to do with catching a killer and everything to do with being the one who did it.
‘Watkins and Dawson were going through the tapes, fast-forwarding to see if anyone in a baseball cap, or Ed himself, came in. I suddenly realized that whenever anybody opened the door to go in or out, which they did a lot because the place was really busy, the camera got a peek at the concourse. At the people walking by. We knew the time Edward and his new pal left the bar so we went through the tape real slow at around that time and Houpla! Edward and his chutney chum.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said, ‘you should be a detective.’
‘Lucky, I know, but we nearly missed it. We got the still made last night and then had it cut and blown up.’ He put his finger down on the middle of the man’s face, and pushed the picture towards me.
‘That’s our bastard,’ Andy said.
I picked the picture up and studied it.
‘Have you given this to the beat boys yet?’ I asked.
‘Being done now.’
‘What about media? Are you going to do a Crimewatch or anything?’
Andy sat back in his chair and sighed.
‘Now that, my dear Bill, is the prob. The Governor, in his infinite, does not believe the picture is clear enough.’
‘He has a point,’ I said.
‘He thinks that if we put it out we’ll get every old dear from Skye to Southend calling in whenever they catch a peek of a bloke in a baseball cap through the sitting-room nets. He wasn’t even sure about giving it to the plods.’
I was surprised. ‘Why not?’
‘Well, it’s not so distinct that you could clock someone with it. On the street. More like if you already knew the guy you might put his face to it. And, for some reason, the Governor doesn’t think that any of our Blue Boys socialize with crazed homicidal fags.’
‘No,’ I said. ’And perhaps he’s even right about that. So what are you going to do?’
‘Use it in evidence when we catch the cunt, and until then give it to the plods but tell them not to get too carried away. And give it to the plain-clothes team who are on the thing. They’ll wave it around in the right places and who knows?’ Andy paused for a second and smirked. ‘The Gov didn’t even mind you having a go with it.’
I smiled at the memory of a fat Scotsman with a perpetual look of disgust on his face, encased in a cloud of cigar smoke, Glenfidich and Aramis.
‘Still remembers me then?’ I asked.
‘Oh, sure he does. Said he always had suspicions about you, especially when you quit. He thinks you couldn’t take being around so many beefy men all the time. Said it was a good idea giving you the picture because you probably go to all those bender bars and might even know the geezer yourself.’ Andy Gold laughed.
‘Charming,’ I said, and I took out an A4 manila envelope from my desk drawer, and slid the picture into it.
Andy told me he was going to troll the picture round to all the people he had interviewed already and that he’d let me know if anything came of it. He said he didn’t hold out much hope really, and that his team were pretty well resigned to waiting for the next one. He said we were about due bearing in mind the length of time between the other murders. He left me with two copies of the photograph and I walked him down the hall to the lift. He popped into the cafe to take his coffee cup back and when he came out he was smiling again, having set aside thoughts of serial k
illers as easily as an onboard magazine when the flight attendant comes by.
‘You know,’ he said, as he stepped into the waiting lift, without even the faintest trace of irony, ‘I think that Italian piece fancies me.’
* * *
Back in my office I made a call to the courier company I use and told them that I had a pick-up. Then I called Carl at the Repro place near my flat and told him that I would be biking over a picture that I wanted doing in postcard size. Tvo hundred to start with. I said I’d pick the copies up later, just before he shut.
‘Oh, you mean today, Mr Rucker?’ Carl replied wearily. I told him he was beautiful, and hung up.
One of the messages was from Sharon. She said she had been given a couple of tickets for a flamenco dance show at Sadler’s Wells on Friday night and would I like to go. What was today? Wednesday. Cool, why not? I called her at work and arranged it. The other message was from Mrs Charlotte Morgan. She was just returning my call. She left a work number I could reach her on if I needed to speak to her today, or I could contact her at home that evening after seven. I called the work number and Mrs Morgan agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to meet me the following morning.
After I’d given the envelope with the photo in to the biker I spent the rest of the afternoon going through the newspapers I’d picked up from the library. As I read what the press had to say about the three murders, the image of the man’s face was ever present in my mind. This face was out there somewhere, and it was highly likely that its owner was thinking of ways to provide the papers with even more copy.
I started with the lorry driver and the rent boy and then I went through everything there was about Edward Morgan. What I wanted to try and see was if they felt the same, not the way they were reported but the events themselves. There was something about them which seemed to me to be familiar in some way, as if I had read of something like them before but didn’t know where. Probably in one of those pseudo-Victorian true crime books that always used to be kicking around the station house. For some reason my brother came to mind, as if he had mentioned something like this to me.
I wondered if the man in the picture had seen to Waldock and Evans as well as Teddy Morgan. The newspapers were in no doubt as to the link between the killings. Newspapers like to serialize everything; they sell more copies that way. While they couldn’t print many of the details of how the murders were committed, they were allowed to mention the use of the bottles, which they all did with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The broadsheets were quite restrained but I was shocked once again by the dramatization given by all the tabloids. Their tone was one of horrified moral outrage at the murders, but underlined with a joyous ‘we’ve got a great story’ air. The very reporters who wondered as to who could possibly perpetrate such heinous crimes were the same ones who hounded the relatives of the dead for quotes. In one rag there was even a big exclusive which purported to be by the mother of James Waldock. It was about the sordid acts which her life of poverty and drug dependency had reduced her too: theft, deceit and prostitution. And, I thought to myself, talking to tabloid news journalists. I remembered the first time I had ever encountered such bullish insensitivity, picking up some rag in a Melbourne bus station. It was a graphic report about some other vicious killings, including pictures, splashed all over the first few pages. At the time I’d thought it unbelievable, even over there. Now it’s commonplace, even here.
As I went through the lurid tales in the papers it struck me that if Teddy Morgan had been killed by the same man who killed Evans and Waldock, the killer had definitely broken his pattern to a certain degree. The question was whether or not Teddy’s murder was pre-planned or opportunistic. Either way there was a discrepancy between that and the other murders: even given the baseball cap, the killer had, unlike the previous two times, given people a chance to see him. If it was just a ‘lucky’ chance – if the killer had been at the airport anyway and just happened to meet a gay airline pilot at the bar who offered him a lift home – then it would mean he had just got a little careless. He couldn’t resist his urge to do what he does, even though he knew that he had been in a public place prior to the killing. If, however, the killer had planned to go to the airport in order to find a victim then he wasn’t being careless; he was being overconfident. He didn’t care if he was seen because he either thought that his hat was sufficient disguise or he didn’t take into account the security cameras.
Irritatingly enough, neither the chance nor planned option seemed completely credible to me. I thought about the chance idea. The other crimes were obviously preplanned; the bottle in each case appeared to have been prepared in advance and the perp made sure that there was no one else around, or if there was then they weren’t the sort to go chatting to the Bill about the activities of a recently murdered boy-prostitute. Bearing in mind his previous meticulousness it seemed difficult to believe that the killer had just happened to be in the airport and had met Edward and decided to kill him. Also, his bag looked empty. What would a person who had to be at the airport anyway be doing with an empty bag? And how did he know that he would be able to use a bottle on Teddy if he had just met him? Because Teddy told him about the champagne he had? Maybe. But even so I found it hard to believe it was chance. The barman said that the man in the hat had been at the bar for a while. Why would he sit there, in an airport, if he wasn’t hoping something was going to happen?
I suddenly realized that I hadn’t asked the barman if he had noticed the guy before, on other days, checking the place out. Idiot. He probably wouldn’t remember, and he would have told the police if he did remember seeing the guy previously, but even so. I might have been able to get him to remember, and if I did it would prove that the whole thing was intentional – he had gone there to find a victim. I made a mental note to call the airport first thing in the morning.
I didn’t think it was a chance thing but the idea that it was planned also had me doubting. Why was he so deliberately careless? There are many ways to kill people you don’t know without doing so after you have been seen chatting to them in a well-lit airport bar. Agreed, a killer of gay men does have to meet his victims and this will have to be in a public place (unless of course the victim is a prostitute or a lorry driver). Maybe the guy wanted to spread more panic – make it dangerous for men to pick each other up in public as well as dangerous to give them lifts or sell them sexual favours. But then why didn’t he use a bar or a gay club? Too obvious? Perhaps. Male flight staff do have a reputation for homosexuality but was he really likely to meet one in a public area? Apparently, according to the barman, he was; Alex Mitchell said that some of the gay staff came to his bar. But that still leaves him with the problem of the cameras and the fact that Teddy’s uniform would make his last movements particularly memorable to potential witnesses.
I tried to think how I would select my victims if I was in the habit of murdering homosexuals. While I did think that his first two strikes made sense, I really did not think that I would go to the airport. It would take me too long to meet somebody, by which time I would have become a regular feature in the place. Unless I lucked out first or second time. Not worth it. But then again, I thought, maybe the killer isn’t very bright. It isn’t written anywhere that serial killers should be, that’s just in the movies. Or maybe it’s me that’s not very bright and Teddy’s murder was excellently planned.
Well, nobody’s caught him yet.
I felt that the discrepancies I’d found did increase the chance that Sir Peter Morgan was right, that the murder could have been a copycat set-up. But set up by whom? There was, however, one other option to consider if the killer was the same for all three murders. Not only had the murderer planned on murdering someone he met at the airport, he had planned who it was going to be. He knew Edward Morgan and had decided that he would be next. This option presented a myriad of different possible scenarios based on who Edward knew and where he went, none of which I knew anything about. Yet. Hacking away at that option would
be fruitless at the moment and anyway my head felt pretty full of different takes on the thing as it was. I decided to leave all the stuff I had put into my brain to sift itself. I packed up the newspapers, turned on the machine, and went down to my car.
As I passed the cafe Ally saw me through the door and called out to me.
‘Hey, Billy,’ she laughed, ‘such nice friends you’ve got!’
Chapter Seven
I had half an hour before my pictures would be done so I drove down to King’s Cross and parked a few doors down from the squat inhabited by, among others, Dominic Lewes. It was still light but it wouldn’t be for ever so I tried to think of a way to precipitate Dominic’s appearance at his front door. Bomb scare? Too drastic. Eventually I just decided to walk right up and ring the doorbell.
‘Yeah?’
It was a girl. I couldn’t see much of her because the door was only open as far as the chain would let it. What I could see was that she wasn’t one to get overly influenced by a Timotei ad or go overboard on fake tanning cream.
‘I’m looking for Dominic,’ I said.
’Who?’
’Dom.’ Her face didn’t register that she knew anyone of that name. ‘Smallish kid,’ I said. ‘Bleached blond crop and brown eyes. He lives here?’
The girl hesitated for a second. A male voice behind her called out, ‘Who is it?’
‘Someone for Mikey,’ the girl told him, turning round and moving away from the door.
The owner of the voice came up and took the chain off the door. He was a tall black guy, about the thirty mark, dressed in a black V-necked T-shirt and camel-colour jeans.
