The Mermaids Singing

F ROM 3" DISK LABELLED: BACKUP. 007; FILE LOVE. 014

Getting Gareth to Carlton Park was less easy than I’d anticipated. I’d done my reconnaissance carefully, I thought, and I’d counted on being able to drive down the access road used by the gardeners. What I hadn’t taken into account was the long Christmas break. The road was blocked off by two metal posts slotted into the asphalt and locked in place with heavy padlocks. I could probably have squeezed through on the verge, since the jeep would have had no problem flattening the small shrubs that lined the road. But I would inevitably have left tyre tracks and probably tiny traces of paint. I had no intention of allowing Gareth to deprive me of my liberty, so that option was closed to me.

I parked the jeep round the back of the storage shed where the park staff kept their equipment. At least there I was out of sight both from the road and the park. There weren’t many people around at two o’clock on Boxing Day morning, but success is all about taking pains.

I got out of the jeep and scouted around. The shed was out; it had a burglar alarm. But the gods were smiling on me now. Around the side of the shed, there was a low wooden trolley, the kind that porters used to wheel along station platforms in the days when there were railway porters who didn’t think shifting luggage was beneath them. The gardeners probably used it to transport plants round the park. I pushed it back to the jeep and tipped Gareth’s naked body on to it. I tucked a couple of black plastic bin liners round the body and sprayed the axles with a quick blast of lubricating oil to cure a nasty squeak, then stealthily I set off towards the shrubbery.

Again, I was lucky. I saw no one. I steered the trolley round to the rear of the bandstand towards the shrubs that covered the steep slope behind. At the edge of the path, I pushed the trolley on to the grass verge and into the edge of the shrubs. Then, wary of leaving footprints on the soft ground, I clambered on to the trolley and rolled Gareth’s body off the end and into the bushes. I stepped back and jumped down, pulling the trolley after me. The bushes looked a little battered, but there was no sign of Gareth. With luck, he’d remain undiscovered until the postman delivered my Christmas message to the BEST.

Ten minutes later, the trolley was back in place and I was nosing out of the park’s rear entrance on to a quiet lane opposite the churchyard. Even though the chances of being spotted were slim, I waited until the main road was in sight before I turned my lights on. Unlike Temple Fields, this was exactly the sort of area where some nosy insomniac would notice a strange vehicle in the early hours.

I drove home and slept for twelve hours, waking up in time for an interesting couple of hours on my computer before I went in to work. Luckily, it was a busy night, so I had plenty of complex problems to take my mind off the anticipation of the following day’s Sentinel Times.

They’d done me proud, in spite of the short time they’d had to deal with my message. They’d obviously got on to the plod right away, and managed to persuade them to take it seriously. They’d given me the front page, complete with a photograph of my message, though without anything that would identify who the card had come from.

KILLER ALERTS BEST!

The naked and mutilated victim of a twisted killer has been discovered in a city park following a bizarre message sent to the Sentinel Times.

The killer, who signed himself ‘Santa Claws’, revealed in a grisly Christmas message that he had dumped the body in Carlton Park.

The sick communique appeared to be written in blood. It was scrawled on the company Christmas card of one of the city’s leading firms of solicitors.

It was accompanied by a home video of the body’s location, which BEST staff immediately recognized from the distinctive bandstand on Park Hill.

Alerted by BEST reporters, police dispatched a squad of uniformed and plain-clothes officers to the area of the park mentioned in the Christmas card.

After a short search among bushes off the nature trail near the bandstand, as indicated in the video, a uniformed constable discovered the body of a man.

According to police sources, the body was naked. The man’s throat had been cut and his body mutilated.

It is believed that he may have been tortured before his death.

Although this area of Carlton Park is known as a pick-up area for predatory homosexuals, police are not presently connecting this killing with the murders earlier this year of two young men whose bodies were dumped in the Temple Fields ‘gay village’ area of the city.

The body has not yet been identified, and police have not released a description of the victim, who is believed to be in his late twenties or early thirties.

The package, which had been posted on Christmas Eve in Bradfield, arrived at the offices of the Sentinel Times in this morning’s post, addressed to the news editor, Matt Smethwick.

Mr Smethwick said, ‘My first thought was that someone was playing a sick joke, especially since I know one of the solicitors in the firm concerned.

‘Then I realized my friend was out of the country on a skiing holiday, so it couldn’t have been him who posted the package.

‘I rang the police right away, and luckily they took it seriously.’

I should think they did. I’d never been more serious in my life. In spite of what the police were saying, the thought that Gareth was the third in a series must have made the short journey across their minds. It had certainly not escaped the attention of the journalists, who used the latest discovery as an excuse to rehash the killings of Adam and Paul. By the time the City Final edition hit the streets, they’d even found a rent-a-quote academic to spout forth.

INSIDE THE MIND OF A KILLER

The man the Home Office have chosen to spearhead the hunt for serial killers spoke today about the latest slaying that has terrified the city’s gay community.

Forensic psychologist Tony Hill is one year into a major study funded by the government which will lead to the setting up of a criminal profiling task force similar to the FBI unit featured in The Silence of the Lambs.

Dr Hill, 34, was formerly the chief clinical psychologist at Blamires Hospital, the maximum-security mental unit which houses Britain’s most dangerous criminally insane offenders, including mass murderer David Harney and serial killer Keith Pond, the Motorway Madman.

Giving his verdict, Dr Hill said, ‘I have not been called in by the police to consult on any of these cases, so I know no more than your readers do about them.

‘I’m reluctant to make a snap judgement, but if pushed, I’d say it was certainly possible, and possibly likely that the murders of Adam Scott and Paul Gibbs were committed by the same person.

‘On the surface, this latest killing looks similar, but there are certain crucial differences. For a start, the body has turned up in a very different sort of location. Even though Carlton Park is also known as a gay cruising area, it’s got a very different ambience from the urbanized Temple Fields.

‘Also, the sending of the message to the Sentinel Times is a significant variation. Nothing similar happened in the earlier cases, and the killer makes no reference to previous killings.

‘That inclines me to think we may be dealing with at least two separate individuals here.’

And so on and so forth, all of it in much the same vein. All of it saying in neon lights, ‘We haven’t got the faintest idea where to start looking.’ I didn’t think that worrying about Dr Tony Hill was going to keep me awake at nights. I decided it was time to teach the powers that be a couple of lessons they wouldn’t forget in a hurry.