Birdman

20

'Mr Henry, DI Diamond here. We met at the Dog and Bell the other day.' A scrabbling noise and the letter-box lifted, a warrant card appeared briefly, the small tanned nose familiar. 'I'm putting some photographs through the letterbox. I think you've seen them before.' A shower of ten-by-eights landed on the floor. Gemini, back against the wall, stared mutely down at the faces in his hall. 'We've got corroborative statements putting at least three of these girls in your company. Anything you'd like to say?'

Gemini was silent. On the other side of the door Diamond coughed.

'Maybe you'd consider coming down to the station for a chat?' He waited a moment. Gemini remained silent, staring at the letterbox, listening to the sound of thin paper being folded. His mother was still sleeping in the bedroom at the bottom of the hallway, he didn't want her awake, didn't want her being troubled.

'I'm also putting a copy of our search warrant through. Under the provisions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act I'm obliged to ask you if you will consent to the search of your car, registration C966 HCY, and give you this opportunity to pass the keys to me.'

Gemini slid down the wall to his haunches.

'I'll take that as a ''No''.' A carbon copy fluttered to the floor. 'The warrant, Mr Henry. We'll be back with a record of everything seized, which for the purposes of this investigation will mean the car and its contents.'

'You ain't takin' no car.'

'Hello?' A pallid blue eye appeared at the letterbox, blinking. 'Hello?'

'You takin' my car, is it?'

'That is correct.'

'Because you think them girls was in my car?'

'You know why we're interested in them, don't you?' Even from here Gemini could smell Diamond's sour breath. 'Don't you?'

'Maybe,' Gemini whispered. 'Maybe.'

'It's not Gemini,' Caffery said. 'It can't be.'

Maddox turned up his raincoat collar against the dying shreds of a storm and looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. They stood at the foot of a high-rise council block, part of the Pepys estate, Deptford, as FSS technicians in green overalls secured Gemini's red GTI to the lab's low-loader. High above them the clouds were tugged by invisible winds away from Deptford, off over to the Thames. It was a Saturday, the interviews at St Dunstan's were scheduled for Monday and Caffery was in down-time. He'd elected to spend his time sitting on the team's heels.

'Have you heard of serotonin? Free histamines? First and second instars?'

'I'm not a scientist.'

'The wounds were post-mortem,' Caffery said. 'I mean very post.'

Maddox put his hands in his pockets. 'We knew that from the autopsy.'

'No. We thought they were inflicted in the heat of the moment, as soon as they were dead, as part of the killing act.' He glanced at the lab technician tying a white SEIZED PROPERTY tag on the GTI's windscreen wiper. 'Steve, look. The women were raped. He used a condom because he's a clean freak, or phobic about AIDS, and did it post-mortem.'

'Post-mortem?'

'That's why there was no sign of force, no bruising to the genitals. Dead tissue doesn't really react to noninvasive violence.'

'How did you dream this up?'

'Forensics say the wounding was up to three days after death.'

'Three days?'

'It's been bugging us why they weren't raped. And here's the explanation. He's been hanging on to the bodies. The rape probably happened at the same time as the mutilation, probably repeatedly, and probably after the rigor had worn off.' Caffery saw Maddox's face tighten a fraction. 'He's a necrophiliac, Steve. It doesn't explain the ease with which he killed them, but it does explain why he wants the killing so unfrenzied, why there was no knock-about bruising, no black eyes.'

'I don't think I want to hear this.'

'The death has to be quick, unfussy. He isn't interested in killing. That's not the fun. The fun is the corpse. He only disposes of them when they become too putrid.' Maddox shuddered as if the sun had gone behind a mountain. The last weak spatters of rain subsided. Caffery put his hands in his pockets and took a step closer, dipping his head in to Maddox. 'Birdm— the offender keeps the bodies for three days and then, when the murder itself is just a memory, then he mutilates them. You know what it means?'

'Apart from he's even more of a weirdo than we thought?'

'It tells us more than that.'

Maddox bit his lip. New, washed sunshine flickered against the concrete block and he looked suddenly old. He glanced up the edge of the nearest high-rise to Gemini's flat. 'He's got privacy?'

'Yes, and he lives alone.' Caffery followed Maddox's gaze to the flat. The curtains were drawn. 'Most likely he's got a freezer.'

Maddox cleared his throat. 'We can't get a warrant for the flat: the friendly magistrates've gone PC on us.'

'OK.' Caffery started walking to the entrance of the block.

'Where d'you think you're going?'

'I've got something to show you.'

'Hey.' Maddox caught up. 'I don't want you rattling him, Jack.'

'I won't.'

In the hallway a young girl of about ten, with long dirty blond hair and a crusty-nosed baby on her hip, stared out through the glass at them. She wore a filthy pink T-shirt and had scuffed bare feet. Caffery tapped on the glass. She opened the door, stood back and looked at them in silence.

'Thanks.' He slammed his hand on the lift button and the doors opened. He stepped inside, and turned to look at Maddox. 'What floor's he on?'

'Seventeen! We're not speaking to him, mate. Not yet.'

'No.' Caffery hit the button for the seventeenth floor. 'Get in and let's see, shall we, how many times the doors open between here and the seventeenth. Let's just see how feasible Mel Diamond's idea really is.'

The two men stood, hands in pockets, faces turned up to the red light travelling across the panel above the door. 'Imagine you're him, Steve. You've got a body in a binliner right here on the floor. That's a woman's body we're talking about. Cut and curled up. Stinking.'

The lift climbed: nine, ten, eleven. Maddox was silent, watching the red light crawling. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. It stopped and the doors opened. An old woman with a waterproof shopping case and a tiny shivering Jack Russell on a lead looked at them.

'Going down?'

'Up.'

'I'll come with you anyway.' She stepped inside smiling, tying a plastic hood over her perm. 'You never know if it'll stop on the way back down.'

Caffery looked at Maddox and whispered, 'Remember now. On the floor.'

A mother with two toddlers got in on the fifteenth floor, and after stopping on the seventeenth the lift continued to the twentieth, the top floor. Now there were six people and a dog in the lift. Maddox shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. On the way back down they stopped a further three times. The lift was full by the time they reached the lobby.

'It's daytime,' Maddox said as they stepped outside into the daylight, rubbing his face wearily. The girl with the baby pressed her nose against the window as they walked away. 'He moved them in the night.'

'Yes, but can you imagine going down all those flights day or night? Looking at the numbers like we've just done, and then, after all that, pulling it out of the lift.' He started to pace towards the car park. Beyond him the low-loader's hydraulic ramp jerked closed; the GTI shuddered in its moorings. 'All this way across the forecourt.' He stopped, his hands open. 'Look up. How many windows can you see?'

'Jack, this is the Pepys estate. It wouldn't be the first time a dodgy-looking package was dragged across this forecourt in the middle of the night, be assured of that.'

'You saw those PMs.' He lowered his voice. 'Don't pretend you didn't notice the smell. Even three days into death they smell, Steve, they stink. You know. It's a smell you never forget, a smell you can't wash out.'

'He might've got another place.'

'Sure,' Jack nodded, sucking breath in through his nostrils. 'Mmm, sure. And you just hang on to that, OK. Just hang on to that hope.'

At that Maddox's face changed. The blue of a vein pulsed in his temple and when he spoke his voice was low, almost inaudible. 'I had the governor on this morning: he's heard we've got a profiling buff on the team. So now I'm in the business of covering up for you.'

'The DCS prefers fluke sighting and circumstantial evidence?' He shook his head. 'Steve, face it, F team have probably knocked on the door of every racist in east Greenwich, and everyone is going to be ecstatic at the chance to shop some miserable local drug dealer. Get him hauled in, out of their hair for a few days. DI Diamond just loves it, it's in his veins, and I'm wondering, Steve, if he's doing it because he knows he can, because—' He shoved his hands in his pockets and met Maddox's grey eyes with his dark blue ones: full on, defiant. 'Because you're letting him.'

'You're still on three-month trial with us, Jack. Don't forget that.'

'I haven't forgotten.'

'I'll see you back at Shrivemoor. Wish Veronica luck for the chemo.'

'Steve, wait—'

But he was walking away and Caffery had to shout above the roar of the low-loader.

'Superintendent Maddox!' His voice bounced between the high-rise flats. The children in the doorway poked their heads out, startled by the noise. 'I'm going to prove you've got the wrong person in the frame, Superintendent Maddox — I'm going to prove he isn't even black!'

But Maddox continued to walk. The low-loader changed gear and Gemini's GTI, covered in a white tarpaulin, set out to be paraded like an Indian wedding barat through the streets of Deptford.

The pub was empty. An Alsatian, asleep next to a Calorgas fire, head on its paws, opened one eye to watch Caffery walk to the bar. Betty, the barmaid, dressed in a low-necked nylon lace blouse, a pair of large-framed glasses on a chain round her neck, didn't bother greeting him. She put her cigarette out and simply stood there, varnished nails resting lightly on the beer taps, waiting for him to speak.

Caffery held his card up. 'Old Bill.'

'Yeah, I remember. You want a drink or not?'

'Go on, then. A—' No single malt in this pub. 'A Bells.' He felt in his pockets for change. 'How's business?'

'Look at the place. The reporters have come out of the woodwork, scared half the punters away.'

'Have you talked to them?'

Betty snorted and her dangly turquoise earrings shivered. 'I wouldn't take their dirty money. I'm telling you, I wish none of this had ever happened.'

'We all wish that.' Caffery peeled his feet from the sticky carpet and sat on the stool. 'Betty, do you remember the young man we interviewed in here?'

'The coloured lad? The one who scarpered?'

'Yes.'

'That's Gemini. They give their kids such funny names, them lot, don't they? 'Ere.' She beckoned him with her veiny hand. There was no-one else in the pub, but it seemed to satisfy her when Caffery bent in close enough for her to whisper. 'That Gemini' — she closed her hand around his wrist — 'the papers are saying them girls were users, you know — drugs.'

'Yes.'

'Well, they have to get it somewhere, don't they?' She tapped her nose conspiratorially. 'And that's all I'm saying.' She wiped a tumbler with a J-Cloth, pushed it under the optic and set it in front of him. 'He pretends he's just cabbying for them, but I'm not blind, I know it gives them a chance to do their little, you know, transactions.'

'Does Joni know him?'

'Of course.' Betty squinted at him and Caffery got the full treat of her eyelids, flashing like the underside of a kingfisher. 'She always gets a lift from Gemini. Her and Pinky, if she don't bring her bike.'

'Her and who?'

'They called her Pinky when she was working.'

'Rebecca,' he murmured, oddly embarrassed on her behalf.

'That's her. She's an artist now. She'll sit in that corner in the saloon bar, with her paints, serious as anything, and not say a word all afternoon.'

Suddenly the Alsatian sat up and growled. Caffery looked round in time to see the door close and the shadow of a man retreat beyond the frosted glass.

'Come in, love, it's open,' Betty called, throwing the cloth over her shoulder and coming out from behind the bar. She opened the door and stood for a moment, chewing her nails, gazing into the street, before giving up and letting it swing closed. 'One of the regulars. Must of saw you and thought you was the newspapers.' She picked up his glass, wiped the bar and replaced it on a clean mat. 'That or he knew you were the Bill.'

The dog sat down next to the heater and scratched its ear with a grizzled hind paw, eyes squinty with pleasure.

When Caffery left the streets were empty. The pavements had dried but the trees were still dripping and earthworms slid from between the gaps in the flagging. Suddenly he was aware of a shadow on the paving slabs keeping pace with his, and the soft squeak of bike gears. He turned.

'Afternoon, Inspector.'

Rebecca stopped the bike and put one long leg on the kerb to balance herself. She wore brown shorts, a loose oatmeal sweater and her long hair was caught in a ponytail. A leather portfolio was secured over the back wheel by worn canvas straps.

Jack put his hands in his pockets. 'Is this a coincidence?'

'Not really.' The lilac tree above them dripped onto her sweater, leaving small dark spots. 'I keep coming back to the pub, you know, wondering — I saw you leaving.'

'I see.' He saw she had something to tell him. 'You've remembered something?'

'Well, yes.' Her mouth twisted apologetically. 'But it's probably nothing. Probably a waste of your time.' Strong white nails worked at the tiny stitches of the canvas straps. He'd forgotten how pretty she was.

'Nothing's nothing.'

'OK—' She spoke warily, ready to be laughed at. 'I remembered something about Petra.'

'What?'

'Sometimes when I fall asleep, you know that bit just before you go under completely, the part where all your dreams from the night before come back?'

'Yes.' Caffery knew too well. It was the place he often met Ewan and Penderecki.

'I'm sure it's not important, but last night I was half dreaming and I remembered Petra telling me she was allergic to make-up. She never wore it. You can see it in my paintings. She was always pale.' The sun broke through the cloud cover and cast the sharp shadow of Rebecca's eyelids over green-gold irises. 'That photo in your briefcase, she looked like — like a doll. I've seen dead things before, and they look realer than she did.'

'I'm sorry you saw that.'

'Don't be.'

'Rebecca?'

'Yes?' She tilted her head and looked at him. A drop of rain fell out of the tree onto her cheek. 'What is it?'

'Why didn't you tell me about Gemini?'

'What about him?'

'He left with Shellene that day. Why didn't you say?'

She folded her arms under her small breasts and looked at her toes. 'Why do you think I didn't say?'

'I have no idea.'

'Don't be naive. He deals drugs, deals to Joni, that's why.'

'Oh, Jesus.' Caffery shook his head, frustrated. 'You know, don't you — Rebecca, you do know how serious this is?'

'Of course I know. Don't you think I've thought of nothing else?' She bit her lip. 'Gemini's got nothing to do with it.'

'OK, OK.' He rubbed his forehead. 'I think you're right. But the problem is I'm alone with that. Everyone who matters thinks Gemini looks pretty bloody choice right now. He's in trouble, Rebecca, genuine, no-fucking-around trouble.'

'It's not him. I don't know how you can even think—'

'I don't! I just told you — I don't think it's him!'

'Jesus.' She turned the handlebars away from him, suddenly subdued. 'There's no need to be shitty about it.'

'Rebecca — look.' He subsided, suddenly feeling foolish. 'I'm sorry. I just — I need some help here. I need someone to be straight with me, give me a break for a change.'

'Oh, for God's sake,' she murmured. 'We all need a break. And you're being paid to figure it out.'

'Rebecca—'

But she didn't look back. She pedalled away, the sweater slipping off one brown shoulder, leaving Caffery to stand in the middle of the pavement for several minutes, angry and confused, watching the exact point where she was swallowed by the city.