Birdman

42

With the help of half a bottle of Glenmorangie he managed three hours of intense sleep before he was jolted awake by a thought:

Susan Lister hadn't been opened.

He sighed and rolled onto his back, his hands over his eyes. No bird sewn deep inside. No bird.

Why? Why didn't you give us the symbol this time?

It's not meant as a symbol.

Jack flinched. He hiked himself up on his elbows and blinked, his heart thumping. The answer could have been spoken by someone in the room.

Not a symbol? Then what?

Susan Lister was living. No bird. And for the six sad pieces of carrion in the morgue? A live, struggling bird. Struggling so hard that it ripped tissue from the bone beneath. Harteveld's work seeming to stretch out from beyond death.

The moonlight shifted, cold on his skin, and Caffery lay back, breathing carefully, listening to his heart. He thought he knew what the bird meant. And he thought he knew exactly how it fitted into the puzzle. Now he knew where he was going.

F team — some of whom had already moved their belongings — had been contacted and were due back at Shrivemoor in time for the morning's meeting. Caffery met Maddox, Essex and Kryotos an hour in advance. They were all tired, dispirited. Caffery stood for a few minutes in the centre of the incident room holding his glasses, thinking, locking his ideas into place, while Maddox sat in the corner, head propped in his hands, staring across at him. Kryotos was in the kitchen, making coffee. They could hear the sound of spoons rattling in the cups all the way down the corridor. She hummed as she brought the coffee into the incident room — as if she thought noise might alleviate the depression in the air.

Maddox sighed. 'Right.' He ran his hands down his face and looked up at Essex and Kryotos. 'You both know what happened last night.'

'Yeah.'

'And a hair turned up on Jackson that we can't file. We have to read that as another victim — so, I don't care how tired everyone is, think "shit" and "shovel" on this.' He looked up. 'Jack? You ready?'

'Yeah.'

'Go on—' He waved his hand in the air. 'Go on. Tell them what you told me.'

'Yeah — OK.' He hesitated a moment more, still staring at the floor. Then his face cleared. He put his glasses on and turned to them.

'It's Birdman,' he said simply.

Essex and Marilyn exchanged glances.

'A copycat?' Essex said.

'No. I mean this is Birdman. The press never got enough for a copycat. Harteveld was the killer. Birdman is the mutilator. Harteveld is dead, Birdman's still working.'

Marilyn stopped spooning sugar into her coffee and stared at him — Essex was frowning, twisting his coffee cup into a circular groove on the blue and silver Met mouse mat. Maddox propped his chin in his hand and studied their reactions. Then he swivelled his eyes to Caffery. 'You're going to have to convince them.'

'I can.' He opened his briefcase and handed Kryotos the notes he'd made at the FSS. 'Jane Amedure says the PM woundings on Peace Nbidi Jackson were consistent with the others — three days after death.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning Harteveld was either under surveillance when they were done or already dead. Quinn and Logan couldn't find any evidence in the Halesowen Road flat because Harteveld didn't do the mutilations. It was someone else.'

'Like a little club.' Kryotos handed the notes to Essex and resumed stirring the coffee. 'A necrophiliac's club. Usual rules: no blacks, no Jews, no spikes in the club house—'

'No, no.' Maddox held his hand up. 'Let him go on. We can have a snigger when he's given us a working scenario.'

'Right.' Caffery sat down opposite them. Opened his hands on the table. 'I think it went like this: Harteveld's a necrophiliac, no doubt about that. But he's unusual for this kind of paraphiliac because he's educated: he knows the sort of shit it could land him in, so he keeps it under wraps, doesn't act on it: if he's your average perve it could've been brewing for years. Then, seven months or so ago, something sets him off — he gets hit with his key stressor, maybe a relationship goes sour, there's a professional upheaval, we might never know exactly what, but anyway his tendency kicks in. He acts without thinking, gets his jollies, and then, when it's over, he sees the trouble he's in.'

'He's stuck with a body.'

'And spooked about disposing of it. But that's OK, because he knows someone who can help. Not another necrophile. But an opportunist. A sexual inadequate, a sadist. Someone ill enough not to care if the victim is dead or alive. It's him, not Harteveld, who's cleaning the bodies.'

'Cleaning second-hand goods,' Essex murmured.

'Quinn never found any of that soap at Harteveld's.' Maddox picked at the lid of a miniature UHT milk carton. 'What was it?'

'Wright's Coal Tar.'

'Hmmm.' He was silent for a few moments. He tipped the milk in his coffee, tapping out the last drops, and looked thoughtfully at his DI. 'Come on, then, Jack. I'm halfway there.' He threw the little carton in the bin and settled back in the chair. 'Talk us into it.'

'OK. Remember we couldn't understand how Harteveld was so balls-on accurate about picking on victims who wouldn't be missed? Now, Logan showed Gemini a photo of Harteveld and he blanked. The barmaid did too. Like he's never been in the pub. Gemini was cabbying the girls up to Croom's Hill for a meeting that had already been made. So here's what I'm thinking: what if this second offender was doing the pre-planning? Getting to know the girls, finding out who's not going to be missed, making the arrangements. That way Harteveld is never seen in the pub — he already knows who he's after because someone's marked her for him.'

'And the same offender comes in again later?'

'And he's the one, not Harteveld, who's doing the decoration — the wigs, the make-up.'

'This is the Lister offender we're discussing?' Kryotos was less dubious now. 'Striking out on his own?'

'Exactly. He's got a taste for it now.'

'It would answer a lot of questions,' Essex said. 'Like why that bird in Royal Hill never knew there was a body in her wheelie for two days. Maybe it had only been there overnight like she said. Maybe the other guy dumped it after Harteveld did his swansong.'

'Now.' Caffery leaned forward. 'Jackson had cement dust in her hair — the same dust that was on the others — at first we thought it came from the recovery site, the aggregate yard, but Jackson never went there. Lister too — the FME cleaned her up, swabbed off some grey dust. Maybe we've got another Fred West, maybe he's in the building trade or doing work on his house. But most importantly I think he's got links with St Dunstan's.'

'Marilyn.' Maddox got to his feet and tapped a biro against his teeth. 'Marilyn, get me the CS. He's going to love this. And Jack—' He sat on the desk and looked at his DI. 'I know what you're working up to.'

'You do?'

'Oh yes. You've already got an idea. Haven't you?'

'Yes, I have. I shouldn't have let him go in the first place.'

'Go on, then. Take Essex. You can have Logan too when he gets here.'

'Hang on — hang on.' Everyone paused. Kryotos was frowning. 'I thought the FME told you there were no marks on Lister's head.'

'Didn't need to be,' Caffery said. 'Same as with Hatch — her hair was the right colour. He cut it to match. He picked her because she was nearer to what he wanted. She was a jogger — St Dunstan's was on her route — I think that's when he targeted her. This is the first time he hasn't had to take what he was given: this one he chose. He's hunting for himself now.'

'But she wasn't — uh — you know. Cut open. The bird. No bird.'

'Yes.' He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up again everyone could see how tired he was. 'That's because she wasn't dead.'

'What?'

Caffery placed his hands palm down on the table and stared at the piebald thumbnails, pressed together. 'He opened them to put the bird in. He's not like Harteveld, he doesn't choose to have his victims dead. He's a sadistic rapist, but death isn't the fun for him. He'd rather they were living so he can enjoy their fear.' He looked directly at Marilyn, trusting her not to flinch. 'Lister wasn't opened for the simple reason that she had her own healthy heart pumping in her body. A heart he could hear reacting to the torture.'

'What are you telling us?' she said faintly.

'I know what he's saying,' Essex said. 'The birds were alive when they went in. They'd have struggled. Like' — he began rolling his sleeves down, as if the room had become cold — 'like the sound of a heart.'

'Exactly.' Caffery stood up and pulled on his jacket. 'Exactly.'

With all last night's excitement he had made himself late. He had so much on his mind. His coming birthday, Joni, and, of course, the person who had spent a day and a night in his flat, broken and folded up.

It made him tremble to think how easy the abduction had been, how easy and symmetrical the disposal — in her own front garden, for her husband to find — and what, of course, this success promised for the future.

At first, when he sat up on her back seat with the cordless power saw in his fist, she had simply lost all control of her body. He thought she was having an epileptic episode: her head thrashed, her feet drummed on the car floor, her mouth worked soundlessly, teeth click-clicking in the darkness. But once he'd made the decision to knock her out — with a punch of the saw's handpiece to the side of the head — it became easy.

There had been only one drawback. He had believed, after days of studying her as she jogged past St Dunstan's in the mornings, that he'd chosen the right one, that there would be no need for surgery. So it was a bitter disappointment to him, when he'd undressed her in his flat, to see her breasts — to realize that some cutting would be necessary. Still, that had been a small detail compared to the overwhelming success of the event, and his confidence, already swollen in the last few months, took another lurch ahead. By his birthday he'd be ready for the real thing. He pondered this in his scruffy, hothouse kitchen as he opened a bag of M&Ms and absent-mindedly wriggled his finger between the bars of a bird cage, where four abject, half-bald zebra finches shivered on the floor. He couldn't remember the last time he had fed them, but that didn't matter now.

One day left until his birthday. Just one day now. He took the chocolates and wandered into the bathroom. It was time to get ready.

At 9 a.m., on the dot, the phones in St Dunstan's per sonnel office came off answerphone.

'Personnel. Wendy speaking.'

'Wendy.' Caffery tucked his tie in his shirt and leaned forward on his desk. 'DI Caffery speaking. Area Major Investigation Pool. You helped us with that little room in the library.'

'Oh yes, yes. Hello, Inspector, hello. I've been wondering when we'd hear from you. It's all been quite a shock. Did you know Mr Harteveld was quite a familiar face here in personnel? I have to say I'm most terribly sorry, terribly sorry. I hope his behaviour hasn't tarnished St Dunstan's in your eyes. We'd all be very sad if… You see, we're proud of our reputation and if I thought for one moment that that dreadful man had harmed it — I'd—'

'Wendy.'

'Yes.' She caught her breath with a little gulp. 'Forgive me.'

'Do you have records of who is currently taking leave?'

When he told her who he was looking for she said: 'Now, Inspector Caffery, I'm going to put you on hold while I get his file.' She treated him to a few bars of Pachelbel's Canon, and was back in less than a minute, breathless and fluttery.

'Hello? Inspector?'

'Yes.'

'Mr Thomas Cook's on leave, due back June the eighth.'

'Or so he says.'

'I'm sorry?'

'Nothing. Have you got his address?'

Cook lived on the bottom floor of a two-flat conversion in Lewisham. No building work in the street or to the front of the house. Leaving Logan in the Sierra, a plane tree dripping water steadily onto the bonnet, Caffery and Essex pulled their raincoats over their heads and crept across the tarmacked forecourt, through the wooden side door and into the garden. The garden was overgrown — again no evidence of cement or construction work — and the house silent: the windows blank, all the curtains on the bottom floor closed.

They stood in the wet grass and were looking up at rain dripping from the gabled roof when their radios came alive.

'Bravo six-o-two from Bravo six-o-six.' Absurdly, Logan was whispering. 'Sir?'

Caffery span the radio out of the belt holster. 'Bravo six-o-two receiving.'

'Some movement, sir. Inside the house.'

'Got you. We're on our way. Out.'

They trotted back round to the Sierra.

'Who is it?'

'Little old lady.'

'Old lady?'

'You know, grey hair, bifocals.'

'The upstairs neighbour?'

'Well, if she's the neighbour then I'd like to know what she's doing in the target's flat.'

'What?'

'Downstairs. I meant downstairs. Look.'

They turned. In the front windows on the ground floor they got a glimpse of a large pair of hands as a curtain was opened.

'OK.' Caffery started to walk back to the house. 'Maybe it's my mistake.'

'Jack,' Essex had to trot to keep up. 'What do you think you're doing?'

'Maybe it's my mistake, maybe twenty-seven a is downstairs and twenty-seven b upstairs.' He leaned on the doorbell and next to him Essex shivered.

'I don't like this, Jack.'

'What're you talking about? It's just a little old lady.'

'Dressed to Kill,' he hissed. 'Dressed to fucking kill, that's what I'm talking about.'

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, heavy footsteps, and as Caffery pulled his warrant card out of his pocket Essex took a step back from the front door.

'I mean it, Jack. I don't like this at all.'

His face in the stained mirror above the sink, with his bad teeth and shiny red skin, reaffirmed his life belief that anger was his civil right, that he had a licence to fury. He'd never had a day, an hour, of being unashamed of his appearance: he was inclined to fat and had never really lost the soft womanly hips and chubby legs of toddlerhood. The tops of his thighs rubbed together when he walked, and nightly he cleaned lines of waxy white deposit from the folds in his flesh. And he, with the lust of a bull. He was brutally oversexed and yet it was no surprise when he had reached the age of twenty a virgin.

His first paltry sexual conquest was in a sodden alley in Camden in exchange for a half-bottle of Pink Lady. Later a St Lucian prostitute in Hackney for £10 and four Pernod and blackcurrants. It was at the age of twenty-two, while retaking Biology, Physics and Chemistry A levels, that he got a job as a security officer in UMDS and his life changed.

His duties, in the shadow of London Bridge station, allowed him time to study; they included checking passes, directing visitors, shivering in the car park Portakabin outside the pathology department, and, every other week, alone, at night, doing the time-key patrol: through the polished corridors, the empty canteen smelling of mashed potato and sour milk, the lecture theatres, the path lab, the anatomy lab.

The anatomy lab, where, one winter eighteen years ago, his life had become inextricably bound to Harteveld's.

Theirs had been a peculiar meeting of disjointed minds. Looking at each other over the green draped shapes and stainless-steel dissecting tables, they knew, with a conviction like that of lovers, that like had met like. Neither needed to vocalize the personal struggle they'd lived. Straight-backed, hard-boned aristocrat looked down across the classes and quite simply, quite poetically knew.

He didn't pass his A levels and soon afterwards he gave up his dreams of being a doctor and left the security company. Harteveld, too, left UMDS, but the allegiance between the heir to a pharmaceuticals fortune and the ex-security guard weathered the years. Their particular, specialized interests remained the same.

There had been four or five rapes over the years: in car parks, forests, girls too drunk to remember the licence plate of the small man who pulled over and offered them a lift. That was how he had first come south of the river. She was a stripper from Greenwich. It was 2 a.m. on his birthday, and he found her wandering the roads north of the Rotherhithe tunnel, trying to hitch a ride. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, in her PVC miniskirt and leather jacket, her Nordic blond hair cut in a neat fringe. Even now, in his dank bathroom in Lewisham, he groaned involuntarily when he thought of the love he'd spilled over Joni.

She had sat limply in the front seat of his car, noises coming from her throat, as he groped at her soft body pressed and folded under the seat belt. Inside the leather jacket her heart fluttered like a weak bird. It was only when he tried to lift her skirt that she resisted. She stumbled drunkenly out of the car and sat woodenly on the pavement, her livid make-up smeared, pushing him away when he climbed out of the car and tried to touch her.

'Not now, yeah?' she muttered. 'I feel sick.'

He stood looking down at her ash-blond head, her knees in laddered stockings and suddenly chose not to rape her.

Just like that.

It was an unexpected deviation. He took her home and said goodnight. Just like that. As if it was nothing. As if this was normal for him.

Afterwards he felt virtuous, elated, filled with light. He quickly decided his generosity to her was an expression of love. He wanted her so much that his head ached when he thought about her.

But Joni pushed his advances away, got angry when he appeared at her pub performances, angrier when she heard he'd got a new job in St Dunstan's and had purchased the ground-floor flat of an old lady's converted house in Lewisham, less than a mile from her home in Greenwich.

He didn't flinch at her anger, she was his reason for living. His flat was a shrine to her, he photographed her in the street, bought her drinks in the pub. Sometimes Joni gave him moments of pleasure — sometimes she smoked or drank so much that she softened to him and he was able to take her home — let her sleep it off in the spare bed. He didn't touch her. Not once. That wasn't the point. The point was for her to come to him. That was crucial. He kept the flat clean in the pained hope that she would understand how he cared for her: hiding his treasured pictures when she stayed, taking every precaution, spraying the flat with air freshener — Joni loved things to smell sweet.

And eventually she did come to tolerate him in a resigned, tired way. In return he learned to tolerate her thoughtless, patternless acts of faithlessness, her flirting with other men, her refusal to touch him. Even when she had driven him to the brink of fury, arriving that day, five years ago, fresh from the surgeon's knife, her new, swollen breasts pouting on her rib cage, he had stayed calm, polite. It didn't matter what Joni did in the present tense, in the three-dimensional world, because she lived on in his internal fantasy theatre as she had been that night, warm and pliable, with her small, soft-tipped breasts and drink on her breath.

Back in the kitchen one of the battered little zebra finches had found the strength to get up to the perch. It stared at him with its bright little eyes. He grunted and shook the cage, hard, until the exhausted bird was dislodged and fell to the floor, too stunned and starved to flap. It lay there on its side panting and blinking at him as he finished the M&Ms, crumpled the bag and started to get dressed.