Birdman

44

When DI Caffery had gone Malcolm Bliss leaned back in his chair and stared at the door for a long time. Though he was newly confident, elated, humming with excitement, sometimes an intermittent, idiopathic anxiety plagued him. DI Caffery's visits didn't improve things. In the grips of such anxiety he found himself furious with Harteveld for putting him here.

'But then, Harteveld,' he muttered to himself, 'who else would you have turned to when you found yourself with a well-fucked dead girl on your hands?'

'You're the only person who can help. The unthinkable has happened.'

It had been December when Harteveld had come, in the early hours of the morning, backing the Cobra into the carport and showing Bliss the human-sized chrysalis in the boot. A fat girl.

'Scottish. She's from Glasgow, I believe.'

Wrapped from head to foot in clingfilm.

'It was all I could find to put her in, I don't want traces in the car.'

'Have you fucked her?'

Money changed hands, the woman-chrysalis was placed on his bed. Harteveld pressed Bliss's hands, he squirmed at the touch, hideous.

'You're the only one who would understand.' Harteveld was twitching. 'I know you can deal with it, because, frankly, I'm afraid I can't.'

After Harteveld had gone Bliss closed the door and paced the flat, chewing the inside of his mouth, drinking cherry brandy. He talked to himself for a while, in senseless, protracted sentences.

She was in the bedroom, face down where Harteveld had thrown her, her hands folded against her belly, her face smeared and flattened under the clingfilm. He liked the clingfilm, liked the way it held her. Even alive she would have been unable to struggle. Licking his lips, a faint scum of perspiration on his forehead, Bliss crossed to the bed and started unwrapping her, unfolding her arms, turning her over, inspecting her.

She had a tattoo on her forearm. The lividity was faint on her front, the majority of the blood had sunk down to the backs of her thighs, her buttocks and shoulders. Harteveld must have kept her lying on her back for some time.

'That's right. You put your feet up.' He jabbed a finger into the pitted thigh and smiled. 'You big-titted sow.'

A fountain of exhilaration lifted from the pit of his stomach. This reminded him of UMDS, the first delighted realization that the dead cannot object to being poked, prodded, insulted, spat on and fucked. He could jism on her face, in her mouth, in her hair. There was nothing she would say no to. A big juicy-mouthed doll for his use alone.

But then, with a shudder, it occurred to him that she had already been used — Harteveld would have done all of those things to her already. There might be traces of him left. He hurried into the bathroom for a bowl, a tablet of Wright's Coal Tar soap and a face flannel. Joni's photograph, photocopied a hundred times and pinned to the walls, smiled at him.

He ran water into the chipped enamel bowl and swilled the flannel around. The zebra finches in their cage skeetered across the perch, banging into each other, shaking their feathers. Joni gazed at him, making him shift uncomfortably, scratch his neck, all those little eyeballs staring—

And then the idea of what to do with the body slowly took shape.

Back in the bedroom he washed the girl, formulating his plan, carefully opening her legs and squeezing water into her, allowing it to trickle out onto a towel under her buttocks. He repeated it time after time until he could be quite certain that anything left of Harteveld was gone. He wanted her clean, new for him.

It was dawn when he finished; he was due at the hospital at 9 a.m. Lola Velinor, his boss, was a stickler for time-keeping. Somehow he'd reward Velinor for her rigidity. He didn't know how yet, but he would pay her back. Sweating, in spite of the December chill, he bundled the corpse head first into the chest freezer, folded her legs in after her and went to work.

Over the years in personnel he had made sure he had access to every cupboard, every office, every nurse's station. He knew St Dunstan's inside out and soon found what he wanted: suture material, a pair of Halsted mosquito artery forceps, a surgical needle and a scalpel. In Lewisham he bought a wig, make-up, a set of brushes and a finely balanced pair of Wilkinson's scissors.

Back at home he changed into surgical scrubs, took the girl from the freezer and placed her in the bath to defrost while he busied himself preparing. By 8.30 she was ready: on his bed, the wig in place, the make-up on, bloodied fat and tissue from the breasts removed in a tupperware container and flushed down the drain with steaming water and a helping of Fairy liquid. He'd seen the procedure in books in the library and thought he'd done it rather well. The blue stitches did nothing to improve the appearance of her breasts, but better that than the big, fleshy cow's tits: they reminded him of Joni's deliberate destruction of her body, the one he'd so nearly possessed, so honestly, in the car that night.

The last touch — truly inspired — was the bird. If one opened the thorax (the incision didn't need to be as long as a classic TA) and sliced through the fleshy fan-shaped pectoralis major muscle and gently lifted up the sternocostal flap underneath, the marbled bones in their filmy visceral pouch revealed themselves. Just like a side of beef. Just like the bodies at med school.

The bird struggled as he slipped it inside; for a moment he thought it might free itself, flap around the ceiling spraying foul matter on him, but he leaned in, pressed the skin closed and hurriedly sewed the wound closed.

He put his ear to the cold breast.

The bird fluttered weakly. Just like Joni's whispering heartbeat that night.

Then he fucked her, twice, holding on to her cold shoulders, breathing sour breath into her purple face. And in the end it was, if not perfect, at least better than his own soft hand.

'Bitch,' he told her afterwards, flinging the condom onto the carpet. 'Bitch.' She was cold, solid as a joint of pork on the bone. She couldn't talk back. He slapped her face, and the wig slid backwards revealing her thick tabby hairline. 'Bitch.'

In spite of his attempts to keep the body frozen when he wasn't using it, it soon became putrid. He bundled it into two dustbin liners, took a gardening spade from the carport and drove out to where the A2 started. He knew this route well, it was the route he took every weekend — to the Kent bungalow left to him in his mother's will. There was a patch of scrubby forgotten land there, in the shadow of the new Dome. It was lonely in the daytime, deserted at night. He found a place that was undisturbed and did what he had to do.

Weeks later Harteveld came to him again, with his tight upper-class expression and Gucci suit, another whitened creature wrapped in clingfilm in his car.

After the body was safe inside the flat — Frobisher's bedroom light had not come on — Harteveld sat on the edge of the sofa, his perfect hands folded on his knees.

'The pub you go to, Bliss.'

'Yeah.' He scratched a patch of flaky skin on his forehead. 'The Dog. What about it?'

'Most of the girls in there wouldn't be missed. Not for a day or two.' Harteveld's brow was slick with perspiration. 'Would they? It would be a day or so before anyone noticed they were gone.'

'What are you saying?'

'You're a familiar face. No-one would be surprised if you asked a few questions, got to know some of the girls. Found out which ones were safe. You could — uh…' He shifted unhappily. There had always been something uncomfortable about Harteveld. 'You could send them to me.'

And so Malcolm Bliss and Toby Harteveld entered into a diabolical pact, an arrangement which suited them both; Harteveld was never seen in the pub and Bliss, who over the years had become as transparent and unremarkable as a shadow to the patrons of the Dog and Bell, was able to discover which women had the most fragile connections at home, which were least likely to be reported missing in the first few days. In return he received payment and the full use of the women's bodies later. Moreover he was in a position to prevent Joni from becoming embroiled.

Gradually he became bold. He tried to persuade Harteveld to deliver the bodies to him at Wildacre Cottage, his mother's bungalow. It was the ideal venue — quiet, isolated: tailor-made for his purposes. But Harteveld refused — wanting to minimize the time spent transporting his cargo — he made it clear who was the master and who the running dog. Nor did Bliss want to risk the forty-minute journey, so he acquiesced — taking his enjoyment as quietly as he could, in the shuttered, overheated Brazil Street flat.

His time would come. His confidence was growing.

He started to take other risks. He had stood one of the last bodies in the living room for a day — rigor had frozen her there, propped up next to the TV set, stark naked like a showroom dummy — so he could masturbate looking at her. When the rigor wore off she had collapsed violently on the floor, waking him from his sleep in the other room. Her stomach had split and he'd had to get rid of her. Experience was telling him when the bodies would start to smell too strongly.

His most delicious pleasure was to leave someone propped up in his bed while he popped out to the Dog for a leisurely drink. Sometimes he saw Joni, and when he did he smiled gracefully. The man, the pub. He was like the other punters now; out being part of the game, watching strange women open their legs, in the warm knowledge that his stiff little wife was at home, waiting for him and his new wet lust.

He was happy. As powerful as an eagle. Nightly he was possessing a simulacrum of Joni. And slowly he saw that possessing her was weakening her. Something in his sense of her began to erode. It became less important for her to come to him. There are, Malcolm, hundreds of ways to skin a cat. He stopped bothering about cleaning the house.

With the police involvement he had to change venue: he left the last of Harteveld's leftovers for Lola Velinor to find. It seemed appropriate to give the mulatta to the mulatta, he told himself, like to like, a people cares for its own. He was proud of the neatness. And now that Harteveld was dead he was in complete control.

He drove to a hardware hypermarket, his heart bounding along with excitement. The cordless drills and saws were displayed on hooks — shiny in their plastic casing. He spent an hour wandering up and down the aisle, assessing each one in detail, eventually choosing the Black & Decker Versapak, 7.2 volt, 2,700 no load strokes per minute cordless power saw. It was designed for excising small pieces of wood, used a rechargeable battery locked in the handle, weighed less than seven pounds, measured only twelve inches from the handle piece to the tip of the blade, and fitted perfectly into the glove compartment of the Peugeot. At home he put a gammon joint in the kitchen sink and practised on it — slicing it neatly with a squeeze of the trigger.

Armed with his new friend he promoted himself to a live hunt. He had been watching her for a few days and she proved to be far better than the others. She was warm. She bled and thrashed — particularly when he'd used the clumsy aneurysm needle to sew her up. Her heart shunted along in her chest when he put his ear to her breast bone and Bliss wondered why he had waited so long to start hunting for himself.

Now he knew he was ready. Joni. Joni.

Only one day to go…

Malcolm Bliss stood, smoothing thinning hair over his scalp. It had been a stressful morning; he deserved a drink. He returned Cook's file to the cabinet, found his jacket and left the office.