Dead Famous

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 6.00 a.m.

Six hours later, as Coleridge left the scene of the crime, the light was beginning to break on an unseasonably grim and drizzly morning.

“Murder weather,” he thought. All of his homicide investigations seemed to have taken place in the rain. They hadn’t, of course, just as his boyhood summer holidays had not all been bathed in endless cleansing sunshine. None the less, Coleridge did have a vague theory that atmospheric pressure played a tiny role in igniting a killer’s spark. Premeditated murder was, in his experience, an indoor sport.

From beyond the police barriers hundreds of flashbulbs exploded into life. For a moment Coleridge wondered who it might be that had caused such a flurry of interest. Then he realized that the photographs were being taken of him. Trying hard not to look like a man who knew he was being photographed, Coleridge walked through the silver mist of half-hearted rain and flickering strobe light towards his car.

Hooper was waiting for him with a bundle of morning papers. “They’re all basically the same,” he said.

Coleridge glanced at the eight faces splashed across every front page, one face set apart from the others. He had just met the owners of those faces. All but Kelly, of course. He had not met her, unless one could be said to have met a corpse. Looking at that poor young woman curled up on the toilet floor, actually stuck to it with her own congealed and blackened blood, a kitchen knife sticking out of the top of her head, Coleridge knew how much he wanted to catch this killer. He could not abide savagery. He had never got used to it; it scared him and made him question his faith. After all, why would any sane God possibly want to engineer such a thing? Because he moved in mysterious ways, of course; that was the whole point. Because he surpasseth all understanding. You weren’t meant to understand. Still, in his job it was hard sometimes to find reasons to believe.

Sergeant Hooper hadn’t enjoyed the scene much either, but it was not in his nature to ponder what purpose such horror might have in God’s almighty plan. Instead he took refuge in silly bravado. He was thinking that later he would tell the women constables that Kelly had looked like a Teletubby with that knife coming out of the top of her head. It was the same thought that Geraldine had had. Fortunately for Hooper he never ventured such a remark within Coleridge’s hearing. Had he done so he would not have lasted long on the old boy’s team.