The Art of Murder

Chapter 53

'Are you absolutely sure?' Superintendent Hughes asked, staring at the monitor in the Media Room.

'One hundred and ten per cent,' Pendragon replied, and told her about how Gemma Locke had lied to him about Eberswalde.

Hughes still looked doubtful for a second. She stared at the floor, concentrating, then suddenly snapped into action mode. 'Right. I'll get an armed squad mobilised immediately.'

Pendragon was nodding. 'As back-up, ma'am. Let me go in first. She knows me. And she won't be expecting us.'

'Inspector! The woman is insane and extremely dangerous.'

'I know. Turner and I will go together… armed. You can have the SWAT team ten seconds away.'

'Why, Jack?'

'I honestly couldn't tell you,' he replied, holding the Super's steady gaze.

'Very well. And you know where she is?'

'Oh yes,' Pendragon replied, recalling the Bermondsey address Sammy Samson had dug up. He suddenly had a clear image of Gemma Locke standing in her apartment the previous day, her face straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, an image tarnished only by the thick swathe of bandage around her head. 'I have a studio in Bermondsey,' she had said. Freezing rain was hammering against the road, coming down so heavily it was almost impossible to see the buildings only a few yards beyond the windscreen. Twenty-two units had been fabricated out of a vast complex of Victorian grain stores that backed on to the river near Tate Modern. Gemma Locke's stood at the end of a row, number eleven. It was a two-storey cube with at least two hundred square metres of floor space.

All the occupants of the other offices and units had been surreptitiously moved to safety. Pendragon and Turner donned Kevlar jackets and duty belts, each with a holster for the standard police issue Glock 17 pistol, a baton and a small tear-gas canister. They crossed from the car towards the rear of the units as nine highly trained officers from the Specialist Firearms Command, known as CO19, dressed in full body armour and armed with Heckler amp; Koch MP5 machine-guns as well as Glock pistols, took up position around unit number eleven.

Pendragon went ahead. Crouching low, he traversed the tarmac and pulled up against the back wall. The brickwork was sodden and had turned a dozen shades darker than normal. A gutter overhead had slipped from its bracket and freezing water in a sheet a metre wide cascaded down from the roof. As Turner reached the wall, Pendragon moved off towards the rear door. He tried the handle. It was unlocked and opened inwards.

Out of the rain it was suddenly eerily quiet with just the steady beating of water on the roof to dispel the stillness. Pendragon looked around. They were in a small lobby about eight feet square. A door in the far wall stood ajar. A strong smell, a blend of chemical cleaner, paint and linseed oil, pervaded the place. Jack leaned against the doorframe and pushed the door slowly inwards.

It opened on to a large space, considerably bigger then the ground floor of most suburban houses. The walls had been painted a creamy white, and the floor was of highly polished dark oak parquet. Two large windows set in one wall had been blacked out so there was no natural light coming into the room. Around the three other walls ran a balconied mezzanine level. A large chandelier holding dozens of lit candles hung from the centre of the vaulted ceiling and cast a surprisingly strong light over the room. But it was a strangely hollow light, a sickly orange hue. The chemical smell was stronger in here.

It took a moment for the two police officers to see the figure seated in the chair at the far end of the room. Pendragon walked carefully across the wooden floor, crouching and turning as he had been trained to do. He had the Glock gripped in both hands and was scanning the shadows in the far corners of the room, expecting the unexpected. Turner was a couple of paces behind him.

Dr Geoff Hickle was strapped to the chair, unconscious. He was dressed in a heavy green coat and a Russian-style fur hat. Pendragon had seen that hat before. His body was strapped so he was sitting back in the chair, but his head was slumped forward. His splendid teeth had been smashed and a pipe stuck into his ruined mouth. His right ear had been removed and placed in his lap. The wound had been wrapped in a bloodstained bandage pressed against the side of his head with a strip of adhesive gauze.

'Holy shit!' Turner exclaimed, coming up beside Pendragon.

Shocked, Jack leaned forward and felt for a pulse. There was one, but it was weak.

'So, what do you think of my Van Gogh?'

Pendragon and Turner spun round, their guns tracking the source of the voice.

'Oh, boys, put the guns down.'

Gemma Locke's face appeared over the rail of the balcony ten feet above their heads. 'I'm coming down now. I'm unarmed.'

She ducked out of sight. The policemen kept their weapons trained, listening, following the sound of the woman's shoes as she descended a set of spiral stairs they could just make out in the corner of the room. She reappeared a few seconds later. She was wearing a diaphanous white dress, her long bob swinging around her face and neck. She reached the bottom of the stairs and started to cross the floor towards them.

'Stop there,' Pendragon commanded.

'Oh, Jack, please. Put the silly guns down. I'm not going to hurt anyone. It's not in my nature.' She produced a shrill laugh that only succeeded in making both Pendragon and Turner tighten their grip on the weapons. 'Okay,' Gemma Locke went on, suddenly serious. 'Maybe I have been a little harsh with some of them. But…' and she screwed up her face… 'they were so… nasty to me, Jack. They were soooo nasty.'

'We need to get Dr Hickle to hospital, Gemma. The game's over.'

'Nearly over. I'm just putting the finishing touches to my masterpiece. Then the whole world will know what a great artist I am.' She took a couple of steps forward. Pendragon cocked the pistol. Gemma stopped and lowered her head. 'Okay, I see I'm going to have to explain.' Then she looked up quickly, a faint smile playing on her lips. 'It'll be a good rehearsal for the tabloids and the global networks who will be clamouring to hear my story. But where do I start?'

'Gemma, please. Stop this now. We need to get…'

'Shut up. Just shut up and listen!' Gemma Locke's eyes blazed in the oppressive gloom. Then she swallowed and seemed to compose herself. 'Yes, you can call me Gemma. I prefer it now. But as you have of course worked out, I was once Juliette Kinnear. Poor little Juliette.' Then she glanced at Dr Hickle. 'I made him my last victim because he broke my heart.' She turned back to the two policemen, an expression of contempt on her face. 'But you do understand, don't you? Revenge was simply an added bonus.'

'Why did you kill those people?' Turner asked, keeping his gun trained on her.

'I'm an artist. This is my masterpiece.'

'What?'

'Ms Locke believes that she has created art out of a series of murders,' Pendragon explained, his face rigid.

'The way you say it, Jack! Good God, show some respect! You have to admit, it is damn impressive.' She waved one hand in the air. 'Juliette started it. Well, actually, no, my father started it. He was something of a bibliophile. Had a wonderful library, he was really proud of it. He was away a lot on business – selling biscuits! Mother died when I was fourteen. So, when I wasn't painting, or in London – with him…' and she flicked a glance at Hickle… 'I spent many hours on my own in the library. And then one day, I must have been seventeen… Yes, it was then, because I had just had a review of my first little exhibition in Chelmsford – a bad review from a young writer called Gary Townsend…'

'Townsend?'

Gemma Locke shrugged. 'Yes, I was annoyed when that one went wrong.' She sighed and looked down at the parquet floor for a moment before meeting Pendragon's eye. 'I had it all so carefully planned too. You've probably worked it out, Jack. I drugged Hickle. He could still walk. He was just, well, a little confused! I managed to slip out of a back entrance to his apartment block. Later, I met up with Townsend at the unit. I had convinced him to show by telling him I had a juicy story for his rag. But then his ditzy girlfriend followed him. I got away but I had to figure out a way to get to him in the hospital and divert any suspicion from myself. I faked the mugging, killed the bastard, and got you to come and see how poorly I was. Quite a performance, I thought. Especially the bit where I pretended to pass out at my apartment. You were so sweet.'

'What has your father's library got to do with any of this?' Turner asked.

'Oh, I found something there that changed my life, Sergeant. A journal. Well, a collection of letters really. I started to read them, and was astonished when I learned that they had been written by Jack the Ripper.' She stopped for a second. 'Don't believe me, Inspector? No, well, that's understandable. Anyway, it's irrelevant whether or not you accept what I say. The letters were an inspiration to me. They revealed that The Ripper had been a very talented artist who had chosen his victims to create a masterwork. The series of murders was the work.

'I was transformed by my discovery, though my first effort to apply the Ripper's concept did not work as well as I had hoped. As you know, I attacked our gardener, Macintyre. I was pleased with the piece – Jack, you should have seen his face. That combination of red and blackened flesh with a dash of brittle white bone… it was truly beautiful. But it landed me in a lot of trouble, and nobody seemed to understand what I was doing.'

'You attacked the man so you could paint him afterwards?' Turner asked.

Gemma Locke's eyes widened. 'Your sergeant's a little slow, isn't he, Jack?' She giggled.

Pendragon said nothing.

'The act itself was the work of art, Sergeant. I didn't do anything so crude as to paint the scene. I had moved way beyond such a commonplace approach. But, as I said, it didn't work out as well as I had hoped. I ended up in Riverwell. They drugged me, shocked me with their ECT and for a while it changed me. I never stopped wanting to get out of there, but the therapy quashed my artistic drive. So I faked my own death in Maldon. A nurse, Nick Compton, was besotted with me… a state of mind I had assiduously nurtured. He was complicit in the set-up on the seafront. I hid under the rafters of the pier, then crawled out and slipped away while the hospital staff panicked.'

'But the dead girl they identified?'

'Nick and I had killed her. He got me out of the hospital the night before the trip to Maldon. She was a young prostitute from Southend. Nick had a little dinghy. We dumped the body in the sea just off Maldon. We knew she would be washed up by the tide, but we weren't sure how quickly – that was the dodgiest bit of the plan, actually. But it all worked a treat. My father was too traumatised to make the ID at the morgue, and so his brother Lionel went along. But it was an irrelevance anyway. North Sea fish are fond of human flesh.' She smiled.

'And later you killed Nick Compton?' Pendragon asked.

'Yes. He knew too much and I was losing my grip on him.'

'Then you vanished.'

'I think of it more as a transformation. I went into a dormant phase, a chrysalis if you like. I was able to steal money from my father's accounts. I figured it would one day be my inheritance, I was just taking it early. I went to the States, underwent plastic surgery, bought some coloured contact lenses, several fake IDs… oh, and I had the tattoo removed.' She touched the side of her neck and smiled. 'I moved to London late in 1998 and gradually rebuilt my career under a new name. I wanted to prove to myself that I could succeed as a conventional artist. That if I had not had my original career stolen from me, I would be famous. Perhaps the most famous artist of our time. I knew I was that good.'

'But many years later something went wrong. Something recently led you back to the path of murder.'

'I don't consider it as "going wrong",' Gemma Locke said, matter-of-factly. 'No, two things coincided, Inspector. First, I began to doubt myself. That was Townsend's fault. The young journalist who had been writing for a local paper in Chelmsford was now the Arts Editor of a big national daily. He had no idea Gemma Locke had once been Juliette Kinnear, and he probably could not even remember giving the young Juliette a bad review for her fledgling exhibition in a lousy church hall. But he slammed my last show at the White Cube and it began a chain reaction in my mind.

'I started to wander into a different mental state, one I had experienced before. It was a joyous liberation. I felt free again, filled with creative energy and self-belief. I was so grateful I could almost have spared the bastard.' She produced a shrill laugh and looked from Pendragon to Turner. 'Oh, come on, guys. Don't you see the funny side? No? Okay… well, that's the truth of it. If it had been just that one bad review I might not have started a new masterpiece inspired by my old mentor, The Ripper. But then I discovered that silly little man Noel Thursk had unearthed some facts I would have preferred to be kept buried. I had known about his ridiculous book for years, but hadn't taken him seriously until then.' She threw her arms out and slapped her palms against her sides. 'Well, it was obviously a sign!'

'But why the others?' Pendragon asked, aware he needed to humour her until he could make a move.

'That's a good question,' she replied, warming to the subject. 'And one I want to explain at length to the media. From an artistic point of view, I wanted six tableaux. It's a matter of symmetry. Taken as one great piece, it's a beautiful composition. But the subjects were all on my personal hit-list anyway.' She lifted a hand and began to tick them off. 'Kingsley Berrick. That man did everything he could to keep me down and to promote other, far lesser, talents ahead of me.'

'Like Chrissy Chapman?'

'Precisely.' Gemma Locke beamed. 'My oldest, bestest friend. It wasn't Chrissy's fault that Berrick made her his poster girl over me. But it was her fault that she was on the verge of marrying him.' And she tossed her head towards the pitiful maimed figure tied to the chair. 'So, I thought I'd set up dear Chrissy in a way that would be in keeping with the others… and humorous as well.'

'Oh, I'm sure Chrissy Chapman's family are laughing their arses off,' Turner said, glaring at Gemma.

'Hah! You were right the other day, Inspector. Your sergeant does think he's funny.'

'And how did you manage to set up Ms Chapman in the way you did?' he replied keeping his tone even.

'Oh, it wasn't easy, I can assure you of that. But then, no great art comes easily. I trained as a sculptor under the Russian master Korentikoff when he lived in London during the early noughties. I also studied reconstructive surgery techniques privately. The internet is a wonderful thing. Anyway, Chrissy… I brought her here soon after Hickle left for his run. It was under the pretext that I had a surprise for her. I certainly didn't lie! I killed her quickly – the same way as the others. Then I drained her of blood, smashed the bones in her face, and with liberal amounts of glue, spray-on skin and quick-setting plaster, was able to sculpt back her face to my liking.'

'And Father O'Leary?' Pendragon asked wearily, trying to draw the exchange to a close without tipping the woman over the edge. Lesson 101; psychopaths just love to talk about themselves.

Gemma Locke's face clouded over. 'That so-called priest abused me.' In the deathly silence, she breathed in sharply. 'Sexual abuse, DCI, the oldest trick in the book for many a Roman Catholic priest, God bless 'em. O'Leary was my local parish priest. My parents were religious, especially Mother. When I was thirteen, I was pushed into taking lessons in preparation for Confirmation.' She started to giggle again. 'I made sure Michael O'Leary realised who I was just before I dispatched him. But he died too fast. I was much too nice to him.' She suddenly leaned forward and took a step nearer Dr Hickle.

'Don't!' Pendragon snapped.

Gemma stood still then turned back towards them. 'Jack, you have to understand. I must finish my…'

'You're finishing nothing.'

Gemma Locke's hand slid into a pocket of her gown.

'Stop!'

'It's not a gun, Jack.'

'Bring your hand back into view… slowly,' Turner yelled.

She pulled her hand from her pocket. It was clasping a hypodermic.

'Put it down,' Pendragon commanded.

She ignored him and took a step towards Dr Hickle. A shot rang out, booming in the restricted, echoing space. Gemma Locke screamed in surprise. The hypodermic flew through the air and landed a few feet away. Blood spurted from a wound in her hand and she stumbled back, crumpling into a heap.

Pendragon dashed forward, his gun levelled at her head. Gemma Locke lay on her side in a foetal position, cradling her wounded hand. A line of blood spilled away across the wooden floor.

'Turner… call the paramedics,' Pendragon ordered.

He bent forward, keeping the gun pointed at Gemma's head, and pushed back her shoulder gently. She stared up at him, her smile sliding into a look of triumph.

'How perfect, Inspector. They'll have to add a new chapter to the textbooks, and it will be all about me.'