29

CALVIN BRIDGE WAS exhausted.

Somehow he had imagined that getting married would mean more of the same, but it was turning into none of the same. In fact it seemed to be a process of chucking out the same, and filling the same’s space with a whole bunch of new stuff that wasn’t the same at all. Stuff he really had no interest in. Organization. Commitment. Babies.

Swatches.

How had it happened? Was he overreacting? Was this just the way things went? And was it temporary? After the trauma of the wedding, would he have the old Shirley back? Or was the Shirley that was morphing into a completely different person in front of his very eyes the real Shirley? The one he’d be married to for the rest of his life.

Calvin actually shivered at the thought.

He longed for drink, drugs and debt. He longed for a Korean gangster flick and a meat-feast pizza all to himself.

He longed for another life. But, between them, Shirley and the Devon and Cornwall Police had him running through this life like a hamster in a wheel.

As well as trying to catch a serial killer, on Tuesday night Calvin had held Shirley’s hand through a tablecloth crisis. The choices were Ivory, Buttermilk and Vanilla. They were all the same, but it had taken three hours hunched over the huge and hideous books of swatches, and two long, weepy interludes, to reach a decision.

And the swatches were only part of it. Shirley had turned Calvin’s flat into her own little incident room, swirling with a thousand paper samples and cloth samples and cake samples and favours and flavours, and infinite lists that Calvin was supposed to have memorized. It was a glittery tide of wedding porn – all of which cost a thousand times more than real porn. The invitations were impregnated with bits of lavender and had edges that were ‘hand-torn’ – presumably by experts, given the price. And the centrepieces – which were only made of flowers – were each the same price as a crate of reasonable beer. The cake was costing more than Calvin’s first car.

‘Is it made of gold?’ he’d said, and Shirley had cried for the four millionth time since the Italian Grand Prix.

‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ said Kirsty King.

‘No,’ sighed Calvin. ‘I don’t know what any woman’s thinking. Ever.’

DCI King gave him a quizzical look. They were eating lunch in the incident room, which doubled as the staffroom. There were vending machines containing curly sandwiches and warm chocolate bars, and a frieze of evidence around the wall. Photos of Jody Reeves and the Burrows and the lay-by, and of Frannie Hatton’s body – still the only one they had.

Most of the major-incident team had gone out for chips, but Calvin was eating a sandwich from the machine that was so tasteless he had to keep looking at it to make sure it was still prawn. DCI King brought the same lunch from home every day – a pork pie and olives, which she fished out of their tall glass jar with Dr Shortland’s gall-stone scoop.

It was perfect for the job.

Now DCI King popped one in her mouth, ignored his lament, and carried on where she left off. ‘I’m thinking, maybe the women weren’t the targets.’

Calvin raised an eyebrow. ‘Frannie Hatton would probably disagree with you.’

‘Touché,’ said King. ‘They were targeted, of course, but what if they weren’t the people he was really aiming to hurt?’

Calvin wasn’t quite sure what King was getting at, but he was happy to go along with her, if only because she wasn’t talking about renting an owl as a ring-bearer.

‘We have so little to go on,’ King continued. ‘But, taking the assaults on Kelly and Katie into account, what we do have to go on is a consistent m.o.’

She started to count the modi operandi off on her fingers, using the gall-stone scoop as an aid. ‘One: he covers his face. Two: he makes them take their clothes off, but he doesn’t sexually assault them. Three: he makes them phone their mothers.’

She paused and Calvin looked at her expectantly for ‘four’. ‘That’s it,’ said King. ‘Those are the only three things we know for sure. Everything else is just extrapolation or assumption.’

‘OK,’ he agreed.

‘So, covering his face is obvious. But you tell me, Calvin, why does he make them strip and then not touch them?’

Calvin did try to think, but it seemed counter-intuitive. Once a woman took her clothes off, the whole point was to touch them. Otherwise you might as well just read a magazine. He had to admit, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I,’ said King. ‘I mean, I know it’s going to turn out to be some weird screwed-up reason because of some sexual dysfunction or some shit that happened when he was a kid or something. But what it does do is speak to motive, and it tells us that – for the first three assaults at the very least – the motive was not to sexually assault these women. Even if he’d been working up to it, then I reckon he would have got there by Frannie Hatton, don’t you? I mean, if you can murder someone, you can sexually assault them, surely?’

‘Right,’ Calvin assumed. ‘That makes sense.’

Did it? He wondered. What made sense to a killer might not be what made sense to DCI King and him, eating their lunch in Bideford police station.

King went on, ‘But call your mother. That’s bizarre and it’s consistent and it’s very specific. And he’s been saying it right from the start, so it must be an important element in whatever sick game he’s playing. It makes me think, why are they all young? And that makes me think – they’re all young enough to have mothers to call, so maybe the mothers are the key.’

‘But there are no links between the families,’ said Calvin. ‘The mothers don’t know each other, they don’t share the same interests or incomes or lifestyles, they don’t go to the same places or know the same people.’

‘Right,’ said King. ‘And that’s why I started thinking, maybe the mothers have been the targets all along. Not because of who they are, but because of what they are.’

‘And what are they?’ said Calvin.

King stared at him. ‘They’re mothers, Calvin.’

Calvin frowned. ‘But how can they be the targets if he’s killing someone else?’

‘Think about it,’ said King. ‘Who suffers more – the victims or their mothers?’

‘The victims,’ shrugged Calvin. ‘They die.’

King tapped her teeth with the scoop. ‘You don’t have children, right?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Nor me,’ said King. She drummed the scoop on the table a few times, thinking, and then looked over her shoulder to the desk sergeant, Tony Coral, who was eating a cheese and onion pasty at the table behind her. ‘Tony, you have kids, don’t you?’

‘Two boys,’ nodded Sergeant Coral, with flaky pastry down his front.

‘What are their names?’

‘Ivor and Martin.’

‘Would you rather die yourself or watch Ivor and Martin die?’

‘Bloody hell!’ He coughed, but King just kept waiting for an answer, so he croaked, ‘How are they dying?’

‘Horribly,’ said King.

Coral brushed flaky pastry off his tunic and shook his head. ‘Jesus, I couldn’t watch that. Don’t even like thinking about it.’

‘So you’d rather be dead yourself than watch your children die?’

‘Yup,’ he said, and put his pasty down with a look that said he wouldn’t be picking it up again.

‘Cheers,’ said King, and turned back to Calvin. ‘See? What if the killing’s just part of the whole thing? The stripping and the calling the mothers, and forcing them to witness the murder? The girls suffer and die, but the mothers have to suffer and go on living.’

Calvin frowned. ‘It seems a bit of a roundabout way of hurting someone.’

‘Maybe he can’t hurt his own mother – or maybe he doesn’t even know he wants to – and so he’s taking it out on other people’s mothers.’

‘Acting out,’ said Calvin. ‘I think that’s what Americans call it. Shirley watches those shows where people blame their parents for everything. Acting out. Or is it acting up?’

‘No, that’s the kids on Supernanny,’ said King. ‘But whatever the Americans call it, it makes sense, don’t you think?’

Calvin shrugged. ‘As much sense as any other bloody thing.’ DCI King nodded and sat back in her chair. Then she said, ‘You’re shedding cherubs.’

‘Huh?’ Calvin followed her gaze under the table to his feet, where a light sprinkling of tiny silver and gold foil cherubs had escaped his turn-ups.

That fucking wedding.

Загрузка...