The Mermaids Singing

14

A man is not bound to put his eyes, his ears, and understanding into his breeches pocket when he meets with a murder. If he is not in a downright comatose state, I suppose he must see that one murder is better or worse than another, in point of good taste. Murders have their little differences and shades of merit, as well as statues, pictures, oratorios, cameos, intaglios or what not.

Tony lay sprawled in his bath, a snifter of brandy close at hand. Languid, relaxed, spent, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this comfortable, this optimistic. His experiences on the phone with Angelica, coupled with his conviction that he’d done a good job on the profile, had given him fresh hope. Maybe he didn’t have to be dysfunctional. Maybe he could join the rest of the world, the ones who handled things, who assimilated the past and shaped their world according to what they wanted to see. ‘I can change my life,’ he announced.

The cordless phone rang. In a slow, flowing movement, Tony reached for it. It held no terrors for him now. Strange how he had grown to welcome rather than fear Angelica’s calls. ‘Hello,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Tony, it’s John Brandon. I’m sending a car round for you. We’ve got another one.’

Tony sat up, the water swilling up and down like an experiment in a marine laboratory. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Carol Jordan and Don Merrick were at the scene within five minutes of the shout.’

Tony squeezed his eyes shut. ‘Oh God,’ he groaned. ‘Where is it?’

‘The public toilets in Clifton Street. Temple Fields.’

Tony stood up and stepped out of the bath. ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said heavily.

‘OK, Tony. The car should be with you in five minutes or thereabouts.’

‘I’ll be ready.’ Tony cut off the connection and walked out of the bathroom, towelling himself dry as he went. His mind racing, he pulled on jeans, T-shirt, shirt, sweater and leather jacket, adding an extra pair of socks as he remembered how bitter the night had been earlier. The doorbell rang just as he was tying the laces of his boots.

In the squad car, the atmosphere of tension wrecked any possibility of constructive thought as they sped through the night streets, blue light strobing against the unearthly orange of the streetlights. His escort, a pair of macho traffic cops, maintained a taciturn pose of absolute control that didn’t lend itself to conversation. Tyres squealing, they swept into Clifton Street, the driver slamming on the antilock brakes at the sight of the police tapes that cut off access to the central section of the street.

The tape was lifted for Tony, who headed for the middle of the street where a cluster of police vehicles and an ambulance were parked at seemingly random angles. As he drew closer, he could see the sign for the public toilets, lit up against the looming dark of the building. By the ambulance, he spotted the conspicuous figure of Don Merrick, unmistakable with his bandaged head. Ignored by the milling officers, Tony pushed his way through to Merrick, who was deep in conversation on a mobile phone. He gave Tony a quick wave to signal he’d spotted him, and wound up his phone conversation with, ‘All right, thanks, sorry to have bothered you.’

‘Sergeant,’ Tony said. ‘I’m looking for Mr Brandon. Or Inspector Jordan.’

Merrick nodded. ‘They’re both inside. You’ll be wanting a look too, I suppose.’

‘Who found the body?’

‘One of the street girls. She claims all the ladies loos were full, and that’s why she went into the disabled cubicle. Me, I’d lay money she was with a client. He’ll have legged it at the first sight of trouble.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony saw Carol emerge from the toilets. She made straight for the pair of them. ‘Thanks for turning out,’ she said as Merrick moved away and continued making his phone calls.

‘If I said I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, someone would almost certainly take it the wrong way,’ Tony replied wryly. ‘What makes you think it’s Handy Andy?’

‘The victim’s naked, and his throat’s been cut. He’d obviously been brought there in a wheelchair, but he’d been tipped out on to the floor. And lying on top of him, there was a copy of last night’s Sentinel Times front page,’ Carol replied, her voice strained, her eyes haggard. ‘We provoked him, didn’t we?’

‘We didn’t. The newspaper might have, but we didn’t,’ Tony said bleakly. ‘I didn’t expect him to react this fast, though.’

Merrick approached again and said cheerfully, ‘Looks like I’ve tracked down the wheelchair. One went walkabout from the maternity hospital reception earlier on tonight. With a bit of luck, somebody might have seen it.’

‘Good work, Don,’ Carol said. ‘Shall we take a look, then?’ she asked Tony. He nodded and followed her as she shouldered her way through the milling officers towards the toilet entrance. Tony slowly walked into the lavatories, making a mental inventory as he looked around him, conscious of the black rubber tiled floor with its raised circles, the apparently random pattern of the grey and black tiles on the wall, the defiant graffiti, the raw dank air, the smell of disinfectant barely masking the piss. Inside the entrance, the toilets split in two, men to the left, women to the right. The disabled toilet was to the right, just by the entrance to the women’s toilets. Brandon and Kevin Matthews stood by the door, looking in through the wide doorway. Tony walked up and joined their glum and silent communion. A photographer was standing just inside the door, off to one side, recording a scene that would shake some jury to the core, provided Brandon’s men could deliver Handy Andy to them. Every few seconds, the stark white light of the flash etched the scene on the retinas of the watching men.

Tony stared intently at the body lying sprawled on the floor. It was, as Carol had said, naked, but it was not clean. There were smears of some sort of dark, oily substance on knees, elbows and one ankle. And there were bloodstains on the body too. The cut to the throat was wide, but not, Tony suspected, deep enough to have caused death. As far as he could see, the sexual organs themselves were undamaged, but the man’s rectum and anus and the soft flesh around there had been savagely removed with deep cuts from a sharp blade. A warm surge of relief flowed through him, forcing him to recognize what he’d been refusing to think about. Like Carol, he too had been afraid that somehow his activities had provoked Handy Andy to break his cycle and to strike again. Ever since Brandon’s phone call, that horror had been sitting on his shoulder like a malevolent bird of prey.

Tony turned to Brandon and said bluntly, ‘It’s not him. You’ve got a copycat.’

From the shadows at the far end of Clifton Street, coat collar turned up, Tom Cross joined the ghouls who seemed to spring from under the pavement itself and watched the familiar ritual dance of a murder-scene investigation. His lips pursed in a tight smile and he moved further back into the shadows. He took his diary out of his inside pocket and ripped out a page for notes. In the dim light from a streetlamp, he wrote, ‘Dear Kevin; I bet you a bob to a gold clock that the Queer Killer didn’t do this one. All the best, Tom.’

Seaford had been embarrassing as well as painful, but Tom Cross was not a man who allowed humiliation to stand in the way of his purpose. He folded the note in four and wrote, ‘Detective Inspector Kevin Matthews. Personal’, on it. He pushed his way through the crowd till he caught the eye of one of the constables behind the tape. ‘You know who I am, don’t you, lad?’ Cross demanded.

The constable nodded hesitantly, casting a quick glance to either side, to see who was watching his encounter with the force’s current leper.

Cross proffered the note. ‘See that Inspector Matthews gets this, there’s a good lad.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the constable said smartly, enclosing the note in his gloved fist, finding a moment to wonder who’d had the bottle to give Popeye Cross a shiner like that.

‘I’ll remember you when I’m back in harness,’ Cross said over his shoulder as he pushed back through the spectators.

Cross cut back through an alley to the Volvo, parked in front of a nightclub’s fire exit. The day had been far from satisfactory, and the morning held no promises of improvement. But the conviction that his message to Kevin Matthews was the truth made Tom Cross feel there had been some point to his activities.

‘The postmortem will back me up,’ Tony said stubbornly. ‘Whoever killed this guy, it wasn’t our serial killer.’

Bob Stansfield scowled. ‘I don’t see how you can be so sure, just because of a few oil stains.’

‘It’s not just that the body wasn’t clean.’ Tony ticked the points off on his fingers. ‘He’s the wrong age group. He’s barely twenty, if that. Far from being in the closet, he was well known on the gay scene. You’d identified him by three this morning.’

Kevin Matthews nodded. ‘Well known to Vice. Chaz Collins. An ex-rent boy who worked in a bar and liked rough sex.’

‘Exactly,’ Tony said. ‘Also, there’s not a mark on his penis or his testicles, whereas our killer has been progressively violent with those organs. All the press have been told so far is that the victims have been sexually mutilated. We haven’t indicated how or where. This killer has interpreted that as a justification for getting rid of the whole anal area. I suspect he’s done that because he buggered the victim before he killed him and he wanted to make sure Forensic didn’t pick up any semen.’ Tony paused to collect his thoughts, and to pour another cup of coffee from the pot that the canteen had sent up with the breakfast trolley John Brandon had ordered for their morning conference.

‘The wheelchair,’ Carol said. ‘He took a big risk stealing that from the maternity hospital. I don’t think that fits with the cautious behaviour the serial killer has always displayed so far.’

‘And he’s not been tortured,’ Kevin added, through a mouthful of sausage-and-egg roll. ‘Or not obviously, anyway.’ He had a note in his pocket that would determine his view as much as anything that was said inside this room. Popeye might be off the job, but Kevin would back his instinct against anyone’s.

But Bob Stansfield wasn’t giving up. ‘OK, what if he’s doing it differently to make us think it’s a copycat? What if he’s deliberately trying to confuse us? After all, you can’t ignore the newspaper lying there. And Dr Hill’s profile warned us that the stress of inaccurate newspaper coverage might throw his pattern out.’

Tony carried on meticulously building a bacon-and-egg roll. He squirted an aureole of brown sauce round the yolk, closed the lid, squashed it so the yolk broke, then said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that as a theory. It’s perfectly feasible that he might kill just to flaunt his skills. It wouldn’t be planned so far ahead as the others, so his choice of victim might well be very different. But the underlying pattern would be the same.’

‘But it is,’ Stansfield insisted. ‘This kid had his throat cut, same as the other ones. And this bastard had made a right mess of him. How can you say he wasn’t tortured when you look at the state of his arse?’

‘If I was a betting man, I’d lay you a hundred to one that Chaz Collins didn’t die from having his throat cut. I’d bet he was manually strangled and his throat cut afterwards to make it look like he’s one of the serial-killer victims. I think what happened here is that some rough sex got a bit out of hand. Chaz was struggling while he was being sodomized, and his sex partner grabs him round the throat to get him to calm down. In the frenzy of orgasm, he squeezes too tight and he has a corpse on his hands. He figures his only chance of getting away with it is making it look like the serial killer’s handiwork, and just in case we don’t get the message, he dumps last night’s paper on the body.’

‘It’s certainly plausible,’ Brandon said, fastidiously wiping his greasy fingers on a paper tissue from a pack in his pocket.

‘I think Tony’s right,’ Carol said decisively. ‘My first reaction was that this was the fifth victim, but the more I think about it, the more I think I was wrong. You know what really clinches it for me?’ Four pairs of eyes looked quizzically at her. She felt under as much pressure as she ever had in the witness box. ‘Last night wasn’t Monday.’

Tony grinned. Stansfield cast his eyes upwards. Kevin nodded reluctantly, and Brandon said, ‘You think the night of the week’s that important to him?’

Carol nodded. ‘There’s obviously some very strong reason why he goes for Monday, whether it’s practical or superstitious. And whatever it is, it means a lot to him. I don’t think he’d break it just to stick two fingers up to us.’

‘I agree with Carol,’ Kevin chipped in. ‘Not just because of the night of the week. The other stuff, too.’

Stansfield looked surprised. ‘Well, I’m obviously outvoted here,’ he said good-naturedly. ‘Separate job it is. Who’s going to handle it, then?’

Brandon sighed. ‘I’ll have a word with Chief Superintendent Sharples at Central, pass the buck on to him. If it’s not one of ours, it’ll be down to their chief inspector.’

‘He’s off sick,’ Kevin reminded him absently.

‘So he is. Well, it’ll be passed on to whichever inspector drops unlucky this morning. Now, I know the events of last night deprived us of the chance to give Dr Hill’s profile the attention it demands, but I think we should – ’ Brandon was cut short by a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.

The uniformed desk sergeant came in with a couple of envelopes. ‘These have just come in, sir. One from Forensic, one from the path lab,’ he said, laying them on the desk in front of Brandon. He was gone by the time Brandon had taken a sheaf of papers from each.

The others hid their impatience as Brandon skimmed through the pathologist’s preliminary findings. ‘“Dear John”,’ he read out, ‘“I know you’ll be screaming for something on this one, since on the face of it, it looks like your serial killer has finally left some forensic traces. The bad news is, I don’t think this is your man’s handiwork. The victim was already dead from asphyxiation before his throat was cut. He was probably strangled manually. Also, I don’t think he was cut with the same blade as your four earlier victims. From the look of it, this was a longer and thicker blade, more like a chef’s vegetable chopping knife. Whereas, as you know, I reckon the earlier ones were done with something more like a filleting knife. Time of death I’d put between eight and ten p.m. last night. I’ll let you have a full report as soon as…” blah, blah, blah. Well, looks like you were right, Tony.’

‘Just as well I’d agreed to go along with you in time, otherwise I’d have looked a right prat,’ Bob Stansfield said, extending a hand to Tony. ‘Nice one, Doc.’ Carol smiled secretly. Thank God the rest of the team were finally starting to accept Tony had something worth saying. It was amazing how different the atmosphere was now that Cross had gone.

Kevin shifted uncomfortably in his chair and said, ‘What have Forensic got to say? Anything about our cases, or is it all preliminary stuff on Chaz Collins?’

Brandon flicked through the other papers. ‘Prelims… prelims… prelims…’ He drew his breath in sharply. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, baffled disgust in his voice.

‘What is it, sir?’ Carol asked.

Brandon rubbed a hand over his long face and stared at the paper again, as if checking that he hadn’t misread it. ‘They’ve been looking at the burns on Damien Connolly’s body. Trying to work out what caused them.’

Tony stopped moving, the last bite of his sandwich halfway to his mouth. ‘So what’s the verdict?’ Bob Stansfield demanded bluntly.

‘This is totally bloody mental,’ Brandon said. ‘The only thing the lads in Forensic can come up with is the attachments for a cake-icing kit.’

‘Of course,’ Tony breathed dreamily, a distant smile lighting up his eyes. ‘All the different star shapes. It’s obvious, once it’s pointed out.’ He was suddenly aware that the other four were staring at him. Carol alone looked concerned. On the other faces, he saw expressions he’d seen before. Wariness, repugnance, disgust, incomprehension.

‘Twenty-four-carat head banger,’ Stansfield said bitterly. No one was quite certain whether he meant the killer or Tony.

The day Penny Burgess took over the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times ’s crime beat, she resolved that she was going to have better contacts than any of her male predecessors had managed. She realized that the male rituals of the masonic lodge and the smoker were going to remain closed worlds to her, but she determined that nothing was going to happen of any significance even there without her knowledge.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that her home phone had rung twice between six and seven that morning. Both calls were from police officers, telling her that the man who’d been questioned earlier in connection with the Queer Killings had been arrested trying to skip the country. No names, no pack drill, but the anonymous suspect would be up before the magistrates that morning to be remanded in custody on a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice. Following on from the discovery of a fifth body that had kept Penny out of her bed till gone two that morning, the connection was obvious.

Penny smiled dreamily to herself over her second cup of strong Earl Grey. It would be another front page for her tonight. Provided the editor and the lawyer didn’t lose their bottle. She dumped her cup and cereal bowl in the sink and picked up her coat. Either way, it was going to be an interesting day.

Carol had drawn the short straw when it came to going to court to make sure everything went according to plan before the magistrates. Stansfield and Kevin had a backlog of routine enquiries to pursue, and Tony had gone to Leeds to keep a long-standing appointment with a Canadian academic psychologist who was attending a conference in the city. They needed, said Tony, to discuss some esoteric aspect of his task-force study. ‘Conceptual mapping,’ he’d told her as they’d snatched a few moments together after the group briefing.

He might as well have said ‘quantum mechanics,’ she thought ironically as she ran up the steps of the court building, her collar turned up against an east wind that promised sleet before dinner. She was going to have to learn a lot if she was going to get anyone to consider her seriously for this task force, that much was clear.

Any thoughts of the task force vanished as soon as she cleared the security check and turned into the long corridor that housed half of the dozen magistrates’ courts. Instead of the usual disgruntled and defiant knots of low-level law breakers and their depressed families, she came face to face with a milling mob of journalists. She’d never seen that kind of media turnout at a Saturday-morning court, normally the quietest of the week. At the heart of the crowd, she could see Don Merrick, his back to the courtroom door, looked harassed.

Carol immediately wheeled round on her heel. But she was too late. She’d not only been spotted but also recognized by one of the handful of journalists who weren’t visiting firefighters sent up by the national media networks at the sniff of a good tale. As she rounded the corner, they shot after her. All except Penny Burgess, who leaned against the wall and gave Don Merrick a tired smile.

‘You weren’t the only one that got the early-morning phone call, then,’ he said cynically.

‘Unfortunately not, Sergeant. At least the lads seem more interested in your guv’nor than they do in you.’

‘She’s better looking,’ Merrick said.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Merrick said drily.

Penny’s eyebrows climbed. ‘You must let me buy you a drink sometime, Don. Then you can find out for yourself if the gossip’s true.’

Merrick shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, pet. The wife wouldn’t like it.’

Penny grinned. ‘Not to mention the guv’nor. Well, Don, now the pack’s gone off in full cry after Inspector Jordan, are you going to let me exercise my democratic right to report the proceedings of the magistrates?’

Don Merrick stood clear of the door and waved her in. ‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘Just remember, Ms Burgess, the facts, and nothing but the facts. We don’t want innocent people put at risk, do we?’

‘You mean, like the Queer Killer’s been doing?’ Penny asked sweetly as she slipped past him and into the court.

Brandon stared in disbelief at Tom Cross. His face was knitted in an expression of deep complacency, his multicoloured eye socket the only disruption to a picture of smug self-satisfaction. ‘Just between ourselves, John,’ he was saying, ‘you have to admit I was bang on the button about McConnell. That stiff last night – it wasn’t down to the Queer Killer at all, was it? Well, it couldn’t have been, could it, on account of you had me laddo banged up downstairs.’ Ignoring the absence of ashtrays in the ACC’s office, Cross lit a cigarette and puffed a happy cloud of smoke into the air.

Brandon struggled, but he couldn’t find the words. For once, he was speechless.

Cross looked around vaguely for somewhere to flick his ash, and settled for the floor, rubbing it into the carpet with the toe of his shoe. ‘So when do you want me to start back on the job?’ he asked.

Brandon leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘If it was up to me, you’d never work in this town again,’ he said pleasantly.

Cross choked on a mouthful of smoke. Brandon looked back down and savoured the moment. ‘By heck, you like your joke, John,’ Cross spluttered.

‘I’ve never been more serious in my life,’ Brandon said coldly. ‘I called you here this morning to warn you off. What you did to Steven McConnell yesterday afternoon was assault. The file stays open, Superintendent. If you come anywhere near this investigation again, I’ll have no hesitation in charging you. In fact, I’ll enjoy it. I will not have this force brought into disrepute by any officer, serving or under suspension.’ As Brandon’s words sank in, Cross paled, then turned puce with anger and humiliation. Brandon stood up. ‘Now get out of my office and my station.’

Cross got to his feet like a man concussed. ‘You’ll regret this, Brandon,’ he stuttered furiously.

‘Don’t make me, Tom. For your own sake, don’t make me.’

Thinking on her feet, Carol led the journalists round to the small lounge outside the lawyers’ cafeteria. ‘OK, OK,’ she said, trying to damp down their baying with exaggerated hand movements. ‘Look, if you’ll just give me two minutes, I’ll come right back and answer your questions, OK?’

They looked uncertain, one or two at the back showing a tendency to drift back towards the courts. ‘Look, people,’ she said, gently massaging her jaw, ‘I’m in agony. I’ve got raging toothache, and if I don’t ring my dentist before ten, I’ve got no chance of him fitting me in today. Please? Give me a break? Then I’m all yours, promise!’ Carol forced a pained smile and slipped through to the cafeteria. There was a phone on the far wall, which she picked up. She made great play of taking out her diary and looking up a page, while dialling the familiar number of the court. ‘Court one, please.’ She waited for the connection, then said to the clerk, ‘This is Inspector Jordan here. Can I speak to the CPS solicitor?’

Moments later, she was talking to the Crown Prosecution Service lawyer. ‘Eddie? Carol Jordan. I’ve got about thirty hacks here waiting for Steven McConnell to come up. They’re dying to jump to all the wrong conclusions, and I think you might prefer to get him on now while I’ve got them tied up at an impromptu press conference. Can you swing it with the clerk?’ She waited while the solicitor muttered with the court clerk.

‘Can do, Carol,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

Keeping up the pretence, Carol put the phone down and scribbled something in her diary. Then she took a deep breath and headed back towards the pack.