Killing With Confidence (5 page)

‘Very well,’ replied
Cruickshank, ‘but we need to get her murderer fast.’

‘Oh, do you think so,
moron?’ Crosbie muttered.

‘What was that, DCI
Crosbie?’

The colour drained
from Crosbie’s face before he quickly composed himself. ‘I think
it’ll be clearer in the morning.’

‘Here’s hoping,
Inspector,’ and with that the DS turned on his heels and left.

This Tourette’s thing
is getting worse, Crosbie thought to himself. It was bad enough
cursing like a trooper in his head – he abhorred
swearing – but now it was escaping into the real world he
needed to seek help. Maybe he was cracking up? Maybe he’d seen the
results of too much violence – Selina would be his
forty-second murder case. He had a horrible feeling this
case – and his condition – was going to get a lot worse
before it got better.

10

Copycat Killer

Osiris
broke the whore’s neck and dumped her body in a ditch just five
miles down the M74 from where Selina had been killed at Strathclyde
Park.

Every newspaper and
TV channel had been plastered with details of her death. Osiris
decided it was time to turn the country’s morbid fascination with
murder into blind panic now that a killer was on the loose.

That’s why he had
carried out a copycat killing. The prostitute he’d picked up in
Glasgow’s notorious Blythswood Square had clearly worked the
streets for years and knew how to handle a violent punter, but no
one she’d ever encountered had shown the same strength and ferocity
as Osiris, who had broken her jaw with one punch and knocked her
out with another, showing remarkable dexterity within the confines
of the car.

Osiris hated coppers,
and this would act as a distraction for what he had in mind. He
knew time was short. Sooner or later the cops were going to get
lucky and he wouldn’t be able to bluff and bluster his way out of
it. That simply could not be allowed to happen. Osiris had to be
free to carry out his work, which, in his warped mind, he often
considered charitable. Life couldn’t have been so great for the
whore he’d just dumped. As far as he was concerned it was a mercy
killing. He was ridding the earth of another ‘disease-spreading
parasite’ – no bad thing. But what he had planned next would
be highly risky. He needed to concentrate. He needed his CDs.

Osiris pressed
play
on his car stereo and let the soothing words wash over
him. ‘People ask me, “How did you get to the top?” Then “How much
do you earn?” usually follows.’ Much laughter from the studio
audience followed. The American voice continued. ‘But only a loser
asks questions like that. There is no quick fix or secret to get to
the top. I had firm beliefs that what I was doing was right and
different from all the rest. And I stuck to my guns.’ Americans so
loved speaking in clichés, but that bit still made Osiris smile. He
too knew that what he was doing was right and different from the
rest. The self-help guru added, ‘As for how much I earned last
year – it was two hundred million dollars when I floated my
company, thank you very much.’ That got whoops and rapturous
applause from the studio crowd.

But Osiris cared
little for cash. Killing was his currency.

11

Feeling Peckish

April threw
caution to the wind and ordered a full English breakfast in her
favourite greasy spoon café. She felt ravenous this morning,
stuffing whole bacon rashers wrapped in butter-sodden toast and
dipped in the yolk of a fried egg into her mouth. Fifteen minutes
later the huge chasm that had become her stomach was finally
satisfied. She remembered a time when food wasn’t the be all and
end all of her life. In her late teens she had hardly eaten at all,
much to the constant worry of her poor mother. ‘Oh, Mum, I’m too
busy to eat,’ she’d say while getting dolled up for yet another
night at the Zanzibar in Hope Street – Glasgow’s premier
hotspot at the time.

She gave a wry smile
to herself and looked down at the mounds of flesh that now jutted
out beyond her ample chest. ‘What a little butterball I’ve become,’
she muttered, once again too loudly.

The waitress Martel
was used to the slightly batty old peroxide blonde speaking to
herself. It didn’t bother her as April always had a warm, ready
smile and never failed to leave a tip. She poured April another cup
of tea and placed a small pile of today’s newspapers on the table
beside her.

April smiled and
said, ‘Thanks, love,’ before flicking through the pages. The
Daily Herald
’s main rival, the
Express
, had some
dramatic headlines about Selina’s death, but a quick scan through
the copy confirmed they had nothing but the basic details –
the jewellery queen was dead.

That wasn’t the case
in the
Daily Herald
, with the dramatic pictures of Martin
Seth’s body lying unconscious by the family pool.

April was pleased to
see that, apart from the intro, most of her copy remained
untouched. She didn’t come from the school of writers who felt that
every article they wrote was a potential Pulitzer Prize winner and
therefore should remain untouched by sub-editors – the
plumbers of journalism. The ‘subs’ were the production journalists
who actually made the reporters’ articles fit into the spaces on
the page. Many reporters had a them-and-us attitude to subs. There
were, without doubt, good and bad ones – as there were good
and bad reporters. The good subs would only change a reporter’s
copy to correct it or enhance it. A bad one would rewrite it for
the sake of it, miss out the relevant points, change ages and
sometimes even names. It was also not unknown that by the time they
had rejigged the article, they had often forgotten who had written
it, and occasionally even stuck someone else’s by-line on it. But,
as far as April was concerned, subs had bailed her out more often
than dropped her in it, catching embarrassing spelling mistakes
and, at worse, legals that would have had her before a judge on
contempt of court. When she overheard reporters bitching about how
a sub had rewritten their copy, April often wondered if they ever
thanked them for repairing their spelling mistakes, appalling
grammar or the horrendous legal gaffes that had slipped under the
radar. Over time the subs knew April could put words together in
roughly the right order and let her copy be.

She flicked through
the rest of the paper, occasionally commenting on tales that caught
her attention, blissfully unaware she was reading out loud. Ten
minutes later she gathered her things and left a pound tip on the
counter.

Martel said, ‘You
know, after you’ve talked us through the morning papers, there’s no
need for me to read them afterwards.’

April laughed. ‘I
really am a mad old, bat aren’t I?’



Connor was
slightly hungover. He sat slumped in his chair with a latte in hand
and glanced up at April. She looked remarkably bright and breezy.
He glanced at her feet. At least she was wearing the same coloured
shoes today. That was a positive sign.

They hadn’t even
exchanged good-mornings before the Weasel kicked open the door to
the broom cupboard. He didn’t bother with any pleasantries. ‘The
editor wants to see you both in his office
now
.’

This meant official
business. You never knew what to expect when summoned by the
editor. Even Connor’s favourite boss Danny Brown could make a
career-changing decision on your behalf in a five-minute meeting in
his office. Occasionally, it would be for a pat on the back –
or herogram as they were called – but Connor remembered one
piece of sound advice he’d been given by Badger: ‘In this business
one day you’re a hero, the next a cunt.’

The pair were shown
into Nigel Bent’s office by his PA.

It was obvious Bent
was a control freak, with a dash of OCD – everything on his
oak-panelled desk was laid out in meticulous straight lines. Even
the way he was sitting, with his two index fingers resting on his
chin as if deep in thought, was stage-managed for the benefit of
Connor and April.

Neither rated this
editor, and not just because he’d been parachuted in by the company
to replace the popular Danny Brown. There was something cold and
dark about Bent. He was the sort of man who craved the title of
editor and the power that came with it, rather than the job itself.
The staff at the
Daily Herald
had rarely seen Bent since his
appointment a month ago. He’d claimed in an introductory bulk email
to staff that ‘his door was always open’, when in fact it was
permanently shut.

Connor sensed that
underneath the calm exterior, the sharp suits and the gelled
strands of hair that did little to conceal Bent’s baldness, there
lurked a real bad bastard.

‘Ah, April, Connor,
good hit yesterday,’ he said, sounding just a little too rehearsed.
‘A very good hit.’

Maybe they’d been
summoned for a herogram after all, but Bent was more of an email
editor – why say something face to face when you can fire off
a few emotionless words on a computer? There must be something
else. And there was.

‘But today I need to
know if anyone knows why Selina was in that car park. Maybe ask
your cop contacts, Connor? And, April, I want you to go back up to
the Seths and see if Martin knew anything about her last movements.
But go easy on Martin. He’ll be raw and sensitive right now.’

Especially after
April sat on his chest, Connor thought to himself.



Back in the
broom cupboard April and Connor were silent. April was the first to
speak. ‘Go easy on him? The entire country thinks Martin did it and
I’m told to go easy on him. Did you get the impression Bent’s
worried about something?’

‘Yup, he was way too
friendly,’ said Connor. ‘The Weasel could have told us to hit the
cops and the doorstep. Bent’s after something or at least needs to
know something. Let’s find out what he really wants to know. Might
be a good stick to beat him over the head with.’

12

Headline News

The
stereotypical image of a serial killer is one of some deranged
loner sharpening his knives in front of a homemade altar in a
blood-splattered basement surrounded by press clippings. But to be
a successful serial killer requires a degree of social skills. He
needs to blend in. How often when a mass murderer is caught do you
hear a neighbour say on TV, ‘He was such a quiet, normal chap,
too.’

No one who saw Osiris
having a pint in the Lab bar in Glasgow city centre that lunchtime
would have suspected that a deranged psychopath lurked within.

‘Another pint,
Vinnie?’ said the tubby regional manager Chick McAulay.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’
he replied cheerfully.

‘What d’you make of
this rich bitch, Vinnie?’ MacAulay waved the front page of the
Daily Herald
at him and continued. ‘Came from fuck all but
suddenly thought her shite smelled better than the rest of us
because she was
friend to the stars
.’ He flicked to April’s
spread and pointed at the pictures of Martin Seth at his lowest
ebb, having just been dragged from the bottom of a swimming pool.
‘There’s your murderer. That’s why he tried to top himself. Guilty.
Guilty as hell. Case closed.’ Having wrapped up the Seth mystery,
MacAulay moved effortlessly onto the football.



If only
life were that easy for DCI Crosbie. He had read Martin Seth’s
statement four times since arriving at his desk at 7 a.m. He then
turned his attention to April’s interview with Seth in the
Daily
Herald
. He liked newspapers, particularly the
Herald
,
and had once nurtured ambitions to be a reporter, but try as he
might he couldn’t make the breakthrough. A young family soon
demanded a steady income rather than the bits and bobs of freelance
work he brought in. And so he joined the Strathclyde Police where
he rose steadily through the ranks from flat foot to Detective
Chief Inspector. He knew colleagues who had attained higher ranks
and wished they hadn’t. Their career choice meant a full-time desk
job and constant computer work. They no longer got to chase the bad
guys or even use their powers of arrest.
What’s the point in
being a cop if you never nick some cunting lowlife
fuck?

Crosbie remained
quiet for a moment, scanning the room for reaction to his outburst.
Thankfully, it appeared to have gone unspoken. That reminded him.
He had an appointment with a shrink at three. He’d gone private
because even though the force offered free counselling and
psychological services he didn’t trust the claims they were
confidential. Somewhere they’d have to log his problem, and if the
top brass wanted to get their hands on it they could. And that
would mean anything said could be taken down and used against
you.

Crosbie reckoned he’d
have enough time to bring Martin Seth in for questioning and make
his three o’clock session with the psychiatrist. It was an
appointment he didn’t have a hope in hell of making.



Martin was
also flicking through the newspapers Selina had insisted were
delivered each morning so she could scour for the next celebrity to
front a new product range. Of course, she could only really afford
the stars who were on the slide, and not the ones who were hot to
trot and would make ridiculous financial demands. He thought how
ironic it was that his wife would have loved the publicity her
sudden and violent death had caused. Not only was she the main
splash story on every Scottish daily newspaper, she had also earned
front-page coverage on the bigger-selling, London-based
papers.