The Burning (34 page)

Given what had happened before he was arrested, I wasn’t expecting him to have been passed for interview by the doctor. I wouldn’t have been; I was exhibiting the alertness and tensile strength of overcooked broccoli. Apparently he was tougher than me, though, because when I got to the nick at six, the first thing I saw was Chris Pettifer being lectured by Judd in the corridor. Pettifer was one of the squad’s trained interrogators and his presence there at that hour of the morning could only mean that the suspect was fit and healthy and ready to talk. I went past without interrupting, noting that Judd was looking even more intense than usual. I was very glad I didn’t have the responsibility of securing a confession.

I found Peter Belcott in the interview room when I went in, which wasn’t a surprise. He had a trick of turning up when things got interesting.

‘Fill me in, mate. Who is he?’

‘I’m not your mate.’ Belcott relented. ‘His name’s Razmig Selvaggi.’ He rolled the syllables around in his mouth, enjoying the sound of the name. ‘Twenty-four years old. His mother’s Armenian, father’s Italian. He lives in Brixton with his family, who run a takeaway. He does deliveries for them. No trace PNC. That’s it.’

‘Has he confessed yet?’

‘They’re just going to talk to him now. There’ll be a live feed from the interview room, if you want to watch it.’ Belcott nodded towards the small meeting room where the light from the TV flickered.

‘I might just do that.’ I started to walk away.

‘I heard Kerrigan stopped him with her face. Wouldn’t be the first time she’d had that effect on a man.’

My hands clenched into fists before I could stop them. ‘She got injured going to the assistance of another officer, so I wouldn’t joke about it too much if I were you. And where were you last night? Hot date with
World of Warcraft
, was it?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Delighted to.’

I went into the meeting room where a couple of the lads were already sitting, waiting for the show to start. I stood behind them, leaning against the wall. My arm throbbed dully and I felt wretched, on the whole. I wanted to see Selvaggi again, but I was glad of the distraction too.

On screen, the door opened and Pettifer walked in, Judd right behind him. The sound was off but I could see the inspector was still talking. Obviously he didn’t trust him enough to let him do his job. Pettifer looked fed up and I didn’t blame him. One of the detectives who was sitting in front of me booed loudly and threw a balled-up piece of paper at the screen. He might have made the arrest, but Judd wasn’t going to be winning a popularity contest any time soon. The two of them took their seats at the table, Pettifer with a look back over his shoulder at the camera. He knew we were watching and I wondered if it was a help to know we were rooting for him, or if it just put him under more pressure.

The next time the door opened, it was to allow Selvaggi and his lawyer to enter the room. A couple of other officers had come into the meeting room by now and there was a low rumble of comment at the sight of him. The bruises on his face were darkening nicely. His shoulders were hunched with tension and he looked distinctly unimpressive as he sat down at the table.

‘Young, isn’t he?’ Colin Vale voiced what I had been thinking. He looked younger than twenty-four, especially when he started biting his nails.

His solicitor was young too. I guessed she was on call for one of the local defence firms – it being the weekend, she had to be one of the most junior lawyers. She had long, straight red hair with a heavy fringe. Under it, her face was pale, which wasn’t surprising given the early hour. Her suit looked creased and I thought she was nervous as she sat down beside Selvaggi, leaning over to mutter something in his ear. That wasn’t a surprise either. Crimes didn’t come much more serious than this.

I became aware that everyone in the room was leaning forward. ‘Turn it up, Colin.’

The sound came up on Pettifer running through the formulaic preamble that began every interview: stating the time, the date, the location and who was present for the benefit of the tape. Asked for his name and date of birth, Selvaggi gave them in a voice that was so low and husky I strained to hear it. He had a soft South London accent that made his words run together. The solicitor’s name was Rosalba Osbourne. She sounded absurdly matter-of-fact, as if what she was doing was all in a day’s work and nothing to get excited about. Technically, it was, but it was clear to me at any rate that she was hoping no one would notice the nerves that had her fidgeting with her pen. Pettifer cautioned Selvaggi again before launching into the interview. Everything by the book. Nothing open to question.

‘Right,’ Pettifer said once the formalities were out of the way. ‘Mr Selvaggi, do you know why you were arrested this morning?’

‘Mistaken identity.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

He cleared his throat but it didn’t make much difference; his voice was still hoarse when he spoke. ‘You’ve got me confused with someone else. That serial killer.’

‘You were arrested in Campbell Road recreation ground, weren’t you?’

He nodded, then after a nudge from the solicitor said, ‘Yes.’

‘What were you doing there?’

A shrug. ‘Just walking around.’

‘Walking around. Do you often go for a walk in the middle of the night? In the rain?’

‘I’d been working. I needed a break.’

‘Do you often attack women while you’re taking these walks?’

He looked to his solicitor, who shook her head. ‘No comment.’

‘You were caught in the act of attacking two this morning, weren’t you? Both police officers, as it happened, but you didn’t know that.’

‘No comment.’

‘When we searched you, we found these items on your person.’ Pettifer waited for Judd to lay the evidence bags on the table in front of Selvaggi. ‘A stun gun. A hammer. A crowbar. Twine. Bolt cutters. What’s your explanation for that?’

‘I found them.’ It was stupid of him to be tempted into an explanation and I thought Rosalba looked annoyed, but she let him speak. ‘They were on the ground and I picked them up.’

‘Was this before or after you attacked the women?’

‘I never. They were on the ground too.’

‘Who attacked them, Mr Selvaggi?’

‘Someone else.’

‘Did you see someone else? Because we were running a surveillance operation in the area and I think we would have noticed if anyone else had been there.’

Another shrug.

‘For the record, Mr Selvaggi shrugged.’ Pettifer took a sip of water. It wasn’t going badly, all the same. But it was hard to see how he could get out of it when I’d caught him red-handed.

Judd obviously felt he could do better than Chris. ‘Do you really expect us to believe that you just happened to come across the crime scene by chance? How do you explain the petrol can in the carrier of your moped?’

‘It’s in case I run out of petrol,’ Selvaggi deadpanned and the room around me erupted into guffaws; Judd had picked pretty much the only thing that Selvaggi could explain away.

‘We’re going to search your house,’ Judd snapped. His ears had gone bright red. ‘We’re going to go through everything that belongs to you, and everything that belongs to your parents, and everything that belongs to your sisters. We’re going to rip the place apart. And then we’ll see if you have an explanation for what we find.’

‘Better hope we find something,’ one of the older detectives said mordantly. ‘Or that won’t be much of a threat.’

Selvaggi’s face was hard to read, but the quality of the footage and the angle of the camera made it difficult to see the details anyway.

‘When are they searching the house?’ I asked, hoping someone would know.

‘Right now. We’ve just got the warrant.’ I hadn’t noticed him arrive, but Superintendent Godley was leaning in through the door. ‘Rob, I was hoping you might be here. Do you want to come?’

‘Definitely.’ I peeled myself off the wall and followed Godley out to the car that was waiting to take us to Brixton. I recognised it was his way of thanking me for getting Selvaggi under control; it was typical of him to think of it and I appreciated it. I also appreciated the distraction from my concerns about Maeve, because even seeing Judd doing battle with Selvaggi wasn’t enough to keep my mind off her.

‘There’s no news,’ Godley said abruptly as we got into the car. ‘About Maeve. I’ve just rung the hospital.’

‘Oh. Right. Thanks for letting me know.’

‘I’ll tell you if I hear anything.’

‘Very kind,’ I said, not managing to sound anything other than embarrassed. Godley took out his phone and called the commissioner’s staff officer to bring him up to date. I stared out of the window at the streets, wondering if everyone on the squad had worked out how I felt about her, wondering if they’d known it before I did.

*

Selvaggi’s home turned out to be a modest Victorian house in the middle of a terrace. Deceptively narrow, it went back a long way, which explained how there was room for him, his parents and his three sisters to live there. Skylights in the roof were a giveaway that they had done a loft conversion and it was there, Kev Cox told us, that Selvaggi lived, in what was effectively a self-contained flat.

‘We’ve moved the family out already. They weren’t pleased, needless to say, but they’ve gone to stay with relatives in Carshalton.’

The house was uninhabitable already. Kev had arranged for tarpaulins to be hung on frames in front of the windows on the ground floor, and screened off the family car that was parked in the street nearby. Like the rest of the search team, Kev was wearing a white hooded boiler suit and blue gloves. Godley and I ducked behind the tarpaulins to change into paper suits and gloves before we went into the house – there was no way we’d be allowed across the threshold if there was the least chance of us compromising any evidence. The neighbours had been busy getting in touch with the press, and a helicopter whined overhead, filming the search that was going on in the small garden. A cordon was in place at either end of the street so we didn’t have to worry about the media getting too close, but every resident within eyeshot of the house was recording anything they could see. It would all be on the news channels before too long. Riveting it wasn’t, as far as I was concerned, but the news that there had been an arrest was sensational stuff and they needed some sort of visual entertainment to go with the reports. Kev, his face crinkled with tension, was trying to sort out tents to cover the search areas in the garden so he could work unobserved. Godley and I left him to it, stepping gingerly in through the front door, anonymous in our hooded suits and masks.

‘Can I help you?’

The voice belonged to Kev’s second-in-command, Tony Schofield. He was tall and gangling and not normally forceful, but Kev seemed to have given him the job of keeping the crime scene under control.

‘Superintendent Godley and DC Langton,’ Godley said with just a trace of impatience. ‘Kev knows we’re here.’

‘Sorry – I didn’t know – I mean—’ Schofield’s eyes were wide with horror. ‘I thought I’d better check.’

‘Quite right. Can you show us around?’

‘Of course.’ He scrambled to put down the box he was carrying and gestured into the front room. ‘We’ve started down here but to be honest we’re not expecting to find that much. It looks as if he kept most of his things in his room upstairs.’

‘The loft conversion? Let’s start there.’

From the hall I could see into the kitchen where officers were opening every jar and checking every container in the freezer. It looked like it had been a tidy house before we’d got there. Mrs Selvaggi was not going to be pleased when she got home, whenever that might be.

I followed Schofield and Godley up the stairs to the second floor. There was just enough room for all three of us to stand upright in the centre of the room, but the ceiling sloped down sharply. There was a single bed, a chest of drawers and a few built-in shelves, but most of the storage was in cupboards built into the eaves. The doors hung open, showing where the search team had swept through the room like a tornado. It felt cramped in there but it was private, away from the rest of the family, and there was even a small bathroom with a shower in it.

‘He lives up here, pretty much. Eats here. Sleeps here. Spends a lot of time here during the day. Keeps to himself, according to one of his sisters. They don’t even know if he’s in the house a lot of the time. He spends hours at the gym in the health centre too – lifts weights. He doesn’t have a job, officially – just a bit of casual carpentry for cash-in-hand and pocket money from the family business when he does deliveries. We found his work boots and tools. They’ve gone off to the lab.’

‘What else?’ Godley sounded edgy. We had caught him in the act but juries were unpredictable; we needed more evidence that he couldn’t explain away.

‘On those shelves’ – Schofield pointed – ‘he had true crime. Lots of material about serial killers, specifically ones who killed women – two about the Yorkshire Ripper, a few about the Wests, one about the Suffolk Strangler, one about the investigation into Rachel Nickell’s murder, and then a few about foreign killers – Bundy, the Green River Killer, Andrei Chikatilo, Ed Gein, the Hillside Strangler, Charles Manson.’

‘All the top names,’ Godley commented.

‘You’ve got to aim high,’ I murmured.

‘I suppose he was looking for tips,’ Schofield said seriously. ‘He had a set of memoirs by an FBI profiler and a book about forensic investigation too. He’d done the research. How to do it and how to avoid getting caught. Looks like he should have spent longer thinking about the second part. He had a few books on the occult, too. Aleister Crowley and that kind of thing. Amateur Satanism.’

I was getting bored with the discussion of Selvaggi’s reading habits. ‘What else?’

‘Under the mattress we found a collection of porn magazines and a few adult DVDs, mostly with an S&M theme – bit more specialised than your usual top-shelf material, I’m led to believe. In this drawer here,’ and he indicated the bottom one in the small chest of drawers by the bed, ‘there was a cardboard box with women’s jewellery in it.’