The Mermaids Singing (12 page)

Adam struggled even harder when he felt the cold compress cut off his access to the air, but within minutes his legs stopped their pointless thrashing. I waited a little longer, just to be on the safe side, then I rolled off and fastened his legs together with surgical tape. I returned the chloroform pad to its secure bag, then I taped Adam’s mouth shut.

I stood up and took a deep breath. So far, so good. Next, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and took stock. I am familiar with the theory of the French forensic scientist Edmond Locard, first demonstrated in a murder trial in 1912, that every contact leaves a trace; a criminal will always take something away from the scene of his crime and leave something behind. With this in mind, I had carefully chosen my wardrobe for today. I was wearing Levi 501s, the same brand I’d seen Adam wear often. I’d topped it with a baggy V-necked cricket sweater, the exact double of one I’d watched him buy in Marks and Spencer a couple of weeks before. Any stray fibres I left behind would inevitably be ascribed to the contents of Adam’s own wardrobe.

I took a quick look round the study, pausing by his answering machine. It was one of the old-fashioned ones, with a single cassette tape. I opened the machine and helped myself to the tape. It would be nice to have a memory of his voice sounding normal; I knew that the soundtrack on the video wouldn’t have that same relaxed quality.

The door to the garage was locked. I headed off up the stairs, where I found the jacket of his suit tossed over the back of a chair in the kitchen diner. The bunch of keys was in the left-hand pocket. Back downstairs, I opened the garage door and unlocked the hatchback of his two-year-old Ford Escort. Then I went back for Adam. He had, of course, come round. His eyes were filled with panic, muffled grunts came from behind the gag. I smiled down at him as I pressed the chloroform pad over his nose again. This time, of course, he couldn’t struggle effectively at all.

I pulled him into a sitting position, then brought a chair through from the study. I managed to get him on to the chair, and from there I was able to sling him over my shoulder and stagger through into the garage. I dumped him in the luggage space, and slammed the tailgate shut. Not a trace of his body was visible.

I checked my watch. Just after six. It would be another hour till it was dark enough to be certain none of the neighbours passing casually would notice a stranger driving out of Adam’s garage. I filled the time by browsing through his life. Packets of photographs revealed friends, a family Christmas dinner. I would have fitted into this life perfectly. We could have had it all, if he hadn’t been such a fool.

I was startled out of my reverie by the phone. I let it ring, and went through to the kitchen. I helped myself to a bottle of creme cleanser and a cloth and carefully washed down all the paintwork in the hall. I put the used cloth in my backpack, then fetched the vacuum cleaner. I went over the entire hall slowly and carefully, erasing all traces of the struggle from the hard-wearing Berber carpet. I trailed the vac behind me, right into the garage, where I left it in a corner, looking as if it had always lived there. Satisfied I’d removed all traces of me, I climbed into Adam’s car, pressed the remote-control button on his keyring and started the engine as the garage door rose smoothly before me.

I shut the door behind me, and drove off. I could hear muffled noises from the back of the car. I raked around in the glove box till I found a Wet, Wet, Wet cassette. I shoved it into the player and turned the volume up high. I sang along with the music as I drove out of the city and on to the moors.

I’d been worried that Adam’s car might not make it all the way up the track, and I’d been right. About half a mile from home, the road became too overgrown and rutted. With a sigh, I got out and walked up to collect the wheelbarrow. When I opened the tailgate to tip him into the barrow, his eyes were wide and staring. His muffled calls were wasted on me, however. I dragged him unceremoniously out of the car and into the barrow. It was a hard half-mile up the track, since his constant struggling made steering more difficult. Luckily, Auntie Doris had had the foresight to buy a proper builder’s barrow, one with two wheels in front.

When we reached the farmhouse, I opened the trapdoor. The cellar below looked dark and welcoming. Adam’s eyes widened in terror. I stroked his soft hair and said, ‘Welcome to the pleasure dome.’

5

As to… the mob of newspaper readers, they are pleased with anything, provided it is bloody enough. But the mind of sensibility requires something more.

After he’d seen Carol to her car, Tony walked across the campus to the general stores and bought a copy of the evening paper. If publicity was what Handy Andy craved, he’d finally achieved it. Fear and loathing stalked the pages of the
Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times
. Five of them, to be precise. Pages 1, 2, 3, 24 and 25, plus an editorial, were devoted to the Queer Killer. If the nickname was anything to judge by, the police were already leaking like a Cabinet committee.

‘You’re not going to like being called the Queer Killer, are you, Andy?’ Tony said softly to himself as he walked back to his office. Back behind his desk, he studied the paper. Penny Burgess had had a field day. The front page screamed,
QUEER KILLER STRIKES AGAIN
! in banner headlines. In smaller headline type, readers were told,
POLICE ADMIT SERIAL KILLER STALKS CITY
. Beneath was a lurid account of the discovery of Damien Connolly’s body, and a photograph of him at his passing-out parade. The turnover on pages two and three was a sensationalist summary of the three previous cases, complete with sketch map. ‘Bricks without straw, right enough,’ Tony said to himself as he flicked through to the centre spread.
GAYS TERRIFIED BY QUEER KILLER MONSTER
left the reader in no doubt who the
Sentinel Times
had decided were at risk. The copy focused on the supposed hysteria gripping Bradfield’s gay community, complete with interior shots of cafés, bars and clubs that made the scene look seedy enough to pander to the readers’ prejudices.

‘Oh boy,’ Tony said. ‘You’re really going to hate this, Andy.’ He turned back to the editorial.

‘At last,’ he read, ’police have admitted what many of us have believed for some time. There is a serial killer on the loose in Bradfield, his target the young, single men who frequent the city’s sordid gay bars.
‘It’s a disgrace that the police have not warned the city’s homosexuals to be on their guard before now. In the twilight world of anonymous pick-ups and casual sex, it cannot be difficult for this predatory monster to find willing victims. The police’s silence can only have made it easier for the killer.
‘Their reluctance to speak out has probably increased the gay community’s existing suspicion of the police, making them fear that the authorities value the lives of gay men less than those of other members of the community.
‘Just as it took the murders of “innocent” women rather than prostitutes to make the police pay full attention to the Yorkshire Ripper, it is wrong that a police officer has had to be murdered before Bradfield Metropolitan Police takes this Queer Killer seriously.
‘In spite of this, we urge the gay community to cooperate fully with the police. And we demand that the police investigate these horrific killings diligently and with compassion for the concerns of Bradfield’s homosexuals. The sooner this vicious killer is caught, the safer we all will be.’

‘The usual mixture of self-righteousness, indignation and unrealistic demands,’ Tony said to the Devil’s Ivy on his windowsill. He clipped the articles and spread them across the desk. He switched on his micro-cassette recorder and spoke.

‘
Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times
, February 27th. At last, Handy Andy has made the big time. I’m wondering how important that is to him. One of the tenets of profiling serial offenders is that they crave the oxygen of publicity. But this time, I’m not so sure he’s too bothered about that. There were no messages after the first two killings, neither of which received that much publicity after the initial discovery of the bodies. And although there was a message directing the police to the third body via a newspaper, that note made no claims about the earlier killings. I had puzzled over that until Inspector Carol Jordan offered an alternative explanation for the note and accompanying video, namely that without direction, the body may have lain undiscovered for some time. So, while Handy Andy may not be obsessive about creating headlines and panic, it’s clear he wants the bodies found while they are still recognizably his work.’ He switched off the cassette with a sigh. Although he’d turned his back on the academic circus years before, he couldn’t escape his training; every stage of the process had to be on record. The prospect of this investigation providing the raw material for articles or even a book was something Tony found hard to resist.

‘I’m a cannibal,’ he said to the plant. ‘Sometimes I disgust myself.’ He shovelled the clippings together and tucked them into his press-cuttings folder. He opened the boxes and took out the stacks of document wallets they contained. Carol had labelled them all neatly. Fluent capitals, Tony noted. A woman comfortable with the written word.

Each victim had a pathology report and a preliminary forensic report. The witness statements were divided into three groups: Background (victim), Witness (scene of crime) and Miscellaneous. Selecting the Background (victim) files, he walked his wheeled chair across to the table where his personal computer stood. When he’d arrived at Bradfield, the university had offered him a terminal linked into their network. He’d declined, not wanting to waste time learning a new set of protocols when he was perfectly at home with his own PC. Now, he was glad he didn’t have to add data security to the list of worries that kept him awake at nights.

Tony called up the customized software that would allow him to make comparisons between the victims, and started the long slog of inputting the data.

Five minutes in the Scargill Street station was enough to make Carol wish she’d gone straight home. To get to the office she’d been allocated for the duration of the investigation, she had to walk the length of the main squad room. Copies of the evening paper were strewn over half the desks, mocking her with their thick black headlines. Bob Stansfield was standing with a couple of DCs halfway down the room and he called to her as she passed. ‘The good doctor knocked off already, has he?’

‘From what I’ve seen of the good doctor, Bob, he could give some of our bosses a few lessons in working overtime,’ Carol said, wishing she could think of some sharper putdown. Doubtless it would come to her hours later in the shower. On the other hand, maybe it was as well she hadn’t come up with something too devastating. Better not alienate the lads any more than her assignment had already done. She stopped and smiled. ‘Anything new?’ she asked.

Stansfield detached himself from his juniors, saying, ‘Right, lads, get on with it.’ He moved over to Carol’s side and said, ‘Not as such. The HOLMES team are working flat out, smacking all we’ve got so far into the computer, see what correlations they can come up with. Cross has ordered us to pull in all the nonces again. He’s convinced one of them’s our best bet.’

Carol shook her head. ‘Waste of time.’

‘You said it. This bastard’s not got form, I’d put money on it. Kevin’s got a team going out tonight to try something a bit different, though,’ he added, taking out and lighting his last cigarette. He tossed the packet in a nearby bin, an expression of disgust on his face. ‘If we don’t get a fucking break soon, I’m going to have to put in for a raise to cover my bloody nicotine consumption.’

‘Me, I’m drinking so much coffee I’ve got a permanent case of the jitterbug boogies,’ Carol said ruefully. ‘So what’s this idea of Kevin’s?’ Gently does it. First the rapport, then the question. Funny how getting information out of colleagues followed the same rules as interrogating suspects.

‘He’s got an undercover team going out on the gay scene, concentrating on the clubs and pubs with a reputation for S&M.’ Stansfield snorted. ‘They’ve all been down Traffic this avvy, scrounging leather trousers off the bike boys.’

‘It’s worth a try,’ Carol said.

‘Yeah, well let’s hope Kevin’s not sending in a bunch of closet pansies like Damien Connolly turned out to be,’ Stansfield said. ‘Last thing we want is a bunch of CID fairies ending up wearing their own handcuffs.’

Carol refused to dignify the comment with a reply and moved off towards her office. She’d got her hand on the door when Cross’s voice boomed down the room. ‘Inspector Jordan? Get your body in here.’

Carol closed her eyes and counted to three. ‘Coming, sir,’ she said cheerfully, turning back and walking the length of the room to Cross’s temporary office. He’d only been in there a day, but already he’d marked it like a tomcat spraying his territory. The room reeked of cigarette smoke. Half-drunk polystyrene cups of coffee strategically placed on window ledge and desk top had butts floating in them. There was even a girlie calendar on the wall, proof that sexism was alive and well and working in the advertising industry. Hadn’t they realized
yet
that it was the women who stood in the supermarkets deciding which brand of vodka to buy?

Leaving the door open in a bid for air, Carol walked into Cross’s office and said, ‘Sir?’

‘What’s Wonder Boy come up with then?’

‘It’s a bit early for conclusions, sir,’ she said brightly. ‘He’s got to read through all the reports I copied for him.’

Cross grunted. ‘Oh aye, I forgot he’s a bloody professor.’ He spat the word out sarcastically. ‘Everything in writing, eh? Kevin’s got some more stuff on the Connolly business; you’ll have to catch up with him. Was there anything else, Inspector?’ he asked belligerently, as if she were the one who had imposed herself on him.