The Cradle in the Grave (42 page)

‘Let me commit to some of them on your behalf,' said Proust. ‘Baldy's been seen by two eye-witnesses: Sarah Jaggard and our very own Sergeant Zailer. We know he's between thirty and forty-five, white and shaven-headed. We know he has a Cockney accent. There's some disagreement over the shape of his face . . .'

‘I discounted the two eye-witness statements,' Ramsden told him. ‘A profile's useless if you create it around any givens. You look at the crimes – nothing else.'

‘
Could
he be a thirty-nine-year-old white Cockney skinhead?' Proust asked her.

‘On age, race, job, qualifications, whether he's single or in a long-term relationship – all the externals, as I said – I wouldn't want to commit,' said Ramsden. ‘Character-wise, he could be a loner, or very sociable on the face of it.'

‘It isn't particularly helpful to hear that he could be anyone, Dr Ramsden,' said the Snowman. ‘We've had more than three hundred names suggested since Baldy's ugly mug desecrated the papers on Saturday, and another hundred or so wild theories about the sixteen numbers, each more preposterous than its predecessor.'

‘You want to know what I'm able to tell you about this man? The most striking thing about him is the cards he sends and leaves at the scenes of his crimes. Sixteen numbers, the same ones in the same order in each instance, arranged in four rows of four.' Ramsden turned and pointed to the board behind her. ‘If we look at the ones retrieved from the bodies of Helen Yardley and Judith Duffy, and the one Sarah Jaggard found in her pocket after she was attacked, we see that our man likes to be neat and consistent. Wherever the number four occurs, for example, it's written in exactly the same way. Same with the number seven, same with all the numbers. The distances between the digits are also highly regular – they look as if they've been measured with a ruler to get them exactly the same. The rows-and-columns layout tells us that he values order and organisation. He hates the idea of doing anything in a haphazard way, and he's proud of the workmanship that goes into his cards – that's why the card he uses is thick, high-quality, expensive. Though, unfortunately for you, widely available.'

A few groans from the poor sods who'd spent days establishing precisely how wide that availability was.

‘Obsessed with order could mean military,' Chris Gibbs suggested. ‘Bearing in mind he's killing with a US army-issue gun.'

‘It could mean military,' Ramsden agreed. ‘It could also mean jail, boarding school, any institution. Or you could be looking for someone who grew up in a chaotic, unstable family and reacted against it by becoming highly controlled. That's not unusual – the child whose bedroom's unbelievably tidy, but outside his bedroom door, the place is a tip: crockery flying, parents screaming at each other . . . But, as I said, I don't want to talk about the externals because I'm not sure about them. The only thing I want to get specific about is the mindset, at this stage.'

‘You say he's highly controlled,' Simon called out from the back of the room. ‘Assuming he's got family and friends, won't they have noticed that about him? Sometimes mindset spills over into externals.'

‘Aha! Thank you, Detective . . .?'

‘Waterhouse.' Simon disliked many things, but high up on the list was having to say his name in front of large groups of people. His only consolation was that no one knew how hard he found it.

‘I didn't say he was highly controlled,' said Ramsden, looking pleased with herself. ‘I said he might have come from a family that was both practically and emotionally messy.'

‘And he might have reacted against it by becoming highly controlled.' Simon knew what he'd heard.

‘Yes,' she said, giving him what he took to be some kind of waiting signal with her hand. ‘I'd say it's likely that
at some point
, this man was a control freak who ordered his life successfully. But his control's slipping. That's the most interesting thing about him. He's doing everything he can to stay on top of things, he's clinging to the illusion that he's in control, but he isn't. He's losing his grip on the real world, on his own position within it – possibly on his sanity. The same cards that reveal his meticulousness and love of order simultaneously reveal his irrationality and inconsistency. Think about it: he shoots Judith Duffy and Helen Yardley dead and leaves cards on their bodies. He attacks Sarah Jaggard with a knife, not a gun, in broad daylight on a busy street, not in her home,
doesn't
kill her, and places a card in her pocket. He also sends cards to two television producers, whom he neither attacks nor kills, and then, to one of the producers, he goes on to send a photograph of Helen Yardley's hand holding a card as well as a copy of her own book.'

Ramsden surveyed the room to check they were all taking her point. ‘He thinks he's got a carefully thought-out plan, but
we
can see that he's all over the place, flailing around without a clue what he's doing, imagining everything's under control when in fact it's accelerating all the time in the direction of uncontrollability. His mental trajectory is like a shopping trolley sliding down a steep slope, picking up speed as it goes, the wheels twisting this way and that – you know what the wheels on shopping trolleys are like, how hard they are to steer.'

A few people laughed. Simon didn't. He wasn't about to take Tina Ramsden's conclusions on trust just because she could demonstrate that she'd been to the supermarket.

‘He thinks he's clever coming up with this square of numbers that seems to defy interpretation,' she went on, ‘but they could be entirely meaningless. He could be mad, or just plain stupid. Possibly he's got a nihilistic streak: he wants to waste police time by getting you all to chase a meaning he knows isn't there. Or – and I know this isn't very helpful, I know it sounds like I'm saying anything's possible – he might be highly intelligent, and the sequence of numbers could be meaningful, containing a clue either to his purpose or his identity.' Ramsden paused to take a breath. ‘But even if that's the case, his choice of card recipients tends to suggest that the part of his brain that knows what it's about is in the process of being swamped by the trolley-rolling-downhill part.'

Simon opened his mouth, but she was in full flow. ‘Sarah Jaggard and Helen Yardley – okay, a clear link. Both were tried for child murder. Judith Duffy? Not only does she have nothing in common with Jaggard and Yardley, she's their polar opposite: their opponent in an extremely high-profile controversy. Can't your man decide what side he's on? Laurie Nattrass and Felicity Benson – they're linked to all three women via their work, but otherwise there's no common ground. Nattrass and Benson aren't personally involved in any child death cases.'

‘Let me stop you there,' said Proust. ‘It transpires that Miss Benson is personally involved. We found out this morning that her father lost his job over a Social Services cock-up that led to a child death. He committed suicide.'

‘Oh.' Ramsden looked a little flustered. ‘Well, all right, so Benson's linked to child deaths via her work
and
her personal life. In a way, that proves my point even more. Basically, there's no pattern. These people have nothing in common.'

‘Are you serious?' said Simon. ‘I can describe the pattern in a sentence: he's sending cards to people connected to the Binary Star documentary and the three cases featured in it: Yardley, Jaggard, Hines.'

‘Well, yes, obviously in one sense you're right,' Ramsden conceded. ‘Those cases loom large in his mind – I wouldn't deny that. In fact, I'd say he's likely to be someone who's suffered a severe emotional trauma in connection with this issue. He could have lost a child himself, or a sibling, or a grandchild, to crib death perhaps, which might have led to an obsession with people like Helen Yardley and Judith Duffy. But to kill both of them when, as I said, they're polar opposites in terms of what they stand for – there's no sense or rationale to it. And the most worrying thing about the trolley-rolling-downhill type of killer is that he tends to accelerate before he smashes himself to smithereens.'

‘Sorry to interrupt, but . . .' Simon waited to see if the Snowman would silence him. He didn't. ‘You're talking as if the killer's link to the Binary Star film might be purely thematic – he's a bereaved parent and that's why he's become obsessed with the three cases.'

‘I only said he
might
. . .'

‘The connection has to be stronger and closer than that,' said Simon. ‘I don't know how thoroughly or how recently you were briefed, but Laurie Nattrass sent out an email on Tuesday to everyone connected to the documentary – doctors, nurses, lawyers, police, the women and their families, people at the BBC, JIPAC people. At 3 p.m. on Tuesday, nearly a hundred people got Nattrass's email saying Fliss Benson would be taking over as executive producer on the film. Until that moment, she had no connection whatsoever to these cases. One of the people who received the email must be the card-sender. He or she read Nattrass's message, immediately prepared a card for Benson and went out to post it to her at Binary Star, where she received it on Wednesday morning.' ‘Dr Ramsden, all those on the receiving end of Nattrass's email have alibis for one or both of the murders,' said Proust. He might as well have waved his arms in the air and yelled, ‘Listen to me, don't listen to him'. ‘Without exception. And unless DC Waterhouse thinks Sarah Jaggard and Sergeant Zailer are conspiring to mislead us – which I won't be so naïve as to rule out, for he has a penchant for wrong-headed thinking – then we don't need to bother with “he or she”. We know Baldy's a man.' ‘Yes,' said Simon, ‘and we know he killed Duffy and attacked Jaggard, but we don't know he's the card-sender, and we don't know he's our shooter for Yardley.' ‘We're assuming he is, though, right?' said DS Klair Williamson.

‘Yes,' said Proust firmly.

‘I'm not,' Simon told her. ‘Dillon White took one look at the police artist's image and said no, he wasn't the man with—'

‘Warning: DC Waterhouse is about to refer to a magic umbrella,' the Snowman snapped.

‘There are two people involved in these killings,' Simon presented his theory as if it were fact. He'd worry about maybe being wrong later. ‘One's Baldy. The other could be a man or a woman, but let's say “he” to make it easier. That's who's in charge, that's the brain behind the operation: clever, controlling and
in
control. That's who sends the cards, knows what the sixteen numbers mean and is challenging us – letting us know we'll only catch him if we can prove we're as smart as he is.'

‘So we've got Baldy and Brainy.' Colin Sellers laughed.

‘The Brain could be paying Baldy to do his bidding,' said Simon. ‘Or maybe Baldy's loyal to him for some reason, owes him favours. When Baldy said, “You get too far in and then you can't get out,” he was talking about the hold the Brain has over him. The Brain, the card-writer and sender, is the person Baldy tried to phone from Judith Duffy's house, after he'd shot Duffy. He wanted instructions about what to do with Charlie, whether to kill her or not.'

‘If you're right, then alibis or no alibis, anyone who received Laurie Nattrass's email on Tuesday could be the card-sender,' said Sam Kombothekra. ‘Or anyone at Binary Star, anyone either Nattrass or Benson told about Benson taking over as executive producer.'

‘I'd expect the Brain to have a firm alibi for Saturday, when Duffy was killed, but not for Monday,' said Simon. ‘I think, after Baldy messed up with Sarah Jaggard and got interrupted by a passer-by, the Brain decided he'd take care of Helen Yardley himself. Then, with Duffy, he gave Baldy another chance. Maybe he'd given him a bit more training in the interim.'

‘I apologise unreservedly for DC Waterhouse,' said Proust. Tina Ramsden started to shake her head, and opened her mouth to speak, but the Snowman drowned her out as he warmed to his favourite theme: Simon's worthlessness. ‘You have absolutely no reason for thinking two people are involved in these attacks. A four-year-old boy who talks nonsense and the fact that Baldy tried to ring somebody? He could have been phoning his girlfriend to tell her he wanted toad-in-the-hole for his supper. He could have been phoning anyone for any reason. Well, Dr Ramsden? Couldn't he?'

Ramsden nodded. ‘When people find themselves in threatening situations, seeking reassurance is a common impulse.'

‘What, so he's there in Judith Duffy's hall with a dead body in front of him, holding Charlie at gunpoint, and he suddenly takes a break to ring a mate because he wants the comfort of a familiar voice?' Simon laughed. ‘Come on, you're not serious?'

‘I'm not convinced there's any loss of control or irrationality involved,' said Chris Gibbs, standing up. ‘Whether there's two of them or only one, how do you know everything that's happened so far isn't part of a plan? Just because Helen Yardley and Judith Duffy have both been killed . . .'

‘Which strongly suggests the killer doesn't know which side he's on, or maybe he's reached the point where he can only remember names now, and not which side
they're
on,' said Tina Ramsden. Simon approved of her willingness to muck in. She gave as good as she got on the interruption front, and didn't seem to take offence if people disagreed with her.

‘It doesn't necessarily suggest that,' Gibbs looked around for support. ‘Let's say the killer's Paul Yardley . . .'

‘Would that be the same Paul Yardley who has alibis for Monday and Saturday, no Cockney accent and a full head of hair?' Proust asked. ‘Talking of full heads of hair, Gibbs, you appear still to have one. Didn't I tell you to shave it off?'