The Mermaids Singing (35 page)

‘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.

F
ROM
3½″
DISK LABELLED
: B
ACKUP
.007;
FILE
L
OVE
.015

Damien Connolly, the ultimate PC Plod. I couldn’t have found a better person to teach the police a lesson if I’d searched for a year. But he was already there, on my list, one of my own personal Top Ten. He was harder to stalk than the others, because his shift pattern was often in conflict with the hours I work. But, as my grandmother always used to say, nothing worth having comes easy.

I trapped him in the usual way. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but my car’s broken down and I don’t know where the nearest call box is. Can I use your phone to ring the AA?’ It’s almost laughably easy to get across the threshold of their homes. Three men dead, and still they fail to take the most elementary precautions. I almost felt sorry for Damien, since of all of them, he is the only one who had not betrayed me. But I needed to make an example of him, to show the police how pathetically useless they are. It was galling to find myself in agreement with the so-called ‘gay community’, but they were one hundred per cent correct when they said that while supposedly gay men were being killed, the police would do nothing. Killing one of their own would be the one thing that would make them sit up and notice. At last, they’d be forced to give me the recognition and respect I deserve.

To mark this, I had devised something a bit special for Damien. An unusual method of punishment, used occasionally to act as a terrible example
pour discourager les autres.
It seems to have been most commonly used in cases of high treason, where men had plotted to kill the king. Appropriate, I thought. For what was Damien if not an integral part of the group that would bring me down if only they could
?

The earliest record of this treatment in England was in 1238, when some minor nobleman broke into the royal lodge at Woodstock intent on killing Henry III, there on a hunting trip. To demonstrate to any other potential traitors that the king was serious about attempts on his life, the man was sentenced to be torn limb from limb by horses then beheaded.

Another would-be royal assassin met the same fate in the mid eighteenth century. The aspiring assassin’s name just had to be an omen. François Damiens stabbed King Louis XV at Versailles. His sentence read that ‘his chest, arms, thighs and calves be burned with pincers; his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said attack, burned in sulphur; that boiling oil, melted lead, and rosin and wax mixed with sulphur be poured into his wounds; and after that his body be pulled and dismembered by four horses.’

According to reports of the execution, Damiens’s dark-brown hair turned white during the torture. Casanova, that other great lover, reported in his memoirs, ‘I watched the dreadful scene for four hours, but was several times obliged to turn my face away and to close my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half the body having been torn away from him.’

Obviously, I couldn’t get a team of horses down into the cellar, so I’d had to come up with my own arrangement. I’d built a system of ropes and pulleys, attached to floor and ceiling and linked with one of those powered winches that are used on yachts. Each rope ended in a steel shackle that would fasten round wrist or ankle. By adjusting the lengths and tensions on the ropes, I had suspended Damien in midair, his limbs spread in a massive, human X, his pathetic genitals dangling in the middle like something in a butcher’s shop.

The chloroform had a worse effect on him than it did on any of the others. As soon as he came round, he vomited violently, not an easy thing to achieve when you’re hanging upright four feet above the floor. It was just as well I’d removed his gag, or he’d have choked on his own vomit, which would have cheated me out of my satisfaction in his punishment.

He was completely bewildered. He had no idea why he was there. ‘Because I chose you,’ I told him. ‘You were just unlucky enough to choose the wrong job. Now I’m going to question you the way you question your suspects.’

While I’d been poking around in Auntie Doris’s kitchen, vaguely looking to see if she had anything I might find useful, I’d come across her icing set. I remembered that icing set. Every year, her Christmas cakes were a miracle of artistry that any of Bradfield’s bakers would have been hard pressed to equal. Once, she’d been called away by Uncle Henry while she was doing the big cake, and I’d picked up the icing bag, determined to help. I can’t have been more than six.

When she came back from whatever disgusting farmyard task she’d been helping with and saw my efforts, she went berserk. She grabbed the weighted leather strop that Uncle Henry used to keep his cut-throat razors sharp and beat me so hard she tore my shirt. Then she locked me in my room without any supper, leaving me there for the best part of twenty-four hours with nothing but a bucket to piss in. I knew I had to find an appropriate use for her treasured icing set.