Birdman

by Mo Hayder

  Cook caught him looking. ‘Is it that bad?’ He cast a sorrowful look over the shirt, his face deep in shadow. ‘I’m colour blind. Helpless as an infant when it comes to choosing clothes.’

  ‘It’s very—young.’

  Cook raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘I thought as much. They lie to you, these shop assistants. It’s like a game to them.’ He shuffled around to the edge of the desk and for the first time Caffery noticed a book on the table. He just had time to register a black and white photo of a Stryker bone saw when Cook snapped the book shut, tucked it under his arm and shuffled to the door. ‘I’ll be getting out of your way, then.’ He drew a pair of sunglasses from his overalls and rubbed his eyes. ‘All yours.’ He slipped outside and closed the door quietly.

  Caffery and Wendy stood in silence for a moment until Wendy shook her head and made a disapproving clicking sound in her throat.

  ‘Some of the people we employ. Really, it’s a shame.’ She mopped her nose with the tissue from her sleeve and straightened her glasses. ‘Now, Inspector Caffery, can I get you a nice cup of tea? It’s machine, I’m afraid, but I’ve got a little Nestlé’s evaporated under my desk I’d be happy to let you have …’

  In Caffery and Maddox’s office the blinds were up and the afternoon sun coming through the dusty window had grilled everything on the desk. Caffery could smell the hot plastic of the phone as he opened a window, pulled the blinds, leaned on his elbow and picked out Penderecki’s number on the key pad. He let it ring and watched the hands on the clock turn. He knew it wouldn’t be answered.

  One day last year he had tried calling Penderecki mid-afternoon. He knew Penderecki’s movements so intimately that he was puzzled when the phone wasn’t answered. He let it ring, watching out of the French windows, wondering if the unthinkable had happened and Penderecki was lying dead on the floor of the house.

  But then Penderecki’s stout figure appeared at the back door, braces worn over a dirty vest. The trees were in full foliage, but Caffery could make out his face and the glutinous white arc of his arm waving amongst the leaves. It took him a moment to realize Penderecki was waving at him, putting his thumbs up, grinning his toothless smile. He was telling Caffery that he knew who it was on the phone.

  From that day on, whether Caffery called him from the office or the house, Penderecki let it ring. On the rare occasions he did answer it was with a dry, accentless, ‘Hello, Jack.’ Caffery assumed he’d bought a digital read-out for the phone. Now the only pleasure was knowing that the sound of the phone ringing was filling the house for as long as he chose to let it. Small childish pleasure, Jack. Maybe Veronica’s right about you. Sometimes he called several times a day.

  He let it ring for ten minutes then replaced the receiver and wandered into the incident room to see if a fax had come from the clerk at St Dunstan’s.

  ... 15

  Lucilla was half Italian, half German, the most volcanic presence in the Harteveld house. Dense-boned and walnut-skinned, as tall and wide as the door frames, at parties she couldn’t be dissuaded from singing, propped against the Steinway, mascara running down her face, moved to tears by some aria. Toby Harteveld, remote behind his beautiful-English-boy hauteur, found it impossible to believe this woman, with her black flaring hair and jealous rages, was really his mother. He learned early to hate her.

  It was the summer between prep school and Sherborne when he walked into an unlocked bathroom to find her naked, one leg up on the commode as she shaved the thick black hairs trailing from the pubis down the inside of the thighs.

  She smiled. ‘Hello, puppy. Here—’ She held the razor out to him. ‘You can help.’

  ‘No, Mother.’ He was calm. As if he had always known this would happen.

  ‘No?’ She laughed. ‘No, Mother?’ Her head lowered. ‘Are you a little poofter, T? Tell me? Are you a little buggerer? Mmm?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘I’ll tell your father you tried to touch me.’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘No, Mother? You think I won’t?’ She inspected him with her shining black eyes, head on one side as if she was deciding which end to devour first, then with an impatient toss of the dark head she flung open the window and leaned out over the gravel court below, soft breasts spilling across the ledge. ‘Henrick! Henrick! Please come for your son.’

  Toby took the opportunity to slip out of the door. He raced down the stairs, ignoring the indignant shouts from the bathroom, past vibrating chandeliers and shocked staff, through panelled passageways and out into the grounds. He found an elm bole at the lake side, curled up beside it and hid until the evening.

  When he returned the house was quiet, as if nothing much had happened. His father ladled lobster bisque at dinner, his thin lips slightly paler than usual, and the incident was never mentioned again.

  Over the following months Toby became withdrawn. He demanded a lock on his bedroom and in the afternoon lay with his pale hands folded lightly over his stomach listening to Lucilla’s explosive passions in the passages outside. Her mere existence made his internal organs contract; sometimes he fancied she had slyly removed his pillowcases from the laundry and rubbed herself, her juices, into them; he seemed to be able to smell her wherever he went. He learned to sleep face down, his stomach pressed securely into the mattress in case she found a way to let herself into his room. He never, ever fell asleep until he was sure, absolutely sure, that his mother was safe in bed on the other side of the house.

  Two years later, in the family library after his first hunt, Toby met Sophie, the daughter of a local barrister. Long, thin and aloof as marble, she stood erect and white against the rich panelling. Everything Lucilla wasn’t. Toby, fourteen, handed her a glass of champagne, and was surprised and thrilled to notice that the fingers which took it were colder than the chilled glass stem.

  Lucilla instantly sensed the attachment and chose that summer for his rite of passage. She sent father and son abroad. They washed up in South East Asia, Luzon to be precise, and Henrick, full of his own notions about how to rear his young, took Toby to a Makati whorehouse, where he was presented with fifteen girls slouched on their salung-puwets behind a floor-to ceiling pane of glass.

  Toby chose the thinnest, palest of the girls. In bed he ordered her not to speak, not to move, no thrashing or wailing. Sipping coffee and eating fried sinangag on the balcony the next morning, overlooking sun-filled Pasay, he was overwhelmed with the sense that something abnormal was being born in him.

  A month later his mother caught him in the yew topiary with Sophie, he with his jodhpurs around his knees, she closed eyes, long calm face, holding still as if for an X-ray. By the time Toby had dressed and got back to the house Lucilla had already created pandemonium. The staff were milling about in the sun and Toby narrowly avoided being mowed down by the grim-faced Henrick reversing the Land Rover in a spray of gravel across the forecourt and down the driveway.

  The message was clear—Toby was to deal with Lucilla alone.

  Watched by the staff, Toby climbed the steps and placed his white hand on the heavy oak door, his eyes half closed as he waited for the subtle trembles which would map for him where in the house his mother was waiting.

  She was in the formal dining room, pacing the length of the wall under the Antwerp tapestries, breathing loudly through her nose. The blue light from the window illuminated the fine tracery of tears on her jowls. It was the first time they had been alone together since the incident in the bathroom.

  ‘Mother.’

  ‘Sit.’

  He sat at the head of the table, his father’s place. To his left the blue window held the hazy sweep of the lawns and shadowy cypresses, but the panelled dining room was dark, as if the years of tension had collected there. Lucilla dropped into her usual mahogany chair, closed her eyes, placed both hands on her hot neck and shook her head. ‘That anaemic creature. Her father is a damn pederast, she is a mistake of nature.’

  Toby was calm. ‘I don’t hav
e time for a display, Lucilla. Just tell me what I do now.’

  She opened her eyes at that, her hands trembling at her neck. ‘What did I do to deserve you for a son?’

  ‘Tell me what I do now.’

  ‘You’ll board at Sherborne until it is time to go to university.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘And in the holidays, since you hold me in such contempt, you will stay with the Chase-Greys in Connecticut. We’ll make you an allowance.’

  ‘You don’t want to see me again?’

  Lucilla crossed herself, an ancient gesture he remembered her doing only once before. ‘I don’t want to see you again.’

  Toby went back to Sherborne and he and Sophie didn’t see each other again. Three years later she married a defence budget coordinator and went to live in Walton-on-Thames. Toby adapted well. Sophie, he had come to see, was not the cause but a symptom of something bigger. He had a sense of it gathering inside, dark and malformed, as charged as a storm.

  In his last year at Sherborne he focused on getting into medical school. He was bright and the newly formed United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy’s and St Thomas’s—UMDS—accepted him.

  It was at UMDS that Birdman first began to unfurl and examine his wings.

  ... 16

  Nine p.m. and in Shrivemoor Street the lights came on, yellow sodium streaked the hot night. The building was silent, dark save for a single strip of fluorescent light peeping through the blinds of a first-floor room where Caffery and Essex, ties off, collars loosened, sat facing each other over an indexer’s desk, working their way through a four-pack of Speckled Hen real ale and a family drum of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  On his return to the incident room that afternoon Caffery had chosen not to tell Maddox of his progress. When the fax arrived at 4 p.m., just as DI Diamond was leaving to get a warrant for Gemini’s red GTI, Jack had beckoned Essex into the SIO’s room.

  ‘Got plans tonight?’ He showed him the long roll of paper. ‘It puts me a jump ahead, but it’s just the beginning.’

  Now the fax was unfurled over the desk, drooping over the edge and settling in ripples on the floor.

  ‘One hundred and sixty-eight women,’ Essex said, mouth full of chicken. ‘Take away from three hundred and twenty makes, um—’

  ‘One hundred and fifty-two.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He scribbled the numbers at the bottom of the list leaving silvery grease spots with his fingers. ‘Eliminate anyone over, say, fifty?’

  ‘Which won’t be many.’

  ‘At a guess, what, twenty more? And we’re left with one hundred and—’

  ‘Thirty-two.’ Caffery pulled a beer tab. ‘Run it through HOLMES and if nothing comes up we interview. We can’t do a thing over the weekend, but starting on Monday, average interview twenty minutes, we could probably knock out fifty a day between the two of us and be narrowing it down by the Wednesday—that keeps us inside our timetable. Just.’

  ‘Piece of piss,’ Essex said, picking up his beer.

  ‘You lie.’ Caffery raised his drink. ‘And for that I will be eternally grateful.’

  They touched cans and drank. ‘Funny.’ Essex wiped his mouth and leaned back in his seat. ‘Funny how you can’t see it.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Maddox’s confidence in you.’

  ‘Confidence?‘ He shook his head, smiling at the irony. ‘This is confidence? He’s given me four days.’

  ‘That’s four days more than he’s given any other DI. The man’s a play-by-the-book merchant, Jack. A plodder. And you …’ Across the room the MSS printer sprang to life. ‘Well, look at it through his eyes.’ Essex stood, wandered over to the printer and lifted the perspex cover. ‘Scared as he is that you’ll capsize the case, he’s giving you rein. Think about it.’ He peered inside as the print head ping-ponged across the paper. ‘Ah, from our specialist adviser at Lambeth.’

  ‘The lab?’ Caffery was pleased to change the subject.

  ‘Yup.’ Essex smiled. ‘It’s Jane Amedure. Jane Amedure—the little Bootle genius. She showed me the ropes when I did exhibits on Operation Ambleside.’

  ‘Ambleside?’

  ‘Last year.’ Essex didn’t look up. ‘Algerian did his old lady and left her in a freezer in a council flat Old Kent Road way. Six months before they found her.’ He took a swig of beer. ‘The power had been off for three.’

  ‘Unshockable. aren’t you?’

  ‘Yup. Then there was our chum Colin Ireland. Killed his victim’s cat and put its mouth around the victim’s—’

  ‘Yes. I heard. Thank you.’ Caffery was suddenly tired. He rubbed his eyes. ‘Go on then, what’s she giving us?’

  ‘Um.’ Essex skimmed through the report. ‘Let’s see: toxicology and histology, hair analysis. OK, here goes: toxicology … now our unidentified victim, the one that died first, well, she was a user: there was benzoylecgonine and diamorphine in deep tissues.’

  ‘Benzoylecgonine and diamorphine—that means coke and heroin?’

  ‘Ten out of ten. On Shellene Craw, well, we didn’t really need confirmation, but the SA’s giving us it anyway: positive for smack, crack, Es, the works. And Wilcox’s confirmed also smack. Hatch, as we thought, positive, and, surprise surprise’—he looked up—‘a negative on Spacek. Not even crack. Clean.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Uh, yes.’ He scanned the report and gave a low whistle. ‘Krishnamurthi, the man’s an Einstein! Balls on accurate.’ He looked at Caffery, excited. ‘Heroin. Injected straight into the brain stem. Everything would’ve shut down instantly, heart, lungs, the lot. They wouldn’t have known a thing.’

  ‘See?’ Jack said. ‘Do you see what I’m getting at?’

  ‘Yeah—the hospital thing.’

  ‘The brain stem, for Christ’s sake. Can you see some low-end dealer knowing where to find a brain stem? I mean, Jesus—’

  ‘You’re preaching to the converted,’ Essex murmured, reading the report. ‘You know that.’ He held up the paper. ‘You’ll like this too, Jack. Birdman—can I call him that?’

  ‘If you keep it in this room.’

  ‘Birdman’s a clean freak. That or he knows enough about forensics to get rid of his evidence.’ He carried the report to the desk, folding it carefully along the perforated page dividers. ‘Looks like they did have consensual sex, but Birdman uses a condom and Amedure says he makes the girl wash afterwards. That or he washes them post-mortem. They’ve all got traces of soap in the vagina. Look, each sample’s got the same concentration sodium stearate to fat. Manufacturer: good old Wright’s Coal Tar.’

  ‘So if he’s so careful how do you explain the semen on the abdomen?’

  ‘He spills a little when he takes the condom off?’ Essex shrugged. ‘Or he withdraws, takes the condom off and finishes wanking—sorry, let’s be technical, masturbating—on her stomach. Gets her to clean herself, or he cleans it off himself later, after he’s done her. But’—he held up his hand—‘he’s not quite as careful as he thinks, because he leaves a trace.’ He finished his beer and crumpled the can. ‘Now then—here’s haematology, mass spectrometer analysis of the dust-bin liner, hairs. There wasn’t a follicle on that black hair so no DNA, but it is head hair, it is Afro-Caribbean. And, hey, check this out.’ He looked up. ‘The target wears a wig.’

  ‘A wig?’

  ‘Yeah, look—the blond hairs Krishnamurthi took from the victims?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Amedure says ”The hairs were dyed, of Asian origin, none of them had roots and both ends were bluntly cut. Not ripped, or torn. I’d expect to see this in hairs taken from a wig.”’

  ‘They were long hairs,’ Caffery said. ‘A woman’s wig.’

  Essex raised his eyebrows. ‘Michael Caine.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dressed to Kill. You never seen that?’

  ‘Paul—’ Caffery sighed.

  ‘OK, OK.’ He held up his hand. ‘I keep forgetting: I’m the comedian i
n this partnership and you’re the humourless git.’

  ‘And proud of it.’

  ‘Yeah, and sad.’ He went back to the report, chewing his thumbnail. ‘And friendless, don’t forget that.’ He paused. ‘Uh, look, the precipitin test.’

  ‘Precipitin test? That’s to, what? Check for human blood?’

  ‘Yup. Distinguish it from animal.’

  ‘We’re talking about the birds?’

  ‘We are.’ Essex scanned the sheet, his mouth working noiselessly. ‘It says that tissue in the birds’ air sacs was human.’

  ‘What?‘ Caffery looked up.

  ‘That’s what I said. Human.’

  ‘You know what that means?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, how do you think it got into the lungs?’

  ‘They breathed it in?’

  ‘Yes. Meaning—’

  ‘Meaning … oh—’ Essex suddenly understood. ‘Shit, yes.’ He sat down on Kryotos’s desk, his levity gone. ‘You mean the birds were still alive? They died in there?’

  Caffery nodded. ‘Surprised?’

  ‘Well, kind of. Yeah.’

  They were silent for a moment, pondering this. The air in the room had shifted subtly, as if the temperature had dropped a degree or two. Caffery stood up, finished his beer, and pointed to the report. ‘Go on. Go on.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Essex cleared his throat, picked up the report. ‘OK. What d’you want?’

  ‘How does he sedate them?’

  ‘Uh—’ He ran his fingers down the paper. ‘Haematology says uh—oh—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Says he didn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He didn’t sedate them.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘That’s what it says here. Nothing except for … except for alcohol, some cocaine but not enough to do any damage, no phenols, no benzos, no barbs except Wilcox and young Kayleigh. Um …’ His eyes raced over the page. ‘Nothing. Except for maybe our anonymous lady number one who is chock-full of scag. But heroin’s always awkward; everyone’s tolerance is different.’