by J. F. Kirwan
‘Does Security know you have that in your desk?’
‘Why do you think it’s half empty? Just drink,’ he said.
‘Bit early, don’t you think?’
Donaldson didn’t reply.
Greg drank. Donaldson flicked a finger towards the folder. Greg slid his hand inside and eased out six photographs, placing them on the desk in two neat rows. No wonder Donaldson hadn’t shown him all the images back then. The tattoo wasn’t the worst part by any means. Greg focused, examining each one in turn, poring over them methodically, objectively, making mental notes, all the while desperately compartmentalising, trying to believe that this was someone else, not his wife, who’d been violated, tortured, mutilated…
Donaldson saw it coming first. ‘On your left,’ he said. ‘Don’t miss.’
Greg twisted in his chair, leaned over the metal waste paper bin and threw everything up. He must have made quite a noise because Muriel barged in then stopped dead as she saw him hunched over, vomit and drool dripping from his mouth into the bin. Greg kept his head down.
‘Needs another coffee,’ Donaldson barked, and Muriel vanished, closing the door quietly behind her.
Greg accepted a wad of paper towels and cleaned up, then without permission seized the bottle by its neck and drank down two large gulps before clunking it back on the table.
‘Well?’ Donaldson asked. ‘The tattoo? Is it the same?’ He screwed the lid on the bottle and deposited it back in its drawer. ‘Show me you can still do your job, Greg.’
Greg placed his index finger on one of the grainy photos of his wife’s prone corpse. The ‘tattoo’, as they called it, was on her back – its location varied from victim to victim – carved deep enough to expose muscle and a few glimpses of white bone. He studied the curving pattern, and then did what he had to do, what he was trained to do, and – so rumour had it – what he was good at. He imagined he was the one carving it – because The Dreamer’s signature was as much about his state of mind as it was about the physical form of the tattoo.
He leaned back. He was sure now.
‘It is close,’ he said. ‘But not close enough.’
Donaldson sighed heavily. ‘So be it. You have two choices, Greg. Choice number one is that I thank you for the information, I pass it to the team, you go back to your life, and I tell you if it leads anywhere, or if it doesn’t.’
My life? Greg recalled the undisclosed and unfinished pastime of last night. ‘Second choice?’ he asked.
‘You come with me to the Evidence Room, and you start assisting us with our inquiries. As a private consultant. Obviously, even if we were to reinstate your licence, you can’t be assigned to the case directly.’
He wondered if he should tell Donaldson about the phone call, about Fergus. ‘Who’s working the case now?’
‘Greg, the case is pretty much closed out, you know that.’ Donaldson chewed on his words for a moment, then spat one out: ‘Potter.’
‘Potter?’
Donaldson folded his arms. ‘I know. Not the brightest spark plug in the engine. I’m getting someone new in tomorrow, or the day after, latest. She’s… something else. But that’s tomorrow. Now, anything else to share before we get started?’
If he told Donaldson about Fergus, Potter, who had the tact and bedside manner of a pissed-off rhino, would be sent out and would balls it up for sure. Fergus was obviously fragile. Plus, it couldn’t wait till tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever this new detective arrived. Fergus might do a runner. And Greg couldn’t wait.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing else.’
Donaldson rose heavily from his chair. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Greg stayed put. ‘I haven’t stated my choice yet.’
‘Sure you have. You don’t have a life. We both know that.’
Muriel arrived with a coffee. Donaldson took it from her. ‘We’ll be in the gallery. 3B.’
Greg frowned. The gallery was what Donaldson liked to call the ‘windowless corridor’ with the Evidence Rooms. There were other names for it. But he found himself staring at the empty desk, still seeing the after-images of his wife’s corpse. Nausea threatened again, along with the usual tsunami of remorse and loss and all those other emotions he couldn’t untangle. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then stood up and followed Donaldson.
Donaldson paused in the doorway, blocking it, and spoke to Greg in a gentler tone.
‘Leave Kate behind, Greg. Do it now. Focus on finding the real killer and saving the next victim. That’s what she’d want.’
He knew Donaldson was right, or rather that the guy was rarely wrong. So he turned around and pictured Kate sitting in the chair where he’d just been, reading a book as she used to in the evenings. He held back the salt water that threatened. Then, as if not wanting to disturb her, he slowly closed the door behind him with a soft click and followed Donaldson down two flights of stairs to the corridor of hell.
4
The door to Evidence Room 3B had one thin, vertical rectangle of wired glass at head height – enough for someone inside to see out, but not enough for anyone outside to see the room’s contents. Donaldson flashed his badge towards a ceiling security camera, and Greg was buzzed in.
‘You’re lucky,’ Donaldson said. ‘The case is officially cold, but we haven’t had time to archive it. That was due tomorrow. You’ve got till 5pm, latest.’
‘Then?’
‘Look, Greg, if all you have is a theory, I can’t reopen the case. You have to come up with something solid.’
Greg nodded. He had an ace up his sleeve – Fergus – unless it was a joker. He’d find out soon enough. First he needed to get his head back in the game and see what he could deduce on his own; he had a feeling Fergus wouldn’t be a particularly reliable witness.
His mind fast-forwarded to the meeting he planned to have later tonight with Fergus. He usually worked alone when interviewing, and might need to use his dark voice, his interviewing technique that cut deeper than most interrogators. One of his interviewees had nicknamed him the syringe, because he’d barely sensed Greg’s questions penetrate his mind. He wondered if he still had it in him, after everything that had happened.
The door shut, enclosing him in a familiar muffled silence. The room was pretty much how he’d left it three months earlier, the day he’d finally given up on the case and handed back his licence. The part of the wall that focused on Kate was essentially a replica of what he had back at home, tracing the investigation from victim to victim, though his evidence map there was more personal. He had to admit he worked sharper here.
He also usually worked alone because few wanted to be with him when he probed serial killers’ minds, getting inside their worldview so he could dismantle it. Justice wasn’t enough for Greg, or even finding the truth. He didn’t believe it was a good idea to leave irrevocably twisted minds festering in prison for a couple of decades when there might one day be a chance of release. He’d gotten into trouble with the Oversight Board after one of his fiercer interrogations had led to temporary psychological withdrawal of the subject, who had brutally murdered five teenage boys. All Greg had done was help the killer understand the consequences for the victims and their families.
During the ensuing disciplinary inquiry, when the Board had threatened to revoke his licence, he railed on them, saying that if any one of them would let their kids in the same room alone with the killer for more than two minutes, they could have his licence. He made enemies that day, and his career path flatlined, but he kept his job. He’d never shown Kate his dark side. Some things were better left in the shadows.
The state of almost inhumane detachment he required had been evading him ever since Kate’s murder. Cold fire, that’s what he needed, to delve into those dark spaces without recoiling. The photos he’d just seen of Kate’s body… He took a breath, let it out slowly, flexed both hands, cracked his knuckles, placed his fingertips on the table in front of him, and emptied his mind. A small ritua
l, but then so much about serial killers was ritualistic. He ignored Kate’s section on the board – Subject Seven – and walked to the far left of the facing wall to where it had all started.
Subject One.
At the time, of course, they hadn’t known it was the beginning of a series of murders, and had thought it was gang-related, though it was far more brutal – not to mention cleaner – than typical gang executions. And there had been the mark, the first time anyone had seen the carving that became known inside the Unit as the ‘tattoo’. He inspected the photo closely, from different angles, and reckoned it was the very same one that Donaldson had shoved in front of him in the canteen one day, six and a half years ago, two months after Greg had joined the Yard after a seven-year stint in Birmingham where he’d cut his teeth, first training in criminal psychology, then solving his first few psychopathic murder cases. He recalled his encounter with Donaldson with crystal clarity. It had changed his life.
‘Hey, Adams, you’re a shrink, what does this mean?’ He’d dropped the photo on the table, right next to Greg’s plate.
‘And you are?’
‘Donaldson.’
No first name, no rank, no handshake, just a sense of impatience, and an expression that seemed to say, go ahead, impress me if you think you can. He’d already heard of Donaldson and his reputation as a class act. Everyone worked their arse off for him.
Greg remembered staring at the photo back then.
He wondered if it was a trick question. A perfect circle, neatly carved. ‘Do you know how hard it is to draw a perfect circle?’ he said.
‘I failed art at school,’ Donaldson replied, and went to pick up the photo, but Greg placed his fingertips on it, pinning it to the sticky table.
‘It’s the yin-yang symbol,’ Greg said. ‘Usually one half is black, one half white, with a black dot in the white section, a white dot in the black. He’s peeled away the skin to represent the black, leaving one tiny island of skin there to represent the dot.’ He peered closer, glad he’d finished eating. ‘Pretty clean job. Probably waited till the victim was dead, less blood flow, reduced or zero swelling.’
Donaldson pointed an index and a middle finger at his eyes. ‘These work. Obviously it’s yin bloody yang. But what does it mean? Triads? Some Bruce Lee nut?’
Greg imagined the process, going beneath the ‘what’ to the ‘why’. He closed his eyes, imagined carving the symbol after killing the victim. Too intricate for a calling card. It was a message. He opened his eyes.
‘No,’ he said, releasing the photo. ‘It’s about restoring balance.’
Donaldson uttered a grunt and stared down at Greg. ‘What are you working on at the moment?’
‘A suicide case, a young–’
‘Not anymore. My office. Tomorrow morning. 9am sharp.’
Greg came back to the present, recalling that it had taken two more victims and two more years for Greg to prove his theory about restoring balance. In each case the victim had got away with a serious crime – either something thrown out of court, or else a crime that never even made it to legal scrutiny. Unfortunately, the theory hadn’t proven useful in predicting the next victim, and in Kate’s case this particular modus operandi hadn’t seemed to apply at all. With the other victims the police could always ascribe a retrospective motive: dirty secrets have a habit of bubbling to the surface during a murder investigation.
Fergus’s words came back to him. The Dreamer didn’t do it.
He went through each subject in turn, revisiting all the evidence, every interview, every witness, how they’d been found, how long before they’d been found, last known contact, locations, prior movements, time of day, day of the week, month, season, whether it was a public holiday or a full moon… Then he went through the audio tapes of those who’d found the bodies or had some idea of the balance that needed to be restored. There were never actual witnesses. The Dreamer was that good.
There was an adjoining loo and kitchenette to this Evidence Room – not that anyone ever ate with all that blood on the wall – and a Lavazza espresso machine that kept Greg on edge where he needed to be. As the afternoon wore on, Donaldson’s face appeared in the glass rectangle twice, announced by a sharp knock. Greg waved him away. The third time, six hours after he’d walked into Evidence Room 3B, he sat motionless, in part because he’d been through everything three times, but mainly because he’d noticed something.
He wondered why he’d not seen it before.
Donaldson entered, leaned against the closed door, and gave him a measuring stare. ‘You know, I actually wondered if you’d lost it.’
Greg stood up and stretched. ‘You hungry?’
Donaldson made a face. ‘And people say there are no stupid questions.’
Greg suggested sushi. Donaldson negotiated him all the way down to fish and chips in the nearby Mason’s Arms pub. Greg didn’t complain. The past week he’d rarely eaten after a skimpy breakfast and had put a new notch in his belt. Now his appetite returned with a vengeance. He left his plate clean.
Donaldson wiped his mouth on a paper napkin to indicate the end of the meal and the return to business. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
Greg had been turning it over in his mind. He knew that saying it, telling someone else, would make it real, and then there was no turning back. He served it up in small mouthfuls.
‘Kate’s murder was classic: “Dreamer” stamped all over it.’
‘You’re supposed to tell me something I don’t already know.’
Greg leaned forward, feeling for the first time in a long while that surge of intellectual adrenaline he got when he spotted something, when he saw things differently.
‘How long did it take us to verify that the five victims following Subject One were murdered by The Dreamer?’
Donaldson shrugged. ‘Well, with the tattoo–’
‘But you never let us rely on that. And you were right. We always had to make the connection with The Dreamer based on other evidence, patterns consistent with his methods.’
‘A couple of months.’
‘How long did it take with Kate?’
Donaldson stared at his Guinness as if the answer was sketched in the froth. ‘A couple of weeks.’
‘Why?’
Donaldson turned his straight glass around while he answered. ‘She was a classic case. Textbook “Dreamer”.’
Greg prodded the table with his index finger. ‘Exactly. And exclusively so.’
Donaldson looked up. ‘This is the bit where you prove you’re smarter than me, right?’
Greg grew serious. This was Kate.
‘Once I considered the premise that it wasn’t The Dreamer, back in the Evidence Room I decided to take that statement literally, as if it were a fact. Each victim had between three and five of The Dreamer’s seven infamous signatures – the tattoo, but also the eyes taped open–’
‘Don’t remind me.’
‘The wrists slashed right at the end, when the victim was almost dead.’
‘Because for Roman senators, opening the veins was seen as the only way out of a dishonourable situation.’
‘The mouth gagged,’ Greg continued.
‘Because they should have spoken up before.’
‘The genitalia…’ Greg’s words dried up for a moment.
‘This is a pub, Greg. As in public house. You needn’t continue. I remember them all.’
Greg gathered himself. ‘How many did Kate have?’
‘All of them, except the implicit eighth one, the unpunished crime.’ Donaldson’s eyebrows met. ‘Wait a minute. She was the only one to have all seven signs?’
Greg nodded.
Donaldson took a swig, then wiped away a thin foamy moustache. He shook his head slightly, took another gulp then put the glass down. ‘Bugger me sideways. Only someone who wanted to make it look like The Dreamer’s work would make it textbook.’
Greg sat back. ‘More textbook than The Dreamer himself.’
Donald
son pushed the glass away and waved at the waitress. ‘Bill please, we’re leaving.’
Greg reached for his wallet.
‘Put it away. You’re unemployed, remember?’
‘It’s only fish and chips,’ Greg protested, a twenty in his hand. ‘I had a lot of back pay, and truth is, I don’t spend much on anything these days. Kate even had a life assurance I didn’t know about. Automatically paid off the mortgage.’ He wished it hadn’t.
Donaldson ignored him and intercepted the waitress with his credit card and the bill, while Greg pocketed the twenty but left a sizable tip. Donaldson turned to him. ‘I’m going back to the office. You should get some rest.’ He paused. ‘Good job, Greg.’
Outside, Donaldson took a taxi, while Greg waited on the kerb. Despite Donaldson’s enthusiasm, it was still only a theory. Conjecture alone wouldn’t be enough to pull in the proper resources to find Kate’s real killer. He pulled out his phone. Fergus had already texted him the address earlier. Time to see what he really knew.
5
This part of Lambeth was a long way from Maida Vale in every sense, but Greg was no stranger to poorer districts, having grown up in one. Besides, he welcomed the fiercely guarded independence, the proverbial ‘You-stay-out-of-my-shit-and-I’ll-stay-out-of-yours’ graffiti on the wall. Still, Fergus’s address was hard to nail down. After a tube ride to Lambeth North and some walking, Greg arrived at a cluster of council tower blocks and terraced houses. An odd assortment of buildings crowded around a small square of fenced-off park that looked as though it had been intended as a children’s play area but had ended up as a refuge for tramps and drug dealers. Half the lamp post lights had been smashed. It took Greg a while to adapt his vision to the darkness punctuated only by harsh light from windows high above staring down at him, blotting out the stars.