She stood up and walked to a low dresser. She pulled open a drawer and got out a pack of Camel cigarettes. She peeled it, pulled out two and offered me one. I took it and we lit up. She sat, blowing smoke at the chimney.
“But that is just the superficial analysis. There were aspects that troubled me. The first was the incongruence that you pointed out, of the attack on the womb and the knife and the rose. Not only did it suggest two distinct personalities—which could be explained by a multiple personality disorder—but the physical strength needed to tear out her abdomen.
“The other was the more subtle point made by Professor Whittering—your friend Russell. It is an extraordinary coincidence that this killer should have chosen, out of millions of possible victims, Eva Rusakov. This suggested two things to me.” She was silent then, staring into the fire, as though wrestling with some inner conflict.
I said, “I’m listening, Dr. Loss.”
“It suggested, first of all, that he may have been in contact with Eva.”
I said, “The kid on the bus…”
She nodded. “He may be associated somehow with the university and he may have selected his victim from the students. This would fit his profile of attacking people he believes to be superior intellectually in order to prove his own superiority—the reality of his fantasy.” She hesitated. “If this is so, then we can expect him to attack more students—more female students.”
I went to speak but stopped myself.
“The other thing is that the girls may not be his intended target. He may be attacking somebody else through them.”
“What do you mean?”
“That attack on the womb suggests an Oedipal element. That would mean that deep, very deep in his unconscious, he is trying to kill not his mother, but his father. So, his actual focus may be a man—a man he hasn’t the courage to confront, a man he considers somehow superior to himself. He attacks these women because he sees them in some way as the man’s weakness. Trying to hurt the man through the women.” Now she turned and stared at me, squinting through the smoke as she sucked on her cigarette. “And that man might—might—be you.”
I shook my head. “That’s nuts. I don’t even know this guy.”
“But he might know you. Serial killers are stalkers, Mr. Murdoch. He may have come across you in any of a million ways and became fixated, obsessed.”
“So, he would have known that I knew Eva—”
“And killed her to draw you into a battle, but a battle in his world, where he can punish you.”
I tried to grasp what she was saying. It sounded like bullshit to me. “Punish me? For what?”
She sighed. “Try to understand, Liam…” She hesitated. “Try to understand, it isn’t you he is punishing. In his obsessive fantasy world, for some reason that does not need to make logical sense, he has chosen you to represent his father. The person he is punishing is his father.”
I sat, allowing my mind to assimilate what she was saying. Finally, I said, “So this guy would have a cruel, bitching mother and an abusive father.”
She nodded. “And in all probability, his mother fawned over the father, even though he was cruel and abusive to both of them.”
I could see it. I had seen it, a thousand times as a kid. And she was right. Boys raised in that kind of family came out badly damaged.
How could you make it out any other way?
My eyes were heavy. I suddenly felt drained. My cigarette was down to the filter. I sat forward and flicked it into the fire. I said, “There was another killing tonight.”
She didn’t look shocked. She looked sad. “Where?”
“Hyde Park.”
She nodded. “A student?”
“Birkbeck. A first-year psychology student.”
She closed her eyes. “Oh, no.”
“I guess this is one time where it sucks to be right. But there’s more. She was the niece of a close friend of mine.”
She opened her eyes. Her face was expressionless. Her eyes seemed gray and dead. She said, “You are the intended target.”
I thought of Noddy and Maria back at his place on the Portobello Road. How did this punk know so much about me? It didn’t make sense. And yet, my gut told me it did. I said to her, “What about the strength needed to disembowel these girls? He split this last one in half, for Christ’s sake!”
She turned away, glanced at her bookcase then down at the floor. “It isn’t impossible. We can’t go into it tonight. It’s too late and we both need to rest. But there is research, building on the work of Bandler and Grinder and others, Pribram and Bohm, that suggests that the brain can, when in a particular kind of trance state, cause profound physiological changes in the body. There are reliable cases documented of mothers performing extraordinary feats of strength to save their children.” She stared down into her glass. “A mother driven by love, a son driven by hate… They are not so far apart.”
I stood. “I have to get back.”
She stood, too, and came close to me. “Do you want to stay? The weather is awful.”
I searched her face for some hidden meaning. I didn’t find it, but neither could I say it wasn’t there. I said, “No, thanks. I need to get back.” I checked my watch. It was two a.m. “It’s late.”
“Is there somebody waiting for you? Somebody you care for?”
“Yeah.”
She closed her eyes a moment. “Take good care of her, Liam…until this is over. You understand?”
I nodded. I understood.
Chapter Seven
She called me a cab and lent me an umbrella. Fifteen minutes later, I was climbing out of the cab outside Noddy’s Diner. It was closed and all the windows were dark. I heard the hybrid whine of the cab and watched its red taillights disappear around the corner into Oxford Gardens. Then the street was silent except for the wet splash of the rain falling from the guttering.
I went to the door and leaned on the bell. I stepped back and looked up at the windows. No lights showed there. I leaned on the bell again and hammered on the door. The silence inside the house was a black, physical substance.
One of the bad habits I’ve picked up over the years—and one which I’ll never try to shake—is always carrying a pack of lock picks in my pocket. Picking locks is a skill I have worked hard to perfect over the years, and I am not about to let it go rusty. In thirty seconds I was inside and closing the door behind me.
Apart from the pale streetlight that filtered through the plate-glass windows, it was dark, and the silence was absolute. I moved through the bar to the kitchen at the back. Like the rest of the place, it was still and silent, populated by immobile black hulks. The flight of stairs up to his apartment was a patch of deeper blackness in the pitch. I pulled my pen torch from my inside pocket and switched it on. The thin beam pieced the stairwell, picking out small patches of orange carpet and sage-green wall, making the darkness darker by contrast. I began to climb.
I reached the first-floor landing. The small circle of light from my torch told me it was a chub with a handle. I tried it and found it was unlocked. I stepped in, closed the door and listened. There was nothing—no snoring, no breathing, nothing. I flipped on the lights and went from room to room. The beds hadn’t been slept in. The kitchen was clean. There were no used ashtrays. They hadn’t even been here. They’d left directly from the bar.
I sat and scrolled through my calls and found the one from Grant. It rang twice and he answered. I said, “This is Murdoch. Is Edward Brown with you?”
There was a pause. He didn’t like my tone. Fuck him.
He said, “Yes.”
“Is Maria Vazquez with him?”
Another pause. “Would that be your partner, Mr. Murdoch?”
“She wouldn’t be, she is. Is she there or not?”
“She’s here.”
“And where is here?”
“Ladbroke Grove police station.”
I hung up. I felt sour. I’d wanted to tell him myself, but the
cops had gotten there first. I thought about Maria. She couldn’t be much safer unless she was in an army barracks, but it didn’t feel that way. I stared at the dull silver and amber raindrops crawling down the black glass. The threat was faceless, invisible and seemed to be present everywhere.
The rain had eased to a heavy, warm drizzle again. I climbed in the Daemon and drove to the Ladbroke Grove cop shop. It was half past two. The desk sergeant showed me to a waiting room. Noddy was there with his sister-in-law and his two nephews. They were all sobbing and holding each other. He glanced at me with swollen eyes but turned away without saying anything. Maria was by his side, a little apart. She got up and came over when she saw me. She put her arms around me and we stood like that for a while, holding each other.
After a while, she looked up into my face. “What’s going on, Liam?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know yet.”
Then Noddy was there, behind her. His eyes were bloodshot. His lip was trembling. I could see his family on the bench behind him, huddled together, their backs turned toward me. Noddy’s eyes were resentful.
He said, “Is this because of you, Liam? Is this because of all the shit you get up to? Have you brought this down on my family?”
I had no answer. In the end, all I could say was, “I don’t know, Noddy.”
He screwed up his face. There was rage, hatred, betrayal. He said, “Go away, Liam. Go away and don’t come near me or my family again. Just go.” And he turned and went back to his sister-in-law and her remaining kids.
Maria was searching my face, clinging closely to me. “Don’t cut me out, Liam. What’s this about?”
“I don’t know yet, baby. Let’s get out of here. I need to think. But, first, I need to see Grant.”
I found him in the incident room on the third floor. There were a couple of exhausted cops in shirtsleeves going through papers with tired eyes, drinking what was likely cold coffee from polystyrene cups. Grant was sitting with his ass against a desk, staring at a whiteboard. He saw me come in and watched me approach without moving. Maria moved past me and stood examining the board.
Grant said, “Murdoch. What can I do for you?”
“There are two things you need to know, Grant.”
“Just two?”
“First off, Dr. Juliet Loss of UCL—”
“I know of her.”
“She is profiling the killer. You should talk to her.”
“Thanks. And the other thing?”
“I’m the target.”
He raised an eyebrow you could describe as ironic and said, “Oh? Not these girls he’s murdering, but you? They are incidental, are they? Perhaps you’d like to explain that to Mrs. Brown out there.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
He stood and faced me, real close. “I’ll tell you what I do know, Mr. Murdoch, without having to talk to Dr. Loss. I know that serial killers often suffer from a form of narcissism which makes them feel they are the center of the universe, and everything revolves around them.”
I rubbed my face with my hands and looked into his eyes. Maria had turned and was staring at me.
“Grant, if you want to arrest me for being a narcissist, go ahead. Meantime, the victims have just two things in common. They were both studying psychology at UCL, and they are both connected to me through someone I know.”
“I’m very aware of that.”
“The killer is trying to get my attention.”
“He’s certainly got mine. Can you account for your whereabouts at the time of these murders, Mr. Murdoch?”
I stared at him. “When Eva was killed, I was asleep in bed. When Sally was killed, I was alone at home.”
He turned to Maria. “While you were signing up for a course in psychology, Ms. Vazquez, at the University of London’s Birkbeck College.”
She looked at him without answering.
He turned back to me. “Isn’t that what they call ‘synchronicity’, Mr. Murdoch? I say synchronicity, because I don’t believe in coincidences.”
I shifted my eyes from him to Maria. She was watching me with no expression at all. Then I glanced at the board with the photographs of the murders—the victims, intended to lure me, to draw me, toward…what?
I said, “Neither do I, Grant.” I turned back to him. “Talk to Loss. Believe me. If I had done this, I’d have had alibis you couldn’t break with a tire iron.”
He nodded. “Okay. But don’t leave town.”
“I won’t. I’m going to catch this son of a bitch. My advice is, you catch him before I do.”
* * * *
I sat in the car, looking out at the desolate street, with its ineffectual spasms of light where the dying drizzle hit the road in sporadic drips. I offered Maria a cigarette. She shook her head. I lit up and, for a moment, the inside of the Daemon was filled with a dull orange light. I inhaled and tried to gather my thoughts into a meaningful shape. There were too many black gaps where nothing made any sense.
I said, “How long have you known Steve?”
She turned to me and said, “Again? Now?” She was mad.
“No. Just answer me, Maria, without flying off the handle, would you? I’m trying to make sense of all this.”
She turned away. “Believe it or not, I told you the truth. I met him the day he brought me home on the bike.”
“Who else was there?”
She spread her hands. “There were lots of people, Liam. I can’t remember all of them.”
I watched her face a moment, turned away from me, peering out at the tired drops. “Make an effort, baby. This guy has killed two people close to me. He’s been in our apartment…” She faced me and she looked drawn and scared. I went on, “Two gets you twenty that you’ve been in his company without realizing it.”
“Nobody stood out. What does a serial killer look like, Liam?”
It was rhetorical, but I said, “Well, this guy would be small—maybe five-three or four, timid, quiet. He wouldn’t have mixed in much, but he would have been in the background, watching—maybe watching you, but you didn’t notice.”
She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. “It doesn’t sound like anyone there. Liam, I need to sleep. I’m exhausted.”
I sighed. “Okay, we’ll go to a hotel. We can talk in the morning.”
We went to a small guest house I knew in north London. She stared out of the window all the way with her face turned away from me. And when we got to the room, she went to bed without saying anything, and, in five minutes, she was asleep. While she slept, I sat watching the sky turn gray and thinking of Russell and Hook—and Seraphino del Roble and the Brotherhood of the Goat.
* * * *
In the morning, over coffee in the breakfast room, I said to her, “I want you to stay away from UCL and Birkbeck till this is over, Maria. I want to take you down to Russell’s.”
She didn’t answer for a moment, buttering her toast. Then she said, “It’s not enough with Eva and Sally? You want to put his life at risk, too?”
I had my cup halfway to my mouth, but I stopped and put it down again. I said, “Maria, if Russell hadn’t put my life at risk, the Brotherhood would have killed you back at the Abbey of Thelema.”
She didn’t meet my eyes but she said, “Maybe if you hadn’t gone there, my life wouldn’t have been at risk in the first place.”
“You know that isn’t true. Colonel Fermin was out for you because you turned him down. One way or another—”
“I know!” She threw her toast down on her plate and turned away. She shook her head. “But, Liam, everywhere you go! Everything you do! There’s trouble, violence, killing…”
“We back here again, Maria? This is the third time. What are you telling me?”
She closed her eyes. “I’m not telling you anything, Liam. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t start the war in Spain, baby, but I did get you the safe passage out. Remember?”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“Russell has friends who can take care of you. It’s just for a few days. Can I rely on you not to—?”
Now she met my eye and smiled in a way you might describe as rueful. “Go off half-cocked?”
I nodded.
“Yes, Liam, you can. She reached across the table and took my hand. “I’m sorry. I am. I’ve been unfair. But this really—”
I interrupted her. “It really has to be the end of it. I know.”
We ate in silence for a bit, but I could feel that the tension had eased.
Suddenly, she said, “I was thinking about what you asked me in the car.”
I looked up. “Yeah?”
She hesitated. “It’s probably nothing and I don’t want to cause anyone trouble.”
“What is it?”
“There was a young fellow there, but he wasn’t part of the group. I don’t know who he was and he didn’t come to the pub with us. He just sort of wandered in a couple of times. He brought some chairs”—she shrugged—“went to get some markers for the whiteboard…”
“Like a janitor?”
“I don’t know. He might have been a student.”
I scratched my head. “You were in a class?”
“No, it was a presentation, introducing a new course.”
“And he was there helping out?”
“As I say, he brought in a few chairs at the beginning, then he went to get some markers. That was it.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was short—about five four, five five—dark hair, rather prominent nose and thick lips. He might have been Mediterranean. Small hands and feet, shabby… He appeared as though he didn’t wash too often. A bit spotty, like with acne.”
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