The Deepest Cut

by Conor Corderoy

  She turned and left the room. I followed her down to the kitchen, carrying the scrapbooks. She flipped on a switch that made the kitchen look like a morgue, put on the kettle and found some tea, a stained paper bag of sugar and a couple of mugs in a cupboard. She opened the fridge, smelled a carton of milk and emptied it down the sink.

  When she was stirring the tea, she said, “Anthony is my patient. You may not know it, Liam, but I am the world’s leading authority on Freudian psychoanalysis, and I would stake my reputation on Anthony’s innocence.” She leaned her ass against the sink and blew into her tea. “He is deeply neurotic and he has borderline personality disorder, but he is not a killer.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She went on, “I know all about Eva’s father. Believe me. He is a far better candidate for homicidal psychosis than Anthony will ever be. When you phoned me and said you had found Anthony and he had attacked you, I realized what serious danger he was in. What Eva’s father and his thugs would do to Anthony doesn’t bear thinking about. I couldn’t let that happen, so I gave him the keys to this place.” She regarded me with distaste and added, “I should have realized that a man like you would track him down.”

  “I guess I am not supposed to take that as a compliment.”

  “No.” She sipped her tea and was silent for a bit, seemingly staring at a patch of air. Finally, she said, “I met Maria at the Grain Shop on Portobello Road. She struck me as a delightful, intelligent, creative young woman. We had coffee.” She glanced at me in a way you could describe as mischievous and said, “You won’t be surprised to hear that I am a very good listener. It goes, as you would say, with the territory. She ended up telling me that she was with a man she absolutely adored, but who was obstinate and extremely arrogant and couldn’t see that she was wilting and withering away in London with nothing to do.” She shrugged, shook her head and stared at me like I was a mental retard. “I gave her simple, common sense advice. I told her to check the courses at Birkbeck because that is the college I know best for extramural classes. She seemed interested in psychology. I didn’t tell her who I was because it would have seemed arrogant and presumptuous. And, if you weren’t so fixated on blaming Anthony for these murders, you would see that.

  “Why did I call her while Anthony was there? Because we had agreed to meet soon for tea. I knew the poor girl was home alone again, and, as far as I was concerned, having given him the keys, Anthony was leaving.” Her face suddenly contracted with annoyance. “And, frankly, Liam, you think it’s odd because you are convinced he is a serial killer. But I know he’s not! So, there was nothing odd for me in calling her while he was there.”

  We looked at each other in silence for a while.

  I was leaning on the doorjamb and I said, “He exactly fits the profile you gave me of what our killer would be like. You know that.”

  She shook her head. “Superficially, yes, but Anthony is actually a kind, caring person who has no repressed rage or feelings of violence toward anyone. He likes women. He doesn’t hate them.”

  I reached out and handed her the scrapbooks. “Have you seen these?”

  She took her time going through Eva’s, examining the pictures and reading the poems. When she reached the last couple of pages, she went pale. She searched Sally’s and Maria’s in silence.

  I said, “No repressed rage? No hatred?” She didn’t answer and I went on, “I’ll tell you something else, Doc. You were talking about the physiological changes the brain can make when in a particular kind of trance. I’m a big guy and I’ve been in my fair share of scraps and usually held my own. This kid knocked me around like I was a ninety-pound weakling. He fits your profile to a T.”

  She leafed through the scrapbooks again, shaking her head and repeating, “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”

  I said, “Where is he, Doc?”

  Chapter Ten

  “Where is he, Doc?”

  She raised her eyes from the scrapbook to look at me. “I don’t know.”

  I said, “Phone him.”

  She suddenly appeared drawn. “Please, Liam.”

  “Believe me. It’s better you do this through me.”

  She pulled out her cell and sat staring at it.

  I said, “I have Pete on speed dial. How long do you need to think about this?”

  She scowled at me and dialed. After a moment, she said, “Anthony, it’s Juliet, where are you?”

  There was silence and I mouthed at her to put it on speaker. She glared at me and shook her head, then stood and stepped away with her back to me. “You should come home. We need to talk.”

  I stood also.

  She was listening, kept shaking her head and starting to speak, “No… No… Anthony, listen to me… No, Anthony…”

  An undefined anxiety was beginning to twist my gut. I started to ask, “What’s he…?” but she held up a hand, shaking her finger at me.

  “Anthony, you have to listen to me. Listen to my voice, Anthony. Are you focusing on me? Anthony, please listen!” She made an inarticulate sound then stared at the phone, like it should explain itself to her. Then she said, “He hung up on me.”

  I could feel the anger building in me. I said, “What did he say, Doc?”

  She took a long, ragged breath. “He says he is going to your apartment to find Maria.”

  I stared. “And how long were you planning to wait before telling me this?”

  “I’ve just hung up, for God’s sake!”

  “Which apartment? The one on Church Street?”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “No. he says he knows you have moved. He says—”

  I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “What, God damn it?”

  “Liam!” She pulled free and took a step back. “He says Maria told him where it was.”

  I swore under my breath and ran. She was right behind me, half stumbling down the stairs, shouting at me to wait. I wrenched open the front door and ran out into the downpour. The rain was torrential and spilled in my eyes, blinding me. I was vaguely aware of Loss’ voice behind me, shouting at me to wait. I grabbed the keys from my pocket and thumbed the button as I ran. The lights on the Daemon flashed through the sheets of black rain. I wrenched open the driver’s door and heard her scream, “You need me! Liam, you need me!”

  I froze and she stumbled up, drenched and wiping water from her eyes. She faced me across the roof of the car and shouted above the din of the downpour. “You need me to talk to him! He will only listen to me.”

  I growled, “Get in.” And when we were in and had slammed the doors, in the muffled silence I gunned the engine and pulled away. I said, “If he has done anything to her, if he has hurt her or touched her, I want you near. You are going to wish it had been Pete who found you and not me. Now, call her and hand me the phone.”

  She gaped at me in the darkness. “Liam! It’s not my fault—”

  “You brought them together. You allowed him to get close to her. You protected him. You concealed him… Now quit stalling and call her!”

  I drove like a thing possessed. The rain was like bloodstained steel blades in the streetlights and traffic lights that streaked by. All I could see was the blackness that was swallowing my world and the black terror that was twisting my gut, thinking of Maria and what might be happening to her. The road was interminable, and though I was doing over seventy, the car felt sluggish, wading through oceans of heavy, leaden water.

  She dialed in silence. She put the phone on speaker and I could hear it ringing, but there was no reply. She looked at me. “She isn’t answering.”

  “Try again!”

  This time the phone was dead. At one point, she said, “Liam, you have to slow down or you’ll kill us before we can get to her.”

  I snarled, “Tell me to slow down again and I’ll break your neck and throw you out of the car.”

  After what felt like hours but was only thirty minutes, we screamed into Mulberry Crescent, skidded and my tru
nk smashed into a parked Mercedes that started flashing and wailing its alarm into the rain. I screeched to a halt in front of the apartment block and was already out and running up the stairs before Loss had undone her seatbelt. I was reaching in my pocket for the keys while I ran, but I could see the street door was already open.

  Ours was the first-floor apartment and I was screaming out her name as I scrambled up the stairs, fumbling in my pocket for the keys.

  But the door was open. There was a dark smear on the latch on the doorjamb, and I knew without looking that it was blood. There had been a struggle in the drawing room. Two lamps lay smashed on the floor. An armchair was on its side and the coffee table had been thrown against the wall. An ashtray lay broken in half. Cigarette butts and gray ash littered the carpet.

  I knew it was pointless, but I checked the bedroom. The bed had been badly rumpled, the quilt had been pulled back and the cushions were on the floor. I felt dizzy and sick. I was fighting to stay cold, to think. There was no blood except on the doorjamb. If he had killed her, there would have been more blood. The scrapbook. In the scrapbook, he had not reached the homicidal stage. Why had he changed his pattern? Why had he come here? Why had he said that Maria had told him where we were?

  I went into the bathroom and stood staring. Everything was as normal, but scrawled across the mirror in red lipstick was a message for me.

  Time to start feeling the heat, Murdock.

  Then I heard Loss calling to me. I heard her feet clattering up the stairs, irregular and unsteady.

  She was crying. “Liam… Oh, Liam… Oh, God, Liam…” And she was sobbing.

  The room swayed and I seemed to be walking through a fish-eye view of a tunnel toward the front door. I was lightheaded, like my mind was floating above my body. It was unreal. The whole thing was unreal. I stepped out of the door onto the landing and looked down the stairs. Loss was holding on to the banisters, staring up at me. Her eyes were like two huge black holes and her mouth was sagging open.

  She said, “Liam… Liam, you have to come.”

  She turned and staggered, unsteady, down the stairs again. I was paralyzed. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see what she had found, because I knew. As I’d run in, there had been a bulk, a large black bulk on the small patch of lawn on the flowerbed by the wall. I had ignored it. It hadn’t been important then. My mind had been fixed on Maria, on Anthony, on the apartment where he was with her.

  But he wasn’t.

  I snapped out of it and ran down the stairs two at a time to the street door and out into the rain. The short footpath was awash with the light from the lobby, writhing crazy in the ripples. To the right and left there were small plots of garden. And in the right-hand plot, bundled against the wall, crushing the flowers into the mud, was a large, black bundle. Loss was standing next to it, staring at me over her shoulder. I couldn’t tell if she was crying because the rain was streaming down her face. I wiped my own eyes and realized my hands were shaking.

  Then I realized I was mumbling to myself, “Oh, no, please, God, no…”

  My legs seemed to move of their own accord. My feet sank into the sodden turf. I crouched down and saw that the dark bulk was covered in a dark-blue woolen coat. I could feel Loss by my side. She seemed very tall and very still. I took hold of the body and brought it toward me. It was heavy and rolled with a small thud. I pulled back the coat and saw the great, gaping wound in the belly, with the rainwater pooling in among the blood. I saw the knife handle and the rose. Then I burst into uncontrollable, convulsive sobs.

  Because it wasn’t her. It wasn’t Maria.

  I stood and stepped back. My head was reeling and my mind spinning. I stared down at the face, struggling to find meaning. It was Anthony. The ground around him was saturated, not just with the rain, but with blood and gore. His face was waxy and expressionless. I could see the edge of a note wrapped around the stem of the rose. I turned to look at Loss. She was staring at me. There was absolutely no expression on her face.

  I said, “What does it mean?”

  She shook her head. “We have to call the police.”

  I stared down at the body. A voice in my head was screaming at me to get a grip, to react. To do something! I said, “Where is Maria?”

  She was still looking at me, occasionally wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. She said, “Why did she tell him to come here?”

  I thought of the message on the mirror. I said, “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  We stood, staring at each other, with the water falling around us.

  Finally, she spoke. “To somebody it does. To somebody it makes perfect sense.” Her voice was a strange, strangled, almost a hiss.

  * * * *

  Two hours later, I was sitting in an interview room at Ladbroke Grove police station. The door opened and Grant came in, holding two paper cups with small plastic sticks poking out of them. A constable closed the door behind him and he sat on the chair opposite me and placed a cup in front of me.

  “The machine says it’s coffee. Personally, I doubt it.” He shrugged. “But it’s hot and it’s a drink.” We watched each other a moment and he said, “Dr. Loss confirms you were with her most of the evening. Apparently, you were at Anthony Cavra’s place.”

  I sighed and rubbed my face with my palms. “Not exactly.” I filled him in as much as I could. Something made me stress Loss’ role as Anthony’s therapist and play down her relationship with Maria.

  When I’d finished, he sat stirring his coffee for a while.

  Finally, he said, “So this Dr. Loss is the one you said I should have a talk to.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Because she’s an expert profiler on serial killers.”

  I smiled in a way you could describe as rueful and said, “Only this isn’t a serial killer, is it?”

  He studied his little plastic stirring stick and said, “What makes you say that?”

  “Serial killers have one motive for killing—the desire to kill. But they desire to kill a particular type of person. It might be a woman of a certain physical type, or gays, or prostitutes. Whatever it is, it will be a certain type of person.”

  I picked up the paper cup and looked at the black liquid inside it. I thought about drinking it for a moment but abandoned the idea. I put the cup back on the table and said, “These three victims only had one thing in common.”

  He was watching me carefully.

  He said, “Go on.”

  “Me.”

  He raised an eyebrow and drew breath to speak.

  I went on before he could. “Eva was killed in the certain knowledge that Pete would pull strings to get me involved. You know yourself that Pete carries weight in high places. Sally was killed because she was the niece of one of my closest friends, to let me know that whoever it is can get close to me and to deliver me the message on that scroll of paper.” I quoted, “‘To silence the mocking mouth, to still the arrogant heart, to rip out and steal excitement, hope and regeneration.’ And the note in Anthony’s mouth—‘To silence the arrogant mouth, to still the proud heart, to eviscerate Man who has brought upon himself the heat of Hell’s punishing fire.’ Those messages were directed at me, not at Eva and Sally. And Anthony was set up as a scapegoat—a red herring to let me know Maria was a target, but to lead me away from whoever it is who wanted to take her.”

  Grant snorted and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Murdoch, but that is a very unlikely story. It just isn’t credible.”

  I nodded. “I agree, but when you think it through, it is also incontrovertible. And whoever it is that killed Anthony, also took Maria and wrote on my mirror, ‘Time to start feeling the heat, Murdoch.’”

  He was pensive for a bit. Then he said, “Well, if you’re right, it means one of two things. Either you’ve really pissed off some total nutter who is prepared to go to ridiculous lengths to cause you grief…”

  “Or?”

  “Or you’ve pissed off someone who is so r
ich and powerful that these lengths don’t seem ridiculous to them.”

  I nodded. He was right.

  After a moment, he said, “Can you think of anyone like that, that you have really pissed off?”

  I looked him in the eye and lied. “No.”

  Chapter Eleven

  We were on the Chichester Channel, drifting slowly toward the ocean. The air had turned fresh. The molten weight of the heat had gone, and the meringue clouds against the blue sky were light and cool. A soft breeze made small waves on the water and carried us toward the Isle of Wight.

  Russell was pacing the deck. He paced carefully, like he was counting his own steps. We were on Hook’s forty-foot cutter. He was leaning on the helm, just back from the hatch, with his sight lost in the distant haze on the sea. But I could tell from his eyes that he wasn’t really seeing it. His inner eye was seeing his thoughts. I was sitting on the deck holding a cold beer, studying the grain of the wood, thinking about Maria.

  No one had spoken for a while, and my mind had gone back. Russell’s flat was a crime scene. It had been sealed off with yellow tape and the cops were all over it. I’d returned to my place in Church Street and taken a bottle of Bushmills into the bedroom. There I’d sat on the bed, staring through at the empty bathroom where Maria should have been preparing for bed. But the light had been stark and dead and the bathroom silent. The empty mirror had looked back at me with no particular expression, just tiles and a shower cubicle. Cold. Dead.

  Cold. The word had resonated in my head through the whiskey fumes. Cold. But that wasn’t what the message had said. The message had said that it was time to start feeling the heat.

  ‘Time to start feeling the heat, Murdoch.’

  HEAT.

  And as I had sipped at the whiskey and stared at the smoldering tip of my cigarette, I had remembered Russell, sitting in the sun in his white linen, with his huge insect sunglasses, saying, ‘I see the Monopolies and Mergers Commission has allowed the HEAT Corporation’s bid for the Llyn Celyn fusion reactor. That will bring problems.’ Then, ‘The High Energy Atomic Technologies Corporation. HEAT. It pleases us, doesn’t it, when an acronym amounts to an actual word.’