The Mermaids Singing

by Val McDermid

  3. He likes the extra excitement that walking out on the high wire gives him. He needs that buzz.

  4. He must have some areas of emotional maturity in his make-up that allow him to hold himself under control in these highly stressful situations. This may also allow him to buck the poor work-history pattern so common among serial offenders. (See below.)

  Most serial offences demonstrate a degree of escalation, indicating the killer’s need for more thrills, better execution of his fantasies. Like a roller coaster, each high needs to be bigger to compensate for the inevitable low that has preceded…

  Tony looked up, startled. What was that noise? It had sounded like the door to the open-plan outer office, but at this time of night, there shouldn’t be anyone on this floor. Nervously, he pushed himself away from the computer desk, steering his chair across the carpet on silent castors till he was behind his desk and out of the pool of light shed by the lamp beside the computer. He held his breath and listened. Silence. The tension gradually began to ooze away. Then, abruptly, a line of light appeared under his office door.

  The metallic taste of fear gripped Tony. The nearest thing to an offensive weapon on his desk was a chunk of agate he used as a paperweight. He snatched it up and moved stealthily out of his chair.

  When Carol opened the door, she was taken aback to find Tony halfway across the room, hefting a rock in his hand. ‘It’s me,’ she yelped.

  Tony’s arms dropped to his side. ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

  Carol grinned. ‘Who were you expecting? Burglars? Journalists? The bogeyman?’

  Tony relaxed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You spend all day trying to get inside some nutter’s head and you end up as paranoid as he is.’

  ‘Nutter,’ Carol mused. ‘Now would that be some technical term you psychologists use?’

  ‘Only inside these four walls,’ Tony said, walking back to his desk and putting the agate back where it belonged. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Since British Telecom don’t seem to be able to connect us, I thought I’d better come round personally,’ Carol replied, pulling up a chair. ‘I left a message on your machine at home this morning. I assumed you’d already left for work, but you weren’t here either. I tried again around four, but there was no reply from your extension. At least, I assume that’s why the switchboard operator said, “I’m putting you through now,” and I ended up in a black hole. And, of course, now the switchboard have all gone home and I never thought to ask for your direct line.’

  ‘And you a detective,’ Tony teased.

  ‘That’s my excuse, anyway. Actually, I couldn’t face another minute in Scargill Street.’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  ‘Only if I can talk with my mouth full,’ Carol said. ‘I’m starving. Could you go a quick curry?’

  Tony glanced at his computer screen, then back at Carol’s drawn face and tired eyes. He liked her, even though he didn’t want to get close, and he needed her on his side. ‘Just let me save this file, and I’m out of here. I can come back later and finish this.’

  Twenty minutes later they were attacking onion bhajis and chicken pakora in an Asian café in Greenholm. The other customers were students and those of the terminally right-on tendency who hadn’t quite adjusted to the fact they were no longer studying anything except political correctness. ‘It’s not exactly Good Food Guide, but it’s cheap and cheerful, and the service is quick,’ Tony apologized.

  ‘Fine by me. I’m more egg on toast than Egon Ronay. My brother got the gourmet genes in our family,’ Carol said. She glanced quickly around her. Their table for two was less than a foot away from the next. ‘Did you bring me here deliberately so we couldn’t talk about work? Some psychologist’s ploy to refresh my mind?’

  Tony’s eyes widened. ‘I didn’t even think of that. You’re right, of course, we can’t talk about it in here.’

  Carol’s smile lit up her eyes. ‘You can have no idea how much pleasure that gives me.’

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. Tony broke the silence. That way, he stayed in control of the subject. ‘What made you decide to be a copper?’

  Carol raised her eyebrows. ‘Because I like oppressing the underprivileged and hassling racial minorities?’ she tried.

  Tony smiled. ‘I don’t think so.’

  She pushed her plate to one side and sighed. ‘Youthful idealism,’ she said. ‘I had this crazy idea that the police should be there to serve and protect society from lawlessness and anarchy.’

  ‘It’s not such a crazy idea. Believe me, if you dealt with the people I used to handle, you’d feel relieved that they weren’t on the streets.’

  ‘Oh, the theory’s fine. It’s just the practice that’s such a bummer. It all started when I read sociology at Manchester. I specialized in the sociology of organizations, and all my contemporaries despised the police force as a corrupt, racist, sexist organization whose sole role was to preserve the illusory comfort of the middle classes. To some extent, I agreed with them. The difference was that they wanted to attack institutions from the outside, whereas I’ve always believed that if you want fundamental change, it has to come from inside.’

  Tony grinned. ‘You little subversive, you!’

  ‘Yeah, well, I guess I didn’t realize what I was getting into. David knocking out Goliath was a piece of piss compared with trying to change things in the police.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Tony said with feeling. ‘This national task force could revolutionize the clear-up rate on serious crimes, but the way some senior officers carry on, you’d think I was setting up a scheme to allow paedophiles to retrain as child minders.’

  Carol giggled. ‘You mean, you’d rather be back in the locked ward with your nutters?’

  ‘Carol, sometimes I feel like I’ve never left. You’ve no idea what a refreshing change it is to work with people like you and John Brandon.’

  Before Carol could reply, the waiter arrived with their main courses. As she spooned out lamb and spinach, chicken karahi and pilau rice, Carol said, ‘Does your job create the same problems with having a private life as the police service does?’

  Instantly defensive, Tony answered with a question. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Like you said earlier, you get obsessed with the job. You spend your time dealing with shitheads and animals — ’

  ‘And that’s just your colleagues,’ Tony butted in.

  ‘Yeah, right. And you come home at night after dealing with broken bodies and fractured lives and you’re expected to sit down and watch the soaps and act like normal people do.’

  ‘And you can’t because your head’s still plugged into the horrors of the day,’ Tony finished. ‘And with your job, you have the added complication of shift work.’

  ‘Exactly. So, do you get the same problems?’

  Was she asking out of idle curiosity or was this an oblique way of finding out about his private life? Sometimes Tony wished he could just switch off the part of his head that had to analyse every statement, every gesture, every intricate piece of body language and just revel in the pleasure of eating dinner with someone who seemed to enjoy his company. Suddenly aware that he had left too long a pause between the question and the answer, Tony said, ‘I’m probably even worse at switching off than you. Men generally seem to get much more obsessive than women. I mean, how many female train spotters, stamp collectors or football fanatics do you know?’

  ‘And that interferes in your personal relationships?’ Carol persisted.

  ‘Well, none of them have ever gone the distance,’ Tony said, struggling to keep his voice light. ‘I don’t know if that’s down to the job, or to me. Mostly, the last thing they’ve screamed at me as they walked out the door hasn’t been, “you and your bloody nutters”, so I guess it must be me. How about you? How do you handle the problems of the job?’

  Carol’s fork continued its journey to her mouth and she chewed and swallowed her mouthful of curry before s
he answered. ‘I’ve found that men aren’t very sympathetic towards shifts unless they do them too. You know, you’re never there with the tea on the table when they’ve got to rush out to that vital squash match. Add to that the difficulty of getting them to understand why the job drives you inside your head and what are you left with? Junior doctors, other coppers, fire fighters, ambulance drivers. And in my experience, there aren’t many of them who want a relationship with an equal. I guess the job takes too much out of us for us to have much left over. The last guy I was involved with was a doctor, and all he wanted to do when he wasn’t working was sleep, fuck and party.’

  ‘And you wanted more?’

  ‘I wanted the occasional conversation, maybe even a movie or a night out at the theatre. But I put up with it because I loved him.’

  ‘So what made you end it?’

  Carol stared down at her plate. ‘Thanks for the compliment, but I didn’t. When I moved up here, he decided that driving up and down the motorway was a waste of good shagging time, so he dumped me for a nurse. Now it’s just me and the cat. He doesn’t seem to mind the irregular hours.’

  ‘Ah,’ Tony said. He had heard the real pain under the surface, but for once, all his professional skills didn’t seem adequate to the response.

  ‘How about you? You involved with anyone?’ Carol asked.

  Tony shook his head and carried on eating.

  ‘Nice bloke like you, I’d have thought you’d have been snapped up ages ago,’ Carol said, the tease in her tone covering something Tony wished he was imagining.

  ‘Ah, but you’ve only seen the charming side. When the moon’s full, I sprout hair on the palms of my hands and bay at the moon.’ Tony leered melodramatically at Carol. ‘I am not what I appear to be, young woman,’ he growled.

  ‘Oh, Grandmamma, what big teeth you’ve got!’ Carol said in falsetto.

  ‘All the better to eat my curry with,’ Tony laughed. He knew this was the point where he could have moved the relationship forward, but he had spent too long constructing his defences against precisely these moments of weakness to let them down that easily. Besides, he told himself, he had no need of a relationship with her. He had Angelica and bitter experience had taught him that was all he could handle and still function.

  ‘So how did you get into this soul-destroying line of work?’ Carol asked.

  ‘I discovered while I was working on my DPhil that I hated getting up on my hind legs and talking to an audience, which kind of ruled out academic work. So I went into clinical practice,’ Tony said, slipping easily into a flow of anecdotes about his work. He felt himself relax, like a man walking on a frozen lake who realizes he’s back on dry land.

  They spent the rest of the meal on the safer ground of their careers, and Carol asked the waiter for the bill when he came to clear off the table. ‘I’m picking up the tab, OK? Nothing to do with feminism; you’re a legitimate business expense,’ Carol said.

  As they walked back to Tony’s office, he said, ‘So, back to work. Tell me about your day.’

  The swift switch away from the personal back to the case confirmed to Carol the need to play it cool with Tony. She’d never seen anyone back off so fast at gentle flirtation. It was puzzling, all the more since she sensed he liked her. And she had no doubts about her capacity to attract men. At least tracking Handy Andy with him gave her space and time to build a bridge between them. ‘We got a break this morning. At least, that’s what we’re all hoping.’

  Tony stopped abruptly and turned to face Carol. ‘What kind of a break?’ he demanded.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re not being ignored,’ Carol said. ‘It’s something that would be a minor detail in most investigations, but because we’ve got so little to go on here, it’s got everybody excited. There was a torn fragment of leather on a nail by the gate in the Queen of Hearts’s yard. Forensic did a rush job on it, and it turns out that it’s very unusual. It’s deerskin, and it comes from Russia.’

  ‘Oh, my good God,’ Tony said softly. He turned away and took a couple of steps. ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. You can’t get it in this country, and you’d probably need to send someone to Russia to source it, it’s so obscure. Am I right?’

  ‘How the hell did you know that?’ Carol asked, catching him up and grabbing his sleeve.

  ‘I’ve been expecting something like this,’ he said simply.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘An outrageous red herring that’ll have the entire police force running around like headless chickens.’

  ‘You think this is a red herring?’ Carol almost shouted. ‘Why?’

  Tony rubbed his hands over his face and ran them through his hair. ‘Carol, this guy has been so careful. He’s been almost clinical in his obsession with leaving no clues. Serial killers have typically got high IQs, and Handy Andy is certainly one of the cleverest I’ve ever come across, either personally or in the whole literature. Yet suddenly, out of nowhere we get not just any old clue, but a clue so obscure that it could only possibly be left by a tiny segment of the population. And you’re standing here telling me you think this is for real? That’s exactly what he’s trying to achieve. I bet the lot of you have been running around like blue-tailed flies all day trying to suss out where this obscure piece of Russian leather came from, haven’t you? Oh, and don’t tell me, let me guess. I bet there’s now a whole squad tracking back through Stevie McConnell’s life trying to establish where the hell he got it from.’

  Carol stared at him. It seemed so blindingly obvious when he explained it like that. Yet not one of them had questioned the validity of the leather scrap.

  ‘Am I right?’ Tony asked, more gently this time.

  Carol pulled a face. ‘Not a whole squad. Just me and Don Merrick and a couple of DCs. I’ve spent most of the day on the phone talking to governing bodies in weightlifting and body-building, trying to establish if McConnell’s ever been on a national or regional team that either competed in Russia or competed against Russians. And Don and the lads have been grilling travel agencies trying to check if he’s ever been on holiday there.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Tony groaned. ‘And?’

  ‘Five years ago, he was one of a team of weightlifters from the North West who competed in an event in what was then Leningrad.’

  Tony took a deep breath. ‘The poor unlucky bastard,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect the idea that this was deliberately planted to have occurred to any of you,’ he added. ‘I don’t mean that patronizingly. I realize how much closer you are to all of this and how desperately you want to catch this bastard. I just wish someone had told me earlier, before it assumed this major significance for everyone.’

  ‘I did try to phone you this morning,’ Carol said. ‘You still haven’t said where you were.’

  Tony held his hands up. ‘I’m sorry. I’m overreacting. I was in bed, asleep, with the phones turned off. I was exhausted after last night, and I knew I couldn’t concentrate on writing the profile unless I had some sleep. I should have checked my answering machine when I got up. Sorry, I shouldn’t have had a go.’

  Carol grinned. ‘I’ll let you off this time. Just save the fearsome bit for when we catch Handy Andy, huh?’

  Tony pulled a face. ‘Shouldn’t that be “if”?’

  He looked so vulnerable and fallible, his shoulders slumped, his head down, that Carol’s impulses overrode the decision she’d taken only minutes before to play it cool. She stepped forward and pulled Tony into a tight hug. ‘If anyone can do it, you can,’ she whispered, rubbing the side of her head against his chin like a cat marking its territory.

  Brandon stared at Tom Cross, his face a mask of horror. ‘You did what?’ he demanded.

  ‘I searched McConnell’s house,’ Cross said belligerently.

  ‘I thought I said categorically that we had no right to do that? No judge in the land is going to accept that arrest for common assault in the street gives sufficient grounds for suspicion of murder.’

 
; Cross smiled. It was a rictus that would have raised a Rottweiler’s hackles. ‘With respect, sir, that was then. Once Inspector Jordan had established that McConnell had been to Russia, the picture changed. Not a lot of people have had access to obscure Russian leather jackets, after all. It puts him in the frame. And there’s more than one JP around that owes me one.’

  ‘You should have cleared it with me,’ Brandon said. ‘The last order I gave on the subject was no search.’

  ‘I tried, sir, but you were in a meeting with the Chief,’ Cross said sweetly. ‘I thought I’d better strike while the iron was hot, being as how we don’t have him banged up indefinitely.’

  ‘So you wasted more time searching McConnell’s house,’ Brandon said bitterly. ‘Don’t you think you and your men could have been better employed?’

  ‘I haven’t told you yet what we found,’ Cross said.

  Brandon felt his chest constrict. He wasn’t a man given to premonitions, but the sinking foreboding that gripped him now was as palpable as any solid fact he’d ever examined. ‘Think very carefully about what you say next, Superintendent,’ he said cautiously.

  A momentary frown of puzzlement flashed over Cross’s features, but he was too full of the message he bore to worry about the ACC’s words. ‘We’ve got him, sir,’ he said. ‘Bang to rights. We found one of Gareth Finnegan’s firm’s Christmas cards in McConnell’s bedroom, and a sweater that’s a dead ringer for the one Adam Scott’s bird says was missing from his house. Plus a traffic ticket with Damien Connolly’s badge number on it. Add that to the Russian connection, and I think it’s time to charge the little arse bandit.’