by Michael Kerr
Ryan was feeding the jukebox when she returned to the table. She sat down and watched him. His back was to her. He was pressing buttons with one hand, and holding an unlit cigarette in the other. What was it about him that made wings beat in her stomach? There was no one answer. It was his attitude, and an invisible magnetism that defied understanding. His hair was a little long at the back, rucked-up on the collar of his worn leather jerkin. His shoulders were broad, his waist slim, and his jeans tight around firm buttocks. Jesus! She was feeling sensations that made her want him with a passion that she could hardly contain.
He turned and smiled. She knew he had felt her eyes on him. He walked over and settled back in his chair. Johnny Mathis’s mellow voice flowed from the wall-mounted speakers, as sweet as honey from a jar. He was proclaiming that a certain smile and face could lead an unsuspecting heart on a merry chase.
Ryan reached out and took her hand in his. They said nothing. Just listened to Mathis and let his words do the talking for them.
“Do you want to go for broke and risk a night out on the town?” Ryan said.
Raising her eyebrows, Julie said, “Are you hitting on me?”
“I reckon I am, ma’am.”
“What’s your idea of a night on the town?”
“I know a little jazz club you might like. Intimate, with candles on the tables, and a resident band that plays all the standards. They serve up fine food and finer wine.”
“Sounds too good to miss out on. When do you suppose we might find time to jump ship and fit it in?”
“Saturday night.”
Julie squeezed his hand. “You got a date, Ryan.”
Chapter TWENTY
“All right, I’m coming,” she shouted, recognising the tall figure even though he was distorted through a coloured, stained-glass window that boasted the image of a galleon in full sail, with attendant seagulls and a large, dull orange sun that was setting behind a mirror-flat ocean.
He took a deep breath. The window in the top of the door was a vivid reminder of his childhood. For a second or two he was a kid again, looking up at it from a much lower perspective. He hated the house. Maybe it was irrational that a single incident could overshadow all the good times, but it did.
“You should have called first, Francis,” Jessica said. “I might have been out. And the place is a mess.”
Ryan leaned over and hugged his mother. Kissed her on the cheek. She felt thinner, more fragile than he remembered.
“I was in the area and thought you might have the coffeemaker on.”
“You drink too much coffee, son. Your insides will be like tanned leather. Come through. Are you hungry? You look a little underweight. You should take better care of yourself, or settle down with a woman who knows how to cook. I should be a grandmother by now.”
“How are you keeping, Mum?” Ryan said, letting all the usual comments roll over him unheeded.
“Can’t grumble. I keep busy, and get out a lot. Did I tell you that I’m going on a painting holiday to Cyprus?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said as he put a new filter in the machine and started it up. “The change of scenery will do you good.”
“When did you last take any leave from that awful job? Don’t answer that. You haven’t. It’s not healthy, Francis. There’s more to life than being a policeman every hour God sends. You need a diversion.”
“I’m working on it, Mum. Honest.”
“Are you seeing anyone special?”
“I’ve met someone. I’m taking her out on Saturday night.”
“Not another weirdo like that pathologist who chops up bodies?”
“No, Mum.”
“Good. I think that any woman who chooses to do that for a living must be mentally disturbed. It isn’t something a normal person would want to do.”
Ryan waited for the coffee, and let his mother ramble. He wasn’t going to argue. He should never have mentioned what Pat Macmillan’s profession was, when he had been seeing her. Thing was, he agreed with his mother. He couldn’t really get his head round how someone like Pat could get up every morning, eat breakfast, then go to work and cut up dead people. Where was the job satisfaction in eviscerating fellow human beings? He decided not mention that his next port of call was to attend the autopsy on Barbara Coombes. His mother didn’t understand that as a detective investigating murders, he was required to see firsthand what had been the cause of death. He had always balked at the clinical and impersonal procedure. It was something that he found fundamentally distasteful. It gave him the creeps, in no small part because he knew it was feasible that he would end up being sliced and diced, to ascertain the cause of his death. Watching an autopsy was a ball-tightening experience, and brought home a sense of your own mortality. Seeing someone laying bare-arsed on a gurney and having their vital organs removed was food for thought.
“I saw you on the news last night, holding up that photograph,” Jessica said. “It’s hard to believe how such a good-looking man can be the monster you say he is.”
“You can’t go by looks, Mum. Did you ever see pictures of Ted Bundy, the American serial killer?”
“Yes. I found it very disconcerting to think that such a well-educated and apparently pleasant young man could be capable of such terrible crimes.”
“It’s all in the mind. A part of them that no one can see. An old lady that lived next door to Andrew Tyler thinks he’s wonderful. He mowed her lawn, and shopped for her on occasion. They can hide among other people and give the outward appearance of normality.”
“The world seems to have become a far more dangerous place to live in, Francis.”
Tell me about it. “I know, Mum. You need to remember everything I’ve told you about home security.”
Ryan veered the conversation on to lighter subjects, drank two cups of coffee, then looked at his watch and sighed. “Got to go, Mum,” he said. “I have to get back to the Yard.”
“You should visit more often, Francis,” Jessica said. “And I expect you to bring your new lady friend round, if it lasts. What does she do for a living?”
“She’s a cop, Mum. My boss. She was standing next to me when I was showing that photo to the press.”
“Well let’s hope you can work the same shifts, or you’ll see less of her than you do of me.”
“Ouch!”
Jessica hugged him. Rested her head on his chest for a second. She knew why he didn’t visit more often. That inside the man, the boy who had lost his father was trapped in time. She and the house reminded him of an event that had affected them both forever. It was time to move on. She planned to sell the place, relocate to the Chilterns and buy a small cottage in a quiet village, and start painting in earnest. She might never be a Constable or Gainsborough, but it was a pastime that gave her a great deal of pleasure and a sense of fulfilment.
Ryan reached the car, got in and lit a cigarette. Just walking past that fucking garage had made him start to physically shake. He still had infrequent but vivid nightmares. In them, he was always in the garage, stood transfixed in deep shadow, watching as his father stepped up on to a toolbox and tied the rope round a beam. No Daddy, NOO! his mind screamed, but he could not speak. With trembling hands, John Ryan tied the loose end of the rope around his neck. He was crying as he fashioned the knot; moaning as he kicked the toolbox away, and making a shrill, reedy noise as he slowly suffocated. Strings of saliva swung from his bottom lip and chin. And one of his shoes fell off and bounced on the concrete floor as his legs kicked and stretched down in a futile attempt to find support.
Ryan flicked the cigarette out of the window, rammed the key into the ignition and cranked the engine to life. He drove away too fast with hot tears stinging his eyes. It was not true that time heals wounds. That was probably the most stupid saying he had ever heard. Some experiences – the very best and very worst – stay as fresh in the memory as they were in actuality. If he lived to be a hundred, the imagined last moments of his father’s life, that he had no
t witnessed, but which his mind had fabricated, would haunt him until he expired.
A saturnine morgue attendant with an acne-pitted face and baleful eyes led him through the mortuary to the autopsy suite where Pat was about to start the post-mortem examination of Barbara Coombes.
Suitably garbed, Ryan entered the brightly lit, white-tiled theatre and made his way over to where Pat and two assistants in green surgical scrubs and galoshes stood around a stainless steel table, on which the body – or cadaver, as pathologists preferred to call a dead human being – was still intact.
“Hi, Ryan,” Pat said. “You’re late. I’ve finished-up with the husband, and done the external examination on Barbara here. What kept you?”
“Traffic,” Ryan lied. “What was the COD on Dermot Coombes?”
“Cause of death was a single knife wound. His left carotid artery was severed. He bled out. There was no sign of a struggle. And scattered hypostasis tells us that he had been moved from the bed to the bathroom a couple of hours after death occurred. His eyes had been removed, and his genitals cut off post-mortem.”
“And Barbara?”
“She wasn’t so lucky. Died as hard as you can. The perp raped and sodomised her repeatedly. Her lips and nipples were removed while she was alive. The slashes to her breasts, arms and stomach were not fatal. He finished up inserting the blade of a knife into her vagina and causing catastrophic damage. The perineum, between her anus and vulva, was cut through. He ripped her up.”
“Was that what killed her?”
“I don’t know, yet. I would hazard a guess that she died as a result of massive internal bleeding and shock. I think we’ll find that her heart gave out.”
As Mack the Knife made the initial cut with a scalpel, Ryan wished that he was somewhere else, away from the cold air and the stench that would be released when the body was opened up. He kept a bottle of cheap after shave in the Vitari’s glove box, especially for when he came here, to dab on his top lip and help stifle the smell of disinfectant and death, but it did not completely dispel it. Nothing did.
Seeing dead bodies at crime scenes was different. He could view them with a totally different perspective. It was the mortuary and its clinical procedures that froze his marrow. Everything about them was chilling; the white tiles, bright metal of the gurneys and dissecting tables, and the gruesome array of tools used to reduce a corpse to just so much offal.
Pat laid the body open to reveal the marbled fat and muscle. Before too long, juices were running off into the pan beneath the table. Ryan knew the procedure. He spent much of the time looking away, to where bowls waited for organs to be slipped into them, weighed and sectioned. The rib crackers lay ready on top of a trolley, next to the buzz saw that would remove the top of the skull after the corpse’s scalp and upper half of the face had been peeled back and folded over, to hang inside out, wetly, covering the mouth and chin. The sight, sound and entire process of dismantling a human body was far worse to watch than any horror movie.
It was the calm, professional and detached way that Pat performed her art that had turned Ryan off. Even when making love to her, he had not been able to dislodge the picture of her holding a brain in the same cupped hands that then caressed and fondled him.
Part-way through, and after Pat had shown him the damage done to the corpse’s pubic and anal area, Ryan thanked her and left. “Gotta go, Mack,” he said. “I need black coffee and fresh air.
“Stop calling me Mack, Ryan. You’re too squeamish for a murder cop.”
“Not squeamish, Pat. I’ve just never been able to view dead people as no more than meat. I don’t lose sight of the fact that up until a short while ago, this woman and her husband were living, and had plans and dreams that got stolen from them. I can’t properly imagine the agony and terror that Barbara Coombes had to endure. But I choose to try. It keeps me blinkered, focused on running down the sick fuck who did this to her.”
“I’ll get the report to you a.s.a.p.” Pat said.
Ryan nodded and went out into the anteroom. Took off the scrubs and hurried away, his purpose reinforced – as it always was – by the sight of a victim undergoing such ruination.
He sat on the edge of the bed and wept. He felt disconnected and alone in a way that he had not experienced before. His mother had always been there, loving him, caring for him. He was formed from her flesh. Had emerged out from between her open, trembling thighs, wet and bloody into the cruel world he inhabited. They were bound by genes of heredity. No closer relationship could exist. Her betrayal was therefore devastating, outrageous, unacceptable, and absolutely fucking unforgivable. She was aiding and abetting the police in their search for him, her only son.
To see the two cops, Ryan and Brannigan, standing outside his mother’s house in front of the TV cameras, had not surprised him. It was obvious that they would visit and question her. But when Ryan had held up the framed photograph, he had been truly shocked. Why would she help them? He had saved her from the pain and misery inflicted by his no-good father. And he provided her with all the money she needed. The disloyal bitch had no reason to turn on him in this way. She was not weak-minded. Ruby Tyler was a tough woman. She could have told them to piss off, and had no truck with them. She was a Judas, and would repent and suffer for her treachery. Then he would truly be alone. But that was normal. Everyone ended their days alone.
He laid back, thought of his time in the bathroom with Barbara Coombes, and lessened the built-up tension, to find a measure of alleviation from his torment before going to the bathroom to take a shower.
He had his list. His mother was now added to it. All in good time. There was no rush. He would let a few weeks pass before he began working through the names on it. For the time being, he would get to know his neighbours and establish Toby Carlson as a rather highly-strung but pleasant guy, with a good sense of humour, and always ready to help out.
Settled in the padded swivel chair, he booted up his new Dell, wiped his hands on his jeans and let his fingertips play over the keyboard. He entered the real Internet, not the packaged, commercial World Wide Web that provided fodder for the public at large. His business was conducted at a far deeper level. The world of cyberspace that he penetrated was a realm frequented by hackers who knew how to manoeuvre out of sight of the authorities’ watchdogs.
He typed a command and linked with a Ministry of Defence computer. Was asked for first a Username, and then a password. He gave them, and was welcomed, to be afforded access to the files of a fictitious pay clerk. He instigated a cloaking programme to delete any trace of his entry and set up a communications programme and a link to an anonimiser site that would in effect ‘launder’ all e-mails and messages sent to him, and could not be traced. He then logged off. He was up and running again. The computer he had vandalised at Muswell Hill would be of no use to the police. They would find it difficult to enter the severely damaged hard drive. The seventeen character password he used might take a supercomputer several weeks to crack, and once inside, there was nothing that would lead them to him.
An hour later, he received a coded packet that had been diverted to him via the MOD computer. The small string of digitised data contained text and a picture, which he reassembled into readable form.
The timing was perfect. A paid hit was a welcome diversion from the irritation he felt. He could now put his mother, Detective Chief Inspector Julie Brannigan and Emily and Harold into a holding pattern in a separate quadrant of his mind.
The message that popped up on the screen read:
SUBJECT: CORNELL FLYNN
OWNER OF THE PARADISE CLUB
UPPER GROSVENOR STREET
HOME ADD: THE MANSE, KEW ROAD, RICHMOND
ACKNOWLEDGE ACCEPTANCE.
TO BE EXPEDITED AS MATTER OF URGENCY
KOVROV
Andy replied through a chainer in Amsterdam. The agency’s service was invaluable. Its computers stripped out his real return address, replaced it with a fake, and his identity was h
idden. Chainers guaranteed that nobody could find out who a sender was. The system offered total confidentiality and anonymity, and could not be breached by law enforcement agencies.
Kovrov was a city in the Russian Federation, where Sergei Gorchev had been born of peasant stock, to grow up resenting poverty and a diet of mainly Borsch soup. He had rebelled against the communist ethic of hard labour for subsistence that barely put food on the table. Crime was his chosen route to rise above the proletariat in an era when capitalism and the bourgeoisie was suppressed.
Sergei became a thief, using whatever level of violence was necessary to rob those who had more than him. His growing notoriety attracted the attention of the Russian Mafia, and once within the organisation, he advanced quickly, and was now running operations in London for them. He was a large, blocky man with a hewn granite type of face, and black eyes that seemed to absorb the light from all they beheld.
Ideally, Andy liked to plan a hit over a few weeks. He had undertaken seven for Gorchev – code name Kovrov – who was now a regular contractor. He had been put in touch with the Russian by a former ex-con, Anton Pavek, who had since been found floating belly-up in the Thames. Andy didn’t like people who knew him personally to know his business.
Gorchev dealt in cash. The drop was scheduled for the following evening. At precisely eight p.m., a courier would phone Andy on a number he had given, to be told where to take the briefcase that would contain half the fee in Sterling and more info on the mark. It was simple and effective. Andy would direct the man to take the money to one of the city’s parks, and when ready, tell the driver to stop and place the case in a waste bin, or on a bench seat. When the other car was out of sight, he would retrieve the briefcase, remove the money and leave the case behind. Trusting no one was his strength. Not that a satisfied client would bug the case, or even want to follow him. But better safe than sorry, or dead. It was dog-eat-dog in the underworld he inhabited as a professional killer.