Acid Lullaby

by Ed O'Connor

  53

  4th May

  He awoke at 6a.m. and realized he had been crying. His eyes stung. He looked down and saw Mary Colson’s hand resting on his. She seemed to be trying to wake up: her eyelids struggling to roll back the heaviness that the tranquillizers had given them. Underwood leaned forward.

  ‘Mr Underwood?’ her voice was dry and almost inaudible.

  ‘Hello, Mary,’ he said softly.

  ‘Did you remember the keys?’

  Underwood nodded.

  ‘Your friend wants to know about the keys.’ Her grip on the top of his hand tightened slightly as Mary tried to wake up.

  ‘I know, Mary, you told me.’

  ‘Good,’ she whispered. ‘He’s been talking about a box.’

  Underwood felt his hackles rise in fear. ‘Jack told me to put things – things that made me sad – in a box.’

  ‘He wants you to open it.’ Mary’s eyes were open now. She was becoming more alert and aware of her surroundings. ‘I’m in hospital.’

  ‘You fell over yesterday. You banged your arm and your head. Do you feel all right? Can I get you anything?’

  Mary smiled faintly. ‘I’d like a cup of tea.’ She patted his hand softly. ‘You’re a good friend.’

  Underwood stayed until Mary had been served breakfast. He decided to refrain from informing her about the bodies on Fulford Heath, judging her condition to be too weak. After Mary had sipped her tea and made a half-hearted effort to eat some porridge, she lay back on her pillows and drifted back to sleep. Underwood left a brief note saying that he would return to see her in the evening. It was by no means an act of entirely selfless generosity. Mary’s description of the location of the bodies was uncannily accurate. Underwood realized that the old lady still provided the only real insight into the investigation. However, there were other issues drifting through his consciousness. As he drove away from the Infirmary, Underwood’s mind inevitably came to focus again upon his own mother. Ten years before he had driven from the same hospital never to see her again. He knew that in many ways he had been a frustration and a disappointment to her: particularly, his failure to produce children. Their relationship had become fraught in the months leading up to her death: as the cancer had taken control of her body, Elspeth Underwood had become irrational and spiteful. He knew she had been in great pain and he remembered the terror that had grown behind her eyes. Her fear had been translated into bitterness. She had criticized him for ancient indiscretions; accused him of deserting her if he arrived late for visiting time at the hospital; crushing any sympathetic comments with savage fatalism. His rational mind had long accepted and tried to box the memory. However, Underwood knew in the darkest, most childish and selfish part of his soul, that he still resented the manner in which his mother had left him.

  Mary Colson’s hospitalization and her warmth towards him had come as a sharp contrast. She had called him her ‘friend’. The simple gesture had a deep reverberation with Underwood. He had come to believe that with the collapse of his marriage and his lapse into depression he had lost the ability to build new friendships. Mary’s affectionate nature engaged him. She had accepted the inevitability of her death stoically: ‘I’m not afraid of dying,’ she had told him in reference to her vision of the dog-man, ‘but not like that.’ Underwood wondered whether his own mother might have felt the same way about her own disease but merely lacked the courage to say it. He had always been the focus of his mother’s love as a child. Perhaps her bitterness stemmed from the fact that the son she had worshipped had been unable to save her. The thought filled him with pity.

  Underwood made a sudden decision. He left the ring road and drove directly into New Bolden town centre. He passed the grey carbuncle of the police station and headed south on Argyll Street to the residential district known locally as the ‘Hawbush’. Here he parked outside St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church. He sat quietly in the car for four or five minutes before going inside.

  The church was a plain brick structure built in the early 1950s. Underwood pushed open the door. He tried to stymie his usual feeling of sceptical resentment by focusing on the job in hand. The church was being prepared for mass. Underwood wanted to be well clear of the area before any hocus-pocus began. He asked a woman arranging flowers on the left-hand side of the nave for directions to the devotional candles. He found the stand almost immediately, noting that none of the candles had been lit. He checked his watch: it was still early. The fact that his candle would be the first of the day made Underwood feel even more uncomfortable.

  He struck a match, enjoying its gratifying flare, and lit a single candle. Developing an appropriate thought to accompany the act proved difficult. Instead, Underwood found himself recalling his mother’s face on his wedding day. It had been a curious mixture of pride and despair: pride in her son’s happiness, despair at his coming of age. The candle flame glowed in front of him. The priest drifted into Underwood’s field of vision, preparing the altar table for mass. Underwood remembered his embarrassment at being forced to take communion during his childhood, loathing the hypocrisy of undertaking an act that meant nothing to him. It had pleased his mother though. The priest smiled over at him. Underwood nodded an acknowledgment and decided to leave.

  St Josephs was attached to a nearby Roman Catholic School and as Underwood headed back towards the west door, he noticed a display created by the children along the wall. He found himself slowing slightly to absorb their brightly coloured renderings of biblical stories and characters.

  ‘My favourite Saint is Saint Francis,’ one piece began, ‘because I love animals and Saint Francis could talk to them. I have a dog called Mac and a hamster called Chuckles and I speak to them all the time.’

  Underwood smiled. Another display exhibit was entitled ‘Twenty Questions About Church’. He read on, ‘What is mass? Mass is very important in the Catholic Church. It commemorates the Last Supper. We believe that the bread and wine turns into the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ.’

  Another child had copied out an extract from a religious text in beautifully flowing calligraphic writing: ‘For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our saviour, having been made flesh and blood for our salvation.’ Underwood had seen enough. Churches and hospitals were his two least favourite places and he had supped full of both. He hurried back to the car, shivering in the cold morning air. Unlocking the door, Underwood began to assimilate some of the extracts he had read and a terrible logic started to emerge.

  The killer of Harvey and Stark had injected them full of some curious mixture of drugs before killing them. These drugs induced hallucinatory experiences and visions. Underwood had already sensed that the drugs were not designed solely for the purpose of killing the victims. There were much easier ways of achieving that. He reasoned that the drugs were intended to change the victims’ perception of their environment or their captor. Did the killer want to be changed in the perception of his victims into someone or something else? Dr Miller had mentioned that certain chemicals in the drugs had been used in the past as truth serums; that they made the taker vulnerable to suggestion.

  Underwood thought about the Catholic Mass. The idea of change was important to several religious belief systems. In the Catholic Mass the communion bread and wine is thought to physically convert into the flesh and blood of Christ: ‘Jesus Christ our saviour, having been made flesh and blood for our salvation.’ Were the drugs injected into the victims as some bizarre Eucharistic ritual? Was the killer enacting some form of transubstantiation, changing himself in the minds of his victims from the mundane to the spiritual? Or by forcing the mixture into their bodies was the killer compelling them to share in his vision, to become one with him?

  It didn’t quite hang together but Underwood sensed he was close to discovering something. The Holy Communion was a passive act where the receiver willingly takes the Eucharistic elements into their body. The killer’s actions were aggressi
ve. He was forcing his will onto his victims. He was injecting them with his drugs forcibly and presumably in the face of resistance. It was a penetrative act: a rape of the perception. For the first time Underwood began to see the crimes in a sexual context. The killer was forcing his own vision into the minds of his victims. He wanted to create change; to forge a new mode of perception. Underwood felt a cold rush of anxiety as he thought of Rowena Harvey. He was beginning to see why the killer wanted to keep her alive.

  The key was in the nature and history of the mixture. The killer had created a specific fluid that he believed was somehow synonymous with himself. During their meeting in the botanical gardens, Adam Miller had mentioned that the Amanita Muscaria mushroom had been used recreationally in ancient human civilizations. Underwood suddenly realized that he needed to find out how and quickly.

  He could feel the pieces of the puzzle were dropping into place. The killer was most likely a patient of Jack’s: not an official police referral but a private client. The killer was wealthy and drove a large jeep or people-carrier. He was trying to change the perception of his victims: make them alter the way he appeared to them. The Amanita Muscaria mushroom had been deliberately selected by the killer. The mushroom had a long history and was closely interlinked with certain ancient civilizations. And the killer was collecting heads. He now had at least five. He had completed his countdown. Underwood started his engine and accelerated away from St Josephs.

  Counting down to what?

  He needed to talk with Dexter and go through Jack’s personal effects and the remains of his records. Underwood had a growing conviction that God was hiding in the details.

  Interlocking Orbits

  54

  Doreen O’Riordan nervously fingered the fat that overhung her belt. She had learned from PC Sauerwine that Mary Colson had been committed to hospital. However, her anxiety did not spring from genuine concern. DI Underwood’s request that she provide him with all Mary Colson’s recent shopping receipts had filled her with a cold panic. Particularly, she thought bitterly, because she had readily agreed to do so. With the advantage of hindsight, Doreen realized that she should have fronted the policeman then: she should have just shrugged and said that she threw away all Mary’s receipts. Instead, she had panicked and buckled under the pressure of his suspicion.

  She had stayed up late trying to assess the extent of the problem. Now, in the hard light of morning, her situation seemed no better. She had been assigned to Mary Colson six months previously and had been shopping for her twice every week during that period. Doreen didn’t keep accurate accounts of the money she had short-changed from Mary’s housekeeping. She knew that she hadn’t taken any money in the first three weeks of her association with Mary Colson. She had wanted to assess how alert the old bitch was before she started lifting the odd ten-pound note from her change. So during those three weeks Doreen had been scrupulously honest. As she had become confident in Mary’s deteriorating mental state her policy had changed. So, she told herself, she had been stealing from Mary for roughly five months; say, twenty weeks.

  Doreen did some quick mental arithmetic: two shops per week for twenty weeks amounted to forty shops. Assuming that she took about ten pounds from Mary’s change each time she went shopping for her, the total she had stolen had to be in the region of four hundred pounds: approximately half the cost of her holiday. Doreen had also taken smaller amounts from some of her other patients but Mary had been her major source of extra revenue.

  Her problem was that Mary had fooled her.

  ‘That old bitch tricked me,’ Doreen thought bitterly.

  She knew that she had to assume the worst: that Mary Colson had kept records of exactly how much she had given to Doreen and how much she had received in change. Doreen ate a bun and stared out of the bedroom window at the yawning desolation of the Morley Estate. Was she right to think the worst, though? Mary had never seen any of the receipts – Doreen had always been careful either to throw them away or keep them – so how could Mary have known she was being short-changed?

  There was only one possible explanation. Doreen usually left the shopping bags on Mary’s sideboard so the old bitch could unpack them herself. Maybe Mary had added up the price tags on the shopping as she packed it into the cupboards. That way she would end up with a total and be able to subtract it from the amount she had given Doreen then compare the figure with the change she had received. Doreen hesitated. ‘Surely the old bitch wouldn’t be that bloody-minded?’

  She would. The more Doreen thought about it, the more she came to suspect that Mary Colson had set her up. She thought of her holiday, suddenly jeopardized. She thought of her balcony ‘overlooking the crystal clear waters of the Ionian Sea’; she thought of ‘soaking up the rays by the conveniently sized swimming pool’ and of relaxing in the evening ‘to the music of the Lazaros band’. Now that conniving, cantankerous old bitch was trying to spoil her dream. Doreen couldn’t help crying.

  She knew that she had to concentrate. She was determined. She would not sacrifice her dream and besides, it was Colson’s word against hers. Doreen walked through to her little kitchenette and made herself another strong, sugary coffee. Assuming the worst case – that Mary had kept her own records of the money she had handed over – Doreen considered that she had three obvious options. Option one was to give the money back to Mary and apologize. She had absolutely no intention of doing that. Option two was to provide DI Underwood with a mass of till receipts, some genuine and others from her own shopping. She could try to confuse him by highlighting certain items on some of her own till rolls and claiming that they had actually been bought for Mary. It was an attractive plan: she couldn’t believe a busy CID officer would waste his time checking through dozens of old till receipts. Then there was option three. She could go back to Mary’s bungalow while she was away and place some of the money she had taken in various points around the bungalow. Then, if DI Underwood did check the receipts against Mary’s own records and discovered a shortfall, Doreen could claim that Mary was actually hiding money around the house and deliberately trying to drop her in trouble.

  She settled on option three. It would be a calculated loss to guarantee her holiday. She opened the biscuit tin containing her holiday money. How much money would be enough to create the necessary impression without compromising her holiday? She settled on eighty pounds. She would put thirty under Mary’s mattress and fifty in an envelope in one of her cupboards. It meant that she would have to reduce the amount she had set aside for spending money on holiday but she was prepared to take that risk. She was staying full-board at the hotel so she wouldn’t have to worry about buying food. Besides, she told herself, perhaps a nice gentleman would buy her drinks at the Acropolis bar in the evening.

  Doreen was absolutely determined that her dream would not be spoiled. She gathered together a mass of receipts and highlighted various items. Once satisfied that the result would be utterly confusing, she placed them in a manila envelope and wrote ‘DI Underwood’ on the front. She would drop them at the police station next time she was in town. Doreen decided not to write an explanatory note: Underwood hadn’t asked for one. All he wanted was the receipts, so that was what she would give him.

  Pleased with her morning’s work, Doreen allowed herself the luxury of a second Chelsea bun to accompany her cup of coffee.

  55

  Underwood arrived in CID to find Dexter, Leach and Marty Farrell in an office waiting for him. They all looked exhausted. Leach seemed especially tired, his face gaunt and his eyes sunken and black. Dexter waved Underwood in to join them.

  ‘I was wondering where you were,’ she said crisply.

  ‘At the hospital,’ Underwood shot back, ‘with Mary Colson.’

  ‘Roger and his team have been working through the night with the pathology staff at Addenbrookes. He’s going to run through the initial findings on the four bodies we found yesterday. Marty’s been checking up on possible tyre and car matches with th
e tracks found on the Heath.’ Dexter paused for a moment. ‘Jensen’s fingerprints match one of the bodies.’

  ‘Shit.’ Underwood thought of Harrison. Dexter read his mind.

  ‘I’ve told Harrison to take time off. He wants to work through it. He’ll be back in this afternoon. Do you want to get us started, Roger, before we all fall asleep.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Leach had preliminary post mortem reports on the four victims in front of him. ‘Now, I should say that the information I’m about to give you has been compiled in a rush. More detailed tests on the four cadavers will continue through the week. Bearing in mind that we are still missing Rowena Harvey and I realize that there is a time pressure, I’ve concentrated our initial investigations on building a preliminary physical profile of each victim and attempted to ascertain a time of death for each victim.’

  ‘The quick and dirty analysis?’ Underwood asked.

  ‘Exactly. I guess it’s helpful to assess the corpses chronologically.’ Leach frowned through his exhaustion. ‘By that I mean, I’ve considered each case in the order in which we believed they were killed. Make sense?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Dexter said.

  ‘Victim A. Male, Caucasian. Head had been severed completely from the body. Five ten-pence coins found with the corpse. I would estimate his age at being between forty-five and sixty years, his body weight around one hundred and seventy pounds and his height at roughly five feet seven inches. Remaining body hair was dark brown. In many ways, he’s the most interesting of all the cadavers. We estimate he was killed between three and four months ago.’

  Dexter whistled softly. ‘How can you tell? You can’t make an assessment based on body temperature for a body that’s been dead for so long, and presumably he was in a bad way.’