The Mermaids Singing th-1

by Val McDermid

  ‘When can we do that?’ Carol asked, fighting the urge to shake his thoughts out of him.

  ‘Listen, give me the rest of today to myself, and by tomorrow morning I’ll have a draft profile for you. How’s that?’

  ‘Fine. Anything else you need in the meantime?’

  Tony said nothing. Carol gave him a quick sidelong glance and realized he had dozed off. All right for some, she thought. Forcing herself to concentrate, she drove across town to Tony’s house, a turn-of-the-century brick-built semi in a quiet street a couple of tram stops away from the university. Carol pulled up outside. The car’s slow glide to immobility did nothing to disturb Tony, whose breathing had become audible.

  Carol undid her seat belt and leaned over to shake him gently. Tony’s head came up in a startled gesture, his eyes wide and frantic. He stared uncomprehendingly at Carol. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You’re home. You fell asleep.’

  Tony rubbed his eyes with his fists, muttering something unintelligible. He looked blearily at Carol and gave a sleepy, lopsided smile. ‘Thanks for bringing me home.’

  ‘No problem,’ Carol said, still twisted round in her seat, fiercely aware of his closeness. ‘I’ll give you a ring this afternoon, we can fix up a time to meet tomorrow.’

  Tony, awake now, felt claustrophobic. ‘Thanks again,’ he said, retreating hastily, opening the car door and almost tumbling on to the pavement, thanks to the combination of haste and sleepiness.

  ‘I can’t believe I wanted him to kiss me,’ Carol said to herself as she watched Tony open his gate and walk up the short path. ‘Dear God, what is happening to me? First I treat Don like a mother hen, then I start fancying the expert witnesses.’ She saw the front door open, stuffed a cassette in the stereo and drove off. ‘What I need,’ she told Elvis Costello, ‘is a holiday.’

  ‘You tease, and you flirt, and you shine all the buttons on your green shirt,’ he sang back.

  ‘Last night, we were practically sticking the champagne on ice. Now you’re telling me you want to let McConnell go?’ Cross shook his head in a gesture of exasperation so ancient it probably appeared on a Greek vase. ‘What’s happened to change everything? Come up with a cast-iron alibi, has he? Out on the razz with Prince Edward and his bodyguards, was he?’

  ‘I’m not saying let him go this minute. We need to question him closely about his associates, check if he introduced anyone to both Gareth Finnegan and Adam Scott. And after that, we have to let him walk. There’s no real evidence, Tom,’ Brandon said wearily. Lack of sleep had transformed his face into a grey mask that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Hammer Horror film. Cross, on the other hand, looked and sounded as fresh as a toddler who’s just had a nap.

  ‘He was in the Queen of Hearts that night. For all we know, he had Damien Connolly’s body in the boot of his car, just waiting for closing time. It’s got to be grounds for searching his gaff.’

  ‘As soon as we’ve got enough evidence to get a search warrant, we’ll do it,’ Brandon said, reluctant to admit that he’d already taken that unorthodox step. Earlier, he’d asked Sergeant Claire Bonner to check all Damien Connolly’s arrests and traffic tickets, supposedly on the off chance of a connection to McConnell, but so far, she hadn’t unearthed the crucial information that he knew was lurking there.

  ‘I suppose this is all down to Boy Wonder,’ Cross said bitterly. ‘I suppose the shrink says McConnell’s childhood wasn’t unhappy enough.’

  Carol bit her tongue. It was bad enough being the fly on the wall in this clash of the titans without reminding either of her bosses she was witnessing their conflict.

  Brandon frowned. ‘I have consulted with Dr Hill, and yes, he does feel that on the basis of what we’ve got so far, McConnell probably isn’t our man. But that’s not the main reason why I think we should let him loose. The lack of evidence is a hell of a lot more important to me.’

  ‘And to me. That’s why we need time to collect some more. We need to interview these poofters he was drinking with on Monday night, to see what kind of state he was in. And we need to take a look at what McConnell’s got under his mattress,’ Cross said forcefully. ‘We’ve had him in custody for less than twelve hours, sir. We’re entitled to keep him till gone midnight. Then we can charge him with the assault for now, and ask the magistrates for a lie-down in police custody, which gives us another three days. That’s all I’m asking for. I’ll have nailed him by then. You can’t say no to that, sir. You’ll have the lads up in arms.’

  Wrong, Carol thought. You were doing fine up till then, but the emotional blackmail just scuppered you.

  Brandon’s ears flushed scarlet. ‘I hope no one thinks that because we are questioning someone the work stops,’ he said, a dangerous edge in his voice.

  ‘They’re dedicated, sir, but they’ve been working on this a long time without a break in the case.’

  Brandon turned away, staring out of the window at the city below. His instincts said to let McConnell go after they’d had one last attempt at digging his contacts out of him, but he had known without Cross’s clumsy comments that having a suspect had given the murder squad a new lease of energy. Before he could make a decision, there was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Brandon called, swinging round and dropping heavily into his chair.

  Kevin Matthews’s carrot curls appeared round the door. He looked like a kid who’s been promised a trip to Disneyland. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Sorry to interrupt, sir, but we’ve just had a report from Forensic on the Damien Connolly killing.’

  ‘Come in and tell us, then,’ Cross invited genially.

  Kevin gave an apologetic smile and slid his slim frame round the door. ‘One of the SOCOs found a scrap of torn leather caught on a nail on the gate,’ he said. ‘It’s a secure area, the public can’t just walk in, so we thought it might be significant. Obviously, we had to eliminate the people who work at the pub, and the draymen who deliver there. Anyway, it turns out that the yard was whitewashed and the gates were painted only a month ago, so we didn’t have to chase too many bodies. Bottom line is, no one admitted owning anything made from leather like this, so we sent it off to Forensic and asked them to look at it double urgent. The report’s just come back.’ He proffered the report to Brandon, eager as a Boy Scout.

  The relevant passage had been highlighted in yellow. It leapt off the page at Brandon. ‘The fragment of dark-brown leather is extremely unusual. For a start, it appears to be deerskin of some sort. More significantly, analysis indicates that it has been cured in sea water rather than a specialist chemical-curing medium. I know of only one source of such leather: the former Soviet Union. Because regular supplies of the correct chemicals are difficult to come by, many tanners there still use the old method of curing with sea water. I would guess that the fragment has come from a leather jacket that originated in Russia. Leather like this is not available commercially elsewhere, since it does not meet the quality levels required by Western retail outlets.’ Brandon read it, then tossed it across the desk towards Cross.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Cross said. ‘You mean we’re looking for an Ivan?’

  F ROM 3" DISK LABELLED: BACKUP. 007; FILE LOVE. 009

  I read somewhere that murder enquiries cost a million pounds a month. When Paul demonstrated he was every bit as stupid and treacherous as Adam, I began to realize the actions I’d been forced to take might start to have a significant impact on local taxes. Not that I minded a few extra pence a year on my council-tax bills; it was a small price to pay for the satisfaction I gained from dealing with their perfidy.

  I was devastated by Paul’s defection. Just as I’d set the scene for the triumphant celebration of our love, he turned his back on me and chose another. The night he made his first approach, I don’t know how I got home. I can’t remember a single detail of the journey. I sat in my jeep outside the farm, raging against his shallowness, his failure to recognize that I was the one he truly loved. My anger was so strong I’d lost all physical coordinat
ion. I virtually fell out of the driver’s seat and staggered like a drunk towards the haven of my dungeon.

  I climbed on to the stone bench and hugged my knees to my chest while the unfamiliar tears rolled down my cheeks and splashed on the raw stone, staining it dark as Adam’s blood. What was wrong with them? Why couldn’t they let themselves have what I knew they wanted?

  I wiped my eyes. I owed it to both of us to make the experience as rich and as perfect as possible. It was time for new toys. Adam had been the dress rehearsal. Paul was going to be the first night.

  The ploy of the car that wouldn’t start had served me well with Adam, so I used it on Paul. It worked like a dream. Before I was three steps down the hall, he’d even invited me to have a drink while I was waiting for the AA man. But I didn’t fall for his blandishments; he’d had his chance, and it was too late now for me to abort my plans for our union on my terms.

  When he came round, he was strapped into a Judas chair. It had taken me a few days to construct it, since I’d had to start from scratch. The Judas chair was one of my San Gimignano discoveries. I’d only ever seen a couple of references to it in my books, none of which made it at all clear how exactly it was constructed. But there in the museum, they had their very own working model. I had taken a couple of photographs to augment the one in the museum catalogue, and equipped with those, I had worked out a practicable design on my computer.

  It’s not a machine that inquisitors have used much, though I can’t quite see why. The San Gimignano museum puts forward a theory which frankly seems absurd to me. Coupled with some of the other descriptions on the cards, this daft theory convinces me that the cards have been written by some blinkered, obsessive feminist. The theory goes thus: it was OK to use implements of torture on women such as vaginal pears that shredded the cervix and vagina, so-called ‘Chastity’ belts which ripped their labia to a bloody pulp, implements that chopped nipples as efficiently as a cigar cutter, because women were a separate species from the inquisitors, and indeed were often creatures of the devil. On the other hand, so this demented theory goes, torture instruments used on men tend not to be directed against their sexual organs, in spite of the tenderness of those areas, because – wait for it – the torturers felt subconsciously connected to their victims and therefore any mutilation inflicted on their cocks and balls was unthinkable. Clearly, the caption writer in San Gimignano is far from au fait with the refinements of the Third Reich .

  My Judas chair, even if I say so myself, is a masterpiece of the type. It consists of a square frame with a leg at each corner, with arm supports for the forearms and a thick plank up the back. Much like a primitive carving chair, except that there is no seat. Instead, below the gap where the seat should be, there is a sharply barbed conical spike, attached to the chair legs at its base by a cross-brace of strong wooden struts. For the spike, I’d used one of the large cones that cotton yarn used to be wound round on industrial looms. You can pick them up in the souvenir shop of any outpost of the heritage industry. I’d covered it with a thin, flexible sheet of copper, and fastened thin strands of razor wire in a spiral round the outside. I’d added my own refinement to the example in the torture museum: my spike was wired up to the electrical supply via a rheostat, allowing me to apply electric shocks of varying intensity. The whole thing is bolted to the floor to prevent accidents.

  While he’d still been unconscious, Paul had been held above the spike by a strong leather strap under his armpits, binding him to the back of the chair. I’d also strapped each ankle to one of the front legs of the chair. As soon as I unfastened the strap, he’d be thrown on his own resources, relying on the muscles in his calves and his shoulders to keep him from the savage spike, carefully sited immediately below his anus. Since the chair was so high that only his toes could reach the floor, I didn’t expect him to hold out too long.

  His eyes registered the same panic I’d already seen in Adam. But his situation was entirely of his own making. I told him so before I ripped the tape away from his mouth.

  ‘I had no idea, no idea,’ he gabbled. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. You’ve got to let me make it up to you. Just let me out of this thing, and I promise we can make a fresh start.’

  I shook my head. ‘Robert Maxwell got one thing right. He said trust is like virginity; you can only lose it once. You have a treacherous soul, Paul. How can I believe in you?’

  His teeth began chattering, though not, I suspect, from cold. ‘I made a mistake,’ he forced out. ‘I know that. Everybody makes mistakes. Please, all I ask is the chance to make it right. I can make it right, I promise.’

  ‘Show me, then,’ I said. ‘Show me you mean it. Show me you want me.’ I stared at his shrivelled cock, dangling with his balls in the space where the seat should have been. I had looked forward to beauty, but he had failed me there, too.

  ‘N-not here, not like this. I can’t!’ His voice rose in a pathetic wail.

  ‘It’s this or nothing. Here or nowhere,’ I told him. ‘By the way, in case you’re wondering, you’re strapped into a Judas chair.’ Carefully, I explained how the chair worked. I wanted him to make an informed choice. As I talked, his skin turned grey and clammy with fear. When I explained about the electricity, he lost it completely. Piss dribbled from his cock, splashing on the floor beneath him. The stink of warm urine rose and choked me.

  I slapped him so hard his head cracked against the back board of the Judas chair. He cried out, and tears sprang into his eyes. ‘You dirty, filthy baby,’ I shouted at him. ‘You don’t deserve my love. Look at you, pissing and crying like some little girl. You’re not a man.’

  Hearing my mother’s words coming from my mouth shattered my self-control as nothing else could have done. I kept hitting him, revelling in the crunch of cartilage as his nose collapsed under my fist. I was beside myself with anger. He’d fooled me into thinking he was something he wasn’t. I’d thought Paul was strong and brave, intelligent and sensitive. But he was just a stupid, cowardly, lecherous pig, a pathetic excuse for a man. How had I ever let myself imagine he could be a worthy partner? He wasn’t even resisting, just sitting there mewing like a kitten, letting me hit him.

  Panting with exertion and anger, I finally stopped. I stepped back and stared contemptuously at him, watching his tears wash lines through the blood on his face. ‘You brought this on yourself,’ I hissed. All my careful plans had gone up in smoke.

  But now, I didn’t want to give him the second chance I’d given Adam. I didn’t want Paul’s love, not under any circumstances. He didn’t deserve me. I stepped round to the back of the chair and grasped the tongue of the strap. ‘No,’ he whimpered. ‘Please, no.’

  ‘You had your chance,’ I said angrily. ‘You had your chance and you blew it. You’ve no one to blame but yourself, coming here and pissing on the floor like a baby who can’t control itself.’ I pulled the strap, tightening it enough to let me slip it free of the buckle. Then I let it slide free.

  Paul’s muscles instantly clenched, holding him rigidly in place, a scant half-inch above the spike. I moved round into his line of vision and slowly stripped off, caressing my body, imagining what his hands would have felt like. His eyes bulged with effort as he tried to keep himself in place. I sat down and slowly, deliciously began to rub myself, irresistibly turned on by his fight to stay away from the agonizing spike.

  ‘You could have been doing this,’ I sneered, aroused still further by the quivering of his thighs and calves. ‘You could have been making love instead of fighting to keep your arse in working order.’

  If he’d worked out like Adam had, the pleasure would have lasted longer. As it was, his screams of agony mingled with my groans of pleasure. I came like a Guy Fawkes rocket, fire flashing through me and erupting in an orgasm that had me buckling at the knees.

  He tried to pull free, but the barbs just cut deeper into his tender flesh. I lay back in the chair, savouring the waves of pleasure that flowed through me after my orgasm, Paul’s moan
s and screams an extravagant counterpoint to my sexual satisfaction.

  As time passed, he sank lower on the spike, and his screams moderated to whimpering groans. To my surprise, I felt sexual desire rise in me again. After the exquisite pleasure of my first orgasm, I wanted my excitement matched again. I reached for the control box for the electrical current to the spike, and pressed the button that completed the circuit. Even with a relatively low current, Paul’s body convulsed in an arc that wrenched him almost clear of the spike, a fine spray of blood spattering the floor for a couple of feet around.

  I matched the rhythms of our two bodies, the speed and intensity of our mutual excitement keeping perfect pace. I felt my muscles quiver like his as I thrust against my hand. As I came, my body arched in sync with his, my gasps echoed by his last agonized cries before unconsciousness came.

  I have to confess I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Paul’s punishment. Perhaps because he had deserved so much more than Adam, perhaps because I had had higher expectations of him in the first place, or perhaps simply because I was getting better at what I had to do. Whatever the reason, my second excursion into murder left me feeling as if I’d found my true vocation at last.

  9

  We dry up our tears, and… discover that a transaction which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.

  ‘OK, Andy, it’s showtime,’ Tony said to the blank screen of his computer. After Carol had dropped him off, he’d stumbled upstairs, kicking off his shoes and letting his quilted baseball jacket lie where it fell on the landing. Pausing only to empty his bladder, he’d burrowed under the duvet and fallen into the deepest sleep he’d known for months. When he’d woken, it had been after noon. But for once, he felt no guilt about the work he should have been doing. He felt refreshed, excited, elated even. Searching Stevie McConnell’s house had given him a new certainty that he really did understand what he was doing. He had known, with absolute clarity, that Handy Andy did not live like that. And although it wasn’t something he could admit to anyone outside the tight circle of fellow profilers, there was a real rush in realizing that he could probably find his way into Handy Andy’s head and map a path through the tortured labyrinth of his unique logic. All he had to do now was find the key to the door.