The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  ‘I don’t, as a rule. How are you settling in? Everything all right?’

  He was aware of how stilted he sounded.

  ‘Yes, fine.’

  ‘Compared to your previous work?’

  ‘Like a holiday.’

  She smiled wryly and added that the sex abuse unit was regarded suspiciously by most departments, because it dealt with what was thought of as welfare work and was staffed almost entirely by women.

  ‘The men thought it was an easy turn. You know, going to the birthday parties of kiddies who’d been victimized. They called it the shopping unit because they thought we spent most of our time in Marks & Spencer.’

  Cross stubbed out his cigarette. He saw an old woman in the distance walking towards them with the aid of sticks.

  ‘The kids were the hardest to deal with,’ Westerby went on. ‘You’d take them down to the canteen and buy them sweets and get them to draw, and try and get them to talk that way. We had these anatomical dolls and you’d get them to show you what had happened. Buggery, rape, oral sex. I used to despair. That’s where the real damage goes on, as if anyone cares. In the home. The rest is easy. Sorry, I’m preaching.’

  It was unusual to have any discussion about work.

  ‘No. I wonder if the whole crisis is not just a larger manifestation of violence in the family.’

  Westerby did not know what to make of Cross’s remark. It sounded uncharacteristic and so formal, more like something she would have expected to see written down. She wondered whether he was happy with his life. At that moment it seemed not.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, breaking the awkwardness. ‘There she is.’

  The arthritic old woman who had been making such painful progress up the road arrived at her gate. After they had introduced themselves, she invited them into her front room, which looked like it had not changed or seen visitors in twenty years.

  ‘That’s the Breens,’ she said, nodding at the photograph Cross showed to her. ‘It was terrible. To have it happen right outside.’

  She struggled up from her chair using her sticks, brushing aside Cross’s help, and moved to the window, pushing aside the net curtain.

  ‘It was about half past eight. I was in the kitchen. I thought it was my gas that had exploded. We’ve never had anything like that round here. The poor souls, they didn’t stand a chance. They had to re-lay the concrete in front of the garage after.’

  She returned to her seat, shaking her head. The Breens were Catholic, she thought, pleasant enough but distant.

  ‘You’re not sure?’ Cross asked.

  ‘With a name like Breen you would have thought so but they were not church-goers.’

  She knew little more about them, apart from remembering that Breen was some sort of contractor.

  ‘On the morning of the explosion do you know where Mr Breen was?’

  The old woman cocked her head. ‘Well, I suppose he was there. My first thought was that it was him in the car. After that I was straight on the telephone to the police, but everyone else must have been too because the switchboard was jammed. When I next looked there were fire engines and ambulances and everything. I do remember thinking that I never saw Mr Breen after that, even when the house was sold.’

  Westerby could find no record of Breen since the deaths of his wife and children.

  ‘Well, almost no record,’ she told Cross. ‘I checked the obvious sources. There’s an awful lot of Breens in the phone books but none’s our man. But he does have a building society savings account with the Nationwide still under his old address. The last deposit was made before his wife died, and there have been various withdrawals since, amounting to about fifteen thousand pounds.’

  ‘How much is in the account?’

  ‘Fifty thousand pounds.’

  Cross whistled. Who the hell was Breen?

  ‘The withdrawals were made from different branches – Strabane, Londonderry, Armagh and Newcastle, so there’s no pattern. I only thought of building societies because I had to go to mine yesterday.’

  ‘Isn’t there a limit he can draw in cash? Cheques would have to go through a bank.’

  Westerby shook her head. ‘You can draw cash if you phone up and give notice. His old driving licence would have taken care of any proof of identity. He never changed the address with vehicle licensing.’

  ‘Emphysema,’ said Charlie Spencer, a once-big man shrunk to a husk. Cross put him at sixty-five though looking much older. His skin was pitted and pale. Bony wrists hung loosely from frayed shirt cuffs, but his hair was still rigid from years of discipline.

  They sat in the small conservatory of a nursing home whose bright colours couldn’t mask the smell of institution and sickness. Through an open door Cross could see patients tranquillized into a semi-comatose state, slumped round the afternoon television. Spencer stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘You were in charge of the Breen case,’ Cross prompted.

  Spencer’s breath rattled in his chest. He apologized for his failing memory.

  ‘Oh yes, a complete mess,’ he said after Cross had reminded him. He stared at the garden and blinked at the warm sun. Cross tried to decide if he was contemplating his limited future or dredging a faulty memory.

  ‘I can hardly remember what my wife looks like, even though she comes every day,’ Spencer eventually said. ‘What did you say your name was?’

  Cross felt he was facing another dead end. He noticed that the lawn outside had just received its first mowing of the year.

  Spencer appeared to have drifted off. Cross rose to leave, but then Spencer, his eyes still shut, spoke. ‘It was Breen who usually took the car, except on that morning his wife was going to use it to drive the children to school because they’d missed the bus. Breen wasn’t there.’

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘In a hotel across the border, on business, he said. Some of the staff said he had a woman with him, but I never had a chance to question him again. Mr Breen was murky waters.’

  ‘Do you think he had anything to do with the wife’s death?’

  ‘Until I spoke to him. I don’t think you can fake shock like that. In my mind there’s no doubt the bomb was meant for Breen, and maybe part of his shock was knowing it was.’

  ‘Who wanted him dead?’

  ‘At first I thought it was the Provos because Breen was a contractor with at least one company that did maintenance work for the security forces.’

  ‘Which would have made him a target.’

  ‘Quite. The Provisionals never claimed the bomb, but I thought that was because they were too embarrassed after blowing the woman and children to smithereens.’

  Spencer added that he’d heard later from a colleague in Special Branch that Breen’s background was more complicated than it appeared. As well as doing work for the security forces, he was also thought by some to have been in the Official IRA.

  ‘An old Sticky is what I heard, dating back to before the riots of 1969. Some said he dropped out in the seventies. Another story went that he was still active but worked out of the Republic and resurfaced in the INLA.’

  ‘If he goes that far back wouldn’t he be known about?’

  Spencer shrugged. ‘Maybe he was. Maybe his name just didn’t appear on any list. Go back to the beginning and you find they were all in each other’s pockets.’

  Cross saw that Spencer thought he didn’t believe him. Spencer sighed and his breath wheezed.

  ‘Let me tell you a story, going back to the start of the Troubles. It involves a man from the Daily Mirror. Most of the staff on the Belfast desk were young and keen. Then this old drunk was brought in to run the office and none of them could understand why. Anyway, one time the drunk was drunk in the bar of a hotel well known to be neutral. It was also common knowledge that the receptionist was an active republican, so when two soldiers got on the roof and started firing at some commotion, the receptionist went berserk and phoned the barracks to complain, and when the barracks wasn
’t quick enough he marched into the crowded bar and shouted that unless the soldiers got off the roof there’d be trouble. When nobody moved, here’s your receptionist to your man from the Mirror: “You fix it or none of yous is being let into the disco on Saturday.” And the man from the Mirror did. He made the call. The soldiers got off the roof and they all went to the disco.’

  Spencer smiled and gave a painful laugh. Cross wasn’t sure what he was supposed to make of the story. Spencer, seeing his confusion, patiently elaborated.

  ‘The receptionist knew that the man was intelligence, which was more than his colleagues did. The thing is, in those days they all went to the disco – the security forces and the IRA, the whole bloody shooting party. Even McGuinness used to put in an appearance. So your man Breen could have been cutting deals in any direction. In with the IRA. In with the security forces. Making sure his name was kept quiet. They all went to the bloody disco and don’t let anyone tell you different.’

  Cross stood up to leave, still not sure what he was supposed to make of the story. ‘How well did Breen do out of his business?’

  ‘Well enough to support a reasonable standard of living.’

  ‘But not rich.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by rich.’

  ‘He had over fifty thousand pounds saved away.’

  Spencer shrugged. He suddenly looked tired. ‘Not that rich.’

  Westerby lay alone in bed reading, her evening in ruins after a row with her fiancé. It was a word she hated. Or was it the state of being fiancéed she disliked so much? She wondered what she was getting herself into by saying she would marry Martin. There was passion in her, she knew that, though not enough surfaced in their relationship, which seemed too conditioned by caution, especially where sex was concerned. Sex was not what she had expected. Sex, with Martin at least, had turned out to be about not doing things, not getting pregnant, not having sex during her period (his squeamishness, not hers), not doing what he probably wanted her to do, except she didn’t know what that was because he never asked. His reticence about his own body blunted her natural curiosity. In her imagination she always thought of sex as something uncomplicated, but her experience so far told her otherwise.

  Because she considered herself only marginally attractive she suspected that she drew men that were in some way flawed in their unsureness about themselves. They assumed she was comfortable. They did not see the drive, sexual and professional, beneath the surface.

  At work she saw men eyeing her the way they did all women, with their furtive glances, the casual appraisal, quick to dismiss. To judge by their jibes and general attitude, most of them would have been more at ease in a singular world. Women made them defensive and they ignored them or turned them into the butt of their humour. Some WPCs coped with this by becoming more mannish, cracking crude jokes and swearing. For her own part, Westerby had grown used to masculine ways and their abdication of responsibility when dealing with emotional damage. They made themselves scarce when it came to a notification of death or the aftermath of rape, but were happy enough to gawp at a rape victim when she was being examined or read her statement. Most rape cases they dismissed as not real rape, preferring to see them as a combination of enticement, collusion and one too many drinks.

  Westerby thumped her pillow in exasperation. She was wide awake and it would be hours before she got to sleep. She decided she hated her duvet cover. It was a present from her mother, and done in the sort of floral design that her mother didn’t like but thought she did. Westerby couldn’t stand any of it – the floral dish cloths, the floral towels, sheets and curtains. She thought of them as Prevention of the Sex Act sheets, a design so ghastly that it would deter all but the most determined from ever contemplating any form of conjugation, not that her mother, for all her liberal views in other departments, could accept her daughter as anything other than chaste and virginal, at twenty-seven.

  The duvet was a single duvet on a double bed, which pretty much summed up the contradictions of her life. How she had explained the bed away to her mother she could no longer remember. Either she had said that it was already in the flat when she’d moved in or she was looking after it for a friend. It was exactly the sort of detail that her mother would remember and trip her up on one day. New sheets, new fiancé – new mother – she resolved before drifting off into uneasy sleep.

  While Westerby slept, the body of a young woman was found stabbed to death on a piece of wasteland that Monday night, which was the spring bank holiday. As it was Westerby’s day off she only discovered about the murder in the paper, where it made the front page, written up by Ronnie Stevens.

  Stevens had been at the murder site and quizzed Cross as he walked back to his Volvo. Cross had spotted him lurking beyond the scene-of-crime tape that cordoned off the area, in the crowd that had gathered, attracted by the lights and the vehicles. He was irritated by Stevens’ assumption that their one meeting allowed him a familiarity, and tried to ignore him.

  ‘Any scraps for the hacks?’ Stevens asked with a cocky grin.

  ‘A statement will be released.’

  ‘Someone said the eyes are missing.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait for the statement.’

  ‘Is it a slasher?’

  Stevens’ tone said that he scented a big story. Cross wondered how he had found out about the body. Probably one of the ambulancemen had phoned him in exchange for a fee.

  ‘No, it’s not a slasher,’ said Cross, brushing past.

  The paper’s banner headline was inevitably ‘Slasher Strikes!’ The woman was not named. Stevens had inferred that the motive was sexual. Also included was the detail that the victim’s eyes had been gouged out, which had been withheld from the police statement. As a result, Cross spent most of his morning fending various calls about this, including Nesbitt who wanted to know how Stevens had got hold of the detail and why Cross had withheld it in the first place.

  ‘Because I didn’t want the press spreading panic. It’s the kind of case that could get out of hand and until we get a full report the less said the better.’

  Cross let Nesbitt grumble on about press interference.

  ‘Do you have a name on her yet?’ Nesbitt asked just before hanging up.

  ‘Mary Ryan, twenty-one years old.’

  ‘Christ, the poor child,’ said Nesbitt, in a rare display of compassion.

  Poor child, indeed. Hers was a fate he would not wish on anyone. It was the most gruesome murder of his career. The eyes had been gouged out and there was a puncture in the neck where she had been stabbed. The sockets were strangely bloodless. Either they had been bathed or the eyes had been removed after death, after the flow of blood had stopped. It was clear that she had been killed somewhere else. There would have been more blood if it had been done on the spot. The absence of blood startled Cross almost more than the vicious attack on her eyes. But the detail that persisted – and would not budge however hard he tried – was the sharp contrast of everyone’s visible breath on the cold night air, and the lack of any coming from her.

  She was a wee slip of a thing, probably plain at best, he thought, with a wrench of his heart, dowdily but sensibly dressed. One shoe was gone, again suggesting that the killing had been done elsewhere. In all of his years he had seen nothing like it. The body had been deliberately arranged into an obscene display of limbs, with legs akimbo to reveal the pubic area. The victim was wearing no underwear – like Mary Elam, Cross remembered, and he wondered at the connection.

  After the autopsy on Mary Ryan, Cross asked Ricks what the chances were of both women being killed by the same person.

  ‘On the face of it, unlikely, because, as you know, once a killer has established his method he usually sticks to it. Creatures of habit, we are. Stabbers stab, stranglers strangle. Also there’s the mutilation of Mary Ryan and not of Mary Elam. There again, both women’s wrists show signs of having been bound. Absence of underclothing in both cases too, though neither body showed
signs of sexual intercourse or interference. Yon Mary was a virgin, by the way. Hymen intacta.’ Ricks smirked.

  ‘So it’s not impossible they were killed by the same man.’

  ‘Not impossible,’ echoed Ricks. ‘You’re certainly talking about a degree of premeditation.’

  Ricks’ report also confirmed that Mary Ryan’s blood had been washed off the skin. There was none on her clothes, which suggested that she had been stripped and dressed again afterwards. Ricks also noted that the nails had been carefully cleaned, removing any foreign skin or fibre that might have got caught beneath in a struggle.

  Cross wondered if they had enough to link the two deaths, and later said so to Westerby.

  ‘Perhaps the killer had intended to mutilate Mary Elam but was interrupted,’ she said. ‘Or he had to kill her before he meant to.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Just that, really, and the fact that the killer went for the victim’s throat in both cases.’

  Cross hadn’t thought of that. Westerby seemed about to point out something else when she stopped herself, blushing. ‘You don’t want me rabbiting, sir.’

  Cross laughed. He was touched. ‘Say it anyway.’

  ‘Well, I think one might have been a rehearsal for the other.’

  Nesbitt, as Cross could have predicted, was reluctant to have the cases formally linked. ‘For a start, outside of sectarian deaths, there are very few instances of repeated murders. The average Irishman does not have the imagination to kill more than once.’

  ‘What if we’re looking for an Irishman who’s not average?’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, Detective Inspector.’

  Nesbitt’s attitude was more to do with an entrenched police mentality than any real appraisal of the facts, Cross realized. Nor was he amused to find his own argument thrown back at him when Nesbitt cautioned against making any public connection between the two deaths because to do so might cause unnecessary panic.

  An incident room was set up, which became an excuse for half the cranks in the city to call. Mary Ryan had been seen with a man whose name and address were provided by a caller who wished to remain anonymous. The man turned out to be eighty-six years old. A supermarket packer was questioned as the result of another anonymous call, leading to more time wasting. The man had no alibi and was evasive under interrogation. As the case against him mounted – someone of his description had been seen in the area on the day of Mary Ryan’s death and the supermarket where he worked was only half a mile from where her body was found – he offered his excuse. He had been at a meeting of the Ulster Volunteer Force, an outlawed organization.