The Psalm Killer

by Chris Petit

  Nesbitt summarized the situation briskly, taking a nononsense approach that brooked no argument.

  ‘DI Cross thinks we’ve got a killer who advertises his murders in the papers and the next killing is due in a week.’

  Cross was surprised at Nesbitt’s succinct grasp of his material, in contrast to his own weeks of agonizing. The DCI’s brusque appraisal made it sound like he had worked the whole thing out for himself in five minutes. At one point Cross was aware of Cummings regarding him sardonically. He ignored him and turned his attention to Moffat as Nesbitt continued with the panache of a TV presenter reading an autocue. Moffat’s eyes were a guileless brown, his expression impenetrable. By calling in Moffat Nesbitt was probably covering himself, Cross decided. Moffat was there in an advisory capacity, though no one was saying what he was advising on or who he represented.

  When Nesbitt was finished, Moffat cleared his throat and asked why it had taken so many deaths before anyone had connected them.

  Nesbitt coughed loudly, blew his nose, then inspected the contents of his handkerchief.

  ‘There was nothing obvious to connect the deaths. None of them was the same type of murder and two took place outside the divisional area,’ he said, looking at Cross for confirmation.

  Cross nodded, uncomfortably aware of Moffat’s scrutiny.

  ‘It didn’t occur to you that recurring newspaper advertisements might mean recurring murders?’

  ‘It wasn’t that straightforward,’ said Cross. ‘There was no reason to think that the initial murder connected with any of the others.’

  Moffat looked unimpressed. From what he went on to say, it emerged that his speciality was Protestant paramilitary gangs. He probably ran most of them, Cross thought.

  ‘It’s possible you’re dealing with a loyalist terrorist,’ Moffat told the meeting, with enough hesitation to make plain his reservations.

  Cross asked Moffat who he thought might be behind the killings.

  ‘Let’s wait and see what happens next Friday,’ replied Moffat archly.

  ‘DI Cross,’ said Nesbitt. ‘What is going to happen next Friday?’

  Cross explained that there were nearly a hundred possible targets in the area of greater Belfast.

  ‘Short of putting the city under curfew, it’s going to be impossible to keep an eye on them all, but we’re going to try. We’ll step up patrols in the districts where the killer has struck before.’

  During his summary, Cross caught Moffat saying something out of the side of his mouth to Cummings, who smiled in agreement. He was sure they were laughing at him.

  After the conference broke up, Nesbitt asked Cross to stay behind.

  ‘Moffat thinks your theory is a load of balls, so you’d better be right about this or I’ll hang you out to dry. Moffat may be a Brit but he knows Belfast like the back of his hand and he says it doesn’t work the way you say.’

  ‘Before, I would have agreed. I’m only going on what we’ve found.’

  ‘That WPC of yours, by the way, what’s her name?’

  Cross felt a twinge of panic at the turn in the conversation.

  ‘Westerby.’

  ‘There’s nothing going on between the two of you?’

  ‘Between us?’

  Seeing Cross’s astonishment, Nesbitt relented.

  ‘All right, all right, but I needn’t remind you of the consequences.’

  Cross felt anger well up inside him. He asked who had made the allegation.

  ‘Let’s just say that it has come to my attention and it’s my duty to remind you of the official line on the three Ds.’

  The three Ds were drink, dames and debt, all of them rife in the force. Punishment, when applied, could be severe: immediate transfer, a heavy fine, a return to uniform and even dismissal.

  Cross felt caught out. He had deliberately guarded from himself any feelings he had towards Westerby. What was not obvious to him was apparently clear to someone else.

  ‘Everything all right at home?’ asked Nesbitt.

  ‘Yes, sir. Fine, thank you, sir.’

  ‘Good. Keep it that way. At the rate we’re going we’ll soon have to open a fucking marriage counselling service.’

  Cross left the room wondering if he was still under investigation.

  The insecurity he felt at work followed him home. He got the nagging feeling his house was being watched. He dismissed the thought, putting it down to nerves and lack of sleep. His insomnia was the reason agreed with Deidre for his move into the spare room. There, instead of being unable to fall asleep as before, he slept for a couple of hours before waking sharply and lying there anxiously until morning.

  Exhaustion frayed his nerves and on successive days he found himself lifting his hand to Matthew, then to Deidre. He had resisted slapping the boy but when Deidre kicked him in exasperation during a squabble over the washingup he had lashed out. In the astonished silence that followed they stared dully at each other until she had made a dignified exit. Cross squirmed with shame and thought of Willcox.

  Deidre never referred to the slapping, which had left him with the feeling that his life was increasingly blemished. Even his children started to avoid him.

  The room he now slept in so badly was at the side of the house and overlooked fields that were hidden down-stairs by the garden fence. The view from upstairs showed how exposed the flank of the house was.

  Cross stood for a long time in the uncurtained window, putting off the moment of going to bed, staring out, seeing nothing beyond his reflection but black, wondering if anyone was watching. Playing softly on the radio was an old song whose silly words stuck in his mind: I wonder wonder wonder who who who wrote the book of love?

  He imagined the memory of that particular moment returning with his death. Cross emptied his glass and told himself to pull himself together. He tried not to notice that he’d drunk the best part of a bottle of Scotch.

  The watcher was curious about the sad-looking man keeping his vigil in the lit-up window. He wanted to know how much he knew, how far he had got. He wondered about this policeman, so slight and uncertain, hovering in his night-time window.

  He had first seen him when they had come to reclaim the body of Mary Ryan, watching from a derelict house, with night glasses, making careful note of the man who appeared to be in charge, and the registration of his car. It was part of the control, knowing them and watching.

  He had followed the Volvo afterwards to a smart new estate in the south of the city. Later, he was able to pinpoint the exact house. There were fields beyond the estate and a playground nearby, and a wind-break of fir trees that screened him from view. The policeman’s wife was beautiful. None of them looked happy.

  Later that night he pasted together another message, which he put to one side, ready to send: Deliver my darling from the power of the dog.

  Secrecy, then revelation. Establish the pattern, then reveal it, to show up the stupidity for what it was. If a couple of hundred terrorists could tie up thousands in a grinding war of attrition, why shouldn’t one man take it upon himself to reveal the absurdity of it all?

  He opened the dossier on the table in front of him. It listed her address and school, the names of her parents and their professions. A nice middle-class girl, he could tell from the photograph. The line of the song came back to him: Heard the little girl dropped something on her way back home from school.

  He imagined the policeman in his window, trying to picture him. Had he even begun to guess that things had to get a lot worse before they got better?

  He returned to the dossier. On Tuesdays and Fridays she went to a youth club, leaving the house and returning three hours later. She lived in a nice quiet part of the city. Way up on, way up on, way up on, way up on, way up on the avenue of trees.

  So lonely baby.

  ‘Those fellows you’ve got following me, tell them to get off my back.’

  Cross had not expected to hear from Stevens again. Stevens said he was calling from a pho
ne box, his voice slurred.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It only happened since talking to you,’ Stevens said accusingly.

  ‘Why would I have you followed?’

  ‘I haven’t talked to anyone else. Unsolicited mail in the post, is that your idea of a joke?’

  ‘What mail?’ asked Cross, puzzled.

  ‘Brochures, Inspector. One from a clinic that specializes in rebuilding faces, with a letter thanking me for my interest and asking me to make an appointment. Another from a firm making wheelchairs, and a third from an artificial limb company. Some of your people have a funny sense of humour.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Cross.

  ‘Because I’ve got his fucking story, why else?’

  ‘Warren’s story?’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘Because it’s too hot and anyway why trust a peeler?’

  Trust, thought Cross grimly. That’s what Vinnie had wanted.

  ‘This is between us. I give my word I’m not having you followed.’

  ‘Bollocks and shite to your trust.’

  ‘Meet me later. We have to talk.’ Cross was in danger of gabbling. ‘I’ll be in the Horseshoe Bar in the Europa from seven. I’ll be alone and I’ll wait until nine.’

  There was a long silence. Cross hung on, waiting.

  ‘There are enough hot cocks to give Paisley a heart attack,’ Stevens finally mumbled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mucky pix. Boys. Young boys, very young boys, some with men. Men in masks looking like a fucking bunch of Lone Rangers at a nudist convention. And I always thought Niall was a crap journalist!’

  Cross was at the Europa early. An hour later there was still no sign of Stevens. He used a telephone in the lobby to call the newspaper. Stevens wasn’t there and the bad-tempered sounding woman at the other end said no one could remember when they had last seen him.

  Cross waited another hour in the bar, drinking enough to feel maudlin about Miranda Ramsay. He was about to leave when two whisky-sodden foreign correspondents engaged him in barely coherent conversation.

  Gavin had silver hair, a leathery face that was gradually collapsing under the assault of alcohol, and he wore a grubby sky-blue safari jacket that labelled him as exotic, while Bas, sporting the remains of a black eye, was a keen young prop forward, fond of a maul.

  They asked Cross if he was taking part in the ugly night competition and expressed astonishment that he didn’t know what they were talking about. This, they explained, involved a prize for picking up the least attractive woman in the bar, who had to be paraded at the next morning’s breakfast as proof.

  ‘You should’ve seen Bas’s last week. Quelle vache.’

  ‘At least she had a cunt, which was more than yours did.’

  Bas’s roar of laughter boomed round the bar and Gavin shook his head in disbelief at the memory.

  ‘Couldn’t bloody find it. Down on my hands and knees for a bit of a sniff and I couldn’t bloody find it!’

  Cross joined in their laughter, ashamed of himself, and drank away his awkwardness until all trace of Miranda Ramsay was gone.

  They ended up in either Gavin or Bas’s room, drinking someone else’s duty-free Scotch. As the night fell in on itself, Cross tried to hang on to Gavin’s urgent listings of the world’s danger spots and the corresponding quality of the whores, which he pronounced who-urs.

  Cross shut one eye to bring the room into focus, just in time to catch Gavin slump sideways. Bas carried on with the story without missing a beat. Who the others in the room were Cross had no idea.

  He awoke to find himself sprawled on the bed, blinded by daylight. The room stank of Scotch and stale smoke. Gavin was snoring gently, still in the chair where he had had passed out in mid-sentence. Cross left without waking him, pausing only to rinse out his mouth and take a squeeze of toothpaste which he worked round his gums with a finger.

  His head throbbed and his stomach threatened to bring up something, though what he didn’t know as he hadn’t eaten. Unable to face the hotel breakfast, he had made do with too much coffee, charged to Gavin’s room. It added a purposeless buzz to his morning. He was in his office before eight, which was remarkable, given the state of his hangover. All he wanted was to spend the day in bed.

  He phoned McIlvenna. McIlvenna was the first policeman he had met in Belfast thirteen years earlier. They were still technically friends, though it was a year since they had seen each other. Deidre wouldn’t have him in the house after he had passed out in the toilet. Thinking of his own hangover Cross decided he was in no position to criticize.

  They wasted a couple of minutes on pleasantries and McIlvenna said he now had a second home on the Antrim coast which he hoped Cross would soon visit. A sign of the times: policemen with second homes.

  When they got down to business and Cross described the photographs Stevens had told him about, and their possible provenance, McIlvenna was sceptical.

  ‘How good’s your source?’

  ‘Good, I’d say,’ Cross said with more conviction than he felt.

  ‘Is he offering any proof of a Kincora link?’

  ‘Yes, but until I’ve seen the photos on the table—’

  ‘You’ve not seen them?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m checking. I thought you’d maybe heard of them.’

  Cross cursed Stevens for his hangover. He could hear McIlvenna slurping a cup of something.

  ‘I’ve heard the stories, but I’ll bet you anything the pictures are fakes. Someone’s pulling a fast one on your man, or he’s pulling a fast one on you. I’d say they’re from the mainland – they’re easy enough to come by – unless you can specifically identify those involved.’

  Cross wished he’d waited until he had something more concrete.

  ‘Is there anyone who knows about this sort of stuff?’

  ‘I’d know, I’d say,’ said McIlvenna tightly, sounding miffed.

  Cross sighed and looked at his watch. He doubted if Stevens would be in the office yet. He hung on, hoping for some scrap from McIlvenna.

  ‘Do you know a councillor called Eddoes?’ McIlvenna supplied.

  The name was vaguely familiar.

  ‘A right little moral watchdog, always on about sex magazines in newsagents, and so on. He was giving me an earful the other day about the morale of respectable Protestant communities being undermined by Catholic pornography. Which is news to me. And drugs, he said.’

  ‘Drugs. The Provos are scared stiff of drugs.’

  ‘Sanctimonious fuckers, aren’t they?’ McIlvenna laughed. ‘Be careful with Eddoes, by the way. He’s not as lily-white as he makes out. Once they’ve gone respectable, they come up with any excuse to get on their high horse.’

  Eddoes ran a dry-cleaning business in East Belfast and Cross found him in an office over the shop. McIlvenna had said that he had worked at Harland and Wolff shipyards until injury had forced him to take early retirement. Cross couldn’t remember when he’d seen such a big man. Eddoes reminded him of a side of beef and looked uncomfortable in a suit. When he stood up he wasn’t as tall as Cross was expecting, but the impression of bigness remained.

  ‘I won’t waste your time, Inspector,’ said Eddoes, apparently unaware that it was Cross interviewing him. ‘The facts of the matter are simple enough. In spite of the miseries that afflict us, we’re a blessedly clean city in some respects.’

  Cross nodded. As a result of the political anomaly Belfast was a curious case of arrested development.

  ‘Until now!’ said Eddoes, thumping his desk for emphasis and startling Cross.

  ‘Pornography?’ prompted Cross.

  ‘And worse. Drugs.’

  ‘What kind of drugs?’

  ‘The worst kind. Oh, if you’re asking me to produce some dead lad with a needle in his arm, I can’t. Yet. But it’ll come, mark my words. The Taigs are moving in. Drugs and pornography, and not just any pornography – I�
�m talking about boys, some not much more than wee children.’

  Cross pointed out that republican terrorists had always been against drugs and pornography.

  ‘They say they have nothing to do with drugs. What they say and what they do are two different things. A man of your position knows that. They say Sinn Fein has no connection with the Provisional IRA. They say.’

  Cross let Eddoes ramble on. The man was a soap-box orator, too fond of his own voice and probably crazy.

  ‘They’re taking the war to the middle classes!’ Eddoes bellowed. ‘And unless something is done there’ll be drugs handed out in the playgrounds!’

  He would not reveal his source, which left Cross thinking that he was probably dealing with another case of Chinese whispers.

  Before leaving he used Eddoes’ phone to try to track down Stevens. Stevens had not been at the paper when he had tried earlier, nor at home. Whoever he spoke to this time said Stevens was out on a story and no one was sure when he would be back.

  Cross became increasingly irritable as the day wore on. His hangover refused to budge. He realized he had forgotten to ask Eddoes if he had known Warren.

  The sight of Moffat hanging round the coffee machine did nothing for his mood. They nodded at each other and stood in uncomfortable silence while Cross made a show of being fascinated by the machine’s liquid spurt into a plastic cup.

  Moffat was wearing a velvet burgundy waistcoat and a bold check tweed jacket that made him look like he was dressed for a stay in the country, which, thought Cross, was probably how he regarded his Belfast assignment. Friday planes were always full of Brits going back for the weekend. He wondered how often Moffat went home.

  Cross could think of nothing to say. It was ridiculous, he thought. They were supposed to be working as a team.

  He thought it was probably his antipathy to Moffat that made him decide to go out on a limb and talk to McMahon. He left a message at the hospital. To judge by the speed with which it was returned, McMahon was indeed spending most of his time there.

  They met in the canteen after evening visiting hours. McMahon looked ill, paler than before, with dark circles under his eyes. His minder, a different one, sat behind the canteen door as usual.