Fifth Member

by Claire Rayner

  ‘That’s the trickiest bit of all,’ she said. She had started to brush her hair, which was drying rapidly in the warm room.

  He watched her with pleasure, even though he was still thinking about the case. The sweep of her arms as she lifted them rhythmically to her head made him feel warm and happy.

  ‘Is he trying to tell us something about the people in treating them so?’ she went on. ‘Or is he trying to tell us something about himself? Because one thing’s certain. Or at least I think so. He’s trying to communicate with us. If he just wanted people out of the way, he’d go and kill ’em, right? But doing it this way, and taking such risks to do it, makes it even more obvious. He must see from the papers that we’re aware he’s copying the old Ripper MO – it didn’t take ’em long to sniff it out, did it? – so we know where he’ll be next. What is it he’s trying to tell us? Or is he just showing off about how clever he is, fooling the police? The way the first Ripper did?’

  ‘You’re the medical expert, George,’ he said. ‘You tell me. Could it be that not all these crimes are being done by the same person? The MOs are the same but couldn’t there be an element of copycatting here? Damn. Of course not.’ He shook his head. ‘The genital mutilation. We haven’t let that info get out. But each and every one has had that element. Even this last one, though it was incomplete.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I wish I could stay home today and talk with you. I think we’d get further, just the two of us gassin’, than I will all day with the thundering herd over at the nick. But there you go. The job’s the job.’

  He stood up and came over to her to kiss the back of her neck, now revealed as she pinned up her hair. ‘Take it easy today, sweetheart. I’ll see you tonight. And you don’t have to cook unless you really want to. We can always eat out.’ He chuckled. ‘What does an American Princess most like making for dinner? Reservations! Boom boom!’ He ducked his head as she whirled and then kissed her cheek. ‘It’s up to you. See you around seven if I’m lucky. S’long.’ He snapped his fingers at the non-existent hat brim and this time he really did go.

  By the time he came home she’d really done rather well. She’d been unable to get back to sleep, weary though the night’s work had left her. She had opted to do the PM on the body found in Creechurch Lane last night, going straight to Old East to open up the mortuary and once again drag Danny out to earn some overtime, because she had been filled with energy in spite of the long day she’d put in, and it seemed to make sense to get on with it. Gus hadn’t demurred. He’d been as eager as she to get what facts there were as swiftly as possible.

  It had been a straightforward-enough job. As she had told Gus, ‘I’m getting used to bodies with injuries like these,’ and she had finished comparatively quickly, a little to Danny’s chagrin. He’d hoped for more reward than a measly couple of hours at double time. The only odd thing about the body had been the total absence of any identifying items. He had carried in his trouser pockets a few coins, some five-pound notes rolled up and held in a rubber band, a handkerchief, a comb, and that was about all. Now she knew who he was that made sense; and she had sat at her kitchen table drinking her second cup of morning coffee (which was not at all as good as the first had been, a phenomenon she had noticed before and puzzled over) and thought about the man, trawling her memory.

  A traditional Christian, but a bit on the conspicuous side, she thought, that was it. He’d been a young doctor who had Seen The Light and Been Called, as he had announced, to Work for the Poor, back in the 1950s. She remembered reading that about him when he’d made headlines because of the way he’d picketed Church House over the homosexual priest business. Ever since joining the Church he had gone out of his way to live a life of obvious poverty, on the model of ancient saints like St Francis, but had managed at the same time to allow himself to be ambitious and had risen in the Church hierarchy so far that people murmured he’d make it to Canterbury yet.

  Well, she had thought, that explains the rather old and shabby though basically clean clothes the body had worn, as well as the paucity of pocket content. But that didn’t explain why he might have been chosen as a victim. And she had pushed her coffee beaker aside, pulled the Guardian from the other side of the table towards her and seized a red biro to scribble on it.

  First, she listed the victims to date, ‘SAM DIAMOND’, she printed, and then added as an afterthought, ‘(CON)’. She and Gus had agreed that these killings probably weren’t linked with party politicking yet all the same, you never knew …

  On the next line she wrote, ‘DAVID CASPAR-WYNETTE-GONDOR (LAB)’ and followed that with, ‘LORD SCROOP (IND)’ and finally, ‘BISHOP OF DROITWICH (JIMLUTTER)’. After a moment’s thought she added to that, ‘(CON)’ and looked at it. ‘Well,’ she said aloud. ‘He probably is, with all that traditional Church stuff.’ Then she thought again, scratched it out to put ‘(LAB)’ before thinking some more, and crossing that out and putting ‘(?)’. There was no point in trying to guess, after all. She’d find out later.

  Four dead men: what did they have in common, apart from the indignities done to their bodies in death? All of them had been strangled first, she was sure. She had found the same throat markings to suggest that on CWG and the Bishop’s bodies, though not so much on the body of Jack Scroop. But he had been dead a longer time, after all. There were good reasons why it was hard to tell. Well, she thought, that’s a beginning, and wrote it on her newspaper. Now, what else?

  Obviously, they were all part of the Houses of Parliament. Two were elected members, one had inherited his place and the last held his ex officio, by virtue of his job. But all members of the same establishment. Anything else? She chewed her biro and got red ink on her face as she pondered.

  After a while she wrote tentatively, ‘?ALL RADICALS’. Certainly CWG was; he ran right against the grain of the way people like him were supposed to behave. A scion of an aristocratic family yet as far to the left as it was possible for a member of Labour to be. Even the Party found him a touch too idealistic for them on occasion. And Scroop? What of him? A trade union man who had been elevated to the peerage to act as a Labour spokesman in the Lords and what did he do as soon as he got there? Refused to toe the line and became an Independent. That’s radical! And the Bishop, of course, insisting on making so much noise about things he disapproved of; he certainly displayed a sort of radicalism, when compared with the rather damp liberalism of the Church, which seemed to hate above all people who stepped out of line and made exhibitions of themselves, as Lutter undoubtedly had. He’d been on all radio and TV news bulletins and in every paper at regular intervals for ages. She scribbled down these facts, congratulating herself for sitting through so many news broadcasts and Panorama and Newsnight programmes when she had been too sleepy to make the effort to change the channels. Some of what she had heard on those august transmissions had clearly gone into her head.

  And then she stopped. What about Sam Diamond? He was no sort of radical, was he? A Tory with a comfortable majority and no history of ever stepping out of line. Except perhaps, via his wife … Again she scribbled. Perhaps having a wife who didn’t behave the way a virtuous Conservative wife ought to behave qualified him. Radical by association, that was Sam Diamond.

  A beginning, she had thought gleefully and then torn the scribbled page from the paper and attached it to the fridge door with a magnet shaped like a pig. There were things to do right now, and while she did them she’d think some more.

  So she did. She spent the day doing domestic things, slowly bringing a little more order to the remaining chaos of their move, even managing to get the curtain material ready for cutting, which was a start, at least. And all the time she pushed the four victims around in her head and tried to figure out what more there was that connected them and whether those connections, should they be studied, could be expected to point towards a motive for their deaths and via that motive, a murderer.

  And then, just before seven, when she had checked the chicken casserole she had
made, and found it rich, fragrant and a credit to her culinary skills, and had added a dollop of brandy to the fruit salad she had put together (with nuts in it as well of course; to Gus a fruit salad without nuts wasn’t worthy of the name), and tidied the kitchen, picking up the mutilated Guardian to dispose of it, she noticed a headline she hadn’t registered earlier, and stopped to read the article beneath it. And it hit her. Hit her so hard that the moment she heard his key in the front door, she went belting up the stairs two at a time from the kitchen to pull him in and cry, ‘Gus! I think I might have worked it out. The why, I mean. Oh, Gus, I really think I might be on to something!’

  16

  He refused to listen until both of them were sitting on the sofa in the cluttered living room with glasses in their hands. ‘I’m no boozer and no one can say I am,’ he interrupted when she tried to tell him what she’d been thinking. ‘But after the day I’ve had, I’m not about to listen to a word till I’ve got a little restorative under my belt.’ And with considerable expertise for a non-boozer set about making Bloody Marys for both of them.

  ‘All right,’ he said eventually as he stretched himself against the sofa cushions with a sigh of comfort. ‘What has the day spent among the fleshpots of home brought forth? Apart from dinner, that is. That chicken – it is chicken, isn’t it? – smells fabulous.’

  ‘It’s this.’ She pushed the Guardian at him.

  ‘The “Grauniad”? What is it this time? Have they started producing misprints again? I do hope so, I miss the old days.’

  ‘Read that headline,’ she said and obediently he bent his head and read.

  ‘ “The Destruction of Democracy”,’ he said. ‘The comment columnist?’

  ‘That’s it. Now read the article.’

  She sat watching him over the rim of her glass as he read, waiting with as much patience as she could. And when at last he raised his head and looked at her she said eagerly, ‘Well? Do you see?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said slowly and put the paper down. ‘This chap is suggesting that there could be some attempt to bring down not only this Government but also the Opposition, so that the whole party system is thoroughly discredited and the electorate will accept all the Independent candidates who will flood the hustings at the next election as a result?’

  ‘That’s how I read it too. He doesn’t say so in as many words, but the implication’s clear. All that fuss over the cash-for-questions affair, and then that business over the nuclear industry and the way so many MPs have been caught with their pants down in strange bedrooms this past few weeks –’

  ‘And you think there’s a connection between all this’ – he looked down at the paper – ‘and our killings?’

  ‘I do. I truly do. Look, suppose you were part of some group which is trying to change the system radically. Trying to get rid of the existing parties and just have Parliament run by individuals who don’t act together but do what they think’s best for themselves and their constituents – which, as that piece says, could be a disaster because it just opens up the way for some charismatic type to take over.’

  He shook his head. ‘Ducks, you’re talking about a deliberate conspiracy. And I don’t think that’s on for a moment.’

  ‘Why not? There’ve been conspirators before in this country – in every country.’

  ‘Oh, sure. But they’re itsy-bitsy schemes dreamed up by a handful of lunatics – zealots, then, if you don’t like the word – who come up with crazy notions. I just can’t see why you’re so excited about this.’ He tapped the paper. ‘It makes no mention of the deaths of our two MPs and a couple of blokes from the House of Lords, does it? He’s just floating a notion of his own about what’s been happening in the media recently. Journalists are getting smarter and finding out more. And taking more chances publishing it all. But believe me, sweetheart, these people who hang around Westminster and Whitehall aren’t smart enough to conspire. They’re much too busy looking after their own problems and pensions – and pockets – to make the effort.’

  She was stubborn. ‘It fits so well, Gus! One of the links between these four deaths is the fact that they were all radicals of one kind or another, but of the old-fashioned sort. There’s Sam Diamond who’s not one of your top people, the way Tories usually are, but who’s got – had – a wife who sells suggestive underwear and appears to be involved in some sort of racket – remembering what happened at Heathrow. Nothing very top peopleish about all that, is there?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They stopped being the fancy top-drawer element back when the grocer’s girl got to Number Ten. And you can hardly call the Prime Minister top class, can you? That hare won’t run.’

  ‘But the others! CWG was a burning hot idealist, a man of the people, who’d throw himself off Everest to protect Parliamentary democracy. And I think the same would have been true of Scroop. A trade union man like that, he’d have been on the same side as CWG must have been. As for Lutter: an idealist all the way to hell and back. They’d be so against any attempt to bring down the two parties, wouldn’t they, that they’d be blocks in the way of these people that column is about. Getting rid of them would make total sense.’

  Again he shook his head. ‘I can see it’s an attractive idea, but it doesn’t incorporate the other features we’ve got. Why mimic the Ripper killings, for example?’

  ‘Mimicking? But you’re wrong. That does fit in! There were definite attempts to hush all that up, weren’t there, at the time? People said they thought the killer might be a VIP in spades – Queen Victoria’s son, for God’s sake! And there were other theories. The main thing we know is that a hell of a lot of the available evidence never saw the light of a court. It was as though the police had orders, and a lot of pressure on them, to drag their feet and not find a perpetrator. Which would make sense if it was a VIP – and in this case I suspect the same sort of VIPs could be involved now and our killer is actually telling us this by using the Ripper MO. Did they call it that then? Modus operandi?’

  ‘Probably. And I do see what you mean there.’ He sounded judicious. ‘But what’s the point? If all you’re trying to do is get rid of some people who are a political nuisance to you? I grant you that could be a reason. I was involved in that business of the Bulgarian chap who was killed with ricin on an umbrella tip when he came out of the BBC at Bush House, so I know things like that happen, but then you just kill ’em where and when you can. You don’t expose yourself to appalling risks of being caught just so you fit a hundred-year-old case. And you don’t risk covering yourself with blood when you do it. Not just to send an esoteric message in a wacky code, to show us the killings are political.’

  She pounced on the latter point. ‘They were strangled first, remember?’ she said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So that means there wasn’t so likely to be blood in great spurts all over the killer. If you put a knife into a living artery, it’s like walking into a fountain. If the heart has stopped though, it’s just puddles, if you’re careful. And he always stood behind, remember, and so dodged any possible splashes. If he wore gloves and –’

  Gus leaned forwards and put a hand on her knee. ‘It won’t stand up, sweetheart. I can see what you mean, and I can see why you think it. When all the people being killed are involved in politics then it seems obvious there’s a political element. But let me offer you a different scenario.’

  ‘So offer.’ She was a little sulky. She’d expected if not enthusiasm at least a less dampening response.

  ‘I’m going back to the mad axe-killer idea. Or one of his ilk,’ he said. ‘It’s really the only one that makes sense. Here is a man who is in essence barking mad. He may seem, to his friends and neighbours, as normal as a nice cuppa, but underneath he seethes with paranoid notions. And one of ’em makes him hate politicians. And why not? There’s plenty of reason to hate them. Whenever they do surveys of people’s attitudes, politicians come higher on the list of those most people despise than even journa
lists.’

  ‘And policemen?’

  He ignored that. ‘And as you say yourself, they’ve had a particularly vicious press lately. Not that they haven’t earned it, of course. I can well see why someone with a bee in his bonnet about the buggers already might be tipped over into craziness and start to kill ’em off. But that’s incidental to the need to kill in a – in an elaborate repeated pattern. Who they kill is far less important than the fact that they kill someone. It’s pure accident a particular type is chosen – for the Ripper it was prostitutes, for our chummy it’s politicians. For another it might be lollipop ladies. It’s doing it that gives them satisfaction, not the identity of the person. And there’s something else I can tell you about these mad axemen. They love stories about mad axemen. If you look around their pads after you’ve caught ’em you find all these books about past killers and how they do what they do and where they do it. Our man’s one of those, mark my words, ducks. It’s going to be careful policework that’ll get him, not ratiocination in the booklined study and all that. It’s not Sherlock we need. It’s PC Plod.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you could say you’ve got him. Every time I look at Rupert I think – OK, let that go,’ as he opened his mouth to argue. ‘I’m going to disagree with you. Not completely, but a good deal. I know you don’t go along with gut feelings and hunches but –’

  ‘Where did you get that idea?’ He sounded genuinely surprised. ‘I’ve all the time in the world for them. I think they’re evidence of knowledge you’ve got and don’t know that you’ve got. If you act on them, eventually you trace out the lines of where the gut feelings came from. So I never ignore them.’

  ‘But you prefer to have a logical line of reasoning first. Or at least at the same time.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. Wouldn’t you in my place? But hang on to your hunches, sweetheart. If something else turns up to strengthen ’em, well, then we’ll look at ’em. But the one about a great political conspiracy I can’t take. And’ – he hesitated – ‘I’m not trying to come the old acid, but let’s face it, ducks, you’re a bit of a newcomer to British politics. You need to have lived here all your life and really studied it to make sense of it, I reckon. I’m a cockney born, bred and built in, and I don’t understand most of it, mainly on account of I’ve never had the time to waste on it – party politics, that is. But I know this much: we’re designed all wrong for the sort of thing this fella’s writing about.’ Again he tapped the paper. ‘And that you’ve been beguiled by. It just ain’t on. Not here.’