‘I had to tell someone.’
She drew an arrow that looped down from Bryony Dean to Len Pigeon, another that looped up from Martin Turner to Bryony: death’s dark connections. A skeleton map pinpointed locations and a line connected them: death’s geography.
She worked systematically, annotating the board with dates, times and circumstances, as if there might be a hidden link. Delaney drank his beer. He knew she was crying.
There was activity down on the field, but none where Woolf had parked the car, a no man’s land between the road and the field, sunless, the patch between the bushes and the wall strewn with cans and cigarette packets. He could hear distant voices and birdsong and a plane banking to find the Heathrow approach. He opened the driver’s door, then unloaded the boot. It wasn’t hard work and it didn’t take long. He drove the car to the top of the rise and just a fraction further, then applied the handbrake but left the engine running while he set things up. Then he went to the passenger’s side, opened the door, leaned in and released the handbrake.
The car went over the rise and out of sight. Woolf walked away without looking back, not hurrying, making for a nearby high street, the weekend shoppers, the anonymity of crowds. There was a tiny freckling of blood on his cheek, but only someone close enough to kiss would have found it.
No one saw the Volvo coming until it was fifty feet away. Parents screamed, kids ran in all directions. The car went through at speed, missing everything and everyone, until it ran into a play area on the far side, ploughing through swings and sideswiping a little wooden carousel before taking a climbing-frame full on, the engine racing for a moment, then cutting out. One of the first people to reach it was Peter the top-notch husband. He yanked open the driver’s door, then stared. He just stared. Other people arrived, and they stared too. After a moment Ben arrived at his father’s side and peered in through the open door.
It was a terrible accident, Ben could see that, though his father pulled him away before he could tell exactly what had happened to the driver. Peter had seen more. A man in the driver’s seat, his hands wired to the steering wheel. The neck-stump. The head on the passenger seat, wired in place.
What he hadn’t seen was the neatly inked words across the brow of the decapitated head:
HAPPY NOW?
62
They taped off the entire field and, when Andy Greegan spotted the divot of turf the Volvo had kicked up as it went over the rise, they tracked back and found tyre prints in ground that was still soft from the storm, so they taped the bushes and the wall as well.
The SOC tent covered the car and body, intact and unmoved. Fly-swarm was a major problem, but there was nothing to be done: chemical sprays would have contaminated the site. The photographers had to hunker down to get shots of the head in situ. The garden wire that held it in place had cut a furrow into the forehead; a second strand went across the mouth, leaving it open in a tortured, noiseless cry. There was something bizarre about the headless torso: its rigid back, the wrists wired to the wheel in the approved ten-to-two position. Lacking a face, it seemed utilitarian: a damaged crash-dummy. Only the dark red, meaty neck-stump and the protruding stub of neck-bone pronounced it once human.
Peter and Ben told what they could. They were questioned separately, Maxine Hewitt sitting down with the boy, Sue Chapman as back-up. Pete Harriman and Frank Silano sat down with Peter. They told much the same story, except that Peter had more to tell, having had the longer look. Neither Maxine nor Harriman spent much time over the interviews. They had fifty other people to talk to.
Stella was in with Collier, who had been fielding seamlessly joined telephone calls. In order to be able to talk to her, he’d taken the phone off the hook, and its klaxon was wailing at him.
He said, ‘I don’t know what the fuck to do.’ Stella said nothing. Collier reached round, took his jacket off the back of his chair and threw it over the phone. ‘Do you?’ He looked at her as if she were holding out on him. ‘How do we nail this bastard?’
‘It’s the toughest crime to solve, you know that.’
‘I’m getting it from all directions. The press. The SIO…’ He lit a cigarette, cupping one hand round the lighter as if he were standing in a wind.
A man who can see the end of his tether, Stella thought. To her surprise, she felt almost sorry for him: out of his depth and signalling wildly for help.
He said, ‘Sometimes they just don’t get caught, do they? Serials. Sometimes they just stop, and that’s an end to it.’
‘Often,’ Stella observed.
‘Yes, often.’
‘Or they make a mistake.’ She shrugged. ‘Dennis Nilsen’s drains. Peter Sutcliffe’s false licence plates.’
‘This guy’s not making mistakes.’
Stella said, ‘Or else he’s already made one, and we haven’t noticed.’
The squad-room detritus covered desks and spilled from bins. Sue Chapman informed everyone that the cleaners were on strike for better conditions. It wasn’t clear what sort of conditions those were, though Pete Harriman offered the opinion that they might want things to be altogether… well… cleaner. Sue had brought in some black bin-bags.
Silano had pinned the new scene-of-crime shots to the white-board and used a magenta marker to fill in the stats. This time Stella was running the session. Collier stood a little to one side, trying to look as if he might have something to say later.
‘Victim,’ Stella said, ‘George Nelms. Sixty-one, retired schoolteacher, widowed, lived alone, no police record, no bad habits that we know of, not that we expected to find any. Mr Average. He lived quietly, he was liked by his neighbours. He employed someone to cook and clean for him. At weekends he was a volunteer helper at Green Lane Fields sports facility. He was killed by a single transverse cut to the throat. I haven’t got the post-mortem findings yet, but, when I have them, they’ll be circulated. His head was severed from his body: you’ll have had all the details from the crime report by email.
‘There seems little doubt that this is the fourth in a series of apparently motiveless murders: the writing on the victim’s forehead indicates as much.’ She stopped as if the bald facts were all she had to offer – which was pretty much the case. ‘We’ll just have to proceed with this as we have with the other deaths. Talk to your contacts, just in case something’s trickled down to street level. We’re putting a yellow-board up by the sports field. It’ll carry Crimestoppers’ number and our number’ – she shrugged – ‘who knows?
‘We’re giving the press everything except the writing: so, the make, year and number of the Volvo, the place, the exact time, victim ID, and the fact that he was decapitated. We’ve also said that we consider Nelms to be the most recent victim of a serial killer. This means that we’ll have a press feeding frenzy to cope with, no question, and high levels of criticism, and more than the usual nutters phoning in to confess, but we’ve reached the stage where saturation looks like the only option. Anyway, it would be pointless to pretend. The press have been screaming “serial” for a week or more. Okay… any ideas?’
The floor fan in the corner ticked. Someone’s phone played its message tune. An ARV pulled out of Notting Dene, its siren picking up.
The AMIP-5 squad room declared itself an ideas-free zone.
63
Monica Hartley sat in an upright chair, her hands folded in her lap. She had applied a dab of lipstick for the occasion. A dab of lipstick, a blouse with a frill, her outdoor shoes. She said, ‘I went in every other day. On the days I went in, I made enough for the next day. He didn’t mind eating the same thing twice, he wasn’t fussy like that. They say his head was cut off. They say it was in the papers. He was in the car, but his head was off. Is it true?’
Stella said it was true.
Monica said, ‘I cleaned for him as well. I did two hours’ cleaning and tidying and an hour cooking. I did three hours every other weekday. Does anyone know who’ll get the house?’
Stella said she had no
idea.
Monica said, ‘I think there are relatives. His wife died five years back, but I think there are relatives. I think he had cousins. First or second cousins. Where was his head, then? Where did that turn up?’
Harriman coughed, or else it was a smothered laugh. Stella said that George Nelms’s head had been found in the car.
‘He had his routines, you know? He was regular in his habits. I can’t think that anyone disliked him. I never saw anyone go to the house. I went regular, but I never saw anyone else. He helped out at the sports ground weekends. He was a teacher before he retired. He was history and sports, I think. The thing about the house, the reason I mentioned the house, I’m wondering if he left any sort of a will.’
Stella said she didn’t know.
‘The reason I mention a will is because I wonder about what happens if he didn’t. If there isn’t a will to be had. I wonder about what sort of claim I could make.’
Stella wondered too. She asked about the nature of the claim Monica had in mind.
‘Common-law wife,’ Monica explained. ‘I just wonder whether that gives me a right. I think it does. More than a cousin, you might say. More than a second cousin. Common law, isn’t it? That’s how it seems to me, because I used to give him sex. After his wife died, not before. I used to go in every other day, and it was what he wanted, he told me straight out. So giving him sex, giving him sex over five years, that’s common-law wife in my book. Cleaning and cooking and giving sex, they’re all wifely duties, no one could say any different, so who do I talk to about that?’
Harriman was looking at the floor and biting his lip. Stella said she had no advice to offer on the subject.
Monica showed them to the door. She said, ‘I liked him, but he never had much to say for himself.’
Harriman pulled out into a box junction and sat on the grid listening to a chorus of horns.
He said, ‘Is that right? Is she right about that?’
‘Definitely,’ Stella said. ‘A man gets laid, he loses sole ownership of his house. It’s as it should be.’
When the message tone had gone off during Stella’s briefing, it had been a text to Harriman from Gloria: Last night? Best fuck in history.
‘I’ve had a thought,’ Harriman told her. ‘I wonder whether he meant to decapitate Leonard Pigeon. The incision went right to the neck-bone, I remember that.’
‘And he was interrupted, you think?’
‘It was on the towpath, there must have been people about.’
‘But no one saw him.’
‘Maybe it was all taking too long. He panicked.’
‘He doesn’t strike me as a panicker.’
‘Okay, not panicked. Just didn’t have the time. What did the crime-scene analysis tell us?’
‘About what?’
‘About how he left the scene?’
‘Behind the bench there are bushes, beyond the bushes an iron fence, then a ditch, a field, a road. That seems to have been his route.’
‘Right. He didn’t have to walk along the towpath to get away. So maybe he did see someone coming.’
‘Okay, maybe. But he hanged Bryony Dean, and he shot Martin Turner.’
‘So is there some sort of pattern to that? A hanging, a shooting, a decapitation.’
‘Meaning that’s what he intended, and he cut Nelms’s head off, because first time round, with Leonard Pigeon, it didn’t go right.’
‘That’s what I’m saying, yes.’
Stella nodded. ‘And the pattern, if it is a pattern, tells you what?’
‘No, I didn’t say I had a theory about what the pattern might mean. Just a theory about the pattern.’
‘If it is a theory.’
‘Yes.’
‘Big step forward,’ Stella said.
They drove in silence for a while, Harriman shooting amber lights and overtaking on the inside. He said, ‘That’s common law? One fuck and you’re out on the street?’
Candice Morgan looked out of the window at the mid-range Honda illegally parked across the driveway. She said, ‘Is that actually a police car, or are they trying to be undercover?’
Neil Morgan was speed-reading the press, the semi-literate tabloids and all the broadsheets, scanning them for a mention of himself. He had a secretary and a cuttings agency who also did this, but he liked to be ahead of the sort of back-stabbing name-check some journalists favoured. He said, ‘Our security services are cash-strapped. I made a speech on the subject last week.’
Candice’s suitcases stood in the hallway. She said, ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t go.’
‘Why not?’
‘If they’re right. If he really meant to kill you, not Len.’
Candice and the girls took a break twice a year: Paris, New York, Rome. A break from husbands and the round of tennis, lunch, gym, charity work. This time it was Madrid.
Morgan smiled. ‘Candice, I have visible police protection. I’m not sure what you think you might usefully add to that. Go. Have a good time. Bring me something back.’
She said, ‘They just sit out there with their coffee and cigarettes. I could be in here chopping your head off with a meat cleaver.’
‘You wouldn’t know where to find it.’
‘It’s in the kitchen.’
‘My point exactly.’
They were the sort of jokes any couple might make, though there was a drop of acid in the tone, a chip of ice in the look. Morgan’s mobile rang, and he glanced at the LCD display, then let it ring.
‘You’re avoiding someone,’ Candice observed.
‘A business call.’ He realized that sounded odd, so he added: ‘Unimportant business.’
Candice was wearing a robe, though she was fully made up. She had fine features and an aristocratically long face that looked better with nothing but a light tan, but she was too aware of the faint lines by her eyes and the corners of her mouth. The lapel of the robe had fallen to one side, revealing the globe of her breast, and Morgan glanced at it reflexively.
She said, ‘It’ll be good to get away from London for a few days.’
A limo was double parked alongside the Honda. The driver, carrying Candice’s suitcases, came down the steps from Morgan’s house.
Candice looked into the sitting room on her way out and said goodbye. Morgan was taking a call on his mobile. He blew her a kiss. After the front door closed, he said, ‘Look, I did what I could. These guys seem to think I’ve got the say-so on this. Not true. I know people who have, but that’s a different matter.’
Bowman said, ‘They paid you.’
‘To do a job. I’ve mentioned their name. I’ve mentioned it several times. What more do they expect?’
‘When you met with them, you were more positive, that’s what I hear. That’s their recollection.’
‘When I met them…’ Morgan hesitated. ‘Things were a little different. You know how it is in politics.’
‘Not really.’
Morgan tried to muddy the issue. ‘People move on, people who might have been useful, you have to take time to develop new allies.’
It was a brand of bullshit Bowman had slipped up in before. He said, ‘Maybe I’d better come and see you.’
‘That wouldn’t be helpful.’
‘We could talk this through.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Morgan said. ‘I’m caught up in other things just now.’
‘The Americans are eager that we sort something out. They think it ought to be possible to formulate some sort of ongoing strategy.’
‘Really?’ said Morgan. ‘The Americans think that? Look, tell the Americans to go fuck themselves.’
He flipped the phone shut. It was a confident gesture, but it didn’t reflect the way he felt. He opened the phone and made a call. He said, ‘She’s gone to Madrid.’ Then, ‘No, not tonight. There’s someone I have to see.’
Abigail said, ‘Oh, well… Sure. Okay.’
It was disappointment masquerading as indifference.
Morgan said, ‘I want to see you, of course. It’s something I wasn’t expecting. Something I ought to take care of.’
Abigail picked up on the note of anxiety in his voice. ‘Are you all right, Neil?’
‘Fine. Look, tomorrow, okay? Tomorrow for sure.’
‘Yes.’ A pause, then she said, ‘I’ll be here.’ As if it had ever been in doubt.
He made a few calls, answered a few letters, tried to settle in his study with some committee reports, but the words ran on the page. He wandered round the house. He made coffee he forgot to drink.
Finally, he called Bowman back. ‘Okay, let’s meet. If you’re worried, if the Americans are worried… Here’s the problem: I’m under police protection. It’s a precaution.’ He offered no explanation, so Bowman assumed terrorism. ‘So far as I know, they photograph anyone who calls at the house. You don’t want that.’
‘No? Why not? We could be meeting for any number of reasons.’ Bowman laughed. ‘Offshore-investment packages, perhaps.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Ah, well… that’s a different issue.’
‘I’ll try to lose them. Meet you somewhere…’ Morgan considered for a moment, then gave Abigail’s address. ‘Sometime after dark. So: ten o’clock?’
Bowman said, ‘If I get there first?’
‘Someone will let you in.’
‘Okay,’ Bowman said. Then: ‘Is she pretty?’
Morgan called Abigail. He said, ‘I’ll be there at ten, okay?’
‘Sure.’ She sounded pleased. ‘What changed?’
‘The person I have to see? We’re meeting at your place. Ten o’clock.’
‘Okay.’
‘Just a brief meeting.’
‘Okay.’
‘A private meeting.’
‘I’ll watch TV in the bedroom.’
‘It means I can see you after all.’ As if he’d arranged things to that end, as if he’d been beating his brain to think of a way.
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