A spinner with STAND on one side and FAST on the other was advertising a minicab rank. Bloss made a deal with one of the drivers and they went down to Notting Hill and ordered drinks in the Ocean Diner.
He said, ‘Here’s how it works. You pick your ground, you pick your person, you pick your method. If there’s no connection between you, you can’t be caught. In order to be caught, you have to make a mistake. That’s why I wanted to make it look as if Valerie and Sophie had been done by whoever attacked the other women – because it’s likely he’ll make a mistake. There was nothing between Valerie and me; nothing between Sophie and me.’ He was drinking whisky over ice, rolling it round his mouth, savouring it. ‘Except that I killed them, of course.’
‘Did you follow them?’
‘Follow...?’
‘For a few days, maybe. A week or so. Beforehand.’
Bloss shook his head. ‘Went out. Chose someone’ – he made a short, chopping motion with his right hand, the hammer coming down – ‘took my chance.’
‘I’d follow,’ Kimber said. A man with his preferences; a man with his own way of doing things. ‘I’d want to follow for a bit. Get to know them, get a good sense of them. Tease myself with it.’
‘Riskier,’ Bloss advised. ‘You can be seen.’
‘I’m never seen. I’m the invisible man.’
While they were talking, Kimber had been watching people go by in the street. Bloss followed his eyeline and laughed. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘any of them. Pick any one of them.’
Suddenly, Kimber seemed feverish. His eyes glistened. ‘What should I use?’
Bloss finished his drink and signalled for another. He said, ‘You have to look at possibilities, weigh things up. It’s winter. It’s cold. People are wearing heavy coats and other clothing underneath. A knife could be deflected, or might not go deep enough. Do you see what I mean? You might not get the depth. You’re probably coming up behind the person, so you want your first move to be decisive. More than that, you’ll have chosen your ground. You’ll have found the place. So you don’t want that person getting clear, getting into the open.’
‘A hammer,’ Kimber suggested, taking a tip from the expert.
‘A hammer’s good. A hammer works.’ Bloss waved a hand to the barman and held up three fingers – make it a triple. ‘Now, there’s the question of whether you want to kill that person outright, kill her right there and then, or whether you want to spend some time with her.’
‘Spend time...?’
‘You see, that can be a tricky thing. You want to spend some time, so you try and get the swing just right, hard enough to put her down but not so she’s dead. Maybe not even out, but let me tell you, that’s more luck than judgement. Some people have thin skulls.’
Kimber had a schooner of beer in front of him, almost untouched. ‘Valerie?’ he asked.
‘Sophie. Second strike, the hammer went through. Went through and stuck. I had to stand on her shoulder and heave to get it back.’ Bloss laughed. ‘Here’s a tip, Bobby. Get a reversible coat. There’s always a bit of a problem.’
‘Problem?’
‘Splatter problem.’
Bloss’s drink arrived and he took a long swallow. Kimber said, ‘It’s Robert.’
‘What?’
‘Not Bobby – Robert.’
‘And babywipes. Don’t forget the babywipes.’
A car alarm kicked in directly outside the diner, started by nothing more than the wind. On the other side of the road, a beggar was sitting on her sleeping-bag and playing the penny whistle, her Christmas carol drowned out by the two-tone shriek.
‘Now there’s a good hit,’ Bloss suggested. ‘Street-people. No one knows them, no one gives a fuck.’
‘A bit impersonal,’ Kimber said.
Bloss looked at him and laughed. ‘You’re right. Bobby, you’re so right.’
Earlier, Bloss had watched as Kimber unpacked. The photos that Kimber had pasted to his walls were in an artist’s portfolio along with the card of hair-clippings. While Kimber went round the tiny flat distributing his belongings, Bloss sat quietly by the window holding the card, his fingertips making the faintest contact with the blonde, the brown, the red, the black. He wasn’t looking at the snippets, but his hands moved like those of a blind man, tracing the features of a loved one whose face he’d never seen. He lifted the mounting-card closer and took the scent: still a trace of perfume, he thought, and, somehow, wonderfully, a trace of the girls themselves.
Now he took a long pull at his Scotch and said, ‘Oh, Bobby, you’re so right.’
Anne Beaumont was wearing a top coat and a scarf. She opened the door to Stella and said, ‘It’s after ten.’
‘You’re going out.’
‘I just got in.’
Anne opened the door a little wider and Stella stepped inside. She said, ‘Jesus, it’s cold.’
They went downstairs to a basement kitchen and Anne took a bottle of red wine from the rack. She said, ‘I was listening to the car radio: someone said it’s too cold for snow. Difficult to work that one out, since the North Pole’s under about fifty feet of it.’ She handed Stella a glass of wine and Stella gave her the video, as if it were a fair exchange. ‘If this is a scene of crime vid,’ Anne warned her, ‘I can’t watch it on an empty stomach.’
‘It’s not.’
‘I need to eat anyway. Want something?’
They made pasta, which gave Anne long enough to watch the masked man several times. When Kimber got to the list of things he wanted to do to Valerie Blake, she closed her eyes as if it were a defence against the damp, pink lips pursing through silk and lingering on those obscenities.
‘Have some Parmesan,’ she said; then, ‘This is him, is it? The Collector.’
‘Robert Adrian Kimber.’
‘He’s got a lively imagination.’
‘We can’t find him. He’s gone. What I want to know –’
‘Is whether this tape tells us anything we didn’t know before. Well, the answer’s yes and no.’ Anne was hungry. She gathered spaghetti on her fork and ate it while Stella waited. ‘Remember I said that matters can escalate? A journal’s one thing; it’s for his own amusement. The tape is something else; it’s to bring him into the life of his victim. While he’s following her, the trick is to keep out of sight – to remain unknown. Okay, he doesn’t want to be identified, obviously, hence the mask, but he does want her to know he’s there. The kind of control he gets from following – the kind of power – is his to know about. Now he wants her to know about it too; he wants her to be frightened. She sees that tape and he’s an indelible part of her life, not just when she watches it, not for a couple of weeks, but for ever. That might be the purpose. That might be the endgame. It depends how much closer he needs to get. Whether he needs to see the effect of his power over her, see it happening.’
‘Which would consist of –?’
‘A confrontation. But there’s another version of that – confrontation by proxy. That’s why he confessed. Okay, he’d done that before, so the Judas Syndrome was already at work in him, but then something altogether more dramatic happens. Think about it: someone he’s been following gets murdered. Not just any victim, but Valerie. His Valerie. Think of the mixed emotions. She’s been taken from him: an outrage. Someone else has singled her out: a greater outrage. But the logical extension of his power-play – Valerie’s death – someone’s done that for him; outrage, perhaps, but also relief. Relief and excitement. He has to be a part of that, he can’t let it go by. So he says it was him. Maybe he half believes it was. You’re eating and I’m not.’ Anne forked up some more pasta and, for a short while, they ate in silence.
Finally, Stella asked, ‘And the tape?’
‘Well, he made the tape before Valerie’s death, so his assumption was that she’d get it, watch it, be terrified by it. The question is, what next? He can’t follow her any more after this. She’d go to the police, they’d be on the case. He could keep sending
her videos, I suppose, but I can’t see that being satisfactory for very long – same performance every time, really; same script, same costume. Boring.’
‘So you think he’d do what?’
‘I think he’d either stop – move on to someone else – or he’d kill her.’
‘Which?’
Anne smiled. ‘I know you think psychiatry is a question of calculating the odds, but people are unpredictable, especially those you’ve never talked to, never met and know almost nothing about.’
‘Apart from the journal and the tape.’
‘Right, so he’s a type but not a person. Dealing with type is largely guesswork.’
‘So guess.’
Ann poured more wine. She said, ‘You’ve got spaghetti sauce on your chin.’ Then, ‘I think he’s ready to kill.’
‘Too cold to snow’ might be a fallacy, but that’s still pretty cold. When Anne opened the door to the street, Stella stepped out and turned with something to say but didn’t say it.
‘What?’ Anne asked.
‘Delaney went to see him.’
‘Kimber?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘The Judas Syndrome – he thought it was a nifty title.’
‘Oh, so it’s my fault.’
‘It would help if you owned up to that, yes.’
Anne laughed. ‘He can see an article in it.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And why not?’ Anne asked. ‘Do you want to come back in, because it’s quite astonishingly cold?’
‘No, I’m going. It’s not so much that he wanted to write a piece, it’s more that I asked him not to.’
‘Write the piece or see Kimber?’
‘Both.’
‘And you have a right to ask that?’
‘A psychoanalyst’s question.’
Anne shrugged. ‘I’m a psychoanalyst.’
‘But not my psychoanalyst.’
‘So why are you asking all these questions that I’m answering while freezing my tits off and not being paid?’
‘He went to see Kimber, he didn’t tell me he was going to, and he hasn’t told me that he did it. He was working off privileged information, things I’d said to him in confidence. It might well have compromised me. It was sneaky.’
‘A sneaky journalist. There’s a first.’
‘He’s my sneaky journalist, that’s the point.’
‘So you feel –’
‘Betrayed.’
‘That’s a big word. Very big word. For Jesus Christ’s sake, come into the hall, I’ve lost all feeling in my fingers.’
‘No, I’m going. What should I do? Confront him? Wait for him to tell me? Leave it until the piece appears and act outraged? Tell me as a friend.’
‘Your problem,’ Anne said, ‘is not so much the fact that he’s done it as whether he might do it again. My problem is that I have frostbite.’
‘So what are you saying – wait and see?’
Anne was closing the door as she said, ‘That’s what life is – a matter of wait and see.’
Stella walked towards her car. She said, ‘Why did I fucking ask?’
*
Bloss was drunk, the kind of settled-in drunkenness that would take a long time to bottom out. He wanted to do some more drinking, but thought he’d better go home to do that. There was a tendency to rashness in him.
He left the Ocean Diner with Kimber at his heels; just the right place for him to be. Sadie and Jamie were getting ready to bed down in the side alley. As he passed, Bloss handed Sadie a ten-pound note. He said, ‘There’s a good night’s sleep in that,’ and laughed, bird-like and shrill. Sadie took the money and turned away from the alley, hungry to make a connection.
It was late but the streets were full and the bars were on long licence. The Gate Cinema was showing It’s a Wonderful Life. In the estate agents’ windows, colour snaps of six-bedrooms-four-bathrooms that could be yours for a cool two mill were linked by tinsel streamers.
A girl went by, a pretty bottle blonde, and Bloss nudged Kimber, laughing. ‘Could be her.’
Another was wearing a fur hat, a quilted coat and tall heels; a pale, perfectly oval face beneath the hat. ‘Could be her.’
Another crossed the road towards them, long-limbed, auburn hair caught by the wind. Good to look at. ‘Could be her.’
They were all good to look at.
Bloss took Kimber by the bicep and gave a squeeze. ‘We’ll do it, Bobby. We’ll do it together.’
Stella took a drink through to the bedroom, where Delaney was watching TV. He switched it off when she came in.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘keep watching.’
‘It was just some cop show. Big Shit Cop was a tough guy who broke all the rules to get things done, but you loved him for it.’
She smiled. ‘That’s the way it is with Big Shit Rulebreaker Cops.’
‘How did it go?’
‘We got there. He was out.’ She didn’t say ‘gone’. She didn’t say ‘not going back’ and she didn’t say ‘your fault’. There’s no virtue in a confession when the confessor has nothing to lose.
‘You’ll peg him another day.’
‘Oh, sure.’
He sampled her drink, then set it aside and drew her on to the bed. He kissed her and she kissed him back, of course she did, but all the time they were making love she was thinking bad thoughts.
31
I will call this one Monica.
I will call this one Nancy.
I will call this one Olivia.
I will call this one Patricia.
I will call this one Rosina.
This is a good place for photographs. My new adress. I can open the window and photograph them as they go by. Its a main road. I am looking for a special one. My friend Leon Bloss and I are looking for a special one. I dont know what shes like but Ill know her when I see her.
This is different to before.
But he just likes the end of it. Thats how it was with Valerie and Sophie he told me he just went out and found someone and did it. That was it. End of story. Not for me. Ill find someone and follow her a bit get close and know her a bit and that will make it different. Make it more sniffy-wiffy more touchy-feely. Smell the perfume off her hair and maybe brush her shoulder on the tube or listen to her making a call on her mobile phone know what her voice sounds like. Thats what Ill do.
Maybe Ill go and see Nancy being just down the street. Maybe Ill give her a ring. There was one today a redhead but I dont know if it was natural she was wearing a long black coat no buttons just a belt and the coat opened as she walked and she had on a short skirt and bright colured tights and boots. She was choice. I snapped her as she crossed the road I took three or four. I called her Patricia. Now shes up on the wall. If shes a regular Ill follow her.
Theres another wears a leather coat with fur on the collar and round the sleeves. Shes blonde I think its natural but she wears a red hat woollen what they call a beanie cherry red youd call it. Shes the one Ive called Monica. I dont see her so much but I like the look of her. She went into a shop and bought some CDs. I followed her to her flat which is not far and looked up at the window for a while and saw her looking out she didnt see me. It could be her. Choose her perhaps. She might do. She might well do. But I like Patricias short skirt and I like her red hair.
Its just a step its just one step further.
I had a dream last night. I was flying across London and I could see everyone all the girls Ive ever photographed or followed but they couldnt see me. I was the invisible man. And I could walk through walls but they couldnt see me doing that ether. I could walk through walls and get into where they lived but then I was there and they had gone and I felt alone and sad. It was like a dream I used to have when I was small.
Leon says Ive got to get my giro from a different post office each week then they cant track you. I think Ill give Nancy a ring or I could just go up the street their ten a penny up there. A
ll of them are foreign who would miss them? Their trash.
I wish he wouldnt call me Bobby.
I think Ill go out for a walk. I think Ill go and see who I can find. Patricia or Monica or another.
32
There was frost in the air and a high wind-chill factor when Roseanne Cotter walked into Paddington Green nick. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a light sweater, and there was a touch of blue about her lips and tear-streaks on her face. She was carrying a photograph, a holiday snap of herself and her husband in Majorca. She gave the photo to the desk sergeant.
She said, ‘His name’s Martin.’ Her hand remained outstretched as if she might take the photo back, as if she’d had second thoughts. Then she added, ‘The girl on the towpath. All the others. His name’s Martin.’ She was shivering, but it had nothing to do with the weather.
The local CID lifted Martin Cotter twenty minutes later. He’d been asleep and woke up to a ring of cops round his bed, all wearing Kevlar vests and protective headgear and carrying semi-automatic weapons. He lifted his head from the pillow and looked round as if there might be some simple explanation for this, then realized that there was.
He said, ‘Roseanne.’
They kept their guns trained on him as he got out of bed, but he was carrying nothing more than a hangover and a lean stare. Roseanne had told them where to look: they went down to the small basement where Martin kept a DIY workroom. His tools were racked in order of type and size and they gleamed, so although the forensics team would later remove them for testing, no one expected the tools to tell a story.
They also found items of women’s clothing, mostly underwear, all bloodstained, and that was where the story both began and ended.
Pete Harriman fielded the call from Paddington Green detectives, then he and Stella took the Westway flyover and sat in traffic for thirty minutes listening to a radio news show called Christmas Round the World. Reports came in of slaughter in the Middle East and a gore-fest in Africa and Harriman laughed out loud. ‘Peace on earth,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t that the idea? Goodwill towards men.’
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