“Not a thing,” Metcalfe replied savagely. “A bloody useless witness. It was almost as if he was wilfully refusing to remember anything.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t like the police,” Karen cut in quietly.
“Whatever the case,” Collison said ruefully, “there’s not a lot we can do about it. It’s not as though he’s a suspect, after all.”
“Excuse me, guv,” Priya Desai said suddenly, “but why not?”
There was total silence as everyone in the room turned to look at her. She looked embarrassed, but determined.
“Explain,” Collison asked simply.
“Look at the board, sir.” She walked to the front of the room and pointed. “You wrote these words yourself. We think our killer is an opportunist who has a vehicle in which he can carry his murder kit. Well, a taxi is a vehicle. A taxi driver meets a lot of lone women, especially at night, and we know that a taxi driver was the last person to see our fifth victim alive.”
Collison stared at her. So did Metcalfe. So did everybody.
“God in heaven, why am I such an idiot?” Collison cried. “Bob, find Hazel and get him back here. If he won’t come voluntarily, arrest him on suspicion of murder. And find his bloody cab and get Forensics to go over it molecule by molecule.”
“Shall I check for previous convictions?” asked Willis.
“I’ve already done that,” Metcalfe answered. “He’s clean so far as CRO’s concerned. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have got his cabbie’s licence.”
“Well done, Bob,” Collison said. “At least one of us has got his wits about him. Now, get moving. Priya, can I have a word?”
While Metcalfe was giving orders behind him, he drew her aside. “Priya,” he said earnestly, “when this case is over, remind me to have a serious chat with you about what you’d like to do in the force.”
“Thank you, sir,” she replied with a sudden grin. “I will.”
When Ronnie Hazel reappeared he was, if anything, even more sullen and uncooperative than before. He was also very angry.
“What the hell’s all this about?” he demanded as soon as Collison entered the room. “We’ve just been through all of this. If you can’t bloody well remember what questions to ask, that’s not my problem, mate. I’ve got a living to earn.”
“We’ll try not to keep you longer than necessary,” Collison replied mildly while Metcalfe switched on the tape recorder, “but I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to drive your cab for a while anyway. We need to take a look at it.”
“Look at it? Why?”
“Evidence. After all, the murdered woman did sit in it, didn’t she? She might have dropped something out of her handbag, for example. It happens.”
“Nah,” said Hazel dismissively. Collison and Metcalfe both looked at him quizzically.
“You seem very sure of that,” murmured Collison.
“Course I am. I’d have found it when I cleaned it this morning, wouldn’t I?”
“How often do you clean your cab?” asked Metcalfe. “Inside, I mean?”
“As often as it needs it. Every couple of days, I suppose, with a proper steam clean once a month, or thereabouts. Just so happens it was this morning—with the steam, that is.”
They both stared at him for a few seconds.
“Do you mean to say,” Collison asked grimly, “that you knew we wanted to talk to you about a murdered woman and yet you steam-cleaned your cab, thus destroying any forensic evidence that it might contain?”
“Yeah, what of it?” Hazel was growing more belligerent. “Good job I did, innit? If it’s no good to you, I can get back in it and start earning some money, rather than wasting my time here.”
“I see you don’t properly understand the situation, Mr Hazel,” Collison told him calmly. “So far as we can ascertain, you were the last person to see Katherine Barker alive. Earlier today we gave you every opportunity to tell us exactly when and where you last saw her, which you were very reluctant to do. That being the case, I am going to detain you for questioning under caution on suspicion of murder.”
Hazel went a bright pink colour and subsided abruptly onto a chair.
“Do you wish to say anything at this stage?” Collison continued, delivering the formal caution they all knew by heart. “You do not have to say anything, but that it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything which you do say may be given in evidence.”
Hazel made an inarticulate gurgling noise.
“We’ll take that as a ‘no,’ I think,” Collison said briskly. “Now let’s take you to see the custody sergeant. Then we can come back here and have a proper chat.”
It turned out their chat was to be somewhat delayed, however. The custody sergeant took one look at Hazel and promptly asked him if he had any history of heart trouble or high blood pressure. When he nodded in reply, the sergeant took Collison to one side.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, “but I don’t like the look of him, really I don’t. He’s got ‘heart attack’ written all over him. I’d like to call the duty doctor to take a look. Once he okays him for further questioning, you can have him back.”
“Fair enough,” said the superintendent with a sigh. “But see if you can hurry things up, will you? Coffee, Bob?”
“Why not?”
“Damn,” said Collison as they sat down in the canteen. “I didn’t want to caution him unless I had to. Now the clock’s ticking. I was hoping we could shock him into saying something before he thought to ask for a lawyer.”
“Worth a try,” Metcalfe said sympathetically. “I’d have done the same myself.”
“Yes, but it didn’t work. Now we have to justify continuing to hold him, and we’ve got a doctor crawling all over him, and he’s bound to ask for a brief.”
“Worth it anyway,” said Metcalfe with a smile. “At least it shut the surly little bugger up. Came as quite a shock, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Collison slowly, “which isn’t great. Certainly seemed like the reaction of an innocent man.”
“Oh, come on, sir, you had no choice but to go for it. He has a vehicle, he’s constantly having chance encounters with lone women late at night, we know that he was the last person to see the Barker woman alive. At the very least we need to check his alibis for the other murders.”
“That’s all true,” Collison agreed, “but maybe he would have given us all that voluntarily anyway.”
Metcalfe snorted. “Fat chance! He wasn’t exactly bending over backwards to help, was he?”
“I suppose not.”
“Anyhow, he’s all we’ve got.”
“Yes,” Collison concurred grimly. “He’s all we’ve got.”
They lapsed into silence.
“Tell you what,” said Collison after a few moments. “If we’ve got to wait to interview Hazel anyway let’s go back and check his whereabouts for the other killings with his wife, and let’s get Peter Collins in this afternoon instead of tomorrow.”
Desai was despatched to interview Mrs Hazel but Collison’s frustration grew by the hour. It seemed the custody sergeant was having trouble finding a duty doctor. In response to the suggestion that they should simply call a doctor from the Royal Free Hospital, which was just down the road, he muttered darkly that “It has to be someone on my list.”
When Metcalfe brought the afternoon edition of the evening paper into the incident room and laid it down before him with a meaningful expression, his stress levels rocketed some more. Spread across the front page was the headline “Cops detain suspect in hunt for serial killer.”
“Oh dear God, no.” He groaned involuntarily.
“Sorry, guv,” Metcalfe said with feeling. “Looks like we have a real problem here—within the team, I mean.”
“Agreed,” said Collison quietly, “but short of placing everybody under surveillance and tapping their phone calls, what can we do?”
“Excuse me, sir,” Will
is cut in, “but Peter is here.”
“Great!” said Collison thankfully. “Here’s one person I can look to for good news, at least.” He stood up and clapped his hands for attention. “Gather round please, everyone,” he called. “Let’s hear what Dr Collins has to say.”
Dr Collins, who was dressed in a sports jacket, a watch chain leading into his breast pocket, looked ill at ease.
“Well, er, hello again everyone,” he began uncertainly. “I suppose before we go any further I should stress that what I’m about to say is pure conjecture. Personal conjecture, I mean.”
“But based on the facts, surely?” said Collison, with a reassuring smile.
“Based on the facts, certainly,” Peter replied cautiously, “but you must bear in mind that any two or three psychologists might come up with two or three different interpretations. This is not a precise science.
“In fact,” he continued, warming to his task, “Popper even questioned whether it is really a science at all, you know.”
He gazed around the team as if looking to spark a debate. Karen intervened quickly. “Why don’t you just give us your views, Peter? I’m sure the guvnor can decide for himself what to make of them.”
“All right then.” He looked around for somewhere to sit down, ignored the proffered chair and perched instead on the edge of a desk. “First and foremost, our killer is most probably a loner. He either lives alone, or has a job which involves him spending a lot of time on his own, possibly travelling.”
“So it could be a driver—a taxi driver maybe—even if he was married?” Metcalfe interjected.
“It’s possible,” mused Collins, “though I really had in mind something like a travelling salesman, or a long distance lorry driver. I don’t think our man has any sort of proper relationship with a woman, and if he doesn’t live alone then that situation would be difficult to sustain unless he was away from home for quite lengthy periods.”
Collison motioned Metcalfe to hold back and said, “Go on.”
“I’m having problems categorising him,” Collins said thoughtfully. “The serial killer’s motivation usually falls into one of two broad groups: punishment or fantasy friendship. In the first case, the killer believes that women are evil and deserve to be punished. Sometimes this feeling is limited to prostitutes, but in more extreme cases it can extend to all women. Killers of this type can exhibit religious mania, even to the point of claiming to hear God telling them what to do. Yet in everyday life they can behave quite normally.”
He crossed his arms and gazed down at his brown brogues, as though focusing his thoughts.
“Killers in the second category often kill almost for company, literally so if they live alone they can keep the body for an extended period, as though it were a sort of houseguest. In this case we may be talking about having sex with the body after death, and constructing some sort of fantasy relationship with it. This element of fantasy may play itself out in the rest of their lives too, perhaps pretending to have had some sort of dramatic and impressive past, or knowing famous people, or having fantasy friends and sexual partners.”
“So what’s your concern here?” Collinson asked.
“Well, to a certain extent we have elements of both types. The killings appear to be the result of random sightings, which argues for the first type, as does the fact that they were all young women on their own, who either were or could be taken by a disturbed personality to be prostitutes. But that’s about as far as it goes. In particular, these killings are quite clinical. Punishment killers usually indulge in frenzied attacks with multiple injuries, and often mutilation of the body as well. There’s none of that here.”
There was a pause as he scratched his head.
“So you think the second type is more likely?” Karen prompted.
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “The taking of an item of clothing, particularly an intimate item such as underwear, could be simply a trophy, but could also suggest that he wants some sort of personal reminder for emotional purposes, just as we might keep a photograph of someone close to us when they die, rather than something to gloat over.”
“So, what does this tell us?” Collison asked.
“Not a great deal by itself,” Collins conceded, “but there are some special aspects of this particular case, which we need to take into account.”
He took a sip out of the cup of tea that Karen had placed beside him. An instinctive grimace was quickly and politely suppressed. Peter Collins was not used to tea of the sort on offer in police incident rooms.
“The two things which exercised me a good deal were the manner of killing and the use of a condom. It seems to me, on reflection, that taken together they may tell us quite a lot.
“First, the victims have all been struck over the head by a heavy instrument, which may be a hammer. He either rapes them first and then kills them, or the other way round, we’re not sure which. An initial hammer attack argues for a desire to make absolutely sure that the victim is incapacitated straight away with a single blow. Whether before or after, it shows a desire to get things over with quickly and cleanly.
“What can we make of the hammer blow? Our man is uncertain of his ability to overpower a woman quickly and effectively. Therefore he is likely to be of slight build and below average height. He certainly will not have any background of hard physical work, nor come from the armed services (though he may well brag about some fantasy military background) nor be proficient in any physical activity which involves in some way imposing yourself on someone else—rugby, say, or martial arts. In short, our man is a bit of a weed.”
Collison was jotting down notes. “Go on, this is very useful.”
“I’m not sure the manner of attack tells us too much, except that it definitely points to these not being punishment killings. If so, he would want to keep his victims alive as long as possible, not despatch them cleanly. Also, if he hits them first, it argues even more strongly for him wanting them to be completely helpless when he rapes them. You can’t get much more helpless than being dead.”
“What if he rapes them first, and then kills them?” Metcalfe enquired.
“Well now, that’s where it might get really interesting. If he rapes them first and then kills them immediately afterwards, it could suggest disgust either with what he has just done specifically or with sex generally. That’s where we start moving from one category into the other. If that were the case, then we would expect mutilation, but there isn’t any. Of course, it may be that by this time his overwhelming instinct is fear of getting caught and he just wants to be off and away as quickly as possible. Perhaps if he ever has more time to linger over a killing, then we will see mutilation.
“On balance, though, I incline towards a different direction. The use of a condom is most unusual in a rape of this nature. At first I thought that it could just be symptomatic of a horror of sex generally, but if you accept that, then nothing else seemed to make sense. Then I found myself going down a different track.”
Feeling the suspense in the room, he rather mischievously broke off to take another sip of tea.
“What we have to explain, to reconcile if you like, is why we are seeing indications of two different types of killer. I believe what we are dealing with here is someone who has the motivations of the first type—anger, revenge, hatred—but the characteristics of the second.”
Collison suddenly grasped what he was driving at. “You mean someone who wants to punish women but is too frightened, too pathetic, whatever, to do it properly?”
“Exactly.”
“And the condom? Where does that fit into the picture?”
“Ah!” Collins beamed triumphantly. “That’s where it all came together for me. I believe you will find that at some stage your man has been infected with some form of sexual disease, certainly by a woman and possibly by a prostitute. He sees the rape as some way of getting his own back—”
“—but is terrified of getting infected again and thus wears
a condom,” finished Collison. “Brilliant.”
A round of applause broke out spontaneously. Collins smiled bashfully.
“Bad news, sir,” Priya called out as she put her bag down on her desk. Nobody had seen her enter the room.
“Great—now what?”
“Our suspect has an alibi for at least one of the killings, sir. A coach trip to Wales with his wife. I’ll double-check the details with the travel firm, but she showed me her diary and their credit card bills, and I’d say it’s kosher.”
“Suspect?” Collins looked confused. “I didn’t know you had a suspect.”
“Don’t you read the papers?” said Ken Andrews. “We’ve got a suspect banged up downstairs right now—taxi driver.”
“A suspect we may now have to release,” Collison reminded everyone. “If only the bloody papers hadn’t got hold of the story. Now we’re going to have to explain why we held him for questioning in the first place.”
A phone rang on a nearby desk. Karen answered it and then held the receiver out apologetically to Collison. “Assistant Commissioner Crime for you, guv.”
Chapter Seven
That evening the police put out a press release regretting premature media speculation and announcing that a man who had been assisting them with their enquiries, and had been briefly held under caution while certain facts were checked, had been released and was no longer a suspect in the case.
Ironically the duty doctor finally turned up just as Hazel was being released, and was none too pleased to discover that his visit had been wasted. He sent the “no longer a suspect” on his way with admonishments to see his own doctor for a check-up.
The ACC had been surprisingly understanding, and was heartened to hear that Collison now had a profile of the killer.
On impulse, Collison called his wife to suggest that they go out to dinner. Eight o’clock saw them at their favourite restaurant in Fulham. However, whether it would remain their favourite was called into question as they were turned away at the door; it was closed for a private function.
What Would Wimsey Do? Page 8