The insistent bleep of Carol’s pager cut into the conversation, demanding as a baby’s cry. ‘I have to find a phone,’ Carol said.
‘What is it?’
‘One thing you can always say for sure,’ Carol said, hurrying back out of the alley. ‘It’s never good news.’
‘Look, I’ve told youse all I know. I’d just met this guy Don in the Hole, we was going for a cup of tea and suddenly there’s footsteps and Don hits the ground like Vinny Jones just tackled him and I turn round and there’s this bampot with a brick. So I give him the citizen’s arrest with the left hook, and that’s when your boys turn up mob-handed, and here I am.’ Stevie McConnell spread his hands out in front of him. ‘Youse should be giving me a commendation, no’ the third degree.’
‘And you expect us to believe this …’ Cross consulted his notes. ‘This Ian attacked this Don just because he’d turned him down earlier in the evening?’
‘That’s about the size of it. Look, this Ian, he’s known about the town. He’s a heidbanger. He gets out of his brain on speed and thinks he’s God Almighty. This Don gave him a right showing up, you know, made him look like a big jessie instead of macho man, so your man was for getting his own back. Look, you gonnae let me go, or what?’
Cross was spared from replying by a knock on the door. Brandon shrugged away from the wall he’d been leaning against and opened the door. He exchanged a few murmured words with the constable outside then came back in. ‘Interview suspended at 1.47 a.m.,’ he said, leaning past Cross to turn off the tape recorder. ‘We’ll be back shortly, Mr McConnell,’ Brandon promised.
Outside the interview room, Brandon said, ‘Inspector Jordan and Dr Hill are upstairs. And DS Merrick has come back from Casualty. Apparently, he says he’s well enough to run through the evening’s events himself.’
‘Right. Well, we’d better hear what he’s got to say, and then we can have a proper go at Jock.’ Cross marched upstairs to the squad room, where a concerned Carol was hovering over Merrick. Tony sat a few feet away, feet propped up on the rim of a wastepaper bin.
‘Bloody hell, Merrick!’ Cross roared, seeing the dramatic bandage that turbanned his head. ‘You’ve not turned into one of them bloody Sikhs, have you? Christ, I knew it was a risk sending a team into poofterville undercover, but I wasn’t expecting religious mania.’
Merrick smiled weakly. ‘I figured that way you couldn’t send me back into uniform for cocking up, sir.’
Cross gave a grudging smile in return. ‘Let’s be hearing it, then. Why have I got a bolshie little sporran-sucker in my nick?’
Brandon, standing a couple of feet behind Cross, interrupted. ‘Before DS Merrick runs through the evening’s events for us, I just want to explain to Dr Hill why we’ve dragged him in here at this time of night.’ Tony straightened up in his chair and pulled a sheet of paper towards him. ‘When you were giving your lecture the other day,’ Brandon continued, moving past Cross and sitting on the edge of a desk, ‘you mentioned that psychologists can often give pointers to detectives about interview approaches. I wondered if you could apply that to this situation.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Tony said, uncapping his pen.
‘How do you mean, interview approaches?’ Cross said suspiciously.
Tony smiled. ‘A recent example from my own experience. A force I’d been advising had arrested a suspect in two rape cases. He was the macho type, all bluster and muscle. I suggested that they send in a woman CID officer to interview him, preferably a small, very feminine woman. That made him angry right from the start, because he held women in contempt and thought he wasn’t being treated with the appropriate respect. I’d briefed her in advance to suggest in her line of questioning that he couldn’t possibly be the rapist since, frankly, she didn’t think he had it in him. The result was, he blew his stack and coughed to the two rapes they had him in the frame for, as well as three other offences they didn’t even know about.’
Cross said nothing. ‘DS Merrick?’ Brandon asked.
Merrick took them through his experiences in the bar with frequent pauses for thought. At the end of his recital, Brandon and Carol looked expectantly towards Tony. ‘What do you think, Tony? Are either of them a possible?’ Brandon asked.
‘I don’t think Ian Thomson is a starter. This killer is far too careful to get involved in something as ridiculously high profile as a street brawl. Even if Don hadn’t been a police officer, the chances are that Thomson would have ended up in trouble for going after someone with a half-brick. Even in a city where attacks on gays are not noted for their high priority in policing terms,’ he added drily.
Cross scowled. ‘Gays get treated same as everybody else by the lads,’ he blustered.
Tony wished he’d kept his mouth shut. The last thing he wanted was to get into a head-to-head with Tom Cross on Bradfield police’s ‘gays and blacks don’t count’ policy. He decided to ignore the comment and forged on. ‘Also, there’s nothing in what we know about the killer’s behaviour to suggest that he’s an upfront S&M gay man. It’s clearly not from the gay scene that he’s selecting victims. However, McConnell sounds more interesting from your point of view. Do we know what he does for a living?’
‘He’s the manager of a gym in the city centre. The same gym that Gareth Finnegan used,’ Cross said.
‘Hasn’t he been questioned before?’ Brandon asked. Cross shrugged.
‘One of Inspector Matthews’s team has spoken to him,’ Carol butted in. ‘I noticed the report when I was preparing the material for Dr Hill,’ she added hastily, when she saw the beginnings of a scowl on Cross’s face. God forbid he should think she was trying to undermine him. ‘My dustbin memory,’ she continued, trying to make a joke of it. ‘As far as I can remember, it was simply a routine enquiry, checking up on whether Gareth had had any particular buddies or contacts at the gym.’
‘Do we know McConnell’s domestic arrangements?’ Tony asked.
‘He shares a house with another couple of shirt-lifters,’ Cross said. ‘He says they’re both in the body-building game too. So, is he in the frame or not?’
Tony doodled in the margin of his notes. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘What are the chances of getting a search warrant?’
‘On what we’ve got at the moment? Not good. And we’ve no grounds for a search without one. Not even in our wildest dreams can we claim that a street assault gives us grounds to search McConnell’s house for evidence relating to serial killings,’ Brandon said. ‘What would we be looking for in particular?’
‘A camcorder. Any indication that he has access to somewhere isolated and deserted like an old warehouse, factory, derelict house, lock-up garage.’ Tony ran a hand through his hair. ‘Polaroid photographs. Sado-masochistic pornography. Souvenirs of his victims. The jewellery missing from the bodies.’ He looked up and met Tom Cross’s sneer. ‘And you should check the deep freeze just on the off chance that he’s kept the pieces of flesh he removed from the bodies.’ He felt a moment’s gratification when Cross’s expression changed to disgust.
‘Charming. But first we have to get something more to go on. Any suggestions?’ Brandon asked.
‘Send DS Merrick and Inspector Jordan in to interview him. The realization that the man he tried to pick up is a police officer will unsettle him, make him feel that his instincts can’t be trusted. There’s a chance too that he has problems with women –’
‘Of course he’s got problems with women,’ Cross interjected. ‘He’s a bloody arse bandit.’
‘Not all gay men dislike women,’ Tony said mildly. ‘But a lot do, and McConnell may be one of them. At the very least, Carol will make him feel threatened. All-male situations