He shook his head. ‘Sorry, ma’am. They didn’t say.’
‘Wonderful,’ she muttered sarcastically. Turn your back for a minute and they were off playing their boys’ games. Little mission, indeed. Bollocks to that, Carol thought as she marched back to her car. ‘Three can play at that game,’ she said as she turned the ignition key.
Tony flicked through the last of the magazines and returned it to the box file in the bedside storage cube. ‘S&M always leaves me feeling faintly queasy,’ he remarked. ‘And this lot’s particularly nasty.’
Brandon agreed. McConnell’s collection of hard-core pornography consisted mostly of magazines crammed with glossy colour pictures of well-muscled young men torturing each other and masturbating. A few were even more disturbing, with their graphic shots of male couples indulging in full sex with an array of sado-masochistic trappings. Brandon couldn’t remember seeing nastier examples, even when he’d done a six-month attachment with Vice.
They were sitting on the bed in Stevie McConnell’s room. As soon as Carol and Merrick had left for their interrogation, Brandon had said, ‘Would it be helpful to you to see where McConnell lives?’
Tony picked up his pen again and started to doodle on the sheet of paper. ‘It might give me some insight into the man. And if he is the killer, there could be evidence that ties him into the crimes. I don’t mean murder weapons, or anything like that. I’m thinking more of the souvenirs. Photographs, newspaper clippings, as well as the stuff I was talking about before. But it’s academic, isn’t it? You said there was no chance of getting a search warrant.’
Brandon’s melancholy face lit up in a strange smile, almost a leer. ‘When you’ve got a suspect in custody, there are things you can do to circumvent the rules. You game?’
Tony grinned. ‘I’m fascinated.’ He followed Brandon downstairs to the cells. The custody sergeant hastily dropped the Stephen King novel he’d been reading and jumped to his feet.
‘It’s all right, Sergeant,’ Brandon said. ‘If I only had a couple of prisoners to think about, I’d be enjoying a good read, too. I’d like to have a look at McConnell’s property.’
The sergeant unlocked the property cupboard and handed the transparent plastic bag to Brandon. There was a wallet, a handkerchief and a bunch of keys inside. Brandon opened it and removed the keys. ‘You haven’t seen me, have you, Sergeant? And you won’t see me when I come back in a couple of hours, will you?’
The sergeant grinned. ‘You couldn’t possibly have been here, sir. I’d have been bound to notice.’
Twenty minutes later, Brandon was parking the Range Rover outside McConnell’s terraced house. ‘Lucky for us McConnell happened to mention that the two blokes he shares the house with are away on holiday.’ He took a cardboard box out of the glove compartment and gave Tony a pair of latex gloves. ‘You’ll need these,’ he said, slipping a pair over his own hands. ‘If we do get a search warrant, it would be a bit embarrassing when the fingerprint team turn up you and me as prime suspects.’
‘There’s one thing I’m curious about,’ Tony said as Brandon inserted the key in the mortice lock.
‘What’s that?’
‘This is an illegal search, right?’
‘Right,’ Brandon said, opening the door and stepping into the hall. He groped for the light switch, but didn’t turn it on when he found it.
Tony followed him, closing the door behind him. Only then did Brandon snap the light on, revealing a carpeted hall and stairs. There were a couple of framed posters of body-builders on the walls. ‘So if we find any evidence, presumably it’s inadmissible?’
‘Also right,’ said Brandon. ‘But there are ways round that. For example, if we find a bloodstained cut-throat razor under McConnell’s bed, it will mysteriously find its way on to the kitchen table. Then we go to the magistrate, explain that we went to McConnell’s house to check he was telling the truth when he said his house-mates were on holiday, and we happened to look through the windows and we spotted what we have reason to believe is the weapon used to kill Adam Scott, Paul Gibbs, Gareth Finnegan and Damien Connolly.’
Tony shook his head in amusement. ‘Bent? Us? Never, your honour!’
‘There’s bent and there’s bent,’ Brandon said grimly. ‘Sometimes you need to give things a shove in the right direction.’
Tony and Brandon moved through the house, room by room. Brandon was intrigued by Tony’s method. He would walk into a room, stand in the middle of the floor and slowly scan the walls, the furniture, the floor coverings, the shelves. He almost sniffed the air. Then, meticulously, he opened cupboards and drawers, lifted cushions, examined magazines, checked titles of books, CDs, cassettes and videos, handling everything he touched with the care and precision of an archaeologist. Within seconds, his mind was busy, analysing everything he saw and touched, slowly building a picture in his mind of the men who lived here, constantly matching it against the embryonic picture of Handy Andy that was developing in his mind like a photographic print in developer fluid.
‘Have you been here, Andy?’ he asked himself. ‘Does this feel like you, smell like you? Would you watch these videos? Are these your CDs? Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli? The Pet Shop Boys? I don’t think so. You’re not camp, I know that much about you. And there’s nothing camp or chichi about the house. This place is so aggressively masculine. A living room furnished in eighties chrome and black. But it’s not a straight man’s house, is it? No girlie magazines, not even car magazines. Just body-building periodicals stacked under the coffee table. Look at the walls. Men’s bodies, oiled and shining, muscles like carved wood. The men who live here know who they are, they know what they like. I don’t think this is you, Andy. You’re controlled, Andy, but not this controlled. It’s one thing to keep yourself buttoned up, it’s another thing altogether to be strong enough to project so coherent an image. I should know, I’m the expert. If you were as firmly rooted in your identity as the guys who live here, you wouldn’t have to do what you do, would you?
‘Look at the books. Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, Stephen Gallagher, Iain Banks. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biography. A couple of paperbacks about the Mafia. Nothing soft, nothing gentle, but nothing off the wall either. Would you read these books? Maybe. I think you’d like to read about serial killers, though, and there’s none of that here.’
Tony turned slowly towards the door. It was a small shock to see Brandon standing there. He’d become so absorbed in his scrutiny that he’d lost all sense of being in company. Watch yourself, Tony, he warned himself. Stay inside your head.
In silence, they trooped through to the kitchen. It was spartan, but well equipped. In the sink there was a dirty soup bowl and a mug half full of cold tea. A small shelf of cookery books testified to the occupants’ obsession with healthy eating. ‘Fart city,’ Tony observed wryly, opening a cupboard filled with jars of pulses. He opened the drawers, noting the kitchen knives. There was a small vegetable knife with a blade worn thin from sharpening, a bread knife whose blade was pitted with age, and a cheap carving knife, the handle bleached from the dishwasher. ‘These are not your tools, Andy,’ Tony said to himself. ‘You like knives that do their work properly.’
Without consulting Brandon, he walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Brandon watched him stick his head round the first bedroom door and reject it. As he passed, he saw that it was obviously the couple’s room. He followed Tony through the door across the landing. In McConnell’s bedroom, Tony seemed to drift away altogether into a world of his own. The room was simply furnished with modern pine bed, chest of drawers and wardrobe. An array of weightlifting trophies sat on the deep windowsill. A tall bookcase was crammed with pulp science fiction and a handful of gay novels. On a small table, there was a games computer and a television monitor. On a shelf above was a collection of games. Tony browsed through Mortal Kombat, Streetfighter II, Terminator 2, Doom and a dozen