‘Mostly with myself,’ Carol said. ‘But I can deal with that. The important thing for me is that we get the job done.’
‘Me too. It’s pretty rare for me to find a police officer who seems to have a grasp of what I’m trying to do.’ He picked up the papers on his desk. ‘Carol … This isn’t about you, you know. It’s about me. I have problems of my own that I need to deal with.’
Carol stared at him long and hard. He felt a quick twitch of panic as he realized he could not read her eyes. He had no idea what she was feeling. ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ she replied, her voice cold. ‘Speaking of problems,’ she added, ‘haven’t we got some work to do?’
Carol sat alone in Tony’s office with his profile of the serial killer. He had left her to read it while he worked next door with his secretary, catching up on the correspondence that had piled up since Brandon had hijacked him only a handful of days before. She couldn’t remember ever having been so fascinated by a report in her entire career. If this was the future of policing, she desperately wanted to be part of it. At last, she came to the end of the main body of text and turned to a separate sheet.
Points to pursue:
1. Had any of the victims ever mentioned to a friend/relative that they had been the subject of an unwanted homosexual approach? If so, when, where and from whom?
2. The killer is a stalker. His first encounter with his victims probably takes place quite a long time before he kills – weeks rather than days. Where is he encountering them? It may be something as banal as where they take their dry-cleaning, where they have their shoes heeled, where they buy sandwiches, where they have tyres or exhausts put on their cars. Given that they all lived close to the tram network, I think we should check whether the victims regularly used the trams to go to and from work, or to go out in the evenings. I suggest that in-depth background checks are done, going through bank accounts, credit-card statements and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, girlfriends and family members. This may help develop suspects.
3. Is there any indication that the victims were keeping the night in question free for any particular purpose? Gareth Finnegan lied to his girlfriend about it – did any of the others?
4. Where is he doing his killing? It’s unlikely to be in his home, since he will have calculated the possibility of being arrested, and will have taken pains to avoid leaving forensic traces there. It’s also got to be big enough for him to build and use the torture engines we are assuming in these cases. It may be an isolated lock-up garage, or a unit on an industrial estate which is deserted at night. Bearing in mind that he almost certainly lives in Bradfield, it’s possible that there exists an isolated rural property that he has undisturbed access to.
5. He must have found out about instruments of torture somewhere so that he could construct his own. It might be worth checking with bookshops and libraries to see if any of their customers has enquired about or ordered books on torture.
Carol flicked back a few pages, rereading a couple of paragraphs which had particularly struck her first time through. She found it hard to credit how quickly Tony had assimilated the stacks of files she’d delivered. Not only that, but he’d drawn out of them the key points that created for the first time in Carol’s mind a picture, albeit shadowy, of the man she was hunting.
But the profile raised questions in her mind. At least one of those questions didn’t seem to have occurred to Tony. She wondered if it wasn’t referred to because he had dismissed it out of hand. Either way, she had to know. And she had to find a way of asking that didn’t sound like an attack.
FROM 3½″ DISK LABELLED: BACKUP.007; FILE LOVE.013
I hated to keep Gareth hanging on, but I had to leave him for one little errand. In his car, I’d found a few of the Christmas cards his company sent out to favoured clients, already signed by all the partners. Inside one, with a fountain pen, a stencil set and Gareth’s blood, I’d written in block capitals, ‘A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL YOUR READERS; YOUR EXCLUSIVE CHRISTMAS GIFT IS WAITING IN THE SHRUBBERY OF CARLTON PARK BEHIND THE BANDSTAND. COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON FROM SANTA CLAWS.’ It wasn’t easy to write with the blood; it kept congealing on the nib, which I had to clean every few letters. Luckily, there was no shortage of ink.
I addressed a Jiffy bag to the editor of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times and put the card in it, along with a video I’d made a couple of weeks before, when I’d started to plan what to do with Gareth. I’d already decided to change my modus operandi slightly. Temple Fields was bound to be risky now; even if the queens were too drunk or stoned to be vigilant, the police would be keeping an eye open for more than the occasional cottaging poof. But the nature trail through the shrubbery of Carlton Park is almost as notorious a pick-up area.
Early on a rainy Sunday morning, when there was nobody about, I’d driven out to Carlton Park with my camcorder. I started off by the wrought-iron bandstand. I walked around it, filming it from every angle. It wouldn’t take long before somebody in the BEST office recognized the landmark. After all, Carlton Park is the biggest park within the city boundaries, and there’s a brass-band concert there every Sunday from April to September. I deliberately kept the camcorder at chest level rather than on my shoulder; I’ve read of instances where correct estimates of height have been made simply from the angle photographs have been taken from. If some forensic scientist was going to draw any conclusions from this video, I wanted to be sure they would be the wrong ones.
Leaving the bandstand behind, I walked down the nature trail towards the shrubbery. I panned across the general area where I thought I’d dump the body, then stopped filming. I passed nobody on my way back to the jeep. That was probably just as well, since I was grinning from ear to ear at the thought of the news editor puzzling over my Christmas message.
The message would also serve two other functions. It would minimize the time it took to identify Gareth’s body, which meant the publicity machine would have plenty of fodder to keep it going through what was always a slack news period. Secondly, it would send the police on a wild goose chase, working out who could have had access to the Christmas cards.
The police might even decide that someone connected with Gareth through work had decided to bump him off and make it look like a copycat killing by dumping the body in a gay cruising area. Just the sort of thing a deranged and disillusioned client would do. If I got really lucky, they might even give the bitch a hard time, too.
I drove into the city centre to post the packet at the main post office. There were enough last-minute panicking gift-givers for me to be unremarkable. I stopped at an off licence on the way back to buy a bottle of champagne. I don’t normally drink when I’m working, but this was a special occasion.
When I got back, Gareth was semi-conscious, mumbling incomprehensibly. ‘Santa’s here,’ I said cheerfully as I came down the stairs. I popped the cork on the champagne and poured two glasses. I took one over to Gareth and, standing on tiptoe, I gently lifted his lolling head. I held the glass to his lips and tilted it. ‘You’ll enjoy this,’ I said. ‘It’s vintage Dom Perignon.’
His eyes snapped wide open. For a moment, he looked bewildered, then he remembered and he fixed me with a look of pure hatred. But he was parched, and couldn’t resist the champagne. He swallowed it greedily, not savouring it at all. Then he belched in my face, a look of strange satisfaction in his eyes.
‘Wasted on you,’ I said angrily. ‘Like all the fine things in life.’ I stepped back and slashed the glass across his face. It shattered against his nose, cutting his cheek to ribbons. I was glad Auntie Doris wouldn’t be coming back. She’d had that set of six fragile crystal glasses as a silver-wedding present, and she’d never used them, terrified that someone would break one. She’d been right to be concerned.
Gareth shook his head. ‘You’re evil,’ he slurred. ‘Pure evil.’