The tape was lifted for Tony, who headed for the middle of the street where a cluster of police vehicles and an ambulance were parked at seemingly random angles. As he drew closer, he could see the sign for the public toilets, lit up against the looming dark of the building. By the ambulance, he spotted the conspicuous figure of Don Merrick, unmistakable with his bandaged head. Ignored by the milling officers, Tony pushed his way through to Merrick, who was deep in conversation on a mobile phone. He gave Tony a quick wave to signal he’d spotted him, and wound up his phone conversation with, ‘All right, thanks, sorry to have bothered you.’
‘Sergeant,’ Tony said. ‘I’m looking for Mr Brandon. Or Inspector Jordan.’
Merrick nodded. ‘They’re both inside. You’ll be wanting a look too, I suppose.’
‘Who found the body?’
‘One of the street girls. She claims all the ladies loos were full, and that’s why she went into the disabled cubicle. Me, I’d lay money she was with a client. He’ll have legged it at the first sight of trouble.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony saw Carol emerge from the toilets. She made straight for the pair of them. ‘Thanks for turning out,’ she said as Merrick moved away and continued making his phone calls.
‘If I said I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, someone would almost certainly take it the wrong way,’ Tony replied wryly. ‘What makes you think it’s Handy Andy?’
‘The victim’s naked, and his throat’s been cut. He’d obviously been brought there in a wheelchair, but he’d been tipped out on to the floor. And lying on top of him, there was a copy of last night’s Sentinel Times front page,’ Carol replied, her voice strained, her eyes haggard. ‘We provoked him, didn’t we?’
‘We didn’t. The newspaper might have, but we didn’t,’ Tony said bleakly. ‘I didn’t expect him to react this fast, though.’
Merrick approached again and said cheerfully, ‘Looks like I’ve tracked down the wheelchair. One went walkabout from the maternity hospital reception earlier on tonight. With a bit of luck, somebody might have seen it.’
‘Good work, Don,’ Carol said. ‘Shall we take a look, then?’ she asked Tony. He nodded and followed her as she shouldered her way through the milling officers towards the toilet entrance. Tony slowly walked into the lavatories, making a mental inventory as he looked around him, conscious of the black rubber tiled floor with its raised circles, the apparently random pattern of the grey and black tiles on the wall, the defiant graffiti, the raw dank air, the smell of disinfectant barely masking the piss. Inside the entrance, the toilets split in two, men to the left, women to the right. The disabled toilet was to the right, just by the entrance to the women’s toilets. Brandon and Kevin Matthews stood by the door, looking in through the wide doorway. Tony walked up and joined their glum and silent communion. A photographer was standing just inside the door, off to one side, recording a scene that would shake some jury to the core, provided Brandon’s men could deliver Handy Andy to them. Every few seconds, the stark white light of the flash etched the scene on the retinas of the watching men.
Tony stared intently at the body lying sprawled on the floor. It was, as Carol had said, naked, but it was not clean. There were smears of some sort of dark, oily substance on knees, elbows and one ankle. And there were bloodstains on the body too. The cut to the throat was wide, but not, Tony suspected, deep enough to have caused death. As far as he could see, the sexual organs themselves were undamaged, but the man’s rectum and anus and the soft flesh around there had been savagely removed with deep cuts from a sharp blade. A warm surge of relief flowed through him, forcing him to recognize what he’d been refusing to think about. Like Carol, he too had been afraid that somehow his activities had provoked Handy Andy to break his cycle and to strike again. Ever since Brandon’s phone call, that horror had been sitting on his shoulder like a malevolent bird of prey.
Tony turned to Brandon and said bluntly, ‘It’s not him. You’ve got a copycat.’
From the shadows at the far end of Clifton Street, coat collar turned up, Tom Cross joined the ghouls who seemed to spring from under the pavement itself and watched the familiar ritual dance of a murder-scene investigation. His lips pursed in a tight smile and he moved further back into the shadows. He took his diary out of his inside pocket and ripped out a page for notes. In the dim light from a streetlamp, he wrote, ‘Dear Kevin; I bet you a bob to a gold clock that the Queer Killer didn’t do this one. All the best, Tom.’
Seaford had been embarrassing as well as painful, but Tom Cross was not a man who allowed humiliation to stand in the way of his purpose. He folded the note in four and wrote, ‘Detective Inspector Kevin Matthews. Personal’, on it. He pushed his way through the crowd till he caught the eye of one of the constables behind the tape. ‘You know who I am, don’t you, lad?’ Cross demanded.
The constable nodded hesitantly, casting a quick glance to either side, to see who was watching his encounter with the force’s current leper.
Cross proffered the note. ‘See that Inspector Matthews gets this, there’s a good lad.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the constable said smartly, enclosing the note in his gloved fist, finding a moment to wonder who’d had the bottle to give Popeye Cross a shiner like that.
‘I’ll remember you when I’m back in harness,’ Cross said over his shoulder as he pushed back through the spectators.
Cross cut back through an alley to the Volvo, parked in front of a nightclub’s fire exit. The day had been far from satisfactory, and the morning held no promises of improvement. But the conviction that his message to Kevin Matthews was the truth made Tom Cross feel there had been some point to his activities.
‘The postmortem will back me up,’ Tony said stubbornly. ‘Whoever killed this guy, it wasn’t our serial killer.’
Bob Stansfield scowled. ‘I don’t see how you can be so sure, just because of a few oil stains.’
‘It’s not just that the body wasn’t clean.’ Tony ticked the points off on his fingers. ‘He’s the wrong age group. He’s barely twenty, if that. Far from being in the closet, he was well known on the gay scene. You’d identified him by three this morning.’
Kevin Matthews nodded. ‘Well known to Vice. Chaz Collins. An ex-rent boy who worked in a bar and liked rough sex.’
‘Exactly,’ Tony said. ‘Also, there’s not a mark on his penis or his testicles, whereas our killer has been progressively violent with those organs. All the press have been told so far is that the victims have been sexually mutilated. We haven’t indicated how or where. This killer has interpreted that as a justification for getting rid of the whole anal area. I suspect he’s done that because he buggered the victim before he killed him and he wanted to make sure Forensic didn’t pick up any semen.’ Tony paused to collect his thoughts, and to pour another cup of coffee from the pot that the canteen had sent up with the breakfast trolley John Brandon had ordered for their morning conference.
‘The wheelchair,’ Carol said. ‘He took a big risk stealing that from the maternity hospital. I don’t think that fits with the cautious behaviour the serial killer has always displayed so far.’
‘And he’s not been tortured,’ Kevin added, through a mouthful of sausage-and-egg roll. ‘Or not obviously, anyway.’ He had a note in his pocket that would determine his view as much as anything that was said inside this room. Popeye might be off the job, but Kevin would back his instinct against anyone’s.
But Bob Stansfield wasn’t giving up. ‘OK, what if he’s doing it differently