The Mermaids Singing (43 page)

‘What is it?’ Dave asked, suddenly alert.

‘This here. Christopher Thorpe, the Seaford one?’

‘Yeah? Carol reckoned it wasn’t the same one as ours. I mean, he’s got convictions for being a male prostitute, but this one in Bradfield looks to be married, because the woman at the same address has his surname. And let’s face it, you don’t get dockland rent boys driving around in serious motors like the Discovery.’

Merrick shook his head. ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong. I know this Christopher Thorpe from Seaford. I worked on Vice in Seaford before I came here, remember? I was the arresting officer on two of these charges in soliciting. Christopher Thorpe was halfway to a sex change at the time. He had the tits and everything, he was trying to earn enough money to get the operation. Guess what his working name was? Dave, Christopher Thorpe isn’t
married
to Angelica Thorpe, he
is
Angelica Thorpe.’

‘Fuck,’ Dave echoed.

‘Dave, where the hell is Carol?’

Angelica stood in front of him, hands on hips, chewing one corner of her mouth. ‘You can’t, can you? You can’t prove it because you know nothing about my life.’

‘In one sense you’re absolutely right, Angelica. I don’t know the facts of your life,’ Tony said carefully, ‘but I think I know a bit about the shape of it. Your mother didn’t do a very good job of loving you. Maybe she had a problem with drink or with drugs, or maybe she just didn’t understand what a little kid needed. Either way, she didn’t make you feel loved when you were little. Am I right?’

Angelica scowled. ‘Go on. Dig yourself a hole.’

Tony felt a prickle of fear tingle at the base of his skull. What if he’d got it wrong? What if this woman was the exception to every statistical near certainty Tony had held at the front of his mind during the whole enquiry? What if she was the one serial killer who had come from a happy, loving family? Dismissing his doubts as a luxury he couldn’t afford right now, Tony ploughed on. ‘Your father wasn’t around much when you were growing up, and he never showed you he was proud of his son, even though you did everything you knew how to make him feel that pride. Your mother expected too much of you, kept telling you you were the man of the house, and giving you a bad time when you behaved like the child you were instead of the man she wanted to pretend you were.’ Angelica’s face twitched in a spasm of recognition. Tony paused.

‘Go on,’ she grated between clenched teeth.

‘It’s not easy for me to talk, doubled over like this. Can’t you slacken the rope a bit, let me stand upright?’

She shook her head, her mouth sulky as a child’s.

‘I can’t look at you properly like this,’ Tony tried. ‘You’ve got a fabulous body, you must know that. If it’s going to be the last thing I see, at least let me appreciate it.’

She cocked her head to one side, as if replaying his words to check them for truth or trickery. ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘It doesn’t mean anything’s changed, though,’ she added as she moved to the winch and released it. She let out about a foot of slack.

Tony couldn’t bite back the scream of pain that shot through his shoulders as the muscles were released from the strain that had stretched them to their limit. ‘It’ll wear off,’ Angelica said roughly as she returned to her station by the camcorder. ‘Keep talking,’ she instructed him. ‘I’ve always enjoyed fantasy fiction.’

He eased himself upright, struggling against the pain. ‘You were a bright kid,’ he gasped. ‘Brighter than the rest of them. It’s never easy making friends when you’re so much smarter than the other kids. And maybe you moved around a bit. Different neighbours, maybe even different schools.’

Angelica was back in control of herself, her face impassive as he continued. ‘It wasn’t easy to make friends. You knew you were different from everybody else, special, but you couldn’t work out why at first. Then as you grew up, you realized what it was. You weren’t the same as the other boys because you weren’t a boy at all. You had no interest in girls sexually, but it wasn’t because you were gay. No way. It was because you were really a girl yourself. What you discovered was that dressing up in women’s clothes made you feel like you’d come home, like this was how you were meant to be.’ He paused and gave her a crooked smile. ‘How am I doing so far?’

‘Very impressive, Doctor,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m fascinated. Carry on.’

Tony flexed his shoulder muscles, relieved to discover that the damage so far seemed to be only temporary. The pins and needles that raged across his back seemed no more than a minor irritation after what he’d been through. He took a deep breath and carried on. ‘You decided to become the person you were inside, the woman you knew you really were. God, Angelica, I’ve got so much respect for you, putting yourself through that. I know how hard it is to get the medical profession to take the idea seriously. All the hormone therapy, the electrolysis, living as a half-man, half-woman while you waited for the operations, and then all the pain of the surgery.’ He shook his head, wonderingly. ‘I know I wouldn’t have the courage to put myself through all that.’

‘It wasn’t easy.’ The words escaped from Angelica’s lips, almost against her will.

‘I believe you,’ Tony said sympathetically. ‘And after all that, to find yourself wondering if it had been worth it after all, when you realized that the stupidity, the insensitivity, the lack of insight you’d identified in men didn’t just disappear because you were a woman. They were still the same old bunch of bastards, incapable of recognizing an exceptional woman when they were offered her love and affection on a plate.’ He paused, studying her face, deciding if the time was right for the big gamble. The coldness had left her eyes, replaced by a look almost of misery. He softened his voice and lowered the volume. Please God, let his training pay off.

‘They rejected you, didn’t they? Adam Scott, Paul Gibbs, Gareth Finnegan, Damien Connolly. They turned you down.’

Angelica shook her head violently, as if by activity she could deny the past. ‘They
let
me down. They
let
me down, they didn’t turn me down. They betrayed me.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Tony said softly, praying that his hard-earned techniques weren’t going to fail him now. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘Why should I?’ she shouted, stepping forward and slapping him so hard he tasted blood as his cheek impacted against his teeth. ‘You’re no better than them. What about that slag? That blonde bitch, that fucking plonk you’ve been giving one to?’

Tony swallowed the warm salty blood that filled his mouth. ‘You mean Carol Jordan?’ he said, playing for time. How should he play this? Should he lie or tell the truth?

‘You know full well who I mean. I know you’ve been with her, don’t fucking try lying to me,’ she hissed, raising her hand again. ‘You treacherous, faithless bastard.’ Her hand cracked him across the face again, so hard he heard his neck crick under the force of it.

Tears sprang to his eyes involuntarily. The truth wasn’t going to work. It would only earn him more punishment. Praying he could lie with conviction, Tony pleaded, ‘Angelica, she was just a fuck, just someone to scratch the itch. You’d got me so horny with your phone calls. I didn’t know when you were going to call again, or even if you were.’ He allowed anger to creep into his voice. ‘I wanted you and you didn’t tell me how I could get hold of you. Angelica, it’s like you with the other ones. I was filling in time, waiting for my equal. You can’t believe that a mere cop would answer my fantasies, do you? You should know, you’ve had one too.’

Angelica stepped back, shock on her face. Sensing he had made some kind of a breakthrough, Tony pursued her with his words. ‘We were different, you and me. They weren’t worthy of you. But we were special. You must know that, from our phone calls. Didn’t you sense that we had something extraordinary? That this time it would be different? Isn’t that what you really want? You don’t want the killing. Not really. The killing only happened because they weren’t worthy, because they let you down. What you really want is a worthy partner. What you want is love. Angelica, what you want is me.’

For a long moment she stared at him, eyes wide, mouth open. Then confusion took over, as obvious to Tony as a hooker’s come-on. ‘Don’t use that word to me, you worthless scumbag,’ she stuttered. ‘Don’t fucking say it!’ Her voice was a low, throaty scream. Suddenly, she turned on her heel and ran from the room, her heels clattering up the stairs.

‘I love you, Angelica,’ Tony shouted desperately after her retreating footsteps. ‘I love you.’

Carol and DC Morris stood on the doorstep of the small terraced house in Gregory Street. She didn’t need to be a psychologist to read his body language. Morris was fed up at trailing round pursuing Carol’s daft hunch. ‘They must be out at work,’ he remarked after their fourth assault on the doorbell.

‘Looks that way,’ Carol agreed.

‘Shall we come back later?’

‘Let’s go on the knocker,’ Carol suggested. ‘See if any of the neighbours are around. Maybe they can tell us when the Thorpes get back from work.’

Morris looked as if he’d rather be on crowd control at a student demo. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said in a bored voice.

‘You take across the street, I’ll go for this side.’ Carol watched him trudge across the street as wearily as a miner at the end of his shift, shook her head with a sigh and turned her attention to number twelve. This was much more the kind of territory Tony had suggested for their killer. Thinking of Tony just made Carol cross again. Where the hell was he? She really needed his input today, not to mention a bit of support for an idea that everybody else seemed to think was a complete waste of time. He couldn’t have picked a worse moment to go on the missing list. It was unforgivable. At least he could have phoned his secretary and not left her having to field his calls and make excuses for him.

There was no bell on the door of number twelve, so Carol bruised her knuckles on the solid wood. The woman who opened it looked like a caricature from a soap opera. In her forties, her make-up would have been over the top for dinner in LA, never mind mid-afternoon in a Bradfield back street. Her dyed platinum blonde hair was piled high in a lopsided beehive. She wore a tight black sweater with a scoop neck revealing a cleavage the texture of crumpled tissue, shiny blue skin-tight leggings, white stilettoes and a thin gold ankle chain. A cigarette dangled from a corner of her mouth. ‘What is it, love?’ she said nasally.

‘Sorry to trouble you,’ Carol said, flashing her warrant card. ‘Detective Inspector Carol Jordan, Bradfield police. I’m trying to get in touch with your next-door neighbours at number fourteen, the Thorpes, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody home. I wonder if you happen to know what time they get in from work.’

The woman shrugged. ‘Search me, love. That cow comes and goes at all hours.’

‘What about Mr Thorpe?’ Carol asked.

‘What Mr Thorpe? There’s no Mr Thorpe next door, love.’ She gave a croak of laughter. ‘It’s easy seen you’ve never clapped eyes on her. Any man that married that ugly cow would have to be blind and bloody hard up. So what’ve you got her for?’

‘It’s just routine enquiries,’ Carol said.

The woman snorted. ‘Don’t give me that fanny,’ she said. ‘I’ve watched enough episodes of
The Bill
to know they don’t send inspectors out on routine enquiries. It’s about time you put that cow behind bars, if you want my opinion.’

‘Why is that, Mrs…?’

‘Goodison, Bette Goodison. As in Bette Davis. Because she’s an ugly, anti-social cow, that’s why.’

Carol smiled. ‘I’m afraid that’s not a crime, Mrs Goodison.’

‘No, but murder is, isn’t it?’ Bette Goodison crowed triumphantly.

Carol swallowed, hoping the effect of the word wasn’t as visible as it was palpable. ‘That’s a very serious accusation.’

Bette Goodison took a final drag of her cigarette and expertly flipped the dog end across the narrow pavement and into the gutter. ‘I’m glad you think so. It’s more than your mates at Moorside nick did.’

‘I’m sorry you feel you’ve not been well served by my colleagues,’ Carol said in a concerned tone. ‘Perhaps you could tell me what you’re talking about?’ Please God, let this not be a rerun of the Yorkshire Ripper case, where the killer’s best friend told the police they suspected he was the Ripper and the police paid no attention.

‘Prince, that’s who we’re talking about.’

For one wild moment, Carol had a vision of the diminutive American rock star buried in the back yard of a Bradfield terrace. Pulling herself together, she said, ‘Prince?’

‘Our German shepherd. Always complaining about him, that Angelica Thorpe was. And she had no grounds. That dog was doing her a service. Anybody so much as walked down our ginnel and that dog let you know about it. She’d have paid a fortune for a burglar alarm as efficient as that dog. Any road up, a few months back… August, it were, weekend before Bank Holiday, we come home from work, Col and me, and Prince is gone. Now, there’s no way he could have got out of that yard, and he’d have gone for anybody that came in. There’s only one way he could have disappeared, and that’s if he was murdered,’ Mrs Goodison said, stabbing Carol in the chest with her finger for emphasis. ‘She poisoned him and then she got rid of the body so there would be no proof. She’s a murderer!’

Normally, Carol would have walked a mile barefoot to avoid this conversation, but she was in pursuit of Handy Andy, and any oddity was something to be grasped eagerly. ‘How can you be so sure it was Mrs Thorpe?’ she asked.

‘Stands to reason. She were the only one that ever complained about him. And the day he went missing, me and Col were out at work, but she were home all day. I know that for a fact, because she were on nights that week. And when we knocked on her door to ask did she know anything about him going missing, she just smiled all over that ugly gob of hers. I could have put her face in for her,’ Mrs Goodison said emphatically. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m afraid that without evidence, there’s not much we can do,’ Carol said sympathetically. ‘You’re sure, are you, that Mrs Thorpe lives alone?’