The Mermaids Singing (44 page)

‘Nobody’d want to live with an ugly cow like that. She never even has visitors. Not surprising, mind, she looks like a brick shithouse in drag.’

‘Do you happen to know what kind of car she drives?’ Carol asked.

‘One of them bloody yuppie jeep things. I ask you, who needs a bloody great jeep in the middle of Bradfield? It’s not like we live up some farm track, is it?’

‘And do you know where she works?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, my serial’s starting.’

Carol watched the door close behind Bette Goodison, an unpleasant suspicion starting to form in her mind. Before she could try number ten, her pager bleeped insistently. ‘Phone Don at Scargill Street. Double urgent,’ she read.

‘Morris!’ Carol shouted. ‘Get me to a phone. Pronto monto.’ Whatever was going on in Gregory Street could wait. Don clearly couldn’t.

Exhausted, Tony had slipped into some nightmare delirium doze. A gout of freezing water thrown in his face smacked him straight to agonized attention, his head snapping back painfully. ‘Augh,’ he groaned.

‘Wakey, wakey,’ Angelica said roughly.

‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ Tony said through swollen lips. ‘You’ve had time to think about it, and you know I’m right. You want the killing to stop. They had to die, they deserved to die. They let you down, they betrayed you, they didn’t deserve you. But all that can change now. It can be different with me, because I love you.’

The rigid mask of her face crumpled before his eyes, becoming softer, more tender. She smiled at him. ‘It’s never been about sex, you know. I could always have sex. Men paid me for sex. They paid me a lot of money for sex. That’s how I paid for the surgery, you know. They always wanted me.’ Her voice was filled with a strange mixture of pride and anger.

‘I can see why,’ Tony lied, arranging his face in what he hoped was an expression of hunger and admiration. ‘But what you really wanted was love, wasn’t it? You wanted more than loveless sex on the streets or faceless sex down the phone. You deserve that. God, you deserve it. That’s what I can give you, Angelica. Love isn’t just physical attraction, though God knows you’re attractive. But love’s about respect, admiration, fascination, and I feel all of that for you. Angelica, you can have what you want. You can have it with me.’

Her warring emotions were written plainly on her face. He could see that part of her desperately wanted to believe him, wanted to escape into the normal world of relationships. But that part had to contend with a level of self-esteem that was so low she couldn’t imagine anyone worth loving wanting to love her. And, underlying it all, suspicion that he was trying to entrap her. ‘How can we?’ she demanded harshly. ‘You’ve been trying to hunt me down. You’re with the police. You’re on their side.’

Tony shook his head. ‘That was before I realized you were the same woman I’d fallen in love with on the phone. Angelica, love is the one emotion that overrides duty. Yeah, I’ve worked with the police, but I’m not one of them.’

‘You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,’ she sneered. ‘You’ve been trying to put me away, Anthony. You expect me to believe you? You must think I’m really stupid.’

‘Quite the opposite. If you want to talk about stupid, talk about the police. Mostly, they’re one-dimensional, boring bigots who couldn’t keep a psychologist interested for more than five minutes. I don’t have anything in common with them,’ he argued desperately.

She shook her head, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘You work for the Home Office. Your whole career, you’ve spent catching serial offenders and treating them. And you expect me to believe you’d suddenly change sides and stay loyal to me? Come on, Anthony, I’m not going to fall for crap like that.’

Tony felt his powers flagging. His brain just wasn’t fast enough any longer to keep her at bay. Wretchedly, he said, ‘I’ve not made a career of catching people, only treating them. I had to do that, don’t you understand? Inside the places where I’ve worked is the only place where I can find minds that are complex enough to be interesting. It’s like going to see animals at the zoo. You want to watch them in their natural habitat, but if the only way you are ever going to see them is at the zoo, you go. I’ve always had to wait till they were in captivity before I could study them. But you, you’re still in the wild, still the way you want to be, perfected in your craft. And compared to them, you’re the cream of the crop. You’re exceptional. I want to spend the rest of my life being excited by your mind. I can’t imagine ever finding you boring.’ Terrifying, maybe, but never boring.

Her lower lip thrust out, bringing an expression of calculating petulance to her face. She nodded in the direction of his groin, where his penis hung limp. ‘So if you find me that attractive, how come it doesn’t show?’

It was the one question to which Tony had no answer at all.

‘What have we actually got, Carol?’ Brandon challenged.

Carol paced the floor of Brandon’s office, ticking off her points on her fingers. ‘We’ve got a transsexual. Not a transsexual who went through the controlled, counselled National Health Service process, but one who, according to Don, was turned down for a sex change here and had to finance an operation abroad by selling sex. So right from the start, we know we’ve got someone who has been examined by psychiatrists and found to be unstable. We’ve got this transsexual driving a vehicle identical to the one driven by a suspect in Damien Connolly’s murder. We’ve got a neighbour who’s convinced that Angelica Thorpe offed her dog. The dog was killed a fortnight before the first murder. Angelica Thorpe bought software that would allow her to manipulate videos in her computer system, which fits a theory of the killer’s behaviour developed by me and endorsed by our psychological profiler. She even lives in the kind of house Tony said she would,’ Carol argued vehemently.

‘When she was Christopher, she was definitely a few butties short of a picnic,’ Don chipped in.

‘I wish we could ask Tony about this,’ Brandon said, stalling.

‘So do I,’ Carol said through her teeth. ‘But he’s obviously found something more important to do today.’ A sudden thought hit Carol like a sandbag to the neck. Her knees started to buckle and she collapsed into the nearest chair. ‘Oh, my God,’ she gasped.

‘What is it?’ Brandon asked, concerned.

‘Tony. He hasn’t been in touch with anybody since he left here yesterday. He had two task-force meetings arranged for today, according to his secretary, but he hasn’t shown up at work, and he hasn’t phoned in. He wasn’t home last night, and he’s not there now.’ Carol’s words hung in the air like a cloud of poisonous smoke. A wave of nausea lurched up from her stomach, almost choking her. Somehow, she maintained her composure under Brandon’s concentrated stare.

With fingers that trembled, Carol picked up Brandon’s copy of the profile from his desk. Urgently, she flicked through the pages till she found what she was looking for. ‘“It is possible that his next target may also be a police officer, perhaps even one who is working on the investigation. This alone will not be sufficient motive for the killer to choose them; they must also fit the victim criteria that he has drawn up in his own mind in order for the killing to assume its full meaning for him. I would strongly recommend that any officers who fit the victim profile employ extra vigilance at all times, noting any suspicious vehicles parked near their homes, and checking to see whether they are being followed to and from work and social events.” Think about it, sir. Think about the victim profile. Sir, Tony fits it perfectly.’

Not wanting to believe what Carol was suggesting, Brandon said, ‘But it’s not eight weeks. It’s not time!’

‘But it
is
a Monday. Don’t forget, Tony also pointed out that his timetable could be accelerated if something happened to traumatize him. Stevie McConnell, sir. Think of all the publicity. Someone else was getting the credit for his crimes. Look, it’s in here, sir: “Another possible scenario is that an innocent person is charged with the killings. That would be such an affront to his sense of himself that he might commit his next murder ahead of schedule.” Sir, we’ve got to move on this now!’

Brandon’s hand was on the phone before she’d even started her last sentence.

The front door opened directly into the house. Downstairs couldn’t have looked more normal. The small living room was furnished inexpensively but comfortably with a two-seater sofa and matching chair upholstered in moss-green Dralon. There was a TV, video, mid-priced stereo system and a coffee table complete with a copy of
Elle
. A pair of framed posters of whales in the ocean hung on the walls. The single bookshelf contained a selection of science-fiction classics, a couple of Stephen King novels and a trio of Jackie Collins bonkbusters. Carol, Merrick and Brandon moved cautiously through the room, past the stairs and into the kitchen diner. It was surgically neat as a showroom, work surfaces clean and uncluttered. On the drainer, one mug, one plate, one fork, one knife.

With Brandon leading the way, they climbed the narrow stairs built between the two downstairs rooms. The front bedroom was pink and frothy as a strawberry milkshake. Even the kidney-shaped dressing table, with its skirt of lace, was pink. ‘Barbara Cartland, eat your heart out,’ Merrick muttered. Brandon opened the wardrobe and flicked through the array of women’s clothes. Carol headed for the drawers in a pink tallboy and worked her way down. They contained nothing more disturbing than a selection of tacky underwear, much of it in red satin.

It was Merrick who first broached the back bedroom. As soon as he opened the door, he knew no one was going to be screaming to the papers about magistrates granting warrants on non-existent evidence. ‘Sir?’ he shouted. ‘I think we’ve cracked it.’

The room was arranged as an office. A large desk held a computer and assorted peripherals that none of them could identify. To one side was a telephone linked to a sophisticated tape recorder. A small video-editing desk was in one corner, next to a filing cabinet. A wheeled trolley carried a television and video, both state of the art and top of the range. Shelves lined two walls, filled with computer games, videos, cassettes and computer disks, each box labelled neatly in firm capitals. The only alien object in the room was a leather recliner, the material slung hammock-like on a steel frame.

‘Bingo,’ Brandon breathed. ‘Well done, Carol.’

‘Where the fuck do we start?’ Merrick said.

‘Do either of you know how to work the computer?’ Brandon asked.

‘I think we should leave that to the experts,’ Carol said. ‘It might be programmed to crash the data if someone else tries to log on.’

‘OK. Don, you take the filing cabinet, I’ll take the videos, and Carol, you take the cassettes.’

Carol moved across to the shelves of cassettes. The first couple of dozen seemed to be music tapes, ranging from Liza Minnelli to U2. Next were a dozen marked ‘AS’ and numbered from one to twelve. Fourteen marked ‘PG’ followed, then fifteen with ‘GF’, eight with ‘DC’ and six with ‘AH’. The concatenation of initials was far beyond the boundaries of coincidence. Carol picked the first ‘AH’ tape and, heart heavy with misgivings, slotted it into the cassette player. She picked up the headphones plugged into the machine and gingerly pushed them into her ears. She heard the sound of a telephone ringing, then a voice so familiar she could have wept. ‘Hello?’ Tony said, his voice reduced by the telephone line.

‘Hello, Anthony,’ a voice not entirely strange to her said.

‘Who is this?’ Tony asked.

A chuckle, low and sexy. ‘You’ll never guess. Not in a million years.’ Got it, thought Carol, grim foreboding gripping her. The voice on the answering machine.

‘OK, so tell me,’ Tony said, his voice curious, friendly, joining in the game.

‘Who would you like me to be? If I could be anyone in the world?’

‘Is this some kind of wind-up?’ Tony demanded.

‘I’ve never been more serious in my life. I’m here to make your dreams come true. I’m the woman of your fantasies, Anthony. I am your telephone lover.’

There was a moment’s silence, then the phone slammed down at Tony’s end. Over the dialling tone, Carol heard the strange woman say, ‘
Hasta la vista
, Anthony.’

She stabbed the stop button and violently pulled out the headphones. She turned round to see Brandon transfixed by the image of Adam Scott stretched out on a rack, naked and apparently unconscious. Part of her mind could not comprehend what she was seeing. Evil, she thought, should be drenched in blood, not prosaically displayed on a suburban television screen.

‘Sir,’ she forced out. ‘The tapes. She’s been stalking Tony.’

Tony tried a laugh. It came out more like a sob, but he carried on regardless. ‘You expect me to get an erection? Trussed up like this? Angelica, you chloroformed me, kidnapped me and left me to come round alone in a torture chamber. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve got no experience of bondage. I’m too bloody scared to get a hard-on.’

‘I’m not letting you go, you know. Not to run straight back to them.’

‘I’m not asking you to let me go. Believe me, I’m happy to be your prisoner if that’s the only way I can spend time with you. I want to get to know you, Angelica. I want to prove my feelings to you, I want to show you what love feels like. I want to show you whose side I’m really on here.’ Tony tried to turn on the kind of smile he’d learned that women responded to.

‘So show me,’ Angelica challenged, letting one hand run caressingly down her body, lingering over her nipples and edging towards her crotch.

‘I’m going to need your help. Just like I needed you on the phone. You made me feel so good, like a real man. Please, help me now,’ Tony pleaded.

She took a step towards him, moving sinuously as a stripper. ‘You want me to turn you on?’ she drawled in a ghastly parody of seduction.

‘I don’t think I can do it like this,’ Tony said. ‘Not with my arms pinned behind me like this.’