A Tapping at My Door: A Gripping Serial Killer Thriller (The DS Nathan Cody Series) (15 page)

Well, maybe not exactly the same.

Cody moves in to get a closer look at the body. Which isn’t easy, given that the eminent Dr Stroud has squeezed his vast bulk into the cramped porch. Cody issues a gentle cough, just enough to make the pathologist aware of his presence. Stroud leans back a little, affording Cody a clearer view of Garnett lying spread-eagled on his back.

‘Spot the difference,’ says Stroud.

There is a lot of blood in here. Even more than there was with Terri Latham. Streaks of red up the walls, and even on the ceiling. Thick, sticky puddles of it on the tiled floor. It looks as though Garnett was stabbed multiple times. As with Latham, his eyes have been gouged out. Cody peers uneasily into the dark ragged holes in the man’s face.

And that’s the difference. Cody can see the eyes. Yes, a bird has been placed on Garnett’s face, but this bird is much smaller than a raven. It doesn’t cover the hollowed-out eyes, leaving them to stare zombie-like at the porch ceiling.

‘What is that?’ Cody asks. ‘A blackbird?’

‘Looks like one to me,’ says Stroud.

This puzzles Cody. Why a different bird? Why should Terri Latham be deserving of a huge, imperious raven, while Garnett gets the cut-down version?

Stroud points his gloved finger at the bird’s leg. ‘There’s another message. I suppose you want me to go against protocol and open it here and now?’

Cody turns to his superior. She nods. ‘Go ahead, Rory. If it’s got the killer’s name on it, I’ll kiss you.’

Stroud smiles and pushes his bushy eyebrows up and down. ‘How could I resist an invitation like that?’

Cody has to chase away the grimace creeping across his face. The scene is gruesome enough without the added imagery of Blunt and Stroud engaged in mutual tonsil-tickling.

Stroud mutters something into his voice recorder, then picks up some steel implements and leans over the body. Standing just outside the front door, Cody and the other detectives can see nothing beyond Stroud’s enormous back.

Eventually, Stroud turns his head to the side. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘There’s another slight difference.’

‘Rory,’ says Blunt. ‘This isn’t an episode of
Quincy
. Can you cut the drama and just give us the facts?’

Stroud shifts his body mass out of the way. Permits them all a good look at what he has already seen.

Cody hears the intakes of breath. Hears the ‘Oh Jesus!’ from Webley.

Stroud has removed the bird. What can be seen underneath is undeniably the face of Paul Garnett.

Minus his nose, that is.

It ought to be the start of an absurdly dark joke:
I say, I say, my policeman’s got no nose. How does he smell . . .?

But it’s nothing to laugh at. This man has had part of his face forcibly removed, possibly when he was still alive. The protrusion of flesh and bone and gristle has been cut away, leaving a neat, flat triangle of glistening redness.

‘Hacksaw job, I’d say,’ Stroud offers. ‘No sign of the missing olfactory organ.’

Nobody replies. Nobody is quite sure what to say. The silence continues while they gather their thoughts, while they try to come to terms with the horror splashed across their minds.

‘All right,’ says Blunt, a little shakily. ‘Open the message, please.’

But Cody already has an idea what it contains. He has put two and two together, and wonders whether the others have done the same, or whether their brains are just too overloaded to make sense of anything right now.

Stroud teases open the rolled-up paper and reads it out: ‘
Wasn’t that a dainty dish?
’

‘What?’ says Webley. ‘What the bloody hell—’

‘The nursery rhyme,’ says Cody. ‘“Sing a Song of Sixpence”. Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie.’

Webley nods. ‘When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing; wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king? But what does—’

‘Now skip to the last verse. The maid was in the garden . . .’

Webley thinks for a moment as the rhyme comes back to her. ‘The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes, when down came a blackbird . . .’

She lets it trail, and Blunt finishes it in a solemn tone: ‘. . . and pecked off her nose.’

Another silence ensues.

‘He’s playing with us,’ says Blunt. ‘The bastard thinks this is all a game. I’m not having it. From now on he gets to know how serious we are.’

She looks Webley in the eye, then Cody. ‘Pull the Vernons in. I don’t care if it upsets them or anybody else. Somebody knows something, and I’m going to make bloody sure they don’t keep it to themselves for very long.’

20

They divide the family up. Interview them separately and simultaneously in three rooms. Blunt decides it’s prudent to deal with Frank Vernon herself. Another team deals with his wife. Webley and Cody get to talk to Robert, the son who looks so uncannily like his dead brother. He sits across from them in the small, characterless interview room. Very still, hands in his lap, knees together. His face is expressionless, his thoughts unreadable, although Cody gets the persistent impression that Robert is laughing at them inside.

‘First of all,’ says Cody, ‘I’d like to thank you for agreeing to help us with our inquiries.’

‘My pleasure,’ says Robert. ‘I always like to do my bit for law and order.’

Cody searches Robert’s face for signs of a wind-up, but finds it impassive.

‘I want to stress that you’re not a suspect at this present time. You’re simply here to answer some questions we have. Are you okay with that?’

Robert considers this. ‘I would be . . . if it was true.’

Cody exchanges glances with Webley. ‘I’m sorry. If what was true?’

‘That I’m not a suspect. Of course I’m a suspect. The two police officers who were involved in the death of my brother have both been murdered. I repeat, it was
my
brother they killed. If I’m not on your list of suspects, then you’re not doing your job properly. Now shall we start again, Detective? Only, can we do it properly this time?’

Cody tries to keep his own face as devoid of emotion as his interviewee’s. He hopes he is appearing as calm and collected and logical as Robert, but he’s not convinced he’s managing it. The man is right, of course. Clearly he’s a suspect. The only reason Cody told him he wasn’t is that the Chief Superintendent handed down a dictum that ‘in light of previous events’ this family was to be treated with the ‘utmost care and respect, and with no finger-pointing unless absolutely warranted by the evidence’.

So much for the softly-softly approach.

‘All right, Robert. But you’re not under arrest, okay? You’re free to go whenever you like.’

Robert looks around at the door, as if contemplating that very option. Cody wonders if this is going to be over before it’s even begun.

‘I’ll stay,’ says Robert. ‘I’ve got nothing better to do right now.’

How very kind of you, thinks Cody.

‘You’re not at work today?’ he asks.

‘I’m between jobs at the moment.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I used to be a car salesman. I was good at it, too. Then Kevin was killed. The firm told me to take as much time off as I needed, but my mum and dad couldn’t manage without me. I got sacked in the end. To be honest, I don’t think they wanted the publicity.’

‘You haven’t done any work since then?’

‘A couple of things, to make ends meet. Some bar work. A short time in a call centre, for as long as I could stand it.’

‘You didn’t like it there?’

‘The people were idiots. Especially the girls. All they talked about was sex, fashion and music.’

‘You don’t like any of those things?’

‘Let’s just say that my tastes and opinions aren’t as superficial as theirs. I asked one of them what she thought about Mandela, and she thought it was a new clothes shop in town.’ He pauses. ‘Anyway, why are we talking about this, Detective Cody?’

Cody waves a hand. ‘Just breaking the ice. Making conversation.’

Robert stares for a while, then a scornful smile crosses his lips as he shakes his head.

‘You find that amusing?’

‘Amusing? I find your whole attitude amusing, Detective. Maybe most of the people you drag into this police station are as thick as pig shit, but I’m not one of them. I know exactly what it is you’re trying to do with all this small talk.’

‘What am I trying to do?’

Robert taps a finger on his temple. ‘Trying to get in here. Trying to figure out how I tick. Well, you can forget about it. I have no intention of getting all touchy-feely with you, Detective Cody, so just ask me where I was last night and what I was doing, and then we can both go our separate ways again.’

Cody feels a sizzle of anger. He tries to douse it, but he suspects that Robert Vernon will do his best to pour more fuel onto it.

‘Where do you live, Robert?’

‘You know where I live. With my parents. They told you that yesterday. I moved back in because they need me. Because of Kevin.’ He winks at Cody. ‘Just dropping that in again. I assume we’ll get back to that subject.’

‘And you were there last night?’

‘The nights are long. Could you be more specific?’

‘Put it this way: were there any times you weren’t in your parents’ house last night?’

Robert goes theatrical. Puts on a show of wrestling with his memory.

‘Last night . . . last night . . . Well, there was— no, hang on, that was just a dream. But what about— no, I changed my mind about doing that. Actually, thinking about it, I’d have to say the answer is no.’

‘So you were there all night?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘And your parents can vouch for that?’

‘I doubt it. They do something at night called sleeping. If I went out in the middle of the night – say, to kill a copper – I don’t think they’d hear me. Although they don’t sleep as well as they used to, not since my brother was murdered.’

Cody notices a slight emphasis on that last word. He doesn’t rise to the bait, though. That would be playing into Vernon’s hands.

Quiet until now, Webley joins in: ‘Robert, can we just get one thing straight? You said before that you want us to do our job properly. Well, this is it. This is us doing our job, talking to the people who might be able to help us. Someone has killed two police officers. Both of them were implicated in the death of your brother. Both were cleared. Now it doesn’t matter whether you agree with that decision or not, the point is that these victims have an obvious connection to your family. Like DS Cody said, we’re not trying to pin anything on you. We just want to find out if there is any information you can provide us with to help us catch whoever did these crimes.’

Vernon keeps his gaze fixed on Webley throughout her speech. He doesn’t move, his hands remaining in his lap.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not convinced.’

Cody sees the flicker of puzzlement on Webley’s face.

‘Not convinced about what?’ she asks.

‘You. It just doesn’t work.’

‘I’m sorry, what doesn’t work?’

‘Trying to act all superior. Trying to take some kind of moral high ground. You don’t pull it off. It might be something to do with you being a woman. You just don’t have that same ring of authority that a man has. Now, DS Cody here, he sounds the business. But you . . . No, sorry, you just don’t cut it. You’re pretty, though – I’ll give you that.’

Don’t rise to it, thinks Cody. He’s trying to rattle you.

‘For your information,’ says Webley, ‘there are a lot of women in the police force, many of them at high levels. My boss on this murder team is a woman.’

‘You mean DCI Blunt? Yeah, I’ve met her. Not exactly the best example of womankind, though, is she? I mean, come on. A guy would have to be pretty desperate to go fishing in that lake, don’t you think?’

Cody waits for the eruption from Webley, but she surprises him with how collected she remains.

‘You don’t really mean that,’ she says.

This throws him. Cody sees it in his eyes. He was expecting belligerence, or at least disgust. Not a challenge like this.

‘You think?’ he answers. A weak riposte.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I can hear it in your voice. It’s an act, and not a very good one either. You don’t like us, and you don’t like being here, and so you thought you might as well try to be as much of a pain in the arse as you can. Well, that’s fine, Robert. If you want to act like a child, go ahead. Your other choice is to be adult about the situation by helping us solve the murders of two police officers. What are you going to be today – a grown-up or a five-year-old?’

Vernon does something odd then.

He cries.

He does it in silence. He stares at Webley for a full minute, and then a single tear beads in his right eye and rolls down the curve of his cheek.

Cody isn’t sure he is seeing this at first, but then he notices how the left eye does the same. Vernon breaks contact with Webley. Stares straight ahead at the wall behind them instead. His expression doesn’t alter; he makes no sound. But the tears continue to flow down his face until they are dripping softly onto the desk below.

It happens like this sometimes. They walk in acting big. Hard as nails. They mouth off and they swear and they pronounce their hatred. And then, as if by magic, the veneer cracks. Sometimes the trigger is a memory or a photograph or, as in this case, something the interviewing officer has said. It’s as if Robert wanted to be himself all along. He just needed to be given permission.

‘Robert,’ says Cody. ‘Are you okay?’

Robert has to open his mouth a couple of times before he can get the words out. ‘He was my brother.’

From Webley: ‘We know, Robert. We understand.’

‘He was older than me. He wasn’t all there in the head, but he was still my brother. He was polite and he was caring and he even had a good sense of humour. He would never have hurt a fly. He wouldn’t have attacked those two police officers. He might not have understood what they wanted him to do, but he wouldn’t have lashed out at them. He didn’t have it in him. One time, I caught a load of kids who were teasing him and throwing stones at him. He just laughed, like it was a game. He could have crushed those kids in one hand. But he didn’t. He just stood there and took it. That was my brother for you. That was Kevin.’