The Reborn (32 page)

Dr Shan indicated with a nod that she would delay them no more. ‘I’ll take you to the interview room and let the ward know you’re here.’ She picked up the phone.

Coulter was not the first killer Rhona had been in close proximity to. Some, like the Gravedigger, hadn’t been from choice. Others had been in a court of law with at least a dock between. A smiling Coulter was a table’s width away.

‘Well, Professor, who do we have here?’

‘Mr Coulter, I am Dr Rhona MacLeod.’

‘
Dr
MacLeod? A psychiatrist?’

‘No, a doctor of science.’

He took a moment to consider that.

‘And what kind of science, exactly?’ he said.

‘I specialise in forensics.’

‘Wow,’ he laughed. ‘Brains as well as beauty.’

His gaze was openly admiring but not overtly sexual. He was less intimidating than Rhona had expected; his eyes were friendly and his manner pleasant and unthreatening. He looked interested in her, but there was another quality about him. A sort of magnetism that drew and held her.

‘So, Dr MacLeod, why are you here?’

Although he wasn’t shifting in his seat, there was a sense of restless energy about him.

‘To take a look at your workshop.’

‘They already did that. They didn’t find anything.’

‘I know.’

He leaned back, folding his arms. ‘Well, if you’ve got the time to spare, I’m happy for you to take another look.’

‘I’d like to ask you a couple more questions first,’ Magnus said.

Coulter switched his attention to him. Rhona felt a strange surge of relief that he no longer held her in his gaze.

‘Fire away,’ he said with enthusiasm.

‘Tell me about Geri.’

‘You’ve been reading my diary!’ He sounded pleased by this. ‘Geri’s my girlfriend.’

‘She visits you here?’ asked Magnus.

‘When she can. She writes to me a lot and we talk on the phone.’

‘Does she live alone?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just wondered, with you in here long term, whether she had another partner?’

‘I told you, she’s
my
girlfriend.’

The pleasant façade had cracked momentarily, but it was back up before they had time to see what lay beneath.

‘What does Geri have to say about Caroline?’ persisted Magnus.

‘She knows other women write to me. If it helps, she doesn’t mind.’

‘I see. Tell me about Caroline.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Her age, what she does for a living, what she writes to you about.’

Coulter frowned. ‘That would be breaking a confidence.’

‘She writes to you in secret?’

‘Some people might not approve.’

Magnus sat in silence for a moment.

‘How’s the Melanie doll coming along?’

Rhona watched as a small smile played on Coulter’s lips. This was what he’d been waiting for. ‘She’s all ready. Do you want to take a look?’

The doll was tiny, with fuzzy, dark hair and rosebud lips. She was dressed in a pink suit with a daisy motif, just like the one they’d found in the park.

‘Would you like to hold her?’

He held it out to Rhona, who was standing with Magnus in the doorway of the workroom. She wanted to refuse, but her arms seemed to move of their own accord as she accepted the doll from him. She had expected to feel revulsion, but found herself cradling it as though it were a real baby. And it did look and feel exactly like one, even down to its soft, floppy body.

‘Don’t you just love that wee face?’ Coulter’s eyes lit up as he gazed at the doll. ‘Look, the eyelids even look slightly damp. Moist glaze medium does that.’ He turned to smile at Rhona. ‘Attention to detail is what makes these dolls special.’

She handed it back to him, and he took it gently, even cradling the head.

‘Who’s this one for?’ she asked.

‘Geri. A present.’

‘Did she choose the name?’

‘Yes.’

Rhona wondered if the Reborn had been made to replace Geri’s own baby, the child he had killed.

Coulter laid the doll carefully in its box.

‘When you examine the room, Doctor, you’ll be careful with my tools?’

He indicated the neat row of instruments that resembled a surgeon’s implements, and Rhona had a sudden unpleasant image of him carving the doll’s face from clay, excavating the eye sockets with a scalpel.

When Coulter and Magnus left, accompanied by the orderlies, Rhona looked around the room. Coulter had been completely relaxed about the possibility of a search, with nothing in his manner to suggest he was worried. But then, if Magnus was correct in his assessment, the man was a practised liar.

The workroom was quite small, more like a large cupboard, a table filling one wall. Behind it were shelves stacked with materials, all labelled. A small jar of the glaze he’d talked about sat next to a selection of brushes. The numbers and different sizes made Rhona think of an artist’s studio. A paint set named ‘Peaches and Cream Complexion’ was open. Perhaps it had been used on Melanie.

Magnus hadn’t mentioned Melanie’s death to Coulter, yet Rhona couldn’t help but feel that he knew about it already. He had been relaxed, confident, almost triumphant about the newborn he’d given her name to.

Assuming Coulter was aware of Melanie’s death, who could have told him? Not Dr Shan, whose reaction made it clear the news had come as a shock. It hadn’t been made public yet, so Coulter would have to be in touch with someone close to the case. For that to be true, he had to have a means of communication.

He had to have access to a mobile.

Mobiles in prisons were either hidden whole, or were taken apart to hide, the SIM card being the most important part. Although it was a recent phenomenon, dogs were already being trained to sniff out mobile parts. It was the only option, short of trying to block all mobile calls in and out of prison. Both methods were difficult to achieve, but were imperative if they were to prevent crime and drug empires being run from behind bars.

Rhona was sure she would unearth something to prove Coulter had found a way of communicating with the outside world. She set to work.

42

Bill could sense the energy when he entered the room, and wondered if it meant they had made a breakthrough. Multiple officers had been working on the mobile images gleaned from the calls they’d made to the public, and they wouldn’t be so excited if they had found nothing.

Roy had placed mobiles at the scene via the calls they’d made and received. If their killer had made a call when at the funfair, he or she would be among those detected.

A hush descended as Bill walked to the front. Roy was seated next to a laptop, whose screen was duplicated on a whiteboard above him. On it was a map of the site, showing the location of every van and every funfair ride the night Kira was murdered.

Bill gave Roy a nod, and he began.

‘Over sixty images were made available to us from that night; their locations are marked on the map. During the hour before Kira’s disappearance we have a record of fifty calls bouncing off nearby masts, and all of these have been logged by the time the call was made. When we concentrated on the area around the dodgems, the Waltzers, the toilets and the mirror maze, the number narrows down to nearer twenty and the images to ten.’ He paused. ‘Just after Kira left the others at the dodgems, she showed up in the background of a short video.’ He enlarged an image and set it to run.

The video showed a teenage boy kissing a girl before they both laughed towards the mobile in his outstretched hand. Behind them a pregnant female in a fringed jacket crossed the screen, face intent, walking quickly. It was Kira, looking very much alive.

‘Five minutes later a photo taken near the line of female toilets finds this.’

He tapped the screen and a second image became enlarged. It was poorer quality than the video, but it was clear enough to see what the excitement in the room was about. Behind a kid with a candyfloss was a row of toilet cubicles. Emerging from one was a clown. There was an explosion of noise from those watching.

‘We pick up the clown again a few minutes later.’ Roy brought up another image. ‘Next to the candyfloss van, in a direct line to the entrance to the mirror maze.’

‘Anything that suggests the clown got in there with her?’ Bill asked.

Roy shrugged. ‘We can’t tell. It would have to have happened via the exit or under the canvas at the rear, and no one was round there to take photos.’

‘Let’s see the shot near the candyfloss van again. Can we estimate the clown’s height?’

Roy brought up a scale on the screen. The clown was approximately two thirds the height of the van.

‘We estimate it at 1.67 metres,’ he said. ‘Around five feet five.’

‘Any sightings of the clown before that time?’

‘None.’

Bill turned from the screen to address the group.

‘OK, the clown emerged from a female cubicle, where we can assume they may have gone to put on the costume. So we have an average height female or a shorter male, in a red-haired clown wig, the colour of the fibres retrieved by forensic from under Kira’s fingernail.’ He turned back to Roy. ‘Anyone else recorded in the vicinity of the maze around the time the victim went inside?’

Roy brought up three images. ‘These were taken within a ten minute period.’

As Bill studied the photographs, his stomach flipped. ‘Can you enlarge that one further?’ He pointed at the third.

The image was slightly blurred, but unmistakeable. Tall and thin, dark-haired and hook-nosed. A raven, he’d thought when he first saw him at Morvern. Dr Frank Delaney, Kira’s tutor, had been at the funfair the night she died.

As soon as the commotion died down, Bill gave orders that Delaney be brought in for questioning. Then he headed for his office and closed the door. The coffee he’d fetched before the meeting sat cooling on his desk. He sat down on the swivel chair and took a swig. He didn’t like hot coffee anyway. As he anticipated the caffeine hit, he allowed a sense of satisfaction to flow through him.

He was reminded of the knitting his mother used to do when he was small. Fair Isle patterns, a weave of complex colour. But when things went wrong and she slid the knitting off the needles to rip it back, the pattern unravelled to reveal a set of single identifiable strands.

Kira – clever, manipulative, sexually promiscuous. A siren who influenced both men and women. In the video her expression had been intent. Was she heading somewhere in particular, to meet someone? Had Delaney also succumbed to her power and gone to meet her that night?

The last time her mobile had been used was to record the image of the doll for them to find, so it was logical to assume that whoever killed Kira took her phone and used it. The tech team had detailed all the calls and checked the numbers. The Daisy Chain gang had featured, David, home, a Twitter account she had set up. They were going through that account now. Bill had been shown some of the messages she’d posted online, direct messages received and sent, the people she’d been following and who had been following her. It had all looked like gobbledegook to him but it had to be studied, every last piece of empty-headed nonsense.

Bill glanced at his watch. They would have had to pull Delaney from school. Maybe even out of the classroom. No doubt the Principal of Morvern would comply with the police summons using her normal discretion, but he wouldn’t like to be in her shoes if Delaney turned out to be a prime suspect in a murder case and the parents found out.

He fired up his laptop and logged on to the crime scene software. He wanted another look at Delaney. This time he studied the expression on Delaney’s face and decided the man was scanning the crowds. With his height it was easy. Was he looking for Kira? Had she been on her way to meet him when she went into the maze?

While he waited for news of Delaney’s arrival, he picked up the phone and dialled Sutherland’s office.

The DSI listened in silence while Bill outlined the developments in the case.

‘Very well. Keep me informed.’

Bill caught him before he rang off. ‘There’s something else.’

‘Can it wait?’

Bill decided to plough on regardless. ‘It’s about Fergus Morrison.’

‘Who?’ Sutherland knew full well who Bill was referring to.

‘I heard he was dead, shot by an assassin. Is it true?’

‘Where did you hear this?’ Sutherland snapped.

‘The rumour mill,’ lied Bill.

‘Canteen gossip.’

‘It’s not true then?’

‘As I said, canteen gossip.’

The DSI was lying, and was aware that Bill knew it. He brought the discussion to an end. ‘As I said, keep me informed about the
current
case.’

It was the signal to lay off, and Bill took it. He knew Fergus Morrison was dead, which meant the Kalinin case was dead in the water. If SOCA had something else up its sleeve, he wouldn’t hear about it; the Super had made it clear that it was none of his business.

Bill knew he would have to tell Rhona that the rumour about Morrison’s death was true, and regretted now that he had ever mentioned it to her. He feared he had only made matters worse.

He tried to refocus his thoughts on the fairground case and the man he was shortly to interview. Delaney had been plausible, pleasant even. Maybe he had been honest, for the most part. Good liars always stuck close to the truth; maybe Delaney had simply omitted the part where he was sleeping with his student.

There was a knock at the door and DS Clark stuck her head round.

‘Delaney’s here, Sir. Room five.’

Dr Delaney had exuded intelligence and confidence when seated in the Principal’s study at Morvern. He looked considerably less confident now.

Police interview rooms tended to have an unpleasant smell. A lot of sweating went on in them, not to mention the actual bodily fluids left behind by some previous occupants. Bill was used to the odour, in the same way that the doctors and nurses who walked hospital corridors daily no longer smelt illness, disinfectant and death.