The Torment of Others (49 page)

On the other side of the chimney breast bookshelves had been built into the wall. Tony crossed to look at them, but he was distracted by the sight of a laptop on the dining table. He ducked through the arch, opened it and pressed the button to turn it on. While he waited for it to boot up, he went back to the bookshelves. ‘There’s got to be a record,’ he murmured.

The lower shelves contained videos, the upper ones books. Most of the books were lesbian fiction, from pulp romance to more serious literature by writers such as Sarah Waters, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson. Incongruously, half a dozen tattered hardbacks of John Buchan thrillers. On the top shelf, legal textbooks, police manuals. He bent over to study the videos. American cop shows like
CSI, NYPD Blue, Law & Order
dominated, though there were also a few lesbian classics such as
Bound
and
Show Me Love.
He took out a couple of cases at random, but the contents matched the covers.

‘Gotta be a record,’ he repeated. He went back to the computer and gazed at it. The trouble was, he wasn’t much of a techie. He knew enough to run the programs he wanted to run and that was about it. He needed Stacey Chen. But that was about as likely as a moonwalk right now. ‘It’s not going to be here. You’re too clever for that. You know what people like Stacey can do. No, you’re going to want something tangible, something you can access without leaving footprints.’ He looked around the room. There was nowhere to hide anything down here. Wherever the puppetmaster kept the records of her exercises in power, they weren’t here.

Purposefully, Tony headed for the stairs. He wasn’t worried about being disturbed; all Carol’s officers were working flat out round the clock. Jan wouldn’t be back for hours yet. Plenty of time to have a good look round.

The three cops thundered up the dimly lit stairs of 7 Grove Terrace, ignoring the open-mouthed student who had let them in and who was now shouting, ‘Hey, what the fuck…’

They stumbled into one another on the landing outside the door of flat 4. Carol banged the door with the side of her fist. ‘Police, open up,’ she shouted, venting all the anger, fear and frustration of the past few days.

No reply. Kevin pushed his way to the door and hammered so hard the wooden panel cracked. ‘Open up, Carl. The party’s over.’

‘Kick it in,’ Carol said.

Kevin stepped back and threw himself at the door. It vibrated, but didn’t break open. As he backed up for another attempt, Stacey intervened. ‘Gimme a chance,’ she said.

Kevin almost burst out laughing. ‘You what?’

But Stacey was already somewhere else. She stood side-on to the door, breathing deeply. She seemed to coil into herself then she erupted in a blur of movement, one leg shooting out and hitting the door right next to the lock. There was a splintering of wood and the door sagged open.

‘Fucking hell,’ Kevin said.

Carol gave Stacey a perplexed glance. ‘You’re full of surprises,’ she said, pushing the door open. What faced them stripped away any sense of wonder or levity. Carl Mackenzie lay sprawled on the bed, blood and brains on the covers and the wall behind him. The air was thick with the salt metallic taste of blood. In his right hand, a gun lay, his fingers curled loosely around the grip.

‘Gunshot wound to the right temple. Gun in his hand,’ Carol said automatically.

‘Oh Jesus, no,’ Kevin shouted. ‘Fucking bastard, why couldn’t you give us Paula first? Fucking selfish bastard.’

‘Looks like suicide to me,’ Stacey said.

Carol bent forward to peer closely at the body on the bed. ‘Except I can’t see any powder burns round the wound.’ She reached out and laid the back of her hand against his arm. ‘Still warm. Very fucking convenient.’

Stacey frowned. ‘Convenient for who?’

‘For whoever wants us to believe that Carl Mackenzie was smart enough to plan a series of murders and to kidnap a cop.’

‘I don’t understand. His prints were on Paula’s powerpack. Do you mean he was working with someone?’

Carol sighed. ‘Not with someone, Stacey. For someone.’

It wasn’t so bad after all. Nothing like as exciting as making the others do the work, but still a thrill. Having the power to take a life and having the nerve to exercise it; how could that not be close to as good as it gets?

I wonder how long the suicide scenario will hold water. It depends on whether they find him because they know they’re looking for him for the murders or whether they just find him. If it’s the ice blonde and her team of nodding dogs, it won’t take them long to realize Carl wasn’t alone when he died. It’s a pity I had to use the pillow, but I didn’t have a silencer and it was more important that I got away than that I made the scene watertight and some nosy neighbour clocked me leaving after the gunshot
.

Maybe I should have tried the line that I was interviewing
him when suddenly he reached for the gun and shot himself. I could have been the hero of the hour. But that would have been a high-risk strategy, and I haven’t got this far by taking unnecessary risks. I’ve always stacked the odds in my favour. Like with the trained monkeys: I always made sure they were well in my debt before I started pushing the buttons to make them perform. With Derek, there was the evidence of the rape that I conveniently made disappear. With Carl, there were the drugs
.

Now it’s time to finish clearing up. I’m keeping an eye open for what I need, doubling down the side streets a couple of miles from Carl’s place. And there it is, tucked down an alley. A builder’s skip, full of wood and broken furniture and rubble. I pull up at the mouth of the alley and grab the ruined pillow. I stuff it under a broken sheet of chipboard and I’m back in the car inside a minute
.

I need to get back on to the visible plane, but I want to see her first. I’m aching for her; it’s been a long time since this morning, and Carl won’t be bringing any more videos. I’m going to have to go there myself later to change the video cassette and to check on her. Shoving a dildo garnished with razor blades into a woman’s vagina myself will be less satisfying. Making someone else do it, now that’s worth the candle. But getting my own hands dirty was never part of the game plan
.

But there’s no other way out. Left to her own devices, she’ll take too long to die. They’ll have found where I’m keeping her long before that happens. And even though there’s nothing there to point the finger at me, I’d prefer her to be dead when they get to her
.

Of course, there might be more pleasure to be had in her staying alive…Watching her struggle with the damage my power has inflicted might just offer something rather
special to savour. It’s possible that would amuse me while I look for another monkey to train
.

Yes. Perhaps for once the exercise of mercy might be a more entertaining route to take
.

But first I want to see her suffer some more
.

The immaculate cream carpet continued throughout the upper floor of the house. The room straight ahead was clearly the main bedroom. Although it was as perfectly ordered as the living room–no clothes thrown over chairs, bed neatly made, dressing table as organized as Dr Vernon’s instrument tray in the pathology lab–it wasn’t what he’d expected. Somehow, though the overall effect managed to be sterile, this was undoubtedly intended to be a boudoir. Decorated in peaches and cream, the curtains matching the bed linen, the room contained more flounces and frills than Tony had ever seen outside the bedding department of John Lewis.

‘Who are you trying to be here?’ he asked out loud. ‘Who do you bring here? Are you trying to lull them into a false sense of security? Are you trying to kid them that you’re not really a shark?’ He walked over to the chest of drawers and, feeling uncomfortably like the sort of sexual pervert that ended up as his patient, he slid open the top drawer. It was crammed with excessively feminine lingerie of the kind Tony had only ever seen in expensive shops and then only in occasional glimpses. But even here, order prevailed. Bras on one side of the drawer, briefs that deserved their name on the other. He gingerly moved his hand among the lace and silk. Nothing untoward met his fingers.

The next drawer contained carefully folded T-shirts, many of them silk, and an assortment of hosiery. The bottom drawer was packed with sweaters. He closed it, having found nothing except clothes.

He looked over at the bed. Kingsize, traditional iron bedstead painted cream. It was, Tony thought, a measure of his intellectual investment in perversion that he could never contemplate such a bed without automatically thinking of bondage. On either side there was a bedside table complete with lamp. It was impossible to tell which side Jan slept on.

He checked the drawer of the bedside table nearest the door. Empty. The other offered a couple of books of lesbian erotica, one with an S&M theme, a dildo and a small anal probe. Nothing very remarkable, he thought. ‘Of course, I could be wrong about you. It does run counter to the probabilities,’ he muttered. ‘And if I am, that could be very embarrassing.’ He shut the drawer and looked around purposefully.

One wall of the room appeared to consist solely of doors. Tony tried the first and found himself inside a small en suite shower room. Not a hiding place in sight. The next door opened into a walk-in wardrobe stretching the rest of the length of the room. He moved slowly along, flicking through the clothes. Suits, trousers, jackets, blouses, a couple of formal evening dresses. Everything clean and ironed, some items still in their dry-cleaning bags. He got down on his knees to look behind the shoes. She had what he thought Carol would find a depressing penchant for cowboy boots.

Probing among the boots, his fingers brushed against the coolness of metal. Scrabbling under the footwear, he discovered a metal file case pushed back into a recess in the wall. ‘Bingo,’ he breathed. He pulled it out into the light and tried the remaining key he’d had cut.

The lock turned with the smoothness of frequent use. Hoping for more than a stash of porn, Tony opened the lid.

Carol stood on the landing in Grove Terrace, watching the SOCOs work their tedious magic. She could hear Stacey’s voice floating down from the floor above.

‘How well did you know Carl Mackenzie?’

Then a woman replying, ‘I wouldn’t say I knew him. We’d speak on the stairs, that sort of thing. But that’s as far as it went. He wasn’t the full shilling, poor lad.’

‘Did you ever see other people coming and going from his flat?’

‘Can’t say I noticed anybody. A proper Billy No-Mates, that was Carl. Eager to please, but not the sort you’d want following you round.’

‘And did you hear anything this afternoon?’

‘Not me, love. I was watching the telly.’

Kevin walked up from the floor below. He shook his head. ‘Nobody heard a thing.’

Carol sighed. ‘They really didn’t, or they conveniently didn’t?’

‘I think they were telling the truth,’ he said despairingly. There’s a little old lady downstairs, she’d love to have heard or seen something. She hasn’t had this much excitement since the Boer War.’

‘You know, Kevin, if Carl Mackenzie killed himself, I’ll apply for a transfer to Traffic. Get the uniforms to search the bins.’

‘The bins? What are we looking for?’

‘Look at the bed. What’s wrong with this picture?’

Kevin looked but he couldn’t see past the body steadily cooling on the soiled sheets. He shrugged. ‘There’s no pillow. Can you sleep without a pillow,

Kevin?’

The penny dropped. ‘A pillow with a hole in the middle.’

Sam Evans was fed up. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be doing. Jan Shields had marshalled half a dozen of them back down to Temple Fields to go over what was, as far as he was concerned, old ground. They were ordered to carry out another canvass of the area immediately surrounding the bin where the transmitter pack had been found. They’d dispersed on their rounds and he hadn’t seen Shields since. He’d knocked on the doors assigned to him, asked the same questions, logged the same negative responses.

He decided to have a quick pit stop in Stan’s Café. The coffee was terrible, but the atmosphere was marginally less depressing than that inside the police station. As he walked down the street towards the greasy spoon, he saw Honey on the kerb, touting for trade. ‘Hey, girl, how’re you doing?’ he said easily.

‘Hi, Sammy,’ she said. ‘Crap, actually. You lot are killing the trade.’

‘Fancy a coffee?’ He’d thought she had something for him in the pub, but Jan Shields’ arrival had closed her down tight as a drum. Maybe he could loosen her up again.

‘You buying?’

‘I’m buying.’

‘In that case, you can treat me to an all-day breakfast.’

He grinned. He’d always admired bottle. ‘Come on, then.’

A few minutes later, Honey was attacking a monstrous fry-up with all the gusto of a starving dog. Mouth full of sausage and egg, she mumbled, ‘Brilliant, Sammy.’