The Mermaids Singing (20 page)

‘I can tell you the whole plot, for fuck’s sake,’ McConnell said angrily.

‘You could have seen it any time, Stevie,’ Merrick said gently. ‘What did you do after the pictures?’

‘I went home. Cooked myself a steak and some vegetables.’ McConnell paused and stared at the table. ‘Then I went into town for the last hour. Just for a quick drink with a few mates.’

Carol leaned forward, sensing McConnell’s reluctance. ‘Where in town?’ she demanded.

McConnell said nothing.

Carol leaned further forward, the tip of her nose an inch from his. Her voice was quiet but icy cold. ‘If I have to stick your face on the front page of the
Sentinel Times
and send a team into every pub in the city, I’ll do it, Mr McConnell. Where in town?’

McConnell breathed in heavily through his nose. ‘The Queen of Hearts,’ he spat.

Carol leaned back, satisfied. She stood up. ‘Interview terminated at 3.17 a.m.,’ she said, leaning over to switch off the tape recorder. She looked down at McConnell. ‘We’ll be back, Mr McConnell.’

‘Wait a minute,’ he protested as Merrick got up and the two of them made for the door. ‘When am I going to get out of here? You’ve got no right to keep me!’

Carol turned back in the doorway, smiled sweetly and said, ‘Oh, I have every right, Mr McConnell. You’ve been arrested for assault, let’s not forget. I have twenty-four hours to make your life a misery before I even have to think about charging you.’

Merrick gave an apologetic smile as he backed out of the room in Carol’s wake. ‘Sorry, Stevie,’ he said. ‘The lady’s not wrong.’

He caught up with Carol as she was asking the custody sergeant to return McConnell to the cells. ‘What do you think, ma’am?’ Merrick asked as they walked off together.

Carol stopped and eyed Merrick critically. His skin was pale and clammy, his eyes feverishly bright. ‘I think you need to go home and get some sleep, Don. You look like shit on a stick.’

‘Never mind me. What about McConnell, ma’am?’

‘We’ll see what Mr Brandon has to say.’ Carol set off for the stairs, Merrick trailing behind her.

‘But what do
you
think, ma’am?’

‘On the face of it, he could be our man. He’s got nothing approaching an alibi for Monday night, he runs the gym where Gareth Finnegan worked out, he knew Adam Scott and by his own admission he was in the Queen of Hearts on Monday night for the last hour. He’s certainly strong enough to have carted the bodies in and out of a car. He’s got form, even if it is only a couple of breaches of the peace and a Section 18 wounding. And he’s into S&M. But that’s all circumstantial. And I still don’t think we’ve got grounds for a search warrant,’ Carol rattled off. ‘What about you, Don? Got a feeling in your water about this one?’

They turned down the corridor towards the murder squad room. ‘I kind of like him,’ Merrick said grudgingly. ‘I can’t imagine that I’d take a liking to the bastard that’s been doing these murders. But then, I suppose that’s a pretty daft reaction. I mean, he’s not the two-headed man, is he? He’s got to have something about him that lets him get close enough to his victims to do the business. So maybe it
is
Stevie McConnell.’

Carol opened the door to the squad room, expecting to find Brandon and Tony still sitting there, fuelled by coffee and canteen sandwiches. The room was empty. ‘Where’s the ACC got to now?’ Carol said, tiredness lending her voice a note of exasperation.

‘Maybe he’s left a message at the front desk,’ Merrick suggested.

‘And maybe he’s done the sensible thing and buggered off home to bed. Well, that’s us for tonight, Don. McConnell can stew for a bit. See what the bosses have to say in the morning. Maybe we can try for a search warrant now we know McConnell was in the Queen of Hearts. Now, get out of my sight and go home to bed before your Jean accuses me of leading you off the straight and narrow. Get some sleep. I don’t want to see you before noon, and if your head’s hurting, stay in bed. That’s an order, Detective Sergeant.’

Merrick grinned. ‘Yes, ma’am. See you.’

Carol watched Merrick walk back down the corridor, worried at the slow deliberation of his movements. ‘Don?’ she called. Merrick turned enquiringly back to her. ‘Get a taxi. My authorization. I don’t want you wrapped round a lamppost on my conscience. And that’s an order, too.’ Merrick grinned, nodded and disappeared down the stairs.

With a sigh, Carol walked down the squad room to her temporary office. There was no message on her desk. Bloody Brandon, she thought. And bloody Tony Hill. Brandon at least should have waited till she’d finished her interrogation of McConnell. And Tony might have left some indication of when he expected them to meet to discuss his profile. Muttering under her breath, Carol followed Merrick out of the building. As she reached the foyer, the officer minding the front desk called, ‘Inspector Jordan?’

Carol turned back. ‘I’m what’s left of her.’ ‘The ACC left a message for you, ma’am.’ Carol approached the desk and took the envelope the constable handed her. She ripped it open and pulled out a single sheet of paper. ‘Carol,’ she read. ‘I have taken Tony off on a little mission. I’ll drop him at home afterwards. Please be in my office for ten this morning. Thanks for your hard work. John Brandon.’ ‘Great,’ Carol said bitterly. She gave the constable a tired smile. ‘I don’t suppose you know where Mr Brandon and Dr Hill were headed?’

He shook his head. ‘Sorry, ma’am. They didn’t say.’

‘Wonderful,’ she muttered sarcastically. Turn your back for a minute and they were off playing their boys’ games. Little mission, indeed. Bollocks to that, Carol thought as she marched back to her car. ‘Three can play at that game,’ she said as she turned the ignition key.

Tony flicked through the last of the magazines and returned it to the box file in the bedside storage cube. ‘S&M always leaves me feeling faintly queasy,’ he remarked. ‘And this lot’s particularly nasty.’

Brandon agreed. McConnell’s collection of hard-core pornography consisted mostly of magazines crammed with glossy colour pictures of well-muscled young men torturing each other and masturbating. A few were even more disturbing, with their graphic shots of male couples indulging in full sex with an array of sado-masochistic trappings. Brandon couldn’t remember seeing nastier examples, even when he’d done a six-month attachment with Vice.

They were sitting on the bed in Stevie McConnell’s room. As soon as Carol and Merrick had left for their interrogation, Brandon had said, ‘Would it be helpful to you to see where McConnell lives?’

Tony picked up his pen again and started to doodle on the sheet of paper. ‘It might give me some insight into the man. And if he is the killer, there could be evidence that ties him into the crimes. I don’t mean murder weapons, or anything like that. I’m thinking more of the souvenirs. Photographs, newspaper clippings, as well as the stuff I was talking about before. But it’s academic, isn’t it? You said there was no chance of getting a search warrant.’

Brandon’s melancholy face lit up in a strange smile, almost a leer. ‘When you’ve got a suspect in custody, there are things you can do to circumvent the rules. You game?’

Tony grinned. ‘I’m fascinated.’ He followed Brandon downstairs to the cells. The custody sergeant hastily dropped the Stephen King novel he’d been reading and jumped to his feet.

‘It’s all right, Sergeant,’ Brandon said. ‘If I only had a couple of prisoners to think about, I’d be enjoying a good read, too. I’d like to have a look at McConnell’s property.’

The sergeant unlocked the property cupboard and handed the transparent plastic bag to Brandon. There was a wallet, a handkerchief and a bunch of keys inside. Brandon opened it and removed the keys. ‘You haven’t seen me, have you, Sergeant? And you won’t see me when I come back in a couple of hours, will you?’

The sergeant grinned. ‘You couldn’t possibly have been here, sir. I’d have been bound to notice.’

Twenty minutes later, Brandon was parking the Range Rover outside McConnell’s terraced house. ‘Lucky for us McConnell happened to mention that the two blokes he shares the house with are away on holiday.’ He took a cardboard box out of the glove compartment and gave Tony a pair of latex gloves. ‘You’ll need these,’ he said, slipping a pair over his own hands. ‘If we do get a search warrant, it would be a bit embarrassing when the fingerprint team turn up you and me as prime suspects.’

‘There’s one thing I’m curious about,’ Tony said as Brandon inserted the key in the mortice lock.

‘What’s that?’

‘This is an illegal search, right?’

‘Right,’ Brandon said, opening the door and stepping into the hall. He groped for the light switch, but didn’t turn it on when he found it.

Tony followed him, closing the door behind him. Only then did Brandon snap the light on, revealing a carpeted hall and stairs. There were a couple of framed posters of body-builders on the walls. ‘So if we find any evidence, presumably it’s inadmissible?’

‘Also right,’ said Brandon. ‘But there are ways round that. For example, if we find a bloodstained cut-throat razor under McConnell’s bed, it will mysteriously find its way on to the kitchen table. Then we go to the magistrate, explain that we went to McConnell’s house to check he was telling the truth when he said his house-mates were on holiday, and we happened to look through the windows and we spotted what we have reason to believe is the weapon used to kill Adam Scott, Paul Gibbs, Gareth Finnegan and Damien Connolly.’

Tony shook his head in amusement. ‘Bent? Us? Never, your honour!’

‘There’s bent and there’s bent,’ Brandon said grimly. ‘Sometimes you need to give things a shove in the right direction.’

Tony and Brandon moved through the house, room by room. Brandon was intrigued by Tony’s method. He would walk into a room, stand in the middle of the floor and slowly scan the walls, the furniture, the floor coverings, the shelves. He almost sniffed the air. Then, meticulously, he opened cupboards and drawers, lifted cushions, examined magazines, checked titles of books, CDs, cassettes and videos, handling everything he touched with the care and precision of an archaeologist. Within seconds, his mind was busy, analysing everything he saw and touched, slowly building a picture in his mind of the men who lived here, constantly matching it against the embryonic picture of Handy Andy that was developing in his mind like a photographic print in developer fluid.

‘Have you been here, Andy?’ he asked himself. ’Does this feel like you, smell like you? Would you watch these videos? Are these your CDs? Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli? The Pet Shop Boys? I don’t think so. You’re not camp, I know that much about you. And there’s nothing camp or chichi about the house. This place is so aggressively masculine. A living room furnished in eighties chrome and black. But it’s not a straight man’s house, is it? No girlie magazines, not even car magazines. Just body-building periodicals stacked under the coffee table. Look at the walls. Men’s bodies, oiled and shining, muscles like carved wood. The men who live here know who they are, they know what they like. I don’t think this is you, Andy. You’re controlled, Andy, but not this controlled. It’s one thing to keep yourself buttoned up, it’s another thing altogether to be strong enough to project so coherent an image. I should know, I’m the expert. If you were as firmly rooted in your identity as the guys who live here, you wouldn’t have to do what you do, would you?

‘Look at the books. Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, Stephen Gallagher, Iain Banks. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biography. A couple of paperbacks about the Mafia. Nothing soft, nothing gentle, but nothing off the wall either. Would you read these books? Maybe. I think you’d like to read about serial killers, though, and there’s none of that here.’

Tony turned slowly towards the door. It was a small shock to see Brandon standing there. He’d become so absorbed in his scrutiny that he’d lost all sense of being in company. Watch yourself, Tony, he warned himself. Stay inside your head.

In silence, they trooped through to the kitchen. It was spartan, but well equipped. In the sink there was a dirty soup bowl and a mug half full of cold tea. A small shelf of cookery books testified to the occupants’ obsession with healthy eating. ‘Fart city,’ Tony observed wryly, opening a cupboard filled with jars of pulses. He opened the drawers, noting the kitchen knives. There was a small vegetable knife with a blade worn thin from sharpening, a bread knife whose blade was pitted with age, and a cheap carving knife, the handle bleached from the dishwasher. ‘These are not your tools, Andy,’ Tony said to himself. ‘You like knives that do their work properly.’

Without consulting Brandon, he walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Brandon watched him stick his head round the first bedroom door and reject it. As he passed, he saw that it was obviously the couple’s room. He followed Tony through the door across the landing. In McConnell’s bedroom, Tony seemed to drift away altogether into a world of his own. The room was simply furnished with modern pine bed, chest of drawers and wardrobe. An array of weightlifting trophies sat on the deep windowsill. A tall bookcase was crammed with pulp science fiction and a handful of gay novels. On a small table, there was a games computer and a television monitor. On a shelf above was a collection of games. Tony browsed through Mortal Kombat, Streetfighter II, Terminator 2, Doom and a dozen other games whose keynote was violent action.

‘This is more like it,’ he murmured. He stood by the chest of drawers, hand poised to open one. ‘Maybe it’s you after all,’ he thought. ‘Maybe you leave the living room to the other two. What if this is your only domain? What would I expect to find here? I’d want your souvenirs, Andy. You need to keep something by you, otherwise the memory disintegrates too fast. We all need something tangible. The discarded perfume spray that holds her fragrance and summons her before my eyes like a hologram; the theatre programme from the night we first made love and it was all right. Keep the good memories, throw away the bad. What have you got for me?’

The first three drawers were disappointingly innocuous: underwear, T-shirts, socks, jogging suits and shorts. When Tony opened the bottom drawer, he sighed in satisfaction. The drawer contained McConnell’s S&M gear — handcuffs, leather restraint straps, cock rings, whips, and a clutch of items that looked to Brandon as if they ought to be in some kind of laboratory or mental institution. As Tony calmly took them out and examined them, Brandon shuddered.