The Mermaids Singing (42 page)

Philip Crozier’s house was a narrow, terraced three-storey modern town house, the ground floor consisting mainly of an integral garage. Carol sat in the car, eyeing it up and down. ‘We going in, ma’am?’ the young detective constable in the driving seat asked.

Carol thought for a moment. Ideally, she’d wanted Tony to be with her when she interviewed the people whose names the computer had spat out. She’d tried ringing him at home. No reply. Claire said he hadn’t come into the office yet, which surprised her since he’d had a nine-thirty appointment. Carol had swung round by the house, but it looked exactly the same as it had the night before. Off having fun with his lady friend, she’d decided. Serves him right if he misses out on the showdown with Handy Andy, she thought maliciously, then immediately regretted her childishness. Failing Tony, she’d have liked to have had Don Merrick with her. But he was out pursuing other lines of enquiry that had flowed from the identification of the Discovery. The only person she could find who wasn’t urgently involved with something else was DC Morris, on the third month of his secondment to CID.

‘We might as well see if he’s in,’ Carol said. ‘Though he’s probably at work.’

They walked up the path, Carol taking in the details of the neatly trimmed lawn and the smart paintwork. The house didn’t really fit Tony’s profile. It was more like the victims’ houses in terms of value and status, rather than the home of someone who aspired to their lifestyles. Carol pressed the bell and stepped back. They were about to give up and return to the car when Carol heard feet pounding downstairs. The door swung open to reveal a stocky black man dressed in grey sweat pants and a scarlet T-shirt, his feet bare. He couldn’t have looked more different from Terry Harding’s description. Carol’s heart sank momentarily, then she reminded herself that Crozier might not be the only person with access to his software and his Discovery. He was still worth interviewing. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

‘Mr Crozier?’

‘’S right. Who wants to know?’ His voice was relaxed, the Bradfield accent strong.

Carol produced her warrant card and introduced herself. ‘I wonder if we could come in and have a word, sir?’

‘What about?’

‘Your name has cropped up in some routine enquiries and I’d like to ask you some questions for the purposes of elimination.’

Crozier’s brows furrowed. ‘What sort of enquiries?’

‘If we could just come in, sir?’

‘No, hang on, what’s all this about? I’m trying to get some work done here.’

Morris stepped to Carol’s side. ‘There’s no need to be difficult, sir, it’s just routine.’

‘Mr Crozier isn’t being difficult, Constable,’ Carol said coolly. ‘I’d feel just the same in your shoes, sir. A car answering the description of yours has been involved in an incident, and we need to eliminate you from our investigation. We’re speaking to several other people in connection with this enquiry, sir. It won’t take long.’

‘All right then,’ Crozier sighed. ‘You’d better come in.’

They followed him up stairs carpeted in functional cord carpet into an open-plan living-room-cum-kitchen. It was furnished in expensive but minimalist style. He waved them to two leather and wood armchairs and dropped into a leather bean bag on the polished wood floor. Morris pulled out his notebook and ostentatiously opened it to a fresh page.

‘You work from home, then?’ Carol asked.

‘’S right. I’m a freelance animator.’

‘Cartoons?’ Carol said.

‘I do mostly science animations. You want something for your Open University course that shows how atoms collide, I’m your man. So what’s all this about?’

‘You drive a Land Rover Discovery?’

‘’S right. It’s in the garage.’

‘Can you tell me if you were driving it last Monday night?’ Carol asked. God, was it only a week ago?

‘I can. I wasn’t. I was in Boston, Massachusetts.’

She went through the routine questions that established precisely what Crozier had been doing, and who she could check the information with. Then she stood up. Time for the key question, but it was important to keep it looking casual. ‘Thanks for your help, Mr Crozier. One more thing — is there anyone else who has access to your house while you’re away? Someone who could have borrowed your car?’

Crozier shook his head. ‘I live on my own. I don’t even have a cat or plants, so nobody has to come in when I’m away. I’m the only one with keys.’

‘You’re sure of that? No cleaning lady, no colleague who drops in to use your system?’

‘Sure, I’m sure. I do my own cleaning, I work alone. I split up with my girlfriend a couple of months back and I changed the locks, OK? Nobody’s got keys except me.’ Crozier was starting to sound tetchy.

Carol persisted. ‘And no one could have borrowed your keys without your knowledge and had them copied?’

‘I don’t see how. I’m not in the habit of leaving them lying around. And the car’s only insured for me, so nobody else has ever driven it,’ Crozier said, his irritation clearly mounting. ‘Look, if somebody did anything criminal in a car with my number on, they were using faked-up plates, OK?’

‘I accept what you’re saying, Mr Crozier. I can assure you that if the information you’ve given me checks out, you won’t be hearing from us again. Thanks very much for your time.’

Back at the car, Carol said, ‘Find me a phone. I want to try Dr Hill again. I can’t believe he’s gone AWOL the one time we really need him.’

F
ROM
3½″
DISK LABELLED
: B
ACKUP
.007;
FILE
L
OVE
.018

It’s laughable. They pick a man who can’t even tell whether I’ve carried out a particular punishment or not and they employ him to help them catch me. They could at least have shown me the respect of employing someone who has some reputation, an opponent worthy of my skills, not some idiot who has never encountered someone of my calibre.

Instead, they insult me. Dr Tony Hill is supposed to be producing a profile of me, based on his analysis of my killings. When this account is published, years hence, after my death in my bed from natural causes, historians will be able to compare his profile with the reality and laugh at the gross inaccuracies of his pseudo-science.

He will never come close to the truth. For the record, I set down that truth.

I was born in the Yorkshire port of Seaford, one of the busiest fishing and commercial docks in the country. My father was a merchant seaman, the first officer on oil tankers. He went all over the world, then he would come home to us. But my mother was as bad a wife as she was a mother. I can see now that the house was always in chaos, the meals irregular and unappetizing. The only thing she was good at
,
the only thing they could share, was the drinking. If there was an Olympic pairs event for pissheads, they’d have walked off with the gold
.

When I was seven, my father stopped coming home. Of course, my mother blamed me for not being a good enough son. She said I’d driven him away. She told me I was the man of the house now. But I could never live up to her expectations. She always wanted more from me than I was capable of, and ruled me by blame rather than praise. I spent more time locked in the cupboard than most people’s coats do.

Without my father’s pay cheque, she was thrown on the resources of the welfare system, which was barely enough to live on, never mind get drunk on. When the building society repossessed the house, we went to live with relatives in Bradfield for a while, but she couldn’t handle their disapproval, so we moved back to Seaford, when she turned to the town’s other boom industry, prostitution. I grew accustomed to the procession of disgusting, drunken sailors traipsing through the succession of grubby flats and bedsits where we lived. We were always behind with the rent, usually doing a moonlight flit just before the bailiffs got really heavy.

I grew to hate the ugly, grunting copulation that I was a constant witness to, and stayed out of the house as much as I possibly could, often sleeping rough down by the docks. I used to pick on kids that were younger than me to get their money off them so I could afford to eat. I moved schools almost as often as we moved house, so I never did too well there, in spite of the fact that I knew I could run rings round most of the other kids, who were just stupid.

As soon as I was 16, I left Seaford. It wasn’t a wrench; it wasn’t as if I’d ever managed to make many friends, what with moving all the time. I’d seen enough of men to know that I didn’t want to grow up like them, and I felt different inside. I thought if I moved back to a big city like Bradfield I’d find it easier to work out what I wanted. One of my mother’s cousins got me a job at the electronics firm where he worked.

About that time, I discovered that dressing in women’s clothes made me feel good about myself. I got my own bedsit so I could do it whenever I wanted to, and that calmed me down a lot. I started studying computer science at evening classes, and eventually got some proper qualifications. About that time, my mother got left a house in Seaford in her brother’s will.

I got the chance of a job back in Seaford, working in computer systems for the local private phone company. I didn’t really want to go back there, but the job was too good to turn down. I never went near my mother. I don’t think she even knew I was there.

One of the few good things about Seaford is that it’s handy for the ferry to Holland. I used to go there every other weekend, because in Amsterdam I could go out dressed as a woman and nobody batted an eyelid. Over there, I met a lot of transsexuals as well as transvestites, and the more I talked to them, the more I realized that I was just like them. I was a woman trapped in a man’s body. That explained why I’d never had much sexual interest in girls. And although I found men attractive, I knew I wasn’t a poof. They disgust me, with their pretence at normal relationships when everybody knows that it’s only men and women that can fit together properly.

I went to see the doctors at Jimmy’s in Leeds, where they do all the sex-change operations in the north, and they turned me down. Their psychologists were as stupid and blinkered as all the rest of their brotherhood. But I managed to find a private doctor in London who prescribed the hormone treatment I needed. Of course, I couldn’t go on working while this was going on, but I spoke to the boss and he said he’d give me a good reference for another job when I’d had the operation and I was a woman.

I had to go abroad for the operation, and it was all much more expensive than I expected. I went to my mother and asked her if she’d mortgage the house to lend me the money and she just laughed at me.

So I did what I’d learned from her. I sold myself on the docks. It’s amazing how much money sailors will pay for a
travesti.
They get out of their heads with excitement at the thought of someone who has breasts and a cock. I wasn’t like the other hookers either; I didn’t blow it all on drink or drugs or a pimp. I stashed it all away till I could afford the operation
.

When I came to Seaford, not even my own mother recognized me at first. I’d only been back a few days when she took that tragic accidental overdose of drink and pills. Nobody was surprised. Yes, Doctor, you can add her to the list.

With my qualifications, experience and reference, I had no trouble getting a job as a senior systems analyst with the phone company in Bradfield. The money I made from the sale of the house in Seaford bought me my home in Bradfield, and I started the task of finding a worthy man to share my life.

And Dr Tony Hill presumes to understand me, without knowing any of this? Well, in a very short time, I’ll share it all with him. Such a shame he won’t have the chance to write it down for himself.

18

The truth is, I am a very particular man in everything relating to murder; and perhaps I carry my delicacy too far.

Don Merrick walked into the HOLMES room munching a two-inch-thick double cheese and Bar-B-Q bacon burger. ‘How do you do it?’ Dave Woolcott asked. ‘How do you get those slack Alices down the canteen to cook you edible food? They could burn a cup of tea, that lot, but you always manage to twist them round your little finger.’

Merrick winked. ‘It’s my natural Geordie charm,’ he said. ‘I just pick on the ugliest one and tell her she reminds me of my mother when she was in her prime.’ He sat down and stretched his long legs. ‘I’ve checked out the half-dozen Discoveries your sergeant gave me. They’re all in the clear. Two of them are women, two of them have got rock-solid alibis for at least two of the nights in question, one’s got multiple sclerosis, so he couldn’t have done the jobs, and the sixth sold his to a dealership in the Midlands three weeks ago.’

‘Great,’ Dave said heavily. ‘Give the list to one of the operators so we can update the file.’

‘Where’s the guv?’

‘Carol or Kevin?’

Merrick shrugged. ‘I still think of Inspector Jordan as my guv’nor.’

‘She’s off chasing wild geese,’ Dave said.

‘She got a result, then?’ Merrick asked.

‘Two cross-matches.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ Merrick said.

Dave rummaged among his papers and found three sheets of paper stapled together. The first listed the two correlations. Merrick frowned and flicked over a page. The second was a print-out of the result of a criminal records search on Philip Crozier. Nothing known. Hurriedly, he turned to the third page, which listed two Christopher Thorpes. One had a last-known address in Devon and several convictions for burglary. The second had a last-known address in Seaford. There were a string of juvenile convictions; assaulting a football referee, breaking windows at a school, shoplifting. There were half a dozen adult convictions, all for soliciting prostitution. Merrick sucked in his breath sharply and turned back to the front page. ‘Fuck,’ he said.