The Torment of Others (12 page)

Kevin found Sam Evans slouched against the wall outside one of the interview rooms. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

‘Am I glad to see you,’ Evans groaned. ‘That woman in there most definitely does not like people of colour. How come we say one word out of place and we get hit with a complaint of racism, but she gets to call me a jungle bunny?’

Kevin winced. ‘You want me to take a crack at her?’

‘Be my guest.’ Evans waved a hand at the door. ‘I can’t get a single word out of her. I’m going for a smoke.’

He handed Kevin a folder and walked off. Kevin opened it and saw a single sheet of paper that told him nothing more than name, age and address. ‘You weren’t joking, were you, Sam?’ he said softly.

Kevin looked through the spyhole in the door to see a bleached-blonde woman in a short, tight, black dress. The notes said she was twenty-nine but, from this distance, she looked closer to nineteen. She was pulling her skimpy jacket close to her as if the room was chill. She was smoking, and judging by the thickness of the air, it wasn’t her first cigarette. So much for Brandon’s non-smoking policy. Kevin remembered the first day he’d tried to enforce it. The suspect he’d been interviewing had threatened him with a complaint under the human rights legislation for cruel and unusual punishment. He wasn’t going to be telling Dee Smart to put her fag out. She was the nearest they had to a useful witness so far, and this case was far too important to take chances with.

He walked in and treated her to his best sympathetic smile. Thank fuck,’ she said. ‘A human being.’

‘You have a problem with my colleague?’ Kevin said, a sympathetic smile on his face.

‘He gives me the creeps,’ she muttered. ‘He’s got that Ali G chip on his shoulder. “Is it because I is black?” No, mate, it’s because you is an arsehole. Somebody should tell him even whores are higher up the food chain than the shit on his shoe. Where does he get off, looking down his nose at me?’

‘He’s a bit lacking in the social skills department.’

‘You can say that again.’ She blew out a stream of smoke and scowled. ‘So are you going to treat me any better?’

Twenty minutes later, the two of them were almost cosy. The mugs of tea he’d brought as an ice-breaker were empty, and they’d got through the hardest part, the actual discovery of the body. ‘Just how long had this arrangement been going on?’ Kevin asked conversationally.

Dee lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘About three months, I suppose. Sandie used to share the room with another girl, Mo, but she moved back to Leeds so Sandie asked me to come in with her.’

‘How did it work in practice?’

Dee flipped open her cigarette packet and looked in disgust at the three remaining cigarettes. ‘You’re going to need to find a fag machine if we’re going to be at this much longer.’

‘Don’t worry about that. Tell me about the arrangement.’ Kevin gave her his best sympathetic smile.

Dee scowled. It brought the fine lines on her skin into sharp relief, making her look her age. ‘Sandie has the early shift. Most nights she likes to knock off about ten. She’s got a kid. A little lad, Sean. Her mum looks after him. Sandie likes to get home in time to get a decent kip before she gets him up in the morning for school. Any time after half past ten, the room was mine.’

Kevin tried not to think how Sean would be feeling when he woke up tomorrow morning to discover his mother had been murdered. Instead, he concentrated on what Dee was saying. ‘So how come you didn’t find her there last night?’ he asked.

‘I wasn’t working last night.’ She clocked the look of surprise on his face. ‘If you must know, I had the shits. I must have eaten something dodgy. There was no way I could turn tricks, the state I was in.’

It made sense. Even whores could throw a sickie, Kevin thought. ‘So as far as you knew, everything was normal? When you went up with your punter you expected the room to be empty?’

Dee closed her eyes and shuddered at the memory. ‘Yeah.’

‘Had you seen Sandie at all earlier in the evening?’

Dee shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t have unless I was working, and I wasn’t. I had a couple of drinks in the Nag’s Head before I got started, but I never saw Sandie.’

‘Where did she normally work?’

‘Down the end of Campion Boulevard. Just past the mini-roundabout.’

Kevin pictured it in his mind’s eye. Only fifty yards down the side street and Sandie would have been at the entrance to the alley where the shared room was. ‘What about regulars?’ he asked.

Dee suddenly lost her composure. Her eyes welled up with tears and her voice emerged as a strangled wail. ‘I don’t know. Look, we shared the room and the rent, we didn’t live in each other’s pockets, I don’t know what she did or who she did it with.’

Kevin reached across the table and took her hand. Astonishment overcame her emotional outburst and her mouth fell open. ‘I’m sorry. We just need to explore every possibility if we’re going to have any chance of catching him.’

Dee snorted derisively, pulling away from him. ‘Listen to you. Anybody would think it was a respectable mother of three who’d been killed, not some throwaway tart.’

Kevin shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I don’t know who you’ve been listening to, Dee, but we don’t treat anybody as a throwaway victim here. My guvnor wouldn’t stand for it.’

Dee looked momentarily uncertain. ‘You mean that?’

‘I mean it. Nobody on this investigation is giving any less than a hundred per cent. Now, I want you to come upstairs with me and look at some photographs. Will you do that for me, Dee?’

‘All right,’ she said. It was hard to say who was the more surprised.

After midnight, the fluorescent lights in Carol’s office seemed indecently bright, turning skin tones grey. Carol was reading the scant computer files on Derek Tyler’s murders when the door opened and Tony walked in. ‘It’s rubbish, you know,’ he said without preamble.

Carol, accustomed to the vagaries of his conversational style, humoured him. Thanks for coming in. What’s rubbish?’

‘Copycats. They don’t happen. Don’t exist–not in sexual homicide.’ He dropped into the chair opposite her desk and sighed.

‘What are you saying, Tony? That Derek Tyler managed to be in two places at once?’

‘I don’t know anything about Derek Tyler until I read the files. What I do know is that whatever we’ve got here, it’s not a copycat.’

Carol struggled to make sense of what she was hearing. ‘But if the MO is the same…?’

‘Then you’ve got the same killer.’ He gave her an apologetic smile and shrugged.

That’s not possible. From what Don says, and from what I’ve read here, there was no doubt on the forensics. And Derek Tyler is behind bars.’

Tony yanked the chair forward and leaned on the desk. His face was inches from hers. ‘What is sexual homicide about?’ he demanded.

Carol knew the answer to this one. The perverted gratification of desire.’

‘Good, good,’ he said, moving even closer. ‘How many lovers have you had?’

Flustered, Carol looked away. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘More than one, right?’ he continued insistently.

Carol gave in. It was easier than the alternative. ‘More than one,’ she agreed.

‘And have any of them ever behaved identically in bed?’ Tony asked, as if the answer would settle an important argument.

Carol started to see a glimmer of where he was going with this. ‘No.’ Tony’s intense blue eyes were irresistible. In spite of herself, she grew tense at his physical closeness. Whether he recognized that or not, he gave no clue.

His voice dropped, becoming intimate and gentle. ‘My particular needs can only be met by one specific ritualistic process. I need you bound to the bed, I need you clothed, I need your voice stilled by a leather gag, I need you in my power and I need to destroy the manifestation of your sexuality.’ He took a deep breath and pulled back. ‘What are the chances that there are two of us out there who want exactly the same thing?’

Comprehension dawned on Carol. She relaxed now the immediacy of the intimacy had receded. ‘Point taken. But we’re still left with an identical MO. Which is a problem for me.’

Tony leaned back and his voice changed. Carol recognized the shift. Now he was thinking out loud, unformed conclusions bumping into each other. It had taken him a while to be comfortable enough with her to riff like this, but now it was almost as if he saw her as an extension of himself in these moments of verbal reverie. ‘Unless of course someone wanted to get rid of Sandie specifically and thought it would be clever to do it in a way that made us run around like headless chickens looking for an impossible killer.’

‘I suppose that’s conceivable,’ Carol said reluctantly.

‘I mean, if it wasn’t for the history, tying it into past cases, it wouldn’t be that far out of the ordinary. Extreme, but not extraordinary.’

‘Jesus, Tony,’ Carol protested. ‘You think what he did to her wasn’t extraordinary?’

‘Divorce your personal response from your professional one, Carol,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve seen worse than that. A lot worse. Whoever did this still has a lot to learn about sexual sadism.’

‘I’d forgotten how far from normal you are,’ she said wearily.

‘That’s why you need me,’ he said simply. ‘Probably the only really interesting aspect of it is that she wasn’t undressed. I mean, if you go to the trouble and expense of going back to a room with a hooker, I’d have thought you’d want her to take her clothes off. I know I would. Otherwise, you might as well just do it in the back of the car or up against a wall.’

‘So what does that say to you?’

‘Rape.’ The word hung in the air between them. For months it had been unspoken and unspeakable. But now it was out in the open. Tony raised his shoulders in an apologetic shrug.

Carol struggled to stay in the professional zone. ‘Why do you say that? There’s no sign of a struggle back there. Presumably Sandie agreed to be tied up. Presumably he’d agreed to pay her.’

‘Absolutely. But he wants it to feel like it’s rape. So he doesn’t want his victim undressed. That way he can fool himself that he’s a rapist.’

It was Carol’s turn to look puzzled. ‘He wants to pretend he’s a rapist? And then he kills them? Why can’t he just pretend to be a murderer?’

Tony sighed. ‘I don’t know that yet, Carol.’

It’s ironic, but he’s calmer now the streets are full of cops. It’s what he expected, and it’s always comforting when what he expects happens, even if it’s bad shit. Because at least then he knows it’s not something worse
.

He was doing a bit of business in the toilets at Stan’s Café when he saw the blue strobe of their lights through the high frosted-glass window. One set of lights could have been anything, but three together had to be Sandie. And he didn’t panic. He’s proud of that. Before the Voice, he probably would have run, just as a matter of principle. But now he carried on selling rocks to the nervy black kid, acting surprised when he tried to hurry the action along because of the bizzies outside
.

The kid had barely walked out the door when the conversation started. ‘They’ve found her,’ the Voice said, warm and caressing. ‘They’re going to be all over Temple Fields tonight. They’re going to want to talk to everybody. They’re
going to want to talk to you. And that’s fine. Just fine. You know what you’re going to say, don’t you?’

He gave the door a nervous glance. ‘Yeah. I know.’

‘Humour me. Let me hear it again,’ the Voice coaxed
.

‘I was round and about, just like usual. Dropped in at Stan’s, had a couple of beers in the Queen of Hearts. I never saw Sandie all night. I sometimes used to see her down the end of Campion Boulevard, but I never saw her last night.’

‘And if they ask you for alibi names?’

‘I just act thick. Like I can’t tell one night from another. Everybody knows I’m a bit slow, so they won’t think anything of it.’

‘That’s right. Vague is good. Vague is what they expect from you. You did a great job last night. Wonderful footage. When you get home tonight, there’ll be a little reward waiting for you.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ he protested, meaning it. ‘I’m sorted.’

‘You deserve it. You’re a very special young man.’

He felt a warm glow inside, a warm glow that’s still there. Nobody but the Voice has ever thought anything about him was special, except his educational needs
.

So now he’s out there, mooching around like usual. He checks out the cops, a mixture of uniforms and obvious CID. They’re working their way down both sides of the street. He could go back to Stan’s and wait for them to come to him, or he could amble towards them like a fool with nothing to hide
.

He recognizes one of the CID from before, when they were all over Temple Fields a couple of years ago. A big Geordie. Geordie didn’t treat you like shit. He changes his angle of approach to come close to Geordie and the woman he’s working with. They’re talking to a punter, but he’s got
nothing to say, he can’t wait to be away. He’s probably given them a moody name and address and he wants to skip before they catch him out
.