An Easeful Death (16 page)

Stevie relayed the information to Monty in his bedroom. He’d flipped the mattress cut side down and was remaking his bed.

‘Frank Dixon,’ Monty repeated the name. ‘Another of his games.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You remember,
Dixon of Dock Green
—that TV show about the London bobby?’

‘Oh yes, “Evenin’ all”.’

Monty almost smiled. He went on to say that the notion of Martin Sparrow as a serial killer was ridiculous, but conceded that the cleaner’s meeting with Michelle did need investigating. When Stevie pointed out he could have been the one who stole Monty’s watch, he reluctantly agreed it was a possibility.

As for his gym membership, he told Stevie he’d stopped going to the gym several months previously after literally bumping into Michelle on the stairs. As his visits had to be on record somewhere, there was no way that Monty’s gym membership could be used as evidence against him.

Stevie breathed out a sigh of relief and dropped the subject.

***

After a couple of hours’ work, the flat was, once again, fit for habitation. The three of them sat at Monty’s kitchen table eating a take-away pizza. Monty pushed the box away, his share barely touched.

‘Still feeling sorry for yourself?’ Stevie asked, hoping for a rise; anything to jolt him out of his current apathy.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am. It’s not every day I fall off the wagon, turn up at work to stare in the face of my dead ex, get accused of her murder, suspended and then have my flat ransacked. Sorry if I’m not ideal company.’

With a nerve-jangling scrape he pushed his chair away from the table.

‘I’m going for a shower.’

Stevie let out her breath when the bathroom door closed and looked at De Vakey.

‘His attitude is quite understandable, Stevie,’ De Vakey moved towards the kettle. ‘How about a coffee?’

She nodded, appreciating the stabilising influence De Vakey had brought to this harrowing situation. She watched as he made the coffee, as at home in a kitchen as he would be in a boardroom. He was probably an excellent cook too, although he did look absurd in that apron. The time was finally right to give him a serve, but he spoke before the words could leave her mouth.

‘Do you really believe he was drinking last night?’

She looked into his unreadable grey eyes. ‘Why, don’t you?’

‘He has no memory of it.’

‘Is that so strange?’ She left the table and settled herself on the nearby sofa.

De Vakey handed her the coffee, then sat down in the armchair opposite. ‘How long has he been on the wagon?’ he asked.

‘Monty was never an alcoholic, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was a social drinker, that’s all.’

‘Okay, I’ll rephrase the question. When did he stop drinking?’

‘About four years ago.’

‘No hesitation, you seem very sure.’

Stevie looked at the back of her hands and noticed a sticky smudge on the face of her diver’s watch. ‘He’d been in England on a course and came back temporarily for the Christmas break to see Michelle. They’d been separated for a while and he was hoping for some kind of reconciliation. I saw him at the work Christmas party, the reconciliation didn’t seem to be working and he’d been drowning his sorrows.’

The smudge looked like honey. Izzy must have been playing with her watch again; small fingerprints covered the face. After breathing on the glass she rubbed it in circular motions on the leg of her jeans. ‘I don’t know for sure, but I think he did something he felt ashamed of. He hasn’t drunk alcohol since.’

‘He must have a very strong image of whatever it was that made him so ashamed. For it to trigger instant abstinence, the image must have been very painful.’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw De Vakey studying her.
Leave your watch alone
, she told herself, folding her hands in her lap and tucking her legs underneath her on the sofa.

But she couldn’t stop her mind from flying back to the event she and Monty never discussed. It was as if by never mentioning that night, they could pretend it had never happened. His shame could fade with time and she could stop yearning for something she could never have. Now, here was this stranger dredging it all back up again. She threw him a sharp look.

‘So you think that he really can remember what happened last night and is just conveniently blaming the alcohol? You’re way out of line, mate.’ She flung her hand in his direction. ‘And for God’s sake take that fucking apron off!’

De Vakey looked down at his torso and chuckled, making the down-turned corners of Stevie’s mouth lift slightly. After removing the apron he sat back down and returned to business. ‘I appreciate your loyalty to Monty,’ he said, ‘but it’s time to think outside the square. Maybe he hadn’t been drinking last night, but maybe someone wanted it to seem as if he had.’

Stevie stared at him for a moment. She didn’t need to hear another word. She sprang from the sofa and rushed to the bathroom, pounding on the door.

‘Monty! Get your arse out of there!’

Monty appeared dressed in nothing but a sulphur-yellow towel and a thick blanket of steam. He stood and gaped as Stevie hauled the bag of rubbish from the bathroom, wet hair sticking up on his head like exclamation marks.

De Vakey spread newspaper over a portion of the carpet. He seemed to know what Stevie was doing, although Monty had no idea.

‘James got me thinking about your presumed fall from grace,’ she said as she hefted the garbage bag and tipped out the contents. Empty jars, cans and cartons clattered onto the newspaper. De Vakey reacted quickly with more newspaper to protect the carpet. Monty pushed a beer can back with a bare foot then knelt down to examine it, holding the towel around his waist secure with one hand.

He shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe I did this.’

‘Maybe you didn’t,’ Stevie said, sniffing at another empty can.

Monty followed suit. ‘Sour beer, what are we supposed to be looking for?’

De Vakey handed him an empty carton of tomato juice, its corner cut for pouring. Most of the juice had leaked onto the floor, but a few drops still remained in the bottom of the carton.

Monty put it to his nose and shrugged. ‘I don’t know, has it gone off? I can’t tell.’

‘Considering the amount of chilli you use, I’m amazed you can taste anything.’ Monty was usually sharper than this. Stevie was surprised to have to spell it out for him. ‘Jeez, Monty, don’t you see? You were probably drugged!’

Monty stared open mouthed from one of them to the other.

‘Was this a new carton last night?’ De Vakey asked.

Monty squinted at it as he tried to remember. ‘No, I’m pretty sure it was already open. I took it from the fridge.’

De Vakey ran his finger around the carton’s cut corner, ‘I’m no connoisseur but this juice looks a bit darker than it should.’

Monty looked into the carton and shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe it is, I was busy with other things last night, I didn’t notice.’

‘These days, because of date rape, an additive is put into Rohypnol tablets to make the liquid they’re put in turn blue in order to alert the drinker,’ Stevie said, examining the dregs in the carton for herself. ‘It doesn’t show in dark drinks though, so I’m not sure if it would dramatically alter the appearance of tomato juice.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But if it was drugged, it would have to be by someone who knows your drinking habits, right?’

‘They’re no secret, it’s common knowledge I’m on the wagon.’

‘Keyes and Thrummel?’

‘I never met them before today, but I suppose word gets around.’ He sighed. ‘But let’s just get me in the clear first before we start pointing any fingers.’

Stevie put the carton on the coffee table. ‘I’ll bag this up and send it to the lab for tests. I think this’ll go a long way to getting you off the hook. Has anyone been in your flat recently?’

Monty collapsed onto the sofa with his head in his hands. ‘No. Yes. I can’t remember.’

‘What about a spare key?’

‘My neighbour to feed the fish when I’m away.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Wait on—there was a plumber. Mrs Nash opened the flat up to a plumber yesterday. She left me a note about it.’

Without moving from the sofa, he made a futile scan of the flat as if he might come across the note. Stevie could see it was a delaying tactic, as if his foggy mind needed time to grapple with the implications.

When his eyes drifted back to hers his voice was hoarse. ‘Of course, that has to be it, but why would someone want to drug me?’

‘It has to be linked to the watch, to putting you in the frame,’ Stevie said.

Monty shook his head and sighed. ‘There was a moment when even I thought, maybe...’ He paused, cleared his throat and shrugged off his self-doubt. ‘Never mind, this explains a lot. Thanks guys.’

‘I’ll speak to Mrs Nash in the morning,’ Stevie said. ‘Hopefully she’ll be able to give us a description of this so-called plumber. Meanwhile you need to get dressed. I’m taking you to the hospital for a blood test.’

Often the killer will have his own bizarre language of symbols. For example a hair fixation, as interpreted by Freud, can be seen to represent a fear of the adult female’s sexuality.

De Vakey,
The Pursuit of Evil

After the blood test, Stevie and Monty returned to the flat to find that De Vakey had had a lot more success fixing the TV than Monty had.
Jeez
, Stevie thought,
was there anything the man couldn’t do?

‘Before I saw those files,’ Monty said, settling deeper into the sofa next to Stevie, ‘I thought it was the posing that linked the four crimes. Now I see the link as the cut hair or shaved heads.’ A different perspective on the previous night’s events had strengthened his voice. His colour had improved too, Stevie noted.

‘You’re right, the missing hair is much more of a concrete commonality than the posing alone,’ De Vakey said. He rose from his seat and turned off the TV.

‘The hair could easily be our unsub’s fetish,’ he continued, ‘something that triggers memories he has a compulsion to destroy, something to do with his mother most likely. It’s the timing that has me confused, though. I would expect him to escalate as his compulsions grew, but this pattern is hard to understand. There were three weeks between the deaths of the prostitutes, a jump of several years to Royce, then only a matter of days between Royce and Birkby.’ He gestured to Monty. ‘Have there been any other reports of these kinds of staged murders over the last few years?’

‘No, not unless he’s been overseas or inside.’ Monty said.

‘I’ll put someone on an Interpol search tomorrow, also check out recently released sex offenders,’ Stevie said.

De Vakey was deep in thought. ‘Unless Michelle Birkby wasn’t part of the original equation. Unless she needed to be killed.’

‘She was up to something, she as good as told me she was. She’s been like a dog with a bone over those KP murders,’ Monty said.

His slip into the present tense made Stevie’s heart ache for him; she knew his marriage to Michelle had not always been a loveless one.

‘The pattern’s asymmetrical in other ways, too.’ She leaned towards De Vakey. ‘The prostitutes weren’t gym members, but the last two vics were. We’ve got prostitutes to ordinary women, none of them bearing any physical resemblance to each other: black-haired, red, blonde and now brunette. Object rape to no penetration at all, unpainted victims to painted victims magnificently staged with a Keats’ quotation—I mean so much of it just doesn’t make sense.’

Monty pressed both palms into his eyes before focusing a bleary gaze on Stevie. ‘My notebook has gone along with the case files. There are hazy spots in my memory, but one thing I do remember thinking is how the victims were total opposites. Could his selection be a deliberate attempt to throw us off track, to go against the norm? With all due respect, De Vakey, you profilers base your suppositions on research and statistics. There’s not room for much flexibility there.’

De Vakey shrugged, ‘Nothing can be carved in stone. A profile is about a type of person, not a specific one. But when you’ve studied patterns of aberrant behaviour for as long as I have, you can’t help but notice certain persistent constants.’

‘I know what Monty means, though,’ Stevie said. ‘Look at the Linda Royce case. It’s as if he deliberately tried to make her different from the others: the paint, the elaborate posing, the quotation on her thigh.’

De Vakey looked from one of them to the other. ‘Yes, but fundamentally it’s still the same crime. You’re correct, Monty, when you see the hair as the common link. The man is out to depersonalise the victims, and what better way to do it, especially with a woman, than to cut off her hair? This is the one thing he cannot help doing because it is rooted in his deepest fantasies. It is something he cannot change, no matter how clever he thinks he is. As for the Easeful Death quote, perhaps in his own warped way he thinks that by killing them he’s doing them a kindness.’

‘But it wasn’t written on the prostitutes at all,’ Monty said.

‘Four years have passed, the line might have come to his notice in the meantime,’ De Vakey replied. ‘Who knows what he’s been up to since then. Maybe he’s pursued further education in an attempt to curb his impulses, and maybe it did for a while, until something sparked him off again. The KP murders were a crude attempt to shock; these later murders smack of a much higher level of sophistication.’

De Vakey’s tone was almost one of admiration. Did he regard this murdering animal as a worthy opponent? Stevie shivered and drew her legs tight under her body.

‘Whatever it was, he’s had a huge increase in confidence since the KP murders,’ De Vakey continued. ‘Prostitutes are low-risk victims. They put themselves in harm’s way each time they take on a client. Linda Royce and Michelle Birkby, on the other hand, were high risk; they would have been reluctant to put themselves in any kind of dangerous situation. They have family, friends and loved ones who would miss them immediately. This fact would increase the buzz for our unsub and give him an even greater high when he got away with it. The next victim will probably be even more of a risk to him, and I predict that she will turn up sooner rather than later.’