Devices and Desires (10 page)

Rickards came promptly on time. It was precisely 9.00 when Dalgliesh heard his car and, opening the door on the darkness of the night, saw his tall figure striding towards him. Dalgliesh hadn’t seen him for more than ten years, when he had been a newly appointed inspector in the Metropolitan CID, and was surprised to see how little he had changed; time, marriage, removal from London, promotion had left no
apparent mark on him. His rangy, graceless figure, over six feet high, still looked as incongruous in a formal suit as it always had. The rugged, weather-beaten face, with its look of dependable fortitude, would have looked more appropriate above a seaman’s guernsey, preferably with RNLI woven across the chest. In profile his face, with the long, slightly hooked nose and jutting eyebrows, was impressive. In full face the nose was revealed as a little too wide and flattened at the base, and the dark eyes, which when he was animated took on a fierce, almost manic gleam, in repose were pools of puzzled endurance. Dalgliesh thought of him as a type of police officer less common than formerly but still not rare: the conscientious and incorruptible detective of limited imagination and somewhat greater intelligence who had never supposed that the evil of the world should be condoned because it was frequently inexplicable and its perpetrators unfortunate.

He gazed round the sitting room at the long wall of books, the crackling wood fire, the oil of the Victorian prelate above the mantelshelf as if deliberately impressing each item on his mind, then sank into his chair and stretched out his long legs with a small grunt of satisfaction. Dalgliesh remembered that he had always drunk beer; now he accepted whisky, but said he could do with coffee first. One habit at least had changed. He said: “I’m sorry that you won’t be meeting Susie, my wife, while you’re here, Mr. Dalgliesh. She’s having our first baby in a couple of weeks, and she’s gone to stay with her mother in York. Ma-in-law didn’t like the idea of her being in Norfolk with the Whistler on the prowl, not with me working the hours I do.”

It was said with a kind of embarrassed formality, as if he, not Dalgliesh, were the host and he was apologizing for the unexpected absence of the hostess. He added: “I suppose it’s
natural for an only daughter to want to be with her mother at a time like this, particularly with a first baby.”

Dalgliesh’s wife hadn’t wanted to be with her mother, she had wanted to be with him, had wanted it with such intensity that he had wondered afterwards whether she might have felt a premonition. He could remember that, although he could no longer recall her face. His memory of her, which for years, a traitor to grief and to their love, he had resolutely tried to suppress because the pain had seemed unbearable, had gradually been replaced by a boyish, romantic dream of gentleness and beauty now fixed for ever beyond the depredation of time. His newborn son’s face he could still recall vividly and sometimes did in his dreams, that white, unsullied look of sweet, knowledgeable contentment, as if, in a brief moment of life, he had seen and known all there was to know, seen it and rejected it. Dalgliesh told himself that he was the last man who could reasonably be expected to advise or reassure on the problems of pregnancy, and he sensed that Rickards’s unhappiness at his wife’s absence went deeper than missing her company. He made the usual enquiries about her health and escaped into the kitchen to make the coffee.

Whatever mysterious spirit had unlocked the verse, it had freed him for other human satisfactions, for love; or was it the other way around? Had love unlocked the verse? It seemed even to have affected his job. Grinding the coffee beans, he pondered life’s smaller ambiguities. When the poetry hadn’t come, the job too had seemed not only irksome but occasionally repellent. Now he was happy enough to let Rickards impose on his solitude to use him as a sounding board. This new benignity and tolerance disconcerted him a little. Success in moderation was no doubt better for the character than failure, but too much of it and he would lose his cutting edge. And five minutes later,
carrying in the two mugs and settling back in his chair, he could relish the contrast between Rickards’s preoccupation with psychopathic violence and the peace of the mill. The wood fire, now past its crackling stage, had settled into a comfortable glow, and the wind, seldom absent from the headland, moved like a benign, gently hissing spirit through the still and soaring clappers of the mill. He was glad that it wasn’t his job to catch the Whistler. Of all murders, serial killings were the most frustrating, the most difficult and the chanciest to solve, the investigation carried on under the strain of vociferous public demand that the terrifying unknown devil be caught and exorcised forever. But this wasn’t his case; he could discuss it with the detachment of a man who has a professional interest but no responsibility. And he could understand what Rickards needed: not advice—he knew his job—but someone he could trust, someone who understood the language, someone who would afterwards be gone, who wouldn’t remain as a perpetual reminder of his uncertainties, a fellow professional to whom he could comfortably think aloud. He had his team and he was too punctilious not to share his thinking with them. But he was a man who needed to articulate his theories and here he could put them forward, embroider, reject, explore, without the uncomfortable suspicion that his detective sergeant, deferentially listening, his face carefully expressionless, would be thinking, “For God’s sake, what’s the old man dreaming up now?” Or, “The old man’s getting fanciful.”

Rickards said: “We’re not using Holmes. The Met say the system is fully committed at present, and anyway we’ve got our own computer. Not that there’s much data to feed in. The press and public know about Holmes, of course. I get that at every press conference. ‘Are you using the Home Office special computer, the one named after Sherlock Holmes?’ ‘No,’ I say,
‘but we’re using our own.’ Unspoken question: ‘Then why the hell haven’t you caught him?’ They think that you’ve only got to feed in your data and out pops an Identikit of sonny complete with prints, collar size and taste in pop music.”

“Yes,” said Dalgliesh, “we’re so sated now with scientific wonders that it’s a bit disconcerting when we find that technology can do everything except what we want it to.”

“Four women so far, and Valerie Mitchell won’t be the last if we don’t catch him soon. He started fifteen months ago. The first victim was found just after midnight in a shelter at the end of the Easthaven promenade—the local tart, incidentally, although he may not have known or cared. It was eight months before he struck again. Struck lucky, I suppose he’d say. This time a thirty-year-old schoolteacher cycling home to Hunstanton who had a puncture on a lonely stretch of road. Then another gap, just six months, before he got a barmaid from Ipswich who’d been visiting her granny and was daft enough to wait alone for the late bus. When it arrived there was no one at the stop. A couple of local youths got off. They’d had a skinful so weren’t in a particularly noticing mood, but they saw and heard nothing, nothing except what they described as a kind of mournful whistling coming from deep in the wood.”

He took a gulp of his coffee, then went on: “We’ve got a personality assessment from the trick cyclist. I don’t know why we bother. I could have written it myself. He tells us to look for a loner, probably from a disturbed family background, may have a dominant mother, doesn’t relate easily to people, particularly women, could be impotent, unmarried, separated or divorced, with a resentment and hatred of the opposite sex. Well, we hardly expect him to be a successful, happily married bank manager with four lovely kids just coming up to GCSE or whatever they call it now. They’re the
devil, these serial murderers. No motive—no motive that a sane man can understand anyway—and he could come from anywhere, Norwich, Ipswich, even London. It’s dangerous to assume that he’s necessarily working in his own territory. Looks like it, though. He obviously knows the locality well. And he seems to be sticking now to the same MO. He chooses a road intersection, drives the car or van into the side of one road, cuts across and waits at the other. Then he drags his victim into the bushes or the trees, kills and cuts back to the other road and the car and makes his getaway. With the last three murders it seems to have been pure chance that a suitable victim did, in fact, come along.”

Dalgliesh felt that it was time he contributed something to the speculation. He said: “If he doesn’t select and stalk his victim, and obviously he didn’t in the last three cases, he’d normally have to expect a long wait. That suggests he’s routinely out after dark, a night worker, mole-catcher, woodman, gamekeeper, that kind of job. And he goes prepared: on the watch for a quick kill, in more ways than one.”

Rickards said: “That’s how I see it. Four victims so far and three fortuitous, but he’s probably been on the prowl for three years or more. That could be part of the thrill. ‘Tonight I could make a strike, tonight I could be lucky.’ And, by God, he is getting lucky. Two victims in the last six weeks.”

“And what about his trademark, the whistle?”

“That was heard by the three people who came quickly on the scene after the Easthaven murder. One just heard a whistle, one said it sounded like a hymn and the third, who was a churchwoman, claimed she could identify it precisely, ‘Now the Day Is Over.’ We kept quiet about that. It could be useful when we get the usual clutch of nutters claiming they’re the Whistler. But there seems no doubt that he does whistle.”

Dalgliesh said: “‘Now the day is over / Night is drawing nigh / Shadows of the evening / Fall across the sky.’ It’s a Sunday-school hymn, hardly the kind that gets requested on
Songs of Praise
, I should have thought.”

He remembered it from childhood, a lugubrious, undistinguished tune which as a ten-year-old he could pick out on the drawing-room piano. Did anyone sing that hymn now? he wondered. It had been a favourite choice of Miss Barnett on those long dark afternoons in winter before the Sunday school was released, when the outside light was fading and the small Adam Dalgliesh was already dreading those last twenty yards of his walk home, where the rectory drive curved and the bushes grew thickest. Night was different from bright day, smelt different, sounded different; ordinary things assumed different shapes; an alien and more sinister power ruled the night. Those twenty yards of crunching gravel, where the lights of the house were momentarily screened, were a weekly horror. Once through the gate to the drive, he would walk fast, but not too fast, since the power that ruled the night could smell out fear as dogs smell out terror. His mother, he knew, would never have expected him to walk those yards alone had she known that he suffered such atavistic panic, but she hadn’t known and he would have died before telling her. And his father? His father would have expected him to be brave, would have told him that God was God of the darkness as He was of the light. There were after all a dozen appropriate texts he could have quoted. “Darkness and light are both alike to Thee.” But they were not alike to a sensitive ten-year-old boy. It was on those lonely walks that he had first had intimations of an essentially adult truth, that it is those who most love us who cause us the most pain. He said: “So you’re looking for a local man, a loner, someone who has a night job, the use of
a car or van and a knowledge of
Hymns Ancient and Modern
. That should make it easier.”

Rickards said: “You’d think so, wouldn’t you.”

He sat in silence for a minute, then said: “I think I’d like just a small whisky now, Mr. Dalgliesh, if it’s all the same to you.”

It was after midnight when he finally left. Dalgliesh walked out with him to the car. Looking out across the headland, Rickards said: “He’s out there somewhere, watching, waiting. There’s hardly a waking moment when I don’t think of him, imagine what he looks like, where he is, what he’s thinking. Susie’s ma is right. I haven’t had much to give her recently. And when he’s caught, that’ll be the end. It’s finished. You move on. He doesn’t, but you do. And by the end you know everything, or think you do. Where, when, who, how. You might even know why if you’re lucky. And yet, essentially, you know nothing. All that wickedness, and you don’t have to explain it or understand it or do a bloody thing about it except put a stop to it. Involvement without responsibility. No responsibility for what he did or for what happens to him afterwards. That’s for the judge and the jury. You’re involved, and yet you’re not involved. Is that what appeals to you about the job, Mr. Dalgliesh?”

It was not a question Dalgliesh would have expected even from a friend, and Rickards was not a friend. He said: “Can any of us answer that question?”

“You remember why I left the Met, Mr. Dalgliesh.”

“The two corruption cases? Yes, I remember why you left the Met.”

“And you stayed. You didn’t like it any more than I did. You wouldn’t have touched the pitch. But you stayed. You were detached about it all, weren’t you? It interested you.”

Dalgliesh said: “It’s always interesting when men you thought you knew behave out of character.”

And Rickards had fled from London. In search of what? Dalgliesh wondered. Some romantic dream of country peace, an England which had vanished, a gentler method of policing, total honesty? He wondered whether Rickards had found it.

It was 7.10 and the saloon bar of the Duke of Clarence pub was already smoke-filled, the noise level rising and the crowd at the bar three feet deep. Christine Baldwin, the Whistler’s fifth victim, had exactly twenty minutes to live. She sat on the banquette against the wall, sipping her second medium sherry of the evening, deliberately making it last, knowing that Colin was impatient to order the next round. Catching Norman’s eye, she raised her left wrist and nodded significantly at her watch. Already it was ten minutes past their deadline, and he knew it. Their agreement was that this was to be a pre-supper drink with Colin and Yvonne, the limit both of time and alcohol consumption clearly understood between her and Norman before they left home. The arrangement was typical of their nine-month-old marriage, sustained less by compatible interests than by a carefully negotiated series of concessions. Tonight it had been her turn to give way, but agreeing to spend an hour in the Clarence with Colin and Yvonne didn’t extend to any pretence that she actually enjoyed their company.