Val McDermid 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Mermaids Singing, The Wire in the Blood, The Last Temptation

‘Hoy!’ the outraged man shouted. ‘Bugger off, Peeping Tom!’

Carol sighed. ‘Police. Zip your dick or you’re nicked.’ Before she’d even finished the sentence, the hooker was on her feet and heading for the mouth of the alley as fast as her stilettoes would let her. Realizing it wasn’t worth arguing now the whore had gone, the man quickly fastened his trousers and pushed past Tony. As he turned the corner, he shouted, ‘Frigid cunt!’ back at her.

‘You all right?’ Tony asked, his genuine concern obvious.

Carol shrugged. ‘When I started in the job, it really shook me when punters abused me like that. Then I realized it was them that had the problem, not me.’

‘The theory’s sound. How does it work in practice?’

Carol pulled a face. ‘Some nights I go home and stand in the shower for twenty minutes and I still don’t feel clean.’

‘I know exactly what you mean. Some of the messy heads I have to poke about inside leave me feeling like I’ll never have a normal relationship with another human being again.’ Tony turned away, not wanting his face to betray him. ‘So this is where you found Paul?’

Carol moved forward to stand beside him. She shone her torch into the doorway. ‘He was lying there, with a couple of bin bags tucked around him so he wasn’t immediately obvious. Judging by the condoms lying around, the working girls had been screwing the night away smack bang next to a corpse.’

‘I take it you’ve talked to the girls?’

‘Yes, we’ve had them all in. The one that scuttled out of here like a cockroach when the light goes on uses this spot most nights. She says she had a punter some time around four in the morning. She knows it was then because this bloke is a regular who comes off his shift at the newspaper-printing plant about then. Anyway, she was going to bring him down here, but there was a car in the way.’ Carol sighed. ‘We thought we’d cracked it, because she could remember the make, model and the numbers on the licence plate, because it was the same as the number of her house. Two-four-nine.’

‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess. It was Paul Gibbs’s car.’

‘Got it in one.’

The insistent bleep of Carol’s pager cut into the conversation, demanding as a baby’s cry. ‘I have to find a phone,’ Carol said.

‘What is it?’

‘One thing you can always say for sure,’ Carol said, hurrying back out of the alley. ‘It’s never good news.’

‘Look, I’ve told youse all I know. I’d just met this guy Don in the Hole, we was going for a cup of tea and suddenly there’s footsteps and Don hits the ground like Vinny Jones just tackled him and I turn round and there’s this bampot with a brick. So I give him the citizen’s arrest with the left hook, and that’s when your boys turn up mob-handed, and here I am.’ Stevie McConnell spread his hands out in front of him. ‘Youse should be giving me a commendation, no’ the third degree.’

‘And you expect us to believe this …’ Cross consulted his notes. ‘This Ian attacked this Don just because he’d turned him down earlier in the evening?’

‘That’s about the size of it. Look, this Ian, he’s known about the town. He’s a heidbanger. He gets out of his brain on speed and thinks he’s God Almighty. This Don gave him a right showing up, you know, made him look like a big jessie instead of macho man, so your man was for getting his own back. Look, you gonnae let me go, or what?’

Cross was spared from replying by a knock on the door. Brandon shrugged away from the wall he’d been leaning against and opened the door. He exchanged a few murmured words with the constable outside then came back in. ‘Interview suspended at 1.47 a.m.,’ he said, leaning past Cross to turn off the tape recorder. ‘We’ll be back shortly, Mr McConnell,’ Brandon promised.

Outside the interview room, Brandon said, ‘Inspector Jordan and Dr Hill are upstairs. And DS Merrick has come back from Casualty. Apparently, he says he’s well enough to run through the evening’s events himself.’

‘Right. Well, we’d better hear what he’s got to say, and then we can have a proper go at Jock.’ Cross marched upstairs to the squad room, where a concerned Carol was hovering over Merrick. Tony sat a few feet away, feet propped up on the rim of a wastepaper bin.

‘Bloody hell, Merrick!’ Cross roared, seeing the dramatic bandage that turbanned his head. ‘You’ve not turned into one of them bloody Sikhs, have you? Christ, I knew it was a risk sending a team into poofterville undercover, but I wasn’t expecting religious mania.’

Merrick smiled weakly. ‘I figured that way you couldn’t send me back into uniform for cocking up, sir.’

Cross gave a grudging smile in return. ‘Let’s be hearing it, then. Why have I got a bolshie little sporran-sucker in my nick?’

Brandon, standing a couple of feet behind Cross, interrupted. ‘Before DS Merrick runs through the evening’s events for us, I just want to explain to Dr Hill why we’ve dragged him in here at this time of night.’ Tony straightened up in his chair and pulled a sheet of paper towards him. ‘When you were giving your lecture the other day,’ Brandon continued, moving past Cross and sitting on the edge of a desk, ‘you mentioned that psychologists can often give pointers to detectives about interview approaches. I wondered if you could apply that to this situation.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Tony said, uncapping his pen.

‘How do you mean, interview approaches?’ Cross said suspiciously.

Tony smiled. ‘A recent example from my own experience. A force I’d been advising had arrested a suspect in two rape cases. He was the macho type, all bluster and muscle. I suggested that they send in a woman CID officer to interview him, preferably a small, very feminine woman. That made him angry right from the start, because he held women in contempt and thought he wasn’t being treated with the appropriate respect. I’d briefed her in advance to suggest in her line of questioning that he couldn’t possibly be the rapist since, frankly, she didn’t think he had it in him. The result was, he blew his stack and coughed to the two rapes they had him in the frame for, as well as three other offences they didn’t even know about.’

Cross said nothing. ‘DS Merrick?’ Brandon asked.

Merrick took them through his experiences in the bar with frequent pauses for thought. At the end of his recital, Brandon and Carol looked expectantly towards Tony. ‘What do you think, Tony? Are either of them a possible?’ Brandon asked.

‘I don’t think Ian Thomson is a starter. This killer is far too careful to get involved in something as ridiculously high profile as a street brawl. Even if Don hadn’t been a police officer, the chances are that Thomson would have ended up in trouble for going after someone with a half-brick. Even in a city where attacks on gays are not noted for their high priority in policing terms,’ he added drily.

Cross scowled. ‘Gays get treated same as everybody else by the lads,’ he blustered.

Tony wished he’d kept his mouth shut. The last thing he wanted was to get into a head-to-head with Tom Cross on Bradfield police’s ‘gays and blacks don’t count’ policy. He decided to ignore the comment and forged on. ‘Also, there’s nothing in what we know about the killer’s behaviour to suggest that he’s an upfront S&M gay man. It’s clearly not from the gay scene that he’s selecting victims. However, McConnell sounds more interesting from your point of view. Do we know what he does for a living?’

‘He’s the manager of a gym in the city centre. The same gym that Gareth Finnegan used,’ Cross said.

‘Hasn’t he been questioned before?’ Brandon asked. Cross shrugged.

‘One of Inspector Matthews’s team has spoken to him,’ Carol butted in. ‘I noticed the report when I was preparing the material for Dr Hill,’ she added hastily, when she saw the beginnings of a scowl on Cross’s face. God forbid he should think she was trying to undermine him. ‘My dustbin memory,’ she continued, trying to make a joke of it. ‘As far as I can remember, it was simply a routine enquiry, checking up on whether Gareth had had any particular buddies or contacts at the gym.’

‘Do we know McConnell’s domestic arrangements?’ Tony asked.

‘He shares a house with another couple of shirt-lifters,’ Cross said. ‘He says they’re both in the body-building game too. So, is he in the frame or not?’

Tony doodled in the margin of his notes. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘What are the chances of getting a search warrant?’

‘On what we’ve got at the moment? Not good. And we’ve no grounds for a search without one. Not even in our wildest dreams can we claim that a street assault gives us grounds to search McConnell’s house for evidence relating to serial killings,’ Brandon said. ‘What would we be looking for in particular?’

‘A camcorder. Any indication that he has access to somewhere isolated and deserted like an old warehouse, factory, derelict house, lock-up garage.’ Tony ran a hand through his hair. ‘Polaroid photographs. Sado-masochistic pornography. Souvenirs of his victims. The jewellery missing from the bodies.’ He looked up and met Tom Cross’s sneer. ‘And you should check the deep freeze just on the off chance that he’s kept the pieces of flesh he removed from the bodies.’ He felt a moment’s gratification when Cross’s expression changed to disgust.

‘Charming. But first we have to get something more to go on. Any suggestions?’ Brandon asked.

‘Send DS Merrick and Inspector Jordan in to interview him. The realization that the man he tried to pick up is a police officer will unsettle him, make him feel that his instincts can’t be trusted. There’s a chance too that he has problems with women –’

‘Of course he’s got problems with women,’ Cross interjected. ‘He’s a bloody arse bandit.’

‘Not all gay men dislike women,’ Tony said mildly. ‘But a lot do, and McConnell may be one of them. At the very least, Carol will make him feel threatened. All-male situations offer him the opportunity for camaraderie, so we take that off him.’

‘Let’s try it, then,’ Brandon said. ‘If DS Merrick is up to it.’

‘I’m game, sir,’ Merrick said.

Cross looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to hit Brandon or Tony. ‘I might as well bugger off home, then,’ he blustered.

‘Good idea, Tom. You’ve had more than your fair share of all-nighters lately. I’ll hang on here, see what comes out of McConnell’s interview.’

Cross stomped out of the squad room, passing Kevin Matthews on the way. The atmosphere visibly lightened in Cross’s absence. ‘Sir?’ Kevin said. ‘Ian Thomson – it looks like he’s out of the frame on the murders.’