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.’
15
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.’
Stevie met Monty’s worried glance.
‘This man will only stop when he’s caught,’ De Vakey answered their silent question. ‘Think of the worst case of drug addiction you’ve ever known and multiply it by ten. The whole of his psyche has been taken over by these urges. When he’s not physically committing these crimes he’s fantasising about them or preparing for the next one.’
‘Have you any idea when that might be?’ Stevie asked.
De Vakey shrugged. ‘I predict the next murder could be within days.’
Stevie stiffened and looked at Monty who stared back at her, speechless.
‘When is the re-enactment of the Linda Royce walk?’ De Vakey asked, forcing an end to the shocked silence.
‘Sunday,’ Stevie said.
De Vakey rubbed his hands together. He seemed animated, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Not only will this reenactment serve as a memory jogger for the general public, it may even lure our killer out. His toying with the police is as important to him as the murdering of his victims. The toying, in fact, has escalated to another plane with the murder of a police officer’s ex-wife. He won’t be satisfied with anything less now.