Birdman

'Marilyn.' Maddox got to his feet and tapped a biro against his teeth. 'Marilyn, get me the CS. He's going to love this. And Jack—' He sat on the desk and looked at his DI. 'I know what you're working up to.'

'You do?'

'Oh yes. You've already got an idea. Haven't you?'

'Yes, I have. I shouldn't have let him go in the first place.'

'Go on, then. Take Essex. You can have Logan too when he gets here.'

'Hang on — hang on.' Everyone paused. Kryotos was frowning. 'I thought the FME told you there were no marks on Lister's head.'

'Didn't need to be,' Caffery said. 'Same as with Hatch — her hair was the right colour. He cut it to match. He picked her because she was nearer to what he wanted. She was a jogger — St Dunstan's was on her route — I think that's when he targeted her. This is the first time he hasn't had to take what he was given: this one he chose. He's hunting for himself now.'

'But she wasn't — uh — you know. Cut open. The bird. No bird.'

'Yes.' He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up again everyone could see how tired he was. 'That's because she wasn't dead.'

'What?'

Caffery placed his hands palm down on the table and stared at the piebald thumbnails, pressed together. 'He opened them to put the bird in. He's not like Harteveld, he doesn't choose to have his victims dead. He's a sadistic rapist, but death isn't the fun for him. He'd rather they were living so he can enjoy their fear.' He looked directly at Marilyn, trusting her not to flinch. 'Lister wasn't opened for the simple reason that she had her own healthy heart pumping in her body. A heart he could hear reacting to the torture.'

'What are you telling us?' she said faintly.

'I know what he's saying,' Essex said. 'The birds were alive when they went in. They'd have struggled. Like' — he began rolling his sleeves down, as if the room had become cold — 'like the sound of a heart.'

'Exactly.' Caffery stood up and pulled on his jacket. 'Exactly.'

* * *

With all last night's excitement he had made himself late. He had so much on his mind. His coming birthday, Joni, and, of course, the person who had spent a day and a night in his flat, broken and folded up.

It made him tremble to think how easy the abduction had been, how easy and symmetrical the disposal — in her own front garden, for her husband to find — and what, of course, this success promised for the future.

At first, when he sat up on her back seat with the cordless power saw in his fist, she had simply lost all control of her body. He thought she was having an epileptic episode: her head thrashed, her feet drummed on the car floor, her mouth worked soundlessly, teeth click-clicking in the darkness. But once he'd made the decision to knock her out — with a punch of the saw's handpiece to the side of the head — it became easy.

There had been only one drawback. He had believed, after days of studying her as she jogged past St Dunstan's in the mornings, that he'd chosen the right one, that there would be no need for surgery. So it was a bitter disappointment to him, when he'd undressed her in his flat, to see her breasts — to realize that some cutting would be necessary. Still, that had been a small detail compared to the overwhelming success of the event, and his confidence, already swollen in the last few months, took another lurch ahead. By his birthday he'd be ready for the real thing. He pondered this in his scruffy, hothouse kitchen as he opened a bag of M&Ms and absent-mindedly wriggled his finger between the bars of a bird cage, where four abject, half-bald zebra finches shivered on the floor. He couldn't remember the last time he had fed them, but that didn't matter now.

One day left until his birthday. Just one day now. He took the chocolates and wandered into the bathroom. It was time to get ready.

At 9 a.m., on the dot, the phones in St Dunstan's per sonnel office came off answerphone.

'Personnel. Wendy speaking.'

'Wendy.' Caffery tucked his tie in his shirt and leaned forward on his desk. 'DI Caffery speaking. Area Major Investigation Pool. You helped us with that little room in the library.'

'Oh yes, yes. Hello, Inspector, hello. I've been wondering when we'd hear from you. It's all been quite a shock. Did you know Mr Harteveld was quite a familiar face here in personnel? I have to say I'm most terribly sorry, terribly sorry. I hope his behaviour hasn't tarnished St Dunstan's in your eyes. We'd all be very sad if… You see, we're proud of our reputation and if I thought for one moment that that dreadful man had harmed it — I'd—'

'Wendy.'

'Yes.' She caught her breath with a little gulp. 'Forgive me.'

'Do you have records of who is currently taking leave?'

When he told her who he was looking for she said: 'Now, Inspector Caffery, I'm going to put you on hold while I get his file.' She treated him to a few bars of Pachelbel's Canon, and was back in less than a minute, breathless and fluttery.

'Hello? Inspector?'

'Yes.'

'Mr Thomas Cook's on leave, due back June the eighth.'

'Or so he says.'

'I'm sorry?'

'Nothing. Have you got his address?'

* * *

Cook lived on the bottom floor of a two-flat conversion in Lewisham. No building work in the street or to the front of the house. Leaving Logan in the Sierra, a plane tree dripping water steadily onto the bonnet, Caffery and Essex pulled their raincoats over their heads and crept across the tarmacked forecourt, through the wooden side door and into the garden. The garden was overgrown — again no evidence of cement or construction work — and the house silent: the windows blank, all the curtains on the bottom floor closed.

They stood in the wet grass and were looking up at rain dripping from the gabled roof when their radios came alive.

'Bravo six-o-two from Bravo six-o-six.' Absurdly, Logan was whispering. 'Sir?'

Caffery span the radio out of the belt holster. 'Bravo six-o-two receiving.'

'Some movement, sir. Inside the house.'

'Got you. We're on our way. Out.'

They trotted back round to the Sierra.

'Who is it?'

'Little old lady.'

'Old lady?'

'You know, grey hair, bifocals.'

'The upstairs neighbour?'

'Well, if she's the neighbour then I'd like to know what she's doing in the target's flat.'

'What?'

'Downstairs. I meant downstairs. Look.'

They turned. In the front windows on the ground floor they got a glimpse of a large pair of hands as a curtain was opened.

'OK.' Caffery started to walk back to the house. 'Maybe it's my mistake.'

'Jack,' Essex had to trot to keep up. 'What do you think you're doing?'

'Maybe it's my mistake, maybe twenty-seven a is downstairs and twenty-seven b upstairs.' He leaned on the doorbell and next to him Essex shivered.

'I don't like this, Jack.'

'What're you talking about? It's just a little old lady.'

'Dressed to Kill,' he hissed. 'Dressed to fucking kill, that's what I'm talking about.'

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, heavy footsteps, and as Caffery pulled his warrant card out of his pocket Essex took a step back from the front door.

'I mean it, Jack. I don't like this at all.'

* * *

His face in the stained mirror above the sink, with his bad teeth and shiny red skin, reaffirmed his life belief that anger was his civil right, that he had a licence to fury. He'd never had a day, an hour, of being unashamed of his appearance: he was inclined to fat and had never really lost the soft womanly hips and chubby legs of toddlerhood. The tops of his thighs rubbed together when he walked, and nightly he cleaned lines of waxy white deposit from the folds in his flesh. And he, with the lust of a bull. He was brutally oversexed and yet it was no surprise when he had reached the age of twenty a virgin.