Stanley was a tall, fit-looking man with long hair and the pallor of goat’s cheese. He swayed a little on his feet as he started to make his report.
‘Shit, what’s the matter with you?’
‘Hospitals,’ he said biliously. ‘They always set me off. It’s the smell.’
‘Well, don’t pass out in here. You couldn’t afford it.’ Jake searched inside her shoulder bag and found a small bottle of smelling salts she had carried since she was a beat copper. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Snort on this a bit.’
Stanley held the bottle underneath his flaring nostrils. He sniffed a few times and then nodded gratefully. ‘Thanks,’ he said weakly.
‘You’d better hang on to it,’ she said. ‘Feeling up to filling me in?’
He nodded. ‘They’re operating on Mayhew right now. But it looks pretty hopeless. The front of his head has got more holes in it than a bowling ball. And he’s lost a great deal of blood. But he did come round very briefly while the constable was with him in the ambulance.’
Stanley beckoned to the armed policeman who was standing a short distance away. The man walked towards the two senior officers, his boots squealing on the expensive rubber flooring like a pair of small furry animals.
‘Constable, tell the Chief Inspector what Mayhew said to you in the ambulance.’
The constable pushed his machine pistol out of the way, unbuttoned the breast pocket on his flak-jacket and took out his computer. ‘He said, “Those bastards. They lied. They lied. I should have known, they always meant to kill me. They lied. Brain. Brain”.’ He shook his head. ‘He wasn’t very audible, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re sure of all that?’ said Jake. ‘That was exactly as he said it?’
‘As exactly as I was able to judge, ma’am. He was more or less delirious.’ The constable returned the computer to his pocket and swung the machine pistol back across his chest.
‘And he only spoke the one time?’
The constable nodded. ‘By the time we got here he’d stopped breathing. I believe they managed to revive him in the operating theatre. The nurse has promised to keep an ear on anything else he might say while he’s in there.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jake. ‘If he says anything else, no matter how trivial, I want to know about it. Understand?’
‘Ma’am.’
Jake and Inspector Stanley were half way along the corridor leading to the front door when they heard a shout behind them. They turned and saw the constable wave them back. Beside him stood a man in a green overall.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the surgeon, when they reached him. ‘But your man never regained consciousness.’
Lester French, a firearms expert in the Forensic Pathologist’s Office at the Yard, stood up from his collection of microscopes and cameras and dropped a bullet into Jake’s outstretched palm.
‘That’s what killed Mayhew,’ he said. ‘That, and five others like it. Your killer’s no fool, I’ll tell you that much. There’s quite a lot of stopping power in that little beauty.’
‘And this is the same kind of bullet that killed all the others?’
French nodded firmly.
‘How does it work?’
‘The cartridges themselves are masterpieces of precision engineering,’ he said with real admiration. ‘A machined brass cartridge case with a self-contained high pressure air reservoir. A simple and effective valve system.’ He picked up a small gas cylinder from the laboratory’s work bench. ‘You charge your cartridges up with this.’
‘Are you saying that this killer has been manufacturing his own ammunition?’ Jake asked uncertainly, confused by the expert’s enthusiasm for his special field.
‘No, no. As I said, it involves precision engineering. This particular shell is made by a Birmingham gunsmith. You buy the cartridges from any gun shop. But you stick whatever bullet you like on the end of it. To that extent, your man has been manufacturing his own. And it’s pretty heavy stuff too. Hollow-nosed, conical-conoidal, pointed and streamlined.’
‘But it is a gas-gun,’ Jake said, in search of further elucidation. ‘Is that like an air-gun?’
‘In the firing of the weapon, yes. But with regard to what comes out of the barrel, no.’ He lifted the piece of misshapen metal from Jake’s palm and held it up to the light. ‘I mean, a conventional air-pellet bears no more resemblance to this than a bloody pea. Whatever you hit with this, stays hit.’
‘What does the gun look like?’ said Stanley.
French led them through a door at the back of the laboratory to a small firing range. On a trestle table lay what looked like a long-barrelled.44 calibre revolver. He picked the weapon up and handed it to Jake. ‘That’s the sort of thing,’ he said.
‘It looks like a normal gun,’ she said.
French pursed his lips. ‘It does everything that a normal gun is supposed to do.’ He nodded in the direction of one of the targets. ‘Try it. It’s loaded.’
Jake thumbed back the hammer. It felt lighter than a conventional revolver.
‘That’s it,’ said French. ‘Now push the safety off and you’re ready to fire.’
She levelled the barrel at the target, aimed and then squeezed the trigger. The gun hardly moved in her fist as it fired, with no more sound than a hand slapping a desk top.
‘Smooth, eh?’
French led them down to the target.
‘This plywood’s two centimetres thick, so it ought to give you a pretty good idea of what a good-sized gas-gun will do to a man.’
Jake’s bullet had hit the human-shaped target in the centre of the groin.
‘Nice shot,’ said French. He pulled a pen from his top pocket and probed the hole. ‘Clean through. Impressive, eh?’
‘It certainly is,’ murmured Stanley.
‘You can even buy a silencer for this weapon if you still think it’s too noisy. But the most remarkable thing about it is that no firearms certificate is required. Anyone over the age of seventeen can walk into a shop and buy one today, no questions asked.’
Jake shook her head. ‘How come?’
French shrugged. ‘With all the legislative attention focused on conventional firearms, nobody noticed that air-guns were becoming more and more sophisticated. Mind you, you’d have to pay over five hundred dollars for a piece like the one you’re holding, Chief Inspector. Twice that for a rifle.’
‘You mean to say that there are rifles like this too?’ said Stanley.
‘Oh yes. Some of them with laser-guided nightsights if it’s a bit of poaching you fancy. And, with mercury or glycerine exploding bullets, a gas-rifle would be just the thing for your amateur Lee Harvey Oswald.’
‘Presumably the rifles are even more powerful,’ Jake observed.
‘With the right sort of ammunition, a good gas-rifle could drop a decent-sized stag. Of course, some of those weapons are regulated.’ French grinned fiercely. ‘Let’s hope your man hasn’t got hold of one of those. There’s no telling what he’d do. Still, it’s not like he hasn’t been busy already, eh? To shoot a man in the Tate Gallery, in broad daylight. The newspapers are going to love that.’
Later that afternoon Jake had an appointment with her psychotherapist, Doctor Blackwell. The clinic was a smart, three-storey house in Chelsea, just off the King’s Road, and Jake had been seeing Doctor Blackwell for almost a year.
Blackwell belonged to the Neo-Existential school of psychotherapy. This avoided the more mechanistic aspects of classical Freudian analysis and encouraged the patient to take charge of her own life. The key element in the relationship between existential therapist and patient was the encounter, wherein the patient’s problems were discussed and the therapist tried to direct the patient to the life-enhancing, authentic solutions that were to be discovered through the exercise of free choice. According to Doctor Blackwell the experience derived from these encounters was ultimately transferred to the way in which the patient saw herself and others.