Birdman

Harteveld hesitated a moment, then let his eyelids droop down. He opened his hands on the table, palms up in a gesture of relief and gratitude. Here it was, then, what he had been searching for. The good, welcoming shore of escape.

20

'Mr Henry, DI Diamond here. We met at the Dog and Bell the other day.' A scrabbling noise and the letter-box lifted, a warrant card appeared briefly, the small tanned nose familiar. 'I'm putting some photographs through the letterbox. I think you've seen them before.' A shower of ten-by-eights landed on the floor. Gemini, back against the wall, stared mutely down at the faces in his hall. 'We've got corroborative statements putting at least three of these girls in your company. Anything you'd like to say?'

Gemini was silent. On the other side of the door Diamond coughed.

'Maybe you'd consider coming down to the station for a chat?' He waited a moment. Gemini remained silent, staring at the letterbox, listening to the sound of thin paper being folded. His mother was still sleeping in the bedroom at the bottom of the hallway, he didn't want her awake, didn't want her being troubled.

'I'm also putting a copy of our search warrant through. Under the provisions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act I'm obliged to ask you if you will consent to the search of your car, registration C966 HCY, and give you this opportunity to pass the keys to me.'

Gemini slid down the wall to his haunches.

'I'll take that as a ''No''.' A carbon copy fluttered to the floor. 'The warrant, Mr Henry. We'll be back with a record of everything seized, which for the purposes of this investigation will mean the car and its contents.'

'You ain't takin' no car.'

'Hello?' A pallid blue eye appeared at the letterbox, blinking. 'Hello?'

'You takin' my car, is it?'

'That is correct.'

'Because you think them girls was in my car?'

'You know why we're interested in them, don't you?' Even from here Gemini could smell Diamond's sour breath. 'Don't you?'

'Maybe,' Gemini whispered. 'Maybe.'

* * *

'It's not Gemini,' Caffery said. 'It can't be.'

Maddox turned up his raincoat collar against the dying shreds of a storm and looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. They stood at the foot of a high-rise council block, part of the Pepys estate, Deptford, as FSS technicians in green overalls secured Gemini's red GTI to the lab's low-loader. High above them the clouds were tugged by invisible winds away from Deptford, off over to the Thames. It was a Saturday, the interviews at St Dunstan's were scheduled for Monday and Caffery was in down-time. He'd elected to spend his time sitting on the team's heels.

'Have you heard of serotonin? Free histamines? First and second instars?'

'I'm not a scientist.'

'The wounds were post-mortem,' Caffery said. 'I mean very post.'

Maddox put his hands in his pockets. 'We knew that from the autopsy.'

'No. We thought they were inflicted in the heat of the moment, as soon as they were dead, as part of the killing act.' He glanced at the lab technician tying a white SEIZED PROPERTY tag on the GTI's windscreen wiper. 'Steve, look. The women were raped. He used a condom because he's a clean freak, or phobic about AIDS, and did it post-mortem.'

'Post-mortem?'

'That's why there was no sign of force, no bruising to the genitals. Dead tissue doesn't really react to noninvasive violence.'

'How did you dream this up?'

'Forensics say the wounding was up to three days after death.'

'Three days?'

'It's been bugging us why they weren't raped. And here's the explanation. He's been hanging on to the bodies. The rape probably happened at the same time as the mutilation, probably repeatedly, and probably after the rigor had worn off.' Caffery saw Maddox's face tighten a fraction. 'He's a necrophiliac, Steve. It doesn't explain the ease with which he killed them, but it does explain why he wants the killing so unfrenzied, why there was no knock-about bruising, no black eyes.'

'I don't think I want to hear this.'

'The death has to be quick, unfussy. He isn't interested in killing. That's not the fun. The fun is the corpse. He only disposes of them when they become too putrid.' Maddox shuddered as if the sun had gone behind a mountain. The last weak spatters of rain subsided. Caffery put his hands in his pockets and took a step closer, dipping his head in to Maddox. 'Birdm— the offender keeps the bodies for three days and then, when the murder itself is just a memory, then he mutilates them. You know what it means?'

'Apart from he's even more of a weirdo than we thought?'

'It tells us more than that.'

Maddox bit his lip. New, washed sunshine flickered against the concrete block and he looked suddenly old. He glanced up the edge of the nearest high-rise to Gemini's flat. 'He's got privacy?'

'Yes, and he lives alone.' Caffery followed Maddox's gaze to the flat. The curtains were drawn. 'Most likely he's got a freezer.'

Maddox cleared his throat. 'We can't get a warrant for the flat: the friendly magistrates've gone PC on us.'

'OK.' Caffery started walking to the entrance of the block.

'Where d'you think you're going?'

'I've got something to show you.'

'Hey.' Maddox caught up. 'I don't want you rattling him, Jack.'

'I won't.'

In the hallway a young girl of about ten, with long dirty blond hair and a crusty-nosed baby on her hip, stared out through the glass at them. She wore a filthy pink T-shirt and had scuffed bare feet. Caffery tapped on the glass. She opened the door, stood back and looked at them in silence.

'Thanks.' He slammed his hand on the lift button and the doors opened. He stepped inside, and turned to look at Maddox. 'What floor's he on?'

'Seventeen! We're not speaking to him, mate. Not yet.'

'No.' Caffery hit the button for the seventeenth floor. 'Get in and let's see, shall we, how many times the doors open between here and the seventeenth. Let's just see how feasible Mel Diamond's idea really is.'

The two men stood, hands in pockets, faces turned up to the red light travelling across the panel above the door. 'Imagine you're him, Steve. You've got a body in a binliner right here on the floor. That's a woman's body we're talking about. Cut and curled up. Stinking.'

The lift climbed: nine, ten, eleven. Maddox was silent, watching the red light crawling. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. It stopped and the doors opened. An old woman with a waterproof shopping case and a tiny shivering Jack Russell on a lead looked at them.

'Going down?'

'Up.'

'I'll come with you anyway.' She stepped inside smiling, tying a plastic hood over her perm. 'You never know if it'll stop on the way back down.'

Caffery looked at Maddox and whispered, 'Remember now. On the floor.'

A mother with two toddlers got in on the fifteenth floor, and after stopping on the seventeenth the lift continued to the twentieth, the top floor. Now there were six people and a dog in the lift. Maddox shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. On the way back down they stopped a further three times. The lift was full by the time they reached the lobby.

'It's daytime,' Maddox said as they stepped outside into the daylight, rubbing his face wearily. The girl with the baby pressed her nose against the window as they walked away. 'He moved them in the night.'

'Yes, but can you imagine going down all those flights day or night? Looking at the numbers like we've just done, and then, after all that, pulling it out of the lift.' He started to pace towards the car park. Beyond him the low-loader's hydraulic ramp jerked closed; the GTI shuddered in its moorings. 'All this way across the forecourt.' He stopped, his hands open. 'Look up. How many windows can you see?'