Birdman

28, 30, 32, 34.

34.

It had been double-glazed and pebble-dashed; greying lace curtains hung in the top windows. There was no front lawn, the driveway had been extended and an ugly carport tacked onto the side. Empty.

'I know him,' Essex said as Caffery let the car roll past. A bottle-green Rover was parked in the driveway, half hidden by the low brick wall, and a tall, greying man in a dark suit stepped out, looked into the carport and straightened his tie. Caffery pulled the Jaguar into the kerb.

'That's DI Basset. Greenwich CID. Come on.'

They hurried back down the street, pulling on their jackets, stopping in the next door's driveway, out of view of the lower windows. Basset had his hands in his pockets and was looking in the window of the ground-floor flat. When he noticed Essex gesticulating from the neighbour's front garden he looked puzzled. Then alarmed.

He hurried over to them. 'Jesus H. Christ,' he hissed. 'I'm not treading on anyone's toes here, am I? I should have checked with you, but it was starting to look as if you weren't going to get to her, and she was driving me nuts over the phone—'

'Slow down,' Caffery whispered, plucking his sleeve and drawing him further behind the fence. 'Now what're you saying?'

'It's Frobisher, the one I told you about.'

Caffery and Essex exchanged a look. 'The one you told us about?'

'Yeah, you know, the one with the neighbour.'

'I've lost the plot here,' Essex whispered.

'I called you. Remember? Left a message with a DI, said you ought to check it out? I didn't hear so I just assumed—' He shifted uncomfortably, looking from Caffery to Essex, and back again. 'Rule number one, eh? Never assume. I take it you know nothing about Mrs Frobisher and her neighbour? The smells? The leaking freezer?' He stood on tiptoe and shot a look over the fence. 'Dead birds in the dustbins and now someone screaming in the flat?'

Caffery closed his eyes and put his hand to his head. 'We've got a suspect in Thirty-four A. That's this house.'

'Frobisher is Thirty-four B. His upstairs neighbour.'

'And you told our DI — when?'

'About a week back. About the time the press were breaking the Harteveld story.'

'Fuck.' Caffery looked at Essex, who was staring at his shoes.

'Diamond,' he said.

'The same,' Caffery sighed. 'OK.' He straightened up. 'What have we got? Have you spoken to anyone in there?'

'No-one in.'

'You've been in?'

'No, Mrs Frobisher called about twenty minutes ago, knickers in a twist, said she'd heard screaming. Poor old cow's frightened out of her wits. Didn't want to bother us again because she thought—'

'She thought we were dealing with it?'

'Yes.' Basset looked embarrassed. 'Shit, y'know the CS's going to love this.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Can't be helped. Can't be helped.' A noise from the house. Basset leaned around the dividing fence and beckoned them to follow. The front door had opened and Mrs Frobisher stood on the doorstep wearing a blue quilted housecoat and men's carpet slippers. A tortoiseshell cat weaved around her ankles.

'Mrs Frobisher.' Basset approached, his hand outstretched. 'Nice to see you.' For a moment she only blinked at his hand, then placed hers in it, looking over his shoulder at Caffery and Essex. 'I'm sorry, meet my colleagues. DI Caffery and DS Essex.'

She nodded at the two solemn-faced men. 'I was making some tea.'

'Lovely,' Essex said stepping inside.

* * *

The flat was clean but cluttered, magazines piled in corners, a faint smell of food underlying the scent of pine air freshener. The men sat in an annexe to the kitchen, on threadbare armchairs, looking at Mrs Frobisher's rambling collection of ornaments: stuffed toys, a selection of service station mugs, photos of Gregory Peck clipped from magazines and mounted in faux silver frames.

In her kitchen Mrs Frobisher talked to herself as she matched Blue Geranium cups with striped saucers. She found a crocheted pink tea cosy and opened a packet of custard creams.

'It was yesterday afternoon, about fourish because I'd been watching Judge Judy and had just made a cup of tea.' She put the tray down. The cat was under the table, its paws placed neatly side by side, eyes closed complacently. 'I called Tippy and she was just having a saucer of milk, and then I heard a commotion. He was outside, with a young lady.'

'What did she look like, the young lady?'

'They all look the same to me. Blonde. Skirt up to here. Very tiddly, stumbling around in the front. She had a turn on the driveway and he had to carry her inside. Well, I didn't hear hide nor hair of her after that. Didn't think no more of it. Not until this morning then all of a sudden I heard—' The tea cup she was holding trembled slightly. 'I heard her screaming. Curdle your blood, a sound like that.'

'Do you have a key to downstairs?'

'Oh no. He doesn't rent from me. But—'

'Yes?'

'I noticed he left a window open, he was in that much of a hurry to get out.'

'Any idea where he's gone?'

'He's got another place, I know that. Somewhere in the country, I believe. Maybe he's gone there. He took the car.' She looked at DI Basset. 'You said to look at the name of his car.'

'And did you?'

She nodded. 'A Peugeot. I should have known, my daughter-in-law drives one.'

* * *

Essex got in through the casement window while Caffery waited outside, in the carport, thinking how sheltered this was, how easy it would be to back a car up to the doorway, open the boot and—

'Jack.' Essex opened the door. His face was white. 'It's him. We've found him.'

49

Inside the flat the rooms were dark, the curtains drawn tight, the air sour. They had borrowed plastic freezer bags from Mrs Frobisher to wear over their shoes and each step peeled flakes of dried matter from the sticky carpets.

'Look at this.' Essex stood in the doorway of the main bedroom. 'Can you believe it?' Across every inch of the walls photographs had been pasted: Polaroids, snapshots, some torn from magazines. Many were of Joni, but others were taken from Dutch or German porn magazines: showing a child sucking an engorged penis, a woman straddling an Alsatian and in a blurred still, from what looked to Caffery like a snuff movie, an Asian teenage boy strained on a bed, arms and feet tied apart, blood on his thighs.

From a fitted melamine wardrobe came the faint flutter of wings. Essex opened it and the two men stared speechless at the cage. A solitary zebra finch on its perch, feathers wet and clumped. It crouched there blinking silently at them. On the floor, amongst the grit, huddled four corpses, interleaved with maggots.

They moved through the rooms. Essex took a look inside the living room at what was taped to the walls and turned back to Jack — his face white.

'Sick,' he murmured. 'This man is sick.'

Polaroids of the victims in death.

Craw, Wilcox, Hatch, Spacek, Jackson. Raped, mutilated. One showed Shellene Craw wedged in a standing position, like a shop-window mannequin, between the television set and the wall, her eyes open, arms sticking out stiffly.

'The wig,' Caffery whispered, nodding at the Polaroid.

Essex came and stood behind him, giving a whistle through his teeth. 'You were right, Jack. You were spot on right.'

On the far wall they came face to face with a Polaroid of Susan Lister, naked and blood-streaked, bound and gagged, her eyes blackened and swollen.

'Oh, for fuck's sake.'

Blurred arcs across the photograph, across her face. A white shape in the bottom corner. Caffery understood. Bliss had photographed himself ejaculating over Susan Lister's broken face.