‘Why was that?’ he asked, almost curiously. Vogel glanced at Freda Heath again.
‘Might you have left Dawn somewhere?’ Freda asked in a level tone.
Willis looked at the professor as if seeing her for the first time.
‘Why would I have left her anywhere?’ he asked, sounding bewildered.
‘Could you have hurt her, perhaps? Might you have done that, DS Willis?’
‘What? Hurt Dawn? Why would I do that?’
The words sounded normal enough, but Willis’s eyes no longer seemed focused on anyone or anything in the room. His chest began to heave, as if he were having trouble breathing or as if he were struggling to control forces within himself. His eyes rolled back into their sockets. His tongue protruded slightly from his mouth. He lifted his hands from the table and let his arms fell loosely by his side. Then he sprang to his feet and threw both arms in the air.
The two uniformed constables on duty by the door stepped forward. Vogel and Nobby Clarke both indicated that they should hold back.
‘I am Aeolus,’ said the man, who had previously been known to them only as Willis. ‘I am Aeolus. I control the winds. The winds of fortune. The winds of change. I am all powerful. This Willis is merely my servant.’
The voice was immediately different, more educated and with the hint of Latin accent that Vogel had noticed on the phone. His eyes blazed. If Vogel hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was with a kind of righteousness. So, when Willis was Aeolus, he was aware of his other identities. Or at least some of the time he was, at any rate. Freda Heath had suggested that might be so.
‘And the others, Leo, Al, Saul, are they also your servants?’ Vogel continued.
‘When I call upon them they are there.’
‘But why, you Aeolus, so powerful, why do you call on these…’ Vogel paused, wondering how far too push this. Again he glanced towards Freda Heath. The professor gestured for him to continue. Was she reading his mind, Vogel wondered? Well that’s what psychiatrists were supposed to be able to do, wasn’t it? Or was it? Vogel didn’t have the faintest idea. He went for it anyway. The man he had thought to be a perfectly ordinary police detective was staring at Vogel. Silent. Expectant. Challenging?
‘Yes?’ he queried.
‘… these pathetic apologies for men,’ Vogel continued. ‘A serial paedophile, a twisted closet gay, an inadequate sexual misfit, who dreams of having a family but cannot even perform the sexual act…’
It happened very quickly. Again there was the moment of almost total muscular relaxation. Then the man, who had once been Willis, threw himself across the desk that separated them and tightened his hands around Vogel’s neck.
‘You think you are better than me, you jumped-up piece of filth,’ he yelled. ‘You think you’re the special one. I can have any woman I damned well want. They flock to me. I know how to court them. I know what they want…’
The two uniforms leapt forwards, grabbed the suspect and pulled him off the DI. This time nobody protested. They pushed him back onto his chair and now stood on either side of him, each with a hand on one shoulder.
Willis slumped in his seat. Vogel coughed a couple of times and took a drink of water from the one glass that had survived the unexpected onslaught. The voice Willis had just used had held more than a trace of Wiltshire. A rural burr. That must have been Saul speaking, Vogel thought, just as Sonia had described him.
‘Yes, but you can’t give it to them though, can you?’ Vogel remarked, continuing to pressurise. ‘That’s your problem, isn’t it? You can’t do it. You can’t fuck.’
Willis/Saul/Leo/Al, the man who believed he was Aeolus, raised his head and stared at Vogel. There was ice in his eyes. Vogel wondered if he would try to attack again, but he didn’t. Instead, his lips cracked into a kind of leer.
‘They have to be the right age,’ he said. ‘If they’re young enough I can do it.’
The accent was now Scottish. Melanie Cooke had told her friend, Sally, that Al spoke with a Scottish accent. So this was Al, Vogel thought. Vogel watched him pull repeatedly at the collar of his suit, at the back of his neck. What was he doing, Vogel wondered? Then he realised. He was trying to put a non-existent hood over his head. Al was always hooded, even in the summer. All the reports about him indicated that. This was Al all right.
‘So,’ Vogel continued gently. ‘Why didn’t you make it with young Melanie Cooke?’
The other man’s eyes narrowed.
‘Because she was a vicious, knowing bitch,’ he said, still sounding Scottish. ‘She wasn’t the way I like them at all. She was no child.’
Vogel almost had to physically gulp back his repulsion. He had worked with this man, lived out his professional life alongside him. Vogel wanted to attack him, just as the creature he had once known as Willis had attacked him, only more effectively. He controlled himself with difficulty.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You can’t ever do it with a woman, can you? Not really. Not the way they want. Not the way you want.’
The other man’s eyelids flickered. He made no reply.
‘You’re all right as Leo though, aren’t you? You can fuck a man all right. Can’t you? That’s no problem for you is it, Leo?’
Vogel felt Nobby Clarke’s eyes upon him, burning into him. Had he really gone too far now? The man they had known as Willis took a huge intake of air, exerted his not inconsiderable strength, forced himself to his feet not withstanding the restraining hands of the two uniforms and stood, directly facing his four inquisitors.
‘I am Aeolus,’ he said, in that curious mix of English public school and classic Latin.
‘I know not of what you speak. I am Aeolus.’
Epilogue
Prolonged further questioning brought about little change and next to no information from the multi-personalitied suspect. Leo, Al, Saul and Willis all seemed to have effectively disappeared beneath the wings of Aeolus. The CPS remained unsure whether a prosecution could be successfully brought in view of such extensive mental health issues.
Meanwhile, the Avon and Somerset Constabulary successfully applied to the courts to be allowed to remand their suspect in police custody without charging him for four days — the maximum period allowed except in cases of terrorism — whilst they continued their investigations into the case.
The Greater Manchester Police were asked to check out Willis’s early life. They quickly found that the story he had told his ex-wife, although factually based, had strayed significantly from the truth.
Willis’s father may well have been a wife-beating philanderer, who had yet to be found, but his stepfather, Peter Maxwell, was not as Willis had portrayed him. And he was dead. He’d killed himself soon after his daughter had been discovered drowned in her bath. Manchester Police had located Maxwell’s brother, who told them that Peter Maxwell could not come to terms either with the death of his daughter or being suspected of involvement in it. The brother further maintained that Maxwell was a gentle man, who had never been violent or abusive to his wife, his stepson or his daughter.
But the brother said Maxwell always thought John Willis, whom he considered to be a highly disturbed child, may have attacked the little girl, even though he had only been twelve at the time. Maxwell’s brother claimed that the young John had resented the presence of his stepfather from the start and been seriously jealous of his stepsister, whom he believed to have stolen the affections of the mother he adored.
It also transpired that Willis’s mother was not dead. She’d suffered from lifelong mental health problems, which she certainly seemed to have passed on to her only son. She remained in a secure hospital having been sectioned under the mental health act when Willis was twenty and at engineering college. Eighteen months later, Willis had suddenly decided to change his career choice and become a policeman, selling the Manchester family home and relocating to join the Avon and Somerset Constabulary.