‘You had to get her away from people, drug her, suffocate her with the plastic, mutilate her and get her to the dump site,’ he said slowly. ‘Where’s the pleasure for you? Where’s the why? What are you getting off on? Possessing her? Controlling her?’
He turned away and walked back to the window, frowning into the gloom. ‘It’s just not long enough. You spent weeks grooming her. For what? A couple of hours? I don’t think so. You commit that much planning, that much time, that much energy, you want more than a snatched couple of hours. You’ve lusted after her. You need to slake that thirst. But not you, apparently. You just killed her, cut her and dumped her. That doesn’t make any sense . . .’ Everything he knew told him killers like this relished the time they spent with their victims. They set up their hiding places away from prying eyes so they could satisfy themselves again and again and again. They didn’t take all the risks involved in capturing a victim only to turn their backs on the possibility of stretching the pleasure to the max. The ones who liked live prey held them captive, violating them again and again, torturing them and savouring the chance to make their fantasies flesh and blood. Often with the emphasis on the blood. The ones who preferred the passivity of a corpse often went to great lengths to keep the body as fresh as possible for as long as possible. The early stages of decomposition were seldom a deterrent to the seriously screwed up.
But that’s not what happened with Jennifer. ‘Killed her, cut her and dumped her,’ he repeated. ‘No time to play. Something happened to stop you. But what?’ It had to be something unforeseen. Perhaps he’d lost access to the place where he’d planned to take her. Or else something had erupted in his other life that made it impossible to carry out his plans. Whatever it was, it must have been compelling. Nothing less than that would keep a killer from his satisfaction, not once he had his victim in his power.
It made sense, Tony thought. But not the sort of sense that satisfied. ‘Killed her, cut her and dumped her,’ he muttered under his breath as he walked back to the drinks table and poured himself a taster of the second Armagnac bottle. He took a tiny sip and returned to his pacing.
Suddenly he stopped short. ‘Cut her. Cut her.’ Tony slapped his forehead. He hurried back to the photographs, confirming what he thought he remembered. ‘You cut out her vagina, ripped up her cervix, slashed her uterus. You went to town on her. But you didn’t bother with her clitoris.’
Tony drained his glass and returned for a refill. The conclusion that was rattling round his head seemed inescapable. Any investigator of this kind of crime would think it absurd in its counter-intuitiveness. But he’d never been afraid to accept possibilities that others shied away from. It was one of the reasons Carol Jordan had always prized his mind. Somehow, he didn’t think DI Stuart Patterson would be so generous. But there was no getting away from it. It was the only thing that made sense of the two incongruities he’d recognised.
‘This isn’t a sexual homicide,’ he declared to the empty room. ‘There’s nothing sexual about it. Whatever’s going on here, it’s not about someone getting their rocks off.’
Which begged a question that was, to Tony, even more disturbing. If it wasn’t about sex, what was it about?
CHAPTER 18
Alan Miles wasn’t hard to spot. He was the only person standing outside Halifax station in a gentle mist of rain wafting down from the Pennines that defied the canopy. Carol parked where she shouldn’t and walked briskly over to the slightly stooped figure peering out at the world through the kind of glasses she hadn’t seen anyone wear since the NHS stopped doing free prescription pairs. Heavy black plastic across the top, steel wire round the rest of the lenses, and thick as milk-bottle bottoms. Face like an Easter Island slab. She could imagine him giving the bottom-stream fourth-year boys hell. ‘Mr Miles?’ she said.
He turned his head with the articulation of an elderly tortoise and appraised her. Evidently he liked what he saw for a smile of extraordinary sweetness transformed him utterly. His hand went to the brim of his cap and he raised it fractionally. ‘Miss Jordan,’ he said. ‘Very prompt. I like that in a woman.’ In the flesh, he sounded like a basso profondo version of Thora Hird.
‘Thank you.’
‘I hope I wasn’t rude to you on the telephone. I have no telephone manner. It’s a device that completely flummoxes me. I know I sound most off-putting. My wife tells me I should leave it alone and let her deal with it.’
‘If I had the choice, I would leave it to somebody else to deal with,’ Carol said. She meant it; she’d spent the last twenty minutes talking to division commanders, press officers and her own team, making sure everything that could be done to find Seth Viner was being done. And that nobody was forgetting about Daniel Morrison either. The guilt at jumping ship was tremendous. But not enough to divert her from her other mission.
‘Now, I see you’ve arrived by car, which is perfect, really,’ Miles said. ‘If you don’t mind driving, we can make our way to the very premises where Blythe and Co held sway. That’ll give you a sense of the place. There’s a very pleasant public house a few streets away where we can have a small libation while I outline what I’ve got for you. If that’s acceptable to your good self?’
Carol struggled to keep a straight face. She felt as if she’d stumbled into a BBC TV series by one of the other Alans - Bennett or Plater - who specialised in Yorkshire eccentrics. ‘That would suit me fine, Mr Miles.’
‘Call me Alan,’ he said with a roguish look. If he’d had mustachios, he would have twirled them, Carol thought as she led the way back to her car.
He sat stiffly in the passenger seat, a whiplash of a man leaning towards the windscreen, the better to see where they were going. He directed her through a convoluted one-way system, leaving the town centre behind and climbing a steep road flanked by small stone-faced terraced houses. They turned off about halfway up the hill into a warren of narrow streets. The final turn brought them into a dead end. On one side Carol could see a line of brick houses whose front doors opened directly on to the street. Opposite was the side wall of what looked like a warehouse or a small factory. It was obviously not a recent construction, being made of stone with a slate roof. Beyond the building was a small yard for vehicles, cut off behind a high chain-link fence. A metal sign said, Performance Autos - Yorkshire. ‘There you go,’ Miles said. ‘That used to be the premises of Blythe and Co, Specialist Metal Finishers.’
It was hard to feel excited about so prosaic a building, but it did mark a real step forward in her journey. ‘That’s quite something, Alan. Seeing it still standing.’ If he wanted to, Tony could make this journey and send his imagination travelling through time. Somehow, she thought he might give it a miss. ‘So what have you got to tell me about Blythe’s and its owner?’
‘Shall we repair to the public house?’
‘With great pleasure,’ Carol said, wondering why she was starting to sound as if she too inhabited TV Yorkshire. I’ll be ordering a port and lemon next.
The Weaver’s Shuttle huddled down a lane near an old Victorian mill that had been converted into apartments. The pub had avoided a makeover, its exposed stone walls and low beams stubbornly enclosing an old-fashioned bar where couples sat and talked quietly, old men played dominoes and a group of middle-aged women were having a very decorous darts match. The barman nodded to Miles as they walked in. ‘Evening, Alan. The usual, is it?’ Reaching for a half-pint glass and a wooden pump handle.