Sonata of the Dead (25 page)

Later I heard her heart beating like that of a startled animal, and her breathing softened and she retreated into sleep and I watched her for an hour or so until the light in the room was so poor that she became indistinguishable from the grains of night.

I must have slept too, because the smell of coffee awoke me. Romy was sitting at the end of the bed. She was naked, dawn light tigering her body through the Venetian blinds. Her breasts were full and caramel-coloured; paler skin delineated the shape where a bikini had once been. I wondered which beach she had been lying upon, and with whom. But who cared? She was here, she was naked with me.

She was leafing through the manuscript pages, gingerly holding each piece of paper by the corner, possibly so she didn’t corrupt the evidence with her fingerprints, but probably more so that she didn’t have to touch too much of the disgusting thing. I felt bad then for bringing it at all. She was right. We should just make something up, but give it enough of a subtle spin to make it sound believable. What if she read this and concluded that it was a guy who bought chocolates for his grandmother at the weekends, fed stray dogs and gave regularly to children’s charities?

‘This stuff…’ I said. ‘It’s typed. You said you were a graphologist.’

‘That didn’t bother you when you came over last night.’

‘I came for you last night.’

‘You gain some insight, staring at paper all day, handwritten, typed… scattered with ideograms or hieroglyphics. You develop… I don’t know the word.’

‘Empathy?’

‘Empathy, yes. You see patterns and shapes. It doesn’t matter, sometimes, how they were introduced to the page.’

‘It’s all just a kind of reading,’ I said.

She nodded. And then: ‘He’s a loner,’ she said.

‘That makes sense,’ I said. ‘There can’t be many serial killers who get away with this kind of thing with wives and children in tow.’

‘He likes his work.’

Too much
, I thought.
He doesn’t even consider it work. Not any more
.

‘He showed great promise as a youngster.’

‘A youngster?’

‘I’m guessing… look at the dates. 1988. Nearly thirty years ago.’

I took one of the pages from her. If she was right it meant that whoever had written them might be any age now between forty-five and sixty. ‘“Their teeth shone dully, mist filming their vision. Teeth long and wolfish, flashed in the light.” It’s got some rhythm to it, I’ll give him that.’

‘The sentences, though typed scruffily on a failing machine, are, if not grammatically correct, then trying their best. The spelling is not great. The punctuation is all over the place, but that might be because his typewriter doesn’t work properly. Or it could be a stylistic choice. He feels as if he deserves some success, but it never came. The dog that never had its day. And like you point out, the sentences contain patterns, rhythms. Sometimes they’re long and meandering; sometimes staccato, very short. I’d be willing to bet they follow his moods. I imagine he is a moody person, prone to swift changes in his emotional state. And I think… I think he stands up to write.’

‘Stands up? How do you work that out?’

‘Look at how hard these keys have punched into the paper. You can feel them on the back, like Braille. And this is good-quality paper. I don’t think you get that kind of leverage sitting down. Not consistently, anyway.’

‘Anything else? Anything we might damage him with?’

‘I don’t know. There’s some stuff… like this, at the beginning of “Bluebottle Jam”: “I lie asleep in bed, but only sometimes. Mostly I’m awake, struggling with my fear of the dark, conscious of the sweat on my forehead. Conscious of the cruel silence. After ten years the dreams still bother me. Ten years.”’

‘You think, what? He goes walkies with the black dog?’

‘Well, I wonder if he might play host to suicidal tendencies. These handwritten notes in the margin… you didn’t add these, did you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No, of course… but the way the line rises and falls here, where he’s written “Shit… it’s all shit”. I don’t know, it’s difficult to say as there are no lines on the paper, but it’s indicative. Perhaps it’s nothing. But also… the stroke pressure is quite high. Like the type, you can feel the words through the page. This suggests a strong libido. Not quite the kind of thing we can bait him on. Although these smears, these blotches… you could point to a kind of sensual indecency, depravity even, a lack of control where indulgence is concerned. Appetites, you know.’

‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘I like it. Maybe we can build him up with that, and then pull the rug out. This guy is a sex god… oh no, hang on, I mean he’s a pervert.’

‘The way the words slant forwards, a heavy slant…’ She puffed out her cheeks. ‘Wow. You could say the person is hysterical, or is prone to hysteria. He overreacts. He loses touch of himself, his inner feelings, his control, his self-denial. And following on from that, he is influenced by the emotional worth of a situation rather than any person caught up within it. He is indifferent to feelings of others.’

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘And here, loops within loops… a tendency to secrecy. Deliberate concealment. He omits. He deceives and misleads. The omission of information in the hope it hides the truth. And perhaps he does this even to conceal things from himself…’

‘Is there anything here that chimes with what you saw before, in that first batch of pages I gave you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult to say. Writers… writing changes from person to person, even within the space of a few months. Circumstances can alter handwriting. Moods. Illnesses.’

I glanced through some more of the sheets. Whatever typewriter these pages had wound through was grimy and knackered, or maybe just the misery in the words had turned it that way. And some of the lines didn’t hang quite right. ‘
Sometimes I wonder what became of all the school friends. It’s natural
.’ That impersonal ‘
the
’ where you’d expect a ‘
my
’. It said something about him. It gave me the creeps.

I rubbed my face. Days of stubble rasped back in response. It was a loud sound in the room. I watched the beat of Romy’s heart transmit itself to the necklace hanging against her sternum.

‘How is
your
stroke pressure?’ she asked. She placed the papers on the floor and knelt on the bed. She lowered herself on to all fours. Her nipples grazed my thighs as she moved towards me.

‘I’ve never had any complaints,’ I said.

‘When do you have to see the police?’

‘Our meeting is at six a.m.’

‘You have an hour.’

‘What can we do in an hour?’

‘Joel, Joel, Joel…’ she whispered, a teacher admonishing a particularly thick pupil. Her nails scrawled mysterious ideograms across my chest. ‘What
can’t
we do?’

* * *

Mawker didn’t agree with it; not at first. Hell, I wasn’t even sure it was a good idea. I mean, the guy had obviously been on the wrong end of a lot of criticism. He’d already flipped his lid, retrieved it and tried to screw it on back to front. A bit more of a kicking was hardly going to make a difference. But it might. We had to try. Especially now that Niker and Pallant had gone dark and he was running out of targets. We dragged Simm in and read him the riot act. He kept pleading that he’d thought it was all just a big literary joke but the disgusted looks on our faces soon shut him up. He handed over the rest of the manuscript and the letters and Mawker told him he was lucky to be escaping a prison sentence. He sat there now, his face sadder than a diabetic’s treat cupboard.

It was in all the papers that day.
The Hack
. I guessed Simm had been in touch with them. He was determined to get a payday of some kind it seemed. Fuck it. Get it out in the open. Maybe someone had seen something and would come forward. Maybe The Hack himself would suddenly find the pressure of nationwide coverage too great and either surrender to the police or top himself.

‘This mad berk, this evil fucker,’ Mawker said, ‘is clearly trying to attain the notoriety he thought he’d get via publishing by knocking off people on his writerly shit list.’

‘Have a promotion,’ I said. He gave me a look but didn’t react. We were in his office on the ninth floor at New Scotland Yard. No photographs on his desk. No Tupperware lunchbox, lovingly prepared for him. Instead there was a greasy cardboard box sticking out of the wastepaper bin, and the high reek of curry. Coke cans were strewn around like tokens on a coach’s tactics board. He needed a haircut. His shoes were scuffed. What looked like a bead of apricot jam clung right at the tip of the V of his tie. It smelled in here, and not just of chicken jalfrezi. It was Mawker’s sweat, a tart compost of anxiety and anger. No amount of Pledge or Windolene sprayed by the cleaners could shift it. On his desk was a computer. Someone had affixed a sticker to the back of it which read ‘Ello, ello, ello, PC PC’. It was a laugh a minute in this place.

‘And this moniker they’ve given him. The Hack. Because he has some ambitions as a writer. And also, it’s a reference to his MO, although we haven’t released any specific details on that.’

‘Double promotion. Mawker, you are on fire, son.’

‘Can it, Sorrell,’ he said. ‘I’m just summarising what we know.’

I handed him an index card from his desk. ‘I reckon you could write everything
you
know on that card. With space left over to draw a giant cock. And balls.’

‘We’ve had top brass talk to the BBC,’ Mawker said. ‘They’ll let us run something during the ten o’clock news. But there’s no guarantee he’ll be watching. If he’s not writing or shedding blood, what? He sits up late at night with his Ovaltine to see how the latest McEwan has fared?’

‘They don’t do reviews on the ten o’clock news, Mawker. Do keep up.’

‘Whatever the fuck it is.’

‘Anyway, we have to try,’ I said. ‘Simm can do it. Or one of his publishing cronies. “This guy can’t write for toffee. He couldn’t write his way out of a wet paper bag. No future in this game.” Really pile it on. Get the radio stations to pick it up for their bulletins. Get it on tomorrow’s front pages.’

Simm licked his lips and flicked his attention from me to Mawker and back to me, as if we were playing invisible tennis. ‘I’m not doing it,’ he said, and widened his eyes for emphasis. They looked as if they might just bug out of his face and make a bid for freedom. ‘And anyway, what would it achieve? You hit a wasps’ nest with a stick, you won’t do it again. I don’t want him after me.’

‘He’s already after you,’ I said. He blanched.

‘We need to get him angry,’ Mawker said. ‘Lure him out. Get him to make a mistake.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’ Simm was chipping away at my resolve. He was right. Of course he was right, but I had nothing else in the ideas tray. It was either this or wait for him to strike again. And we had no idea who his next victim was likely to be. What was crippling me was that it might be Sarah; he might know where she was, even if I didn’t. At least this way we could set him up with some potential targets that we could keep close to until he made his move from the shadows.

‘Like I said,’ I said, ‘we have to try. Anything come through from forensics, Ian?’

‘You only call me “Ian” when you want something.’

‘Well it is your name. Granted, it’s not the one I choose to use half the time.’

‘Nothing from forensics, not that it’s any of your business. No prints. No DNA. He’s not a knobber. No hairs or fibres, so either he’s naked and bald as a coot when he attacks, or he’s super lucky.’

‘Or super cautious,’ I said.

‘In which case this might not work,’ Simm said. It felt as if the words were leaping from his mouth, working on any little point of weakness so as to disarm, anything to take him further from where we wanted to go. His body followed up, repositioning itself, all eager, open. I decided he must be quite an act at the various negotiation tables of London’s publishing industry. ‘He’ll smell a trap a mile off. And then he’ll keep his head down for as long as it takes until things have cooled off. You’ll scare him away. Maybe for good.’

‘We take that risk,’ Mawker said. ‘At the very least the spree is over and we can go back over the evidence and approach this in a more thorough, by-the-numbers fashion. We’ll catch him, but it’ll take time. This way I think we get a crack at catching him more quickly.’

‘I don’t want anything to do with it,’ Simm said. His body had closed up again, like a shellfish at low tide.

‘It’s too late for that,’ I said, and then to Mawker: ‘What’s the setup?’

A BBC crew were coming around to New Scotland Yard the next morning. Ten a.m. sharp. Tula Barnes would be there, as well as an experienced and well-respected editor from Janner & Fyffe, one of the city’s oldest publishers. The footage would then be able to be repeated as much as possible throughout the day, maximising the chance of The Hack seeing it.

‘Let me see if I can bring something else to the party,’ I said. ‘If you think giving him a kicking over the quality of his metaphors isn’t good enough, there might be some other way we can sting him.’

‘Like what?’ asked Mawker.

‘Give me till tomorrow,’ I said.

‘We haven’t got the time. We need to work on what we’re going to say now.’

‘Well do that then, but allow for some extra material.’

‘Christ, Sorrell, this is going to be some ugly clusterfuck, I can feel it in my bladder.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ I said.

* * *

It was five minutes quick march round the corner to check on the dead letter drop. As before I took my time, glancing up and down Birdcage Walk and across at the park, where the swans were being fatted for the Queen’s table. It was late afternoon and the traffic was picking up, but there were few pedestrians down here. I watched a woman jog by with various high-end fitness gadgets appended to her torso and arms, then ducked next to the tree and found a piece of paper folded up into the knot of roots.

51°30’59.26”N 0°10’33.61”W

13.04. @ 0000 WTFIGO?!?

Midnight tonight. I opened the map on my phone and fed in the co-ordinates: Paddington Station. I struggled for the literary link. Hadn’t there been a Sherlock Holmes novel where they took a train from Paddington?
The Hound of the Baskervilles
maybe? Or was I thinking of the film? Fuck Sherlock Holmes and his hound. It didn’t matter. I was hyperventilating.