Maynard’s frown became almost painful.
…that she was dressed as the tom no one recognized!
Belle de Jour?
In this case the shrinking violet dressed up like a temptress? Able to go so far but no further and then, out of frustration, attacking the person she actually wanted to be.
Could this be something as simple or as complex as genophobia? Maynard tried to shake the thought from his head.
Start again. People don't start this way. They start in little ways and while they are learning they leave behind a little form. The learning curve. Antisocial behaviour, shoplifting, minor infringements that carried nothing more than a warning. So where did she come from? Where was she staying? The answer lay in the Square, on that kerb of crawlers.
Maynard found sleep difficult at the best of times, but during a case it was almost impossible. He worried it until it was done. That was why after HOPE he had given it up and gone back to therapy. Interaction was where it mattered, where you could rebuild a shattered life. The people who shattered the lives came at you like waves on a spring tide and like Cole had said earlier, he wasn’t King Canute. You could get one or two but there would always be more stacking up behind. They rolled in, wave after wave, bringing with them acts of depravity and wickedness that the civvies – the good citizens of this green and pleasant land – could not even imagine.
We see things that no one should see. We hear things that no one should hear.
Coming back was personal, nothing to do with Cole or Baxter or the closure of HOPE, his old department. If Cole knew why he had come back he would have laughed out loud. Everyone had secrets. Didn’t they just? This wasn’t about the challenge. This was about selfharm. The dawn stole in from an overcast sky and set the day. Sam Butler was well aware that time was running out. What had seemed like crucial breakthroughs were simply not delivering and a sense of panic gnawed at his gut. He said, “They've held on to it since seventy-six?” Anian shrugged and bony shoulders ridged her thin shirt. “It was high profile. And they still use it at Hendon. It was quoted verbatim in one of those true-crime books called…”
He was standing over her. A button was undone and he caught sight of some blue bra. Without looking away he said, “ The Underground Slasher.”
“Absolutely. Guess who wrote it?”
“Wouldn’t be a guy named Maynard, would it?”
Anian threw him a flirty smile. She bent slightly forward – he was sure it was unintentional – and showed him some more of the vale. “I read it,” Sam Butler said, trying to pull back a memory, but the view was in the way and it wouldn't come. He shook his head – the vale of tears was right, he thought – and went on, “Crime does pay.” “It paid even more than that. It was serialized in the Sundays.” She pressed play and the voice of John Lawrence came through. Not as resonant but unmistakable.
“I was a gentle child and so quiet that people would say I wasn’t there when in fact I was. It got me into trouble on more than one occasion when my parents would ask how I had behaved at a particular function only to be told I wasn’t there. I was very shy and you would always find me in a corner, hiding. It was only later that it came to me I didn’t have to hide, that in fact, no one noticed me anyway. “My father was in the army. We were posted to Cyprus. It was well before the country was partitioned but even then Makarios was causing trouble. He was a dangerous man. We lived in Nicosia in a white villa next to a dried-up riverbed. I remember we used to find a lot of dead cats in Nicosia. Wherever you went you came across dead cats and that was strange. The point? Yes, the point is that this is the riverbed where I used to catch lizards. Some of them were up to a foot long. Before that, when I was even younger, I used to make Plasticine models of chickens complete with their lungs and hearts and gizzards and, once I'd made them I would slit them open to extract their innards. It fascinated me. Even though I’d put them there and knew exactly what I’d find, it was still a moment of huge excitement. I never knew why. Now, a little older, I had the lizards. Using drawing pins, I crucified them on little crosses I knocked together. I’d put three of them on a little mound of sand. It wasn’t a green hill but probably closer to the truth. Have you been to Jerusalem? There's not much green. And there wasn’t in Nicosia either. But there were lots of red anemones. I remember them well. But they didn’t last long. Just three days at Easter time and then, they died. Perhaps that is why they have become associated with Jesus. I used drawing-pins at first, until I got some tiny little tacks that would go through their hands and feet. They were better. More realistic. More like nails. You had to bang them in, like the Romans did. Hands? Do lizards have hands? Well, they did for me. If you slice off their tails before you put them on the cross they look quite human. They sort of moved, like Jesus might have done. You know? In agony. Or ecstasy. And they bled. But their blood was fatty, watered down. Not rich red, like ours.”
Anian recalled Maynard’s account of Lawrence’s early life, the birth of his brother, his mother’s hospitalization and his rejection. What was it the psychologist had said? It lit the fuse?
The tape continued. “After a while, about a month or so, that got boring, so I used to slit them open with a razor-blade. I'd sit for hours, watching the pale blood dry in the hot sun. When I stood up I'd get quite dizzy. A kind of religious experience. Point is, when I slit open one belly, a big white egg fell out. I say white. It was mostly white, but there was pus and green strands on it. Not much blood. But after that, I went after the females. At first you couldn't tell the difference until you slit them open. But after a while I learned. It wasn't only the swollen belly but the skin as well. Even the eyes seemed different. They hung there, on their crosses, with their mouths wide open and their little round eyes glazed over, but they didn’t cry out. They made no noise at all. But finding an egg, watching it fall out while they were still wriggling, that was special. After that I started cutting open the eggs, finding the little brown tadpoles inside. Even in the burning sun some of them lived for more than a few seconds.
“Tell me, if you can, what more than that can a schoolboy want?” Another voice came in, male, gentle. “You've told us about your parents. They forced you to go to church. Did that annoy you?” Lawrence laughed. “Of course we were forced to go to church. People in the fifties still believed in God. I collected the Sunday-school cards like everyone else. Moses and David and Jesus, dished out by a fat woman in flip-flops who had her eyes on the padre.”
“Did you have any friends in Cyprus? Did they cut the lizards as well?”
“Friends?” Lawrence's chuckle went on for some moments. The velvety tones of his voice sent a shiver down Anian’s back. She could barely believe she was listening to the man she knew as Mr Lawrence, the man whose knife and brush had so perfectly captured her image. The stranger's voice came back. “You never thought that killing the lizards was wrong?”
“Wrong? It didn't come in to it. At school we were dissecting mice and frogs.”
Anian pressed stop and the room fell strangely silent. Police officers – a couple of them old-timers waiting for their pensions, who had seen and heard a few things in their time – shuffled in their seats and exchanged uncomfortable glances. They were repelled, mostly, by the matter-of-fact quality of Lawrence’s voice but also by its – almost
– patronizing tone.
Breaking the silence Sam Butler said softly, “One sick bastard. He's killing these women, or he's got them bottled up someplace. I don't know how or where, but it's him. We know it's him.”
One of the PCs said, “What about having the lodger in, Sarge?” “Paul Knight? A waste of time. Let’s be kind and say that he is mentally challenged. He won’t give us any more than he did at the shop and that’s nothing. Lawrence is careful. He isn’t going to confide in Paul Knight.”
“That’s a no then, Sarge?”
Butler went on, “Guy’s have come back with zilch, so he's not up to his old tricks, at least not on the underground. So let's try it from another angle.”
Guy's Hospital kept a comprehensive pathology database on wounds to the person. There had been no unsolved attacks on pregnant women.
“He meets them in the shop, through his art classes or, as customers. Worse case scenario, he's killing them. Best, he's holding them prisoner. We’ll leave the why for the psychologists. Either way, it means there's another place where he does his business. How does he get there? As far as we know he doesn't have transport. How does he get the women there? Does he arrange to meet them, or does he take them? Are they forced to go along?”
One of the PCs cut in, “There's another possibility.”
“Go on?”
“If he is involved then he might be helping them to get away from…domestic violence, unhappy marriages.
