I wondered if I might use your phone to call the AA? I’ll pay for the call, of course…’ I let my voice trail away.
His smile broadened and relaxed, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘No problem. Come in.’ He stepped back and I moved inside the door. He gestured down the hall. ‘There’s a phone in the study. Just on the right there.’
I moved slowly down the hall, ears alert for the sound of the front door closing behind me. As the lock snapped back into place, he added, ‘There’s nothing worse, is there?’
‘I’ll just look up the number,’ I said, pausing in the doorway to reach in my backpack. Adam kept on walking, so that when I pulled out the Mace spray, he was only a couple of feet away from me. It couldn’t have been more perfect. I let him have it full in the face.
He roared in pain and stumbled back against the wall, hands clawing at his face. I moved in swiftly. One foot between his ankles, hands on his shoulders, a quick twist and down he went, face crushed into the carpet, gasping for breath. I was down on top of him in seconds, gripping one wrist and twisting his arm up his back while I snapped the handcuff over it. He was struggling against me by now, tears streaming down his face, but I managed to grab his other flailing arm and snap the other half of the cuffs on it.
His legs were thrashing under me, but my weight was enough to keep him pinned to the floor while I took a ziplock plastic bag from my backpack. I opened it, extracted a pad soaked in chloroform and clamped it over his nose and mouth. The sickly odour drifted upwards into my nostrils, making me feel slightly light-headed and queasy. I hoped the chloroform hadn’t gone off; I’d had the bottle for a couple of years, ever since I’d stolen it from the dispensary on a Soviet ship where I’d spent the night with the first officer.
Adam struggled even harder when he felt the cold compress cut off his access to the air, but within minutes his legs stopped their pointless thrashing. I waited a little longer, just to be on the safe side, then I rolled off and fastened his legs together with surgical tape. I returned the chloroform pad to its secure bag, then I taped Adam’s mouth shut.
I stood up and took a deep breath. So far, so good. Next, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and took stock. I am familiar with the theory of the French forensic scientist Edmond Locard, first demonstrated in a murder trial in 1912, that every contact leaves a trace; a criminal will always take something away from the scene of his crime and leave something behind. With this in mind, I had carefully chosen my wardrobe for today. I was wearing Levi 501s, the same brand I’d seen Adam wear often. I’d topped it with a baggy V-necked cricket sweater, the exact double of one I’d watched him buy in Marks and Spencer a couple of weeks before. Any stray fibres I left behind would inevitably be ascribed to the contents of Adam’s own wardrobe.
I took a quick look round the study, pausing by his answering machine. It was one of the old-fashioned ones, with a single cassette tape. I opened the machine and helped myself to the tape. It would be nice to have a memory of his voice sounding normal; I knew that the soundtrack on the video wouldn’t have that same relaxed quality.
The door to the garage was locked. I headed off up the stairs, where I found the jacket of his suit tossed over the back of a chair in the kitchen diner. The bunch of keys was in the left-hand pocket. Back downstairs, I opened the garage door and unlocked the hatchback of his two-year-old Ford Escort. Then I went back for Adam. He had, of course, come round. His eyes were filled with panic, muffled grunts came from behind the gag. I smiled down at him as I pressed the chloroform pad over his nose again. This time, of course, he couldn’t struggle effectively at all.
I pulled him into a sitting position, then brought a chair through from the study. I managed to get him on to the chair, and from there I was able to sling him over my shoulder and stagger through into the garage. I dumped him in the luggage space, and slammed the tailgate shut. Not a trace of his body was visible.
I checked my watch. Just after six. It would be another hour till it was dark enough to be certain none of the neighbours passing casually would notice a stranger driving out of Adam’s garage. I filled the time by browsing through his life. Packets of photographs revealed friends, a family Christmas dinner. I would have fitted into this life perfectly. We could have had it all, if he hadn’t been such a fool.
I was startled out of my reverie by the phone. I let it ring, and went through to the kitchen. I helped myself to a bottle of creme cleanser and a cloth and carefully washed down all the paintwork in the hall. I put the used cloth in my backpack, then fetched the vacuum cleaner. I went over the entire hall slowly and carefully, erasing all traces of the struggle from the hard-wearing Berber carpet. I trailed the vac behind me, right into the garage, where I left it in a corner, looking as if it had always lived there. Satisfied I’d removed all traces of me, I climbed into Adam’s car, pressed the remote-control button on his keyring and started the engine as the garage door rose smoothly before me.
I shut the door behind me, and drove off. I could hear muffled noises from the back of the car. I raked around in the glove box till I found a Wet, Wet, Wet cassette. I shoved it into the player and turned the volume up high. I sang along with the music as I drove out of the city and on to the moors.
I’d been worried that Adam’s car might not make it all the way up the track, and I’d been right. About half a mile from home, the road became too overgrown and rutted. With a sigh, I got out and walked up to collect the wheelbarrow. When I opened the tailgate to tip him into the barrow, his eyes were wide and staring. His muffled calls were wasted on me, however. I dragged him unceremoniously out of the car and into the barrow. It was a hard half-mile up the track, since his constant struggling made steering more difficult. Luckily, Auntie Doris had had the foresight to buy a proper builder’s barrow, one with two wheels in front.
When we reached the farmhouse, I opened the trapdoor. The cellar below looked dark and welcoming. Adam’s eyes widened in terror. I stroked his soft hair and said, ‘Welcome to the pleasure dome.’
5
As to… the mob of newspaper readers, they are pleased with anything, provided it is bloody enough. But the mind of sensibility requires something more.
After he’d seen Carol to her car, Tony walked across the campus to the general stores and bought a copy of the evening paper. If publicity was what Handy Andy craved, he’d finally achieved it. Fear and loathing stalked the pages of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times . Five of them, to be precise. Pages 1, 2, 3, 24 and 25, plus an editorial, were devoted to the Queer Killer. If the nickname was anything to judge by, the police were already leaking like a Cabinet committee.
‘You’re not going to like being called the Queer Killer, are you, Andy?’ Tony said softly to himself as he walked back to his office. Back behind his desk, he studied the paper. Penny Burgess had had a field day. The front page screamed, QUEER KILLER STRIKES AGAIN! in banner headlines. In smaller headline type, readers were told, POLICE ADMIT SERIAL KILLER STALKS CITY. Beneath was a lurid account of the discovery of Damien Connolly’s body, and a photograph of him at his passing-out parade. The turnover on pages two and three was a sensationalist summary of the three previous cases, complete with sketch map. ‘Bricks without straw, right enough,’ Tony said to himself as he flicked through to the centre spread. GAYS TERRIFIED BY QUEER KILLER MONSTER left the reader in no doubt who the Sentinel Times had decided were at risk. The copy focused on the supposed hysteria gripping Bradfield’s gay community, complete with interior shots of cafes, bars and clubs that made the scene look seedy enough to pander to the readers’ prejudices.
‘Oh boy,’ Tony said. ‘You’re really going to hate this, Andy.’ He turned back to the editorial.
‘At last,’ he read, ’police have admitted what many of us have believed for some time. There is a serial killer on the loose in Bradfield, his target the young, single men who frequent the city’s sordid gay bars.
‘It’s a disgrace that the police have not warned the city’s homosexuals to be on their guard before now. In the twilight world of anonymous pick-ups and casual sex, it cannot be difficult for this predatory monster to find willing victims. The police’s silence can only have made it easier for the killer.
‘Their reluctance to speak out has probably increased the gay community’s existing suspicion of the police, making them fear that the authorities value the lives of gay men less than those of other members of the community.
‘Just as it took the murders of “innocent” women rather than prostitutes to make the police pay full attention to the Yorkshire Ripper, it is wrong that a police officer has had to be murdered before Bradfield Metropolitan Police takes this Queer Killer seriously.
