murder left me feeling as if I’d found my true vocation at last.
9
We dry up our tears, and… discover that a transaction which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.
‘OK, Andy, it’s showtime,’ Tony said to the blank screen of his computer. After Carol had dropped him off, he’d stumbled upstairs, kicking off his shoes and letting his quilted baseball jacket lie where it fell on the landing. Pausing only to empty his bladder, he’d burrowed under the duvet and fallen into the deepest sleep he’d known for months. When he’d woken, it had been after noon. But for once, he felt no guilt about the work he should have been doing. He felt refreshed, excited, elated even. Searching Stevie McConnell’s house had given him a new certainty that he really did understand what he was doing. He had known, with absolute clarity, that Handy Andy did not live like that. And although it wasn’t something he could admit to anyone outside the tight circle of fellow profilers, there was a real rush in realizing that he could probably find his way into Handy Andy’s head and map a path through the tortured labyrinth of his unique logic. All he had to do now was find the key to the door.
In the office, Tony powered his way through the remaining piles of documents, making notes as he went along. Then he closed the blinds and told his secretary to hold all his calls. He moved his own chair round the desk so that it faced the visitor’s chair. On the desk to one side, he placed his tape recorder, still switched off. He walked over to the door and stood with his back to it, contemplating the room. Some poem he’d once read echoed in his mind. Something about a road that divided in a wood, and the importance of choosing the branch less travelled by. For as long as he could recall, his fascinations had led him down the road less travelled by. It was the road that his patients walked, the dark path that led into the undergrowth, away from the dappled sunshine of the broad path. ‘I need to understand why you chose that road, Andy,’ Tony murmured. ’This is what I do best, Andy. You see, I know what draws me to that road. But I’m not like you. I can go back when I want to. I can choose the sunny path. I don’t have to be here. All I’m doing is studying your footsteps. Or at least, that’s what I tell the world.
‘But we know the truth, don’t we? You can’t hide from me, Andy,’ he said softly. ‘I’m just like you, you see. I’m your mirror image. I’m the poacher turned gamekeeper. It’s only hunting you that keeps me from being you. I’m here, waiting for you. Journey’s end.’ He stood for a moment longer, savouring the admission he’d made to himself.
Finally, he sat down in his chair and leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands loosely linked. ‘OK, Andy,’ he said. ‘It’s just you and me. We’re going to skip the preliminaries; all that stuff where we do the verbal arm wrestling and you eventually decide to talk to me. We’re going straight for it. First off, I want to say how impressed I am. I’ve never seen a cleaner job. I don’t just mean the bodies, I mean the whole thing. Sweet as a nut, you did it. Never a witness. Let me rephrase that. Never anybody seeing any significance in what they saw or heard, because there must have been people who saw or heard something, but they didn’t make the connection. How did you manage to be so invisible?’ He pressed ‘record’ on the cassette recorder, then stood up and stepped across to the other chair.
Tony took a deep breath and deliberately relaxed his body. He used breathing techniques to put himself into a light state of trance. He instructed his conscious mind to let go, to allow his higher self to access directly all he knew about Handy Andy and to answer for him. When he spoke, even his voice was different. The timbre was rougher, the tones deeper. ‘I blended in. I took care. I watched and I learned.’
Tony swapped chairs again. ‘You obviously did a good job of it,’ he said. ‘How did you choose them?’
Back into Andy’s chair. ‘I liked them. I knew it would be special with them. I wanted to be like them. They all had good jobs, a nice life. I’m good at learning things, I could have learned to be like them. I could have fitted into their lives.’
‘So why kill them?’
‘People are stupid. They don’t understand me. I was the one they always laughed at, then they learned to be afraid of me. I don’t like being laughed at, and I’m tired of people being wary of me, like I’m some animal that’s going to go for them. I gave them a chance, but they didn’t give me any choice. I had to kill them.’
Tony sank back in his own chair. ‘And after you’d done it once, you realized that was the best thing in the world.’
‘I felt good. I felt in control. I knew what was going to happen. I’d planned it all out, and it worked!’ Tony surprised himself by the degree of enthusiasm that came out. He waited, but nothing more seemed to emerge.
He returned to his own chair. ‘Didn’t last for long, did it? The pleasure? The sense of power?’
In Andy’s chair, he felt at a loss for the first time. Usually, he found role play loosened up his ideas, let his thoughts flow free. But something was clogging this up. That something was clearly at the heart of the issue. Tony moved back to his own seat and thought about it. ‘Serial killers act out their fantasies in their crimes. The crime itself never lives up to the fantasy, so it has limited power. Its details are incorporated into the fantasies, which are then realized in a second, often more ritualistic killing. And so on. But as time goes by, the fantasies have less and less staying power. The killings have to get closer and closer together to keep the fantasies fuelled. But your killings don’t get closer together, Andy. Why is that?’
He moved across, not hopeful. He allowed his mind to blank, letting his consciousness drift off, hoping it would come up with an answer that might satisfy his idea of Andy. After a few moments, Tony felt himself slipping away from consciousness. All at once, from what felt like a long way away, a deep chuckle rumbled through him. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ his own voice mocked him.
Tony shook his head like a diver coming to the surface. Dazed, he got to his feet and snapped the blinds open. So much for alternative techniques. What was interesting, however, was the point at which his brain had snagged. This was one of the factors about Handy Andy that was unique. The gaps stayed constant. Even allowing for his use of a camcorder, it was still remarkable.
The line of thought restored Tony’s earlier vigour and he decided to take a side trip to the university library’s media-studies section where he went through the back numbers of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times for the appropriate dates. A careful scrutiny of the entertainments pages revealed little in common between the four evenings in question, unless he was prepared to consider that the local art cinema always showed classic British black-and-white comedies on Mondays. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine Passport to Pimlico fuelling homicidal sexual fantasies. Finally, just after seven, he was ready to start on the profile.
He started with the usual caveat.
The following offender profile is for guidance only and shouldn’t be regarded as an identikit portrait. The offender is unlikely to match the profile in every detail, though I would expect there to be a high degree of congruence between the characteristics outlined below and the reality. All of the statements in the profile express probabilities and possibilities, not hard facts.
A serial killer produces signals and indicators in the commission of his crimes. Everything he does is intended, consciously or not, as part of a pattern. Uncovering the underlying pattern reveals the killer’s logic. It may not appear logical to us, but to him it is crucial. Because his logic is so idiosyncratic, straightforward traps will not capture him. As he is unique, so must be the means of catching him, interviewing him and reconstructing his acts.
Tony continued the profile with a detailed account of the four victims. He included everything he’d gleaned from the police reports about their domestic circumstances, employment history, reputation among friends and colleagues, habits, physical condition, personality, family relationships, hobbies and social behaviour. Next, he wrote a short resume of the pathologist’s report on each man, the nature of their injuries and a description of the crime scenes. Then he began the crucial process of organizing and arranging his information into meaningful patterns so he could start to draw his conclusions.
None of the four victims had any history of homosexual relationships, as far as can be ascertained. (We cannot exclude a secret homosexual/bisexual orientation, but there is no evidence in any of the four cases to suggest this.) Yet each body was dumped in an area known primarily for its use by the gay community. In particular, the bodies were dumped in spots which are notorious for the consummation of casual sexual encounters. What does this say about the killer?
1. He is a man who is not comfortable with his own sexuality. He deliberately chooses men who are not
