18
The truth is, I am a very particular man in everything relating to murder; and perhaps I carry my delicacy too far.
Don Merrick walked into the HOLMES room munching a two-inch-thick double cheese and Bar-B-Q bacon burger. ‘How do you do it?’ Dave Woolcott asked. ‘How do you get those slack Alices down the canteen to cook you edible food? They could burn a cup of tea, that lot, but you always manage to twist them round your little finger.’
Merrick winked. ‘It’s my natural Geordie charm,’ he said. ‘I just pick on the ugliest one and tell her she reminds me of my mother when she was in her prime.’ He sat down and stretched his long legs. ‘I’ve checked out the half-dozen Discoveries your sergeant gave me. They’re all in the clear. Two of them are women, two of them have got rock-solid alibis for at least two of the nights in question, one’s got multiple sclerosis, so he couldn’t have done the jobs, and the sixth sold his to a dealership in the Midlands three weeks ago.’
‘Great,’ Dave said heavily. ‘Give the list to one of the operators so we can update the file.’
‘Where’s the guv?’
‘Carol or Kevin?’
Merrick shrugged. ‘I still think of Inspector Jordan as my guv’nor.’
‘She’s off chasing wild geese,’ Dave said.
‘She got a result, then?’ Merrick asked.
‘Two cross-matches.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Merrick said.
Dave rummaged among his papers and found three sheets of paper stapled together. The first listed the two correlations. Merrick frowned and flicked over a page. The second was a print-out of the result of a criminal records search on Philip Crozier. Nothing known. Hurriedly, he turned to the third page, which listed two Christopher Thorpes. One had a last-known address in Devon and several convictions for burglary. The second had a last-known address in Seaford. There were a string of juvenile convictions; assaulting a football referee, breaking windows at a school, shoplifting. There were half a dozen adult convictions, all for soliciting prostitution. Merrick sucked in his breath sharply and turned back to the front page. ‘Fuck,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Dave asked, suddenly alert.
‘This here. Christopher Thorpe, the Seaford one?’
‘Yeah? Carol reckoned it wasn’t the same one as ours. I mean, he’s got convictions for being a male prostitute, but this one in Bradfield looks to be married, because the woman at the same address has his surname. And let’s face it, you don’t get dockland rent boys driving around in serious motors like the Discovery.’
Merrick shook his head. ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong. I know this Christopher Thorpe from Seaford. I worked on Vice in Seaford before I came here, remember? I was the arresting officer on two of these charges in soliciting. Christopher Thorpe was halfway to a sex change at the time. He had the tits and everything, he was trying to earn enough money to get the operation. Guess what his working name was? Dave, Christopher Thorpe isn’t married to Angelica Thorpe, he is Angelica Thorpe.’
‘Fuck,’ Dave echoed.
‘Dave, where the hell is Carol?’
Angelica stood in front of him, hands on hips, chewing one corner of her mouth. ‘You can’t, can you? You can’t prove it because you know nothing about my life.’
‘In one sense you’re absolutely right, Angelica. I don’t know the facts of your life,’ Tony said carefully, ‘but I think I know a bit about the shape of it. Your mother didn’t do a very good job of loving you. Maybe she had a problem with drink or with drugs, or maybe she just didn’t understand what a little kid needed. Either way, she didn’t make you feel loved when you were little. Am I right?’
Angelica scowled. ‘Go on. Dig yourself a hole.’
Tony felt a prickle of fear tingle at the base of his skull. What if he’d got it wrong? What if this woman was the exception to every statistical near certainty Tony had held at the front of his mind during the whole enquiry? What if she was the one serial killer who had come from a happy, loving family? Dismissing his doubts as a luxury he couldn’t afford right now, Tony ploughed on. ‘Your father wasn’t around much when you were growing up, and he never showed you he was proud of his son, even though you did everything you knew how to make him feel that pride. Your mother expected too much of you, kept telling you you were the man of the house, and giving you a bad time when you behaved like the child you were instead of the man she wanted to pretend you were.’ Angelica’s face twitched in a spasm of recognition. Tony paused.
‘Go on,’ she grated between clenched teeth.
‘It’s not easy for me to talk, doubled over like this. Can’t you slacken the rope a bit, let me stand upright?’
She shook her head, her mouth sulky as a child’s.
‘I can’t look at you properly like this,’ Tony tried. ‘You’ve got a fabulous body, you must know that. If it’s going to be the last thing I see, at least let me appreciate it.’
She cocked her head to one side, as if replaying his words to check them for truth or trickery. ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘It doesn’t mean anything’s changed, though,’ she added as she moved to the winch and released it. She let out about a foot of slack.
Tony couldn’t bite back the scream of pain that shot through his shoulders as the muscles were released from the strain that had stretched them to their limit. ‘It’ll wear off,’ Angelica said roughly as she returned to her station by the camcorder. ‘Keep talking,’ she instructed him. ‘I’ve always enjoyed fantasy fiction.’
He eased himself upright, struggling against the pain. ‘You were a bright kid,’ he gasped. ‘Brighter than the rest of them. It’s never easy making friends when you’re so much smarter than the other kids. And maybe you moved around a bit. Different neighbours, maybe even different schools.’
Angelica was back in control of herself, her face impassive as he continued. ‘It wasn’t easy to make friends. You knew you were different from everybody else, special, but you couldn’t work out why at first. Then as you grew up, you realized what it was. You weren’t the same as the other boys because you weren’t a boy at all. You had no interest in girls sexually, but it wasn’t because you were gay. No way. It was because you were really a girl yourself. What you discovered was that dressing up in women’s clothes made you feel like you’d come home, like this was how you were meant to be.’ He paused and gave her a crooked smile. ‘How am I doing so far?’
‘Very impressive, Doctor,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m fascinated. Carry on.’
Tony flexed his shoulder muscles, relieved to discover that the damage so far seemed to be only temporary. The pins and needles that raged across his back seemed no more than a minor irritation after what he’d been through. He took a deep breath and carried on. ‘You decided to become the person you were inside, the woman you knew you really were. God, Angelica, I’ve got so much respect for you, putting yourself through that. I know how hard it is to get the medical profession to take the idea seriously. All the hormone therapy, the electrolysis, living as a half-man, half-woman while you waited for the operations, and then all the pain of the surgery.’ He shook his head, wonderingly. ‘I know I wouldn’t have the courage to put myself through all that.’
‘It wasn’t easy.’ The words escaped from Angelica’s lips, almost against her will.
‘I believe you,’ Tony said sympathetically. ‘And after all that, to find yourself wondering if it had been worth it after all, when you realized that the stupidity, the insensitivity, the lack of insight you’d identified in men didn’t just disappear because you were a woman. They were still the same old bunch of bastards, incapable of recognizing an exceptional woman when they were offered her love and affection on a plate.’ He paused, studying her face, deciding if the time was right for the big gamble. The coldness had left her eyes, replaced by a look almost of misery. He softened his voice and lowered the volume. Please God, let his training pay off.
‘They rejected you, didn’t they? Adam Scott, Paul Gibbs, Gareth Finnegan, Damien Connolly. They turned you down.’
Angelica shook her head violently, as if by activity she could deny the past. ‘They let me down. They let me down, they didn’t turn me down. They betrayed me.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Tony said softly, praying that his hard-earned techniques weren’t going to fail him now.
