Bryant & May 08; Off the Rails

with the abstruse motivations of intellectual murderers – fictional killers carved designs into corpses according to biblical prophecies and hid body parts in patterns that corresponded to Flemish paintings – but the reality was that the act of murder remained as squalid and desperate as it had always been. It was the province of the spiritually impoverished.

Bryant dug out a none-too-clean handkerchief and blew his nose noisily. “Why do you think he’s a serial killer?”

“Well, here’s the thing, Mr Bryant. It’s very hard to completely hide your personality. I always know when my son’s been in my room, no matter how hard he tries to cover his tracks.”

“The poor little bugger’s got a forensic scientist for a father. How can he ever hope to pull the wool over your eyes?”

“And we always know where you’ve been – we follow the smell of your pipe, the mud and the sweets wrappers. It’s easier if you’ve no personality there to begin with. And serial killers suffer from a sort of moral blankness. There was a case in America, a young couple, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. They were known as the Ken and Barbie Killers because they were middle-class WASPs. In the trial notes, the prosecution asked Karla how she could sit downstairs reading while her husband murdered a young girl upstairs. Do you know what she replied? ‘I’m quite capable of doing two things at once’. Blankness, see? And they go about things in the wrong way. Karla was worried that she’d leave behind evidence, so she shaved a victim’s head. That really confused the profilers, who thought it must be a psychosexual signature, but she’d done it so she wouldn’t have to throw away the rug that the corpse was lying on. She was more concerned about the rug than the murdered girl.”

“And you can see something like that here, can you?” Bryant could not appreciate the silence of empty souls; his passions were too rich and various. They included Arthurian history, anthropology, architecture, alchemy and abstract art, and those were just the A’s. He let his partner handle the messy human stuff. While he appreciated the biological intricacies of the heart, for him its spirit remained forever encrypted.

An absence of personality. Banbury’s right. Mr Fox takes alienation to a new level. He examines others as if they’re circuitry diagrams. Bryant studied the murderer’s cold, bare little bedroom in wonder. Mr Fox sees this weakness as a skill, but we have to make it the cause of his downfall.

The room was as dead as an unlit stage set. Ten years, he thought. That’s how long you’ve been hiding your true nature. When did you come to realise you were different, Mr Fox? What happened to make you like this? Do you even remember who you once were?

Bryant knew that the man they were looking for had befriended several local residents. They had visited him, and Mr Fox had socialised with them in order to use their knowledge of the area. Had he let them inside the flat? Why not – he had nothing to hide here. He was an actor who adopted personalities and characteristics that he thought might prove useful. Actors were good at doing that. How many books had been written about Sir Alec Guinness without ever revealing what he was truly like?

“When you report in to Janice,” he told Banbury, “get her to circulate Mr Fox’s description to acting schools, would you? There are several in the immediate area.” The CSM threw Bryant a intrigued look as he repacked his kit. “This ability to deceive might be rooted in some kind of formal training.”

Bryant could only dimly sense his quarry. There were people out there who were touched by nothing. The damaged ones were the most dangerous of all. He needed some concrete facts. But even the people who had been befriended by Mr Fox seemed to recall nothing about him. In a world of streaming data, how could one man leave behind so little?

“Dan, can I borrow you for a minute?” Banbury was good at repopulating empty rooms; he could put flesh back on the faintest ghosts. Everyone at the unit knew that Banbury had been a lonely child, overweight and socially lost, locked in his bedroom with his flickering computer screens. Perfect PCU material in training, as it turned out.

Banbury dusted powder from his plastic gloves with an air of expectation. “Mr Bryant?”

“What can you tell me about Mr Fox from this room? I don’t mean on a microscopic level, just in general. There must be something. I can’t read much at all.” Bryant looked around at the IKEA shelves, the cheaply built bed, the bare cupboards.

“You met him, Mr Bryant. You know what he looks like.”

“That didn’t tell me a lot. He stuck to answering questions, gave us facts without opinions, avoided bringing himself into the conversation. He’s extremely clever at not sticking in the memory, especially a memory like mine.”

“Well, give me your impression.”

“I don’t do impressions. Let me think. Slight but muscular. About five ten. Smooth, unmemorable face, like a young actor without makeup. Fair complexion. Grey eyes. Not much hair, although I have a feeling he shaved his hairline. I wish we’d had a chance to photograph him. I got one interrogation in before going to brief the others – entirely my fault; I was anxious to get down the details of the case. We should photograph them on arrest, the way they do in America. John took a picture on his mobile phone, but the room was dark and it didn’t come out very well.”

“Okay, so we don’t have an ID for him, but there’s a piece of face recognition software that might pick up his main features from Mr May’s shot. Maybe we can find a match. That’s assuming he has a record.” Banbury took a few steps forward, pinched his nose, leaned, peered, scratched at his stubbly head. “I’ve already had a good look around, of course – ”

Of course you have, thought Bryant. Natural curiosity got the better of you. We all want to know about the kind of man who can kill without thinking twice.

“I think he’s probably lived here since his late teens, which makes him just under thirty. A loner from a broken home. Very closed off about the past. Something bad happened there that he doesn’t want to remember – there’s usually some kind of family trouble in the background. We know that his friendships are cultivated for their usefulness, and any emotions he expresses are meticulously faked. The habit of never presenting his true self to anyone is probably so ingrained that he wouldn’t be able to reveal himself now if he tried. A classic user, unemotional and unrepentant. You tell ‘em they’ve done wrong and they look at you as if you’re speaking French. This really does place him in the serial killer category. Clever planning, no witnesses, no evidence; it’s a pattern. I bet he hasn’t used his real name for so long that he’s almost forgotten it. Probably OCD. A fantasist, a re-inventor, but it has all come out of necessity.”

“Where are you getting all this?”

“Oh, the belongings, mainly.” Banbury waved a hand across the shelves. “A few other points of interest. The picture on the wall there.” He indicated a photograph of an empty red metal bench against a white tiled wall. “You couldn’t get much more sterile than that, could you? He doesn’t do people. Except his grandparents – there’s an unframed photo of an old couple in the bedside table. We’ll see if we can get anything from it. There are only two types of items here: the stuff he owned as a child, and recent acquisitions. In the former group you’ve got the alarm clock with the chicken on it beside the bed, and that little grey metal animal, an armadillo I think. The clock’s from the early 1950^s so I’m guessing it was purchased by the grandparents. Anything that ugly would have to have sentimental value. Those armadillo figurines were popular in Texas in the mid 1970^s, but they were available here. Maybe it reminds him to keep a tough shell. Might have been a gift from his father.”

“That’s a bit of a leap.”

“The trick is not to look at anything in isolation. Whether they mean to or not, most people continually reassess their belongings, adding and subtracting all the time to keep everything in balance. So I add the picture, the clock and the armadillo to that book over there.” He pointed to a single hardcover in an alcove beside the bed. Founders of the Empire was a volume on great British explorers. “It’s signed with a message from his father. No names, unfortunately.”

Banbury picked up the book and showed Bryant. He wasn’t about to let the detective touch it without gloves. “See, he’s written on the flyleaf. ‘An independent man makes his own way in the world – Dad’. Hard to imagine a more impersonal note. I guess he wanted his kid to grow up self-reliant and disciplined. No sign of a mother anywhere. Kid stuff here, near the bed – adult stuff over there. The teenage years are missing. Then we jump to a few recent purchases in the cupboard, the paperback copy of Machiavelli, psychology manuals, the fiction choice suggesting that he likes reading about villains more than heroes, American Psycho, The Killer Inside Me, damaged people. He’s interested in learning how