I put my feet up, opened a can of beer and enjoyed the feature.
On the screen, Gemma came out of the bathroom naked. A knock on the door. She pulled on a dressing gown, and because the camera wasn’t trained on the door it didn’t show her opening it. It had sound though. Sound is handy for blackmailing people. Not only do men not want their wives seeing them fucking around, they don’t want them hearing the embarrassing tripe they come out with either.
‘Good evening,’ a man’s voice said. ‘Hotel maintenance.’ It was Picasso.
Gemma asked him if he could come back later.
‘I’m afraid the telephone system is dysfunctional. The fault has been traced to your room. Our other guests are being inconvenienced. May I? Shan’t take a moment.’
She let him in. The tool bag in his hand made him look like a tradesman. She didn’t ask for ID. For all the good it would’ve done her.
Big guy, he was – any taller and he’d’ve needed to duck under the light fitting – blonde hair. Hands like baseball gloves. I’d expected him to shut her up with them. But he had other ideas. He put the tool bag on the bed and opened it. Gemma had no sooner turned to go into the bathroom than he drew a spray out of the bag and coughed politely before saying, ‘Oh, just one thing more.’
She turned back saying, ‘Yes?’ and caught it straight in the face.
To say the spray knocked her out would not be entirely accurate. It was trying to knock her out though. She was way beyond swooning and heading towards collapsing when he caught her and laid her out on the bed. Next came a look at what lay beneath her dressing gown. He took it off. I thought for a moment he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to sample what he was admiring, but he had other ways of treating women – sitting on top of her, taping her mouth and binding her hands behind her back. Even if she’d been fit enough to put up a struggle by this time, it would’ve been useless. He must’ve had ten stone on her. A weightlifter would’ve had a job shifting him.
I now got some idea why they’d named him Picasso. Maybe he was a nut who thought he was Picasso. That or he thought he was a geometry teacher. He used a protractor on her chest. Then a scalpel. This was why he’d taped her mouth. The spray would’ve kept her unconscious and therefore quiet. The scalpel brought her round. She was now wide awake and fit to scream the house down and disturb the other guests. He had it all worked out. Oh, there was a lot of holding her face down and generally preventing her from kicking and bucking, but there was still a fair bit of composure in what he was enjoying. He reminded me of a barber with a careful hand on the cut-throat razor. Only he wasn’t shaving her, he was … sketching. There’s no other word for it. It might sound mad, but what I was reminded of was that artists not only paint, they sketch. And Picasso sketched with scalpels. No way could this guy be copycatted; not by any professional killer I knew. The artistic element ruled it out. You’d need to see the flair with which he’d used those blades to know what I mean.
Next came a saw. He kept his tools surgically clean. This one was pristine. A tenon saw, the kind you’d use for sawing mitre joints. He had other joints in mind. Her groin to start with. She wasn’t objecting now. She was way past objecting.
I stilled the frame and – now this bit was part speculation; my surveillance gear was good, but it wasn’t good enough to show minute detail – because I was watching this on a computer screen and not on a VCR, I was able to enhance a shot of a cellophane bag he’d taken out of the tool bag along with his camera. I couldn’t tell for sure, but to me it looked like the bag contained a tongue. In clear liquid. A big tongue. I thought of a dog’s, only because I’d expected to see a ‘dog’ element in this. Winters had taken Greg’s. He hadn’t taken it for a walk. It had to have some connection. Fuck knows what it was.
But it occurred to me that if I were a killer like him, what would I do with a tongue? More importantly, what would he do with it? Working out in the open, he might bring a dog along to lick the victim. He’d be too smart to draw attention to himself by walking into the Top Towers Hotel with one on a lead. Would he bring a tongue instead? Would licking a victim with it be his way of avoiding copycats? If the liquid was saliva, would it come from one mutt in particular? Without that ingredient, no one could copy his work. Flair or no flair. Forensic’d spot it. That’s how I saw this anyway.
By this time, y’see, I’d been toying with the idea that if I couldn’t catch him, I could copycat him. If a girl turned up carrying his hallmark, Greg’d be released and the pressure’d be off. And if I did manage to track him down later on – I’d come up with one idea – he’d be available to do a bit of work for me now and again. No
