‘He must have used something.’
‘No, Jack. He didn’t. Bits and pieces of junk in all of them, but nothing that would have done the trick.’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure. Jane Amedure says so. Must be true.’
Caffery was exasperated. ‘So how did he keep them still enough to stick a sodding great needle in their necks?’
‘They’re not magicians, you know,’ Essex said solemnly, looking up from the report. ‘These guys who spirit our loved ones away from under our noses, they’re not especially clever. Most cases I look back on and realize how very unclever they were.’
‘Unclever?’ Caffery echoed, absently looking at his black thumbnail. He wondered how unclever Birdman was. How unclever Penderecki was. How unclever you had to be.
‘Accidentally lucky,’ Essex said.
‘No. Birdman’s not lucky. He knows.’ He stood and wandered over to the photos. ‘Doesn’t he?’ He appealed to the dead women staring blankly from the walls. ‘Well? How did he do it?’
‘Jack,’ Essex said from behind. ‘Look at this.’
The women stared back at Caffery: Petra, thin arms, sparkling smile and leotard; poor, dull Michelle Wilcox clutching her wild-haired daughter—
‘Jack.’
Big, toothy Shellene. Kayleigh in the pink party dress, holding up a glass to the camera. ‘What if it’s my baby in there, my baby, my little, little girl? What if it’s her?’
‘How’s he doing it?’
‘Jack!’
‘What?’ He turned. ‘What is it?’
‘Entomology.’ Essex was shaking his head. ‘I know why it looks like he’s not raping them. Disgusting bastard.’
‘Why?’
‘You know what we’ve got on our hands, Jack?’
‘No, what’ve we got on our hands?’
‘We’ve got a necrophiliac. A full-blown necrophiliac.’ He tapped the report and held it out to Caffery. ‘It’s all there. In black and white.’
... 17
Early 1980s. UMDS. Gross anatomy 1.1. B stream lab rotation.
Standing in a class of ten, dotted amongst the green-shrouded shapes on stainless-steel gurneys, the sweet tang of formaldehyde deep in his nostrils, 19 years old and Harteveld knew that something life-changing was happening.
He was paired with a young female student, and assigned to the corpse of a middle-aged woman. For the next year she would be stored at night, in a stainless-steel cadaver tank, and wheeled out in the daylight hours under her green cotton sheet, to be dissected, mulled over and rearranged by his trembling gloved fingers.
She was sharp-featured with small yellow pouches for breasts, thin pubic hair, razor-sharp hip bones jutting up under papery skin. Her dark blond hair was smoothed back over the scalp.
‘Doris awake and ready?’ the girl student would call cheerily to the technicians as she entered the lab, pulling on her gloves.
‘She’s overslept this morning, look at her, can’t get a thing out of her.’ They’d wheel her out. ‘Hey, Doris, wake up. You’re on.’
And she’d be delivered to Harteveld, who stood trembling and silent, not joining the joke, sweating at the thought of the inspired frigid stillness which waited under the green sheet. Sometimes he found himself shaking so much next to her supine body that the scalpel fell from his fingers.
‘You haven’t the stomach for it,’ his co-student murmured, nudging him in the ribs during peritoneal and upper GI topology. ‘Get it? You haven’t the—oh, forget it.’
He’d saved the allowance made to him by his parents and bought a flat in Lewisham—a ground-floor flat with a square garden and brick wall in front. After class he lay in the bedroom, curtains closed, and fantasized about the corpse so often that it seemed to have rubbed part of his brain raw. She took on the proportions of a goddess in his mind: waxen, motionless white face; serene and cool, a marble muse, blue veins showing in her lips, her blond hair fanned out on the pillow for him. Waiting in infinite stillness. It was the stillness and pallor which attracted him: so unlike the plump, wriggling Lucilla.
Panic-stricken, he made clumsy attempts at self-administered aversion therapy. He wrote to researchers in the States asking for supplies of Depo-Provera. When they refused he tried injecting himself with diamorphine before anatomy class. But it made him too nauseous to get to his feet. Worse, it offered no relief from the fantasies.
It was only six weeks later, almost at the end of his first term, just before Christmas, when disaster truly struck.
The lab technicians had overstayed their welcome in the Standard, and hadn’t returned the anatomy specimens to the cadaver tanks in the anteroom. Harteveld, sick and shaking with the possibility this opened to him, loitered behind after the last anatomy class of that term, crouched in the corner, at eye level with the polished pneumatic valves used to raise and lower the dissecting tables.
It was 2 p.m., and already the flinty northern light was fading from the sky. The old heating system creaked and shuddered in the belly of the building, but in the lab the air was chill and stale. Harteveld wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked himself gently. The bodies lay silent in the weak hibernal light, skin stripped in neat sections from the arms, clamps, haemostats, retractors sprouting like small spines from their gelid grey stomach meat. She was in the centre of the room. From here he could see the dun fall of her hair.
And then the big door at the far end of the lab opened.
Security.
Harteveld’s heart stilled. He mustn’t be found here. He should stand up and pretend casually to be collecting something. Quickly now. But his legs were trembling, useless. A cold sweat broke out across his scalp. He was trapped.
And then something happened which changed everything.
The security guard locked the door, from the inside, and pulled the blinds.
... 18
At 10.30 p.m., when Caffery left Shrivemoor, the night was still warm. He left the radio off and drove in silence, promising himself a bath and a healthy shot of malt whisky when he got home. Under the moment-to-moment preoccupations—his tiredness, traffic lights, the too-bright headlights on the South Circular—he was aware of a new inhabitant in his thoughts, like a scrawled image at the bottom of a shifting lake, the beginnings of a picture, a real picture, of Birdman.
A necrophile. How could they have missed it?
He turned left at Honor Oak, right across Peckham Rye, the ghostly white dabs of gravestones in Nunhead cemetery floated beyond the trees. The bloody arc of Birdman’s career fleshed itself out in his head. A man—tall? short?—squatting like an incubus, a carrion crow, eyes running with excitement, moving his hands over a corpse. The dead and the undead. An unholy alliance.
And the backbeat of unanswered questions continued: a live bird sewn inside a body cavity, long after death. Why? And why can’t you forget that image? The strange, ordered cuts to the scalps—except Kayleigh, his subconscious prompted. Why not Kayleigh? And how did Birdman keep his victims still for the injection? This problem breathed its own peculiar brand of unease. It whispered mind control; worse, it whispered a toxin that modern forensics couldn’t identify.
He parked the car under his neighbour’s flaking plane tree, and wearily climbed out, his head thudding. All he wanted now was quiet. He slung his jacket over his shoulder. A Glenmorangie and a bath.
But something unnaturally pale waited for him in the shadows on the doorstep.
He stopped, hand on the gate, as his eyes adjusted to the night. When he realized what was gleaming gently in the half-light he knew it was Penderecki’s work.
Two dolls, naked, the colour of lifeless babies, plastic limbs linked, face to genitals, face to genitals. Splayed out on the step in front of them a note on a pink Ladbroke’s chit:
ringing me is like ringing you’re neck
Caffery unbuttoned his shirt cuff, pulled it down over his hand and carefully turned the bundle. A girl’s doll, blond nylon hair,
lolled outwards, blank eyes turned upward, arms held up and out as if ready to catch a beach ball. Barbie or Sindy. Smooth nippleless breasts, finger’s-width waist and, scribbled obscenely on the slope of plastic between its legs, overlarge as if infected, a raw red-ink vulva.
Very Penderecki.
He prodded the other doll and rolled it onto its back. Action Man, or GI Joe, the same blind stare and scratched-in genitalia, the same rigid beseeching hands. HASBRO was stamped in the small of the back.
And this Caffery recognized. This had once been Ewan’s toy.
He clearly remembered the mystery of its disappearance. One sunny afternoon in the early Seventies. Before lunch it had been lying face down in the grass in the back garden, pinned by the lead weight of miniature grenades and water canteens. After lunch it was gone. Spirited away. ‘Well now, Ewan,’ their mother, as mystified as they were, giving the sky a suspicious look, ‘maybe it was stolen by a crow.‘ The next day she bought the all-new Action Man from Woolworth’s in Lewisham. ‘Look at his hands, Ewan. They can grip. Isn’t that better?’
This was not new from Penderecki, this subtle torture. Caffery gathered the dolls up, found his keys and wearily pressed inside his front door.
The kitchen light was on and he could see a pile of his shirts freshly folded on the ironing board.
Veronica.
In his tiredness he hadn’t noticed her car outside.
Be good to her, Jack. She’s ill. Don’t forget, be good.
In the kitchen he threw his jacket on the chair, took a roll of cling film and carefully wrapped the dolls individually, ready to be filed away in Ewan’s room. The Le Creuset was on the hob and from the living room Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ came twining around the good cooking smells of ginger and coriander. From the shelf he took a glass and the Glenmorangie and poured himself a large shot. His body ached with fatigue. He wanted silence, his whisky, a bath and then bed. Nothing more. He certainly didn’t want Veronica.
‘Jack?’
‘Yeah, hi,’ he called dully into the hall.
‘I let myself in. I hope you don’t mind.’
Well, Veronica, if I do mind what good will it do me?
‘Come up.’
In Ewan’s room. Why did she always gravitate to that room? Taking the dolls and the whisky he slowly climbed the stairs.
She was sitting in the middle of the floor, wearing a carefully tailored navy skirt suit with white starched cuffs secured by gold pins. She had kicked her shoes off so he could see the pale moons of her toenails through the flesh-coloured tights. Scattered around her were the contents of all his Penderecki files.
‘Veronica?’
‘What?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m tidying up your files. I thought people might want to look round the house at the party so I’m tidying your files for you.’
‘Well, don’t.’ He put down the whisky and the wrapped dolls on the desk and started to pick things up. ‘Just don’t.’
Veronica stared at him. ‘I was only trying to help—’
‘I asked you not to come in here.’ He turned. ‘I’ll say it again: don’t come in here. And don’t go into the files.’
Her forehead furrowed, her mouth pushed out a fraction. ‘I’m sorry. Here, let me put them back—’
‘No.’ He brushed her away. ‘Just—leave—them!’
Veronica flinched and he stopped. You’re shouting, Jack. Don’t shout at her.
‘Look.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry—I’m really—Veronica—’
Too late. Her face was already undoing itself, the forehead twisting, the mouth moving from side to side. She stood up and tears sprang to her eyes.
‘Oh, Jesus.’ He closed his eyes and forced himself to lean into her, to run his hands across her shaking shoulders. ‘Veronica, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—it’s been a bad day.’
‘It’s the cancer, isn’t it? You want to leave me because of the cancer.’
‘Of course I don’t want to leave you. I’m not going anywhere.’ He pulled her against him and rested his chin on top of her head. ‘Look, I’ve been stockpiling my shifts. If you want I can take time out—come to chemo with you.’
‘You’ve taken the time off?’ She stopped sniffling and looked up at him.
‘I want to be with you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Now come on, sit down.’ He pressed his hand on her shoulders and together they sat on the floor, backs against the wall. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of this, OK?’ He twisted his fingers around hers. ‘I am not afraid of the Hodgkin’s.’
‘I’m sorry, Jack.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘I’m sorry this has happened to me. I wish I could change it, I really do.’
‘It’s not your fault.’ He buried his head in her hair. ‘Now, don’t forget—’ He cleared his throat. ‘Don’t forget we’re in this together.’
‘I won’t.’
They sat in silence, watching the mushroom-brown moths softly bounce out of the dark night against the window. He held her hand up to his mouth, kissed it lightly and turned it over to look at the palm.
‘You all right?’
‘Yes,’ she murmured.
He kissed her hair and looked at her hand, half smiling. ‘How come you didn’t have the dye test this time?’
‘Mmm?’
‘The one you told me about. The one you had last time.’
‘I did,’ she said dreamily.
He held her hand close to his face. The skin was pale, faintly spotted, like a fish. But there was no tracery of lines, no subcutaneous network sunk deep in the cool flesh. ‘I thought you could see the dye afterwards.’
‘Not really. It fades pretty quickly.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears and looked at him. Semicircles of mascara underlined her eyes. ‘Jack?’
‘Mmmmm?’
‘Maybe I should go on my own. I’d like to show Dr Cavendish I don’t need my hand held.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘OK. OK.’ He drew the hem of her skirt lightly down her thigh and studied the curved surface of her knee. He had never seen Veronica cry before. Strangely it made him horny. ‘Are you allowed a drink, then?’ He drifted his hand down onto her inner thigh. ‘There’s some Gordons in the fridge if you fancy it.’
... 19
In 1984 Lucilla Harteveld—age fifty-five, weight eighteen stone—was admitted to King Edward VII Hospital in New Cavendish Street with chest pains. In the coronary care unit an ECG showed she had suffered a mild myocardial infarct. She was pumped with anistreplase and disopyramide. Henrick Harteveld immediately contacted his son.
After a cautious mother–son reunion—Lucilla smelled in her hospital bed, as if she’d done something secret under the covers and was enjoying the discomfort it gave her visitors—Toby and Henrick walked solemnly through Mayfair for dinner in the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Left together, unshepherded by Lucilla for the first time in years, the two men talked until midnight. Henrick, who expected to lose his wife, sat upright in his chair and ordered Perrier-Jouët. Toby confessed he had dropped out of medical school and was spending his days sitting uselessly in the small south-east London flat.
The next day Henrick set to work.
Without consulting Lucilla he floated his pharmaceutical company—Harteveld Chemicals—on the stock market, retaining a majority interest and passing £1.5 million of the profits to his son. He was going over Lucilla’s head and it made him tremble—alone in the panelled library, he actually shook with fear and excitement—to think how she would respond to this act of psychosis. To lend the event some respectability he appointed Toby assistant director of marketing, a job so pantomimic that it required him only to put on a suit every few days and show his face at the chrome-and-smoked-glass company headquarters outside Sevenoaks.
And so Toby Harteveld became wealthy.
He temporarily abandoned
the tiny flat in Lewisham—with its elderly neighbours and sleepy cats on the walls outside—and acquired the house on Croom’s Hill, hiring landscapers and builders, cleaners and gardeners. Using the Harteveld name’s high profile in the pharmaceutical industry, he got himself appointed to the private sector steering committee on St Dunstan’s Hospital Trust. He threw parties, the villa filled with lofty creatures: heart surgeons and heiresses, shipping magnates and actresses, women who knew how to wear raw silk and men who knew how to summon a wine waiter with a glance. The conversation danced over futures dealings, fringe theatre, dinghy sailing in Kennebunkport. He tried to build form and significance into his life and briefly he was able to maintain the illusion of sanity.
But, as outwardly he struggled towards perfection, as his life acquired the hue of success, inwardly his despair and alienation increased. His secret sickness grew.
None of his acquaintances knew about the girls he paid for, about meeting them in the street and bringing them to Croom’s Hill, about sending them naked into the garden to stand until they were blue with cold, so they could come glazed and shivering into his double bed. Or him demanding they lie still and unresponsive, eyes rolled back in their heads.
‘I can’t, it gives me a headache.’
‘Shut up, can’t you, just shut up and keep still.’
While he mounted them, still able to reach climax only with his eyes locked tight, turned ferociously inward on fantasy.
One day, as he sat in his temperature-controlled, double-glazed office in Sevenoaks, lunchtime aperitif at his elbow, watching Canadian geese landing on the artificial ponds, he suddenly saw the weight of the burden in a new light. Maybe, he thought, maybe he was incurable. The idea brought him up short. Was it possible, he wondered, that every human is sentenced to a particular lifelong exercise of will, with a duty to accept it with grace and strength? And was it possible that here, in his obsession, he had encountered his own life struggle?
He took a deep breath and straightened in his chair. Very well. He would carry it. He would exist side by side with perpetual restraint and compromise.