Birdman
‘Bitch,’ he told her afterwards, flinging the condom onto the carpet. ‘Bitch.’ She was cold, solid as a joint of pork on the bone. She couldn’t talk back. He slapped her face, and the wig slid backwards revealing her thick tabby hairline. ‘Bitch.’
In spite of his attempts to keep the body frozen when he wasn’t using it, it soon became putrid. He bundled it into two dustbin liners, took a gardening spade from the carport and drove out to where the A2 started. He knew this route well, it was the route he took every weekend—to the Kent bungalow left to him in his mother’s will. There was a patch of scrubby forgotten land there, in the shadow of the new Dome. It was lonely in the daytime, deserted at night. He found a place that was undisturbed and did what he had to do.
Weeks later Harteveld came to him again, with his tight upper-class expression and Gucci suit, another whitened creature wrapped in clingfilm in his car.
After the body was safe inside the flat—Frobisher’s bedroom light had not come on—Harteveld sat on the edge of the sofa, his perfect hands folded on his knees.
‘The pub you go to, Bliss.’
‘Yeah.’ He scratched a patch of flaky skin on his forehead. ‘The Dog. What about it?’
‘Most of the girls in there wouldn’t be missed. Not for a day or two.’ Harteveld’s brow was slick with perspiration. ‘Would they? It would be a day or so before anyone noticed they were gone.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You’re a familiar face. No-one would be surprised if you asked a few questions, got to know some of the girls. Found out which ones were safe. You could—uh …’ He shifted unhappily. There had always been something uncomfortable about Harteveld. ‘You could send them to me.’
And so Malcolm Bliss and Toby Harteveld entered into a diabolical pact, an arrangement which suited them both; Harteveld was never seen in the pub and Bliss, who over the years had become as transparent and unremarkable as a shadow to the patrons of the Dog and Bell, was able to discover which women had the most fragile connections at home, which were least likely to be reported missing in the first few days. In return he received payment and the full use of the women’s bodies later. Moreover he was in a position to prevent Joni from becoming embroiled.
Gradually he became bold. He tried to persuade Harteveld to deliver the bodies to him at Wildacre Cottage, his mother’s bungalow. It was the ideal venue—quiet, isolated: tailor-made for his purposes. But Harteveld refused—wanting to minimize the time spent transporting his cargo—he made it clear who was the master and who the running dog. Nor did Bliss want to risk the forty-minute journey, so he acquiesced—taking his enjoyment as quietly as he could, in the shuttered, overheated Brazil Street flat.
His time would come. His confidence was growing.
He started to take other risks. He had stood one of the last bodies in the living room for a day—rigor had frozen her there, propped up next to the TV set, stark naked like a showroom dummy—so he could masturbate looking at her. When the rigor wore off she had collapsed violently on the floor, waking him from his sleep in the other room. Her stomach had split and he’d had to get rid of her. Experience was telling him when the bodies would start to smell too strongly.
His most delicious pleasure was to leave someone propped up in his bed while he popped out to the Dog for a leisurely drink. Sometimes he saw Joni, and when he did he smiled gracefully. The man, the pub. He was like the other punters now; out being part of the game, watching strange women open their legs, in the warm knowledge that his stiff little wife was at home, waiting for him and his new wet lust.
He was happy. As powerful as an eagle. Nightly he was possessing a simulacrum of Joni. And slowly he saw that possessing her was weakening her. Something in his sense of her began to erode. It became less important for her to come to him. There are, Malcolm, hundreds of ways to skin a cat. He stopped bothering about cleaning the house.
With the police involvement he had to change venue: he left the last of Harteveld’s leftovers for Lola Velinor to find. It seemed appropriate to give the mulatta to the mulatta, he told himself, like to like, a people cares for its own. He was proud of the neatness. And now that Harteveld was dead he was in complete control.
He drove to a hardware hypermarket, his heart bounding along with excitement. The cordless drills and saws were displayed on hooks—shiny in their plastic casing. He spent an hour wandering up and down the aisle, assessing each one in detail, eventually choosing the Black & Decker Versapak, 7.2 volt, 2,700 no load strokes per minute cordless power saw. It was designed for excising small pieces of wood, used a rechargeable battery locked in the handle, weighed less than seven pounds, measured only twelve inches from the handle piece to the tip of the blade, and fitted perfectly into the glove compartment of the Peugeot. At home he put a gammon joint in the kitchen sink and practised on it—slicing it neatly with a squeeze of the trigger.
Armed with his new friend he promoted himself to a live hunt. He had been watching her for a few days and she proved to be far better than the others. She was warm. She bled and thrashed—particularly when he’d used the clumsy aneurysm needle to sew her up. Her heart shunted along in her chest when he put his ear to her breast bone and Bliss wondered why he had waited so long to start hunting for himself.
Now he knew he was ready. Joni. Joni.
Only one day to go …
Malcolm Bliss stood, smoothing thinning hair over his scalp. It had been a stressful morning; he deserved a drink. He returned Cook’s file to the cabinet, found his jacket and left the office.
... 45
The woman behind the bar always nodded, said hello to him. She was a dried-up old object, her face wasn’t worth putting make-up on, but she always speckled it with carnival colours. Sometimes he forced himself to respond but one day last week he’d been here early and spotted her talking to DI Caffery. Bliss, standing at the bar, warm and agitated, decided that for her lapse of judgement the barmaid deserved to be ignored today. He took his drink into the lounge.
Joni would be here soon, and in spite of his excitement he was determined to remain dignified. With all the time he had spent here, tense and aching because Joni was rubbing her raw artificial teats in someone else’s face, he had come to understand and master the behaviour required of a pub drinker. So Harteveld’s request for information about the women was an easy one. Bliss never made a move, just bought drinks and listened. So innocuous he was, the girls looked straight through him as if he were a ghost, and prattled out all their precious secrets, until he knew everything from how bad PMT was to how soon they’d be missed.
They’d have laughed if he’d made a pass at them, or tried to squeeze their little thighs. So he kept still, waiting for the day when the girls would come to him, far sweeter in death than they had ever been in life.
Light streamed into the pub from an opened door. Joni. Aroused, Bliss raised slightly off his hindquarters, tasting the back of his teeth with his tongue. Then he saw, a footstep behind, the friend. He subsided, anger rising. He didn’t like Joni’s friend. She was a high-minded bitch, loftily referring to herself as ‘an artist’, swanning around painting the girls in the pubs as if she could elevate them through art. And the punters too, he himself had been painted by her several times. But he remembered back to when she’d been one of the girls. Then her name was ‘Pinky’. ‘Probably because of the way your clitoris pokes out from your hairy patch,’ he had whispered to himself. Pinky the Clitoris. He picked at a piece of dried skin on his nose and watched her thoughtfully. She headed straight to the bar, nose in the air, not bothering to acknowledge him.
Joni approached—bored-looking. He smiled, folded his hands sweetly in his lap. ‘Hello, Joni.’
She sighed resignedly. ‘Hello, Malcolm. Thought you’d be here. Nothing changes, does it?’ She dropped her belongings on the floor and slumped down on the padded bench a couple of feet from him, her bottom pushed to the edge of the seat, feet stuck straight out in front of her. She w
as wearing knee-high leather boots and a suede skirt which stopped mid-thigh. Her blond hair, pinned with two sweetheart clips above her brow, was cut in the way that all the girls on the streets seemed to be wearing it. Bliss didn’t like it. It irritated him that Joni had a mania for fixing what wasn’t broken, such an impulse for change.
He forced himself to smile. ‘A drink, Joni?’
‘S’pose.’ She looked at her fingernails, her bottom lip sticking out. Joni had a fine way of behaving like a child. She hadn’t grown out of it in all the years he’d known her. It wasn’t cute any more—he should tell her that. Tell her it wasn’t cute—tell her it pissed him off more than he could contain. ‘Wine, I s’pose.’
At the bar the artist waited to be served with her head held back, like a horse on a tight rein. Too good for this place. He approached, smiling politely, thinking of her clitoris. ‘Good afternoon.’
She gave him a funny look, ‘Good afternoon,’ and, picking up the two glasses, turned away. Bliss smiled to himself. Bitch. He took the drink from the creature behind the bar and carefully wiped the sides of Joni’s glass where it had been touched.
Joni didn’t acknowledge him when he put her drink down, but he didn’t mind. He’d become used to this.
‘Are you both well, girls?’ he asked politely. In his excitement his mouth had filled with saliva and he had to talk carefully to stop it spilling out. ‘The world treating you well, is it?’
‘No, it is not.’ Joni pressed her lips into a pout. ‘Some woman got pulled off the street just round the corner from us.’
‘Oh dear.’ Bliss sipped his lager. ‘Do they know who it was?’
‘No.’ Giving him a dirty look, she jerked to her feet, impatiently threw her belongings over her shoulder, downed both drinks and headed up the stairs with a toss of her blond head.
Bliss and the Clitoris sat in silence. She sipped her beer quietly, a red flush creeping up her face. He let the silence settle around them before he spoke.
‘Well, I must say I’ve never seen Joni quite so upset.’
The Clitoris nodded. ‘She’s worried.’ She spoke to her drink, not to him, the way most people did. ‘Says she’s thinking of getting out of Greenwich. She wants to leave.’
Bliss felt the skin on every inch of his body prickle. He let the tightness in his stomach and cock slacken before he spoke. ‘Does she now?’ he said, letting his gaze wander up the stairs. ‘I wonder where she’ll go.’
... 46
Back at Shrivemoor Caffery couldn’t relax. He wandered around the incident room turning over scraps of paper, stared at the whiteboards, stood behind the indexer girls and watched the screens over their shoulders, until Marilyn complained that he was making her jumpy. He went into the SIO’s room and called Jane Amedure –
‘Did you get anywhere with that cement?’
‘The diffractogram’s gone off to Maryland. We could know by the morning.’
– then pulled out the personnel fax that Bliss had sent from St Dunstan’s last week, scanned it, hoping something would catch the light, glint at him, and when nothing did sat with his head in his hands until it grew dark outside, the offices were almost empty, and Maddox looked in on him, jacket on, briefcase in his hand –
‘This is all very noble but, a bit of realism, eh? I know I cracked the whip this morning but I didn’t mean kill yourself.’
‘Yeah, OK OK.’
‘You get some sleep, you hear?’
‘I will.’
He called Dr Amedure again.
‘Give them some breathing space, Inspector Caffery. I promise I’ll call you first thing in the morning. We’re closing shop now.’
So he sat in the deserted offices, the building hollow and quiet around him, smoking out of the window and watching the world come home at the end of a long day. The watery sun dropped behind neat houses, a new poster was going up on the billboard opposite. He had been so swift to put Cook in the frame—so confident of his instincts—finding he had been wrong pressed hard on his nerves. Maddox was right—he should go home, but he was too conscious of Birdman’s presence—powerful and almost close enough to touch: a big game fish weaving around his legs.
Over the road the Maiden Signs worker unrolled and pasted, unrolled and pasted, moved the rigging a few feet along and started the process again. The words Estée Lauder appeared at the foot of the billboard: above them the gleaming camber of the model’s neck. He watched absently, thinking of the hair that had been tangled up in Jackson’s. They were assuming it had belonged to another victim—to someone Birdman had not yet finished with, or someone not yet found. Caffery pressed the bridge of his nose lightly, trying to think.
Another explanation?
The colour and cut matched the wig hairs so exactly that even Krishnamurthi hadn’t noticed the difference. Maybe the hair belonged not to another victim but to the person Birdman was recreating. Maybe that person had been in Birdman’s house. Or been close enough for him to take a trophy from her.
You were so focused on Cook that you didn’t even stop to consider it.
And something—something …
Caffery looked up at the high-gloss face opposite and suddenly he knew.
The metabolite of marijuana in the single blond hair. The aluminium spike on the FSS spectrograph. Joni spraying the room with deodorant, the smell of it always in the flat.
It wasn’t seamless—Joni didn’t wholly fit the picture: fleshy and tall—that wasn’t how he’d pictured Birdman’s Galatea. Even so, as he switched off the lamp and found his keys, leaving the fax and papers scattered over the desk, excitement was balling like a fist under his solar plexus.
At 2 p.m. the Clitoris had drifted off, taking with her the paints, the drawing board, her snotty attitude—leaving Joni alone to do her second spot in the pub. Bliss knew this girl’s mind so well. He knew that once Joni was hooked up to a free drink supply she didn’t shake free that easily. The other punters drifted away, headachy into the afternoon, leaving him alone with her, to plug her up with Liebfraumilch.
At 3.30 she was sick on the stairs up to the ladies—when he brought her back to his flat she was sick again, twice, in the bath.
He pretended he wasn’t angry. He cleaned it up, rinsed it away and let her sleep off the lunchtime binge curled up like a big baby—blonde and pink, wearing just knickers and a T-shirt—in the spare bedroom so she didn’t wake up, see his collection of pictures and make a fuss. Even the construction work on the old schoolhouse failed to disturb her.
How many times had he patiently let Joni do this, he wondered as he sat in the living room picking at a spot on his chin—let her use him as a casual detox base? And never had the sense to do anything about it. How many times had he scrubbed and tidied—cleared the corridor and the bathroom and the living room of his pictures while she slept—put them safely in a cardboard box, spraying sweet scent around the rooms? Only to have her wake up, pull the Walkman over her ears and stumble off on her way. Ignoring him. Treating him like shit.
And how things had changed now. His life had been rewritten. As if he’d looked up one day to find the sun was a different colour.
He got up from the sofa and made a pot of tea in the kitchen, piling a plate high with Bakewell tarts. In the bedroom he placed the tray gently on the pillow next to Joni’s head. She stirred and put a hand to her face.
‘Wake up. There’s some tea for you.’
She pinched her head forward on her neck and peered out with bloodshot eyes. When she saw him she groaned and dropped her head back on the pillow. ‘Oh no.’
‘Have some tea.’
‘No. I’ve got to go home.’ She propped herself up on her elbows and looked blearily around her. ‘God, Malcolm, I’m sorry but I never meant to end up here.’
‘Have a Bakewell tart first.’ His tongue was thick, the ‘T’s were muffled.
‘No, that’s OK.’
‘I insist.’
‘No, really.’
 
; ‘I insist!’
Joni’s eyes widened.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, wiping a dash of saliva from his lips. ‘I want you to have something to eat. You need the strength. Look at you’—tongue between his teeth he reached out and palpated her stomach—‘all skin and bones.’
It was meant to be a tender gesture, but Joni reacted badly, shooting back against the wall. ‘Get off!’
‘But, Joni.’
‘Leave me alone, Malcolm.’
‘Just let me touch—’
‘How many times do I have to tell you? NO!’ She scrambled backwards and dropped off the edge of the bed, landing on her feet, but Bliss lunged forward and caught her by the T-shirt. She swung round and grabbed his hands, trying to prise his fingers away with her sharp little nails.
‘Get off me.’
‘Joni.’
‘Get the fuck—’ She pulled his hands up to her mouth and bit, scraping a tear in his thumb knuckle. ‘Get the fuck away from me.’
‘Don’t do this, Joni.’ His fingers were covered with a mixture of saliva and blood. He bent at the waist, screwed his eyes up and held tight: Joni lost her balance and fell, smashing her shoulder hard against the skirting board.
He let go and stood back, gaping.
They stared at each other, speechless, shocked that it had crossed into violence. Joni was on her back, the T-shirt riding up over her stomach, the shape of her pubis clearly outlined in the pale pink knickers. She looked like a doll, stunned that she’d been broken so easily. For a moment she seemed to be struggling to breathe.
Bliss stepped forward, his hand out to her. ‘Joni.’
‘Get—away—from me. Get the fuck—away from me.’
‘But I love you.’
‘Bullshit.’ She clamped a hand over the injured shoulder and winced.
‘Just spend my birthday with me. Tomorrow. That’s all I ask. You owe me that, for leaving like you did.’
‘I didn’t leave you. We didn’t have anything, you fucking lunatic. You weren’t my boyfriend.’