He gazed into his deep-set blue eyes, still bleary with sleep. Whoever said the eyes were mirrors of the soul was a true bullshit merchant, he thought ironically. Probably just as well, or he wouldnt have an intact mirror in the house. He undid the top button of his pyjama jacket and opened the bathroom cabinet, reaching out for the shaving foam. The tremor he spotted in his hand stopped him short. Angrily, he slid the door shut with a loud crack and reached up for his electric razor. He hated the shave it produced, never leaving him with the fresh, clean feeling that came from a wet shave. But better to feel vaguely scruffy than to turn up looking like a walking illustration of the death of a thousand cuts.
The other disadvantage of the electric razor was that he didnt have to concentrate so hard on what he was doing, leaving his mind free to range over the day ahead. Sometimes it was tempting to imagine that everybody was like him, getting up each morning and selecting a persona for the day. But he had learned over years of exploring other peoples minds that it wasnt so. For most people, the available selection was severely limited. Some people would doubtless be grateful for the choices that knowledge, skill and necessity had brought Tony. He wasnt one of them.
As he switched off the razor, he heard the frantic chords that preceded every news summary on Bradfield Sound. With a sense of foreboding, he turned to face the radio, tense and alert as a middle-distance runner waiting for the starting pistol. At the end of the five-minute bulletin, he sighed with relief and pushed open the shower curtain. Hed expected a revelation that would have been impossible for him to ignore. But so far, the body count was still three.
On the other side of the city, John Brandon, Bradfield Metropolitan Polices Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) stooped over the washbasin and stared glumly into the bathroom mirror. Not even the shaving soap covering his face like a Santa Claus beard could give him an air of benevolence. If he hadnt chosen the police, hed have been an ideal candidate for a career as a funeral director. He was two inches over six feet, slim to the point of skinny, with deep-set dark eyes and prematurely steel-grey hair. Even when he smiled, his long face managed to sustain an air of melancholy. Today, he thought, he looked like a bloodhound with a head cold. At least there was good reason for his misery. He was about to pursue a course of action that would be as popular with his Chief Constable as a priest in an Orange Lodge.
Brandon sighed deeply, spattering the mirror with foam. Derek Armthwaite, his Chief, had the burning blue eyes of a visionary, but there was nothing revolutionary in what they saw. He was a man who thought the Old Testament a more appropriate handbook for police officers than the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. He believed most modern police methods were not only ineffective but also heretical. In Derek Armthwaites frequently aired opinion, bringing back the birch and the cat-o-nine-tails would be far more effective in reducing crime figures than any number of social workers, sociologists and psychologists. If hed had any idea of what Brandon had planned for that morning, hed have had him transferred to Traffic, the present-day equivalent of Jonah being swallowed by a whale.
Before his depression could overwhelm his resolve, Brandon was startled by a banging on the bathroom door. Dad? his elder daughter shouted. You going to be much longer?
Brandon snatched up his razor, dunked it in the basin and scraped it down one cheek before replying. Five minutes, Karen, he called. Sorry, love. In a house with three teenagers and only one bathroom, there was seldom much opportunity for brooding.
Carol Jordan dumped her half-drunk coffee on the side of the washbasin and stumbled into the shower, nearly tripping headlong over the black cat that wound himself round her ankles. In a minute, Nelson, she muttered as she closed the door on his interrogative miaow. And dont waken Michael.
Carol had imagined that promotion to detective inspector and the concomitant departure from the shift rota would have granted her the regular eight hours sleep a night that had been her constant craving since the first week she joined the force. Just her luck that the promotion had coincided with what her team were privately calling the Queer Killings. However much Superintendent Tom Cross might bluster to the press and in the squad room that there were no forensic connections between the killings, and nothing to suggest the presence of a serial killer in Bradfield, the murder teams thought differently.
As the hot water cascaded over Carol, turning her blonde hair mouse, she thought, not for the first time, that Crosss attitude, like that of the Chief Constable, served his prejudices rather than the community. The longer he denied that there was a serial killer attacking men whose respectable facade hid a secret gay life, the more gay men would die. If you couldnt get them off the streets any longer by arresting them, let a killer remove them. It didnt much matter whether he did it by murder or by fear.
It was a policy that made a nonsense of all the hours she and her colleagues were putting in on the investigation. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money that these enquiries were costing, particularly since Cross insisted each killing be treated as an entirely separate entity. Every time one of the three teams came up with some detail that seemed to link the killings, Tom Cross dismissed it with five points of dissimilarity. It didnt matter that each time the links were different and the dissimilarities the same tired quintet. Cross was the boss. And the DCI had opted out of the strife completely, taking sick leave with his opportunistic bad back.
Carol rubbed the shampoo to a rich lather and felt herself gradually wake under the warm spray. Well, her corner of the investigation wasnt going to run aground on the rock of Popeye Crosss bigoted prejudice. Even if some of her junior officers were inclined to grasp at the bosss tunnel vision as an excuse for their own uninspired investigations, she wasnt going to stand for anything less than one hundred per cent committed action, and in the right direction. Shed worked her socks off for the best part of nine years, first to get a good degree and then to justify her place on the promotion fast track. She didnt intend her career to hit the buffers just because shed made the mistake of opting for a force run by Neanderthals.
Her mind made up, Carol stepped out of the shower, shoulders straight, a defiant glint in her green eyes. Come on, Nelson, she said, shrugging into her dressing gown and scooping up the muscular bundle of black fur. Lets hit the red meat, boy.
Tony studied the overhead projection on the screen behind him for a final five seconds. Since the majority of his audience had expressed their lack of commitment to his lecture by pointedly not taking notes, he wanted at least to give their subconscious minds the maximum opportunity to absorb his flow chart of the criminal profile generating process.
He turned back to his audience. I dont have to tell you what you already know. Profilers dont catch criminals. Its bobbies that do that. He smiled at his audience of senior police officers and Home Office officials, inviting them to share his self-deprecation. A few did, though most remained stony faced, heads on one side.
However he dressed it up, Tony knew he couldnt convince the bulk of the senior police officers that he wasnt some out-of-touch university boffin there to tell them how to do their jobs. Stifling a sigh, he glanced at his notes and continued, aiming for as much eye contact as he could achieve, copying the casual body language of the successful stand-up comics hed studied working the northern clubs. But sometimes we profilers see things differently, he said. And that fresh perspective can make all the difference. Dead men do tell tales, and the ones they tell profilers are not the same as the ones they tell police officers.
An example. A body is found in bushes ten feet away from the road. A police officer will note that fact. Hell check the ground all around for clues. Are there footprints? Has anything been discarded by the killer? Have any fibres been snagged on the bushes? But for me, that single fact is only the starting point for speculations that, taken in conjunction with all the other information at my disposal, may well lead me to useful conclusions about the killer. Ill ask myself, was the body deliberately placed there? Or was the killer too knackered to carry it further? Was he hiding it or dumping it? Did he want it to be found? How long did he expect or want it to stay hidden? What is the significance of this site for him? Tony lifted his shoulders and held out his hands in an open, questioning gesture. The audience looked on, unmoved. God, how many tricks of the trade was he going to have to pull out of the hat before he got a response? The prickle of sweat along the back of his neck was becoming a trickle, sliding down between his skin and his shirt collar. It was an uncomfortable sensation that reminded him of who he really was behind the mask hed assumed for his public appearance.
Tony cleared his throat, focused on what he was projecting rather than what he was feeling, and continued. Profiling is just another tool that can help investigating officers to narrow the focus of their investigation. Our job is to make sense of the bizarre. We cant give you an offenders name, address and phone number. But what we can do is point you in the direction of the kind of person who has committed a crime with particular characteristics. Sometimes we can indicate the area where he might live, the kind of work wed expect him to do.
I know that some of you have questioned the necessity for setting up a National Criminal Profiling Task Force. Youre not alone. The civil libertarians are screaming about it too. At last, Tony thought with profound relief. Smiles and nods from the audience. It had taken him forty minutes to get there, but hed finally cracked their composure. It didnt mean he could relax, but it eased his discomfort. After all, he went on, were not like the Americans. We dont have serial killers lurking round every corner. We still have a society where more than ninety per cent of murders are committed by family members or people known to the victims. He was really taking them with him now. Several pairs of legs and arms uncrossed, neat as a practised drill-hall routine.