Dee Smart to put her fag out. She was the nearest they had to a useful witness so far, and this case was far too important to take chances with.
He walked in and treated her to his best sympathetic smile. Thank fuck,’ she said. ‘A human being.’
‘You have a problem with my colleague?’ Kevin said, a sympathetic smile on his face.
‘He gives me the creeps,’ she muttered. ‘He’s got that Ali G chip on his shoulder. “Is it because I is black?” No, mate, it’s because you is an arsehole. Somebody should tell him even whores are higher up the food chain than the shit on his shoe. Where does he get off, looking down his nose at me?’
‘He’s a bit lacking in the social skills department.’
‘You can say that again.’ She blew out a stream of smoke and scowled. ‘So are you going to treat me any better?’
Twenty minutes later, the two of them were almost cosy. The mugs of tea he’d brought as an ice-breaker were empty, and they’d got through the hardest part, the actual discovery of the body. ‘Just how long had this arrangement been going on?’ Kevin asked conversationally.
Dee lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘About three months, I suppose. Sandie used to share the room with another girl, Mo, but she moved back to Leeds so Sandie asked me to come in with her.’
‘How did it work in practice?’
Dee flipped open her cigarette packet and looked in disgust at the three remaining cigarettes. ‘You’re going to need to find a fag machine if we’re going to be at this much longer.’
‘Don’t worry about that. Tell me about the arrangement.’ Kevin gave her his best sympathetic smile.
Dee scowled. It brought the fine lines on her skin into sharp relief, making her look her age. ‘Sandie has the early shift. Most nights she likes to knock off about ten. She’s got a kid. A little lad, Sean. Her mum looks after him. Sandie likes to get home in time to get a decent kip before she gets him up in the morning for school. Any time after half past ten, the room was mine.’
Kevin tried not to think how Sean would be feeling when he woke up tomorrow morning to discover his mother had been murdered. Instead, he concentrated on what Dee was saying. ‘So how come you didn’t find her there last night?’ he asked.
‘I wasn’t working last night.’ She clocked the look of surprise on his face. ‘If you must know, I had the shits. I must have eaten something dodgy. There was no way I could turn tricks, the state I was in.’
It made sense. Even whores could throw a sickie, Kevin thought. ‘So as far as you knew, everything was normal? When you went up with your punter you expected the room to be empty?’
Dee closed her eyes and shuddered at the memory. ‘Yeah.’
‘Had you seen Sandie at all earlier in the evening?’
Dee shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t have unless I was working, and I wasn’t. I had a couple of drinks in the Nag’s Head before I got started, but I never saw Sandie.’
‘Where did she normally work?’
‘Down the end of Campion Boulevard. Just past the mini-roundabout.’
Kevin pictured it in his mind’s eye. Only fifty yards down the side street and Sandie would have been at the entrance to the alley where the shared room was. ‘What about regulars?’ he asked.
Dee suddenly lost her composure. Her eyes welled up with tears and her voice emerged as a strangled wail. ‘I don’t know. Look, we shared the room and the rent, we didn’t live in each other’s pockets, I don’t know what she did or who she did it with.’
Kevin reached across the table and took her hand. Astonishment overcame her emotional outburst and her mouth fell open. ‘I’m sorry. We just need to explore every possibility if we’re going to have any chance of catching him.’
Dee snorted derisively, pulling away from him. ‘Listen to you. Anybody would think it was a respectable mother of three who’d been killed, not some throwaway tart.’
Kevin shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I don’t know who you’ve been listening to, Dee, but we don’t treat anybody as a throwaway victim here. My guvnor wouldn’t stand for it.’
Dee looked momentarily uncertain. ‘You mean that?’
‘I mean it. Nobody on this investigation is giving any less than a hundred per cent. Now, I want you to come upstairs with me and look at some photographs. Will you do that for me, Dee?’
‘All right,’ she said. It was hard to say who was the more surprised.
After midnight, the fluorescent lights in Carol’s office seemed indecently bright, turning skin tones grey. Carol was reading the scant computer files on Derek Tyler’s murders when the door opened and Tony walked in. ‘It’s rubbish, you know,’ he said without preamble.
Carol, accustomed to the vagaries of his conversational style, humoured him. Thanks for coming in. What’s rubbish?’
‘Copycats. They don’t happen. Don’t exist–not in sexual homicide.’ He dropped into the chair opposite her desk and sighed.
‘What are you saying, Tony? That Derek Tyler managed to be in two places at once?’
‘I don’t know anything about Derek Tyler until I read the files. What I do know is that whatever we’ve got here, it’s not a copycat.’
Carol struggled to make sense of what she was hearing. ‘But if the MO is the same…?’
‘Then you’ve got the same killer.’ He gave her an apologetic smile and shrugged.
That’s not possible. From what Don says, and from what I’ve read here, there was no doubt on the forensics. And Derek Tyler is behind bars.’
Tony yanked the chair forward and leaned on the desk. His face was inches from hers. ‘What is sexual homicide about?’ he demanded.
Carol knew the answer to this one. The perverted gratification of desire.’
‘Good, good,’ he said, moving even closer. ‘How many lovers have you had?’
Flustered, Carol looked away. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘More than one, right?’ he continued insistently.
Carol gave in. It was easier than the alternative. ‘More than one,’ she agreed.
‘And have any of them ever behaved identically in bed?’ Tony asked, as if the answer would settle an important argument.
Carol started to see a glimmer of where he was going with this. ‘No.’ Tony’s intense blue eyes were irresistible. In spite of herself, she grew tense at his physical closeness. Whether he recognized that or not, he gave no clue.
His voice dropped, becoming intimate and gentle. ‘My particular needs can only be met by one specific ritualistic process. I need you bound to the bed, I need you clothed, I need your
