de Koninck and her team on their way?’
‘Yep. Due any minute now.’
Van den Bergen nodded. Sniffed. Acknowledged the black dog lurking inside the tent, outside the tent, in the warmth of his car. Bearing down on him. Casting a long shadow over everything. He swallowed painfully, prodding at the swollen glands beneath his ears. ‘My throat’s on fire. Think I’m coming down with something. Just my luck, it will be Ebola. Grab me a coffee, will you?’
Van den Bergen withdrew his phone from his coat pocket and brought up his contacts list. Scrolled down to G. There was the number. George McKenzie. He sighed deeply.
Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, UK, 17 January
The slight man who sat facing her examined the fingernails at the ends of his slender fingers with an expression of intense concentration. George noted that they were always very clean and manicured. His lank, thinning hair hung sullenly over the shoulders of a faded blue sweatshirt. Dirty dark grey. Starting to recede at the temples. Perhaps his haggard, small-featured face might once have been attractive, given its delicate, perfectly symmetrical bone structure. George shuddered at this thought that had popped, unbidden, into her mind. She averted her gaze from his hands and focussed instead on her pad.
‘Cold, Georgina?’ Silas Holm asked. A smile playing on his chapped lips, he leaned back in his chair and looked up at the tall, arched windows of the Victorian building. The perfectly white expanse of snow-heavy sky outside was carved up by peeling painted bars that stretched ceiling-wards. ‘It’s that period of architecture,’ he said. ‘Terribly draughty because of the lofty proportions, you see. Doesn’t matter how much they crank up the heating.’
His gaze found her face and focussed sharply on it, now. George McKenzie knew this much without looking up from her notes. The prison officers said his manner was always one of an attentive vicar, listening with dedicated enthusiasm to the concerns of his adoring flock. It was unclear, therefore, whether Silas Holm was staring at George because he was genuinely engaged by their conversation or whether he was simply fantasising about what he could do to the only woman he was allowed to see on a regular basis, if he still had his liberty. Either way, the fact that he had noticed her shiver – almost imperceptibly, she had thought – made George feel very itchy. She started to arrange her pens in perfectly parallel lines on the desk. Then stopped herself. Reveal nothing about you as a person or the details of your life, her Cambridge University supervisor, Dr Sally Wright had told her. Not only was Sally the senior tutor of St John’s College – the Big Boss-woman in what was otherwise still a man’s world – but she was also the country’s foremost criminologist. If she didn’t know what she was talking about where handling dangerous psychopaths was concerned, nobody did. Dress dowdily. Be on your guard. Don’t get involved.
‘What’s with the tracksuit?’ she asked, deliberately steering the focus back onto her study subject. ‘Where are your tweeds? What did you do?’
Silas Holm gave a small sigh and a resigned smile. Rapped on his leg with his knuckles. The sound was hollow. ‘What could a harmless amputee like me ever do to warrant such a petty punishment? I ask you!’
‘Well you must have done something pretty bad to have your normal clothes taken away,’ George said. ‘It’s not like you’re in prison.’ She shot a questioning sideways glance at Silas’ nurse, who was seated at the end of the desk, within reassuring reach of this small but deadly psychopath.
Graham’s muscle-bound bulk heaved up and down beneath his T-shirt. Laughing heartily. He smoothed a hand over his shaven head. ‘Dr Holm. You are funny,’ he said. His Nigerian accent was pronounced. ‘You are lucky you weren’t transferred back to high dependency. Poor Kenneth! Why don’t you tell Ms McKenzie straight about your little set-to with him?’
The small-featured face of Silas Holm appeared suddenly sharp, grey, remorseless. His voice was clipped. Words came fast. ‘No. I don’t think I will. And I don’t think it warranted being singled out this way.’ The sneer that turned his mouth into a thin, drooping line and the way that he tugged at the sweatshirt with his fingertips marked out his disdain for the garment and that place. ‘The other men look up to me.’ He shuffled in his seat, straightening his posture. But something within him clicked and the friendly smile reappeared. Locked onto George’s face with those ice-blue eyes. ‘They come to me for wisdom, the men in here,’ he told her.
‘What sort of wisdom?’ George uncapped her pen.
‘I know about the world, of course! These oiks know nothing. Most of them are semi-literate at best. I, however, am a man of learning as you know. Before I was subjected to the indignity of coming to this dump, I was celebrated in my field of expertise!’ He leaned forward and stretched his fingers out towards George’s side of the desk.
‘Back up, Dr Holm,’ Graham said calmly.
Silas colluded; withdrawing physically but somehow clinging onto the intimacy he had implied was between them by winking and keeping his voice low. ‘I won the Evelyn Baker Medal from the Association of Anaesthetists, you know.’ Nodding. Matter of fact. Trying to impress.
The session was not progressing as she had hoped. George determined to get her study subject back on track. She tapped the pencil drawing that Silas had brought along to show her. It was the most recent work, contained within a sketch pad that was full of semi-pornographic images.
‘Tell me about this, Silas,’ she said, pointing to the perfectly executed illustration of a woman in a black gimp mask – only her heavily made-up eyes were visible. Startled, yet alluring. Her mouth was contained behind a brutal-looking zip. Her nose transformed into two miserly slits in the black leather. Oddly, she was hanging by her neck from a tree bough. Hanging as though dead, which made the focussed clarity in her eyes all the more alarming. Clad in what appeared to be a black rubber leotard with the breasts and vagina cut out. Two circles. One triangle. ‘Why have you drawn her with one leg?’
Her question was met with laughter. ‘Oh, come on! You know better than to ask that of me!’ Silas said, toying with a strand of his hair almost coquettishly. ‘Am I not famed for my specialist taste in erotica?’
His tone was so smug, so arrogant, that George could not stem her response. Neither could she keep the vitriol out of her voice.
‘Is she one of your victims, Silas? Is she the prostitute from Middlesbrough that you picked up, strangled, partially dismembered and then masturbated over? Oh no! Silly me. Perhaps she was the prostitute from Nottingham, whose arms were found in your freezer at home? Mother of four. First time on the streets because she owed a loan shark money from Christmas. Last time on the streets because you strung her up from the railings of a local school. Or maybe one of the four others that we know about.’
‘Ms McKenzie!’ Graham said, raising his eyebrows.
George’s red mist cleared and revealed a grinning Dr Silas Holm.
‘The trial was a shambles,’ Silas said, flicking his tongue over his narrow, discoloured incisors. ‘I’m putting together a case that I plan to take to the High Court. It was all circumstantial evidence and I intend to get out of this hellhole.’ He examined his fingernails again. Sighed. ‘Anyway, if you must know, that is a portrait of a famous Latvian beauty who stars in all the very best
