The Next to Die, page 8
Sondra Halliday laughed. “Poor DC Sellers and his hurt manfeelz.”
“My what?”
“I see I’ve struck a chord. I’m flattered that you think Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp are my male equivalents in terms of attractiveness. To return to the business at hand—your unsolved murders . . .” She cleared her throat. “Much as I shouldn’t have to spend my spare time teaching Women Are Human Too as a foreign language, I can’t resist. You’re so ignorant, you’ve ignited my missionary zeal. Let’s do a little thought experiment. Did Hitler hate Jews?”
“Course he did. He killed millions of them.”
“He killed disabled people too, though. Maybe that means he wasn’t an anti-Semite. He didn’t kill only Jews. So maybe when he killed those six million Jews, it wasn’t about anti-Semitism at all.”
“Come on, that’s just daft.”
“Uh-huh. As daft as trying to pretend a man who kills three women might not hate women.”
Sellers shook his head, still half wondering what Halliday had said before about his “man field.” What the hell was that? He’d have to Google it. “The comparison doesn’t work,” he said. “Hitler admitted he hated Jews. He was all about anti-Semitism—that was his . . . his thing, his vocation. Billy Dead Mates has never said anything to indicate he hates women.”
“He’s killed three of them, for fuck’s sake,” Sondra Halliday snapped. “Admittedly he’s taking the ‘show don’t tell’ approach, but I’d say his message is clear.”
“And I say it isn’t, and you’re living proof.” Sellers pulled off his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. “The only message I’m getting from Billy is about best friends, nothing to do with gender.”
“You mean biological sex, not gender.” Halliday sounded tired.
“Same thing, aren’t they?”
“No. One is real; the other’s a socially constructed instrument of oppression and subordination. If you want to think Billy doesn’t hate women, fine, you go ahead and think it. I know that he does. I’m happy to disagree if you are, since we’re never going to see each other again please God. And I’m not sure why this godawful meeting was necessary. Do the police really find it so threatening to have a mere woman disagree with them?”
“Why’d you agree to meet, then?” Sellers asked. “No, we don’t find it threatening; we find it irritating and unhelpful. My colleagues and I have devoted a lot of time and attention to putting out the right message in the media. It’s not ad hoc; it’s carefully thought out. The name Billy Dead Mates wasn’t leaked; it was released deliberately.”
“But I heard a DCI—”
“Claim on ITV News at Ten that it was leaked? Yeah, me too. Like I said: there’s a strategy.”
“Please don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking,” Halliday said coldly.
“You’ve interrupted me more than once.”
“Yes, and that’s fine. You know why?”
“Because you’re rude and selfish?” Sellers guessed.
“If I’m rude and selfish, it’s for a good reason. Men have been silencing women for millennia, DC Sellers. If a member of the oppressed class interrupts an oppressor, that’s fightback. That’s necessary resistance.”
“You’re joking.” Sellers laughed, but not for long. “You’re not joking? Fucking hell.”
“‘Sexist Pig Detective in Woman-Has-Noncompliant-Thoughts Shocker,’” Halliday muttered.
“Like you said: we don’t need to agree. I came here today to ask you—politely—to please stop writing, publishing, blogging about Billy and these murders. You’re muddying the waters and making it harder for us to control what’s out there. That could lead to us taking longer to catch him, which in turn could lead to more deaths. Of women, perhaps,” Sellers added.
Halliday was nodding. She couldn’t be about to announce her intention to cooperate, could she? It seemed impossible. “How very familiar all this sounds, even though we’ve never had this conversation before,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“How ultra-reasonable you sound! Who could say no to such a request, when lives are at stake?”
“You?”
“Damn fucking right, me. I’ll concede it’s not all your fault—you’ve just come with your individual request and you can’t understand why I wouldn’t submit, shut my feminist mouth, help the good old police who, after all, only want to catch a killer, and, as you point out, that would benefit women—his future victims.”
“Right. So what’s the problem?”
“Oh, only that men who believe they’re well meaning, reasonable, enlightened, have been trying to derail every conversation started by women about how to demolish misogyny since time began. They don’t realize that’s what they’re doing—of course not. They always have a great excuse. ‘Shut up about misogyny because you’ll only make it worse; you’ll make women targets for even more male violence.’ ‘Shut up about misogyny because we’re trying to catch a murderer and you’re interfering with our media message.’ Obviously I want Billy Dead Women rotting in a jail cell as soon as possible, but, no, I’m sorry, I won’t be silenced about what’s patently going on here. The misogynistic element won’t disappear from this case if I stop mentioning it. Unless we notice and name the problem, we can’t solve it, and that’s my priority. Just as yours is catching Billy.”
“It isn’t what’s going on, though.” Sellers sighed. “What if Billy killed two more pairs of best friends and all four victims were men? Would you concede then that you were wrong?”
Halliday tilted her head to the left. She seemed to be considering it. “Maybe. Though I predict that won’t happen. He’s started out killing many more women than men for a reason. Mi—”
“Misogyny.”
Halliday clapped. “I suppose you deserve some credit for getting the right answer, even if you don’t really believe it. Look, you asked why I agreed to meet you—”
“Is misogyny the answer to this question, too?”
“I’m not going to stop writing about Billy, but I might help you catch him.” Halliday reached inside the bag that was sitting by her feet. Much rummaging and underbreath swearing followed as she failed to find what she was looking for. Sellers hadn’t spotted the slogan on the bag when she’d first arrived; it must have been on the side facing her body. It read: “Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.”
“Aha. Here it is.” Halliday slammed a book down on the table. Beloved, by someone called Toni Morrison. Sellers had never heard of it. “Someone sent me this anonymously. If it was just the book, I’d be clueless, but it was accompanied by a very bizarre letter-cum-passive-aggressive-death threat that makes me wonder if I might know who sent it. I could be wrong, but I think it was him. Billy.”
“Him or her,” said Sellers. “Billy might be a woman. Don’t let the name mislead you.”
“Oh yes, how silly of me!” Halliday sneered. “I forgot how keen men always are to cast a woman in the leading role when that role is ‘villain who needs punishing.’ Do you have any idea how few serial killers are women?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Sellers. “Billy might be one of the few. If she is and we only allow ourselves to suspect men, we’ll never catch her, will we?”
“How convenient. When the statistics turn against you, suddenly statistics no longer matter.” Halliday sighed. “Ugh, look—saving you from your festering bigotry isn’t my job or responsibility. I’m here to do my bit to save women’s lives, so here it is—take it. I think it’s from the man . . . sorry, the male animal you’re calling Billy. Which would make it a significant clue.” She pushed the book across the table at Sellers. “Letter’s inside the front cover. And if you catch him thanks to me, I want proper credit. Men have been taking credit for women’s achievements since the dawn of time. You might have thought we were planning to put up with that forever. Well, here’s a heads-up: we’re not.”
“It’s not something I’ve thought about at all,” Sellers said truthfully.
“Of course it isn’t,” said Halliday. “Because you don’t see women as fully human.”
* * *
Neil Dunning stood up and moved to the front of the room to talk about Linzi Birrell’s murder. He did it in a “This is how it’s done” way, awarding himself points as he went, no doubt. Simon’s loathing for him intensified.
“Linzi Birrell, twenty-three, address 1c, 143 Klessen Road, Combingham,” said Dunning. “Billy’s first victim. I’ll cover the background first, then the murder. Linzi lived with her fiancé, twenty-eight-year-old Ahmed Shoaib, in a rented flat above a toyshop. They chose it because Linzi was a Harry Potter fanatic. Ahmed wanted to live somewhere quieter, off the main drag, but Linzi liked seeing the kids going in and out of the toyshop with their magic wands or whatever, so they stayed where they were, in one of Combingham’s main shopping areas. Linzi desperately wanted to have kids—she and Ahmed had been trying for a year or so, and she was worried about her fertility because she’d been on the pill for years and thought it might have had a lasting effect. No worries about Ahmed’s fertility: he had two kids with his previous girlfriend Dawn Tooke.”
“Dawn Tooke the kids,” James Wing quipped, to halfhearted laughter.
“Linzi and Rhian Douglas went to primary school together in Poole,” Dunning went on with a more severe expression to deter further heckling. “They became best friends there, and then when Linzi’s family moved to Combingham, they kept in touch. Almost constantly. They were the kind of female best friends who said they loved each other all the time and sent texts with a dozen kisses at the end of them. Rhian also loved Harry Potter—though that wasn’t mentioned before, when we were discussing her.”
“Sorry,” said Grace Woolston.
“Don’t apologize,” Kerensa Moore told her. “That’s why we’re doing this. To see what strikes us as important and worth mentioning when we hear the same facts from different people.”
“Linzi worked nights for an agency, cleaning—most recently at Combingham airport,” Neil Dunning said, resuming his exposition. “She was killed on September 19, 2014, between three and six in the afternoon. When she was murdered, she’d presumably recently gotten up and dressed after being asleep for a few hours after her night shift. She was found dead fully dressed in blue jeans and a black and white New Look top.
“It’s a pity there’s no one here from Combingham,” said Kerensa Moore. “I know the Spilling team took over Linzi’s investigation once Joshua Norbury entered the picture, but it’d be nice to have Combingham’s input.”
“The only reason they aren’t here is their own resentment,” Simon told her. “Once we were given overall control, they wanted nothing to do with it. Two of their DCs were meant to be coming today. Guess what? One phoned in sick, and the other had something more urgent come up.”
“We don’t need them, today or ever,” said Proust. “If a murder’s not gang-, drug- or race-hate-related, they don’t know where to start.”
“I assume most of the crime they see is one of those three things?” James Wing asked.
“It is,” said Sam. “Which is why, at first, they pursued the race angle. Linzi’s fiancé is Pakistani, and her ex-boyfriend, the one she left for Ahmed, was the worst kind of white: a member of the English Defence League. He lost his job a while back and took it out on Linzi, so she sensibly dumped him for the more promising Ahmed, who’s an accountant.”
“Why the race angle and not the straightforward jealousy angle?” Wing asked.
“Combingham are race-hate-crime obsessed,” said Simon. “Their hypothesis was white thug or thugs who weren’t about to take it lying down when one of their own—as they’d see Linzi—shacked up with a Pakistani man. Only problem was they had nothing to back that up, and no theories as to why Linzi found a small white handmade book in her coat pocket two weeks before she died, containing nothing but one line of poetry distributed over the double-page spread at the center of the book: ‘I measure every grief I meet.’”
“A line from an Emily Dickinson poem,” said Sam. “The same poem Rhian Douglas had a line from in her little white book.”
“Combingham Police had high hopes a witness might turn up.” Dunning raised his voice a fraction to remind them all of who was supposed to be speaking. “Someone who saw Billy being let in through the door next to the toyshop that leads up to the flats. But no one saw anything, or if they did, they didn’t come forward. Despite Linzi’s flat being opposite a chip shop, a café and a betting shop, there were no witnesses to speak of. Probably a case of too much going on in a busy shopping area, so that no one saw anything.
“Linzi, like Rhian, was shot in the back of the head—in the lounge, though, not the kitchen. She was found in front of the cabinet where she kept all her Harry Potter paraphernalia. Nothing had been taken, Ahmed told police later, but the doors were open, and there was a model of Dumbledore on the floor next to Linzi’s body. We’re thinking maybe Billy asked Linzi to show him the Harry Potter stuff, and when she was facing the cabinet, with Dumbledore in her hand, he came up behind her and shot her. All the people who lived in the other flats above the toyshop were out at work, so no one heard a shot—but that’s not surprising. That road, there are buses roaring by constantly.
“On the coffee table in the lounge were two mugs, one containing the dregs of a cup of tea, the other of coffee. We know from Ahmed—who alibied out early and satisfactorily—that Linzi drank coffee always, never tea. Angela McCabe, victim number three, was the same, and at her place too there was one tea, one coffee mug found near her body. At the Rhian Douglas crime scene, there were two teas; Rhian was a tea drinker. I think it’s safe to assume Billy’s a tea drinker too, therefore.”
“If I were a serial killer with a strong preference for coffee, it’d probably occur to me to ask for tea at my crime scenes,” said James Wing.
Simon disagreed and said so. “You’re about to do something as momentous as commit murder; you’d want your regular go-to comfort drink. It’s not as if ‘Suspect drinks tea’ or ‘Suspect drinks coffee’ is going to bring a police team to your door—millions drink both.”
“True if your pool of potential suspects is everybody out there,” said Kerensa Moore. “Less true if we narrow it down to a few possibles. In that scenario—”
“In that scenario, we fall to our knees and praise the Lord,” said the Snowman. “Can we press on? Who’s doing Angela McCabe?”
“I haven’t finished Linzi Birrell.” Dunning looked shocked that anyone would try to cut him short. “Linzi and Ahmed had been subjected to a fair amount of racist abuse from local unsavories, but nothing that stood out, no one who seemed passionate about it—just the predictable comments shouted in the street, things overheard in pubs. Low-level everyday stuff—nothing to suggest anyone’d take it as far as murder.”
“Another thing Combingham flat-out refused to acknowledge,” Simon said. “As well as my question they’d never answer: Wouldn’t racists kill Ahmed instead of Linzi, or as well as?”
“Combingham detectives interviewed most of the town’s population—everyone who’d ever had a racist thought—and they got nowhere,” said Dunning. “Same when they interviewed Linzi’s and Ahmed’s families, colleagues, friends. Nothing. As per Billy’s other three victims: no red flags in the finances, no affairs—just nothing. Little white homemade books with lines from poems in them, and apart from that? Diddly squat. There was a brief moment when suspicion fell on the owner of the caff opposite Linzi’s flat, Hot-n-Tasty. That’s the caff’s name, not the owner’s. She’s called Miff Sheeran. And she didn’t once leave Hot-n-Tasty on the day Linzi was killed—it’s been confirmed by about twenty people who were also there—so she was quickly ruled out, and no one had pinned their hopes on her anyway. Ahmed insisted Miff wouldn’t hurt a fly, and her DNA wasn’t a match for Billy’s at the scene, so . . . that was a never-very-promising lead down the drain.”
“Though it’s worth remembering that Miff Sheeran denied Linzi ever made a complaint about a lasagna,” said Simon, sensing that Dunning was about to move on without mentioning this.
Proust groaned. “Please not the lasagna again.”
“I just think it’s odd she lied, that’s all,” said Simon. “Linzi can’t have been the first customer who’d complained.”
“I honestly think she might have been,” Sam said. “Hot-n-Tasty isn’t the kind of place where customers have especially high expectations of the food.”
“Three people in the caff on the day in question, two months before Linzi was murdered, confirmed they’d overheard the row between Linzi and Miff about the lasagna,” said Dunning. “Though to be fair, two called it a discussion. Third says it was definitely heated—claims Linzi ended up picking up her phone and the Harry Potter book she’d taken in there with her to read over lunch and walking out, leaving the lasagna on the table after only one mouthful.
“Once she’d left, Miff sat down at the table and ate the lasagna herself, loudly announcing it to be delicious. All three witnesses separately reported the same altercation, which I’m sure no one wants to hear in detail again: Linzi claimed it wasn’t the same, it was worse, but couldn’t say how. Miff said if she was accusing it of being worse she must surely be able to explain in what way today’s lasagna was different and worse than usual . . .” Dunning raced through the substance of the five-month-old argument in a bored voice. “Miff then, er, tried to blame Linzi for having the same thing twice—on the grounds, presumably, that if she never repeat-ordered the same dish, she’d be more likely to avoid dashed hopes and dissatisfaction.”
There was a ripple of laughter around the room—as there had been, traditionally, whenever this particular detail had come up.
“Linzi said, ‘But it’s not the same,’” Dunning went on. “Miff said, ‘Darling, if you don’t want it, I’ll happily take it off your hands.’ That’s when Linzi walked out and Miff sat down and gave a public performance of really enjoying the lasagna, for the sake of PR. Though you’d have thought not fighting with the customers might have been a more sensible approach.”
