Antman (37 page)

He found another way to a kind of temporary relief. The disembodied voices singing Bruckner's
Os Justi
motet wafted through the drawing room. The cadences fell gently, tone by tone into near silence. Graver was back in Palestrina's sixteenth century, where he seemed to find peace. There, all emotions were woven into abstract sounds which stretched them, pulling feelings in fine threads into infinity. Soon they became ethereal, translucent as glass and held only by gossamer to their points of origin.

His words and actions took off like music into the air, floating like clouds, dispersing as they rose towards the upper atmosphere. Even so was the mating of queens and males. The tiny bodies spiralled upwards, opposites drawn together again and again as each queen mated several times, another spent male tumbling to earth as if dead after each once-in-a-lifetime encounter.

Graver considered the pheromones produced by every queen to attract males. He had a vision of his body sweating from every orifice, but wasn't repelled by this. He wanted the smell to be strong and unavoidable. He would stop washing. He took off all his clothes.

The scraping of stridulating segments of the abdomens of the females was the final spur to the males. The accumulating excitement of the males led to females being clasped repeatedly, long after they were sated. Less a mating of equal and opposite beings than an orgy, a mass rape, near-suicide by males unable to stem their carnal urges.

Afterwards the air hummed with the gentle sound of females burring to earth, satisfied, albeit with tattered wings. That no longer mattered. As soon as they landed they would shed their wings by rubbing the joint with their shoulders against some convenient twig or pebble. They would never need to fly again.

The males would never fly again either. The ground beneath was littered already with spent and dying males, too weak to move and incapable of feeding themselves to replenish their energy. Those that weren't picked off by birds and other predators in the hours before nightfall would have little chance of surviving the cool night air.

Graver's only chance of surmounting this ritual, psychologically was to think himself into the circumstances of the queens. He was ready to multiply.

*  *  *

Morrison was off duty soon after lunch. He spent a couple of hours at the University library on his way home that afternoon and pored over the half dozen books he had borrowed, well into the early hours of the morning. He was already sitting at his desk when Chris walked by before 8:00 a.m. that morning, conversing with Bradshaw. Bradshaw was an early starter, usually at work well before 8:00 a.m. He lived alone. His work had long since replaced the spaces once occupied by the company of other people, including women and leisure. He worked now because there was so little else to do.

Morrison thought Bradshaw looked as pleased as Punch, no doubt because he had a suspect in custody. Morrison left his desk, heading for Chris, but at that moment a nearby phone rang and she seemed happy to be called away. He walked into the corridor and found Bradshaw staring at him.

'Can I do something?' Bradshaw asked.

'A minute of your time, please, sir.' Bradshaw was staring at Morrison as though trying to figure out whether he'd really wanted to speak to Chris. ‘What is it?'

'I've been doing some work on the notes our killer sends.'

'Sent,' said Bradshaw. 'Past tense. He won't be sending any more.'

Morrison looked baffled. He was thinking this had been a mistake. He should have exercised patience.

'We've a suspect from the University, bang to rights,' Bradshaw said.

'I must speak to you about that, sir,' said Morrison.

'You should talk to your senior officer,' said Bradshaw.

'I don't think we've found the killer yet.'

'This isn't the time for theoretical speculations,' said Bradshaw to Morrison over one shoulder. 'A word of advice, Constable. Stick to the task in hand.'

Morrison found Chris half an hour later. ‘We're looking for somebody with a major mental disorder, boss. Irrespective of motive or opportunity, Dr Lovelace isn't that person.'

'It isn't me you have to convince, but Superintendent Bradshaw.'

'I just tried. I can't speak to him direct, but you can.'

Chris was being pushed from two conflicting positions. Bradshaw wanted pressure put on Robin and speedy progress towards him being charged, whilst Tom was urging her to lay off Robin. He was convinced their most likely suspect was Walters. Chris knew in her heart of hearts Robin was a no-no, but it took her a while to track Bradshaw down. He was in the car park waiting for a car to take him to a reception at City Hall for a party of visiting police chiefs from the Netherlands. She was just in time. The car was coming through the car park entrance.

‘
We've no evidence, sir, so we've nothing to charge him with and no reason to hold him.'

'I can't discuss it now. I'll be away the rest of the day.'

'It can't wait till tomorrow, sir. We're in a tricky situation. Your visiting police are due to meet the University Vice Chancellor this evening.'

'Dr Sutherland?'

Chris knew Bradshaw was touchy about this contact. Tom had tipped her off about a large and potentially prestigious partnership deal the University was considering signing with the local police, to do with forensic work.

'I was thinking, sir. If the media get hold of the news of our investigations into Dr Lovelace, before we're ready –'

Bradshaw wasn't giving up without a struggle. ‘What on earth's the sudden difficulty with Lovelace? I'm not hearing any justification for this sudden change of direction.'

'Hardly a change, sir. We're still proceeding with the trawl of all University staff, apart from our wider check on likely suspects in the region. These do rather contradict behaving as though we've found our murderer.'

'Perhaps we have.'

'Perhaps isn't proof beyond all reasonable doubt in a court of law.'

'Don't teach me my business,' said Bradshaw testily.

'Dr Lovelace's lawyer, the AUT lawyers and the University lawyers have been in touch with us, sir.'

'UCU?'

'The lecturers' union, sir. Combined with the University, they pack some punch.'

'I know what it means,' he said testily. 'I can punch as well as any two-bit academic, believe me.'

‘
We have no grounds on which to charge. It could be very expensive politically and financially to keep him in custody.'

Bradshaw looked at the waiting car and back at Chris.

'This is damned embarrassing. We can't afford to backtrack with the ACC. We've told him we have a strong suspect in the bag.'

You swine, thought Chris. You're talking in the plural. I bet you've implicated us all in this stupid decision. Out loud she tried to keep her patience. ‘We don't lose him by holding back, sir. He isn't going to flee the country if we let him out. It could work to our advantage, quite apart from saving us from more embarrassment with the media and the University authorities.'

Bradshaw stared at the ground for a few seconds more. 'It's a bloody cock-up. Do it, but keep tabs on this man. Make it clear to your colleagues our investigation is ongoing. We don't want him slipping out of the country.'

An hour later Tom rang up the Station asking to visit Robin, and sensed some embarrassment. Apparently he was labouring under a misapprehension. Robin had recently been released without charge.

When Tom tackled Chris on the phone about it later, she was unforthcoming, except to say Robin had been asked to give further details to explain inconsistencies in his account of his movements in the past few weeks. He would be supplying them shortly.

'Does that mean he's on bail?'

'No, it doesn't.' She let Tom hear her irritation.

'So he isn't in custody, he's not on bail but he might be called in for further questioning.'

'Yes.' She was so prickly, thought Tom. 'If that's all, I need to get on.'

'Brilliant,' he said sardonically, out loud to himself. 'That gives me a marvellous basis for resuming my working relationship with my deputy.'

Five minutes later the phone rang. It was Chris.

'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bite your head off. It's Bradshaw.'

'I kind of guessed he was standing over you.'

'Almost literally. He was fuming because we let Robin go. Bradshaw wants evidence the case is nearly resolved. For the sake of his relationship with his top brass he needs a suspect – proof his style of policing works.'

*  *  *

Chris knew Bradshaw was after blood and wouldn't give up. He was determined to nail somebody for the murders and to him Robin Lovelace was the most convenient suspect, even if he wasn't the most likely culprit. Robin's movements during the recent period were mysterious and this heightened questions about his trustworthiness. He had close connections with insects and with ants in particular. In respect of the latter, he had to be in a minority of one out of tens of thousands of people.

Like Tom, Chris remained unconvinced. Her team of officers were pursuing their trawl of potential suspects in the population and there was no point in trying to confront Bradshaw with her intuition about a technician employed by Tom's department at some time in the past. Bradshaw was too much driven by the facts to be swayed by intuition.

Fortunately, at that moment Morrison produced a distraction. Chris was impressed by Morrison and she guessed Bradshaw was impressed too. Bradshaw had a tacit preference for male officers over female ones, the latter in his view being too prone to emotional involvement. Morrison was what Bradshaw called “a bit airy-fairy”, but undeniably showed signs of developing into a “quality detective”. She had to bear all this in mind and play it carefully, keeping Bradshaw at one remove from what she was doing, without making it obvious. There was no news on the present whereabouts of Walters, but Morrison had managed to delve into his background and come up with a Mrs Blatt who had fostered him just before he left primary school. He placed a sheet of paper on the desk before Chris.

Chris laid the box file down on the desk and took a deep breath. 'That's good. Thanks, Morrison, you might try running the checks for precons and Schedule One sex offences.'

'Have done, boss. Third time I've tried. Couldn't get a result first time. There are too many John Walters. It worked today. He has a bit of a record.'

'For speeding, I suppose. Plenty of people have broken the law. So what?'

'Not a traffic offence, nor even a single offence. Our man has a catalogue of convictions to his name. On one occasion he served three years, less remission of course, for being a model prisoner.'

'Is this verified?'

'Yes, boss. Records have all the form on him. Wait till you hear what he was doing.' Morrison consulted his notepad: 'Demanding money with menaces, assault occasioning actual bodily harm.'

Chris felt considerably better. At last the tide was running her way. In this spirit she rang Tom. 'Fancy a trip to Cambridge? Walters lived in Cambridge for a while, as a young lad.'

'You did well.'

'Thank Morrison. He obtained this former home address for Walters from your Personnel department.'

'How the hell did he do that?'

'An ex-girlfriend, apparently, tipped him off. There's a filing cabinet at the University with the forms from job applications going way back.'

'Sounds dodgy. It's breaking every data protection and privacy rule in the book.'

'Dodgy maybe, but extremely useful. We can return to the moral high ground later.'

Tom still sounded surprised. 'So as far as you're concerned Walters is still in the frame?'

‘
We're trying to find out what we can, keeping it well away from Bradshaw.'

She didn't actually want Tom to accompany her to the interview, but thought there might be some way of their paths converging. Somewhat to her surprise, Tom snatched at the excuse to visit Cambridge, meet up with one of his former academic colleagues at his college and afterwards snoop around the bookshops.