Authors: Rob Kitchin
‘A pact?’
‘Perhaps,’ she hedged. ‘It’s only speculation, but that’s my reading given the case notes. I think she might have provided the impetus, the spark, for this whole killing spree. If he’s going to kill one person, he might as well use it for other ends. He planned the other murders to follow hers.’
‘Sounds a bit far fetched, doesn’t it,’ McEvoy said doubtfully. ‘He meets a homeless girl, he befriends her, she asks him to kill her, and then he thinks, “Well, if I kill one I might as well kill seven. And while I’m at it, I’ll write a book on how to commit the perfect murder”,’ he finished sarcastically.
‘As I said, it’s speculation and I’d need to talk to people who knew her and see more of the crime scene analysis, but it would explain why she seemingly just welcomed the killing and why he carried on with several more,’ Jacobs persisted.
McEvoy scrunched his face up and shrugged his shoulders signalling that he wasn’t convinced. ‘It’s a possibility, I guess,’ he said. ‘She could have also been too pissed to stop him; to know what the hell was going on.’
‘There’s that as well,’ she conceded. ‘There’s something about that death though; something that seems at odds with the other murders. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. Even if she was drunk, you’d have thought she’d have made some effort to save herself?’
‘As you said, maybe she was happy to die? Had enough of life?’
‘It’s more than that. She undressed, laid on the bed, and accepted the sword through the mouth. It wasn’t just that she accepted death, she was prepared to make it look like a sacrifice.’
‘You said he had a short fuse?’ McEvoy asked, trying to steer the conversation back round to The Raven. Laura’s death still gnawed away at him and he wanted time to think about Kathy Jacobs’ thesis.
‘You saw the body back there, Colm. All the other killings were clinical, mechanical. With the exception of Laura, he knocked them unconscious and then dispatched them. Okay, some of them were a little elaborate – the sword, the paint, the cut off toes – but they were all performed calmly and efficiently.
‘He’d battered that woman to death. Not clinically or systematically, but with a violent rampage, hitting her repeatedly and without pattern. Probably wasn’t even aware of what he was doing, though he regained some composure at the end. Made sure she ended up face down in the rock pool to die as he intended – by drowning – and then cleaned up after himself, taking whatever it was he hit her with, and leaving the card and chapter, though he just seemed to throw the latter away. For a brief period he lost self-control.
‘My feeling is it was because the attack probably didn’t go to plan. He’d spent a lot of time preparing it and maybe she didn’t play her part properly. Maybe he forgot some detail. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it triggered a violent reaction. More violent – more frenzied and less calculated,’ she qualified, ‘than the other attacks.
‘That’s not to say that he felt any more compassion for his other victims than her. I think he sees his victims as legitimate targets in the game he’s playing. Even Laura. They’re simply disposable objects, not living, breathing human beings. I doubt he has any real feelings for them or anyone else. The only thing that matters is himself.
‘He’s selfish and he’s egotistical. And there’s no doubt he
is
a psychopath. But he wouldn’t recognise that in himself. He would see himself as rational and reflexive – able to self-analyse and internalise his thoughts and emotions. He knows he’s not like everyone else, but he also knows what he needs to do to appear like they do. To him, though, all other people are inferior.
‘My sense is that he’s almost certainly an over-achiever and he relishes in his own perceived superiority. But he feels that this superiority is not sufficiently recognised by others; that he’s not receiving his fair dues. Perhaps he’s being blocked from promotion at work, or people are simply not taking him or his ideas seriously? I don’t know. What I do think, however, is that he has a desire to prove them wrong, to demonstrate how much smarter than them he is. This is what these killings are all about – ego.’
‘He could have written his book without killing six people,’ McEvoy said flatly.
‘But he wouldn’t have been able to prove that it worked. He wants the recognition, the acknowledgement, that he’s a genius.’
‘He’s a sick bastard,’ McEvoy said without thinking.
‘I agree, but so far he’s got away with the killings and it appears like he really is an evil genius. And if you don’t catch him he will kill again,’ Jacobs continued. ‘He’ll start a new campaign. A new challenge. Maybe not for a while – six months or a year. He’ll lie low, then he’ll start planning – a new book, a riddle, a different puzzle; something. But he will surface again; that you can be sure of.’
‘You sound very confident.’
‘Read the literature, Colm. There are very few serial killers who stop killing once they start. They might pause or go dormant for a while, but they inevitably start again. And he’ll feel his audience will want an encore.’
‘His audience?’
‘The public. The media. This is the biggest story on the planet at the moment. Every news channel, every newspaper, have reporters here. The whole world is watching, waiting to see how it ends.’
McEvoy nodded and stared out of the windscreen at the road ahead, mulling over Kathy Jacobs’ assessment. Whilst informative and useful, if anything it made the investigation seem more daunting. The Raven, while probably arrogant, seemed to the rest of the world exactly like them. Except of course he wasn’t; he was a psychotic egotist.
The mirror was cracked, the line running through his face, the halves not quite matching. Somehow McEvoy felt it looked appropriate. He wedged a finger between his collar and neck and jiggled it about uncomfortable with the fit now the tie was tightened. He straightened the lapels on the new uniform and ran a hand over his hair. It seemed strange to be wearing a suit that fitted perfectly after the looseness of his usual, oversized clothes. Dressed like this there was a danger people might actually start saluting and calling him Sir.
He left the room and joined Bishop, the Assistant Commissioner, Kathy Jacobs and three members of the press team in the meeting room with the Yeats prints. The press team were already sitting in a row along one side of the table, playing with their pencils and pads, worried looks etched on their faces. The morning’s newspapers were laid out before them. The other three were standing together near the window, the Assistant Commissioner holding court. He had the look of a brawler, someone you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley – thick dark hair, ruddy cheeks, big barrel chest, and giant hands with chunky fingers.
They stopped their conversation, their small circle opening to face him.
‘Colm,’ the Assistant Commissioner said with a solemn face, moving forward to shake his hand.
‘Sir,’ McEvoy replied while trying to keep his hand stiff, resisting the crushing vice.
‘Shall we get started?’ The Assistant Commissioner sat at the head of the table. ‘We’ll have to leave for the Burlington in twenty minutes or so – get ourselves set up. No doubt they’ll be even more of the feckers than there were yesterday.’
Bishop sat to his right. Kathy Jacobs skipped a seat, forcing McEvoy to sit at the far end of the table facing the AC and visible to all. He was uncomfortable with Jacobs being there, but nobody else seemed to mind.
‘I hear there’s been another murder,’ the AC prompted.
‘Shirley Hamilton,’ McEvoy replied. ‘Fifty-three and from the North. Married with two grown-up children. He battered her to death with a length of wood out at Donabate. She lived in Dundonald in Belfast and was a regular in a hotel near to where she was murdered. She liked to run along the coast. She had her own training company and had been running staff development courses at the airport.’
‘Jesus Christ, that’s just what we need. The feckin’ PSNI will want to join the party now,’ the AC said, referring to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. ‘They’ll be down here giving us advice, looking down their noses at us as if we’re a feckin’ joke. Are you anywhere near catching this so-called Raven? He’s making us look like eejits.’
McEvoy looked down at the table, his gaze avoiding the papers. ‘Not at the minute, Sir. He’s moving too fast for us to keep up and other than his chapters he’s leaving us nothing to go on.’
‘And what do you need? More people? We need to catch this bastard, Colm. Half the world’s media are here. The locals are telling them that we’re a bunch of incompetent gobshites; that we’re lazy, corrupt, badly managed and run. Every fecker who’s ever had a grievance is calling for major reform and reorganisation and the Minister for Justice is on the phone every five feckin’ minutes. All he can see is his popularity rating falling through the floor. So what’s it going to take?’
McEvoy shifted in his seat and scratched the back of his head. ‘A mistake,’ he said quietly.
‘What?’
‘I said, a mistake.’
‘A mistake!’
McEvoy stayed silent.
‘Is that what we’re meant to tell the world’s press? That we have no feckin’ idea about how to catch him! We’re hoping that he’ll either make a mistake or hand himself in?’
‘We’re doing the best we can,’ McEvoy said, his right leg bouncing uncontrollably under the table. ‘We’ve got six teams working flat out, hundreds of officers. He’s got everything planned, he’s careful, he’s setting up false trails, and he’s not giving us time to catch up.’
‘And do we have any idea where the final murder’s going to be? Who the victim might be?’
‘No. So far they’ve all been sites connected to Dermot Brady. He’s provided us with a list of places he thinks might be targets. We have officers keeping an eye on them all, though he didn’t identify Donabate as a possible location.’
The AC nodded and turned his gaze to Kathy Jacobs. ‘I know you’ve only just got here, Dr Jacobs, but do you have anything that might help us at this stage?’
‘I’ve done a preliminary profile, but I need to work through the full case notes and flesh it out. Even if I’d completed it, I don’t think it would be a good idea to give it to the media unless it’s tied to a good photo or photofit. All that’ll happen is you’ll be swamped with calls, people saying it sounds like such and such across the road. And your photofits are too weak at the minute. They barely look like each other, God knows if they look like the killer.’
‘Fair enough. And what is your initial assessment?’
‘I’d sooner complete my analysis than have to change my mind later. It might lead you to chase false leads.’
McEvoy glanced over at her, trying to read why she hadn’t told them what she’d said in the car.
‘Well, that’s up to you,’ the AC said, clearly frustrated. ‘As soon as you’re happy, we can progress from there. Right, moving on, what are we going to do about this morning’s papers?’ The AC gestured at the table and glared at McEvoy and the media team.
McEvoy lowered his head again. One of the media team cleared their throat. ‘I think, we think, well, it’s Chief Superintendent Bishop’s idea really,’ he spluttered, looking at his notes, ‘that we spin the photos as positively as possible. So rather than become defensive, we use them proactively. The tears aren’t because he can’t cope, that he’s losing control, they’re because he cares. He’s grieving for the victims as much as anyone. As much as everyone working on the case.’
McEvoy glanced over at Bishop, who gently rocked his head, signalling that he’d found a way to protect him; that McEvoy was deeper in debt to him.
‘We need to be careful not to allow this to become a battle between Detective Superintendent McEvoy and The Raven,’ the media person continued. ‘It’ll become too personalised, too much about personalities, rather than the crimes. The media now know that the photos were taken in Santry Omniplex and that Superintendent McEvoy was there to see his daughter on her birthday. They also know about his wife’s death. The danger is they see the photos as evidence of some kind of breakdown. That the family loss, the caring for his daughter on his own, and the burden of the case has become too much emotionally and physically.’