The Fifth Rapunzel Part 5

Donaldson, slightly guilty about the way he'd opted out professionally, felt he should make more effort socially and suggested that Simon might like to have a look over the premises. It would ease the boy, he thought, if he had preconceived disturbing notions of the place.

The Mount externally was a sombre mish-mash of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a twentieth-century extension at the back which would have induced neurosis in an architectural purist, though a thick coat of ivy helped to disguise the worst of it. Inside were craft areas and a heated swimming pool where scantily clad patients, or staff, they all looked the same to Simon, seemed to be enjoying themselves, some in the water, others seated in loungers. In the main building there was a music room, a billiard room, a library and several small sitting-rooms, all cheerfully furnished like a middle quality hotel. Patients - staff? - sat in groups mostly, though a few loners roamed around, or sat alone reading, or just sat.

Simon, expecting something more clinical, asked about ECT. Most visitors did. Donaldson said he didn't believe in it. Simon warmed to him a little. It couldn't have been all that bad for his mother. Perhaps not bad at all. Just a place to rest, as he had told Rhoda. He asked if he could see her room.

Donaldson told him smoothly that no particular room had been set aside for her, she had visited very rarely, just now and again when domestic pressures, that sort of thing, got her down briefly, but he would show him the room she'd had last time she was here. And then he remembered that Corinne Sinclair, a sixty-year-old manic depressive, had gouged out chunks of plaster from the wall with the metal-tipped heel of her shoe the previous night and was now deeply sedated in the 'quiet wing', the only part of The Mount that remotely resembled a hospital. Instead, he showed Simon one of the other bedrooms and said it had been Lisa's. It had a wide window facing the lawn and the shrubby area beyond, where Creggan's tent was. The crazy, cheerful little tepee, viewed from up here, didn't look sinister enough to worry anybody. Simon tried to imagine his mother standing by the window, looking out. She probably wouldn't have liked the yellow chintz curtains, they would have been too flowery for her, not modern enough. Apart from that it was a nice enough room. He wouldn't have minded sleeping here himself.

Donaldson's private accommodation was a three-roomed flat on the top floor, carefully and appropriately furnished. The first time he had entertained Lisa up there, she had looked around it with amus.e.m.e.nt and told him it was phoney. "Who are you trying to con, Steven? This isn't you." She had been referring to the book-lined walls, all the books in their pristine jackets and most un-read. Poetry. The cla.s.sics. History. Modern fiction, but not a lot. The family photographs -his sister's family - hadn't been too prominent, but made a quiet statement. A bachelor needs a little help. The one photograph that had meant anything to him, and had been taken a long time ago when they were undergraduates at Cambridge, had been placed a little behind the others. Lisa had alighted on it. "Hush, hush, whisper who dares," she had teased. Lisa had the ability to annoy. And arouse stronger emotions, too.

He decided not to show his flat to her son.

On the way out they met Sally coming in. "Mr Creggan is back," she told Donaldson, "and he's brought a dog. A pooch. A sort of middle sized mongrel. He said he saw a programme about geriatrics petting dogs and getting better. Dog therapy. He said it should work at any age. If you don't want it, Bob Millington up at the farm will probably take it for a while until Mr Creggan goes again." She smiled. "You do get lumbered with problems, Doctor Donaldson, and you keep so calm."

If Donaldson could have sacked her there and then for her veiled insolence, he would have done. And if he could have booted Creggan out without losing 'his fee he would have done that, too. Creggan was paying well over the odds and money mattered. He excused himself to Simon and strode off in the direction of Creggan's tent.

And left Simon and Sally standing together within touching distance.

Sally duly touched him, her fingers lightly resting on his wrist. It wasn't a Rhoda touch, but it was warm enough to be pleasant. "I knew your mum," she told him. "Last time she was here, I'd only just come. I cleaned her room out for her and she gave me something when she was leaving. I'll give it to you if you'll take me for a run in your car. I have a free afternoon tomorrow."

For the first time for months Simon felt mildly happy. He asked her her name.

"Sally," she told him, giving his wrist a gentle squeeze.

Sally was the sort of name he a.s.sociated with a milk-shake with a lot of sugar in it. A bit boring. Not like Rhoda. He asked what his mother had given her, but she wouldn't tell him.

"You'll see."

He noticed that when she smiled her eyes were coolly appraising. Her eyes and her lips didn't match. Her b.o.o.bs, however, were a beautiful pair. His eyes lingered on them and she giggled. "Tomorrow's okay, then? About half past two? I'll come down to your place."

"Yes," he told her, blushing. "Tomorrow's okay."

Max Cormack, a young Irish pathologist, took over Peter Bradshaw's job with some trepidation. He had the right qualifications and sufficient experience not to do anything stupid; even so, he felt like a raw understudy stepping into the leading actor's shoes. How was it that dabbling with the dead fired the imagination of the living? Crime stories sold newspapers. And books. And plays. Oth.e.l.lo strangling Desdemona still sent thrills of horror down the spine. Intimations of mortality, other people's mortality, churned the stomach but were exciting, too. The public wanted to know more. And more. Forensic science, as opposed to other sciences, had some readable bits like excerpts from a 'whodunnit'. Genetic fingerprinting, for instance, had featured in quite a few articles in the Press. The Press coverage of Bradshaw had been very high profile, to use the current jargon. Getting himself killed so spectacularly had probably helped.

Easy on there, Cormack chicked himself, cynicism will get you nowhere. Bradshaw was a competent pathologist and, according to his colleagues, a likeable bloke. And his colleagues, the senior policemen he'd met after being appointed, seemed likeable, too. Not the type to go in for practical jokes, though at first he'd thought one of them was taking the mickey.

The pink envelope had been placed on his desk next to a couple of folders full of Bradshaw's unfinished business and a single sheet of paper, typed by his secretary, outlining the general set-up and pointing out what was urgent and what wasn't. A competent girl, Sofia. Pretty, too. Asian, he guessed. Skin the colour of milky coffee and dark brown eyes. She was eyeing him now as he fingered the envelope. It was fully addressed and stamped and had come through the post.

He opened it. The card inside was pink, too. Congratulations on your new job was the printed message. And under it the picture of a Scottie dog wearing a tartan cap and smoking a pipe. Anthropomorphic. Very twee. An Irish leprechaun doing a jig on a mortuary slab would be more in keeping.

He turned the page. And saw closely written in a small cramped hand: Look at Rapunzel Number Five, Doctor Cormack, and look hard. May the good Lord guide you to the truth while Bradshaw rots in h.e.l.l. It wasn't signed. It took him a few moments to recognise the handwriting and remember where he'd seen it before. Photocopied on the Hixon file. Not a joke. Not even an execrable one.

"What's Hixon trying to do," he asked, tossing the card over to Sofia, "trying to prove he's mad?"

"Only a lunatic would want to go to Broadmoor," she said and then, realising what she'd said, giggled. She examined the card and pa.s.sed it back. "Professor Bradshaw had a lot of this sort of thing. Only worse. Obituary cards - some of them. Very stark. He tore them up."

Cormack, about to do the same, hesitated, decided not to, and put the card in the desk drawer. D.C.I. Maybridge was meeting him for a drink that evening. He'd been part of the Rapunzel team, too, and had probably been badgered in the same way. He wondered if Maybridge would object to talking shop over a couple of pints.

They were due to meet at the small pub near the docks at eight thirty. He would have preferred a different venue. The corpse of an elderly man, drowned a few days previously, had been caught in the propeller of a motorboat and brought ash.o.r.e like a gutted fish. Hardened to his job, he had gone through the usual routine while one of the young constables, Radwell, he thought his name was, had crouched behind a bollard and been sick. Maybridge hadn't been present.

By eight thirty the small section of dockside had been washed clean. The evening sun shone on the mullioned windows of The Bell and on Maybridge, nattily dressed in a lightweight grey suit, who was standing by the entrance. He had arrived early. "Look," he said, without preamble, "if you'd rather go somewhere else, they serve good draught ale and a bar snack, if you want it, a couple of streets away. Radwell told me things were pretty messy over there."

"Pathologists, like policemen," Cormack a.s.sured him, "have selective memories. Just now everything is looking pretty good. The Bell will suit me fine."

Maybridge, who hadn't a selective memory and was plagued by horrific visions of violent death for quite a while after each case, thought he could detect bravado in Cormack's response. "Well, if you're sure." "Quite sure."

But the pathologist chose a table away from the window, Maybridge noticed. There are degrees of professional toughness. Age, in some cases, hardened the carapace, though mostly it was a matter of temperament.

When a newcomer joins a team you try to help him to settle in. Extending the hand of friendship to Peter's successor had been easier than Maybridge had expected. Peter himself would have approved of the appointment; there would be no stealing of his thunder. Cormack had a quality of Irish charm that was difficult to define and was probably best summed up as being easy with people. He was highly competent, but not aggressively so. Peter, at times, showed off. Played to the gallery. Part of his professorial role. Cormack wasn't professorial material and had no ambition to go in that direction. He hoped to stay put, he told Maybridge. He liked this part of the country. He had put his house in Sheffield on the market and was on the look-out for something not too big, but large enough for a family home. He and his girlfriend were planning to marry in a year or so when she returned from the States. She was nursing in a Chicago hospital. In the meantime he was living in digs and trudging around estate agents in his spare time. So far he hadn't seen anything that appealed. Or if it appealed, he couldn't afford it.

Over a second pint of Guinness he broached the subject again. "Your village, Macklestone, reminds me of a hamlet near Deny where I was brought up. If anything comes on the market there, would you let me know?"

Maybridge, guessing he had Peter's house in mind, explained the situation. "Bradshaw's son, Simon, has inherited the property - or is about to. It's much too large for a lad on his own, but it's too soon to approach him about selling up."

Cormack, who did have it in mind, was embarra.s.sed. "Sure it is. No way would I worry him. G.o.d, I'd be no better than a b.l.o.o.d.y vulture if I did. But maybe later ... when he's had time to think ..."

Maybridge wondered to what degree thinking about it would hurt. Would it be turning the knife in the wound if Simon met his father's successor with a view to selling his home to him? Would it hurt less to sell it to someone else? Or would he be glad to be rid of it? Cormack seemed a decent enough bloke. Not insensi- tive. They could meet casually perhaps and the property needn't be mentioned until both were more sure about it. Simon might want to stay put. He suggested that Cormack might like to have digs in the village. "I could give you the addresses of a couple of farms that do B. and B. and an evening meal. It would give you a chance to have a proper look around. Something else might turn up in the meantime. Everything should be clearer in a few months."

Cormack, pleased with the idea, thanked him. There was no great hurry. The future, with average good luck, should last a long time. Simon's parents, he reminded himself, had probably thought the same. And the chap who had been fished out of the dock this morning. And all those unfortunate little tarts that Hixon had raped and strangled.

He mentioned Hixon's card but didn't show it. A cosy chat about an eminent predecessor's home and his son couldn't be concluded with Hixon's purple prose about Bradshaw's rotting in h.e.l.l. A glossing over the contents, however, didn't fool Maybridge ...

"Derogatory about Bradshaw, and that's probably putting it very mildly. Did he threaten you?"

"No. Just pointed me in the direction of the fifth Rapunzel. Obviously likes the name the Press have tagged on to his victims. Seems to imply that she wasn't his victim and wants me to do something about it."

Maybridge was watching him keenly, his hand of friendship momentarily not quite so firm. "Your reaction?"

Cormack answered thoughtfully. "You tell a hoaxer to get lost. Someone who is dangerously paranoid, no matter what the shrinks might say, you ignore. I have no doubt whatsoever that the professor's forensic evidence was one hundred percent correct in all five cases." It was tempting to ask why Hixon should have settled on just that one case, but perhaps not politic. Instead he asked how Hixon had got hold of a card like that in the nick, written that sort of rubbish on it and got it past the censor.

"The same way he desecrated the wreath at the Bradshaw's funeral." Maybridge told him about it. "Someone on the outside does it for him."

"And someone on the outside informed him about my appointment - that's how he got my name?"

"Could be. Or he could have read about it in the local paper. Newspapers aren't banned in the nick. Most of what is reported in the Press is correct, though some information is withheld when it's a murder investigation. Afterwards, when the case is closed and it can be safely released, it is."

"Safely?"

Maybridge took a few sips of Guinness before replying. "Serial murders usually have method in common - one particular way of doing it. Or a bizarre way of signing off. If it's a knifing, a hieroglyphic in blood, perhaps, somewhere on the victim's body. A signature can be copied. It confuses the evidence. So the police keep quiet about it. But you must know all this. It's part of your job."

Cormack did, of course. But most of the cadavers he'd investigated had been straightforward killings. Run of the mill murders, the majority domestic, and reported freely during the Press conference. The Rapunzel murders had been unique. The common denominator: manual strangulation of five long-haired prost.i.tutes, their hair plaited and tied tightly around their necks afterwards - like a noose. According to Bradshaw's reports.

"My job," he told Maybridge amicably, "is dealing with anything the police land on me. You haven't landed anything bizarre on me yet. No one has written a billet-doux on any of my cadavers' bellies. All has been sweet and simple. Or maybe simple but not sweet. You catch the murdering b.u.g.g.e.rs at some risk to yourselves. I make a further mess of their victims at the autopsy, then bung off everything relevant to the forensic science laboratory. The experts get going with traces of s.e.m.e.n, blood, hair fibres, human and otherwise, nail sc.r.a.pings, etc, etc. They a.n.a.lyse this and that, feed the computers with data, and, hey presto, get an answer. Usually correct. But no acclaim whatsoever. Nice job, though. Not messy. Good if you want a quiet life."

"Hm," said Maybridge. Peter hadn't. He'd probably appreciated his back-up team, but he'd been standing out there well in front and obviously enjoying every minute of it. Simon doing a back-room job was easy to imagine. He might have his father's genes, but he certainly hadn't his temperament.

Genes. Genetic engineering. D.N.A. fingerprinting. All up-front words in common use bandied around by lay-men as well as professionals. Cormack had used the phrase 'usually correct' just now. Rightly. Even an exact science has a margin of error. D.N.A. fingerprinting had been ruled unsafe in a recent murder enquiry in the U.S.A. The fifth Rapunzel case had been particularly difficult. Unlike the others. He was relieved, however, that Cormack had dismissed Hixon's insinuation as paranoid. It was, of course.

It's easy to play the fool and get away with it if your audience is made up of amateurs. If they're a team of professionals, headed by a professional, it becomes rather difficult. The Mount's medical staff guessed that Donaldson was being well paid for turning a blind eye on Creggan and risked sounding him out about it at one of the staff meetings. Sue Raudsley, a psychotherapist who had only been on the staff a few months and didn't care if she were sacked, was spokeswoman and junior enough to sound naive. "What, if anything, is wrong with Paul Creggan?" she asked. Donaldson, antic.i.p.ating the question at some stage, but not just then when he wasn't in the mood to answer it, had snapped back: "His desire to pitch a tent in the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, sleep on a trestle bed and eat appalling food. Normal behaviour, would you say?" The Raudsley woman, to his annoyance, had pressed on: Was Creggan suffering from stress, failure to respond to the para-sympathetic nervous system, perhaps? Or could his night walks be linked with depression and diurnal variation of mood? If so, why wasn't he on medication? Valid questions. Donaldson, furious that his ethical credibility was being impugned, had congratulated her drily on her text-book knowledge and suggested that she might learn to apply it more effectively when she had more clinical experience. It hadn't been a comfortable session and he had brought it to an abrupt end.

He was thinking about it now as he approached Creg-gan's tent. Creggan had his back to the tent flap, which was open, and was pulling a jersey over his head. His suit was on the floor, gathering dust from the tarpaulin and the sisal matting. The tent smelt of gra.s.s and Creg-gan's after-shave, which he wouldn't use again until he was back in London.

Donaldson greeted him coldly. "Welcome back. You left on impulse, perhaps. Your note was very brief. I would have appreciated being told. A few minutes of your time in my consulting room wouldn't have delayed you too much."

Creggan apologised. "You're right. It was discourteous of me. I attended the funeral and then ..." he spread his hands, shrugged. "It was upsetting. I didn't stop to think." He picked the suit up from the floor and put it on the bed. "Do sit down. It's good to see you again. Good to be here."

"I wasn't aware you knew the Bradshaws." Donaldson sat on the only chair there. It was made of wicker but with a thickly padded back and seat.

"No," Creggan said. "Put it this way, I joined the party like a great many more. The lady with the camera spoilt the show - or added more interest to it, depending on your point of view."

Had all The Mount patients attended, Donaldson felt like telling him, Press interest would have been intense, the villagers would have been outraged and he would have been reported to the G.M.C. for unprofessional conduct.

Creggan's answer to his question about knowing the Bradshaws hadn't been a clear negative. Donaldson put it to him again. "I wondered if you had met Mrs Bradshaw - Lisa - during one of her visits here."

"Here - to my tepee?" Creggan deliberately misunderstood him. "Oh, no, Doctor Donaldson. Far too primitive. Not at all the right surroundings for the lady - any lady. Fine for me, of course. And for my dog." He clicked his fingers. "Come on, boy, come and be introduced."

The animal, part ba.s.set, part rough-haired terrier of some sort, had been curled up asleep behind a wooden crate containing a dozen bottles of Dom Perignon champagne. Creggan's gift of appeas.e.m.e.nt.

"Champers from us both," he told Donaldson. "For you and your staff. Or just for you." He fondled the dog's silky ears. "He's called Perignon, too. Perry for short. Your delectable little Sally has suggested that he stays at White Oak Farm, if the farmer agrees and you won't have him. He has kennels, she tells me, and a cattery. I can collect him there for walkies."

Donaldson eyed the dog dubiously. It eyed him back, yawned, then wagged its tail. A cheerful animal. He remembered Creggan's allusion to the black dog of despair during the first interview. And his later attempt to bribe his way in. The champagne now was a bribe. How would pompous Miss Raudsley react to that? More importantly, how should he?

"I can't allow a dog on the premises," at least he could be definite about that, "and if you tried keeping it out here it could still wander indoors and be a nuisance to the patients. As for keeping it at Millington's farm - that would be all right by day - but going up there and collecting it at night and taking it on night walks in the country where there are sheep ..."

Creggan interrupted him. "On a lead, Steven. And not always at night. I promise you there'll be no trouble."

It was the first time Creggan had used his Christian name. It didn't signify anything, most of the older members of staff used it. Even so ... a growing familiarity? Or a touch of contempt?

"Medication might help you," he suggested, resuming the dominant role, "if you have trouble sleeping."

"Ah, but I do sleep," Creggan pointed out, "whenever I feel like it. Just as Perry sleeps whenever he feels like it. Look at him now." The dog had slumped down again and was resting its muzzle on its paws. Its eyes were closing. "Your therapy might seem unorthodox to some, but you've helped me enormously," Creggan went on, unaware that he couldn't have said anything more apposite. "It would help even more if I could have a companion on my walks. If you'd allow it I'd be immensely grateful."

Donaldson remembered a wet patch on the ceiling of his flat where the roof leaked. How grateful? Possibly that grateful? Creggan's attempt to bribe his way into The Mount had annoyed him. His conscience these days was less tender.

And he might have known Lisa. If so, he might be persuaded to talk about her, and that could be revealing.

As for the dog ... more unorthodox therapy? On the contrary. "All right," he conceded. "I'll try and fix things up with the farmer on your behalf. If Millington agrees, then the dog can stay."

Creggan, very relieved, tried not to show it. He had done enough reconnoitring on his own, surveying possible sites. Lush, soft, spongy ground. All he needed was the help of four strong paws and a muzzle that could pick up the right scent.

Max Cormack and Creggan's dog moved into White Oak Farm on the same day. Millington accorded them both a similar welcome - not effusive. He didn't like dogs but the kennels and cattery were a source of income, badly needed. As for having Bradshaw's successor as a paying guest, he would rather have had someone else, had anyone else wanted to come. But there wasn't anyone -and Maybridge had recommended him. If he refused to have him he'd upset Maybridge, and that might not be wise. Maybridge had sensed his reluctance and made a feeble joke about the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury being pally these days. An accusation of bigotry he resented. He was a staunch Nonconformist, but having an Irish Catholic in his home didn't worry him. He didn't have to go to his church any more than he had to go to the local C. of E. where his wife played the organ. He just didn't like Cormack's job. He had heard he was working on a wino who had fallen into the docks and drowned. Not that Cormack had said he was a wino, one just a.s.sumed it. It could have been suicide, of course. He imagined a white whale-like body on a slab with flippers for fingers. How could it be fingerprinted if the skin had all come off? Would Cormack have to rely on the teeth for identification? What if the corpse was toothless and the dentures lost?

On a more personal level, would this young doctor resent a question about the hernia operation that his G.P. had recommended and had gone wrong? Or did he only deal with the dead?

Millington put Cormack's suitcase down in the large, white painted, sun filled bedroom on the top floor and told him that he wore a truss. Cormack, delighted with the bedroom, said he was sorry to hear it. He had offered to carry the case himself but the wiry little farmer, ruddy cheeked like a garden gnome, had insisted on taking it from him. He asked him, unwisely, why a truss in these enlightened days, and Millington told him - at length. Cormack mumbled something appropriate about mishaps not always being avoidable.

"They're mishaps when they happen to other people," Millington stated bitterly. "How would you like it to happen to you?"

Not an auspicious start in new digs. Cormack wondered if he had been unwise leaving the old ones. But this room looked out over acres of spring-green countryside, and the house itself was superb. Old, creaky, bulging, uneven walls, beams, probably damp, but glorious for all that. Packed full of history. Bradshaw's place, as yet seen only from the outside, couldn't be more different. Modern. Functional. But, of the two, Josie would probably prefer it. He would be glad when she came back to Britain. He wanted to settle down. Have kids.

He changed the subject by asking Millington if he had any family. Millington said he had a brother farming in France and wouldn't mind selling up and joining him. "What good has the E.E.C. done the farmers over here, tell me that? At least he makes a living over there. My wife wouldn't go, though, that's the trouble. Likes being here, she says. Born in Macklestone. Has put down roots. You have to be born in a place to put down roots. You're not accepted otherwise. You're tolerated, that's all. I've been here twenty years and I'm tolerated. Nothing more".

Cormack saw it as a back-handed compliment to the villagers. A very tolerant lot, obviously - Millington amused him, but in small doses only. Macklestone, like all villages, might have barren soil here and there, and if you want to put down roots you have to nourish it to some extent. Like being sociable. He invited him to have a drink with him in the local when he'd unpacked.

Millington declined. He had to be around, he explained bitterly, to give a key to the kennels to a man called Creggan who went on night walks with a dog. And that was the fault of the Common Agricultural Policy, too. In the old days you weren't so skint that you had to pander to lunatics.

Cormack raised his eyebrows and waited for more.

Millington wasn't forthcoming. His wife would have supper on the table by seven, he told him. In about half an hour. The dining-room was to the left of the front door, across the hall from the sitting-room. The sitting-room was for him to use any time he wanted to. There weren't any other paying guests at the moment. He could go in there and read. Or play the harmonium, if he wanted to, but not late at night. Cormack thanked him, said he wasn't musical but liked to read, and would be down shortly. He clenched his jaws against laughter until Millington had gone.

Mrs Millington's Christian name was Dawn and she urged Cormack to use it. He found it extremely difficult. She was too old to be called Dawn, the golden flush of youth long gone. She was in her late forties, he guessed, a heavily built woman with dark brown eyes, greying hair worn in an old-fashioned chignon, and thick strong farming hands. Hands, he was to discover, that could play the harmonium with great tenderness and skill. She spent an hour every Sat.u.r.day evening practising she chose a time when Cormack was out. It was by chance that he returned early from a visit to the Maybridges and heard her, and asked if he might sit and listen. Rather fl.u.s.tered, she agreed. She favoured Bach, she told him, and the Lutheran hymns, but nothing lugubrious. The vicar's choice of hymns, especially for funerals, was the. pits. Really dreadful. She had told him so when he had given her the list for the Bradshaws' funeral, but he hadn't listened. She had been sorry in her heart for their son.

That her sorrow was confined to the son and was in no way extended to his parents became obvious to Cormack in subsequent conversations. To be sorry for the dead, in Cormack's view, was a waste of emotion, but to regret their demise was surely a normal charitable reaction. Her silence on this was surprising. "A dreadful tragedy," he had said, and meant it. Had she responded with something trite about G.o.d's will she wouldn't have aroused his curiosity; instead she had smiled enigmatically and asked him what he would like for his evening meal - ca.s.seroled steak, or cold chicken as the evening was warm?

It was through Mrs Millington that Cormack met Sergeant Radwell socially. He sang in the church choir and had come to borrow some sheet music so that he could photocopy it, he told Cormack. "I've had to skip a few practices, due to police work, and need to catch up. Dawn understands, luckily."

No trouble about calling her Dawn, Cormack noticed. The young sergeant, monosyllabic when in the company of his superiors, even with the easy-going Maybridge, seemed very relaxed here at the farm. Off duty, he had dressed in a navy blue sweat-shirt and jeans, which managed not to look too incongruous in the beautiful little sitting-room which had been made less beautiful by a too-large cherry-coloured three piece suite. The harmonium, the only true antique in the place, glowed softly in the low rays of the setting sun.

"Nice instrument," Radwell said.

Cormack agreed. He listened, rather bored, while Mrs Millington and Radwell had a discussion about one of the arias in the St Matthew Pa.s.sion. Radwell, to make his point, played a few notes on the harmonium with his right hand. Dawn, disagreeing with whatever it was, played it a great deal better with both hands.

Later, when Radwell had left the room to go down to the kennels to have a look at Creggan's dog, Mrs Millington told Cormack about his background. "Graham wanted to be a priest, but hadn't the right temperament. I can't imagine why he became a policeman, he hasn't the right temperament for that, either. Did you know that he was the first to find Susan Martin's body, just two miles across the fields from here? It was a Sunday evening and I'd just got in from church. I shall always remember him running across the yard - well, stumbling - and he could hardly get the words out. I thought he was ill. And then he began to cry ..." Her voice was without emotion. In the distance someone whistled and a dog barked. She put the lid of the harmonium down very gently. "He needed to use our phone to inform Maybridge, but it was some while before he could dial the number, his hand was shaking so much. When he did get through he kept on saying he was sorry, as if it was all his fault. He's not your cool professional policeman. Never will be."

Susan Martin, Cormack remembered, was Rapunzel Number Five. The only prost.i.tute who hadn't been murdered in the environs of a city. It surprised him that Craxton Copse was so close to Macklestone. The name had meant nothing to him when he had read Bradshaw's notes. He wondered if Hixon had been preaching in one of the hamlets nearby. Or had he met the girl in Bristol and enticed her into his car? Bradshaw's notes on all five cases had dealt mainly with inceptive, corroborative and indicative evidence, but had only lightly touched on the non-forensic aspects of direct and circ.u.mstantial evidence. As far as Cormack could remember, there had been very little direct evidence. Hixon had been seen in the areas where the murders had been committed, but then so had a great many other suspects. Maybridge and his team had focused on Hixon in the early days of the investigation mainly because Hixon's unstable personality had almost invited them to. The wh.o.r.e of Babylon was a recurring theme in his sermons and he wrote a couple of letters to the Bristol Evening News extolling the Liberal statesman, Gladstone, for his mission of mercy in the red light districts of nineteenth-century London. Gladstone, he declared, raised fallen women with the hand of love. Glory hallelujah! As prost.i.tutes were being felled, rather than raised, it was an unwise comment at that particular time. But it takes more than unwisdom to nail a murderer. Love in Hixon's case had been carnal l.u.s.t and the hand lethal. Seminal fluid and human hair eventually obtained and scientifically a.n.a.lysed had put him inside. End of five serial murders. Accolades to Bradshaw. Case closed.

"The body was covered with leaves," Mrs Millington said. "It had been buried a long time. Poor Graham walked over it before he realised what it was. He disturbed the evidence, or whatever his colleagues called it. It makes you wonder how many other bodies might have been disposed of in the same way."

Cormack, imagining Bradshaw's reaction to Radwell's perfidy - for G.o.d's sake, walking over a cadaver! - looked at her blankly.

Dawn Millington picked up the sheet music from the top of the harmonium and put it in the music stool. "He called himself the Reverend Hixon," she went on, "and that's what he wanted to be, of course, a pillar of the church. Sad, isn't it?"

Sad? Cormack suppressed an expletive. People were extraordinary. A man commits five murders, is thwarted in his ecclesiastical ambitions, and is put away for life. And this middle-aged, otherwise reasonable woman, who can draw tender music out of an organ and can train people to sing, feels some sympathy for him. How was he supposed to react to that? Politely and non-aggressively seemed the best bet. He told her that he felt he could do with a little fresh air and would take a stroll outside.

Sergeant Radwell liked dogs and it bothered him to see them incarcerated in kennels. Millington's kennels were six wooden sheds, fairly large, erected on concreted areas surrounded with wire netting where the animals could exercise in the open air. The set-up reminded Radwell of a prison yard, but was marginally worse. Cons could mooch around together. These dogs just looked at each other, barked, wagged their tails, let their tails droop, whined, before finally giving up and going to sleep. They were usually there for a holiday period while their owners were away. Today, Creggan's dog was the only occupant and might be there for some time. It looked unutterably sad.

"It isn't right," he said to Cormack, who had joined him. "There's plenty of room at The Mount. It should be there, or Doctor Donaldson should have refused to let Creggan have it." Millington had explained the situation to him. Apparently he had given Creggan a spare key to the kennels so that he could take the dog out whenever he wanted to. Radwell hoped it would be often. Cormack listened sympathetically, more interested in what Radwell had to tell him about The Mount generally than in the doleful little animal.