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  Eloise shrugged: ‘Sure.’

  Both Marshall and Eloise had looked longingly at The Rembrandt Hotel, but seeing as Chambers was paying, they’d politely agreed to his suggestion, the three of them sitting down at a sticky table in the McDonald’s down the road. Stuffing his face, Chambers listened in as Marshall conducted the interview:

  ‘I’ll start with a few easy ones,’ she told Eloise. ‘Were you in a relationship with Robert Coates?’

  ‘Yes … That was easy!’

  ‘From when until when?’

  She thought about it and then started counting on her fingers:

  ‘March until November, ninety-four. Eight months. We’d talk in the corridors when no one was around, steal a few minutes here and there whenever we were able. He didn’t want anybody knowing about us. He was paranoid about it – a real stickler for the rules. Our first “official” date was the evening of my graduation.’ She scowled at Chambers: ‘Is that your second burger?’

  ‘I’ve been up since five!’

  ‘And how would you describe Robert?’ Marshall continued, both women edging away from the lump of chewed meat Chambers had spat across the table.

  Again, Eloise took her time to consider the answer:

  ‘Handsome, charming,’ she blushed as though he’d just walked by and paid her a compliment, ‘fiercely intelligent and … intense.’

  ‘Intense? In what way?’

  ‘In every way. Like how he asked me to marry him after just three months …’ Marshall raised her eyebrows – she was intending to wait until her chosen suitor had proven their worth and was buried six feet under before lamenting the fact that perhaps they should’ve got hitched after all. ‘… And then every single day after that,’ Eloise added sadly. ‘I thought it was romantic at the time. Now, I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Were you two often … intimate?’

  ‘Woah! As much as I’d love to share details of my sex life with you and the Hamburglar here, I think you need to tell me what this is about.’

  ‘Your ex is a serial killer,’ Chambers replied bluntly. ‘He murdered three people back in eighty-nine and another this morning: a young woman … cut off her arms.’ Marshall pulled a ‘Are you crazy?’ face at him. ‘What?’ he said, picking up a handful of chips. ‘It’s going to be all over the news anyway.’

  Taking a few moments to process the revelation, Eloise merely nodded in response.

  ‘Forgive me for saying,’ started Marshall, ‘but for someone who spent eight months of their life with this person, you don’t seem overly shocked.’

  ‘And as someone who ended that relationship and then went out of their way to try to ensure they never saw that person again … I’m not.’

  ‘Try to?’ asked Marshall.

  ‘Robert still contacts me from time to time: letters … flowers. I just tend to ignore them.’

  ‘When was the last time?’

  ‘I don’t know. Months ago,’ she shrugged.

  ‘You had your suspicions about him then?’

  ‘It was only a small thing,’ said Eloise, gazing out of the window, as if watching the story unfold somewhere out on the street. ‘He’d been staying round at mine more often. Things were good. We were happy. Every night, though, there’d be this scratching in the walls, the sound of something scrabbling about right by our heads.’

  ‘A mouse?’ asked Marshall.

  ‘Right. So, what do you do when you have a mouse? You go and buy traps. Which is precisely what I did – not even the humane, trap it and let it go outside, sort. I went for the proper metal bar on a spring, crush-it-to-death type. I wanted that creature dead … until the morning I noticed the trap had gone that is.

  ‘I went downstairs, headed into the kitchen, and had never felt so disgusted with myself – seeing that harmless little animal pinned but still thrashing around in pain. I just wanted to turn back time, nurse it back to health, build it a cosy little home in the wall – put a little light in there for it. Because now that I thought about it, hearing him scratching away at night was reassuring. It meant that I was never really alone.

  ‘Anyway, Robert had clearly just found it and decided to put the poor thing out of its misery before I could get upset. I was just about to sneak back out of the room when I saw him remove the cheese knife from the drawer. One of the really sharp curved ones with the two prongs at the end? And that’s when I spotted two other knives out on the work surface, both stained with blood. I gasped, and he turned to look at me. He didn’t say anything … just stood there with this emotionless expression and these dead eyes. It was like I was seeing him for the very first time … The real him.

  ‘You know when a child picks the wings off a crane fly? It’s a cruel act of dominance dismissed as “normal naïve interest”, justifiable by a developing mind’s lack of understanding of consequence, of coming to terms with one’s place in the natural order,’ she said, the ditzy persona giving way to an articulate university graduate’s mind, the change in her as dramatic as anything Robert Coates could conjure. ‘It was like that – not so much that he was enjoying torturing a tiny animal, more that he needed to do it.’

  Hamburger ruined, Chambers placed it back in the wrapping.

  ‘Did you report it?’ Marshall asked her.

  ‘To whom?’ Eloise asked impatiently. ‘The police? And tell them what exactly – about an already dying mouse and a creepy look? I don’t think they’d send the helicopters in, do you?’

  Marshall looked a little embarrassed.

  ‘Did the two of you have a dog?’ asked Chambers, when a more pressing concern came to mind. He quickly turned to Marshall: ‘What happened to our dog?’

  ‘Winter’s mum has got him for now.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said in relief.

  ‘She named him Bertie.’

  ‘Bertie? He’s not a Bertie,’ he scoffed disapprovingly before returning to the original question: ‘So, did the two of you have a dog?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  Eloise watched him for a moment, but then took the opportunity to ask one of her own questions:

  ‘You said he … cut a girl’s arms off?’ she whispered, appropriately appalled.

  ‘While she was incapacitated … a bit like your mouse,’ replied Chambers, an accusatory barb to his voice, as though she should have seen the signs.

  ‘My God.’

  ‘… Before posing her like The Venus de Milo,’ he added.

  Eloise didn’t even flinch, her colour fading as, outside, threatening clouds moved in, casting gloom over the entire restaurant.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Marshall on seeing the look on her face.

  ‘It’s just … It’s just so like Robert,’ she replied. ‘He has this … need to create something beautiful out of ugliness. It’s probably the thing I loved about him the most,’ she laughed bitterly. ‘How sick is that? It’s weird, I suppose, but it’s like his way of coping with the things he can’t accept.’

  ‘Such as?’ Marshall pushed her.

  ‘Such as when there was a fire at the university. They lost half the art block – all those years of work, irreplaceable … unrepeatable. And do you know what Robert did? He spent an entire week knee-deep in the debris recreating what he could from memory – these incredible ashen sculptures.’

  ‘Sculptures?’ asked Marshall, sharing a look with her colleague.

  Eloise nodded, smiling wistfully at the memory despite what she had just learned about the hero of her story:

  ‘It was truly amazing … truly. Oh! Or the time I broke my arm and was told I couldn’t paint for months. I was utterly inconsolable. But Robert, he sat by my side for almost two days straight creating one of the most incredible paintings I’ve ever seen on my cast to cheer me up.’

  ‘What did he paint?’ Marshall asked her, sounding more like an envious friend than a police officer.

  ‘Us,’ smiled Eloise, eyes glistening. ‘Us as Apollo and Daphne … What?’ s
he asked, noticing the concerned looks on the faces of the two detectives opposite. ‘… What?!’

  ‘We’re going to need you to come with us.’

  ‘Think you could’ve thrown some fake blood around? Made it look a little more nightmarish in here?’ Chambers asked Constable Dogsbody (no one knew his actual name) in irritation, on being confronted with the gallery of enlarged crime-scene photographs alongside commanding works of art. Struggling for room, the overzealous young man had even covered the windows, lending the pictures against the glass an eerie glow as the light seeped in around the edges.

  They had brought Eloise back to New Scotland Yard for further questioning, the terrifying room in Homicide their base from which to investigate the murders alongside their rapidly expanding team. Transfixed by the haunting images surrounding her, Eloise walked a lap of the evidence wall while Chambers evicted his subordinates and switched on some lights.

  ‘Is this all Robert?’ she asked, her voice distant and dazed.

  Adopting a respectful whisper, Marshall nodded: ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re sort of beautiful in a way, aren’t they?’ said Eloise. ‘… I mean, it’s terrible, of course. These poor people,’ she added quickly but unable to hide the spark of wonderment in her hazel eyes.

  ‘Take your time,’ Marshall told her. ‘Any insight you can give us, no matter how small, could be significant.’

  ‘I really don’t know what I’m going to be able to tell you beyond these clearly being Robert recreating the defining moments of his life … But I guess you already knew that.’ She was met with two very blank expressions. ‘… You didn’t already know that?’

  ‘Perhaps you could elaborate a little?’ suggested Marshall, figuring it sounded better than outright admitting they’d had no idea.

  ‘They were found in this order?’ Eloise asked her.

  ‘They were.’

  She took a pair of glasses out of her pocket and pushed them onto her nose, analysing Henry John Dolan’s autopsy pictures as though critiquing a painting:

  ‘Robert always had an affinity for The Thinker; this lone figure sitting deep in contemplation in the midst of the chaos depicted in The Gates of Hell: immersed and yet separate somehow,’ she told them. ‘There are different interpretations: some believe the figure to be Dante reflecting on his nine circles of hell, whereas others believe it to be—’

  ‘Rodin himself,’ Chambers finished on her behalf, wishing more people had been around to hear the most cultured thing he was ever likely to say.

  ‘Robert conformed to that second school of thought because that was how he saw himself … intellectually … creatively – as one who didn’t belong in the scene in which they were trapped, his potential squandered by a world that didn’t appreciate him.’

  ‘And that didn’t set off any alarm bells?’ Chambers asked her.

  ‘Arrogance and the arts tend to go hand in hand,’ shrugged Eloise. ‘He used to draw it all the time. Like obsessively. Where other people sit there daydreaming, doodling rubbish, he’d scribble these incredible sketches without even realising.’ She moved onto the area of wall dedicated to Nicolette Cotillard holding her dead son in homage to Michelangelo’s masterpiece. ‘Pietà. This is clearly a reference to his mother,’ she announced.

  ‘Meredith?’ blurted Marshall in surprise, feeling a six-foot garden gnome might have been more apt.

  ‘No. I mean his biological mother.’ Chambers and Marshall glanced at one another; it was probably a good time to say the ‘could you elaborate’ thing again. ‘She was a drug addict,’ continued Eloise, Marshall unconsciously scratching the pockmarks on her inner arm. ‘… Heroin, a vice she passed on to her son when he was born. Meredith didn’t tell you any of this?’ she asked them, surprised.

  Marshall simply shook her head in response, not wanting the conversation to veer off onto the topic of an elderly woman’s worsening dementia.

  ‘Long story short: Robert was an incredibly tiny and unhealthy baby, who stopped breathing twice in his first few days of life. He always struggled to get his head around it, how close he came to barely existing – everything he would go on to achieve and create just erased like that,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘lying in the arms of a woman too far gone to even notice.’

  ‘The Virgin Mary wasn’t an addict though,’ Marshall pointed out.

  ‘But Nicolette Cotillard was,’ Chambers reminded her. ‘And I don’t need to tell you how much Alphonse had going for him.’ Picking up on the bizarre comment, Eloise glanced between the two detectives inquisitively but neither elaborated. ‘Perhaps even worthy of playing Robert Coates in one of his “masterpieces”,’ he suggested.

  ‘As was Henry John Dolan by that logic,’ said Marshall sceptically. ‘I’m not seeing much of a resemblance there.’

  ‘Maybe we’re being too literal,’ said Chambers. ‘Maybe it’s more symbolic than that. Henry Dolan was undoubtedly an impressive specimen of a man. In another time, he’d have been a gladiator or a warlord rather than “wasted” as a backing dancer and television extra.’

  ‘Now you’re thinking more like Robert,’ Eloise told him. ‘The truth is we’re deep in his head here, and I doubt we’re going to make head nor tail of it. What we do know is that in his own twisted way, he’s trying to find meaning and beauty in the ugliness of what he’s doing. And, for whatever reason, he’s chosen this image,’ she pointed to a photograph of the actual sculpture, ‘to associate with that trauma.’

  ‘What about this one?’ asked Chambers, moving her on.

  ‘Perseus with the Head of Medusa,’ said Eloise. ‘Why is there no photograph of the bodies?’

  ‘Because he didn’t get to finish.’

  ‘Oh. Best guess: this is him finally freeing himself of her once and for all.’

  ‘His mother?’ asked Marshall.

  Eloise nodded: ‘Even though Meredith had adopted him, he had scheduled weekly visits with his mother up to the age of eleven. She still had a huge amount of influence over his life until …’ She trailed off. ‘I suppose it makes no difference now: he stole some of Meredith’s opioid medication from the medicine cabinet and slipped it into his recovering mother’s cup of tea. By the end of the week, she’d been found passed out in a squat house and denied access to him until she could prove she was clean … which never happened. That small act represented him emerging victorious over the greatest monster in his life … Who did he select as his Perseus?’

  ‘We never found a body,’ said Chambers.

  ‘Then who did he choose to be the severed head of Medusa?’

  ‘… Me.’

  She looked troubled: ‘Wow. He must really hate you.’

  ‘I think so, yeah.’

  She walked over to the next set of crime-scene photographs – the half-naked and disfigured body of the Venus de Milo perched on the banks of the river:

  ‘Who was she?’

  Marshall didn’t even need to consult her sheet of paper: ‘Tamsin Fuller, a technician from the art department at the uni.’

  ‘Must have joined after I left. And these?’ she asked, gesturing to the collection of waxy green leaves that had been scooped into an evidence bag.

  ‘They were scattered all around the victim,’ explained Chambers, ‘but didn’t appear to match any of the trees in the area. I’ve got someone trying to identify—’

  ‘Laurel,’ she interrupted him. ‘They’re laurel leaves … It’s a message,’ she said, staring up at the mutilated corpse, for the first time with an appropriate degree of revulsion and sorrow.

  ‘A message?’ Marshall asked her.

  With a nod, Eloise took a deep breath: ‘… That this one is me.’

  CHAPTER 23

  Barry ‘shit job’ King was living up to his name. Where his fellow Rangers would spend their days talking to girls, planting trees and making friends with squirrels, it somehow always fell to him to put out the fires, evict the groups of underage drinkers and deal with the wildlife on its
last legs. And it was this disagreeable task that had him bouncing his 4x4 down the gravel track to the lake at two minutes past finishing time, following a report of blood and feathers on the footpath. Typically, the caller hadn’t been able to wait, which meant he had a half-hour traipse through the dark for whatever the foxes had left for him to find.

  He stopped the engine when the headlight beams skipped across the water like skimmed stones, the handbrake creaking dubiously as he climbed out and set off on his lap of the lake. Sweeping his torch over the uneven terrain, Barry prayed it was only one of the bastarding Canada Geese:

  ‘Not Big Bob the duck,’ he whispered. ‘Please not Big Bob.’

  Approximately a quarter of the way around the lake, in a predictably muddy area of the bank, the first fluffy white feathers caught the torchlight, trembling in the breeze as if still reeling from whatever ordeal they had just witnessed. Like snowflakes in the dirt, he followed the greatest concentration into the treeline, whiteness gradually replaced with crimson – those feathers perfectly still … saturated … dead.

  Noticing a trail of blood glistening up a felled tree, he clambered over the trunk, twisting his ankle on what awaited him on the other side: the remains of two adult swans, their long necks slack and twisted, gaping dark holes where their wings had once attached to their bodies.

  ‘What the hell?’ he muttered, shining the torch around in search of the missing parts, despite knowing that no fox in existence could take down two large cobs in one go.

  Beginning to feel a little vulnerable alone with the silence, he scrambled back over the tree trunk and hurried towards the lake, deciding it was a job that could wait until the morning.

  Marshall glanced down at the multicoloured display tent … and then back up at Winter:

  ‘I’m not getting in that.’

  ‘Come on,’ he told her. ‘I don’t finish for another forty minutes.’

  ‘I am a police officer. I’m not going to hide from your—’

  ‘Shit! Dan’s coming!’ whispered Winter, apparently through his ample back end as it disappeared through the opening.