The Sad Man by P.D. Viner Read Free Book Online

analysis. As has all hairs and fabric fibres. Every surface has been dusted for fingerprints. All papers have been tagged and the contents of all bins have been collected and their contents logged and filed. One of the SOCO team then swept the room with a black light, searching for blood. He got very excited by a patch at the foot of the bed but it turned out to be glittery nail varnish. No phone was found, no laptop or personal computer – no diary and no correspondence. A small amount of cannabis was turned up and a sizable supply of condoms and lubricant. No human hair samples and no dye charts or anything to shed light on the choice to dye her hair. They log a lot of art books and art materials – there are tickets for a Royal Academy show coming up and some theatre show later in the year. There are also a number of photo albums. Tom goes through them, they seem to be mostly from university – though there are a few of Charlie at glamorous art world parties. Tom already has three officers checking on her university friends but instinctively Tom feels that is a dead end. This crime is not something from her past – it will not prove itself to be an aggrieved ex-boyfriend or a love rival. Something in his gut tells him this was far more malevolent.
    He sits on her bed and pulls open a drawer. Inside are piles of mix-tapes, each one appears themed: happy songs , sad songs , opposite songs , songs of doomed love and many many more.
    ‘You always gave me a mix-tape,’ Dani reminds him. ‘Every time you came to see me at uni – there was always a new one.’
    ‘Did you listen to them?’ he asks, though he knows she didn’t – which was probably good. They were pretty juvenile, though he enjoyed making them and spending hours inrecord stores to get things she might like. Every tape he made Dani ended with David Bowie’s ‘Be My Wife’. Or it would have if he hadn’t erased it every time.
    ‘You need to see this,’ one of the SOCO men calls over to Tom. ‘It’s a Polaroid. It was in this book.’
    He hands over a copy of On The Road and a photo. It is of Charlie with her new hairstyle. In it she is topless. She looks brazenly at the camera, as if at a lover.
    ‘Very retro and arty – muted colours,’ The SOCO man offers.
    Tom stares at the photo. ‘Patterson, I want to know who took this.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Get someone in analysis to look at it. I want them to see if they can find a reflection in her eyes, in the glass behind her – anything. I want to see the photographer.’
    Patterson looks incredulous. ‘You watch too much TV.’
    ‘Just get it to them.’
    Patterson waits until he is out of the room to shake his head. In fact he is at the communal stairs before his phone rings and he answers it.
    ‘Oh fuck. Fuckety fuck fuck.’ He turns on his heel and runs back to the flat. ‘Guv!’
    Tom hears the urgency and looks up.
    ‘We’ve got three more.’

Seven
    Saturday 16 October 1999
    Interpol finally fax over the full reports at 2 a.m. Three women killed: two found in Brussels, and the third in Amsterdam. Each of the women had silver-blond hair. Each of them had a single stab wound in the stomach and bled to death, the blood pooling around them. But these are not the details that brought these cases to Tom’s attention – oh no. In each case, the women had a shape carved into their upper chests. A lark’s head knot.
    ‘You should get some sleep,’ Dani tells him.
    ‘I can sleep when I’m dead.’
    ‘You’re joking. That’s an urban myth. There’s no sleep for the dead.’
    ‘Then I’ll sleep when I’m fired.’
    ‘Good idea, then you can lie-in until Countdown comes on. Or Murder She Wrote .’
    Tom carries on reading and rereading the notes. Three murders were committed eighteen years earlier between September 1980 and June 1981, all similar to that of Charlie Brindley-Black. Why? How? And is this an English killer who went to Europe to try out his skills? Or a European murderer