"I don't have to tell you that I don't want a word of this getting out yet," Jack said to the assembled men in the room just down the corridor from his own small office.
"And that tape stays in the safe. Any bootleg copies and you'll have me to answer to, as well as the Court of Session."
There was a general muttering. Some of them men turned to look at their colleagues as if protesting their innocence, protesting at the suggestion that they might even consider such a thing.
"We don't know if there is a connection, except that we're fairly sure he was seen near the scene of Marta Herkik's murder on the night in question, so I want you to get back round the doors and ask some more questions."
Ralph Slater was sitting at the back of the room, his doleful face in his hands.
"Right lads, back out in to the night, and see if you can bring me something."
There was more general muttering as they moved out. Jack had managed to borrow four other officers, two men and two women from a neighbouring division, all of whom had worked or lived in Levenford at some time. It made it easier when the police knew the ground. It helped when you were looking for connections.
Jack motioned to Ralph Slater who was at the tail end of the group leaving the room, then beckoned to John McColl..
"You wait on.There's a couple of things you might want a look at."
Both men nodded agreeably and followed Jack back to the office on the corner. On the way, John paused. "The superintendent's looking for you."
"I know that. I'm busy."
"I'd watch him. He's a real bad bastard."
"Not as bad as me when I make my mind up to it," Jack responded with a tight smile.
"He could break you, you know. Just a word of warning."
"I could give a damn. He's as useless as tits on a bull."
"Just thought I'd put my spoke in," John said. "The boys think you're okay, despite the degree."
John was referring to Jack's accelerated promotion, something that had come almost automatically after he'd gained honours in criminology. The degree had helped in other ways. He'd made a very helpful range of contacts at the university.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence. Tell them I appreciate it. I'll tell them myself when I get the chance."
He opened the door and let them in before him, then crossed to the television in the corner. A video recorder sat on top of the set.
"Looks like another bummer as far as immediate forensics are concerned," Ralph said. "I don't think there's ever been anybody in that room but him. We've not checked the prints, but the ones we have lifted seem to be from the same pair of hands."
"You can tell that just by looking?"
"Been in the game a long time," Ralph replied, taking the compliment.
"What did you think of the set-up?"
"Bloody weird. Looks like a right nutter."
Jack went along with that, but there was more.
When he'd gone back down the narrow staircase to Simpson's cellar, he'd had the same sense of wrongness that he'd felt in the Herkik house. It was nothing that he could put his finger on, just a feeling that prickled the hairs on the back of his neck and scraped on his nerves like nails on a blackboard. Maybe it was the sum total of many things.
The place had smelled like the Herkik murder scene. A mixture of blood and dust. The only difference was, there was no scent of charred flesh. The odour of faeces and urine had hung in the air like a dirty mist, an assault on the nose, and underlying that, a whiff of something rotten.
Simpson was turning slowly on the rope, his head to the side, swollen and turning black, jaw jutting to the left, making his lip pout like a man who's had a stroke. He was naked, apart from a pair of Argyll socks and plain black shoes. His clothes were neatly folded on the desk. Below him, saturated with blood, a pair of small plain panties lay crumpled on the floor beside an equally soaked handkerchief. The man's eyes bulged out from behind a small, pink pair of glasses that looked incongruously childish on the bloated face. One of the lenses was completely gone and through the empty frame, Jack could see the dead man's eye socket was a mass of blood. At first glance it looked as if there was no eye at all.
Jack walked slowly around the slowly turning cadaver. The stench was overpowering. There was a mess on the upturned chair and on the threadbare carpet on which it lay. The thick electrical flex had been tied with a simple knot to a screw-in hook which had been driven into the solid wood of the beam above. The noose was a simple hitch loop, not the kind a hangman would have used. As he moved around, Jack saw something pink lying on the floor. He hunkered down, careful to touch nothing.
He peered closer and saw the little fingers splayed out and his heart sank, his mind immediately conjuring up the baby picture Cissie Doyle had given him of her missing baby. He breathed a sigh of relief when he edged closer and saw that it was not a baby's hand. The light above glinted on the smooth plastic of a doll's arm, baby pudgy, its shoulder end red with congealing blood. He drew a deep breath, thankful it had not been little Timmy Doyle, though after five days, the hopes of finding the baby alive in any case were fading to zero.
After a moment, he stood up again and continued his slow walk around the hanging man. The desk, apart from the clothes, was completely covered in ten by eight black and white photographs, all of them showing children, some taken from odd angles. Over against the wall, there was sink and a draining board bearing flat oblong containers. These two held pictures. Jack could smell the fixer fluid. One glance at the photographs floating in the discoloured liquid told him there was something else very odd about the Reverend William Simpson. He leaned over to have another look. The first picture was very clear, a little girl lying on grass. The second was, at first glimpse, a confusing jumble of lines and shades. He shifted, cocking his head to the side, and then the picture snapped into clarity. It was the same child, taken from a different angle, much closer in. Jack could tell by the position of the left knee which was slightly raised out from the body. The close up shot angled between the pale thighs to a glistening dark patch. As soon as the picture flicked into focus, Jack knew the dark patch was blood.
An instant flash of memory hit him like a kick in the belly, and on its heels a sudden surge of almost uncontrollable anger. He turned away from the developing containers, feeling hot bile rise in his throat and the muscles of his stomach clench and unclench. Simpson's one eye glared at him from behind the child's glasses. For an incandescent second he wanted to rip the corpse down and kick it and not stop until there was nothing left. His fists balled his knuckles white, but he pressed down on his anger, turning away, continuing the round.
It was then that he heard the whispering whirr from the filing cabinet directly opposite the hanged man. He moved forward carefully, making sure he stood on nothing and leaned to the right. The lens of the video camera was like a black eye inside the hood. On the side of the camera, a small red light winked in the dark of the corner.
"Jesus," Jack breathed. He was about to say something else, but then he realised that if the tape was running, everything that happened in the room would be evidence, faithfully recorded on tape. He thought back to his anger bubbling up and a sick feeling of relief welled up from the pit of his belly that he hadn't hauled the dead man down and kicked the shit out of him. That would have looked very bad in court.
He walked quickly past the blind eye of the lens, a blind eye that was taking everything in, then turned to Simpson. He was now facing straight at the policeman, head jerked to the side, face black, chest matted with blood which had streaked down a protruding belly and tangled in the grey pubic hairs. Between the legs, penis and testicles were grossly swollen, as black as the face was. Tightly wrapped around them was a black electrical cable.
And from the cable dangled the weight of an old pressing iron. It knocked like a pendulum against the dead man's shins, pointing to the ground like a ponderous arrowhead.
As Jack stood staring, footsteps thudded down he stone steps outside the basement. The door banged open and the footfalls, now louder, clattered towards the store-room. John McColl lowered his head to save banging it on the lintel, came squeezing through the narrow door, then raised himself up to almost his full height.
"Came as quickly as I..." he started to say, then saw the naked and bloody apparition dangling from the beam.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Jack," he said before Jack could stop him. "What the hell's going on here?"
Jack held a finger up to his lips. He was standing off to the side, away from where the lens was pointing. He jerked a finger in the direction of the camcorder and then made a sliding motion with one finger across his neck.
"What's that?" Big John asked. His eye took in what Jack was pointing at.
"Oh shite," the policeman said.
Two hours later Jack sat beside Ralph Slater facing the television in the office.
He used a remote control to switch it on, selected a spare channel, then used a forefinger to push the play button on the camera which sat beside it, an umbilical cable connecting it to the set.
"I've already had a look at some of this, but we'll take it right from the start. We'll probably need batteries before the night's out."
"We've got a cassette adaptor. It lets you use these things in a recorder," Ralph offered,
"That would help," Jack agreed. "Now, are you sitting comfortably?"
It was a poor attempt at levity, but the other two went along with it. For the next hour, they sat, horribly fascinated, as they watched the death of William Simpson in all its detail again and again.
It was the most appalling, most fascinating thing either of them had even seen, and the most horrific Ralph Slater had ever witnessed, chiefly because he was always on the scene after a death, using his skills to work out what had happened. Now his abilities, he thought, were redundant. There was no doubt about what had happened to William Simpson.
It was not the worst thing Jack had ever seen, not by a long chalk, because what was unfolding on the television screen was happening to somebody he did not know, or particularly care about. He cared even less after what he'd seen in the developing trays on the draining board.
The screen ran blank for less than a second, then flickered to life. Something blurred, casting a shadow, then pulled back, focussing in to become the hand that had been used to press the record button. The scene jiggled a little as the camera was moved slightly, then went still. The focus was clear and distinct and there was enough light from the overhead bulb to throw everything into sharp detail.
Simpson leaned back, staring into the lens. His face held no expression whatsoever. He stood like that, staring with dead eyes right at the two policemen, and raised his hands up to pull his dog-collar away from his neck. The sound came crisp and sharp. They could even hear the rustle of the material. He turned and laid the collar and the black front bib down on the table, then removed his jacket and his trousers. He swivelled to face the camera again, standing in his shirt and a pair of oddly bright boxer shorts. He started removing buttons then slipped the shirt from his shoulders. They were beefy and covered in hair. He laid it down with the rest of his clothes, taking his time to fold it neatly, bent, grunting a little, and removed the shorts before taking the belt from his trousers and cinching it around his paunchy waist then turned to stare once again, into the lens.
"Are you all sitting comfortably" he said. It gave Jack a shiver. He hadn't watched the complete re-run. Simpson had said exactly what he himself had asked Ralph Slater. It was almost like deja-vu.
"Then I'll begin," Simpson continued. He had a strong, quite deep voice, one used to preaching from the pulpit.
Just then, he smiled at the camera. The movement only encompassed his mouth. His eyes did not smile at all. They looked completely and utterly lifeless. It was like watching a rictus develop on a corpse.
The man turned to the desk, opened a drawer and pulled out a small box. He reached for his jacket, fished out a ring of keys, slotted one into the lock and snapped it open. The lid rose with a tiny squeal of protest. Jack thought it was like watching someone perform a religious ceremony. It reminded him of catholic priests he'd seen at the occasional funeral or wedding. They always seemed to open something and bring out sacred objects. Simpson was handling each of the articles and lay them down with a certain decree of reverence. Jack recognised the little panties he'd seen lying wet on the floor. The white square of handkerchief followed, then the small pair of pink spectacles, then the doll's arm.
The minister lifted them all and placed them on a chair in front of the camera, laying the cloth objects over the back. The spectacles he slid over his nose, hooking the short, pliable legs behind his ears with some difficulty, then stuck the doll's arm under his belt, where it remained like a twisted pink handgun.
He moved away then returned, filling the screen. At first, none of them could make out what he had in his hands, then the man moved and they could see it clearly. The light glanced off the flat-iron and beamed coldly into the screen. Simpson carefully mounted the chair. They saw him first take the flex and loop it slowly around his testicles. The erection started immediately. Another loop spun round the rising penis, then three more, before, with a quick movement, the man tied a quick knot and jerked hard. They all heard the sudden groan of pain. The iron lowered slowly from his hands and jarred to a stop when it reached the end of its travel. The three of them groaned aloud, as Simpson had done, and simultaneously crossed their legs, imagining the excruciating pain they would have felt. The minister's mouth only twisted downwards a little, but his eyes remained expressionless, and that was the most awful thing about it. He looked like a man in a complete trance, like a walking automaton.
Everything at the man's crotch swelled hugely, until both observers thought they might burst, although they knew that had not happened.
"For the love of God," Ralph muttered. It was the first word either of them had spoken since the machine had started to turn.
On screen the minister took the other piece of flex and tied it carefully, near the middle of its length, on the hook close to his head. The short end he roped twice around his own neck, then tied the loose piece to the short length reaching to the hook, thus securing the noose. It was pulled so tightly he was hauled up on to the balls of his feet.
The back of the chair was just high enough for him to reach for the little panties. He picked them up and ran them over his face, snuffling at them like a pig rooting for acorns, like a dog checking a bitch. When he drew it down again, they watched as he slid his tongue over his bottom lip.
"Ha ha," he said. It was not a laugh. It was a statement. Jack felt his hackles rise again. Beside him, John pulled himself back slightly. The flat sound the man had made was cold as ice. His eyes glared from the screen.
He rubbed the panties over his chest, then down his belly and finally to his groin. He held the material over his swollen organ and started to rub it slowly up and down.
"Suffer little children," he said, in a voice that was a dreamy moan. "Better for thee that they put a millstone round thy neck and cast thyself into the sea, than thou corrupt any of these, my little ones."
Simpson grinned, though his eyes still glared, then the grin faded. The man started out from the flat screen and the eyes lost their hard, mad look. He reached out a hand towards the camera, still holding the little panties. His face sagged, like a child about to cry. They saw his lips move, trying to articulate again. He mumbled something.
"What was that?" John asked.
Jack held up a hand and leaned forward to the screen, head half- turned to listen.
The minister whispered again.
"Help me". Both of them heard the words. The man's eyes rolled, as if he'd just awoken and discovered himself in danger. Ralph looked at Jack, eyebrows raised.
Then in a flick, the expression changed again. The eyes went stony and flat, as if a film of ice had frosted them over.
"No help. No help. None for the wicked." the hard voice, so different from the pained whisper, snapped out.
"To be, or not to be. That is the question." Despite the constriction of the rope, the words came out clearly enunciated.
"That is the choice. Look at this vessel. This vassal. A man of calling. He has been called, and he knows not what he does."
"What's that, the bible?"
Jack hushed him again.
Simpson snickered. There was no other way to describe the noise that came from behind his teeth. His lips stretched back in a grimace, but the eyes remained flat and dead.
He reached with he left hand and plucked the little doll's arm from where it stuck out from the belt and held it up just in front of his face. Both policemen could see that his cheeks were dark red, dangerously purple. His temples looked swollen.
With a sudden jerk, he drew the arm down, shoulder end towards him. A little spike of metal, what had probably been a hook to hold the arm on to the rest of the doll's body, drove into the flesh on the side of his chest, just above the flabby man-breast. With a quick sideways movement which puckered the pale skin, he drew the thing across for a couple of inches. Blood immediately welled from the tear and flowed down in lines.
It happened so quickly that Jack had to replay the scene a couple of times. As he rewound, he could see the hand jitter and jerk, spasmodically as the man used the spike to tear at his own flesh.
The cuts were not random. At the third viewing of that little splice of the scene which unfolded before their eyes, Jack was able to make out what was happening. Simpson was using the jagged metal to write on his own flesh.
Two words, now obscured by blood. Jack hadn't noticed them when he'd gone down to the cellar a second time. All he had seen was the sheen of red that covered the man's entire chest and belly.
Two words. The rose.
Jack stared. He remembered what Walker had said about the two words written on Marta Herkik's walls. They could have been an anagram. He'd plucked two out from the mix of the letters. One of them had been just the words Simpson was scrawling on his own skin as the blood blurted, gouging the letters with quick rips and pulls in living colour, in dying playback.
When the man had finished, he reached behind him and plucked up the tiny handkerchief. He slapped it to his chest and immediately it turned dark red as it mopped up the fresh blood. He brought it away from his chest and held it up, squeezing it in his hand so that little scarlet drops dribbled from it sluggishly.
"And this is my blood, of the old and everlasting covenant, the mystery of faith which has been be shared by many. I will take this and I will drink it, all of it so that sins may be revealed."
"That's not right," McColl said. "That's not the words." John McColl was a Catholic who attended St Rowan's Church every Sunday and even now still ate fish on a Friday.
Jack ignored him, fascinated, though repelled, by the action on the small screen.
Simpson held the bloody cloth up to his face and rammed it into his mouth. Gurgling, sucking noises issued out of the speaker. It had an eerie quality, like a ravenous dog wolfing food. The man drew the cloth away, showing his face, bloodied and smeared from nose to chin. He held the scrap up again, like a prize, then dropped it to the floor, where it flopped wetly.
"Let the contest now begin," he said, then grinned again in that dead cold rictus. Even his teeth were stained red. "The summons is made, the vessel is empty. The challenge is thrown."
McColl squirmed in his seat. "Is this man a loony or what?"
On screen Simpson glared blankly at the camera, the deadly smile fading. He opened his mouth, his face now swollen and purpling like a beetroot.
"If I should die before I wake, I pray to hell my soul to take."
Just at that instant, the flat expression left the man's face. The eyes rolled wildly. He shook his head, left and right, as if denying the words that had come out of his mouth. He raised a hand to try to grasp the cable that suspended him from the hook on the joist.
Then the chair flew away.
They replayed that few seconds over and over again, and neither of them was able to say what had happened. The man was shaking his head, reaching for the noose, face turning black, when the chair simply kicked backwards and tumbled to the floor.
Simpson made a grunting sound, the kind of noise a man will make when he slips on ice, taken by surprise. The hand, which was still rising, up close to his face, jerked out spastically, almost rigid in a grotesque salute. The eyes bulged behind the little kiddie's lenses, then the hand came swinging back. Jack and McColl were never able to work out whether it had happened deliberately, or if it was just the flailing action of a dying man's hand. Whatever it was, the arm snapped back and a thumb stabbed through the left lens and right into the eye. There was a faint crackle sound and a rubbery thud and blood blurted, forced by the pressure built up in the man's swollen head.
Simpson coughed. The hand came flying out again, leaving a ruined crater where the eye had been, then the whole body went into a paroxysm of violent shivers. The taut cable squeaked in protest. Just as that happened, the room went suddenly dark, not as if the lights had failed, but as if a cloud of dense black smoke had billowed from nowhere. The image fuzzed out on the screen, fading to grey and then to black. The squeal of the cable noose was like a mouse in the darkness, then, from the set on the filing cabinet, came a roar which at first sounded like static, then sounded nothing at all like electronic interference. Jack had heard it the first time he'd played back the latter half of the scene, but McColl rocked back in his seat.
The noise filled the room, a huge and utterly unnerving roaring sound. It was the noise of a vast and irresistible wind, the sound of an avalanche of rocks tumbling in a defile. It was the roar of an immense, hungry and maddened animal. It went on for several seconds, so deafening that Jack reached a hand to turn down the volume. Just as his fingers touched the control, the noise stopped and a dead silence rang in their ears. The screen began to lighten as the darkness, whatever that darkness was, cleared away like a mist driven by wind. As it dissipated, the shape hanging right in front of the lens became clearer until they could again see William Simpson hanging. The body was still trembling in tight little spasms as the nerves twitched and jumped. His right eye, still pale and bulging, was staring right at them.
The twitches continued for two minutes and then stopped. The feet, now dangling straight down, several inches from the floor, trembled a little for a while after that, then everything went still. The minister hung, slowly revolving, his head cocked to the side, while the blood began to congeal on his chest and face.
The video camera ran for another fifteen minutes. They sat and stared in fascination at the dead man suspended from the hook until a new noise came from the speaker, the light thud of feet somewhere in the distance, then the tap of heels on the floor beyond the door which was just out of sight until it swung open.
Young Fiona Simpson came slowly into the room. They could see the edge of the door when it reached its full swing.
"Daddy?" she said, almost hesitantly. She repeated it again, and came fully into the room, moving forward slowly.
For some reason, the dangling body did not seem to register with her. She moved behind it, glanced at the pictures in the trays, curiously at first, then her shoulders stiffened. She backed away, hands held up un front of her, pushing at air. She bumped into her suspended and bloodied father, turned round and her eyes registered it then.
Her mouth opened in an instant wide circle which showed every one of her top teeth. The scream went on and on and on.
It was the third time Jack Fallon had heard it. It didn't get any easier to listen to.
More sounds, thumping of heavier feet. Jack coming into the room, taking in everything with a sweep of his eyes. McColl watched his superior officer swing his head round, for the first few seconds, ignoring the piercing squeal after the first glance at the girl. His eyes registered the body, the blood, the bloodied scraps on the floor. He moved with an economy of motion, raising his hand as he passed the chair, automatically avoiding laying any prints on anything, his foot rising over the fallen chair lest he disturb it. His right arm came up and looped round the girl's shoulders just as the strength drained from her legs. He leaned her back, scooped her with his other hand, then backed out of the door, his gaze fixed on the hanged man.
Two minutes after that, the tape reached its end. The screen flickered, went black, then hissed with electronic snow. Jack reached forward and switched the machine off. John McColl let out a long, slow sigh.
"Excuse me, boss, but what the fuck was that?"
Jack flipped open his cigarettes, offered one to the other man, who took it in fingers that seemed to have been infected with the tremor that had afflicted Simpson in his last dying seconds. Both of them lit up and inhaled deeply. Ralph stoked up his pipe and sucked heavily as he left the room, shaking his head.
"That's the original snuff movie," John said.
"That's why I don't want it out of the safe," Jack told him. "Make sure the guys get the message. Anybody making copies of that will be up for interfering with evidence. I don't want anybody else even watching it."
"Can't blame you. I never want to see it again. Fair turned my stomach."
Jack nodded. "Shame about the girl. At least it's a step in the right direction." He rewound the tape and let John watch it again.
Ralph came back some time later, still puffing on his pipe.
"I've got news for you. We can put Simpson at both locations."
"Both?"
"Yes. Got dozens of them at the Herkik woman's. We got another partial from the hundreds at Latta Court. Would have missed it if I didn't run through them again and got a match. Palm print, no fingers. From the inside of the broken lift."
"You think it was him?"
"Sure it was him, though how he got up to the Doyle level I'll never know. He must have climbed somewhere. Maybe wore gloves."
"He could never have come from the bottom. Not the shape he was in," Jack stated.
"I agree, boss. But there's more. I got a fax from Jim Jackson at Lanark. Their files were all transferred to Regional HQ, but they dug them out for me. Simpson's prints match that case I was telling you about. The wee girl. Goes back a long time, but they still have the evidence in storage. They wired me the photographs and bingo. They've come up with the goods."
Ralph lit up his pipe while the others leaned forward impatiently.
"We got a match on his prints from there. Plus the doll's arm. It's a match for the missing one from the doll they found. But more than that, the scene of death pictures are almost identical to the ones in Simpson's developing tray. The only difference is that the body had been moved. Can't say how far yet. But his happy snaps were taken some time before the body was found."
He sucked hard on the stem and blew out a plume of blue smoke.
"I think that wraps it up, and it gets Cowie off your back." He looked at Jack. "I'd like to know one thing. What put you on to him in the first place?"
Jack tapped his nose.
"Contacts. Old friends."
The two men left Jack's room. He rewound the video and forced himself to watch it again before he switched everything off and sat thinking. The unnerving scenes got no more pleasant with familiarity.
He should have been pleased, but he was not happy. They had enough to place Simpson at the two scenes. They had evidence to show he'd been at the scene of another, years ago, and that one had involved a small child who had been reported missing before being found raped and dead in a patch of scrub-land fifteen miles south of the city.
Yet something nagged insistently at him. It was too pat, too cut and dry, and Jack had the experience to know that nothing was ever so easy.
And there were other things. The words that Simpson had gouged into his own chest. That had sent a deja-vu shiver right through Jack. The man had stared, grinning into the camera, as he'd done that. It was as if he was trying to tell Jack something, having a joke at the policeman's expense. There was too much of a coincidence with what the crossword-playing professor of languages had said.
And there were the words written on Marta Herkik's walls, daubed in those two paperless strips in the dead woman's viscid and congealing blood. There had been no sign of how Simpson had managed to do that, and Jack did not like that at all.
That Simpson had been a man with a terrible secret, he had no doubt, but what he did have doubts about was how he could have killed Marta Herkik so brutally, strip the paper from her walls, rip up dozens of her books and all without leaving any prints except on the table, on the fallen seat and on the doorhandle.
He had doubts about how the man, in his sixties, corpulent and unfit, had managed to get to the Doyle's balcony on a cold winter's night, and without alerting anyone.
He flipped open Ralph Slater's scene of crime report, opened a folder which contained his own paperwork, and started to write. All they needed now was Timmy Doyle's body and they could close this case. Close it officially anyway.
Jack Fallon told himself it was all over bar the shouting as he wrote in his tight longhand. But the doubts crowded in like mourners at a funeral. He hoped it was all over bar the shouting.