Murderabilia Page 5
She’d tried crosswords, online quizzes, memory tests, anything she could think of to keep her brain in some kind of shape, but little of it could hold her attention for long. Books had been half-read and discarded, TV channels had been switched with a regularity that threatened to break the remote control. Did people really stay at home and watch this stuff?
She’d made promises to herself and to Tony, and to the little person that was forming inside her. She said she would relax, that she’d stay in bed and keep movement to a minimum. Of course she wouldn’t stress about the job or the case she’d been ripped from. She wouldn’t think about Denny Kelbie or the Queen Street body or the stack of clothing that was placed under the body or the fact that not all the clothes were there and that bugged the hell out of her. She wouldn’t think about any of that. Not for another ten minutes. Promise. Five at least.
The room, their bedroom, had begun to shrink, she was sure of it. It used to seem a big, generous room, the kind of high-ceilinged Victorian expanse that their part of the West End specialised in. Now, it was closing in on her, edging closer to the bed day by day, till she could almost reach out and touch the walls. She was beginning to dislike it, too, wearying of the pale blue of three of them and the patterned wallpaper of the other. Why had she ever liked the painting of the old man, the one they’d got at the university art show? He just looked gloomy and was beginning to seriously piss her off. She wondered, if she picked up the glass next to the bed, whether she’d be able to knock the painting off the wall with a decent throw.
What shade of blue were these bloody walls anyway? She remembered the tin had said it was something stupid like Mineral Mist, but that sounded more like a non-alcoholic cocktail than a colour. She’d spent seven days trying to determine what they really were. For a while, she’d thought it might be cornflower blue but she realised she had no idea what cornflower was, never mind what colour it was. Maybe the walls were baby blue like Frank Sinatra’s eyes. Or powder blue. Except that was one of those things you just said without really knowing was it was. What kind of bloody shade was powder? Maybe it was azure. Like the sky on a summer’s day. Like sky blue. If she could remember what that looked like.
There was too much time, too, to contemplate her bump. In fact, it wasn’t even a bump yet. It was an internal bump. Hers. The weirdness of it freaked her. It – he or she – was actually growing inside her. She had so much time to lie still and think about this that she sometimes tried to feel it growing, feel it forming. She also had time to resent it. It wasn’t the baby bump’s fault that she was where she was, forced to play invalid while feeling perfectly healthy, she knew that, but it was the reason. Your fault, she heard herself saying.
She felt other things, too, though. Like fear and hope and a fierce protection she’d never quite known. Her emotions were being held hostage and she couldn’t afford the ransom.
It was also irresistibly physical. She’d always been firm in her belief that it was her body and she’d decide anything and everything connected to it. Suddenly, annoyingly, infuriatingly, it wasn’t just hers any more. She was sharing it with another being who was taking and giving without bothering to ask for consent, flooding her brain with all sorts of stuff while simultaneously sabotaging her bladder.
The walls weren’t royal blue or steel blue or navy blue. They weren’t turquoise or cyan or sapphire or cobalt. Maybe they were Oxford blue, whatever that was, or true blue. How could her bosses possibly think Denny Kelbie could run an investigation like that? He was too one-dimensional, too old-school dinosaur, too bloody thick.
The man in the painting on the wall was old-school too. Old-school Glasgow. He had a face battered by life, booze and cigarettes, with eyes that were even older than he was. He was sat in the corner of a pub, her guess was Tennent’s on Byres Road, judging by the wood panelling behind him, and half-glaring, half-smiling at the girl who sketched him. Mona Lisa, Glesga-stylee with a half and a half-pint. The old bugger had been staring at her from that wall for a week now and she was getting fed up with it.
A week. Seven long, long days.
Tony was out there, working, not saying much when he was at home. Not about the Queen Street case, anyway. He said plenty about how she should take it easy. A lot about how she needed to try to relax. Every word making her relax less. He was fussing and fretting and conscientiously driving her crazy. He’d continually try to feed her, as if she weren’t going to get fat enough. He wanted to check her temperature and her blood pressure every five minutes. He’d plump her pillows for Christ’s sake!
It was actually all his fault. He’d done this to her. He’d got her pregnant. He’d made her an invalid. Left her debilitated, incapacitated. He’d made her bloody useless.
There was no way the neatly arranged pile of Aiden McAlpine’s clothes weren’t linked to the murder. No chance. The mind of the person who’d laid them out like that, so obsessively, so neurotically, that was the key. Work out the issue with the clothes and you will be halfway to finding the killer.
The old man sneered down at her from the corner of Tennent’s, laughing at her for being so inadequate. Find out about the clothes? She could barely find her way to the toilet in time. She half sat up, reaching for the pillow and wrenched it out from beneath her, throwing it at the painting on the cornflower wall in the same movement. It missed by a couple of feet and landed on the floor with a pathetic, deflating thud.
She looked down at her fists, clenched like an angry child’s. It was just as well Tony wasn’t there to take her blood pressure. She forced herself to breathe out and take a lungful of something more relaxing. Except she knew there was only one thing that would let her relax at all. She was going to do it. For her sake, for the baby’s sake, for Tony’s sake, for everyone’s sake. For Aiden McAlpine’s.
She reached for her laptop, opened it up and mouthed a silent apology for the promises she was about to break.
She was physically imprisoned but the Internet was her way over the walls. It would be her way of staying sane or going completely crazy.
The latest newspaper reports on the case showed, inevitably, that Kelbie’s investigation had stalled, plenty of bluster and bravado but no progress. No one out there seemed to know any more than she did and she’d been locked up like an invalid. There was information to be had, she was sure of it, and all her instincts told her the clothing was key.
If Aiden had been wearing boxers and socks before he was killed, which seemed likely, where were they now? As far as she could see, the choices were that the killer had discarded them after he’d stripped the body, that someone else had pinched them, or that the killer had deliberately removed them from the pile he left on show. Given how deliberate everything else had been, that was where her money was going.
What it meant, she didn’t know. They could have been kept as trophies, as Tony had suggested in his article. That had already occurred to her and she’d seen and known about cases of that in the past. It was never a good sign and hinted at a repeat offender.
Trophies were something she could understand, though. The psychology of it was pretty straightforward. Often they would dine out on it sexually, reliving the killing in their heads so as to get off on it. Sometimes they would give the trophies to a wife or girlfriend and get their kicks from seeing them unwittingly wandering around wearing objects from the victim. That didn’t seem very likely with a pair of worn socks and pants, though.
Trophies were usually jewellery or locks of hair. Clothes, yes, but underwear was more likely if it was a female victim. She supposed the killer could have been gay and that might explain it, but it still didn’t ring true. Or not true enough.
Maybe the whole thing had been set up to be photographed. Did the other items just mess with the neatness, with the whole weird choreography? Maybe she’d just been in this room too long.
The whole viral nature of what had happened didn’t sit easily with her. The passengers on the train, then Tony’s damn photograph. I
t was what the killer had wanted, that much was obvious. Just showing off, or something else?
A sudden stabbing in her stomach jolted her back into the room. The pain made her double over and her eyes water. Her refugee was not happy she was working when she wasn’t supposed to be. Don’t tell Daddy. The thought came to her through clenched teeth. Don’t tell Daddy.
She did her relaxation exercises and suffered while praying for it to pass. The spasms made her curl on the bed and hold both arms around herself. When it had gone, it left her breathless.
She searched about killers and their trophies, not finding much she didn’t already know or had been taught. It was about a reward for their accomplishments, about the thrill and their sense of invincibility. It was all about fantasy, one that never ends.
She searched, too, for information about staging and photographs, seeking clues to what it might be. She wasn’t working a case: she was working her mind, for good or for ill. She couldn’t stop herself and wasn’t sure she wanted to.
The reading on staging all came back to fantasy. It was all about sex and power, but, then, what wasn’t? Most often, it was a message to the police. A message of the ‘you can’t catch me’ variety. Which only served to prove most repeat killers were also idiots, but it was that sort of brainlessness that led them to being caught.
She typed ‘crime scene photographs’ into her search engine but found it pointing to sites overloaded with explicit real-life crime-scene photos. A flick through a couple of them was enough to turn even her stomach.
She’d seen horrific sights in her time, but these were way beyond. Butchered bodies, rotting corpses and decapitated skulls. Some of the killers were well known; most of the pictured victims were not.
‘Crime-scene photographs psychology’ just got more of the same. Tony’s old day job, which she didn’t need to see. She was about to try another search term when she saw another listing a few hits down the page. ‘Murder memorabilia site selling killer’s crime scene photos’.
A specialist website was selling photographs taken by forensics and used in court to convict an American serial killer named John E. Robinson Snr from Kansas. The photos, described as ‘horrible’, ‘gruesome’ and ‘very grisly’, showed the bodies of women stuffed into barrels on Robinson’s farm.
The website sold memorabilia. Serial-killer memorabilia. It opened her eyes wide. And it gave her a new word. In the trade, it was known as ‘murderabilia’.
True-crime collectibles. Murder memorabilia. Murderabilia. People were buying and selling things related to killings and killers. Letters, weapons, artwork, clothing, anything connected to serial killers in particular seemed to have a value. There were websites dedicated to it, people who made a living from murder. And there was just so much of it.
She jumped into the first one she saw. The names, so many of them familiar, screamed out at her, mostly American. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Ed Gein. A further look found some nearer to home on two sites called KillingTime and Murder Mart. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Dennis Nilsen, Fred and Rose West, Archibald Atto, the Krays.
You could buy missing posters for victims, Christmas cards from killers, arrest warrants, death certificates, photographs, autographs and driving licences. If she had a mind to, she could buy a death mask of the gangster John Dillinger right there and then, delivered to her door in five working days. She could buy a lock of Charles Manson’s hair for eight hundred dollars.
It was a world of its own. A weird, shocking, strange, grisly, thriving world where murder was the order of business. How could she have not known this existed?
She bookmarked page after page, trying to remain calm yet racing on ahead of herself. There was a handwritten letter from Brady, a bucket of tools that belonged to West, a corset worn by Rose, a razor used to slash Tobin in prison, a uniform worn by John Christie. There was soil taken from under an American serial killer’s house, fingernail clippings from another. Napkins, towels, shirts, hats, gloves. Anything. Everything.
She was sickened and fascinated. Unable and unwilling to stop tearing through page after page of it but disturbed by what she saw. Was it anything to do with what she’d been looking for? Maybe, maybe not. But, either way, she couldn’t stop.
How did you price things like these? She saw an autograph from the 1930s American child killer Albert Fish had sold for $30,000. The gun used to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald had gone for over $2 million. A Christmas card from Ted Bundy could be bought for $4,000. A pair of gloves made by a fellow inmate for Manson were selling for $775.
She knew it wasn’t likely but she did it anyway. Couldn’t stop herself. She went to the search function of KillingTime and put the name in, much more in hope than expectation. She got nothing and felt immediately deflated but also a bit stupid. It was an active, unsolved investigation; there was no way they could be seen to be selling such a thing.
It didn’t stop her fingers typing their way to Murder Mart, though. She repeated the search and, when the screen shifted, she had to look again to be sure of what she was seeing.
Aiden McAlpine.
One result.
Boxer shorts and socks worn by Sunrise Killer victim Aiden McAlpine. MSP’s son. 100% genuine. Unique item. Starting bid £3,000.
CHAPTER 13
She’d stared at the screen for an age. Minutes. Just reading and rereading, blinded by the cheek of it, the sheer immoral nerve of it.
Someone – going only by the name of Shadow123 – was actually selling Aiden McAlpine’s underwear. Selling it.
There was a photograph to accompany the item. A pair of light blue cotton socks neatly piled over a pair of navy blue boxers, the Armani logo visible on the waistband.
It took a while for her to get her head around what she was most surprised and angry at. She really thought her days of being shocked by anything were long gone. When you’d seen a drunk man sleeping naked with his dead dog then you’d pretty much lost the thrill of being astonished. This was giving it a run for its money though.
Her first reaction was to pick up the phone and call Addison or Giannandrea but a bunch of voices in her head were shouting at her not to do it. For a start, it wasn’t their case. Addy had nothing to do with it and Rico was having to doff his cap to Kelbie.
Kelbie. She’d be damned if he was getting a lead she came up with. The whole burning embarrassment and resentment of the row in the press conference that made her pass out; she’d never let that go.
Damn. Her stomach creased as the pains sneaked back. The little buggers had their knives out and were jabbing at her. She was doing her best to ignore them but they stabbed and stabbed.
She’d always played the good cop and didn’t know any other way to do it. It came from her dad, she knew that. Straight arrow, straight shooter, do it by the book and do the right thing. Jesus, what he’d think if she didn’t turn this in.
Whoever was selling this stuff wasn’t necessarily the person who killed Aiden McAlpine. She told herself that again and it didn’t sound too convincing. Whoever was selling it, needed to be found. That much she was sure of.
She really didn’t want to give this to them but knew she couldn’t keep it to herself. This was serious, way beyond her pride and her problems with Kelbie. Damn it.
In the end, she came up with a plan that relied on her doing something she’d rather have avoided but simply couldn’t. Letting Tony know she’d been nosing around online. He was not going to be happy.
Unhappy was an understatement. How did you find this? What were you doing online? Have you forgotten what the doctor said? What were you thinking?
At every question, she tried to shift his focus away from the how and the why of what she’d done and to the opportunity she was giving him. Here’s a story. Here’s your story. Here’s your chance.
He kept fretting at it, worrying about her stress levels, about the amount of rest she was getting, about what else she was doing when he wasn’t there.
But what were you even thinking about? You are supposed to be away from all this.
Yes, yes, but that doesn’t matter. She kept telling him it. Your story. Your chance. Their lead. Everyone wins.
She was wearing him down when the first of the spasms kicked in. Just mild ones, but enough that she had to clamp her teeth together to avoid showing the pain. She had to twist it into a sarcastic grimace, covering the fact she wanted to scream.
He picked up on it, she was sure of that, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he just nodded slowly and said okay. He’d do it her way.
He’d go to Mark McAlpine’s news conference and he’d get his story while making sure the cops got the lead about the missing clothes being for sale. Everyone would win. But he’d only do it if she promised to get off the laptop and stay off. No more getting involved where she shouldn’t.
No, of course not. Of course. Not.
CHAPTER 14
Inevitably, it took Winter half an hour longer than it should have done to negotiate Edinburgh’s traffic. If the introduction of the trams had eased congestion it was in the same way that taking a cup of water out of the ocean improved your chances of not drowning in it.
It was a further half-hour to worry about being out of Glasgow and away from Rachel. He’d called before he’d left and he knew he’d call again as soon as he stopped, no matter how much it would annoy her. She felt fine and he felt helpless. It was a certain recipe for argument, but he’d take that.
Mark McAlpine was holding his press conference in a room in the Parliament building at the foot of the Royal Mile, increasing Winter’s difficulty in getting there. It was pretty unusual for a victim’s family to host a media session rather than the cops, but McAlpine was far from your usual grieving parent. He was one of the most recognisable and outspoken Members of Parliament and rarely shied away from the spotlight. Winter cringed at the thought of him using his son’s murder to gain more screen time.