Leo
Leo logged the doll-in-a-box with the evidence officer, telling her to cross-reference it to the river murders as well as the online abuse case. As he’d told Jess and Michael, he didn’t like coincidences.
When exactly had he started thinking of her as Jess? She was Miss Bridges to him. Anyway, she was clearly in a confused set of relationships, no room for a lonely policeman. He couldn’t quite fathom what was going on between her and her threesome of Michael, Jago Jackson and the absent ex-partner she’d talked about, Drew Payne.
Don’t even think about threesomes, Leo. He didn’t usually have a gutter mind, but Jess brought what latent potential he had out of him
Once home, he shed his jacket and went out into the garden to think. Lost among the trees and bushes he could feel as though he’d left Oxford altogether, entered some realm of his own creation, like Tolkien’s woodland Lorien or the secret garden of the children’s tale. Here he could breathe.
He knew to his colleagues he was an enigma but he found it so hard to show any of his true self to people. What was that, anyway? As he pruned a withered tendril off the climbing rose, he wondered if Michael Harrison had profiled him yet. If he did, he would be interested to know that Leo’s mother had been all about exposure, running her life in the public eye when she could attract attention to her small-time acting career. He used his absent and unknown father’s surname to avoid people making the connection to Haven Keene but even that didn’t seem enough. Some would still remember the weepy confession from his media-hungry mother before the daytime TV cameras that her son had been abused by an ex-partner. She claimed ignorance and the programme hadn’t named him, but there was enough information for some kids at school to make his life hell. Their relationship never recovered. It was far better to keep all that out of sight and mind.
When his shadow fell across the water of the dark pool, Goldemort slipped out from the weed to nudge Leo into feeding him. He obliged. God knows what extremes he would turn to if Leo didn’t keep him satisfied. He’d probably sprout legs and chase him into the kitchen.
The carp content, Leo sat on a bench under the Japanese maple. It glowed orange all summer, then flared up in a red blaze in autumn. He relished the way the fallen leaves spread like tiny crimson hands on the black surface in autumn. It was one of the markers of the year that he looked for, like the first celandines in late winter. There was no longer a completely dormant season in the garden, the last late blooms hung on in rose and hebe until December, evergreen clematis took over in a peal of white bells, and crocus edged up among the snowdrops when January came.
The murderer was like that: always busy, never dormant. You thought you were tracking him in one place and another area of activity cropped up unexpectedly. So far he had chosen riverside locations with privileged entry: the college boathouse, confirmed as the scene of the first attack; the boatyard accessed by a code. How did he get two people to go in there? He must not look particularly threatening. Oxford was a relatively low crime area, at least for serious ones like murder. Most inhabitants felt safe walking around at dusk or even at night. Create the right story and unsuspicious people would fall for it. I’ve lost my cat and I think I can hear it in there. Will you open the door? My child is trapped in the boatyard, can you help? My friend’s got into difficulty in the water and I can’t swim. What do I do? That would be enough to lure fit twenty-somethings, and Dr Kingston, away from their own business. That led to the depressing conclusion that they were killed by their goodness of heart, not because of some sexual predilection that Harry Boston preferred to blame. He’d worked in Vice for too long.
The killer passed unseen, like the carp beneath the weed. People assumed he should be where he was. That suggested to Leo that he was possibly a familiar face in the college, either on the staff or one of the visitors. Jago wasn’t completely out of the frame but Leo was thinking he needed to look elsewhere in the college. He was thankful for that as it reduced the pool of suspects from hundreds of thousands to a hundred, and bearing in mind his age and physical type (male, late twenties or early thirties, medium build, white), they were probably talking more like tens. He’d ask Sergeant Wong to whittle down the lists they had, though she was probably already working on that. They’d been asking for alibis but the film set was full of sudden stops and starts and nobody kept tabs on the crew if they weren’t needed. The college was also relaxed during the summer, fellows and staff coming and going in irregular patterns. These difficulties weren’t understood by Leo’s superiors; they didn’t want excuses, only results. But this was a pig of a case. If only they had some DNA to compare, they could then ask for voluntary tests from the men who fitted the description.
Leo picked a leaf from the maple and cast it on the black water.
Come on, life, I need a breakthrough, he thought.