Питер Робинсон - No Cure for Love

“Was he HIV positive?”

“Nope. They ran that test pretty quickly.”

Arvo took a sip of tepid coffee and pulled a face. “What was the time of death?” he asked.

“Between about eleven that night and two in the morning. Wouldn’t say any closer than that.”

“That’s three hours after the kid was picked up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Nobody saw him after he got into that unidentified car around eight?”

“Only the killer.”

“Any signs of torture?”

“Nope. Clean as a whistle. Under the sand, the kid was buck naked. Apart from the stab wounds and an old needle-mark or two, his body was in pretty good shape.”

“Are you running DNA tests on the semen?”

“Sure. Like I said, they got two different samples already. But you know as well as I do, Arvo, that shit takes time. Especially the way things are backed up right now. Thirty-eight homicides last weekend. Thirty-eight . Can you believe it? You can only push the coroner’s office so hard. Those guys are up to their eyeballs in stiffs. Plus it takes so long for toxicology to get the test results from some of these things.”

Four businessmen came in, laughing and joking, fresh from the office by the looks of their clothes.

Joe looked at his watch. Just gone three. “After-work crowd,” he said. “They get in early on a Friday. Sometimes they get here so early they just sort of merge right in with the late-lunch crowd.”

Arvo laughed.

“I guess it’s not often you get a homosexual killer writing love letters to a beautiful actress, is it?” Joe asked.

Arvo shrugged. “Statistically speaking, no.”

“Fuck statistics.”

“Still no. Like I said, letter-writers don’t usually do much more than write letters. I’m just poking around. All I’m looking for is some connection between Sarah Broughton and Heimar, and it doesn’t look as if there is one.”

“If there is, I don’t see it.”

“Me, neither. What’s your theory?”

“Sex killer of some kind. Got to be. And he’s so proud of his handiwork he wants people to admire it. Peacock mentality.”

“Pretty limited audience.”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe.” Then he paused. “These letters the actress has been getting. Anything there?”

Arvo shook his head. “I’ve only seen one, and it’s pretty low-level stuff. How did she react at the scene?”

“As you’d expect. I didn’t get there till later, but according to the first officer she was pretty shaken up.”

“She a suspect?”

“Come on, Arvo, what do you take us for? She wouldn’t be in England right now if she was, would she? When they’d got her calmed down, the detectives who caught the squeal had a good look around her place. No blood, nothing. Do you figure the stiff for her pen pal? He comes visiting and she kills him, then cuts him up, buries him under the sand and conveniently finds him on her morning run?”

Arvo shrugged. “It was worth asking. Weirder things have happened.”

“True. But the answer’s still no. She’s clean.”

“Did she see anything?”

“Nope. Said she might have heard a sound or seen a light in the night, or she might have imagined it. It was later she found the stiff, when she was going for her regular morning run. She says she leaned forward and tugged the arm and... well, I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?”

Suddenly, Joe’s eyes twinkled and he burst into laughter. It sounded like a braying horse. Some of the other drinkers looked over, smiling uneasily. “Hey,” Joe said. “What if the cameras had caught that, huh? TV star bends over to pull this guy up out of the sand and what happens? His fucking arm comes off, that’s what, and she falls flat on her ass holding it out in front of her.”

Arvo visualized the scene, too, and couldn’t help but laugh with Joe at the farcical absurdity of it. When they had calmed down, Joe knocked back the dregs of his drink and stood up. “Got to go, old buddy,” he said. “Or Mary will have my ass. Booked off early. It’s little Sue’s birthday party today and I promised I’d be there. Six. Can you believe it? Seems only last week she was crawling around on all fours and running through a six-pack of Huggies a day. Anyway, don’t be a stranger.”

Arvo stood and shook hands. “You, too,” he said. “Any chance of a look at the crime-scene photos?”

Joe looked at his watch. “Sure, I’ll make a call and have copies sent over. And... ” Joe paused and turned on his way out. “Keep me informed.” He pointed a finger at Arvo and cocked it. “I mean it.”

“Will do. And thanks.”

When Joe had gone, Arvo found he had no desire to stay in the bar any longer. The smoke had thickened since the after-work crowd had started to arrive, and some moron had arranged “Suspicious Minds’ for accordion and strings. Probably made a fortune out of it, too. Welcome to hell.

He had some leftover pizza and a couple of bottles of Sam Adams lager in the fridge at home, and the previous night he’d set his VCR to tape I Married a Monster From Outer Space . If he hadn’t screwed up on the settings, it should be right there in the machine waiting for him. He’d seen it when he was a kid, but after Nyreen, the title took on a whole new perspective.

Arvo couldn’t see any link between a homosexual murder and the letters Sarah Broughton had been receiving. Despite the publicity given to exceptions, the rule was that celebrity stalkers were rarely violent; on the other hand, male prostitution was certainly a high-risk profession, AIDS not being the only danger. It attracted more than its fair share of violent weirdos and thrill killers. So John Heimar’s number had come up. As Joe said, that was just his bad luck.

But as he walked out onto Broadway, Arvo couldn’t help but wonder. The body had been placed where someone would have the shock of finding it, that was for certain. The killer obviously had a theatrical flair and needed an audience, if only of one. What Arvo had to ask himself was why he had selected that particular stretch of beach, where Sarah Broughton went for her morning run.

Sarah lay half-asleep listening to the seagulls screaming and squawking outside her window. At first, she thought she was still in her own bedroom back at the beach house. Soon she would wake up and the bad dream would be over. When she opened her eyes, though, she felt a momentary panic. Everything was different.

This room was smaller, for a start, and a thin white radiator under the drawn curtains infused the air with what little warmth it possessed. The tip of Sarah’s nose felt cold in a way it never had in Los Angeles. In the dim light, she could make out cream wallpaper patterned with poppies or red roses, matching the heavy duvet she pulled up to her chin. Her pillow smelled of lavender. Beyond the noise the gulls made, she could hear the sea pounding the wall.

Then she remembered: she was at the family cottage in Robin Hood’s Bay. It stood at the bottom of the hill, on a row to the left of the main street, and looked out right over the North Sea. That was why her father had wanted it. In clement weather, Sarah knew, Arthur Bolton liked nothing better than to sit in his wheelchair at the bottom of the garden and look out to sea. She fancied that the open horizon somehow helped make up for the years he had spent in the dark, claustrophobic coal mines.

Everything seemed unfamiliar to Sarah because she had never slept in this room before. The last time she had visited, the two adjacent cottages had not yet been knocked into one and renovated. Though she couldn’t remember the visit at all clearly, she had probably slept downstairs on the sofa-bed, stupefied with Quaaludes and cognac.