The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Page B

note?"
    "The mobile phone number for a bookie who had a pitch at Gowran Park racecourse today."
    "Do you know which bookie that was?"
    "Not yet. But I still have the number."
    "Anything else you want to tell me?"
    "I didn’t want to tell you that."
    "If I told Geraghty you’d interfered with the body—worse, you’d stolen evidence—what do you think he’d do?"
    "I have an idea what he’d do with me. What would he do with you?"
    "He’d probably blame me for knowing you."
    "There you are. Not to mention what he’d do if he was told you had given the scene a surreptitious one-two first."
    And there we were. He had me, but I had him. MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction, they used to call it when it came to nuclear missiles. Safe as houses, unless one of us actually went mad. Dave wasn’t looking completely sane to me. He topped his coffee up with Jameson, laughing gently and nodding in private agreement with himself. Then he clapped his hands and almost winked.
    "So what did you make of this Miranda Hart then Ed? Is she a looker, is she?"
    It suddenly occurred to me that Dave might have formed as idealized a picture of my single life as I possibly had of his married one. I threw him a look I was more used to getting from him. The look said:
Cop yourself on, you tool.
It landed right between his eyes and spread crimson across his face.
    "All right," I said. "Each man had his tongue cut out. Do we have any other points of comparison?"
    "One: they were connected in life, in that Kennedy tried to find Hutton. Must have done a certain amount of digging. Two: they were both killed and mutilated elsewhere, and then cleaned up and deposited where they lay in the past couple of days. Three: they were killed in exactly the same way, strangled by hand and/ or ligature. Four: they were mutilated in the same way, tongue cut out. Five: they each had a small leather bag or purse full of coins."
    "Did Kennedy have any tattoos?" I said.
    "Not in the obvious places. I didn’t get time to search the whole body. Nothing else was found on him."
    "What do you make of the tattoos on Hutton’s forearm?" I said.
    Dave shook his head. He had copied them in his notebook. He opened it to that page, and we studied them in silence for a moment.
     
† Ω
     
    "Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet," I said. "From alpha to omega: from beginning to end."
    "From life to death."
    "And the crucifix represents death."
    "And life everlasting."
    "What do you make of it?"
    "I don’t know. A serial killer who’s into symbols and whatdoyoucallit, tarot cards and all this? That’s grand for American films, Ed. In real life, I’d say it’s all my hole."
    I almost laughed out loud. That sounded more like the Dave Donnelly I knew, a man who assumed everyone else needed knocking off his perch, and considered himself the man to do it. If he were a T-shirt, it would read: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK
YOU
ARE? That could have accounted for some of the tension between him and Myles Geraghty: they were both cut from the same cloth. Apart from Dave’s not being a complete and total prick.
    "Still, when was the last time you came across a tongue cut out?" I said. "That’s a lot of work, and a lot of mess."
    "Not if the victim’s dead first. No blood to speak of then."
    "But you take my point? Two in the same day? And both strangled too?"
    Dave nodded.
    "It’s not rock solid, but it would be a hell of a coincidence if the MO was used by two different killers. And what is there no such thing as?"
    "And the fact that they were dumped within a mile or two of each other—does that not suggest the killer’s trying to tell us something?"
    "That’s the other thing I’ve never got about those films and all: why the killer wants to tell the cops anything. I mean, if he’s happy being a mad fucker who goes around killing people, why would he want the cops anywhere near him?"
    "Because it vindicates him as a person. The artistry of his killing spree is