Page 45 of Watching You

‘So from the snippets of hospital CCTV of our suspect following Charlie’s description, we can get no facial recognition because the top half of his face from just below his eyes is always obscured by headwear and he looks down all the damned time.

We’ve got no number plate as he obviously parks away from the site, no mobile number, no means of identifying him, and I suspect he’s onto us because he hasn’t been seen at the hospital since we’ve been undercover there,’ Connie said. ‘It’s like this man has superpowers.’

She and Baarda were in his room at The Balmoral, in the dark once more and staring at images projected onto the wall.

‘I can’t hold the publicity any longer,’ she said.

‘At nine a.m. tomorrow, the media liaison team will release these photos to see if anyone can name him, but the second we do, it’ll be all over the internet and he’ll run.

It’s a hell of a compromise, getting his name but quite possibly losing him into the bargain. ’

‘If he runs it’s an admission of guilt, so that’ll be one problem sorted, because all we have at the moment is proximity in time and place to the hospital, disguises, and passing himself off as a member of staff. That won’t get a conviction, even if we find and arrest him.’

‘Agreed. We definitely need more than that.’

‘Like a motive,’ Baarda said.

‘Like a motive,’ she repeated. ‘Do you have any snacks left in here? I ate all mine, and I really love those little packets of toasted sunflower seeds.’

‘Next to the kettle. You okay? You seem … twitchy.’

‘Yeah, I’m missing something. I know I am. Makes me want to bash a pan into my head. Here they are.’ She opened the pack and sat back down crunching. ‘Let’s take a closer look at him.’

Baarda increased the image size but the blurring was too much of a distortion, so he decreased it again.

‘I like projecting images onto walls. It’s better than looking at photos. The light makes the faces more alive. Let’s play a game. You tell me something you see in the photo and I’ll tell you something. If you name something I haven’t noticed yet, you get a point and vice versa. Go.’

Baarda reached across and took some sunflower seeds before answering.

‘You can see even through the scrubs he’s wearing that his collarbones are quite pronounced.

Most people have enough flesh on them that they wouldn’t be so noticeable through light clothing.

He’s underweight, probably running on pure adrenaline, but also I’d say definitely under thirty-five after which the vast majority of people find it harder to shed pounds. ’

‘Nice,’ Connie said. ‘And I agree. But no points, I already had that one. Okay, it looks to me as if he used to have an earring in his left ear, and the red dot is still noticeable enough that I don’t think he took it out all that long ago.

Might be a further suggestion that he’s trying to be less easy to identify or to blend in, or it could be that he’s going through some psychological changes that are making him want to alter himself, possibly both. ’

‘Good but I got it,’ Baarda said. ‘He’s tense in every image we captured. Look at the tendons at the sides of his neck. If we don’t catch him, he’ll have had a heart attack within the year. That’s a man on a mission.’

‘One–nil,’ she told him, screwing up the packet and tossing it across to the bin.

‘And I hate losing so give me a minute. What have we got? Pale skin, no tan, he’s inside a lot, too obvious.

Lips look rough, probably bites his bottom lip but that’s linked to tension and you already got the tendons.

Make the image a little bit bigger but not so we lose the definition, would you? ’

Baarda obliged.

‘That’s better.’ Connie gave her shoulders a shake and licked her top lip. ‘His facial skin looks uneven in places, as if he has acne scars, although there’s no discolouration. It’s all very even in tone, in fact.’ She stopped talking. ‘All just one tone. More like a woman’s skin—’

‘Because he’s wearing make-up,’ Baarda finished for her. ‘I think you’re right.’

‘Bring up the other photos,’ she said. ‘All of them. I want to see if it’s a lighting anomaly in this one image or if it’s the same in every one. And that’s my point, by the way, even if you butted in at the end.’

‘If you’re right about this, I concede anyway. Here you go. These four other shots are the best we’ve got, although not quite as close up as the one we were just looking at. Everything else is too blurry.’

Baarda scrolled through them.

‘Go back,’ Connie said. ‘No, next one. It’s the same, right? That even, pale, beige skin tone in every shot.’

‘Yup,’ Baarda said. ‘There’s no stubble shadow anywhere, and you can see at the base of his cap that his hair is a darkish brown, so there should be a sense of beard growth even just under the surface. It’s completely hidden. The question is, why?’

Connie took in a slow deep breath as she reached out with her left hand and gripped Baarda’s right wrist.

‘Brodie, go back to the first of the four new images you brought up.’ He did so.

‘There,’ she said, standing and walking to the wall.

‘Now make it smaller so that the resolution is as good as it gets and come here.’ Baarda adjusted the setting and got up to join her.

‘What do you see here?’ She pointed to a dot at one side of his mouth.

Baarda squinted. ‘There’s a mark there, but I couldn’t tell you from what. Could be a scab or even some food he hasn’t wiped. Maybe part of a birthmark. Is that what you think the make-up’s for?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘On the original image, I thought the bumps looked like acne scarring because they were quite well defined and rounded. This mark isn’t scarring, it’s too dark, but it’s definitely rounded and very noticeable.’

‘A mole?’

‘Uh-huh. And I’d say it’s one of several, looking at his overall skin texture. It’s taken a lot of make-up to cover them all up, which is why it looks a bit cakey and unnatural in tone.’ She went back to the sofa and flopped down.

‘Multiple moles on his face would have made him far too standout to get away with going to the hospital regularly. Damn it. You won again. If we send out this image but we get a visual artist to reimagine it with a few of the moles uncovered, even if they’re not exactly in position, it’s bound to jog someone’s memory out there. ’

‘I agree. But I think that imaginary pan just hit me in the head. Those moles are much more important than just helping us identifying him. Can you bring up facial images of all the victims, but I need them all at once?’

Baarda created a new image with the four faces in a square.

‘Now we can see our killer more clearly, it’s so obvious that I can’t believe we missed it.’

‘It was literally staring us in the face,’ Baarda said. ‘I get the connection. Tell me what you know about him now that we didn’t before.’

She rubbed her hands together and gave a tiny bounce on the sofa before she spoke.

‘He’s someone who’s been self-conscious his entire life.

Moles anywhere else on your body can be covered up, but facial moles are unusual.

They make people stare. Kids especially, who have no filter and often no socially aware conscience, are cruel and fast to create nicknames.

I’m guessing the moles were the first thing anyone ever saw when they met him.

The first name calling probably started when he was no more than five years old.

Lucy Ogunode mentioned it to Christie Salter in relation to Dale Abnay who had eczema, talked about him being bullied by other kids. ’

Baarda switched the lights back on in the room and turned his attention to Connie instead of the images.

‘So they all have some form of facial marking. Abnay’s eczema, Divya Singh’s hyperpigmentation which also resembles tiny moles, Archie Bass has a lot of facial scarring from various wounds and exposure over the years and Vic Campbell has excessive tattooing on his face which has also messed with the texture of his skin.

But why choose them as victims? Most people develop empathy from bullying, surely, at least towards people with similar issues. ’

‘That only works if your psychological set-up allows for empathy. Step into his world for a second. As a baby and a toddler, you’re blissfully unaware that you look a bit different.

Maybe you notice it in the mirror but not in a way that sets you apart.

It’s just your face, and that’s great. Then you start school and people point at you and talk about it, and make you feel like an outsider.

Skip ahead a few years and those kids are a bit older and bigger, and now they’re really laying into him, because nothing makes kids feel powerful like excluding someone who’s a bit different.

Those days you come home and look in the mirror and yeah, you hate those kids, but you also hate the moles.

After a while you start hating your whole face.

And you’re powerless to change it. You can’t do anything about it.

It never stops, it never gets better, and maybe there are even new moles appearing.

Fuck me, you’re pissed now. You’re enraged.

Girls are giggling at you, boys are shitty.

It’s hard to make friends, and your parents just tell you to ignore the bullying which is bullshit.

How much hate are you feeling now? That’s got to go somewhere, Brodie, because if it just stays inside it’s gonna break you. ’

‘He’s killing people whose faces remind him of himself?’ Baarda asked.

‘I think maybe he’s killing a representation of himself.

Perhaps he’s someone who’s thought endlessly about suicide but who can’t do that, hence the lack of torture or the lack of a standard pattern in choosing victims – different genders, different races – and in his head he’s killing himself over and over again. ’

‘I get it. And I need a drink. You?’ Connie shook her head as Baarda picked up a glass. ‘What’s the link to the hospital?’

‘I don’t know yet. Maybe he’s hanging around the dermatology unit?

Possibly it’s just somewhere with a huge amount of people passing through so there’s every chance he’ll identify a victim.

It might equally well be something personal to him that we haven’t figured out yet.

But it’s the only link between the victims, Brodie, and I can feel it in my bones. This is why they were all chosen.’

He knocked back a whisky and began putting on his shoes.

‘We’d better get back to the station then,’ he said. ‘You ready?’

Connie was already at the door.