was furnished in expensive but minimalist style. He waved them to two leather and wood armchairs and dropped into a leather bean bag on the polished wood floor. Morris pulled out his notebook and ostentatiously opened it to a fresh page.
"You work from home, then?" Carol asked.
' "S right. I'm a freelance animator."
"Cartoons?" Carol said.
"I do mostly science animations. You want something for your Open University course that shows how atoms collide, I'm your man. So what's all this about?"
"You drive a Land Rover Discovery?"
"S right. It's in the garage."
"Can you tell me if you were driving it last Monday night?" Carol asked. God, was it only a week ago?
"I can. I wasn't. I was in Boston, Massachusetts."
She went through the routine questions that established precisely what Crozier had been doing, and who she could check the information with. Then she stood up. Time for the key question, but it was important to keep it looking casual.
"Thanks for you help, Mr Crozier. One more thing - is there anyone else who has access to your house while you're away? Someone who could have borrowed your car?"
Crozier shook his head.
Chapter 26
"I live on my own. I don't even have a cat or plants, so nobody has to come in when I'm away. I'm the only one with keys."
"You're sure of that? No cleaning lady, no colleague who drops in to use your system?"
"Sure, I'm sure. I do my own cleaning, I work alone. I split up with my girlfriend a couple of months back and I changed the locks, OK?
Nobody's got keys except me. " Crozier was starting to sound tetchy.
Carol persisted.
"And no one could have borrowed your keys without your knowledge and had them copied?"
"I don't see how. I'm not in the habit of leaving them lying around.
And the car's only insured for me, so nobody else has ever driven it," Crozier said, his irritation clearly mounting.
"Look, if somebody did anything criminal in a car with my number on, they were using faked-up plates, OK?"
"I accept what you're saying, Mr Crozier. I can assure you that if the information you've given me checks out, you won't be hearing from us again. Thanks very much for your time."
Back at the car, Carol said,
"Find me a phone. I want to try Dr Hill again. I can't believe he's gone A.W.O.L. the one time we really need him."
It's laughable. They pick a man who can't even tell whether I've carried out a particular punishment or not and they employ him to help them catch me. They could at least have shown me the respect of employing someone who has some reputation, an opponent worthy of my skills, not some idiot who has never encountered someone of my calibre.
Instead, they insult me. Dr Tony Hill is supposed to be producing a profile of me, based on his analysis of my killings. When this account is published, years hence, after my death in my bed from natural causes, historians will be able to compare his profile with the reality and laugh at the gross inaccuracies of his pseudo-science.
He will never come close to the truth. For the record, I set down that truth.
I was born in the
"Yorkshire port of Sea ford, one of the busiest fishing and commercial docks in the country. My father was a merchant seaman, the first officer on oil tankers. He went all over the world, then he would come home to us. But my mother was as bad a wife as she was a mother. I can see now that the house was always in chaos, the meals irregular and unappetizing. The only thing she was good at, the only thing they could share, was the drinking. If there was an Olympic pairs event for piss heads they'd have walked off with the gold.
When I was seven, my father stopped coming home. Of course, my mother blamed me for not being a good enough son. She said I'd driven him away. She told me I was the man of the house now. But I could never live up to her expectations. She always wanted more from me than I was capable of, and ruled me by blame rather than praise. I spent more time locked in the cupboard than most people's coats do.
Without my father's pay cheque, she was thrown on the resources of the welfare system, which was barely enough to live on, never mind get drunk on. When the building society repossessed the house, we went to live