Page 54 of Dropping Like Flies

Lou held his gaze. “No, we haven’t. Everything you’ve told us so far is in the public domain. You need to give us more if you want us to believe you.”

Dougie’s answering sigh said that this whole thing was becoming tiresome. He shifted his gaze from the two detectives to scan the room, staring around it like he was seeing it for the first time. “I should probably have a lawyer before I say more, shouldn’t I?”

I let out a sigh at the same time as Lou and Emma sat back in their seats, their body language giving away the frustration they refused to let show on their faces.

“What?” Griffin asked.

Sometimes I forgot that this was all new to him, that it wasn’t his world. “If he insists on a lawyer, the interview has to stop. It won’t reconvene for a few hours. At which point, his lawyer will advise him to take back everything he’s said.”

Griffin’s brow furrowed. “Even if he did it?”

I laughed. “You haven’t met many lawyers, have you?” I waited for Griffin’s headshake before continuing. “A good defense lawyer doesn’t care if their client is guilty.” I grimaced. “Actually, that’s a bit harsh. They might care, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at them. Their job is to defend their client to the best of their abilities, even if they’re guilty. So for that reason, they’re not big on confessions. In short, if he lawyers up, we can kiss goodbye to our nice, tidy confession.”

“Do you want a lawyer?” Lou asked, his voice carefully modulated when I knew that what he really wanted to do was shake the truth out of Dougie.

A long pause, both rooms so quiet I could hear the electric hum of the strip light above our heads.

Dougie suddenly sat forward and put his head in his hands. It was like he kept switching between different versions of the same person. One that cried. One that flirted. One that didn’t seem to care that he was confessing to incredibly heinous crimes. “What’s my mum going to say?” he said, his voice muffled by his hands. “She’s going to be so disappointed when she finds out what I’ve done.”

Griffin and I exchanged a look, both of us thinking the same thing. That disappointed was a strange word to use when you were talking about the murder of six men in a matter of weeks. Horrified, maybe. Appalled? But disappointed? No, that didn’t really cut it.

Only a few seconds passed before Dougie jerked his head up to reveal that his cheeks were dry. His behavior was certainly erratic. He was nothing like the young man Griffin and I had interviewed a week ago, which begged the question, why not? What had happened between then and now?

“Medication,” I said out loud. “We need to find out if he’s taking any and if so, for what? If he is on medication, find out if he’s stopped taking it.”

Dougie seemed to have forgotten his quandary about needing a lawyer, the next words out of his mouth nothing to do with it. “Duncan took me home because I told him he could do anything he wanted to me. We had sex.”

Lou sat up straighter. “And then?”

Dougie’s lips curled into a smile I would have described as chilling, even without the words that accompanied it. “Then I cut off all his fingers.”

I rocked back, the words hitting me like a punch to the gut. And there it was. The piece of evidence not in the public domain.

Lou leaned forward, doing well to keep his expression carefully blank. No excitement that he’d finally extracted something useful from Dougie. No disgust that someone had confessed to something most of the human race would find repugnant. Just a slight professional interest.

“I see. And what did you do with those fingers?”

Dougie sat back in his seat looking like the cat that had got the cream. “Oh, you want me to tell you about drawing the symbols on the wall with them?”

Strike two.

“It had to be him,” Griffin said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. Knowing one of those things would have been convincing evidence, but knowing both of them… There was no arguing with that. I waited for the elation to hit, but it was strangely absent. Exhaustion could do that to you. It would sink in tomorrow when all that remained was getting the details out of Dougie to use in court, hopefully to send him down for the rest of his life, which, given his young age, would be a very long time indeed.

Lou hid the question having been designed to root out what Dougie had done with the fingers with a nod. “Yeah, the symbols.” He scratched his head. “What was that about?”

Dougie shrugged. “I saw them somewhere, in a film or something, and they looked cool.”

So no demon summoning? Had all of that just been a wild goose chase? If so, I couldn’t say I regretted it. Not when our trip to Manchester had been the catalyst for Griffin and I sorting our shit out. It demonstrated how easy it was to be led astray in a case, though, to get hung up on a lead that had never been one. I’d believed that the symbols were important, that they served a greater purpose than just someone not being in their right mind—which it was becoming increasingly clear described Dougie to a T.

“Where are the fingers now?” Emma asked. “If we search your home, will we find them?”

A furrow appeared on Dougie’s brow. “I didn’t keep them. What kind of sicko do you think I am?”

Lou frowned. “If you didn’t keep them, why take them from the murder scene? In fact, why cut them off at all? What did you want with them?”

“I didn’t want them. I…” Dougie blinked a few times, averting his gaze from both Lou and Emma and staring at the wall like he expected to find the answers written there. When he finally spoke, his words were slow. “I think I’d like that lawyer now.”

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