The Hermaphrodite's Curse Ch. 15

PART TWO - CAMBRIDGE

- 8 -

Gabe sat at a desk in a police interrogation room, feeling truly dreadful. He felt tired and confused and the pain in his head just would not go away. The way the police had treated his rambling account of the day's events hadn't especially helped his mood. Unsurprisingly, they had reacted just as Saphy had predicted to the suggestion that anybody was killed because a four hundred year old painting of a woman was maybe a man. They were equally easy to convince of the idea that Gabe had been assaulted, kidnapped and locked in a basement for the past couple of hours, a basement he could not properly describe nor locate. He had to admit that the whole thing sounded pretty far fetched even to him, and he had lived it.

The door of the interrogation room opened and two police officers entered. One was the one that had already interviewed Gabe for an hour, seeming not to believe a single word of his story. He was a tough looking, broad shouldered man with a military haircut and a condescending attitude. The other man was obviously the first policeman's superior. He was of a slighter build, while still being bigger and stronger than Gabe, but carried himself with an air of efficient command.

"I'm Detective Inspector Gilbert," he introduced himself, "And you've already met Detective Sergeant Godfrey. We'd like to ask you a few questions."

"I've already told him everything that's happened," Gabe said, sounding frustrated and petulant but mostly exhausted after the day he had had.

"Now then, there's no need for you to take that tone with us, Mr. Herrison," DI Gilbert went on, "We're just trying to establish exactly what happened this afternoon. Can you tell us again where you were between the hours of five and seven?"

"I was locked in a basement somewhere in town," Gabe said, "I was attacked, assaulted in the street by a couple of robed assassins and when I woke up I was in this cellar."

"Locked in a basement by a sinister cult? That's your story, Mr. Herrison?" DI Gilbert seemed disbelieving, "A locked basement that you just walked out of when the time came for you to leave. A locked basement that you can't tell us even roughly the whereabouts of. I'm sorry, Mr. Herrison, but I'm having a little trouble believing this story. I think you have a very fertile imagination, right Godfrey?"

"Right, sir. Very fertile," DS Godfrey agreed, eyeing Gabe up in a threatening fashion.

"What about before that then, Mr. Herrison," DI Gilbert continued, "You gave us a London address, so what are you doing here in Cambridge?"

"I came to the university, to see a professor," Gabe explained, "Jane Cavendish. I needed her help with something."

"Needed her help?" Gilbert repeated, giving his colleague a significant glance as he said this, "Was it perhaps in connection with this?"

He opened the file that he was carrying and placed a glossy A4 size photograph on the table between Gabe and the two detectives. Gabe recognised it instantly. It showed the victim of the National Gallery murder, the middle aged woman in a white smock, stretched out on the floor, blood leaking from her neck, the now familiar symbol drawn onto the wall. It was an image that Gabe needed no photo to remember, it was embedded in his mind for good.

"Recognise that?" Gilbert went on.

"I took it," Gabe agreed, "On the day of the murder in the National Gallery. I turned all my photos over to the Metropolitan Police."

"So, you were there with the victim on the day of that murder," Gilbert responded, flashing another significant glance at Godfrey, "None of your photos give any indication of the perpetrator of this heinous crime," the tone he used as he said this had a whiff of sarcasm that Gabe could not quite follow, "Just gruesome images of the victim, right, Godfrey?"

"Right, sir," Godfrey agreed again, "Nothing but shots of a dying body. Never stepped in to lend a hand."

"What can you tell us about this?" Gilbert pointed to the symbol drawn in blood on the wall.

"It's a transgender symbol," Gabe replied, pleased to be able to use the knowledge he'd recently gained.

"So, it means that somebody's a tranny," Gilbert repeated, "A man who wants to be a girl?"

"A she-male," Godfrey agreed, leeringly, "A chick with a dick."

"And this is the reason you came to see Professor Cavendish?" DI Gilbert asked.

"Exactly," Gabe agreed with a sigh of relief, finally feeling that the detectives were beginning to piece things together properly.

"So, in your expert opinion, what do you make of this?" Gilbert's tone continued to have that uncomfortable note of sarcasm in it, "The same thing?"

"Looks like the same to me, sir," Godfrey agreed.

Gilbert took another glossy photo from his file and placed it down on the desk. Gabe leaned over to look at it. The photo showed the head and torso of a grey haired woman. She was naked with her breasts exposed. The blank expression in her eyes showed Gabe that the woman was dead, but he took a few moments to register that the naked dead woman was Professor Cavendish, the same woman who he had talked with just a few hours earlier.

The throbbing ache in his head seemed to get worse. He couldn't breathe for a moment. His head spun and he felt almost as if he was about to faint. There was a sick feeling building up in the pit of his stomach. Struggling to focus his eyes on the photo, all he could see for a moment was grey. The pain in his head made it difficult to think straight. He was struggling to comprehend that in the few short hours since he had talked with her, the professor could have been brutally murdered.

Looking further at the picture, beginning to focus properly, Gabe could see that her naked body had been nastily mutilated. There were a series of ugly, deep cuts into her chest. After a moment, Gabe realised what he was looking at amongst the blood and gore. The cuts formed a circle with a cross beneath and an arrow coming from the top right. It was the image that he was beginning to see everywhere, that symbol he had never seen before this last week but knew so well now. The transgender sign.

"Yes," Gabe admitted, when he could finally bring himself to speak, "That looks like the same symbol. Do you think we're dealing with a serial killer? Might I be the next target? Why didn't they kill me already?"

"It certainly seems likely that there's a link between the two killings," DI Gilbert confirmed, "It seems too much of a coincidence to see two such victims in such close succession with this same symbol attached to each."

"Two such victims?" Gabe asked, confused.

"Both trannies," Gilbert responded, "Right, Godfrey?"

"Right, sir," his colleague agreed, "Evidence points to a classic case of a hate crime."

"Wait," Gabe cut in, confused and messed up in the head, struggling to keep track of the conversation, "Professor Cavendish was transgender?"

He guessed that should not really surprise him given her field of study. Then it hit him, the bigger revelation in that sentence, something he really should have picked up on before.

"And...And the first victim?" he gasped, suddenly putting things together, "She was one too?"

"Don't play dumb," Godfrey cut in, aggressively, "Of course she bloody was. You just told us what the symbol meant, remember!"

"I didn't think she was referring to herself," Gabe protested, sounding unconvincing even to himself, "I thought she meant the painting."

"Right," Gilbert sounded unconvinced, "All I'm saying is that you might interpret the appearance of this symbol at both crime scenes as some kind of a link between them. Now, you, Mr. Herrison, had never met either of these, er, for want of a better word, women before?"

"No, never," Gabe said.

"And yet you were the last person to see either of them alive," Gilbert went on, "And you were the one who knew the symbolism of the blood signs at both crime scenes, the one that drew the link between them."

"Why don't you think about that when you tell us where it is you've been all afternoon?" Godfrey added.

"Wait, are you trying to tell me that I'm a suspect?!" Gabe finally managed to get his mind running clearly enough to realise where this conversation had been heading all along.

"No, we're just saying that you're a valuable witness," DI Gilbert replied with a patronising sneer that suggested the truth was more than his words, "One that can help us greatly in our enquiries."

"And we'll be very interested in questioning you further," Godfrey added, "So, I would stick around. Don't be doing anything stupid like leaving the country."

Finally, after being grilled for what seemed like hours, Gabe was able to leave the station. He felt drained and exhausted, both physically and emotionally, his head still throbbed with a pain that made it hard to concentrate on anything else. He just wanted to lie down and sleep and try and block out the memory of what he had seen in those pictures, what had happened to the woman he was talking to just hours earlier.

These were the thoughts running through his mind as he made his way through the police station, already contemplating a soft bed and a pillow for his aching head. Outside, it had been dark for some time. He checked his watch. 10:20. Saphy had left three hours earlier, along with any chance he had at figuring out what had really gone on that afternoon. Just as he thought this, he felt a hand grab his arm for the third time that day.

Gabe couldn't believe his luck. How did this keep happening? Maybe he should pay a little more attention to where he was going and his surroundings, he thought. He felt his heart sink in the knowledge that some new trouble was about to be heaped onto his shoulders. Feeling light headed all of a sudden, he was about to faint to the floor when he looked up at the arm holding onto his and the person behind him. It was Saphy.

"Come on," she said, her upper class accent bringing Gabe back round to focus on reality, "We're getting out of here."

END OF PART TWO