Davo's Little Something Read online

  His killing grounds. Did that mean he was going to continue killing, even after all the headlines and the Joe Davenport article? He took a sip of coffee and grinned menacingly down at the Sunday Telegraph spread open in front of him.

  ‘Like the guy said—You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Davenport.’ He added a slightly demented chuckle.

  ‘You’ve both seen this I imagine. Just what we bloody well need isn’t it?’ Divisional Inspector Burgess stabbed his finger viciously at the newspaper on his desk and with suspicion all over his florid face glared at the two detectives seated impassively in front of him. ‘And just who gave bloody Davenport his . . . his so called bloody story?’ The Divisional Inspector continued to glare at the two detectives.

  Detective Middleton twisted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Sir, I happen to know this Davenport.’

  ‘So do I. And he’s a proper bastard.’

  ‘But he is a good journalist,’ ventured Detective Blackburn.

  ‘And he knows more people in this town than you, or I, could imagine,’ said Detective Middleton. ‘You can bet your life he’s paying someone in the cornoner’s office for these tips.’

  Inspector Burgess drummed his fingers irritably on his desk. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that bloody Joyce himself, with his warped sense of humour.’

  ‘No, sir. I doubt that very much,’ said Detective Blackburn. ‘Although this theory was Ozzie’s idea in the first place, he swore he wouldn’t say anything to anyone about it. Not out of his office. And especially not the papers.’

  ‘But you can bet your life someone in his department has overheard something or seen something,’ added Detective Middleton. ‘And for a leak like this you can also bet Davenport’s paid plenty.’

  ‘Mmphh!’ Inspector Burgess snorted loudly as he continued to glare at the Sunday Telegraph and began running his finger along the headlines. ‘Just had a look at some of this rubbish. Midnight Rambler Murderer. The Avenging Angel of Gay Martyrdom. Killer’s bloodlust a ray of happiness in the gay community. It could be an ex-police officer, says a spokesman. If it is, it would be the only co-operation we ever get from the police, says another. Bloody poofters. They give me the shits. Hold on. It gets better. Killer rumoured to be an AIDS sufferer with nothing to lose. Morgue attendants refuse to handle bodies of skinhead victims in case the killer has deliberately contaminated them.’ Burgess ran his huge hands over his face and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Fair dinkum, where does he get this utter bloody bullshit from?’

  ‘Joe’s certainly got a way with words hasn’t he,’ said Detective Middleton, trying to hide his amusement at all the discomfort this was causing his superior.

  Inspector Burgess gave him a mirthless smile. ‘In the meantime you’ll both continue to deny this rubbish. Right?’

  ‘Yessir. Whatever you say, sir.’

  ‘I’ll still be giving out the press releases. I might even give this Davenport a ring and tell him to pull his horns in a bit. Not that it would do any good. Probably only exacerbate things.’

  The Divisional Inspector continued to stare at the two detectives in silence for a few moments while behind them the noise of the traffic in the street below could be heard faintly over the hum of the airconditioner propped in the window.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said finally, ‘have you got any new theories since the last time you were in here?’

  Detective Middleton cleared his throat. ‘One or two, sir,’ he coughed gently.

  ‘Righto. Let’s hear them.’

  By halfway through the week the article in the Sunday Telegraph had ceased to bother Davo at all and, if anything, he thought it was a bit of a hoot. In fact he even bought another copy and pinned it on the wall of the garage; the other one he’d previously cut out and added to the steadily increasing collection in the kitchen drawer. The only thing that did worry him slightly was the thought of what might happen if somehow—unlikely as it was—he was to lose the gloves. It would certainly stuff things up a bit. There wasn’t much chance of this happening but on a trip to the junction on Wednesday Davo noticed the disposal store had another two pairs in the window so he bought one, plus another two small sheets of stainless steel and did them up the following day, he didn’t bother to test them on another wardrobe, they looked and felt alright, and rather than have two pairs in the flat he left them on the workbench in the garage right underneath the article from the Sunday Telegraph. He was almost tempted to try them out when he went killing on the weekend but took the original ones instead.

  Although Davenport’s article had ceased to worry him his own common sense and animal cunning told him not to be lurking around the back alleys of Oxford Street and the Cross for too long; get in and get the job over with, he could gloat about it when he got home. But maybe the skinheads were more worried about the article than Davo because there didn’t seem to be a great many of them around. He managed to get a couple on Friday night in a lane near Clapton Place but Saturday night he had to settle for three punks in Ward Avenue not far from Fitzroy Gardens; and one of them was a girl.

  Davo wasn’t to know. They all looked mean enough when they came up behind him in the shadows in the alley and their intentions were obvious. Davo had spotted them earlier and was rolling around putting on a drunk act but watching them out of the corner of his eye at the same time. He was leaning over a garbage bin, pretending to be sick when they came at him: two with bottles in their hands. They didn’t know what hit them when Davo leapt up like an enraged panther and started smashing them to pieces, and Davo didn’t know one was a girl until instead of a curse or a moan of pain she let out an ear-splitting scream of terror that seemed to echo off every building within half a kilometre. Davo got just as much of a shock as what she did. He stood there looking at her as she screamed her head off, almost paralysed with fright, her friends broken and bleeding at her feet and never having hit a woman before he didn’t quite know what to do. But he couldn’t leave any witnesses, and although for just a brief second he felt a modicum of remorse he pivoted at the waist and threw a short but lethal right that caught her on the point of the jaw and snapped her neck like a pencil. The screaming stopped as abruptly as someone pulling the needle off a record and she sprawled down next to her friends in the blood and the broken glass from the bottles they’d intended using on Davo. Davo rolled her over with his foot and as he raised his fist to give her his ‘coup de grace’ he noticed that along with all the red and orange blush she had painted around her eyes, she was wearing jet-black lipstick; before long her face and the faces of her two companions resembled pretty much the same colour of her lipstick.

  Although he always felt good after a killing Davo was still feeling slight pangs of remorse when, an hour later, he sat back in his flat sipping a cup of coffee with Lou Reed’s New Sensations bopping steadily on 2MMM in the background. He’d never hit a woman before let alone killed one and it did bother him a little. But then again this was now the era of women’s liberation and equality of the sexes and all that so really he’d only done the right thing. He nodded his head and smiled at himself in the framed mirror on the loungeroom wall. Yes, if the men were going to be killed there was no reason why the women shouldn’t be killed as well. He smiled and nodded his head in approval again. Yeah. At least now they can’t accuse the Midnight Rambler of being chauvinistic he chuckled.

  Detectives Blackburn and Middleton silently faced each other across the paperstrewn desk in the detectives’ room, each quietly sipping a mug of coffee. They were the only ones in the large partitioned-off room filled with desks and typewriters, and neither man was in a particularly good mood. Whereas in the beginning the skinhead killings had almost had a funny side—if only because of their unparalleled brutality and the fact that they had Divisional Inspector Burgess squirming—the bodies were starting to pile up with too much regularity now and the added ferocious murder of the seventeen-year-old girl and her two punk companions on Saturday night had cast a whole new perspective on the
killings. Whereas before the murders could possibly be interpreted as straight-out revenge and the murderer more than likely a gay as stated in the Davenport article, it was now becoming clear that a brutal psychopath was on the loose, killing indiscriminately and with an increasing bloodlust. What could have started off as revenge had now switched to thrill killings. A police psychiatrist had verified this and these were the worst, most dangerous and most unpredictable kind.

  The two detectives were sitting there mulling over something a detective on another case had told them. He’d been in a large inner city gymnasium, taking a statement from the proprietor about a break-in, and had noticed a group of gays in there pumping iron with a vengeance. The four men were obviously as gay as carnival time in Rio but each one was built like a rugby front-row forward and lifting incredible weights. What Davenport had said in his article about the so called Midnight Rambler being a gay martial arts expert was starting to look like a distinct possibility.

  Detective Middleton took another sip of coffee from his chipped blue mug while he drummed the fingers of his left hand on the desk. He stared absently at his partner for a moment before placing his coffee back on the desk separating them. He was still trying to maintain his sense of humour through this extraordinary macabre case but after seeing what was left of the young girl’s face as she lay on the slab in the morgue on Monday morning it wasn’t getting any easier. But he was trying.

  ‘Well, what do you reckon, Ray?’ he finally said. ‘I think what Billy Minto said about those jokers in that gymnasium is starting to make a lot of sense. You agree?’

  Detective Blackburn nodded his head slowly. ‘Yep.’

  ‘It’s definitely some big poof out for a square-up that’s doing this. I can’t see it being anything else. Can you?’

  Detective Blackburn shook his head this time. ‘No. But we’ve been through every gay assault on record and not one of those blokes has weighed over fifty kilos.’

  Detective Middleton made a gesture with his hands. ‘Yeah, but what about the ones that never get reported. Or one could’ve had a lover that got killed.’

  Detective Blackburn nodded and took another sip of coffee. ‘Yeah, I hadn’t really thought of that.’

  ‘So I reckon it’s about time we went up and had a word with all the horse’s hoofs.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘Up at that gay newspaper place in Crown Street. I reckon those bloody little queens up there know what’s going on and they’re keeping quiet about it. I reckon they’d half-pie know who it is too.’

  ‘Yeah. They’d know something—that’s for bloody sure.’

  ‘Right. Well let’s finish these and go and have a word with them.’

  Detective Blackburn nodded and smiled. ‘I’ll get my handbag.’

  There didn’t appear to be anyone in the little dress shop underneath the Gay Press office when the two detectives pulled up out the front shortly after. Upon entering, they saw a thinnish man in his late twenties with a red crewcut sorting through a stack of cheap shoes on the floor. Hearing the door open he looked up, immediately noticed they were police and got to his feet.

  ‘Yes, can I help you?’ he said unsmilingly.

  Detective Middleton showed his badge. ‘Is the newspaper still upstairs?’

  The redhaired shop assistant nodded: still unsmiling.

  ‘We’d like to see the editor.’

  ‘Just wait here a second and I’ll go and get him.’ The man disappeared through a doorway in the corner and returned a few moments later. ‘He’ll be straight down,’ he said, and returned to whatever he was doing among the shoes.

  Before long a medium-built man wearing green trousers and a matching green shirt and shoes appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He was about thirty with styled fair hair, a neatly trimmed blond moustache and deep expressive brown eyes. He could have been classed as quite handsome, in a Robert Redford sort of way.

  ‘I’m James Nesbitt, the editor,’ he said, walking towards the two detectives. ‘What can I do for you?’ He was cool, a little reserved: he didn’t bother to offer his hand and neither did the two detectives.

  ‘I’m Detective Middleton and this is Detective Blackburn. We’d like to ask you a few questions.’

  Nesbitt nodded his head, still unsmiling. ‘Come upstairs to the office.’

  The two detectives followed Nesbitt up a narrow dingy grey carpeted set of stairs to a small landing. They filed past a cluttered-looking room on the right, where through the half closed door they could see a coffee machine and hear someone shuffling around, then went through another grey door, with the latest cover of the gay magazine Outrageous pinned on it, into a larger room which was the main office.

  ‘Just take a seat and I’ll be with you in a moment.’ Nesbitt sat down behind a desk-cum-table built out into the middle of the room and picked up a ringing phone. The two detectives pulled up a couple of wire-backed garden-type chairs and got out their notebooks; Detective Blackburn raised his eyes at his partner and gazed around the room.

  As far as offices went it would scarcely have suited the managing director of General Motors Holden. The grey threadbare feltex covering the floor was matched by dull, grey paint on the walls, around which were spread several chipped grey lockers and tables with lamps and phones on them. Squeezed in among these was a battered airconditioner which didn’t work. A number of paper racks leant crookedly up against the sombre-coloured walls and an old fireplace filled with more racks was set into another wall. A barely discernible glow came from the bulbs in an old chrome ceiling light with the main light coming from a fly-specked uncurtained window overlooking Crown Street. Several posters depicting plays and gay events and a photo of Rock Hudson, or which someone had pencilled an earring in one of his ears, were tacked around the walls and an anthropomorphic-looking stuffed puppy sat forlornly on one of the lockers in the corner.

  Detective Blackburn glanced through a stack of magazines on a table in front of them while they waited for Nesbitt to get off the phone. Babylonia, Tarzan Boy, The Body Politic. He picked up a copy of Outrageous and flicked through it finally coming to the classified ads. He went through them, then snorted a chuckle and tapped his partner on the arm as he ran his finger along one: it read:

  Melbourne. Young puppy just 19, needs new home. Strict master required to correct my disobedience. Can be a little devil at times but willing to submit to ALL never before dared fantasies. Does anyone have kennel space free. Reply N.535.

  Detective Middleton shook his head slowly then made a quiet barking sound at his partner. ‘Woof—woof,’ he said, as Nesbitt continued to talk on the phone.

  Detective Blackburn made a clawing gesture with his right hand. ‘Miaowww,’ he purred.

  No sooner had Nesbitt got off one phone than another rang then another. ‘Rodney,’ he called out. A few seconds later an elfin-faced man with little pixieish ears and what dark hair he had cut almost to his scalp appeared in the doorway. ‘Rodney. Could you take these calls in the other room.’ Rodney didn’t say anything, he just nodded his head, gave the two detectives a bit of a sour look and disappeared back into the other room.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Nesbitt. ‘But some days in here the phone just never seems to stop ringing.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Detective Blackburn, tossing the magazine he’d been glancing through back with the others.

  There was a pause for a few seconds as the two detectives summed Nesbitt up and the fairhaired editor did the same to them. ‘Anyway, what can I do for you?’ he finally said.

  Detective Middleton continued to stare at him for a moment. ‘Well, I think it’s pretty bloody obvious why we’re here.’

  ‘The Midnight Rambler murders.’

  ‘If you want to refer to them as such,’ replied Detective Middleton, nodding his head with displeasure. ‘But forget about all that sensationalism crap in the papers. We know it has to be one of your lot that’s doing it. And, Nesbitt—you’ve
got to know something.’

  Nesbitt leant back and closed his eyes as a bit of a chuckle went through him.

  ‘There was a seventeen-year-old girl butchered on Saturday night,’ cut in Detective Blackburn tersely. ‘Maybe if you think it’s that funny we can take you down the morgue and show you what’s left of her face.’

  The fairhaired editor laced his hands across his waist and shook his head as he smiled softly at the two detectives. ‘You’re so convinced it’s one of—our lot. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Well who else could it be,’ said Detective Middleton, raising his voice slightly. ‘The victims, all skinheads. The area it’s all happening in, Oxford Street and round the Cross. And they’re not just being killed Nesbitt—they’re being mutilated almost beyond recognition. These are revenge killings, Nesbitt. And you know it.’

  ‘Of course, nothing like that ever happens to us—does it?’

  ‘That’s not the point in this instance,’ said Detective Blackburn. ‘Fair enough, you’ve had your share of trouble—assaults and killings—but this is different. There’s a nut out there running around slaughtering people. And I don’t give a stuff whether they’re skinheads or what they bloody are.’

  ‘And it’s definitely one of us eh?’

  ‘Well of course it bloody is,’ said Detective Middleton. ‘Look, Nesbitt. Don’t try to patronise us. And don’t take us for a couple of dills either.’

  ‘Oh I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Nesbitt smiled a mirthless smile. ‘Look, I honestly don’t believe this. You guys know where we’re coming from, and violence, especially on this scale, has never been part of our scene.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Detective Blackburn. ‘Well it wasn’t all that long ago, just after that hairdresser got killed—what was his name? St Peters. One of your gay mates got up on TV and said you were all taking karate lessons or something. And you’re gonna try and tell me this isn’t the result. Don’t give us the shits.’