VAL McDERMID

Killing the Shadows

This one’s for BB. Because it takes two to jump over the rocks in the road.

Table of Contents

I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

II

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

III

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

IV

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I

The haar moves up from the steel-grey waters of the Firth of Forth, a solid wall of mist the colour of cumulus. It swallows the bright lights of the city’s newest playground, the designer hotels and the smart restaurants. It becomes one with the spectres of the sailors from the docks who used to blow their pay on eighty-shilling ale and whores with faces as hard as their clients’ hands. It climbs the hill to the New Town, where the geometric grid of Georgian elegance slices it into blocks before it slides down into the ditch of Princes Street Gardens. The few late revellers staggering home quicken their steps to escape its clammy grip.

By the time it reaches the narrow split-level streets and twisting vennels of the Old Town, the haar has lost its deadening solidity. It has metamorphosed into wraiths of pale fog that turn tourist traps into sinister looming presences. Peeling posters advertising recent Festival Fringe events flit in and out of visibility like garish ghosts. On a night like this it’s easy to see what inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to create The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He may have set the book in London, but it’s unmistakably Edinburgh that comes eerily off the page.

Behind the soot-black facades of the Royal Mile lie the old tenements surrounding their barren courts. Back in the eighteenth century, these were the equivalent of today’s council-housing schemes—overcrowded with the dispossessed of the city, home to drunks and laudanum addicts, haunts of the lowest whores and street urchins. Tonight, like a tormented replay of the worst historical nightmare, a woman’s body lies close to the head of a stone staircase that provides a steep short cut from High Street down the slope of The Mound. Her short dress has been pulled up, the cheap seams splitting under the strain.

If she had screamed when she was attacked, it would have been smothered by the blanket of foggy air. One thing is certain. She will never scream again. Her throat is a gaping scarlet grin. To add insult to injury, the gleaming coils of her intestines have been draped over her left shoulder.

The printer who stumbled over the body on his way home from a late shift cowers in a crouch at the mouth of the close leading to the court. He is close enough to the pool of his own vomit to gag on the rancid stench held hovering by the oppression of the haar. He has used his mobile phone to call the police, but the few minutes it is taking them to arrive feel like an eternity, his recent vision of hell stamped ineradicably on his mind’s eye.

Flashing blue lights loom suddenly before him as two police cars swoop to a halt at the kerb. Running footsteps, then he has company. Two uniformed officers gently help him to his feet. They lead him towards their squad car where they hand him into the rear seat. Two others have disappeared down the close, the woolly sound of their footsteps swallowed almost immediately by the clinging mist. Now the only sounds are the crackling of the police radio and the chattering of the printer’s teeth.

* * *

Dr Harry Gemmell hunkers by the body, his gloved fingers probing things that Detective Inspector Campbell Grant doesn’t want to think about. Rather than study what the police surgeon is doing, Grant looks instead at the scene-of-crime officers in their white overalls. They are taking advantage of the portable lights to search the area round the body. The haar is eating into Grant’s very bones, making him feel like an old man.

Eventually, Gemmell grunts and pushes himself to his feet, stripping the blood-streaked latex from his hands. He studies his chunky sports watch and gives a satisfied nod. ‘Aye,’ he says. ‘September the eighth, right enough.’

‘Meaning what, Harry?’ Grant asks wearily. He is already irritated by the prospect of enduring Gemmell’s habit of forcing detectives to drag information out of him piecemeal.

‘Your man here, he likes to play follow-my-leader. See if you can figure it out for yourself, Cam. There are marks on her neck that indicate manual strangulation, though I reckon she died from having her throat cut. But it’s the mutilations that tell the story.’

‘Is all this supposed to mean something to me, Harry? Apart from a good reason to lose my last meal?’ Grant demands.

‘Eighteen eighty-eight in Whitechapel, nineteen ninety-nine in Edinburgh.’ Gemmell raises an eyebrow. ‘Time to call in the profilers, Cam.’

‘What the fuck are you on about, Harry?’ Grant asks. He wonders if Gemmell’s been drinking.

‘I think you’ve got a copycat killer, Cam. I think you’re looking for Jock the Ripper.’

1

Dr Fiona Cameron stood on the very lip of Stanage Edge and leaned forward into the wind. The only kind of sudden death she might have to contemplate here would be her own, and then only if she was more careless than she thought she could manage. But just supposing for a moment she lost concentration on the wet millstone grit, she’d plunge down thirty or forty helter-skelter feet, her body bouncing like a plastic doll on the jutting blocks of rock, bones and skin broken and violated.

She’d end up looking like a victim.

No way, Fiona thought, letting the wind push her back from the edge just far enough to take the danger out of her position. Not here of all places. This was the place of pilgrimage, the place where she came to remind herself of all the reasons why she was who she was. Always alone, she returned here three or four times a year, whenever the need grew in her to touch the face of her memories. The company of another living, breathing human would be impossible to bear up on this bleak stretch of moorland. There was only room for the two of them; Fiona and her ghost, that other half of herself who only ever walked beside her on these moors.

It was strange, she thought. There were so many other places where she’d spent far more time with Lesley. But everywhere else was somehow marred by the consciousness of other voices, other lives. Here, though, she could sense Lesley without interference. She could see her face, open in laughter, or closed in concentration as she negotiated a tricky scramble. She could hear her voice, earnest with confidences or loud with the excitement of achievement. She almost believed she could smell the faint musk of her skin as they huddled together over a picnic.

Here, more than anywhere, Fiona recognized the light she had lost from her life. She closed her eyes and let her mind create the picture. Her mirror image, that same chestnut hair and hazel eyes, that same arc of the eyebrows, that same nose. Everyone had always marvelled at the resemblance. Only their mouths were different; Fiona’s wide and full-lipped, Lesley’s a small cupid’s bow, her bottom lip fuller than the upper.

Here, too, the discussions had been had, the decision taken that had ultimately led to Lesley being wrenched from her life. This was the place of final reproach, the place where Fiona could never forget what her life lacked.

Fiona felt her eyes watering. She snapped them open and let the wind provide the excuse. The time for vulnerability was over. She was here, she reminded herself, to get away from victims. She looked out across the brown bracken of Hathersage Moor to the clumsy thumb of Higger Tor and beyond, turning back to watch a wedge of rain drench one end of Bamford Moor. In this wind, she had twenty minutes before it reached the Edge, she reckoned, rolling her shoulders to shift her backpack to a more comfortable position. Time to make a move.

An early train from King’s Cross then a connection to a local train had brought her to Hathersage just after ten. She’d made good time on the steep hike up to High Neb, enjoying the stretch in her muscles, savouring the bunching of her calves and the tautness of her quads. The final scramble that brought her to the northern end of Stanage had left her short of breath and she’d leaned against the rock, taking a long drink from her water bottle before she set off along the flat slabs of gritstone. The connection to her past had grounded her more firmly than anything else she knew. And the wind at her back had exhilarated her, setting her thoughts loose from the jumbled knot of irritation that had woken her. She’d known then that she had to get out of London for the day or else accept that by evening her shoulders would be a tight plane sending waves of pain up her neck and across her head.

The only appointment in her diary had been a supervision meeting with one of her PhD students, and that had been easily rearranged with a phone call from the train. Up here on the moors, no tabloid hack could find her, no camera crew could thrust their equipment into her face and demand to know what Candid Cameron had to say about the day’s courtroom events.

Of course, she couldn’t be certain that things would turn out in line with her expectations. But when she’d heard on last night’s news that the sensational trial of the Hampstead Heath Killer was still on hold after a second day of legal arguments, all her instincts told her that by the end of today, the red-top brigade would be screaming for blood. And she was the perfect weapon for them to use to draw that blood from the police. Better to keep well out of it, for all sorts of reasons.

She’d never courted publicity for the work she’d done with the police, but it had dogged her regardless. Fiona hated to see her face splashed across the newspapers nearly as much as her colleagues resented it. What was almost worse than the loss of privacy was that her notoriety had somehow diminished her as an academic. Now when she published in journals and contributed to books, she knew her work was scrutinized with more scepticism than before, simply because she had applied her skills and knowledge in a practical way that met with pursed lips of disapproval among the purists.

The silent condemnation had only grown harsher when one of the tabloids had revealed that she was living with Kit Martin. It was hard to imagine who, in the eyes of the academic establishment, could have been a less respectable partner for an academic psychologist engaged in developing scientific methods that would help police to catch repeat offenders than the country’s leading writer of serial killer thrillers. If Fiona had cared enough about what her peers thought of her, she might have bothered to explain that it was not Kit’s novels she was in love with but the man who wrote them, and that the very nature of his work had made her more cautious about starting the relationship than she might otherwise have been. But since no one dared challenge her to her face, she chose not to leap into the trap of self-justification.

At the thought of Kit, her sadness shifted. That she had found the one man who could save her from the prison of her introspection was a blessing she never ceased to find miraculous. The world might never see behind the tough-guy charm he turned on in public, but beyond his sharp-edged intelligence, she had discovered generosity, respect and a sensitivity she’d all but given up hope of ever finding. With Kit, she had finally arrived at a kind of peace that mostly kept the demons of Stanage Edge at bay.

As she strode on, she glanced at her watch. She’d made good time. If she kept up her pace, she’d have time for a drink in the Fox House pub before the bus that would carry her back down into Sheffield for the London train. She’d have had five hours in the open, five hours when she had seen scarcely another human being, and that was enough to sustain her. Until the next time, she thought grimly.

The train was quieter than she’d expected. Fiona had a double seat to herself, and the man opposite her was asleep within ten minutes of leaving Sheffield, allowing her space to spread herself over the whole of the table between them. That was fine by her since she had more than enough work to occupy the journey. She had an arrangement with the landlord of a pub a few minutes’ walk from the station. He looked after her mobile phone and her laptop when she was out walking in exchange for signed first editions of Kit’s books. It was safer than the left-luggage facilities at the station and certainly cheaper.

Fiona flipped open her laptop and attached it to her mobile so she could collect her e-mail. A message appeared on her screen announcing she had five new pieces of mail. She downloaded them then disconnected. There were two messages from students, and one from a colleague in Princeton writing to ask if he could have access to some data she had collected on solved rape cases. Nothing there that couldn’t wait till morning. She opened the fourth message, from Kit.

From: Kit Martin <KMWriter@trashnet.com>

To: Fiona Cameron

<fcameron@psych.ulon.ac.uk>

Subject: Dinner tonight

Hope you’ve had a good day on the hill. I’ve been productive, 2,500 words by teatime. Things turned out at the Bailey just like you said they would. Trust that female intuition! (only joking, I know yours was a considered judgement based on weighing up all the scientific evidence…) Anyway, I reckoned Steve would need cheering up, so I’ve arranged to meet him for dinner. We’re going to St John’s in Clerkenwell to eat lots of dead animal so you probably don’t fancy joining us, but if you want to, that’d be great. If not, I made a salmon and asparagus risotto for lunch, and there’s plenty left over in the fridge for you for dinner. Love you.

Fiona smiled. Typical Kit. As long as everyone was fed, nothing too terrible could go wrong with the world. She wasn’t surprised Steve needed cheering up. No police officer relished watching a case fall apart, especially one that had such a high public profile as the Hampstead Heath murder. But for Detective Superintendent Steve Preston, the collapse of this particular case would have left a more bitter taste than most. Fiona knew only too well how much had been at stake in this prosecution, and while she felt personal sympathy for Steve, all she felt for the Metropolitan Police was that it served them bloody well right.

She clicked open the next message, having saved the most intriguing for last.

From: Salvador Berrocal <Sberroc@cnp.mad.es>

To: Dr Fiona Cameron

<fcameron@psych.ulon.ac.uk>

Subject: Consultation request

Dear Dr Cameron

I am a Major in the plain-clothes division of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia based in Madrid. I am in charge of many homicide inquiries. Your name has been given to me by a colleague at New Scotland Yard as an expert in crime linkage and geographic profiling. Please forgive the intrusion of contacting you so directly. I am writing to ask if you would do us the courtesy of providing your services to consult in a matter of great urgency. In Spain we have a little experience with serial killers and so we have no psychological experts to work with policemen.

In Toledo have been two murders inside three weeks and we think they are the crimes of one man. But it is wholly not obvious that they are connected and we need a different expertise to assist us with the analysis of these crimes. I understand that you have experience in the area of crime analysis and linkage, and this would be of great use to us, I think.

I wish to know if in principle you are willing to help us with resolving these murders.

You may be assured of proper remuneration for this consultation if you will be our assistant.

I look forward to hearing your response.

Respectfully

Major Salvador Berrocal

Cuerpo Nacional de Policia

Fiona folded her arms and stared at the screen. She knew that behind this cautious request lay a pair of bodies that had almost certainly been mutilated and probably tortured before death. There was likely to be some element of sexual violation in the attacks. She could assume this with some degree of certainty, for police forces were well capable of dealing with routine murders without calling on the specialist help that only she and a handful of others could be relied on to provide. When new acquaintances discovered this aspect of Fiona’s work, they usually shuddered and asked how she could bear to be involved in such appalling cases.

Her typical response was to shrug and say, ‘Somebody has to do it. Better it’s somebody like me who knows what she’s doing. Nobody can bring back the dead but sometimes it’s possible to prevent more of the living joining them.’

It was, she knew, a glib riposte, carefully calculated to deflect further questioning. The truth was she hated the inevitable confrontation with violent death that her work with various police forces had brought into her life, not least because of the memories it stirred in her. She knew more about what could be inflicted on the human body, more about the sufferings the spirit could sustain than she had ever wished to. But such exposure was inescapable and because it always exacted a heavy toll from her, she only ever accepted a new assignment when she felt sufficiently recovered from her last direct encounter with the victims of a serial killer.

It had been almost four months since Fiona had worked a murder series. A man had killed four prostitutes in Merseyside over a period of eighteen months. Thanks in part to the data analysis that Fiona and one of her graduate students had completed, the police had been able to narrow down their pool of suspects to the point where forensic detection could be applied. Now they had a man in custody charged with three of the four killings, and thanks to DNA matches they were reasonably sure of a conviction.

Since then, her only police consultation project had been a long-term study of recidivist burglars with the Swedish Police. It was, she thought, time to get her hands dirty again. She hit the <reply> key.

From: Fiona Cameron

<fcameron@psych.ulon.ac.uk>

To: Salvador Berrocal <Sberroc@cnp.mad.es>

Subject: Re: Consultation request

Dear Major Berrocal

Thank you for your invitation to act as consultant to the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia. In principle, I am willing to consider your request favourably. However, before I can be certain that I can be of use to you, I need more detail than you have provided in your e-mail. Ideally, I would like to see an outline of the circumstances of both murders, a digest of the pathology reports and any witness statements. I am reasonably competent in written Spanish, so in the interests of speed, you need not have these documents translated for my benefit. Of course, any communications I receive from you will be treated in complete confidence.

For the sake of security, I suggest you fax these documents to my home.

Fiona typed in the details of her home fax and phone then sent the e-mail. At best, she’d be able to contribute to the prevention of more murders and acquire useful data for her researches in the process. At worst, she’d have a valid excuse for staying out of the way of the fallout from the Hampstead Heath trial collapse. Someone—or rather a couple of Spanish someones—had paid a high price to keep Candid Cameron out of the headlines.

2

Fiona walked through the door to the sound of REM telling her that nobody loved a sad professor. As usual, Kit had stacked up half a dozen CDs in the player in his study, hit the random button and walked out the door while there were still hours of playing time left. He couldn’t abide silence. She had learned this early on in their relationship, when she’d taken him walking in her beloved Derbyshire and had been horrified to watch him filling his backpack with cassettes for his Walkman. More than once, she’d come home to an empty house where music spilled out of Kit’s study, the TV in the living room blared like a bull and the radio in the kitchen added a mad counterpoint to the racket. The louder the din, the easier he seemed to find it to escape into his own imagined universe. For Fiona, who needed silence in order to concentrate on anything vaguely creative, it was an incomprehensible paradox.

When they’d first talked about living together, Fiona had insisted that whatever property they bought, it had to be capable of providing her with a quiet space to work in. They’d ended up with a tall thin house in Dartmouth Park whose previous owner had been a rock musician. He’d converted the attic into a soundproof studio that provided Fiona with the perfect eyrie to escape Kit’s background racket. It was even big enough to allow her to install a futon for those nights when Kit was up against a deadline and needed to write into the early hours of the morning. Sometimes she felt deeply sorry for their long-suffering neighbours. They must dread February when, invariably, the end of a book and late-night Radiohead loomed.

Fiona dropped her bags and went into Kit’s ground-floor study to turn off the music. Blessed silence fell like balm on her head. She continued upstairs, stopping off in their bedroom to shuck off her walking gear and pull on her house clothes. She trudged up the remaining two flights to her office, feeling the hills in the pull of her leg muscles. The first thing she registered was the flashing light of the answering machine. Fifteen messages. She’d put money on them all being from journalists, and she wasn’t in the mood to listen to them, never mind to respond. This was one occasion where she was absolute in her determination not to provide a single quote that could be twisted to suit someone else’s agenda.

Leaving her laptop by the desk, Fiona noticed that Major Berrocal hadn’t wasted any time. A pile of paper lay accusingly in the fax tray. That she couldn’t ignore. Stifling a sigh, she picked it up, automatically straightening the edges, and headed back downstairs.

As Kit had promised, her dinner sat in the fridge. She wondered fleetingly how many of his fans would credit that the man who created scenes of graphic violence that gave critics nightmares was the same creature whose idea of relaxation after a hard day’s writing was to cook gourmet food for his lover. They’d probably prefer to believe he spent his evenings on Hampstead Heath, biting the heads off small furry animals. Smiling at the thought, Fiona poured herself a glass of cold Sauvignon while she waited for the risotto to heat up, then settled down at the kitchen table with the Spanish fax and a pencil. Glancing at the clock, she decided to catch the news headlines before she began the chore of deciphering foreign police reports.

The theme music of the late evening news thundered out its familiar fanfare. The camera zoomed in on the solemn face of the newsreader. ‘Good evening. The headlines tonight. The man accused of the Hampstead Heath murder walks free after a judge accuses the police of entrapment.’ Top item, Fiona noted without surprise. ‘Middle East peace talks are on the verge of breakdown in spite of a personal intervention by the US President. And the rouble tumbles as fresh scandal hits Russia’s banking system.’

The screen behind the newsreader’s head changed from the programme logo to a shot of the exterior of the Central Criminal Court. ‘At the Old Bailey today, the man accused of the savage rape and murder of Susan Blanchard was freed on the order of the trial judge. Mrs Justice Mary Delancey said there was no doubt that the Metropolitan Police had entrapped Francis Blake in an operation which she described as “little short of a witch-hunt”. In spite of the lack of any solid evidence against Mr Blake, she said, they had decided that he was the killer. Over to our Home Affairs Correspondent, Danielle Rutherford, who was in court today.’

A woman in her thirties with mouse-brown hair tangled by the wind gazed earnestly at the camera. ‘There were angry scenes in court today as Mrs Justice Delancey ordered the release of Francis Blake. The family of Susan Blanchard, who was raped and murdered as she walked on Hampstead Heath with her twin babies, were outraged at the judge’s decision and at Blake’s obvious jubilation in the dock.

‘But the judge was unmoved by their protests, saving her condemnation for the Metropolitan Police whose methods she described as an affront to civilized democracy. Acting on the advice of a psychological profiler, the police had set up a sting using an attractive female detective in an attempt to win Mr Blake’s affections and to lure him into confessing to the murder. The sting, which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds of the police operations budget and lasted for almost three months, did not lead to a direct confession, but police believed they had obtained sufficient evidence to bring Mr Blake to trial.

‘The defence argued that whatever Mr Blake had said had been at the instigation of the female detective and had been calculated to impress the personality she had falsely projected. And this view was upheld by the judge. After his release, Mr Blake, who has spent eight months in prison on remand, announced he would be seeking compensation.’

The picture changed, revealing a stocky man in his late twenties with cropped black hair and deep-set dark eyes. A forest of microphones and hand-held tape recorders blossomed in front of his white shirt and charcoal suit. His voice was surprisingly cultivated and he glanced down frequently at a piece of paper in his hands. ‘I have always protested my innocence of the murder of Susan Blanchard, and today I have been vindicated by a court of law. But I have paid a terrible price. I have lost my job, my home, my girlfriend and my reputation. I am an innocent man, but I have spent eight months behind bars. I will be suing the Metropolitan Police for false imprisonment and for compensation. And I sincerely hope they will think twice before they set about framing another innocent man.’ Then he looked up, his eyes blazing anger and hatred. Fiona shivered involuntarily.

The picture changed again. A tall man in a crumpled grey suit flanked by a pair of stony-faced men in raincoats walked towards the camera, head down, mouth drawn into a thin line. The reporter’s voice said, ‘The police officer in charge of the case, Detective Superintendent Steve Preston, refused to comment on Blake’s release. In a later statement, New Scotland Yard announced they were not actively seeking anyone else in connection with Susan Blanchard’s murder. This is Danielle Rutherford at the Old Bailey.’

Back in the studio, the newsreader announced that there would be an in-depth look at the background to the case after the break. Fiona turned off the TV. She had no need of their potted version of the facts. There were powerful reasons why she would never forget the rape and murder of Susan Blanchard. It wasn’t the graphic police photographs of the body or the pathologist’s report or her knowledge as a local resident of the scene of the crime, a mere twenty-minute walk from her own front door, although all of these had been terrible enough. Nor was it the brutality of a killer who had violated and stabbed a young mother in full view of her eighteen-month-old twin sons.

What made the Hampstead Heath murder so significant for Fiona was that it had marked the end of her association with the Met. She and Steve Preston had been close since their undergraduate days when they’d both read psychology at Manchester. Unlike most student friendships, it had persisted in spite of their very different career paths. And when British police forces had first started to consider the potential advantages of working with psychologists to improve their chances of catching repeat offenders, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world for Steve to consult Fiona. It had been the start of a fruitful relationship, with Fiona’s rigorous approach to data analysis complementing the experience and instincts of the detectives she had worked with.

Within hours of the discovery of Susan Blanchard’s body, it had been clear to Steve Preston that this was precisely the kind of case where Fiona’s talents could be used to best advantage. A man who could kill like this was no beginner. Steve had learned enough from listening to Fiona, supplemented by his own reading, to know that such a killer would already have cast his shadow over the criminal justice system. With her expertise, Fiona would be able to suggest at the very least what sort of record their suspect would have. Depending on the circumstances, she might well be able to indicate the geographical area he’d be likely to live in. She would look at the same things that detectives saw, but for her they would have different meanings.

Early in the investigation, Francis Blake had emerged as a possible suspect. He had been seen on the Heath around the time of the murder, running away from the direction of the dense undergrowth that shielded the small clearing where Susan Blanchard’s body had been found by a dog-walker who heard the children crying. Blake was branch manager for a firm of undertakers, which suggested to detectives that he had an unhealthy preoccupation with the dead. He had also worked in a butcher’s shop as a teenager, which the police decided meant he was comfortable with the sight of blood. He had no adult criminal record, although he had been cautioned twice as a juvenile, once for setting fire to a rubbish bin and the second time for an assault on a younger boy. And he was evasive about what he’d been doing on the Heath that morning.

There was only one problem. Fiona didn’t think Francis Blake was the killer. She said so to Steve and she kept on saying so to anyone who would listen. But her suggestions for alternative lines of inquiry had apparently led nowhere. Under the glare of an outraged media, Steve was under pressure to make an arrest.

One morning he’d turned up at her office at the university. She’d taken one look at the hard set of his features and said, ‘I’m not going to like this, am I?’

He shook his head and dropped into the chair facing her. ‘You’re not the only one. I’ve argued till I was blue in the face, but sometimes you just can’t buck the politics. The Commander’s gone over my head. He’s brought in Andrew Horsforth.’

Neither of them needed to comment. Andrew Horsforth was a clinical psychologist. He had worked for years in a secure mental hospital whose reputation had slumped with every independent report ever made into it. He relied on what Fiona contemptuously referred to as the ‘touchy-feely’ approach to profiling, priding himself on the quality of insights gained from years of hands-on experience. ‘Which would be fine if he could ever see past his own ego,’ she’d once commented sarcastically after listening to him lecture. He’d had what she privately referred to as a lucky break on the first major case where he’d produced a profile and he’d traded on it ever since, never failing to provide the media with all the quotes and interviews they could desire. When police made an arrest on a case where he’d produced an offender profile, he was always quick to claim the credit; when they failed, it was never his fault. Faced with Francis Blake as a suspect, Fiona felt certain Horsforth could make the profile fit the man.

‘I’m out of it, then,’ she said with an air of finality.

‘Believe me, you’re well out of it,’ Steve said bitterly. ‘They’ve decided to ignore your professional advice and my personal opinion. They’re going ahead with the sting. Orchestrated by Horsforth.’

Fiona shook her head in exasperation. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she exploded. ‘It’s a terrible idea. Even if I thought Blake was your man, it would still be a terrible idea. You might just get something that would stand up in court if you used a trained psychologist with years of experience of therapeutic work to do the entrapment, but with the best will in the world, setting some young copper loose with an idiot like Horsforth briefing her is a recipe for disaster.’

Steve ran his hands through his thinning dark hair, pushing it back from his forehead. ‘You think I haven’t told them that?’ His mouth clamped shut in a frustrated line.

‘I’m sure you have. And I know you’re as pissed off about it as I am.’ Fiona got to her feet and turned to look out of the window. She couldn’t bear to show her humiliation, even to someone as close as Steve. ‘That’s it, then,’ she said. ‘I’m finished with the Met. I’m never going to work with you and your colleagues again.’

Steve knew her well enough to realize there was little point in trying to argue when she was in this frame of mind. He’d been so angry at the dismissal of his own professional judgement that the thought of resignation had briefly flashed across his mind. But unlike Fiona, he had no alternative career where his expertise could make a difference, so he’d tossed the notion aside impatiently as the self-indulgence of hurt pride. He hoped Fiona would do the same, given time. But this wasn’t the moment to suggest that. ‘I can’t blame you, Fi,’ he said sadly. ‘I’ll be sorry to lose you.’

Composed again, she faced him. ‘I’m not the only one you’ll be saying sorry to before this is over,’ she’d said mildly. Even then, she’d understood how badly things could turn out. Police officers desperate for an arrest, shored up by the seeming respectability of a psychologist who told them what they wanted to hear, would not be satisfied till they had their man behind bars.

It gave her no pleasure at all to see how right she’d been.

3

The medieval stronghold of Toledo was built on a rocky outcropping almost completely enclosed by an ox-bow gorge in the River Tagus. The deep river and the steep cliffs provided natural defences for most of the city, leaving only a narrow neck of land to fortify against the enemy. Now a scenic road ran round the far bank of the Tagus, providing panoramic views of a tumble of buildings the colour of honey in the sun, descending precipitously from the ornate cathedral and the severe lines of the Alcazar. This much Fiona remembered from a hot dusty day thirteen years before when she’d explored the city with three friends.

They’d been celebrating the completion of their doctorates by touring Spain in a battered Volkswagen camper, ticking off the major sights and cities as they went. Toledo had meant El Greco, Fernando and Isabella, shop windows filled with armour and swords, and a particularly delicious way of serving quail, she recalled. If anyone had suggested to that young academic psychologist that she’d be returning one day as a consultant to the Spanish police, she’d have wondered what hallucinogenics they’d been on.

The first body had been found in a deep wooded gorge running down to the River Tagus about a mile from the city gates. According to local custom, the gorge boasted the revolting name of La Degollada—the woman with her throat slit, according to Fiona’s Spanish dictionary. The original corpse in La Degollada was said to have been a gypsy woman who seduced one of the guard, allowing a sneak attack to take place on the city. Her punishment for losing her head over a soldier was literally to lose her head. Her throat was cut so severely that she was virtually decapitated. Fiona noted with weary lack of surprise that Major Berrocal’s brief did not record the fate of the soldier.

The contemporary victim was a twenty-five-year-old German citizen, Martina Albrecht. Martina worked as a freelance tour guide, leading organized German-speaking parties round Toledo. According to friends and neighbours, she had a married lover, a junior officer in the Spanish Army who was attached to the Ministry of Defence in Madrid. He had been at an official dinner in the capital forty-odd miles away on the night of the murder. They were still drinking coffee and brandy at the time Martina’s body had been discovered, so there was no question of him coming under suspicion. Besides, Martina’s friends reported that she was perfectly happy with the part-time nature of their relationship and had said nothing to indicate there were any problems between them.

The body had been found just before midnight by a teenage courting couple who had parked their motorbike by the road and climbed down into the gorge to escape from prying eyes. There was also no question of any suspicion attaching to them, although the girl’s father had reportedly accused the boyfriend of being perfectly capable of murder on the grounds that he was planning to debauch an innocent young girl.

According to the crime-scene reports, Martina had been sprawled on her back in the moonlight, arms thrown wide, legs spread. The pathologist revealed that her throat had been cut from left to right, probably from behind, by a long and very sharp blade, possibly a bayonet. It was hard to be precise, however, and since Toledo is famous for its steel, the purchase of razor-edged knives was an everyday occurrence in each of the dozens of tourist shops that lined the main streets. Death had been swift, blood pumping forwards from the severed carotid arteries in a pair of gushing fountains. Her clothing was drenched in blood, indicating that she had been standing rather than lying when the wound had been inflicted.

Further examination revealed that a broken wine bottle had been thrust repeatedly into her vagina, shredding the tissue. The relative absence of blood at the site indicated that Martina had been mercifully dead by then. The bottle had once contained a cheap Manchegan red wine, available in almost any local shop. The only other item of interest at the scene was a bloodstained guide to Toledo in German. Martina’s name, address and phone number were scribbled on the inside cover in her own handwriting.

There were no significant forensic traces, nor any indication of how Martina had been brought to La Degollada. It was not a difficult place to access; the panoramic route round the Tagus actually crossed the gorge, and there were plenty of places nearby where a car could be tucked off the road. According to the woman with whom she shared an apartment near the station, Martina had come in from work around seven. They’d eaten a snack of bread, cheese and salad together, then the flatmate had left to meet a group of friends. Martina had had no firm plans, saying only that she might go out for a drink later. Officers had canvassed the cafés and bars she usually visited, but nobody had admitted seeing her that evening. The members of the tour she had led the previous day had been questioned when they’d arrived in Aranjuez the following day, but none of them had been aware of any of their fellow tourists taking any particular notice of their young guide. Besides, they’d all spent the evening together at a flamenco fiesta. Everyone was vouched for by at least three other members of the party.

In the absence of any firm leads, the investigation had ground to a halt. It was, Fiona thought, the sort of frustrating inquiry typically provoked by the first crime in a series where the offender was intelligent enough to know how to cover his tracks and had no ambivalence about being caught. Without any obvious connection between victim and killer it was always difficult to identify worthwhile avenues of investigation.

Then, two weeks later, a second body had turned up. A relatively short interval, Fiona noted. This time, the scene of the crime was the vast monastery church of San Juan de los Reyes. She remembered the cloisters, a massive quadrangle festooned with absurd gargoyles. It was there, she reminded herself, that one of their group had spotted the bizarre image of a reverse gargoyle—instead of a grotesque face adorning the water spout, this statue consisted of a body from the waist down, as if its owner had been rammed head first into the wall.

The unique feature of the church itself was the array of manacles and shackles that hung along its facade. They were the very shackles the Moorish conquerors used to chain up the Christian prisoners taken at Granada, and when Fernando and Isabella’s vast army captured Granada from the Moors, the monarchs decreed the chains should be hung on the church as a memorial. Fiona remembered vividly how bizarre they had looked, hanging black in the sunlight against the golden stone of the ornamented facade.

The second victim was an American graduate student of religious art, James Paul Palango. His body had been discovered at dawn by a street cleaner who had been sweeping alongside the monastery cloisters of San Juan de los Reyes. He’d turned the corner on the paved area in front of the church when his eye had been caught by something above his head. Palango was hanging suspended from two sets of manacles. In the puffy flesh of his neck, something glinted in the early morning light. When the body was lowered to the ground, it became clear that he’d been strangled with a dog’s choke chain then attached to the manacles with two pairs of handcuffs. The pathologist also reported that Palango’s corpse had been repeatedly sodomized with the broken neck of a wine bottle, which remained inside his torn rectum. Again, there appeared to be no significant forensic traces. Interestingly, in Palango’s pocket there was a guide to Toledo.

Police inquiries revealed that Palango was an evangelical Christian from a wealthy Georgia family. He had been staying at the parador which perched on a high bluff looking across the river to the city. According to the hotel, Palango had eaten an early dinner then gone out in his hired car sometime around nine o’clock. The car was later discovered in a parking garage opposite the Alcazar. Extensive questioning in the neighbourhood revealed that the American had taken coffee in the Plaza de Zocodover at the heart of the old town, but in the general melee of the evening paseo no one had noticed when he had left the café or whether he’d been alone. No one had come forward to say they’d seen him since.

Fiona leaned back in her seat and rubbed her eyes. No wonder Major Berrocal was so keen to enlist her help. The only significant information the police had gleaned from the second murder was that the killer was physically powerful enough to carry a ten-stone man up a ladder, and that he was bold enough to display his victim in a public place. In a handwritten note, Major Berrocal had pointed out that once the nearby café had closed in the early hours of the morning, the area around the church was quiet and although it was overlooked by several houses, the killer had chosen the farthest point of the facade for his exhibition, where he would be least likely to be spotted.

She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms above her head while she contemplated the information she’d laboriously worked her way through. It was professionally intriguing, no question of that. What she needed to consider was whether she could offer anything constructive to the investigation. She had worked with European police forces on several occasions, and had sometimes felt handicapped by her lack of visceral understanding of how their societies worked. On the other hand, she already felt the faint stirrings of an idea of how this killer operated and where the police might start their search for him.

One thing was certain. While she dithered, he would be planning his next murder. Fiona refilled her glass and made her decision.

4

Fiona was halfway downstairs with the Rough Guide to Spain when she heard the front door opening. ‘Hello,’ she called out.

‘I brought Steve home with me,’ Kit replied, his voice relaxed into broad Mancunian by alcohol.

Fiona was too tired to welcome the prospect of late-night drinking and chat. But at least it was only Steve. He was part of the family, too well-rooted in their company to mind if she took herself off to bed and left them to it. She rounded the final turn in the stairs and looked down at them. The most important men in her life, they were an oddly contrasting pair. Steve, tall, wirily thin and dark; Kit, with his broad, heavily muscled torso making him look shorter than he was, his shaved head gleaming in the light. It was Steve, with his darting eyes and long fingers, who looked like the intellectual, while Kit looked more like a beat bobby who worked as a nightclub bouncer on the side. Now, they looked up at her, identical sheepish small-boy grins on their flushed faces.

‘Good dinner, I see,’ Fiona said dryly, running down the rest of the stairs. She stood on tiptoe to kiss Steve’s cheek, then allowed Kit to engulf her in a hug.

He gave her a smacking kiss on the lips. ‘Missed you,’ he said, releasing her and crossing to the kitchen.

‘No you didn’t,’ Fiona contradicted him. ‘You’ve had a great boys’ night out, eaten lots of unspeakable bits of dead animals, drunk’—she paused and cocked her head, assessing them both—‘three bottles of red wine…’

‘She’s never wrong,’ Kit interjected.

‘…and put the world to rights,’ Fiona concluded. ‘You were much better off without me.’

Steve folded himself into a kitchen chair and accepted the brandy glass Kit proffered. He had the air of a man embattled who warily senses he might finally have arrived in a place of safety. He raised his glass in a sardonic toast. ‘Confusion to our enemies. You’re right, Fi, but for the wrong reasons,’ he said.

Fiona sat down opposite him and pulled her wine glass towards her, intrigued. ‘I find that hard to believe,’ she said, a tease in her voice.

‘Fi, I was only glad you weren’t there because you’re big-headed enough without listening to me ranting on about how I’d never have had to endure today’s humiliations if I’d been working with you instead of that arsehole Horsforth.’ Steve held up a hand to indicate to Kit that an inch of brandy was more than enough.

Kit leaned against the kitchen units, cupping his glass in both his broad hands to warm the spirit. ‘You’re right about the big-headed bit,’ he chuckled, his pride in her obvious in his affectionate grin.

‘Takes one to know one,’ Fiona said. ‘I’m sorry you had a shit day, Steve.’

Before Steve could reply, Kit cut in. ‘It was bound to happen. That operation was doomed from day one. Apart from anything else, you were never going to get away with a sting like that in a trial, even if Blake had swallowed the honey-trap and coughed chapter and verse. British juries just can’t get their heads round entrapment. Your average man in the pub thinks it’s cheating to set people up when you haven’t got your evidence the straight way.’

‘Don’t mince your words, Kit, tell us what you really think,’ Steve said sarcastically.

‘I’d hoped you two would already have had the postmortem,’ Fiona protested mildly.

‘Oh, we have,’ Steve said. ‘I feel like I’ve been wearing a hair shirt all day.’

‘Hey, I’ve not been saying it was your fault,’ Kit reminded him. ‘We all know you got stamped on from above. If anyone should be flagellating himself, it’s your commander. But you can bet your pension that Teflon Telford will be washing his hands like Pontius Pilate with a tin of Swarfega tonight. It’ll be, “Well, of course, you have to let your junior officers have their head sometimes, but I thought Steve Preston would have handled matters better than this,”’ he said, dropping his voice to the basso profundo of Steve’s boss.

Steve stared into his brandy. Kit wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know, but hearing it from someone else didn’t make failure taste any less sour. And tomorrow, he’d have to face his colleagues knowing that he was the one appointed to carry the can. Some of them would have sufficient grasp of the politics to understand he was nothing more than the designated scapegoat, but there were plenty of others who would relish the chance to snigger behind their hands at him. That was the price of his past successes. And in the competitive environment of the higher echelons of the Met, you were only ever as good as your last success.

‘Are you really not looking for anyone else?’ Fiona asked, registering Steve’s depression and trying to move the conversation in a more positive direction.

Steve looked mutinous. ‘That’s the official line. To say anything else makes us look even bigger dickheads than we do already. But I’m not happy with that. Somebody murdered Susan Blanchard and you know better than I do that this kind of killer probably won’t stop at one.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Fiona asked.

Kit gave her a speculative look. ‘I think the question might be what are you going to do about it?’

Fiona shook her head, trying not to show her irritation. ‘Oh no, you don’t guilt-trip me like that. I said I’d never work for the Met again after this debacle, and I meant it.’

Steve spread his hands in a gesture of appeasement. ‘Hey, even if I had the budget, I wouldn’t insult you like that.’

Kit grabbed one of the chairs and straddled it. ‘Yeah, but she loves me. I get to insult her. Come on, Fiona, it wouldn’t hurt if you took a look at the entrapment material, would it? Purely as an academic exercise.’

Fiona groaned. ‘You just want it lying round the house so you can poke your nose in,’ she said, trying another diversionary tactic. ‘It’s all grist to your grisly little mill, isn’t it?’

‘That’s not fair! You know I never read confidential case material,’ Kit said, his expression outraged.

Fiona grinned. ‘Gotcha.’

Kit laughed. ‘It’s a fair cop, guv.’

Steve leaned back in his chair and looked pensive. ‘On the other hand…’

‘Oh, grow up, the pair of you,’ Fiona grumbled. ‘I have better things to do with my life than pawing over Andrew Horsforth’s grubby little operation.’

Steve studied Fiona. He knew her well enough to understand the kind of challenge that might overcome her stubborn resistance, and he was desperate enough to try it. ‘The trouble is, Fi, the trail’s really cold. It’s over a year since Susan Blanchard was butchered, and it’s getting on for ten months since we were paying attention to anybody other than Francis Blake. I don’t want to leave things unresolved. I don’t want her kids growing up with their lives full of unanswered questions. You know the kind of emotional pain the absence of knowledge brings. Now, I really want the bastard who did this. But we need fresh leads,’ he said. ‘And like Kit says, at the very least it might be a useful resource for you professionally.’

Fiona shut the fridge door with more than necessary force. ‘You really are a manipulative sod,’ she complained. But knowing he was deliberately pushing her buttons didn’t shield her from the stab of recognition. Stung, she tried a final line of defence. ‘Steve, I’m not a clinician. I don’t spend my days listening to people droning on about their sad little lives. I’m a number-cruncher. I deal in facts, not impressions. Even if I did sit down and stifle my disgust long enough to plough through the entrapment files, I don’t know that I’d have anything useful to say at the end of it.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt, though, would it?’ Kit chipped in. ‘It’s not like you’d be going back on your word and working for the Met. You’d just be doing Steve a personal favour. I mean, look at him. He’s gutted. He’s supposed to be your best mate. Don’t you want to help him out?’

Fiona sat down, leaning forward so her shoulder-length chestnut hair curtained her face. Steve opened his mouth to speak but Kit urgently waved him to silence, mouthing, ‘No!’ at him. Steve raised one shoulder in a half-shrug.

Eventually, Fiona sighed deeply and pushed her hair back with both hands. ‘Fuck it, I’ll do it,’ she said. Catching Steve’s delighted grin, she added, ‘No promises, remember. Bike the stuff round to me first thing in the morning and I’ll take a look.’

‘Thanks, Fi,’ Steve said. ‘Even if it’s a long shot, I need all the help I can get. I appreciate it.’

‘Good. So you should,’ she said severely. ‘Now, can we talk about something else?’

It was after midnight by the time Fiona and the Rough Guide finally made it to bed. When Kit came through from the bathroom, he eyed her reading material with a curious frown. ‘Is that a subtle way of telling me it’s about time we started planning a holiday?’ he asked, slipping under the duvet and snuggling up to her.

‘I should be so lucky. It’s work, I’m afraid. I got a request today from the Spanish Police for a consultation. Two murders in Toledo that look like the start of a series.’

‘I take it you’ve decided to go, then?’

Fiona waggled the book under his nose. ‘Looks like it. I’ll have to speak to them in the morning about the practicalities, but I should be able to get away at the end of the week for a few days without too much difficulty.’

Kit rolled on to his back and folded his arms above his head. ‘And there was me thinking you were planning a romantic break to Torremolinos.’

Fiona put her book down and turned to face Kit, her fingers curling the soft dark hairs on his chest. ‘You could come along for the ride if you like. Toledo’s a beautiful town. It’s not like there would be nothing to occupy you while I’m working. It wouldn’t do you any harm to have a break.’

He dropped one arm to her shoulder, pulling her closer to him. ‘I’m way behind with the book, and if you’re not around over the weekend, that’ll be a good excuse for me to lock myself away and work straight through.’

‘You could work in Toledo.’ Her hand strayed down his stomach.

‘With you to distract me?’

‘I’d be working all day. And probably half the night, if past experience is anything to go by.’ She settled herself more comfortably into his side.

‘I might as well be at home, by the sound of it.’

‘You’d like it.’ Fiona yawned. ‘It’s an interesting city. You never know, it might inspire you.’

‘Yeah, right, I can see myself writing the definitive Spanish serial killer thriller.’

‘Why not? It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. I just thought you might like a bit of a break somewhere that does spectacular gourmet food…’ Fiona’s voice tailed off sleepily.

‘I do think of other things than my stomach,’ he protested. ‘Isn’t it Toledo that has all the El Grecos?’

‘That’s right,’ Fiona said. ‘And his house.’ Her eyes were closed and her voice was a mumble as she slithered down the dreamy slope towards sleep.

‘Now, that does sound worth the trip. Maybe I will come after all,’ Kit said. There was no reply. An early rise and ten miles of Derbyshire moorland had finally taken their toll. Kit grinned and reached out with his free arm for the James Sallis paperback on his night table. Unlike Fiona, he could never sleep without supping his fill of horrors. But then, he reasoned, he knew that what he was reading was fiction. It didn’t matter if he hadn’t solved the crime when it was time to turn the light out. The killers he was interested in wouldn’t be killing again until he was ready for them.

5

The flight to Madrid was half-empty. Without having to be asked, Kit left Fiona with a double seat to herself and moved across the aisle, where he flipped up the screen of his laptop and started work as soon as they were in the air, his Walkman rendering him oblivious to any outside distractions. On the way to the airport, he’d nagged her about making a start on the thick bundle Steve had had delivered to the house, which Fiona had been studiously ignoring for the past two days. She’d been hiding behind the necessity of familiarizing herself with the material from Toledo, but if she was honest, she’d been as thorough with that as she could be. Now she had no excuse, and the flight was just long enough to get a flavour of what she had to digest.

The first section began with a page of personal ads from Time Out. During the course of his lengthy police interviews, Blake had admitted that although he had a long-term relationship with an air hostess, he also replied to women who advertised in the lonely hearts column. He’d said that he went for the ones who seemed insecure, because they were always grateful to meet a good-looking bloke like him. He’d admitted he was interested principally in sex, but insisted that he didn’t want to waste his time on brainless bimbos. From what Fiona remembered of the original interview transcripts, Blake had seemed confident, even arrogant about his capacity to attract women; a man who knew what he wanted and didn’t doubt he could get it. He certainly hadn’t come over as weak or inadequate.

Based on his interpretation of the interviews, Horsforth had constructed several ads that he felt would appeal to their suspect. The first attempts had produced plenty of responses, though none was from Blake. ‘So much for getting inside the head of the killer,’ Fiona muttered under her breath. But the second round snared their target. He had responded to: ‘SWF, 26, slim, new to N. London, seeks male guide for conversation, meals, movies and an introduction to the bright lights and good times. GSOH. Pictures please.’

Blake had described himself as a professional man of twenty-nine with an interest in cinema, reading, walking in London’s parks, and enjoying female company. Under Andrew Horsforth’s guidance, Detective Constable Erin Richards had written the reply.

‘Dear Francis,’ it read. ‘Thanks for your letter, it was easily the most charming of all the ones I’ve received. I must confess I’m a little nervous about this because it’s not the sort of thing I normally do. Would it be OK with you if we exchanged a couple more letters before we actually meet?

‘Like you, I’m interested in going to the cinema. What kind of films do you like best? Although I know it’s probably not what women are supposed to enjoy, I love all those wonderful dark thrillers like Seven, Eight Millimetre and Fargo, and Hitchcock films like Psycho. But they’ve got to have a good plot to keep me going. As for reading, I don’t get to read as much as I should. I like Patricia Cornwell, Kit Martin and Thomas Harris best, and I sometimes read true crime too.

‘I don’t really know London well enough to know where it’s safe to go walking. You read about such terrible things sometimes in the papers, people being mugged and raped in parks, that it makes me a bit nervous because I’m a stranger. Perhaps you could show me some of your favourite walks sometime?

‘I work in the civil service. Nothing very exciting, I’m afraid. I’m a clerk at the Ministry of Agriculture. I moved here from Beccles in Suffolk after my mother died. There was nothing to keep me there, because my father passed away a couple of years before her, and I’ve no brothers or sisters, so I thought I’d come looking for adventure in London!

‘I’d love to hear from you again if you think we might have enough in common to enjoy each other’s company. You can write to the box office number because I’m keeping it on for a couple of weeks longer.

‘Yours sincerely, ‘Eileen Rogers.’

Blake had replied by return of post. ‘Dear Eileen,’ he’d written. ‘Thanks for your lovely letter. Yes, it does sound as if we’d have a lot in common. We seem to go for the same kind of books and films for a start.

‘I can understand why you might feel a bit nervous walking around London on your own. I’ve lived here all my life but there are many parts of the city I don’t know at all, and if I have to go there for work I sometimes feel a little anxious because it’s so easy to end up somewhere that can feel threatening just because it’s unfamiliar. It must be so much harder for a woman on her own. I’d be happy to show you around. I know Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park and Hyde Park well, I go there often.

‘I realize you must be a bit nervous about meeting a stranger like me, but I’d like to talk face to face. I can’t help thinking we would have a lot to say to each other. We could meet somewhere public, like they recommend you should for a first time. I could meet you on Saturday afternoon and we could have coffee together. I thought we could meet outside the Hard Rock Café at Hyde Park Corner at three o’clock. You can phone me to confirm the arrangements if you like.

‘Please say yes. You sound just the kind of woman I want to meet.

‘Best wishes, ‘Francis Blake.’

The fish had swallowed the bait remarkably easily, Fiona thought. It wasn’t so much that Horsforth had been particularly clever or subtle in the way he’d orchestrated the approach, as that Blake had been surprisingly eager to make the contact, in spite of having been the subject of such close police attention. Perhaps that was why he’d been so keen; he was desperately in need of a respite with someone who knew nothing of what he’d been through at the hands of the law. For a man who apparently liked to be in control, it must have been infuriating to be surrounded by people who thought they knew more about him than they really did. A stranger who knew nothing of his role as a suspect would allow him to feel relaxed.

Whatever the reasons, it had provided the opportunity for the operation to go ahead. DC Richards had phoned Blake and arranged to meet. The call had lasted for about ten minutes, Fiona noted. They’d chatted without much awkwardness, mostly about films they’d seen recently, then made arrangements to meet. At their first encounter, as on every subsequent one, Richards was wired for sound, transmitting the conversation to a back-up radio van that kept discreet tabs on the pair of them throughout.

Richards had played her role well, striking an appropriate balance between edgy nervousness and eager friendliness. They’d gone for coffee, then Blake had suggested a short walk through the park before they parted. As they’d walked, he’d pointed out to her the sort of places she could go safely on her own and the ones she should avoid. He seemed to know exactly which areas were open and well-lit and which were gloomy, dotted with shrubbery that could provide hiding places for anyone with dubious intentions. It wasn’t the sort of analysis that the average park stroller would make of his environment, Fiona thought. Just as someone who has almost been trapped in a fire takes an unnatural interest in fire exits forever afterwards, so only someone who imagined using a park for something other than fresh air and exercise would view their surroundings as Francis Blake viewed his. He looked at his world like a predator, not a victim.

That didn’t make him a killer, however. He might be a mugger, a voyeur, a flasher or a rapist and still exhibit a similar response. But Horsforth had allowed himself to be persuaded that Blake was a killer, and he had interpreted his behaviour accordingly. That much was clear from the clinical psychologist’s notes on the meeting. The conversation had been innocuous enough, but Horsforth had still managed to see what he wanted to see.

It was a realization that profoundly depressed Fiona. Any kind of objective analysis of the material was already compromised, because Horsforth’s early decisions about what Blake’s actions implied had dictated everything in the interaction that followed.

The meetings had continued two or three times a week. On the fourth meeting, Richards introduced the subject of Susan Blanchard’s murder, in the context of terrifying things that happened to women in the city. Blake had immediately said, ‘I was there that day. On the Heath. I must have walked past at almost the exact time she was being raped and murdered.’

Richards had pretended shock. ‘My God! That must have been awful.’

‘I didn’t realize anything at the time. Well, obviously I didn’t or I would have raised the alarm. But I can’t help thinking if I’d chosen a slightly different route that day, if I’d gone over the rise behind the shrubbery instead of walking along the path, I’d have stumbled over her killer,’ he’d boasted.

It was a significant exchange, Fiona knew. But again, it was capable of a different interpretation from the conclusion Horsforth had jumped to. What it told him was that Blake was a killer desperate to talk about his crime, however obliquely. What it told Fiona was something else altogether. She made a note on her pad and continued.

By the end of the third week, Blake was beginning to turn the conversation towards sex. It was, he indicated, time to take their relationship to the next stage, beyond cinema visits and walks and meals. Richards backed off slightly, as she’d been told to do, saying she wanted to be sure they’d be compatible before she took the ultimate step of sleeping with him. It was the planned route into talk of sexual fantasy. Fiona had to concede that this had been a shrewd move on Horsforth’s part, though she might have approached it in a more indirect way. But then, she wasn’t a clinician. In matters like this, she had to concede her instinct was probably not the most rigorous guide.

Now it was Richards’s turn to push the direction of the conversation. And she wasted no time. It wasn’t that she was sexually inexperienced, she said. But she’d found herself growing quickly bored with the men she’d slept with in the past. ‘They’re just so predictable, so conventional,’ she complained. ‘I want to be sure next time I get involved with someone, that he’s got an imagination, that he’ll take me places I’ve never been before.’

Blake immediately asked her what she meant, and presumably as Horsforth had instructed her, Richards had backed off again, saying she wasn’t sure she could discuss it openly in the middle of Regent’s Park. She explained that she had to go out of town the next week, to a training course in Manchester, and she would write to him. ‘I feel a bit exposed out here,’ she’d said. ‘I can put it down on paper better. Then if you’re shocked or turned off me forever, I won’t have to see your face, will I?’

Blake had seemed almost amused by her alternation between suggestiveness and coyness. ‘I bet there’s nothing you could say that would shock me,’ he’d said. ‘I promise you, whatever you want, Eileen, I can take you there. All the way there, whatever it is you want. You write me that letter tonight so I get it first thing on Monday morning, and I guarantee you’ll be panting to get back to London by return of post.’

Somehow, Fiona doubted it. However, there was no time now to pursue her doubts to their conclusion. Kit had packed his computer into its case, the ‘Fasten Seatbelts’ sign was illuminated and the cabin crew were moving purposefully towards their seats for landing. Major Berrocal would be waiting for them at the arrivals gate, and a job where she was convinced she could provide useful advice was always going to take precedence over something already wrecked by someone else.

Whatever perverse fantasies Francis Blake and Erin Richards had exchanged would have to remain in the file for the time being.

6

Major Salvador Berrocal was not waiting for them by the arrivals gate. He was actually standing impatiently tapping his foot by the door of the plane when it swung open. He had obviously arranged for a message to be transmitted ahead, for as soon as the cabin crew were back on their feet after landing, a steward was by Fiona’s side, asking her to come forward to the front of the plane so she could disembark ahead of the other passengers. Kit followed in her wake, giving the steward his best smile and saying, ‘We’re travelling together.’

Fiona’s first impression of the Spanish policeman was of tremendous energy barely held in check. He was of medium height, slender and pale-skinned, with dark-blue eyes that were never still. His charcoal-grey suit looked as if it had been freshly pressed that morning, and his black boots shone with a military gleam. Both were at odds with a shock of untidy black wavy hair, worn long enough to cover the back of his shirt collar. He acknowledged her with a polite but abrupt nod of the head, saying, ‘Thank you for coming, Doctor.’

‘Thank you for meeting us. Major, this is my partner, Kit Martin. I mentioned he’d be travelling with me.’

Kit extended a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. Don’t worry, I won’t be getting under your feet.’

Berrocal’s nod was noncommittal. ‘I have a car waiting, Doctor,’ he said to Fiona. He reached for her briefcase and laptop. ‘Señor Martin, if you wouldn’t mind going to the baggage carousel, one of my men will meet you there. He will take you and your luggage to your hotel in Toledo.’ He pulled a card out of his breast pocket. ‘This is my mobile number. You can reach Dr Cameron, she will be with me.’ He flashed a cool smile and set off down the pier towards the main concourse.

‘Mr Friendly,’ Kit said.

‘Mr Under Pressure, I think,’ Fiona replied. She put one arm round Kit and gave him a quick squeeze. ‘Ring me on my mobile, if you need me.’

They set off in Berrocal’s wake, Fiona almost having to break into a trot to keep him in sight. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Kit said. ‘I’ve got the guide book. I will be pursuing my own investigations into Toledo. Either that or I’ll be hunched over a hotel bedside table trying to write.’

They caught up with Berrocal who was waiting by a security door. ‘You must go through customs and immigration,’ he said to Kit, pointing down a corridor to the left.

‘Nice to meet you,’ Kit said. Being pleasant was cheap, especially since Berrocal had taken the trouble to lay on a car for him. He gave Fiona a swift peck on the cheek, said, ‘See you later,’ and headed off without a backward glance.

‘He really won’t be any trouble,’ Fiona said as they strode towards the customs and immigration area. ‘Kit has no problem with his own company.’

Berrocal flashed his badge and steered her ahead of him past the formalities. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to have brought him otherwise,’ he said briskly. ‘I have arranged for you both to stay at the parador in Toledo, but I would prefer to go straight to the scenes of the crimes. Also, I wanted to be able to discuss the case on the way there, which would not have been possible in front of Señor Martin.’

A uniformed officer stood by an unmarked saloon car, snapping to attention as Berrocal approached. He opened the rear door, and Fiona climbed in, Berrocal walking round to the far side to slide in beside her. ‘Toledo is about an hour’s drive from the airport,’ he told her. ‘If you have any questions for me, I can answer them on the way.’

Clearly not a man for small talk, Fiona thought. None of those polite and pointless queries about her flight that usually marked her arrival in strange cities. Nor did he feel the need to make polite conversation about Kit’s books, as had usually happened when he had accompanied her on foreign trips. ‘What lines of inquiry have you pursued?’ she asked. ‘Apart from looking for witnesses, of course.’

Berrocal shifted in his seat so he could look directly at her. ‘We have examined our records of violent sexual assaults. Several people have been interviewed. But either they have an alibi for the first or the second murder or both. Or else we have no reason to keep them in custody.’

‘Your English is very fluent,’ Fiona couldn’t help remarking.

‘I speak better than I write,’ he said, flashing a smile for the first time since they’d met. ‘My wife is Canadian. We go to Vancouver every year on holiday. So when we talked about bringing in an English expert on crime linkage and serial offenders, I was the obvious choice for the liaison officer. As I said in my e-mail, we have no local expertise in this area.’

‘I don’t know if any of us have what I would term expertise in crime linkage,’ Fiona said dryly. ‘I have some experience, but every time I do this, it seems like I’m feeling my way almost as much as the detectives. Every case is different, and sometimes the lessons of the past are not entirely helpful.’

He nodded. ‘I understand. Nobody is expecting a miracle from you, Dr Cameron. But in a case like this, we need all the help we can get. It is no secret to you that when a killer targets a stranger, most of our usual police procedures are useless. So we need a different kind of insight and that is what you can bring to the case.’

Fiona raised her eyebrows and turned away from his penetrating eyes, staring out of the window at the speeding motorway traffic. On one side of the motorway, she could see the city sprawling towards the centre; on the other the scarred red earth of the central Spanish plain, exposed by some sort of construction work. The terracotta soil, the almost metallic blue sky and the heavy shadows of the earth-moving equipment turned the vista into a moving De Chirico painting, resonating with heat and menace. For some reason, it reminded Fiona of the surrealism of Cervantes’ imagination. Like Don Quixote, she thought, she’d be out there tilting at windmills, trying to separate the shadows from the reality, with this restless man as her Sancho Panza to mitigate her confusion.

‘I read the material you sent me,’ she said, pushing her fantastical thoughts to one side and turning to meet his gaze again. ‘I’m not convinced your offender will have a record of sexual offences.’

Berrocal frowned. ‘Why do you say that? From what I’ve read, I thought serial murderers generally had a history of some sort of sexual violence. And he has committed brutal sexual acts on the corpses of both of his victims.’

‘That’s true. But in each case, the violations were committed after death. And the penetration was with a foreign object, not the penis. Not that that necessarily discounts a sexual motive of itself,’ Fiona added, almost absently. ‘But I don’t think the gratification sought here is primarily sexual,’ she continued with more firmness. ‘These crimes may appear superficially to be about sexual power but it seems to me that they are about desecration. Almost vandalism,’ Fiona said.

Berrocal stirred. He looked as if he was wondering whether bringing her along had been such a good idea after all. ‘If that is the case, why are the faces not mutilated also?’ His chin came up in apparent challenge.

Fiona spread her hands. ‘I don’t know. But I imagine it was probably because the killer wanted his victims recognized quickly. They were neither of them locals, so it might have taken a little longer to identify them if their faces had been damaged beyond recognition.’

He nodded, partially satisfied by her response. He decided to reserve judgement on this woman who apparently had no difficulty in finding ways to discard the conventional wisdom. ‘I think it’s better if I don’t ask you your theories now,’ he said with another flash of his bright smile. ‘Better to wait until you have seen where the crimes took place, and then perhaps we could go to the local police headquarters. I have established a control centre there for the investigation.’

‘You’re not based in Toledo, I think you said?’

Berrocal shook his head. ‘I work in Madrid normally. But cities like Toledo have few murders in the course of a year, and most of those will be domestic situations. The result is that they have no one with experience of the more complex type of homicide and so they must bring in a specialist from Madrid. Unfortunately, we have more murders in the city and so someone like me is sent to organize the investigation.’

‘That can’t be easy,’ Fiona observed. ‘You must have to be careful of local sensibilities.’

Berrocal shrugged, his fingers drumming on the window ledge. ‘In some respects. In other ways, it makes it easier for the Toledo officers. When I tread on people’s feet, the local men can spread their hands and say, “Hey, it’s not our fault, it’s that stupid bastard from the big city, coming here and stirring things up and rubbing everybody up the wrong way.” Of course, some of the detectives are a little sensitive, they see my presence as a criticism of them, but I just have to charm them.’ His eyes crinkled in a wry smile. ‘But you must be familiar with these responses too. Like me and my team, you are what my wife calls the visiting fireman.’

Fiona acknowledged his idiom with a half-smile. ‘Sometimes that has other disadvantages too. It’s possible that my unfamiliarity with a place and its local customs may lead me to place more—or less—significance on something than it should have.’

He shrugged again. ‘The other side of the coin is that locals can take for granted what strikes you as an alteration in a pattern, I think.’

‘Toledo is very much a tourist city, is that right?’ Fiona asked.

‘That is correct. It is also the seat of the archbishop, so the bureaucracy of the Church occupies a significant share of the buildings around the cathedral. Between the Church and the tourist trade, there is little room for anything else in the old city. With every year that passes, fewer people live in the old part of Toledo, fewer traditional businesses survive.’

Fiona made a mental note and continued, aiming for a tone of casual interest. ‘Does that cause ill-feeling among those who are pushed out by the demands of the tourist industry?’

Berrocal grinned. ‘I think most people are happy to trade a gloomy medieval apartment up five flights of narrow stairs for a building with air and light and an elevator. And a patio or a balcony where they can sit outside and enjoy the air. Not to mention constant running hot water.’

‘All the same…’ Fiona chose her words carefully. ‘I grew up in a small town in the north of England. Not much more than a village, really. It’s a very pretty village, right in the heart of the Derbyshire Peak District. The perfect place to go walking from, or to visit the caverns that are open to the public. Over the years, more and more tourists came. Whenever cottages went on the market, they were bought up by outsiders and turned into holiday homes. Every shop in the main street became a tearoom or a craft shop. All the pubs were more interested in catering to day-trippers than locals. You couldn’t stroll down the main street or park your car near your own house in the summer months. By the time I left home, half the population would change weekly, holidaymakers who turned up with a carload of shopping. All they ever bought locally was bread and milk. The village lost its heart. It became a tourist dormitory. And the locals who were pushed out in the process weren’t happy at all. At a guess, I’d say there must be some native Toledans who don’t like what’s happening to their city.’

Berrocal gave her a shrewd look. He was sharp enough to realize this was no idle conversation. Following on as it had from her easy dismissal of the obvious analysis of the background of the killer, he understood that she was trying to tell him something. ‘You think someone is killing people because he doesn’t like tourists?’ He tried to keep the incredulity from his voice. This woman had, after all, come with the imprimatur of Scotland Yard.

Fiona turned away from his eyes and stared out across the rolling green fields they were now passing through. ‘I don’t think it’s quite that simple, Major Berrocal. And really I don’t want to theorize ahead of the data. But I do think your killer is motivated by something rather more out of the ordinary than sexual frustration.’

‘OK. How do you want to work this?’

‘What I’d like to do is precisely what you’ve suggested. I’d like to look at the sites where the bodies were displayed and then back at your incident room, I’d like to look at the crime-scene photographs and read the pathology reports in full. I’d also like to see the guide books that were found at the scenes of the crimes, if that would be possible. And then I would like to go back to my hotel room and think about what I’ve seen.’

He nodded. ‘Whatever you wish.’

‘I would also appreciate it if you could extract from your Toledan colleagues any reports of vandalism against tourist sites or hotels or businesses that cater to the tourist trade. And any attacks on tourists themselves. Going back, say, a couple of years. Solved and unsolved, if that’s possible.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll also need a reasonably detailed map of the city that can be scanned into a computer.’

‘I will arrange it.’ He inclined his head in a half-bow. ‘Already you have shown me a different way of looking at these cases.’

Fiona shifted in her seat so she was staring ahead over the driver’s shoulder. ‘I hope so. When I look at a crime, I don’t look with the same eyes as a detective. I’m searching for the psychological as well as the solid practical elements that link that one crime to others. I’m also looking for geographical clusters. But as well as that, I’m watching out for other signals that can tell me something about the criminal.’

‘So then you can figure out the way his mind works?’

Fiona frowned. ‘It’s not so much his motivation I’m trying to get at. It’s more about developing a sense of how he looks at the world. Motivation is highly individualistic. But what we all have in common is that we construct our own identities based on what we’ve learned of the world. So the way a criminal commits his crimes is a reflection of the way he lives the rest of his life. Where he feels comfortable, both physically and mentally. I’m looking for patterns of behaviour in the crime that give me clues to how he behaves when he’s going about his ordinary business.’

She gave a wry smile and continued. ‘Some of my colleagues have a different approach which you’re probably more familiar with. They look at the crimes and seek a set of symptoms in an offender’s past that have produced a particular way of life in the present. I’ve never found that very helpful. For my money, too many people share the same sort of background and don’t turn out to be psychopathic serial offenders for it to be a precise diagnostic tool. I’m not saying that my methods necessarily always produce a more accurate result, but that’s more because I seldom have sufficient data rather than that the methods themselves are flawed. There isn’t a magic formula, Major. But my training is so divergent from that of a police officer that I’m bound to look at things from a different perspective. Between us, we see this thing in stereo, rather than in mono. I can’t help believing that has to give us an advantage over the criminal.’

‘That’s why you’re here, Doctor.’ Berrocal leaned forward and said something in rapid Spanish to the driver. They were approaching a sprawl of modern suburban housing, the road lined with concrete boxes containing furniture stores, car showrooms and small businesses. He sat back and took out a packet of cigarettes, twiddling them restlessly between his fingers. ‘Ten minutes more. Then I can have a cigarette and you can go to work.’

This time, Fiona’s smile was grim. ‘I can hardly wait.’

Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13/4599

Uzqhq dftag stfyg dpqdo agxpn qeaqm ek. Upuym suzpq ufarf qzngf uzykt qmpuf tmpnq qzyqe ekmzp rdust fqzuz s…

The document in question utilizes a simple transliteration (a=m, b=n, etc) and the arrangement of letters into groups of five instead of the normal layout of the words. What follows is a transcription of the coded material, with appropriate punctuation added for sense. J. M. Arthur, Document Examiner.

I never thought murder could be so easy. I’d imagined it often, but in my head it had been messy and frightening. The reality is quite different. The power surge, that’s what carries you through it. Imagination really doesn’t prepare you for the real thing.

The other mistake I made was in thinking murder always had to be part of something else. But the truth is, murder can be an end in itself. Sometimes, people have to pay for what they have done, and taking their lives is the only way to do it.

I never thought I was going to be a murderer. I had my life sorted out. But then something shifted, and I could see them laughing at me, flaunting their so-called success in my face. I’d be a poor excuse for a man if I just took provocation like that on the chin.

Nobody knows how they’ll react when their life gets stolen by people who don’t give a toss who gets hurt. Well, I’ve never been the sort who just sits back and lets things happen, and I’m going to make them pay. I’m going to change the rules. But I’m not going to be obvious. I’m going to be subtle and choose my targets carefully.

This time, they won’t be able to ignore me. They won’t be able to write me off. I’ll be writing them off, writing their names in blood, and sending a message loud and clear. They’re responsible for their own downfall, that’s what I’ll be saying. Live by the word, die by the word.

It’s not hard to track down thriller writers. I’m used to watching people, I’ve been doing it for years. It doesn’t hurt that they’re all so vain. The Internet is clogged up with their websites and they give interviews right, left and centre. And they’re always doing public appearances.

So it made sense to start with somebody who has a really high profile, to make my job as easy as it could be. I decided the best way to make my point was to give them a real taste of their own medicine. It wouldn’t be enough just to kill them. I wanted it to be clear right from the word go that there was nothing accidental about what was going on. And knowing what was coming would make them suffer all the more. Satisfaction, that’s what I want.

To make the punishment fit the crime, I have to get the crime right, and now I’ve made my list. I ranked them according to how easy I thought it would be to do them and that’s how I got my candidates for execution.

1  Drew Shand

2  Jane Elias

3  Georgia Lester

4  Kit Martin

5  Enya Flannery

6  Jonathan Lewis

Now all I have to do is figure out exactly how to take them down.

They put me in this cage. But they should know that caged animals turn savage.

They’ve brought this on their own heads.

7

Fiona scrambled down the narrow path, glad she’d worn flat-soled loafers to travel in. It wasn’t that it was particularly steep, but the beaten ochre earth was dotted with small stones that would have been perilous to the ankles in any sort of heel. She made a mental note to check what footwear Martina Albrecht had been wearing at the time of her death. It might give her some indication as to how willingly she’d accompanied her killer to the scene of her murder.

Berrocal slowed down ahead of her and turned back, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke that reminded Fiona of the dried camel dung fires of the Northern Sahara. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ she answered, catching up and using the pause to scan her surroundings. They were in a narrow, flat-bottomed valley that curved away from the road. The high bluffs on either side had already cut off the line of sight to the viaduct that carried the circunvalacion around the southern bank of the Tagus. From here in, there would have been no chance of being caught in the headlights of a passing car. The sides of the valley were covered in scrubby vegetation, with a few small trees straggling up the gentler slopes.

‘We are almost there,’ Berrocal said. ‘You see those bushes ahead? It’s just past there.’ He set off again, Fiona in his wake.

‘He must have had a torch,’ she observed as the tall shrubs closed around them, almost meeting over their heads. Berrocal’s smoke was forced back into her face and she tried to avoid breathing through her nose until they were in the open again.

‘I don’t think she would have come with him otherwise,’ Berrocal said. ‘There’s no sign of a struggle anywhere by the road or on the path.’

‘What was she wearing on her feet?’

Berrocal turned and flashed her a smile, as if rewarding a bright pupil. ‘Flat sandals. Yes, she probably walked into the trap without thinking twice about it.’

They emerged on the other side of the bushes in a small clearing. On the far side, a pair of gnarled olive trees flanked the path. A single uniformed officer stood in the shade at the entrance to the glade. He started forward, his hand going to his pistol butt. When he saw it was Berrocal, he snapped a salute and stepped back. The whole area was still enclosed in the familiar plastic crime-scene tapes, now looking weatherbeaten and untidy. Fiona could see the irregular reddish-brown stain on the path and the surrounding vegetation, the only obvious sign that this had been the scene of violent death. Incongruously, she could hear the twittering of birds above the distant hum of traffic. She always found herself marvelling at the way the world managed to continue apparently oblivious to the tragedy that had played itself out only yards away.

After Lesley, she had found herself walking the streets of the city where it had happened, angry and frustrated that people could carry on as if nothing had changed, as if it was nothing to do with them. Of course, in a narrow sense, it was no direct concern of theirs. But Fiona had believed then as she believed now that societies got the criminals they deserved. Brutal crimes didn’t spring from nowhere; their seeds lay in the wider crimes of the community they impinged on. It wasn’t a popular view among law enforcement, and when she was working with the police, Fiona kept her views to herself.

So she looked around without comment. There wasn’t much to say other than the obvious. And Fiona had never liked stating the obvious.

Berrocal pointed to the bloodstained area, grinding his cigarette butt underfoot. ‘She was found lying towards the rear of the blood, not in it. It adds weight to the theory that he was behind her and she was standing up when he cut her throat. Mercifully quick, the pathologist says. Then, it looks as if he stepped back and let her fall.’

‘The vaginal injuries were postmortem?’ Fiona asked.

‘Yes. He straddled her, we think. The grass is flattened on either side of her hips, as if someone had kneeled there. He cut her panties away, probably with the same blade. There were smudges of blood on the material. Then he broke the wine bottle on the ground and’—Berrocal cleared his throat—‘he inserted the broken bottle into her vagina. With considerable force. Several times. The glass fragments are on the right-hand side of the body, which supports the idea that he was right-handed.’

Fiona crossed to the side of the clearing and looked at the crime scene from the point of view the killer would have had. ‘The thing that strikes me most about this is what I mentioned earlier. The sexual mutilations are postmortem, which is unusual. There’s no sign of any kind of sexual activity before the attack. He went straight for the kill. No foreplay.’

Berrocal nodded. ‘You think this is significant?’

‘It’s a marker of someone who feels very lacking in power. There’s nothing tentative about it either. It reveals a great deal of anger. So when I’m looking for linked crimes, I’ll be bearing in mind that they will probably exhibit similar markers.’ Fiona hitched up her trousers, crouched down and studied the ground. There was no particular reason for her to do this. In truth, she learned very little from looking at crime scenes. She had never discovered anything that wasn’t covered by the files she would read later. But police officers expected her to absorb something from where the body had been found. It was almost a superstition, and so she’d long ago decided it was easier to humour them rather than start a partnership wrong-footed.

She stood up. ‘Thanks for letting me see this.’

‘Does it tell you anything you didn’t know before?’ Berrocal asked, stepping to one side and indicating she should precede him up the path.

The dreaded question. ‘It confirms one hypothesis,’ she said. ‘Your killer knows his territory well. This isn’t the sort of place that a casual visitor would know about.’

‘A local man, then?’

‘I think that’s a safe assumption,’ she said firmly. ‘He doesn’t just know about the existence of this place, he knows what happened here and what it means.’ She heard the click of his lighter. Berrocal was clearly determined to get his blood-nicotine levels back to normal after an hour’s confinement in the car.

As they rounded the curve and the road came into sight, Fiona stopped abruptly. A miniature train with a string of grubby white carriages was grinding its noisy way across the viaduct. She could hear the tinny sound of a commentary, although it was too far away to make out any of the words. ‘What on earth is that?’ she asked, pointing to the train and turning to Berrocal.

He raised his eyebrows in a world-weary expression. ‘They call it the Tren Real,’ he sighed. ‘The Royal Train. It takes tourists on a ride through the old city and round the circunvalacion.’

Fiona grinned. ‘Hard to imagine the royal family riding on that.’

Berrocal’s face was pained. ‘It has no dignity,’ he agreed. ‘It’s not my favourite example of Spanish tourism.’

They trudged back up to the car in silence. Fiona was oblivious to her surroundings, too busy with her thoughts for appreciation of landscape or the city vista that sprang out before them as they reached the level of the road.

‘Now we’ll go to the church,’ Berrocal announced.

Fiona concealed her impatience. She wanted to start work properly, not waste any more time looking at crime scenes. At this rate, she’d have been as well going back to the hotel with Kit. It would have been about as useful.

* * *

A couple of hundred feet above the panoramic route Fiona was travelling back to the city, Kit was opening a heavy pair of wooden shutters with ornate iron fittings. Light flooded into the room and he whistled softly at the view. The Parador Conde de Orgaz, named after the city’s most famous El Greco, sat on top of Emperor’s Hill with a breathtaking panorama of Toledo laid out before it. The almost unreal vision still bore a remarkable resemblance to the background of dozens of other El Grecos, in spite of the intervening four and a half centuries. The parador was perfectly sited on the bluff opposite the city, and their room commanded a view of the whole medieval city. Kit decided to fall prey to temptation.

Twenty minutes later, a taxi deposited him by the Plaza de Zocodover, a lively square which his tour guide claimed was the heart of social life in the city. Lined with cafés and cake shops, its tall shuttered buildings had an air of slightly decayed elegance. It appeared to be a typical provincial southern European city, Kit thought. Women sturdily crossing with their heavy bags of shopping, elderly men sitting smoking and chatting, teenagers in branded leisurewear lounging in doorways and on corners, furtively eyeing the opposite gender in between posing for their benefit. But it hadn’t always been like this.

Toledo, he knew from his reading, had been captured first by the Romans, then by the Visigoths, next by the Moors and finally by the Christians. Although it had become the capital of Castile and the base for the medieval military campaigns against the Moors, it had also established a reputation as a haven of cultural tolerance.

But all that had changed with the dynastic marriage of Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1479. Isabella’s personal confessor was Cardinal Tomas de Torquemada, the man appointed by the Pope as the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.

Kit had told Fiona only that he was interested in seeing the El Grecos in Toledo. But that was merely a fragment of the truth. What had drawn him to this city was the prospect of walking the very streets Torquemada had walked, many of them virtually unchanged since the fifteenth century and earlier. He wanted to let his imagination carry him back in time to an era when the streets of Toledo were tainted with fear and hatred, when brother denounced brother, when ordained priests invented torture methods so robust they were still in use, when the state perverted a religious crusade into a means to enrich itself.

Toledo was a city that, by conquest and oppression both, was soaked in the blood of its people. The tantalizing prospect of discovering how much of that atmosphere had persisted was what attracted Kit’s imagination.

It wasn’t hard to erase the modern images and see the streets as they must formerly have been. The buildings were the same, tall tenements with narrow twisting passages between them, their facades alternating between patched eroded brick and pale stucco that had generally seen better days. Studded with windows shuttered against the September heat, the only thing that broke up the frontages were lines of washing strung across the alleys.

As the siesta approached, the streets emptied, and Kit found himself mostly alone as he quartered the warren of streets between the cathedral and the monastery church of San Juan de los Reyes, following his map into the old Jewish quarter, the Juderia.

He climbed a flight of steps that took him up between high blank walls and opened out in a small garden with benches that provided a spectacular vista. But contemporary panoramas were not what he was seeking. Kit let his mind wander from the present and stared down over the pale terracotta roofs, blanking out TV aerials and satellite dishes, drifting back into the past.

The Inquisition was supposed to be about establishing a pure-blooded Christian faith in Spain. But what it was really about was anti-Semitism and greed, he thought. But then, most oppressive right-wing movements had similar roots. Back then, the Spanish Jews were seen as too powerful and too wealthy. From being comfortable, safe and prosperous, their lives had been plunged overnight into a living hell.

A kind of hysteria must have swept through the cities of Castile and Aragon, as anyone with a grudge saw a way of evening the score against their enemies. Carte blanche for the inadequate, the spiteful and the self-righteous, Kit mused.

And once denounced, it was almost impossible to escape unscathed. If there were such a thing as reincarnation, Kit thought, Torquemada had probably come back as Senator Joe McCarthy. ‘Are you now, or have you ever been a heretic?’

It must have poisoned the whole community. No one could have felt safe, except perhaps the Grand Inquisitor and his team of helpers. After all, they had a special dispensation from the Pope. If anyone died under torture or if some other mistake were made, they had the power to absolve one another so their hands and their souls could remain stainless.

And now, another killer was stalking the streets of Toledo, revisiting old nightmares and casting a dark shadow over this tourist playground. His tally of victims might be insignificant set beside the legalized murder of the Inquisitors, but for those touched by these deaths, the pain and bewilderment would be equally intense. That was what Fiona was staring into, and he didn’t envy her one bit. She had her own ghosts, and in spite of what she told herself, he believed the work she embraced did nothing to lay them to rest. But he wouldn’t push her; she’d have to reach that conclusion of her own free will, and she was a long way from there. He didn’t envy her the journey either. The country of the imagination was a far easier place to inhabit.

In spite of the warmth of the sun, Kit shivered involuntarily. It was true that a place retained its spirit. In spite of the beauty that surrounded him, it was all too easy to summon up the troubled spirits of past terrors.

It was, he thought, natural territory for a serial killer.

8

Drew Shand sat back and rotated his shoulders, grimacing as they cracked and popped. He’d tried every possible adjustment on the expensive orthopaedic chair, but he always stiffened up like this by the end of the working day, exactly the same as he had when he’d sat on a cheap kitchen chair hunched over his second-hand laptop. The electrically adjustable seat had been one of the first treats he’d bought with the famously substantial advance for his first novel. But still he got backache.

He’d thought that his debut was a pretty good read when he’d finished the first draft, but he’d struggled and failed to hide his astonishment when his agent rang him with the news that it had been sold for a mid-six-figure sum. Each of which was to the left of the decimal point. Hot on the heels of that deal, Copycat had been sold to TV, its adaptation winning a clutch of awards for its charismatic star, and sending Drew’s paperback tie-in straight to the top of the bestseller lists on its coat-tails.

More than the acclaim, more even than the rave reviews and the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger award for best first novel of the year, Drew appreciated his release from the soul-destroying job of teaching English to the over-indulged brats of the Edinburgh middle classes. The demands of keeping a roof over his head had forced him to write Copycat late into the night and in snatched hours at weekends over a period of eighteen months. It had been a hard grind, earning him derision from his pals, who kept telling him to get a life. But now, he was the one with the absolutely brilliant life, while they were still stuck in the nine-to-five. Drew didn’t work to anybody else’s schedule. He wrote when it suited him. OK, that turned out to be most days, but he was still in charge. Drew was the one who made the decisions, not some slave-driving boss acting the hardarse because his own sad wee job was on the line.

And he loved his life. He usually woke some time between ten and eleven. He’d make himself a cappuccino with his shiny new chrome Italian machine, browse the morning papers then energize his brain under the needle jets of his power shower. By noon, he’d be sitting in front of his state-of-the-art computer with a pair of bacon-and-egg rolls. He’d work his way through brunch while he reread what he’d written the day before, then he’d check out his e-mail. Round about half past one, he’d be ready to go to work.

It was only his third novel. Drew still got a helluva charge out of hammering the words down on screen, pausing momentarily to figure out the direction of the next few paragraphs before his fingers thundered across the keys with the heavy touch of a man who’d learned piano as a reluctant child. Not for him the slow composition of a sentence or the check with the word count at the end of every paragraph. Drew didn’t set himself anything as mechanical as a daily word target. He just wrote and wrote till he ran out of steam. That mostly happened about five o’clock. Funnily enough, he usually found he’d written about four thousand words, give or take a couple of hundred. At first he’d reckoned it was just coincidence, then he’d decided that four thousand words was just about the limit that his brain could produce in one day without it degenerating into gibberish.

Well, it was as good an excuse as any for knocking it on the head for the day. He switched off the computer, shrugged off his dressing gown and put on his sweats. The gym was a couple of streets away from his four-roomed Georgian flat on the edge of the New Town, and he enjoyed the walk through the darkening streets, the cold air turning to smoke as it left his nostrils. Poof the Magic Dragon, he thought ironically as he turned off Broughton Street and walked up the steps to the gym.

Drew loved the gym too. He had a circuit that lasted precisely an hour. Fifteen minutes on the Nordic track, half an hour on the Nautilus machines working all the different muscle groups, ten minutes with free weights, then five minutes on the bike. The perfect mix of aerobic and strength exercises, just enough weight and reps to keep him hard without turning him into Stallone.

But it wasn’t just the pleasure of feeling his thirty-one-year-old body respond to the routine that turned Drew on to the gym. It was also the opportunity it gave him to check out the other men who were there. It didn’t matter if they were straight or gay. He didn’t go to the gym to cruise, although he had got lucky a couple of times. Mostly, though, he just liked the chance to watch their bodies as they pushed themselves to their limits, to admire a neat bum, a taut pair of thighs, a well-defined set of shoulders. It wound his spring nice and tight for whatever the rest of the evening might hold for him.

After his work-out, Drew relaxed in the gym’s sauna. Again, it wasn’t the sort where sex was on offer, but it didn’t hurt to eye up the talent, casting the odd sideways glance at a well-hung companion. Sometimes, the glance would be returned and they’d wait till they had the sweaty pine box to themselves before arranging to meet for a drink afterwards in one of the nearby gay bars.

That was another thing he didn’t have to worry about these days. When he’d still been teaching, he’d been incredibly wary about responding to any kind of come-on anywhere that wasn’t a bona fide gay establishment. Even then, he always scanned the bars as carefully as he could before he settled in for the evening. It might be OK for cabinet ministers to be out and proud, but for a teacher in Edinburgh, being a known gay out and about on the scene would still be the quickest route to the dole queue. Now, he could make eye contact anywhere he chose with anybody he chose. The biggest risk he faced was getting a punch in the face, but that hadn’t happened yet. Drew prided himself on having an instinct for who was safe to come on to; he reckoned it was part of the sensibility that made him such a fucking great writer.

He smiled inwardly as he dressed. The guy he’d noticed on the rowing machine was new to the gym —or at least, new to this time of day—but he’d seen him before in the Barbary Coast bar round the corner. The Barbary was one of the newest gay bars in town and it boasted Drew’s absolutely favourite place in the whole of Edinburgh. When you walked right through to the back of the bar, there was a small door set in the wall guarded by a couple of beefy leather men. If they knew your face, they simply stepped aside. If they didn’t, they asked what you were looking for. If you knew you were looking for the Dark Room, they let you pass. If you didn’t, they politely suggested you might want to stay in the main bar. Drew was on first-name terms with them both.

Drew had seen the guy on the rowing machine eyeing him in one of the floor-length mirrors that lined the gym. He reckoned that if he wandered into the Barbary within the next hour, he might just find him leaning on the bar. And if he knew about the upstairs room, well, that would do Drew very nicely for the evening.

God, he loved the Dark Room. There was a sense that anything could happen, and in his experience, it usually did. Several times. The people who had complained about the lovingly detailed graphic violence in Copycat would have a cardiac arrest if they knew a quarter of what men did to each other under cover of darkness in an upstairs room a short walk from the genteel Heart of Midlothian. He wouldn’t mind betting it would shake a few real serial killers to the core as well.

Back at the flat, he took his time dressing. Tight black jeans that gave sharp definition to cock and balls, topped with a white T-shirt with the cover of his book screen-printed across it. He placed a single gold ring in one ear and threaded a studded leather belt through the hoops of his trousers. He slipped his feet into a pair of thick-soled biker boots and tightened the Velcro fastenings. He reached for his battered leather jacket and slipped his arms into the sleeves, admiring himself in the long cheval mirror. Not bad at all, he congratulated himself. Great fucking haircut, he thought, jittering his fingers through the short dark crop that he thought made him look dangerous and sexy. That new guy in the salon was worth every penny.

Drew slid open the drawer in his bedside table and took out a small silver snuffbox, a tiny silver spoon, a silver straw and an expired credit card. He flipped open the lid of the box and scooped out a generous helping of the white powder. Using the credit card, he chopped the cocaine into a pair of thick lines. He inserted the straw into his left nostril, closed his right nostril with a finger and expertly snorted one of the lines. He threw his head back and sniffed a couple of times, revelling in the numbness that spread across his soft palate. He repeated the process with his right nostril, then stood for a moment, enjoying the initial buzz as the coke hit his bloodstream. It was good stuff; he’d feel it for a while yet. And if he needed a top-up, he knew he could always score some more in the pub. It might not be up to the quality of his personal stash, but it would do the business nicely.

Finally, he snapped the steel bracelet of his chunky Tag Heuer round his wrist, taking care not to trap any of his fine dark hairs in the catch. He was ready for the time of his life.

He couldn’t have known it would be the last time.

9

Fiona pushed open the shutters and gazed across the gorge at Toledo basking in the silvery glow of a rising moon. Over on her left, she could identify the spotlit grandeur of San Juan de los Reyes, where James Palango’s body had been left dangling from the shackles. From this distance, it looked far too innocuous for such a display. Certainly when they’d visited it that afternoon, it had appeared an unlikely setting for so degrading a crime. A few tourists had ambled past, reading their guide books, taking photographs and paying no attention to her and Berrocal. Fiona had to remind herself that this was the church built by the two monarchs who presided over the launch of the Inquisition. In all probability, San Juan de los Reyes had seen far worse than this latest corpse.

The visit to the church had added nothing to her knowledge, but it had given Berrocal the chance to run through the details of the crime scene and smoke another three of his execrable cigarettes. Afterwards, they had walked through the town to the police headquarters where Berrocal had made his base. ‘It’s easier than driving,’ he had pointed out. ‘So, what do you need to do now?’ he asked as they set off.

‘I need to familiarize myself with all the details of the cases. That way I can draw up a full list of the key correspondences between them. There’s no point in trying to do a geographical profile with only two cases. There’s not enough information, particularly since these two sites have been chosen for their historical significance. But what I hope to do is to be able to suggest where you should look in your criminal records for the crimes he has probably committed in the past,’ Fiona explained.

‘That’s easily arranged. All the relevant material is in our incident room. I’ve set aside a desk for you there.’ He took out his mobile phone and dialled. He spoke curtly into it, a brief exchange where he said little. He ended the call with a tight smile. ‘The files will be waiting for you.’

‘Thanks. What I’ll probably do is read through it all, make some notes then go back to my hotel. I like to mull things over for a little while before I write my preliminary report, but I’ll have it ready for you first thing in the morning.’

There was nothing high-tech about the incident room Salvador Berrocal had at his disposal. A dingy windowless room at the end of an airless corridor, the walls were grimy and streaked with stains that Fiona didn’t want to think too closely about. It smelled of cigarette smoke, stale coffee and male sweat. Four desks had been crammed into the space, only one of which held a computer terminal. A couple of large-scale maps of the city and the surrounding suburbs were tacked to the walls, and an easel held a familiar sight—the crime board, complete with photographs of the victims and various scrawled notations. Two of the desks were staffed by harassed-looking detectives who gabbled into phones and barely looked up when Berrocal ushered her in.

He pointed to the farthest desk, where two stacks of files leaned against each other at a precarious angle. ‘I thought you could work over there,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry our accommodation is so poor, but this was the only space available. At least the coffee is drinkable,’ he added with a sardonic smile.

And at least there was a power point nearby, Fiona thought as she squeezed into the tiny gap between the chair and the desk. ‘Are these the murder files?’ she asked.

Berrocal nodded. ‘All ready for you.’

It took her a few hours to plough through dozens of separate reports, stretching her Spanish to the limits of her dictionary and beyond. There had been a couple of occasions when she’d had to concede defeat and ask Berrocal for a translation of passages that baffled her. She had made notes as she’d gone along, working with the database painstakingly evolved by her and one of her PhD students which assigned probabilities to particular features of the two murders. The program then analysed which common features were significant in terms of attributing the crimes to one particular perpetrator. For example, most stranger killings took place after dark; that any two crimes in a series had happened at night was therefore not of much significance when it came to linking them. But it was relatively rare to commit a sexual assault on a dead body with a broken bottle, so the fact that these two crimes exhibited that particular feature was given a much higher significance by the program.

Most of the original data had come from the FBI, who had been remarkably generous with details of past cases once they had realized she was happy to have the information stripped of personal details like names of victims and perpetrators. Fiona recognized that like most statistical analyses produced by psychologists, her database was at best only a partial snapshot of the whole, but it did give her some valuable insights into the nature of the crimes she was dealing with. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed her to say with some degree of certainty whether individual crimes were part of a series or likely to be the work of separate offenders.

By the end of her afternoon’s work, she had demonstrated empirically what the police had already decided on the basis of common sense and experience: the two murders were undoubtedly the work of one man. If that had been the only service she could have provided, there wouldn’t have been much point in her making the trip. But she was convinced that by analysing the data she already had, she could point the police towards other crimes the killer might have committed. With access to that information, she might finally be able to construct a useful geographical profile.

What she needed now was to get out of the police station and let her mind roam free over the nuggets of information she had extracted from the files.

She had got back to the room to find a note from Kit propped up on the desk. ‘Gone down to the bar. Meet me there when you get in, and we’ll have dinner.’ She’d smiled then and crossed to the window to check out the view. It was strange to think that the beauty spread out before her concealed all the normal range of human ugliness. Somewhere in that honeycomb maze of buildings, a killer was probably going about his business, unsuspected by anyone. Fiona hoped that she could point the police in the right direction, so they could find him before he killed again.

But that was for later. Fiona turned away from the window and stripped off her clothes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of smoke that lingered in their fibres. A quick shower, then she changed into jeans and a ribbed silk shirt.

Fiona found Kit at a table in the corner of the bar, hunched over his laptop with a glass of inky red wine to hand and a bowl of olives pushed to one side. She put an arm across his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. ‘Had a good day?’ she asked, settling into the leather chair opposite him.

He looked up, startled. ‘Hi. Just let me save this.’ He finished what he was doing and turned off the computer. Folding it closed, he grinned at her. ‘They let you have an evening off?’

‘Sort of. I’ve got to write a report later, but only a short one. It won’t take long. I’m letting it bed down before I commit myself.’ A waiter appeared and Fiona ordered a chilled manzanilla. ‘What have you been up to?’

Kit looked faintly sheepish. ‘I went for a wander this afternoon. Just to soak up the ambience, you know? This place, it’s steeped in history. You can practically smell it in the air. Every corner you turn, there’s something to see, something to imagine. Anyway, I got to thinking about the Inquisition, about what it must have been like here back then.’

Fiona groaned. ‘Don’t tell me. It gave you the idea for a book.’

Kit smiled. ‘It started the wheels turning.’

‘Is that what you were doing on the laptop?’

He shook his head. ‘No, it’s way too early to be writing stuff down. I was just doing a bit of polishing on what I’ve been writing this last week or so. Tickling and tidying, the boring bollocks. What about you? What kind of day have you had?’

The waiter put Fiona’s drink in front of her and she took a sip. ‘Routine. Going through files by the numbers. Berrocal’s very organized. Very on the ball. You don’t have to explain anything twice to him.’

‘That makes your life a bit easier.’

‘You’re not kidding. The trouble is, there’s not much to go at. Normally, a killer chooses a body dump for reasons that are very personal to him. But because these body dumps have particular historical significance, it complicates things. I’m not sure how much use geographical profiling will be.’

Kit shrugged. ‘You can only do your best. They certainly go in for gruesome in these parts. They’ve got this daft little train that takes you through the city and round the ring road on the other side of the river and the commentary is totally bizarre. It’s in Spanish and German and a sort of fractured English, and they tell you all this stuff about the bloody history of the town. They’ve even got this place called the Gorge of the Woman with Her Throat Cut. Can you believe that?’

Fiona was surprised. ‘They tell you about that on the tourist trip?’

He nodded. ‘I know, it’s not the sort of thing you’d normally boast about, is it?’

‘That’s where one of our murder victims was dumped,’ Fiona said slowly. ‘I was working on the assumption that only locals would be familiar with it.’

‘Well, I can tell you all about it,’ Kit said. ‘This woman shagged one of the guards and let the enemy attack the city, so they cut her throat to make sure she wouldn’t be doing that again in a hurry.’

‘Did you go down to San Juan de los Reyes? The big monastery church?’

‘I walked past it. I’m saving it for tomorrow.’

‘Did you notice the chains on the facade?’

‘It’s hard to miss them. According to the guide book, Fernando and Isabella had them hung up there after the reconquest of Granada. They were used to shackle the Moors’ Christian prisoners. I must say, if that’s typical of Isabella’s idea of decor, I can’t wait to see the inside. Eat your heart out, Home Front,’ he added with an ironic grin. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘That’s where the second body was found. You’ve only been here half a day, and already you know the story behind both body dumps. It makes me wonder if I’m right in what I’m thinking.’

Kit patted her hand and assumed an expression of mock-patronage. ‘Never mind, love, you can’t be right all of the time. You leave that to me.’

Fiona snorted with laughter. ‘I’m so glad I’ve got you to rely on. Now, are we going to eat dinner, or what?’

Fiona sipped a glass of brandy and studied the rough ideas she’d sketched out. In the background, the sound of Kit’s fingers tapping the keyboard of his laptop was faintly soothing. Even the mosquito buzz of his Walkman was comforting in its familiarity. He never interfered when she had work to do, something she was eternally grateful for. She had heard too many of her friends complain that if their man wasn’t working, neither were they supposed to be. Kit was always happy to occupy himself with his own work or a book, or to take himself off to a bar and make new acquaintances.

‘I am convinced that the perpetrator’s primary interest is not sexual satisfaction,’ she read. ‘However, the nature of the sexual mutilation he has performed postmortem is suggestive. I believe it is a way of demonstrating contempt for what he sees as the “weakness” of his victims, which leads me to postulate that his method of contact with his victims was one of physical or sexual appeal. At its most crude, I would suggest that he picked them up, possibly on an earlier occasion, and arranged to meet them on the nights of the murders. He may have baited his approach with the suggestion that his specialist knowledge might be of use to them in their professional lives. It is clear that he does not appear to pose a threat to those he has selected as victims. He knows the kind of places where his potential victims are to be found. This implies considerable local knowledge and suggests that he is a native of Toledo.

‘These were not killings that occurred out of sexual rage because of failure of performance or overarousal, but from a different motive entirely.’

So far, so good, she thought. She didn’t think there was much to argue with there. ‘These crimes demonstrate a relatively high level of sophistication and planning. It is therefore unlikely that the perpetrator is new to the world of criminal activity. He is far too comfortable with what he is doing. But if we accept that the motivation behind these murders is not primarily sexual, it therefore follows that it’s unlikely his previous crimes have been sexual in their nature.

‘Given that both crime scenes are significant tourist sites, and that both victims were foreigners, I believe the key to the killer’s motivation is his view of visitors to his city. He sees them not as a benefit but as interlopers who are not to be welcomed. I think it most likely that his past crimes will have targeted either tourists or businesses related to tourism. He most probably began with acts of vandalism against hotels or businesses catering for tourists, such as souvenir shops. This may have escalated into attacks on tourists themselves, such as muggings.’

Fiona sat back and considered. What she was suggesting was by no means a conventional profile of a serial killer, but she had been struck from the first by the unusual nature of the crime scenes. Most killers left their bodies where they killed them or chose carefully selected body dumps that had significance only because they were unlikely to be spotted abandoning the corpse. This killer had taken a high risk with his second victim, so the sites were clearly symbolic for him at a deep level. For once, where the bodies had been found seemed at least as important as the selection of the victims. They weren’t just places that symbolized violence. They would also have meaning for the casual visitor to the city, as Kit’s experience demonstrated.

She was pleased with the progress she had made. Now it was up to Salvador Berrocal to persuade the local police to give her the data she needed on crimes against property and persons related to tourism. Armed with that information, Fiona would be able to apply her theories of crime linkage to figure out which crimes had common offenders.

Once she had established which acts were part of series as opposed to isolated events, she would map the relevant scenes of crime on a street plan of the city that had been scanned into her computer. The powerful geographical profiling software loaded on her laptop would apply a complex series of algorithms to the points on the map. It would then chart probable areas where the perpetrator of those crimes might live or work. She could add the murder scenes to the mix, and if they didn’t significantly distort the areas the computer had suggested, she might be able to indicate to Berrocal the area of the city the killer called home.

Ten years ago, Fiona mused, she’d have been laughed off the platform if she’d dared to suggest that a mixture of psychological profiling, crime linkage and geographical profiling could lead to the capture of a killer. Back then, there simply hadn’t been powerful enough computer programs to crunch the numbers fast enough, even if anyone had considered this an area worth investigating. The world of criminal investigation had changed faster than anyone could have imagined. At last, technology was outstripping the ability of criminals to keep one step ahead of it. And she was lucky enough to be part of the revolution.

And in the morning, she could put her skills to the test once more. Working with the police to capture killers was the most exciting thing she had ever done. But she never lost sight of the fact that she was dealing with real lives, not just a series of mathematical events and computer calculations. If what she did couldn’t save lives, it was ultimately meaningless. And so, every case she was involved in became not only a professional challenge. It was nothing less than a measure of herself.

10

Fiona walked into the smoky office just after eleven. Berrocal and his two detectives were all deep in telephone conversations, barely looking up at her arrival. She’d faxed her report to Berrocal at eight, knowing he’d need some time to assemble the material she needed. She’d used the three hours to have a leisurely breakfast in bed with Kit then to accompany him to see the definitive El Greco, the Burial of the Count of Orgaz, displayed in splendid isolation in an annex to the church of San Tomas. It had been a better start to the day than reading police files.

The stacks of folders on her desk looked the same as they had the day before. She waited for Berrocal to replace the receiver, then spoke. ‘Hi. Are the reports on the vandalism and assaults not here yet?’

Berrocal nodded. ‘That’s them on your desk. Unsolved are on the left, the solved on the right. These are from the last twelve months.’

‘Quick work.’

He shrugged. ‘They knew I’d be on their backs till they came up with what you asked for. They like a quiet life. Can anyone help you with this, or is it something you must do yourself?’

‘Unfortunately, I need to analyse the data myself,’ Fiona told him. ‘What about a map of the city?’

Berrocal raised a finger, admonishing himself. ‘I have them here.’ He turned to the remaining empty desk and raked around in the top drawer, coming up with a small tourist map and a larger, more detailed street map. ‘I wasn’t certain which one would meet your needs best,’ he added, handing them to her.

‘I don’t suppose they’ve got a scanner here?’ Fiona asked without hope.

Berrocal shrugged. ‘There must be one somewhere.’

‘I need the detailed map scanned in as a GIF file,’ she said, opening her laptop case and fishing out a blank floppy. ‘If you can have it put on the floppy, I can transfer it to my system.’

He nodded, turning to the nearer of the two detectives. He snapped something in fast Spanish. The detective quickly ended his call and gave his boss a quizzical look. Berrocal thrust the map and the floppy at him and rattled off a string of short sharp sentences. The detective gave Fiona a radiant smile and made for the door. Clearly even being a gopher for the English consultant was preferable to being cooped up in this box. ‘E café con leche para dos,’ Berrocal added with a wicked grin at the disappearing back.

Thanks,’ Fiona said, reaching for the first file. She had to devise a checklist of significant factors; time of the offence, date of the offence, what form the vandalism had taken, and a dozen other particulars. Then she had painstakingly to enter the details. Where there was a known offender, she also had to input every piece of information relevant to his history and his previous crimes. There were forty-seven files to work through and the fact that everything was in Spanish slowed things down even further. It made for a long day, punctuated by regular cartons of coffee and snacks that she couldn’t have itemized five minutes after she’d eaten them, so intense was her concentration.

Finally, she sat back and waited while the computer sorted the data and offered up the results of its calculations. Unsurprisingly, most of the incidents came up as discrete events. But among those, there were three groupings of crime reports that each appeared likely to have the same perpetrator. The first was a series of attacks on souvenir shops. In every case, the crimes had taken place between two and three in the morning on weekdays. The first three involved paint being thrown across the windows. But then there had been an escalation. Four further attacks had taken place where the windows had been smashed and paint thrown on to the shops’ stock. All the crimes were from the unsolved pile.

A second series featured graffiti daubed on the walls of restaurants and hotels. But here, the slogans were political—right-wing rants about Spain for the Spanish, and the banishment of immigrants. Fiona immediately discounted these as the work of her killer.

A third series emerged from the unsolved pile. Within the past four months, three tourists had been attacked on their way back to their hotels in the early hours of the morning. Berrocal had already told her that Toledo was, by Spanish standards, an early-to-bed city, with most of the cafés and restaurants closed by eleven. But there were a few late-night bars, and the victims had all been in one or other of those. They had been walking back to their hotels alone when a masked man had jumped out from the mouth of an alley and attacked them. There had been no demand for money, just a silent and savage assault lasting a few minutes before their assailant ran off into the maze of narrow passages nearby.

Fiona gave a deep sigh of satisfaction. When crime linkage worked well, it was like a small miracle unfolding before her. Now she could enter the locations of the two significant series into her geographic profiling software and see what emerged.

Kit had watched Fiona walk up the hill from San Tomas, admiring her smooth stride and the way the cut of her trousers gave emphasis to the gentle swell of her hips. I am a lucky bastard, he congratulated himself, luxuriating briefly in the memory of their leisurely morning in bed. Even if she did his head in sometimes with her perpetual need to analyse and dissect everything and everyone who crossed her path, he wouldn’t have swapped her for any woman he’d ever met. One of the things he loved about her was her dedication to the job she did. But even when she was possessed by a case, she never lost sight of the importance of their relationship.

This morning, for example. She could have played the ‘I’m indispensable’ card and headed straight for the police station. But she’d assured him there would be nothing yet for her to get her teeth into and she’d taken time out to share something he’d wanted to do. He tried to do the same thing himself, but he knew he was worse at it than she was. When he was head down, going flat out for the finishing line of a book, he could think of nothing but the next chunk of text he had to get on to the screen. The only way he could show his love for her then was to cook for her and take the time to sit down and eat with her. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

He spent the rest of the day being a tourist, and got back to the hotel just after six, taking a bottle of red wine up from the bar to their room. He had no idea how long Fiona would be, but that wasn’t a problem. He turned the TV on to MTV Europe, poured a glass of wine, booted up his computer and collected his e-mail. The only significant message was from his agent, confirming a deal with the independent film makers who wanted to adapt his first novel for TV. Personally, he thought The Dissection Man was unfilmable, but if they were prepared to pay him large sums of money to find that out for themselves, he wasn’t about to complain.

Not that he cared much about money. Both his parents were teachers and he and his brother had grown up in an environment where money had never really been an issue. There had always been enough and he’d never been conscious of having been deprived of anything because his parents couldn’t afford it. He hadn’t had much of an advance for his first or his second novel, and he reckoned no one had been more surprised than his publishers when The Blood Painter had become an overnight cult sensation then made the crossover to mainstream success. As a result, he guessed he’d earned more money in the previous two years than his parents had in the past ten.

And he didn’t know what to do with it. A large chunk had gone on buying the house, but other than that, he and Fiona had few material desires. He didn’t care about designer clothes, he had no interest in performance cars and he still preferred the kind of holiday where they’d fly somewhere, pick up a hire car and stay in cheap motels or guesthouses. His biggest expenditure was probably on music, but even there he economized by waiting till he was in the States or Canada on a book tour and indulging himself in a CD-buying spree at their lower prices.

The only real indulgence he’d craved was a retreat where he could escape to write when the book was going through that difficult middle period. Beginnings were always easy, but by the time he’d worked through the first hundred pages, depression would strike as he realized he was already falling far short of what he’d aspired to. At that stage, every interruption was a torment. Fiona was about the only person who didn’t piss him off, but that was because she knew when to leave him alone.

It was Fiona who had suggested he buy a cottage in the wilds where he could go and work undisturbed for however long it took him to get over the hump of dissatisfaction. Usually, the truly terrible phase lasted for about six weeks or a hundred and fifty pages, and Fiona had informed him that she’d rather do without his company if that helped him to return more quickly to his normal cheerful self.

So he’d bought the bothy. It never ceased to amaze him that anywhere on the British mainland could feel so isolated. From the two-roomed cottage, no other human habitation was visible in any direction. To get there, he had to fly to Inverness, pick up the elderly Land Rover he garaged there, stock up with a supply of groceries, then drive for another two hours to the eastern fringe of the vast wilderness of Sutherland. His power came from a diesel generator, his water from a nearby spring, his warmth from a wood-burning stove that also heated enough water to half fill his bath. At Fiona’s insistence, he’d invested in a satellite phone, but he’d only ever used it to link up his computer for e-mail.

The isolation was more than most people could have borne. But for Kit, it was a lifeline. With the only distraction an occasional excursion to shoot rabbits for the pot, he invariably found he ploughed through the hardest sections of his books in far less time than it took in London. And the quality of his work had improved as a result. He knew it, and so did his readers.

And there was no denying that absence enriched his relationship with Fiona. Even though they were in daily e-mail contact—often swapping posts that would have qualified as pornography in any other context—their reunions had all the ardour of the first days of their affair, when no amount of physical contact was too much and no demand too outrageous. Just thinking about it excited him. Who would imagine that behind Fiona’s cool exterior was a sensualist who had turned the hard man of British crime fiction into a romantic fool?

She was always at her most passionate when she’d been forced to confront violent death. It was as if she needed to reaffirm her connection to life, to reassert her own vitality in defiance of a killer. Kit might deprecate the source, but he had to confess he wasn’t averse to reaping the benefits.

Mentally, he shook himself. Anticipation of Fiona’s return was the surest way to distract him from what he was supposed to be doing. He had decided to do one of the periodic revisions he routinely ran through to check that everything in the book was flowing smoothly. He typed in the commands to print out the last sixty pages and flicked the TV over to BBC World to check out the news headlines.

The early evening news magazine programme was in full flow, the interviewer winding up what sounded like a deeply dull item about the state of the Euro, courtesy of a junior Treasury minister. The studio anchor’s voice suddenly picked up urgency. ‘And news just in. Police in Edinburgh have identified the victim of a brutal murder that took place in the heart of the Scottish capital in the early hours of this morning as the international bestselling thriller writer Drew Shand.’

Kit’s forehead wrinkled in an incredulous frown. ‘Over to our correspondent James Donnelly in Edinburgh,’ the presenter continued.

A young man with a serious expression stood in front of a grey-stone building. ‘The mutilated body of Drew Shand was found by a police officer on a routine patrol of the Royal Mile just after three this morning. Police cordoned off an area behind St Giles’ Cathedral which remains the scene of police activity. At a press conference earlier this afternoon, Detective Superintendent Sandy Galloway revealed that the victim’s throat had been cut and his face and body mutilated with a knife. He appealed for anyone who was in the area between the hours of midnight and three a.m. to come forward.

‘In the last few minutes, the identity of the victim was revealed as award-winning thriller writer Drew Shand. Thirty-one-year-old Shand was hailed as one of the new stars of British crime fiction when his first novel, Copycat, shot to the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic and won the John Creasey Memorial Dagger and the Mcvitie prize. The television adaptation of Copycat also went on to win several major awards and has been widely screened abroad.

‘A former English teacher, Shand lived alone in the New Town area of the city. His second novel, The Darkest Hour, is due to be published next month. Shand, who was openly homosexual, was known to frequent several Edinburgh gay bars, including at least one believed to cater for those whose tastes run to sadomasochistic practices. At this point, police are refusing to suggest any possible motive for the killing.’

‘Fucking typical, blame the victim,’ Kit snarled, slamming his glass down so hard the stem broke, sending a stream of red wine across the marble floor. Ignoring it, he took a swig straight from the bottle. He scarcely registered its taste. ‘Drew Shand,’ he muttered, tilting the bottle to his mouth again. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Poor bugger.’ He had a sudden flashback to the panel they’d done together at the last Edinburgh Book Festival, the one and only chance he’d had to appear with the rising star. He remembered Drew leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands spread open, face earnest as he struggled to make the point that the violence in Copycat had always been functional, never gratuitous. The audience had been won over, Kit recalled, although he’d had his doubts. Then afterwards, sitting outside the Spiegeltent, drinking Becks straight from the bottle, the pair of them had carried on the discussion, lacing their seriousness with the gallows humour beloved of police officers and crime writers alike. A vivid image of Drew throwing his handsome head back and laughing imploded behind his eyes like a terrible firework.

Kit suddenly realized how he longed for Fiona’s presence. A reviewer had once remarked that Kit made his readers care so much for his fictional victims that the reader felt the shock of losing a real friend when he killed them off. At the time, he’d been proud of the comment. But back then, he’d never personally known someone who had been murdered. Sitting in a strange hotel room in an unfamiliar city, numbed with the shock of Drew Shand’s death, he finally recognized the critical comment for the absurdity it had been.

Now he knew the truth.

11

Fiona stretched extravagantly and looked at her watch. To her astonishment, it was ten past seven.

Her movements attracted the attention of Berrocal, who had been absent for most of the day but had returned a short while before. ‘You are making progress?’ he asked.

Fiona outlined the results of her day’s work. ‘I need a break now,’ she concluded. ‘It’s easy to start making mistakes when you’ve been staring into the screen all day, and if I get the crime-site plotting wrong, the results are worthless.’

Berrocal crossed to her desk, peering over her shoulder at the laptop. ‘This is remarkable,’ he said. ‘A system like this would make our job so much easier.’

‘Quite a few police forces are using it now,’ Fiona told him. ‘The linkage program works best with crimes against property, like burglary and robbery. The version I’m using is experimental. It lets me enter my own set of variables for the checklist, so it needs a certain level of expertise to use it. But the basic version with the fixed parameters reduces burglaries wherever it’s been used. It helps clear outstanding crimes from the books as well as current cases. You should get your bosses to invest in the software.’

Berrocal snorted. ‘Easier said than done. My bosses don’t like to spend money on anything they can avoid.’

‘You did well to get them to pay for me, then,’ Fiona said tartly, standing up and switching off the computer.

‘When it comes to losing tourist dollars, they panic. Suddenly, we get resources that we’d never get in any other circumstances. So, what are your plans for the evening? Would you like me to take you and Kit for dinner somewhere typically Toledan?’ He stepped back to allow her to escape the confines of her desk.

‘That’s kind of you, but I don’t think I’d be very good company. I’ve got all this stuff buzzing round my brain, and I’d rather just go back to the hotel and have a bite to eat there with Kit. After that I’ll probably feel like doing more work.’

He shrugged. ‘Whatever you prefer. But you really don’t have to work every minute you’re here, you know.’

Fiona closed her laptop and started to pack it away. ‘I think I do, Major,’ she said softly. She looked up and met his eye. ‘He’s out there, planning the next one. He’s already working on a short cycle. I hate to sound melodramatic, but when you’re dealing with a killer as organized and as ruthless as this one, every day counts. I don’t want his next victim’s blood on my hands if I can possibly avoid it.’

Berrocal eased the car into the traffic and gave Fiona a quick glance. ‘You really think the man behind the vandalism is the same man who did the muggings?’

Fiona shrugged. ‘There are no certainties in what I do. And ideally, I like to work with at least five locations for each potential series. But on the basis of probability, I’d say so. The vandalism only overlaps the first mugging. After the second mugging, there’s no more paint-throwing or window-breaking. So either the vandal moved away, or he found a more satisfying outlet for his anger. Everything I know about the way violent criminals escalate tells me that it’s likely that, when he wasn’t caught, he became more confident. He moved up a gear and started attacking the direct cause of his rage rather than hitting targets at one remove. If I’m right, it’ll show up when I run the geographic profiling program.’

‘You’ll have proof it’s the same offender?’ Berrocal couldn’t help sounding a little sceptical.

‘Not absolute proof, no. Not even the kind of proof that will stand up in court. But if the program gives me the same likely residential locations for both series of crimes, then we’re looking at a strong probability, wouldn’t you say? And then your colleagues in Toledo will have an idea where to start looking for proof.’ Fiona shifted in her seat, trying to unlock the tightness in her shoulders. They had turned on to the road that skirted the river opposite the bluff where Toledo glowed in the twilight. ‘Amazing view,’ she added.

‘It’s a beautiful city,’ Berrocal acknowledged. ‘That’s why crimes like these seem so much more shocking than a routine act of violence in the back streets of Madrid. And of course, it’s also why there is so much attention on this investigation. It’s not just my bosses who are leaning on us for a quick solution. The newspapers and the TV stations are all over us. Luckily I’ve managed to keep your name out of the stories so far. I don’t think it would go down well that we have had to bring in an expert from England to solve crimes so very Spanish.’

‘I won’t be solving your crimes, Major. I’m a consultant psychologist, not a consulting detective. All I can do is make suggestions. It’s up to you to decide whether they’re worth pursuing, and it’s up to you to find the evidence to nail your killer.’

Berrocal grinned. ‘Doctor, you know and I know that the media are not interested in the truth of the situation. If they find out about you, they will portray you as some sort of miraculous detective, a modern Sherlock Holmes who is called in because the police are too stupid to do their job.’

‘Which is why we don’t tell them I’m here,’ she said. For a minute or so there was silence, until Berrocal turned off the main road and headed up the steep hill towards the parador, leaving the dramatic vista behind them.

‘Will your geographic program tell us if the murderer lives in the same place as the mugger?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know if there’s enough data,’ she answered frankly. ‘On their own, the two murders won’t give us anything approaching pinpoint accuracy. Not enough locations, you see. But I’ll play around with various combinations and see what I come up with. I should be able to answer your question tomorrow morning.’

‘Are you positive you don’t want to go out to dinner?’ Berrocal asked as he pulled into the car park.

‘It’s very kind of you. But I’d rather get through the work. The sooner I get finished, the sooner I can go home. Besides, I’m sure your family would like to see something of you.’

He gave a soft snort of laughter. ‘I’m sure they would. But like you, I’ll be working this evening, I’m afraid.’

‘At least I’ll have Kit’s company for dinner. He has the knack of making me laugh, even in the middle of something as grim as this. And let’s face it, Major, there aren’t too many laughs in this line of work.’

He nodded gravely. ‘I know what you mean. Sometimes I feel I’m dragging the sewer in behind me when I walk in from work. I almost don’t want to pick up my children and hug them in case I infect them with what I’ve seen, what I know.’ He leaned across to open the door for Fiona. ‘Good hunting, Doctor.’

She nodded. ‘You too, Major.’

Fiona’s first reaction when she opened the door was bewilderment. The only light in the room came from the distant vista of Toledo, dramatically uplit by dozens of spotlights. Silhouetted against the light, Kit was sitting on the end of the bed, elbows on knees, head hanging. ‘Kit?’ she said softly, closing the door behind her. She didn’t know what could be wrong, only that something clearly was.

She crossed to him with swift strides, shedding briefcase, laptop and coat on the way. Kit raised his head and turned to face her as she sat down beside him. ‘What’s the matter, love?’ she asked, concern and anxiety in her voice. She put an arm round his shoulders and he leaned into her.

‘Drew Shand’s been murdered,’ he said unsteadily.

‘The guy who wrote Copycat?’

‘According to BBC World, they found his body early this morning just off the Royal Mile.’ Kit sounded dazed.

‘That’s how you found out? From the telly?’ she said, dismayed at the thought.

‘Yeah. I thought I’d catch the news headlines.’ He gave a bleak bark of laughter. ‘You don’t expect to hear one of your mates has been murdered and mutilated.’

‘That’s terrible,’ Fiona said, conscious of the inadequacy of her words. She understood only too well the shock and pain of such a discovery. Though in her case, it had been the telephone that had been the unwelcome messenger.

‘Yeah, and I’ll tell you what’s worse. Because he was out and proud and hung in the kind of bars where the patrons indulge in the sort of sexual practices that your average Edinburger finds repulsive, he’s already being trailed as the engineer of his own destruction. It’s blame-the-victim time. Nothing like that approach to make the respectable citizens sleep easy in their beds, knowing it couldn’t happen to them.’ He sounded angry, but Fiona recognized that as a defence against the hurt.

‘I’m so sorry, Kit,’ she said, holding him close and letting him nestle against her.

‘I’ve never known anybody who was murdered before. I know we’ve talked about Lesley, and I thought I understood how you felt about what happened to her, but now I realize I didn’t really have a clue. And it’s not even as if I knew Drew particularly well. But I just can’t get my head around the idea that anybody would kill him. I just can’t imagine why.’

Fiona had never met Drew Shand, but she knew too much of murder and its consequences not to feel the horror that lay behind the bare fact of his death. She knew only too well what murder meant to those left behind. It was the reason she had become the woman she was.

Kit had hit her with the trigger word. Lesley. If she closed her eyes, it would all come flooding back. It had been a Friday night like any other. She’d been in her first year of university teaching and had fallen into the habit of unwinding at the end of the week with the clinical staff from the institute where she was conducting a research study. They’d start in a pub in Bloomsbury, then work their way up towards Euston Station, ending up in a curry house in a side street on the far side of Euston Road. By the time she’d got back to her two-roomed flat in Camden, it had been almost midnight and the rough edges of the week had been blurred into a genial wooziness.

The light on the answering machine had been flashing crazily, indicating half a dozen messages or more. Intrigued, she’d hit the playback button and carried on walking towards the kitchenette. The first words on the tape stopped her in her tracks. ‘Fiona? It’s Dad. Phone me as soon as you get in.’ It wasn’t what was said, it was the manner of its saying. Her father’s voice, normally strong and confident, had been almost a whisper, a pale quivering echo of its normal self.

A bleep, then the next message. ‘Fiona, it’s Dad again. I don’t care how late it is when you get this message, you’ve got to phone.’ This time the voice cracked towards the end of the short message.

Already, she was turning, moving towards the phone. A bleep, then her father’s voice again. ‘Fiona, I need to talk to you. It won’t wait till the morning.’ All her instincts told her it was bad news. The worst kind of news. It must be her mother. A heart attack? A stroke? An accident in the car?

Fiona grabbed the phone and punched in the familiar number. Almost before it could ring, it was answered. A strange voice said, ‘Hello? Who is this?’

‘This is Fiona Cameron. Who are you?’

‘One moment, please. I’ll get your father.’ There was a muffled exchange then a clatter, then her father’s voice, almost as alien as the stranger’s.

‘Fiona,’ he blurted. Then he started sobbing.

‘Dad, what’s wrong? Is it Mum? What’s happened?’ All Fiona’s professionally soothing skills vanished in the face of her father’s tears.

‘No, no. It’s Lesley. She’s…Lesley’s been…’ He forced his ragged breathing into stillness. She heard a deep, wrenching intake of air, then he said, ‘Lesley’s dead.’

Fiona had no idea what he’d said next. She felt an enormous distance build between her and her surroundings, his voice a faraway echo against the ringing in her ears. Her little sister was dead. It wasn’t possible. There had to be a mistake.

There was none. Lesley, a third-year student at St Andrews University, had been raped and strangled on her way back to her shared house. No one had ever been charged with the crime. The police believed the killer had raped two other students in the previous eighteen months, but they had no significant clues. A couple of footprints from a popular brand of trainers. A description so vague it could apply to half the adult males in the town. Even if they’d had DNA analysis back then, it wouldn’t have been much use. He’d used a condom. All the attacks had taken place in winter and the women were wearing gloves, so they hadn’t scratched their attacker.

For six months after Lesley’s death, Fiona had felt as if she was walking around inside a very bad dream. Any minute now, she could force herself to wake up and none of it would have happened. Lesley would be alive. Her mother wouldn’t be suicidally depressed. Her father wouldn’t be drinking too much and writing endless letters to his MP, the press and the police, complaining of the failure to make an arrest. And she wouldn’t be blaming herself for persuading Lesley to spread her wings and go to St Andrews when she could have joined Fiona in London.

Then one day, she’d gone to a lecture given by a visiting fellow from Canada. He’d talked about the infant science of crime analysis and how it could be applied in criminal investigations. It was like a light bulb in her head suddenly turning on. The cocoon fell away and with piercing intensity, Fiona knew what she wanted to do with her life.

An hour in a lecture theatre, and nothing would be the same again. She couldn’t save Lesley. She couldn’t even catch Lesley’s killer. But now Fiona understood that one day she might find her redemption by saving someone else.

That prospect was enough. Most days, anyway, it was enough. But now murder had touched her life again, even if at one remove. All of this swam through her mind as she sat with Kit in her arms, doing what little she could to comfort him.

After a lengthy silence, Kit finally drew away from her. ‘I’m sorry I’m being such a wet nelly,’ he said. ‘It’s not like he was my best mate or anything.’

‘You’re not being a wet nelly. You knew him, you liked him, you respected his work. And it’s a shock to realize he’s just not here any more.’

Kit stood up and turned on a lamp. ‘That’s the curse of an imagination at a time like this. I keep thinking what it must have been like for him, how scared he must have been.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I need to do something to keep my mind occupied.’ He picked up the pile of paper the printer had spewed out. ‘Do you mind if we just get something sent up from room service?’

‘Whatever you need.’ Fiona hung up her coat and picked up her laptop. ‘I’ve got plenty I can be getting on with if you want to work.’

Kit managed a faint smile. ‘Thanks.’ He settled cross-legged on the bed with his pile of manuscript and a pencil. Fiona watched him in the mirror for a few minutes until she was sure he was reading and not brooding. More than anything, she was glad he’d accompanied her to Toledo. The news of Drew’s death wasn’t something he should have had to face on his own.

That was something she knew all about from personal experience. And she wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy.

Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13/4599

Ufime zftmd pfapa pdqie tmzp. Yqeek ngfza ftmdp. Mrqit agdea regdr uzsft qiqnm zpuwz qiftq pqfmu xeart uepmu xkdag fuzq.

It wasn’t hard to do Drew Shand. Messy, but not hard. They don’t realize how vulnerable they are. A few hours of surfing the web and I knew the details of his daily routine.

I didn’t think it would be too difficult to pick him up. His sort are always suckers for flattery. It was just a matter of finding somewhere to see him off.

Then I found the perfect place: a boarded-up butcher’s shop. The back was tiled from floor to ceiling. There was a butcher’s block in the middle of the room and a couple of big sinks along one wall. Judging by the dust and cobwebs everywhere, nobody had been here for ages, and I didn’t think anybody would be coming through any time soon. So I decided it would be safe just to leave whatever mess I made.

The next day, I parked near his flat, where I could see him come and go. He got back from the gym right on schedule, and an hour later, he was walking back towards Broughton Street. I slipped into his wake and followed him into the Barbary Coast bar. It was already quite busy, and I could see a few blokes giving me the once-over. It made me feel sweaty and uncomfortable. After all, I didn’t want anybody remembering me afterwards.

Drew was at the bar and I moved up beside him. He’d ordered a drink and when it arrived, I held out a tenner and said, ‘This one’s on me.’ He didn’t argue. We moved over to a corner where it was darker, and I acted surprised when he said who he was. I said I thought the torture scenes in his book were brilliant. He went on about how the critics had complained that the violence was over the top, so I told him I thought it was great. Sexy, almost.

He gave me a funny look then. But he didn’t say anything, just went to the bar and got another round in. When he came back, he asked me if that was what I was into, a bit of the rough stuff. It couldn’t have gone better if I’d scripted it. Cutting a long story short, he invited me upstairs to what he called the dark room. Then I told him I had something better than that. I said I worked for a property development company, and I’d managed to get the keys to an old shop that I’d turned into a fantasy dungeon.

I couldn’t believe how easy it had been. I’d thought I might actually have had to have sex with him before I could get him to come with me, and I’d been dreading that even more than what I had planned for him. But he was a pushover. The worst bit was when we pulled up in the back lane and he leaned across and started kissing me. I pushed him away, a bit roughly but that just made him all the more keen. When I was undoing the padlock, he pressed right up against me so I could feel his cock hard against my backside. If I’d been having second thoughts, that would have seen them off sharpish.

I pulled the door open, and as he reached for the switch, I smashed my heavy metal torch down on the side of his head just above his ear. He went down like a tree.

I don’t want to think about the next bit. It wasn’t nice. It’s a lot harder to strangle somebody than it looks. Especially when you’re wearing latex gloves and your hands start sweating and slipping around inside them.

Then I had to do the cutting. That was really disgusting. Horrible. Not just the blood, but the smell. I nearly threw up. I’ve had some shitty nights, but this beat the lot of them hands down.

Once I’d done what I had to do, I zipped his jacket back up to sort of hold things in place. Then I picked him up and carried him out to the 4 × 4. I couldn’t just throw him over my shoulder or his guts would have gone everywhere.

I’d already decided where I was going to dump the body. The actual site described in Shand’s book was out of the question. It was far too exposed. It would have been asking to be caught. But then, what do you expect? One hundred per cent accuracy?

I’d settled on dumping him round the side of the cathedral. When I got there, there was nobody around, so I arranged him on the steps leading up to an office building.

I undid his jacket, and displayed him by the book. God, that nearly had me throwing up all over again. Then I took off as if I had the four horsemen of the apocalypse on my heels. Time to head back to where I was supposed to be.

I expected it to give me nightmares. But it didn’t. It’s not like I enjoyed it or anything. It was a job that had to be done, and I did it well. I take pride in that. But no pleasure.

12

The arrival of their room-service dinners forced both Fiona and Kit to surface from the salve of work. She had been entering data into her laptop and had started running various combinations through the geographic profiling software, but so mechanical a task left too much of her mind free to rerun her own memories. Trying to drown the voices in her head with alcohol was tempting. But Fiona had watched her father turn to drink, an accelerant that had plunged him into paranoid nightmares that had destroyed his life as surely as her murderer had destroyed Lesley’s. If acute liver failure had not killed him four years earlier, she suspected he’d have taken his own life sooner rather than later. So the whisky bottle was, for her, no choice.

But burying herself in work wasn’t doing the trick either. Sitting down with Kit to eat forced her to realize that Lesley’s ghost hadn’t stopped tormenting her since Kit had mentioned her name earlier. And by the looks of him, Kit was equally lost in his own thoughts. They ate their baked fish in virtual silence, neither knowing how to broach the subject that was uppermost in their minds.

Fiona finished first, pushing the remains of her meal to one side of the plate. She took a deep breath. ‘I think I might be better able to settle if I could find out more about what happened to Drew. Not because I think I can help in any practical way, but…’ She sighed. ‘I know that what always helps me is information.’

Kit looked up briefly from his plate, seeing the pain of memory in Fiona’s face. He knew that in the aftermath of her sister’s murder what had woken Fiona screaming from her sleep night after night was ignorance. She needed to know every detail of what had happened to Lesley. Against the wishes of her mother, who was adamant in her desire to possess as little information as possible about her younger daughter’s fate, Fiona had pursued all the avenues she could think of to absorb every fact relating to her sister’s terrible ordeal. She had made friends of the local reporters, she had exerted every ounce of her charm to persuade the detectives to share their information with her. And gradually, as she pieced together Lesley’s last hours, the nightmares had receded. Over the years, as she had learned more about the behaviour patterns of serial rapists and killers, that picture had become even clearer, giving texture and shape to her understanding, filling in the outlines of the transaction between Lesley and her killer.

While part of him felt this was an unhealthy obsession, Kit had to admit that knowledge did seem to have provided some sort of balm for Fiona. And as far as he was concerned, that was what mattered. Even though she couldn’t adequately explain why it helped her to have so detailed a reconstruction in her head, neither of them could deny its force. And Kit had also come to realize that as it was with her personal relationship to murder, so it was with her professional one. The more she knew, the more secure she felt. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps the best way to make sure her sleep wasn’t riven with nightmares about Lesley was to garner what she could about what had happened to Drew Shand. And it might just help him too.

‘What were you thinking about doing?’ he asked.

‘See what they’re saying on the Net,’ she said. ‘How do you feel about that?’

He shrugged then topped up his glass. ‘It can’t be worse than the movies my imagination is running for me.’

Kit gathered the dirty plates and put the trays outside the door while Fiona logged on to the Internet and connected to her favourite metasearch engine, which combed the vast virtuality of the worldwide web at her command. ‘Where can I find Drew Shand?’ she typed. Within seconds, she had the answer at her fingertips. Shand had had his own website, as well as a couple of fan sites dedicated to his work.

‘We might as well try the fan sites first,’ Kit said. ‘I don’t think Drew’s going to be updating his own site any time now.’

The first page Fiona clicked on had a black border round the publisher’s jacket photograph of the dead novelist. Beneath it were the dates of his birth and death and the atmospheric opening paragraph of Copycat.

The haar moves up from the steel-grey waters of the Firth of Forth, a solid wall of mist the colour of cumulus. It swallows the bright lights of the city’s newest playground, the designer hotels and the smart restaurants. It becomes one with the spectres of the sailors from the docks who used to blow their pay on eighty-shilling ale and whores with faces as hard as their clients’ hands. It climbs the hill to the New Town, where the geometric grid of Georgian elegance slices it into blocks before it slides down into the ditch of Princes Street Gardens. The few late revellers staggering home quicken their steps to escape its clammy grip.

Fiona shivered. ‘It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?’ Kit observed. ‘Bloody great opening paragraph. The kid really had something special. Did you read Copycat?’

‘It was one of the pile you gave me for Christmas.’

‘Oh yeah, I’d forgotten.’

Fiona grinned. ‘There were so many.’ Ever since they’d first been together, Kit had given Fiona his personal pick of the year’s crime fiction for Christmas. It was a genre she’d scarcely ever read before they’d become lovers. Now, she enjoyed keeping up with her partner’s competition, as long as it was a guided trip and not a random harvest of the crime section of the bookshops.

Scrolling down, Fiona ignored the hagiography and focused on any details of the crime. Nothing they didn’t already know. The second fan site had little more to offer, except a rumour that Shand had frequented a pub in Edinburgh where gay sadomasochistic group sex allegedly took place in an upstairs room. ‘See what I mean?’ Kit said angrily. ‘It’s starting already. The deserving-victim syndrome. You can see it now. He was murdered because he asked for it. He enjoyed the kind of sex that could turn nasty, and it killed him.’

‘It’ll get worse before it gets better,’ said Fiona. ‘Unless they pick someone up quickly and it turns out to be nothing to do with the gay scene.’

‘Yeah, right. If AIDS doesn’t get you, the bogeyman will.’

Fiona called up the menu of her favourite sites on the web and ran her cursor down the list. Kit leaned into her, reading over her shoulder.

‘I wonder how many people’s favourite places list includes the RCMP, the FBI, various serial killer sites and a forensic pathology discussion group?’ Kit asked.

‘More than is healthy, I suspect,’ Fiona muttered. Towards the bottom of the list was a site that she knew infuriated most of the law enforcement officers she knew. Officially, Murder Behind the Headlines was run jointly by a journalist in Detroit, a private eye in Vancouver who was reported to have had a murky past in the CIA, and a postgraduate in criminology in Liverpool. Given the depth of detail they managed to come up with on sensational murder cases, Fiona suspected there were a few serious hackers involved in putting together the site. Not to mention a very large base of anonymous contributors who enjoyed the prospect of sharing whatever privileged information or hearsay they encountered. Several attempts had been made to close them down on the basis that they were making public information that allowed scope both for copycat killings and for false confessions, but somehow they always seemed to resurface with ever more sophisticated graphics and gossip. Fiona sincerely hoped that the more faint-hearted relatives of the victims never logged on to Murder Behind the Headlines.

Seeing where her cursor had paused, Kit groaned. ‘Gossip central,’ he complained.

‘You’d be surprised how often they get it right,’ she said mildly.

‘Maybe so, but they always leave me feeling like I need a bath. And they can’t write for toffee.’

Fiona couldn’t resist a smile as she connected to the site. ‘Never mind the morality, feel the semicolons,’ she said ironically. When she was prompted for her area of interest, she typed, ‘Drew Shand’. In the top left-hand corner of the page that unfurled before them, the same photograph of Drew brooding handsomely into the camera appeared. This time, however, the text was very different.

Scottish thriller writer Drew Shand has been found murdered in the historic heart of the city he lived in and used as the background to his first gruesome novel, the award-winning Copycat. His mutilated body was found just behind St Giles Cathedral, only feet away from the pavements pounded daily by millions of tourists. So far, no suspects have been arrested.

MBTH hears from a source inside the investigation that there are some very spooky coincidences connecting Shand’s own death and the graphic violence he turned to good commercial effect in Copycat. The plot of his serial killer novel centres round a contemporary re-creation of the celebrated Whitechapel Murders—a sort of Jock the Ripper gorefest.

The original Jack the Ripper’s fourth victim was found by a policeman on his beat. So was Shand’s fourth victim. And so too was Shand.

The police surgeon at the time of the White-chapel Murders, Dr Frederick Brown, reported that: <The body was on its back, the head turned to the left shoulder. The arms by the side of the body as if they had fallen there. Both palms upwards, the fingers slightly bent…Left leg extended in a line with the body. The abdomen was exposed. Right leg bent at thigh and knee. The throat cut across. The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder…A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and left arm.

<The lobe and auricle of the right ear was cut right through…There was a cut…through the lower left eyelid dividing the structures completely through…The right eyelid was cut through to about half an inch.

<There was a deep cut over the bridge of the nose…This cut went into the bone and divided all the structures of the cheek except the mucous membrane of the mouth. The tip of the nose was quite detached…There was on each side of the cheek a cut which peeled up the skin, forming a triangular flap of about an inch and a half. The actual cause of death was haemorrhage from the left carotid artery.

Each of these grim facts was annexed by Shand for his novel. And according to our source, they were all present in the murder of the writer himself. Apparently one of the murder squad detectives called to the scene of the crime had read Copycat and was immediately struck by the similarities. It was only when the police surgeon itemized the injuries and the detective went back and checked both with Shand’s book and accounts of the original Ripper case that the police became convinced that they were dealing with a Copycat copycat.

Apparently the theory doing the rounds at police HQ is that Shand was into hardcore S&M sex. They reckon that made him vulnerable to a perp who had fixated on his book and wanted to try it out for real. Shand was apparently a creature of habit—his daily routine is outlined on his website for all to see. So it wouldn’t have been too hard for the hunter to track him down and, providing the killer was Shand’s type, it would all fall into place. And of course, the easy thing about killing somebody who’s into S&M is they think you’re only playing when you tie them up. Doesn’t matter that, like Shand, your victim works out down the gym every day, because he’s trussed up like a chicken all ready for you.

One other detail—the cops think he was killed somewhere else then brought to the body dump, unlike both the Whitechapel Murders and the slayings in Copycat. But Shand’s flat was clean, so they’ve no idea as yet where the murder actually took place. One thing they can be pretty sure of, though—somebody’s got a helluva cleaning job on his hands.

REMEMBER YOU READ IT FIRST ON
MURDER BEHIND THE HEADLINES

Kit whistled softly. ‘That is seriously creepy shit.’

Fiona logged off. ‘You’re not kidding.’

‘So what’s your take on it?’

‘Probably much the same as yours,’ Fiona said. ‘He clearly planned his crime to mirror the circumstances of one of the murders in Shand’s book. Which in turn mirrors one of the original Ripper murders, apart from the gender of the victim. That he’s succeeded so accurately indicates a high degree of control and organization. His intelligence therefore is likely to be significantly above average. He has a highly developed fantasy life and would probably use violent pornography to support that. He would be unlikely to respond well to authority, so if he had a job it wouldn’t be commensurate with his intelligence, which in turn would be a source of irritation to him.’ She pulled a face. ‘But saying that is simply a matter of playing the probabilities.’

‘But what about his relationship to Drew? Is he a stalker, a jilted lover, or some sort of fucked-up wannabe acolyte? What do you think?’

She dropped into one of the chairs by the window and stared out at the city. When her answer came, she spoke slowly, feeling her way from sentence to sentence. ‘That is without doubt the most interesting question, Kit.’ She gave him a quick smile. ‘Hardly surprising that it was you who asked it. That the murderer fixated on the book and copied its crimes isn’t particularly remarkable. Often killers who display their victims’ bodies ritualistically are replicating images they’ve seen in pornography or in some situation that was particularly meaningful to them. But most sexually motivated killers would be satisfied with wreaking their havoc on any victim who broadly fitted their fantasy. To have chosen to hunt and destroy the creator of the very fiction that fuelled his desire to kill is curiously personal. And in a crime where depersonalizing the victim is often crucial to the process, it’s distinctly unusual.’

Kit ran his hands over his scalp, his face a mixture of amusement and exasperation. ‘It’s always got to be a lecture with you, hasn’t it? You still didn’t answer the question.’

Fiona grinned. ‘I sort of hoped you hadn’t noticed. If you pushed me on it, I’d probably plump for a stalker who has become obsessed with Copycat. But that’s purely speculation.’

‘So is Murder Behind the Headlines, but it doesn’t stop you reading that,’ Kit pointed out. He got up and wandered round the room. ‘It’s a bit freaky, isn’t it? The thought of somebody following Drew around like a shadow, invisible till the last moment when he shows himself. You never think of anything like that when you’re writing. That some nutter is going to read their life story into your words.’

‘You’d probably never write another book if you give that possibility space in your head,’ Fiona said. ‘Other people’s madness is not your responsibility. Come here, give me a hug.’

He crossed to her and gently pulled her to her feet, wrapping his arms around her. She turned her face up to his. ‘There are other ways of taking your mind off things, Kit,’ she said softly as his lips came down to meet hers.

Inside the city walls of Toledo, the evening paseo was in full swing. Around the Plaza de Zocodover, people strolled in couples, families and groups, taking the evening air and catching up on the business of the day as they moved between pools of yellow light. Restaurants, many half-empty now the height of the tourist season was past, served dinner to tourists and locals, greeting their regular customers with smiles and the small change of social intercourse. The bars were doing a thriving trade, their tables full inside and out as older clients enjoyed a digestif with their coffee and the young men checked out the women gossiping and giggling in their separate groups. It was a sharp contrast to the dimly lit alleys and narrow streets that radiated out from the plaza, linking it with the rest of the city.

In one of the cafés on the edge of the square, Miguel Delgado smiled across at the Englishwoman who worked behind the reservation desk at the Hotel Alfonso VI. Two nights before, he’d engineered an encounter where he’d tripped over her handbag and knocked over her drink. She’d been with friends, so she’d suspected no ulterior motive when he bought her a drink to replace the one he’d spilled. Tonight, though, her friends were absent. For the price of another drink, he could make the down payment on his next act of revenge.

He swallowed the last of his café solo and folded up his newspaper. Careful not to draw attention to himself, he crossed to her table, inclined his head in a small bow and smiled. ‘Buenas tardes,’ he said.

The woman returned his smile, without a trace of uncertainty. Minutes later, they were deep in conversation. Delgado was back in business.

13

…On a professional note, I heard last night that Blake has done a deal with one of the Sunday tabloids. You know the kind of thing—my life of hell as the falsely accused Hampstead Heath killer. And on the strength of that, he’s gone off to Spain, allegedly to get away from all the pressure. Of course, we’ve been keeping tabs on him, albeit at arms’ length, and according to the travel agent, Blake has rented a villa outside Fuengirola for the next month. At least you’re far enough away in Toledo not to stand any chance of walking into a neighbourhood café and finding him propping up the bar. Let me know when you’re coming back and we’ll get together for dinner.

Love

Steve

Fiona cleared Steve’s e-mail from the screen. She’d get round to replying later. It was thoughtful of him to pass on the news about Drew, but she didn’t want to be distracted from the task in hand by thinking about Francis Blake right now. While she waited for Berrocal to arrive, she double-checked that she had plotted her crime scenes correctly on the map. Just as she finished, Berrocal strode through the door, full of apologies for keeping her waiting. ‘So, what do you have to show me?’

The map of Toledo was monochrome on the screen, the streets and alleys black lines over the off-grey background. ‘This is how it works,’ Fiona explained. ‘I started off with the street grid. Last night I entered the locations of the events that interest me.’ She omitted to mention the news from England that had stirred memories, turning her sleep into exhausting restlessness. She wasn’t looking for Berrocal’s sympathy, nor, more importantly, did she want to give ammunition to anyone who might suggest her work failed to come up to the required standard. So she mainlined the cartons of industrial-strength coffee that the junior detectives had deposited on her desk and tried to keep the weariness out of her voice. ‘First of all, the vandalism cluster.’

She tapped a couple of keys and the screen came alive in an irregular spread of radiant neon colours, from sea-green, grading through blues and purples to red. There were only two small blocks of red, both to the west of the cathedral and the Plaza Mayor. ‘The program assigns different colours to different degrees of probability. The perpetrator of the acts of vandalism I’ve identified as a cluster is most likely to live within the boundaries of those red blocks,’ she told him, pointing to them with her pencil.

‘Very interesting,’ Berrocal said softly.

‘Don’t ask me how it works. The maths is way beyond me. I leave that to the techies. All I know is that it does have a frighteningly high degree of accuracy.’ She cleared the colours from the screen. ‘Now, this is the picture we get from the muggings.’ Again, the screen pulsed with vibrant colours. This time, there were three red blocks. One of them appeared almost identical to the larger of the two on the previous display, while the other two were more northerly.

‘I think the reason for these two is that the location of the crimes was circumscribed by where our mugger knew there were likely to be late-night victims,’ she continued, pointing to the aberrant blocks of crimson. ‘But look what happens when I amalgamate both sets of results and we look at the vandalism and the mugging together.’

Fiona clicked the mouse a couple of times. Now the larger of the original two red blocks was the only bright-scarlet patch on the screen, the others fading to deep purple. ‘If I were a Toledo police officer looking to clear up these instances of vandalism and mugging, I’d focus my attention on people who live right there, around the bottom end of Calle Alfonso the Tenth.’

‘Fascinating,’ Berrocal acknowledged. ‘But what happens when you consider the murders too?’

‘It’s far from clear-cut,’ she admitted. ‘We’re looking at two instances, which is a very small base to work with. And, as I said to you before, because these crime scenes have historical rather than specifically personal significance, that could distort our results.’ Again she cleared the screen. ‘On their own, they don’t provide us with anything like pinpoint accuracy.’ This time, there was no small red block, just a jagged purple mass that covered most of the west of the old city and spread like a port-wine birthmark out towards the suburbs.

‘However, I’m working on the principle that my theories of crime linkage and the escalation of violence are correct. Now, if I’ve got it right and these three groups of crimes have all been committed by the same person, then when I add the murder sites to the other two series, I should still have my red block in more or less the same place. But if I’m wrong, then the resulting picture will show a significant distortion.’ She looked up at Berrocal and gave a wicked grin. ‘Ready?’

‘The suspense is killing me,’ he said.

Fiona hit a couple of keys and the screen reconfigured itself. The red block was still there, though not in quite such a strong shade. But the purple areas had spread and become noticeably more blue. Fiona circled the red block with the end of her pencil. ‘It doesn’t significantly distort the key area. Which indicates that the person who committed the murders could well be the same person as the vandal and the mugger. But you see this purple zone?’

Berrocal nodded. ‘That’s the fallback zone, is it? If he’s not in the red zone, he might be in the purple?’

‘That’s right. Now, the way that has changed with the murder input may not mean much in itself, given how specific he is about the body dumps and given that the places where he displays his victims are central to the nature of his crimes. But I’m tempted to go out on a limb here and suggest that he might possibly have moved house in between the muggings and the first murder.’

Berrocal frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘It doesn’t matter how high-tech a system is, there’s still room for gut instinct when it comes to interpretation. I’d defend myself by saying that I’ve used this geographic profiler a lot now, and I’ve developed a sense of what the pictures mean that goes beyond what’s in the manual. And there’s something about the shape of this that makes me wonder if we’re looking at a change of address. I’m sorry, I can’t be more scientific than that.’

‘So what we have learned is useless.’

‘No, far from it. If he has moved, it’s been relatively recent. Between the last of the muggings and the first of the murders. There must be civic records that would reveal who lives there and if anybody’s gone in the last couple of months. I could be wrong, he could still be living there. But if I was the investigating officer here, I’d make it my first priority to look at residents inside the red block who have moved out.’

‘You think he moved to make it harder for us to find him?’ Berrocal asked.

‘No, I don’t think he was planning that far ahead. And he may not have left his home from choice. He may have been forced out because the building was being developed for some tourist-related business. He’ll have seen this as a terrible provocation. If that’s what happened, it could have been the factor that tipped him over the edge into murder. He’s been nursing his hatred for a while now, judging by the length of time these earlier offences cover. Perhaps this tourist development has been on the cards for a long time and he’d been fighting it. Then finally, he lost. And he decided to take revenge on the people he thought were to blame.’ Fiona leaned back in her seat. ‘I know it might sound far-fetched, but as psychopathic motives for murder go, it’s as coherent as any. And it makes sense of these events in a way that conventional theories of sexual homicide don’t.’

‘The way you explain it is certainly logical,’ Berrocal acknowledged. ‘Can you print these maps out for us? I’d like to get started on this line of inquiry as soon as possible.’

Fiona nodded. ‘No problem. I’m also in the process of writing a full report for you that incorporates all my reasoning. I’ll include a basic behavioural profile of the perpetrator.’

Berrocal frowned. ‘I thought you didn’t approve of behavioural analysis?’

‘Taken on its own, I think it has limited value. But when you incorporate it with crime linkage and geographical profiling, it can be helpful.’

Berrocal looked dubious. ‘So, when will your report be ready?’

‘I should finish it today.’

‘Good. Then I can distribute it among the investigation team. First thing tomorrow, I’d like you to attend a briefing with them to answer any questions and deal with any objections?’

Fiona nodded. ‘I’d be happy to.’

Berrocal got to his feet. ‘And then I presume you will want to return to England?’

Fiona smiled. ‘You presume correctly. There’s nothing more I can usefully do for you right now, so I may as well go home.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll let you get on with your report,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she said absently, her mind already on the next task. The sooner she finished this, the sooner she could start to think seriously about going home.

II

He never knew how long it would last. That was why he had to savor every moment of it, like a kid opening Christmas presents, unsure which garishly wrapped parcel held the gift that really mattered. The trick was to arrange it so that everything built to a climax. But sometimes it didn’t, and he hated that loss of absolute control, hated the rage that boiled through him when those sluts let him down, when they failed to hold out long enough for him to extract each single possible drop of pleasure from their pain. Death should be the final moment in the crescendo, not a sad diminuendo leaving the spirit dissatisfied.

That was why he worked with such dedication towards perfection. Experience had taught him that every stage released its own particular flavor, from the first moment he chose her to the final moment when he abandoned her. The secret was to plan. The taste of anticipation was almost as good as the spectrum of sensuality supplied by the execution of his perfect scheme. So too was the satisfaction of watching the small minds pitted against him as they struggled through their skirmishes with his handiwork into ultimate failure.

At first, his opponents had been as insignificant as the crickets that chirped the night away outside this safest of safe houses. Dumb sheriff’s officers who’d never investigated anything more complicated than a fucked-up raid on the local Seven Eleven had no chance of coming anywhere near him. He knew the chances of them even managing to complete a VICAP report and file it with the FBI were remote. All that paperwork, interfering with the consumption of Dairy Queen hamburgers and brewskis—no chance.

So puny a challenge couldn’t last forever. He’d known that. He’d bargained on that. He’d set himself up right from the start to beat the finest, so there was no real satisfaction in running rings round the morons who’d gone into small-town law enforcement because they didn’t have the stones to make something of their lives. They thought they knew their turf so well, but that hadn’t stopped him moving into their territory and stealing a woman from under their noses. His greatest triumph this far had come with number five. La Quinta was the daughter of the local sheriff in a small Nebraska town.

As usual, he’d removed her from her own home. Saturday night, and her parents had gone out to a benefit dinner for the local Republican candidate for the Senate race. The girl had opened the front door without a second thought as soon as she saw the Highway Patrol uniform. It had been laughably easy to knock her to the floor with a single blow to the face. Hog-tied, she’d spent the night in the trunk while he drove the interstate, fueled by adrenaline and nicotine.

By mid-morning, he’d been home. Surrounded by dense woodland, away from the possibility of prying eyes, he’d carried her indoors and gotten down to making her his slave. Shackled to a bench in his workroom, La Quinta had learned that pain takes many shapes and forms. The delayed sting of the razor cut. The blossoming of a burn from a smart to a roar of pain that spread inwards as the smell of barbecued flesh drifted outwards. The searing agony of flesh forced to accommodate more than it has room for. The sickening pain of a broken bone never allowed time to knit. The dull distress of a blow strategically aimed at the organs nestling beneath the skin. It took her days to die.

He’d enjoyed every waking moment.

Then he’d taken her back home. Not all the way home, of course. That would have been reckless. He drove her as far as the first bend over the county line on a quiet back road, then left her body sprawled across the blacktop for the next passing driver to crush beneath his unsuspecting wheels.

La Quinta had made them sit up and pay attention at last. He’d read enough to know what would have happened next. An urgent request to the Feebies, then a computerized search of the country to find matches. As soon as they realized he meant business, the machine would have kicked in. True to his prediction, the suits had arrived. And then, finally, she had flown in to face a flurry of cameras at the airport.

Now at last, the game was on.

Jay Schumann was in town. Dr Jay Schumann, the forensic psychologist who had turned her back on a lucrative private practice to become the FBI’s celebrity mindhunter. Jay Schumann, who had single-handedly restored the tarnished image of psychological profiling with a string of spectacular successes. Jay Schumann with those intense dark eyes that contrasted so sharply with her bright blonde hair, a photo opportunity who gave the suits a human face. Jay Schumann, whose glamor had persuaded her bosses that they should use her skills on the media as well as on the criminals.

In the twenty years since she’d so heedlessly and needlessly humiliated him on the night of the senior prom, they’d both traveled a long way from the small New England town. But he had never forgotten nor forgiven the whiplash of her scorn that had branded him and distorted his life forever.

The first five had been his apprenticeship. The next fifteen would perfect his art. One for every wasted year. And then, only then, would he allow Jay Schumann to come face to face with her personal and professional nemesis.

There was a long way to go before then. But now Jay Schumann was on the case. At last the revenge proper could begin.

14

Fiona gave a final glance at her notes then looked out across the half-empty lecture theatre. ‘To sum up. That dreadful old misogynist St Paul says, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” As do most of us.

‘But the sociopath is different. Most of us come to comprehend that we are not the centre of the universe, and that other people can share centre stage in the narrative of our lives. The sociopathic personality never makes that adjustment. In his limited world view, others exist at a less than human level. Their only valuable function is to meet the needs and satisfy the desires of the sociopath himself.’ She gave a sly grin. ‘That’s why they make such good captains of industry.’ Depressingly few answering smiles, she thought ruefully. Probably because half of them had their hearts already set on such a career. So serious, the modern student.

‘So if we are to develop any sort of empathetic understanding of the criminal psychopath,’ Fiona continued, ‘we must learn to step back in time. I leave you with this thought, also from that fascinating psychological text, the Bible. “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Or, as we so often find in our line of work, the kingdom of hell.’ She gave a brief, courteous nod. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Same time, next week.’

Head down, Fiona gathered her papers together as the students shuffled out, their muted mumblings drifting back towards her. She wondered how much she disappointed them. She was certain a significant proportion of them signed up for her courses on the Criminal Mind because their imaginations had been fired by The Silence of the Lambs. Expecting some Jodie Foster fuelled by instinct and intuition, instead they were confronted with seminars on statistics and required to produce essays driven by intellectual rigour. The dropout rate disturbed her departmental administrator, but not Fiona. She’d never been interested in woolly minds.

Some sixth sense made her look up and an unself-conscious smile spread across her face as she took in Kit’s burly frame strolling down the aisle between the ranks of seats. He returned her smile and leaned his forearms on the edge of the platform while she finished tidying her lecture notes into her briefcase. ‘Nice close,’ he said. ‘I like the image of the sociopathic killer as Peter Pan. The boy who never grew up.’

‘Now, that’s an interesting comparison. With a bit of work, I could make something of that. Captain Hook and the Lost Boys. Wendy as mother figure…Thanks, Kit, I think I’ll steal that. So, to what do I owe this pleasure?’ Fiona asked, descending to his level and brushing his cheek with a kiss.

‘I’ve been going like a train today, and I ran out of steam about an hour ago. And I remembered that there’s a launch party for Adam Chester’s new book at Crime in Store at six. I thought I’d swing by on the off-chance that you fancied joining me there.’ Kit fell into step beside her.

‘You haven’t forgotten we’re having dinner at Steve’s tonight?’ Fiona asked.

‘We’re not due there till eight. I thought we could swag a few glasses of publisher’s plonk on the way. Show my face and remind everybody that I’m still a contender. Up to you, love. If you’ve got too much on, I’ll meet you at Steve’s later.’ Kit put his arm round her waist and gave her a quick squeeze before they emerged in the atrium of the psychology faculty building.

Fiona considered for a moment. Nothing more pressing than marking essays should lie in store for her, and those could wait until morning. ‘Let me check my office, and if nothing urgent’s come up in the last hour, you’re on.’

The mystery bookshop was crowded with a mixture of authors, collectors and fans of Adam Chester’s complex and beautifully written 1950s police procedural novels. For this, the tenth in the series, his publishers had reprinted all his previous paperbacks with new jackets, the misty photographs evoking the dark and brooding ambience of the books. His editor and publicist stood proudly beside a display of the covers, flashing encouraging smiles at the potential buyers.

As soon as he walked in the door, Kit was immediately surrounded by an enthusiastic trio of women who turned up at every crime fiction event in the capital and who apparently adored him above all other writers. Fiona left him to it, edging through the crowd and helping herself to a glass of white wine. Kit was a professional; he’d give the women enough of his time to reinforce their view of him as approachable and amusing before disentangling himself and settling in for a good gossip with friends and colleagues. For herself, she was happy enough to take a back seat and watch him work the room.

‘He’s such a pro,’ an admiring voice murmured in her ear. Fiona immediately recognized the genteel Edinburgh tones of Mary Helen Margolyes and turned to greet her with a kiss.

‘Mary Helen, what a delightful surprise,’ she said, meaning it. In spite of hating her melodramatic Jacobite historical mysteries featuring Flora Macdonald’s younger sister, Fiona had a soft spot for Mary Helen, not least because of her acerbic tongue. ‘What drags you away from the Highlands?’

‘Oh, I had to come down to talk to some dreadful wee man at the BBC who’s making a TV series out of the Morag Macdonald books.’

‘But that’s good news, isn’t it?’

Mary Helen’s face puckered as if she’d bitten a sour apple. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew who they’ve cast as Morag.’

‘Tell me the worst.’ Fiona had spent enough time around writers to know exactly what was required.

‘Rachel Trilling.’ Mary Helen’s voice was fat with disapproval.

‘Isn’t she…?’ Fiona struggled to make sense of the name. ‘She’s the lead singer with Dead Souls, isn’t she?’

Mary Helen’s eyebrows rose. ‘My God!’ she exclaimed. ‘At last I’ve found somebody who’s heard of her. But then, what can you expect from a producer who thinks a white cockade is a tropical bird?’

‘Oh, Mary Helen, I am sorry,’ Fiona said.

‘I’ll just have to follow Kit’s perennial advice and take the money and crawl,’ Mary Helen said with a grim little smile.

‘Apart from that, how’s life treating you?’

‘It would be infinitely better if you’d pass me another glass of wine,’ Mary Helen said. Fiona obliged, but before they could say more, the shop manager began his introduction to Adam Chester. Adam spoke briefly and wittily about his new book, then read a fifteen-minute extract. A few questions from the floor followed, then it was time for the signing.

As the purchasers formed a queue by Adam’s chair, Kit glanced across the room. ‘Uh-oh,’ he said to Nigel Southern, the twenty-something writer of comic noir short stories he’d been talking to. ‘I better go and rescue Fiona from the clutches of Mad Mary Helen.’

Nigel raised his perfectly groomed eyebrows. ‘I’d have thought your lady was more than a match for the Highland Harpie. What’s it like, anyway, living with somebody who spends her days poking around the perverted fantasies of psychopaths?’

‘Funnily enough, we don’t talk about it that much. We’ve got a life,’ Kit said. ‘Anyway, that’s not what she does. She uses computer analysis, not psychoanalysis.’

Nigel shook his head pityingly. ‘I couldn’t be doing with that. I mean, it must be like living with the control freaks’ control freak. Isn’t she always telling you you’ve got it wrong?’

Kit gave him a good-humoured punch on the shoulder. ‘You haven’t got a fucking clue how the grown-ups live, have you? Listen, Nigel, if you are ever lucky enough to meet a woman with half the brains, the wit and the looks of Fiona, do yourself a favour. Go on a training course before you ask her out.’ Without waiting for a reply, Kit squeezed through the crowd and enveloped Mary Helen in a bear hug. ‘How’s the queen of the glens?’ he demanded, landing a resounding kiss on her cheek.

‘All the better for seeing you and Fiona. If I’m honest, the main reason I came to this do tonight was in the hope of seeing a few cheerful faces. This business with Drew Shand has cast a terrible pall over the Scottish crime-writing community. We’ve all been phoning each other every day for the last two weeks, making sure we’re still alive.’

‘You’re such a drama queen, Mary Helen,’ Kit teased her.

‘I’m serious, Kit,’ Mary Helen protested. ‘It came as a terrible shock to all of us.’

‘But surely there’s no threat to any of the rest of you?’ Fiona asked. ‘I thought the police were pretty much convinced he’d been killed by somebody he picked up that night in the gay bar, what’s it called?’

‘The Barbary Coast,’ Kit supplied. ‘So unless you’ve got a secret life in sadomasochistic society that we know nothing about, the chances are you’re safe,’ he continued, putting a reassuring arm round Mary Helen’s shoulders.

‘Would that I could lay claim to anything so exciting,’ Mary Helen said dryly. ‘But it’s not that straightforward, is it? I mean, Drew was killed in the precise manner in which he’d murdered one of his fictional victims. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that whoever killed him had some sort of morbid fascination with the genre. You know about these things, Fiona. Wouldn’t you agree with me?’

Put on the spot by Mary Helen’s sharp blue stare, Fiona shrugged. ‘Hard to say. I know no more about the case than anybody else who’s read the papers and surfed the Net.’

‘You must have some sort of theory,’ Mary Helen pressed her. ‘After all, this is your field. Come on, don’t be shy, you’re among friends here.’