Killing the Shadows

by Val McDermid

  “Scumbag tabloids. Makes you sick,” Kit commented.

  Fiona sighed. “He’s technically an innocent man. There’s nothing to stop them paying him.”

  “He’s not innocent if he watched Susan Blanchard get killed and said nothing,” Kit protested.

  “We don’t know that, though. It’s only my theory,” she reminded him.

  Seeing she’d pushed her plate away, Steve took out a cigar and lit up. “I did take my own advice about a second trawl through the eyewitnesses, however.”

  “Any joy?” Fiona asked.

  “Well, it’s early days yet, but there might be something. I read through the original statements again, and I noticed that one person mentioned seeing a cyclist coming from that general direction. She was walking her dog, and she remembered this cyclist because he was going much faster than people on bikes generally do on the Heath. We didn’t follow it up at the time because Blake emerged as such a strong suspect so soon.”

  Fiona frowned. “You know, I remember making a note of that when I was on the case officially. I think I might even have mentioned it in my preliminary report,” she said thoughtfully.

  “So have you interviewed her again?” Kit asked.

  “I went to see her personally,” Steve admitted. He held his hands up as if to stem a protest from Fiona. “I know it’s pathetic, a detective of my rank going out and taking witness statements, and I know I should be able to delegate, but if we screw up again and I’m left carrying the can, at least this time it’ll be my can.”

  “What did she have to say?” Fiona asked.

  “She didn’t have a lot to add. Her walk had already taken her past the shrubbery where the murder took place, and she’s still racked with guilt because she was wearing a Walkman. She’s convinced that if she hadn’t been listening to the Mozart Requiem, she’d have heard something and been able to raise the alarm. Anyway, about ten minutes later, a bike came up behind her and raced past. She took notice partly because cycling isn’t really permitted on that part of the Heath at that time of the day, although some people ignore the rules. But mostly she remembered him because of his speed. He was going like the clappers, she said.”

  Fiona sighed. “Not much chance of a decent description, then.”

  Steve shook his head. “I’m afraid not. She only saw him from behind and she doesn’t know anything about bikes so we don’t know whether it was a racing bike or a mountain bike. She remembers he was wearing a helmet and proper lycra cycling gear. Black trousers, she thinks, and a dark top. Maybe purple or dark-blue or even maroon.”

  “Like that narrows it down,” Kit said.

  “However…” Steve held up one finger and smiled. “She has agreed to be hypnotized to see if there’s anything else lurking in her subconscious about this cyclist. And, when we reinterviewed the other witnesses who came forward and asked specifically if they’d seen anyone cycling that morning, we got one other hit. A nanny was sitting on a bench at the bottom of the hill when he went past her. She said he was going so fast she thought he wouldn’t be able to make it round the bend, but he cleared it and headed for the exit on to Heath Road.”

  “How come you didn’t pick that up first time round?” Kit asked, never reluctant to put Steve on the spot in spite of their friendship.

  Steve looked embarrassed. “She’s Filipino. Her English is pretty good, but it isn’t her first language. When we spoke to her before, we didn’t have an interpreter. The DC who did the preliminary interview decided she had nothing useful to tell us, so he didn’t bother setting up a second interview with an interpreter. This time, we did it properly.”

  “And did you get some useful product?” Fiona asked.

  Steve took a long pull from his bottle of beer and nodded. “Sort of. She reckons he was wearing goggles and a helmet and a dark outfit. She thought it was a mountain bike. She reckoned it looked like the one her employer has. We’ve identified the make and model, though of course she might be wrong about that.”

  “That’s pretty good recollection after all this time,” Fiona said thoughtfully. “How much prompting did it take?”

  “Almost none,” Steve said with a hint of bitterness. “As soon as she was asked about a cyclist, she started nodding and got quite excited. She said she’d tried to tell the policeman who came before, but once he’d established she hadn’t seen Blake, he’d lost interest. In our defence, I have to say we didn’t get her on the first appeal for witnesses. It was about ten days or so later that she came forward. Her employers had been away the week of the murder and she was nervous about coming to the police without their permission. So by the time she made herself known to us, Blake was already our prime suspect.”

  “Not much of a defence,” Kit commented. “And you have the nerve to get pissed off when I put the occasional dozy detective in my books. So where do you go from here?”

  Steve fiddled with his cigar. “I’m tempted to bring Blake in and ask him to make a witness statement.”

  Kit snorted in derision. “I can imagine the statement you’d get from Blake. I’d lay money that it would contain the words ‘fuck’ and ‘off’.”

  Steve threw a mock-punch at Kit’s shoulder. “Don’t mince your words, Kit, tell us what you really think.”

  Ignoring them, Fiona said slowly, “You’d have to handle it very carefully. You’ve taken the public position that you’re not actively seeking anyone else in connection with this. If you pull Blake in for questioning, it would be very easy for him to shout harassment since by your own admission, the investigation is closed. If you defend yourselves by saying the inquiry is still ongoing, then you alert the real killer to the fact that you’re looking for him more actively than you ever were.”

  “But we’d have to balance that against what Blake might tell us,” Steve argued.

  “I think Kit’s right. I don’t think he’ll tell you anything useful,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s got too much to lose if he really did witness the murder.” She counted off the points on her fingers. “One, he risks prosecution for obstruction of justice for not revealing what he has known all along. Two, he loses the edge he might have if he knows the killer’s identity and wants to blackmail him. Three, he loses the power of his secret fantasy. And four, he loses the public protestation of innocence that’s already earned him a lot of money from the newspapers and will net him much more in compensation from the Home Office.”

  “So if it was up to you, you’d leave him alone,” Steve said baldly.

  Fiona raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t say that. I just said I wouldn’t question him about the murder.”

  Steve smiled. “On the other hand, if the traffic division know that when he drives through King’s Cross at thirty-one miles an hour, they should check he hasn’t been drinking…”

  Kit shook his head, pretending sorrow. “That would be harassment,” he observed.

  “Only if we’re clumsy about it. And I intend to keep tabs on him when he does come home.”

  Fiona gave a nod of approval. “It’s an outside chance, but he still might lead you straight to a killer.”

  Steve’s face was grim. “I’ve seen slimmer chances pay off. Believe me, if Francis Blake has anything to hide, I’m going to find out what it is.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Steve replaced the handset of the phone and made a note on his pad. He’d spoken to the Garda officer running the inquiry into Jane Elias’s murder earlier in the day, and he’d hung on to wait and see if the man would get back to him. The guard had promised a response as soon as possible, but had pointed out that Elias’s office alone contained hundreds of letters and thousands of sheets of paper. However, he’d already had a team working on it, and he’d eventually called to pass on the information that so far, no letter resembling those received by Kit or Georgia or their colleagues had been found among Jane Elias’s papers.

  It wasn’t conclusive, of course. She could have thrown it straight in the bin or burned it on the
open fire in her drawing room. But no letter had been found with the body nor had the Garda had any written communication from a purported killer. There was nothing to indicate any connection between the letter-writer and Jane Elias’s murderer. Steve was glad he had good news for someone; he wished someone had the same for him.

  He yawned and stretched his arms out so wide his shoulders cracked. He was far from the only officer still at his desk in New Scotland Yard at nine in the evening. Most of those remaining not actually on night shift, however, were well below the rank of detective superintendent. But then, he reminded himself with regret unmixed with self-pity, most of them had families to go home to. He’d accepted long ago that he would probably never reach that happy position. The ferocity of his undeclared because he knew it to be un reciprocated love for Fiona Cameron had put him involuntarily out of the running in the crucial years of his twenties when all his friends had been settling down first time around.

  He’d sublimated his unrequited passion in his work and when one day he had realized that the strong bond of friendship that locked him to Fiona was, after all, enough, he had understood that he had arranged his life in such a way that he would never again have time, energy or opportunity to form the sort of relationship that would satisfy him. But lately, he had begun to wonder.

  So many of those friends who had become established couples a dozen or more years ago were single again. Few of them seemed to remain that way for too long. Maybe at thirty-eight, it wasn’t too late. Perhaps the time had come when he could plug into a network of single life again. Certainly, if Francis Blake persisted in his declared intent to sue the Home Office, it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that a high-profile scapegoat would have to be found. The debacle of the sting could still mean that he’d end up with lots more time on his hands. He knew if his bosses decided he should be the one to shoulder the blame publicly, he risked at the very least being sidelined, shunted into areas where his public profile would be nonexistent, the professional challenges minimal. Without a demanding job, he would have time to fill. Time not to kill, but to grow.

  On the other hand, he might yet find the key to unlock the mystery of Susan Blanchard’s killer. And while the idea of life with a partner, life perhaps even with children, was a haunting dream, the satisfaction of a job well done was something he craved more actively because he had experienced its intoxication so many times, he knew it could be a reality again and he never grew tired of it.

  With a sigh, Steve closed the file on Francis Blake. He’d reread it a dozen times over the previous week, but he had no niggling sense of having missed something, no gut intuition that told him where the next lead might lie. He wished Fiona’s advice hadn’t chimed with his own instincts about how Blake would react. At least pushing a suntanned and contemptuous Francis Blake for a witness statement would give him something to attack. But he knew she was right. The only reason he wanted to talk to Blake was the desire to make a man he despised uncomfortable.

  Thinking of Fiona in the context of this case set anger burning slow inside him. If only they’d been able to continue working together, he wouldn’t be in this mess now. The thought stirred a buried memory. Steve jumped to his feet and crossed to his filing cabinet. Right at the very beginning of the case, Fiona had drafted a bare-bones profile with some suggested avenues of inquiry. In the general chaos that had supervened, Steve had entirely forgotten about its existence until she had mentioned it in passing the previous evening when they’d been talking about the cyclist.

  His fingers flurried through the folders as he tried to remember where he’d put it. On the second pass, he found what he was looking for. ‘FC prelim’ was scrawled in black marker pen on the top right-hand corner of a pale manila file. Steve smiled and pulled it out. It was painfully slender, which was why he’d missed it the first time. He flicked it open and started to read Fiona’s precise and familiar prose. As usual, she had not identified the case by name, not entirely trusting the security of her university computer. Case SP⁄35⁄FC The victim and the crime scene were both categorizable as low risk. She was a ‘respectable’ married woman, accompanied by her twin children, with no evidence of criminal involvement by anyone in her immediate circle. The crime scene is a public place, reasonably populated by passers-by with little to divert their attention from what is going on in their immediate vicinity. The crime took place in broad daylight, yards from a well-used thoroughfare. Hampstead Heath is generally regarded as one of the safer park spaces by day in the capital, relatively well-policed and lacking a reputation for either serious assaults or drug-related activities. This means conversely that the perpetrator took a high level of risk to carry out his crime. This indicates either a relatively high level of maturity and sophistication or a reckless disregard for the consequences of his action. If however we examine the nature of the crime itself, it is clear that this was not an opportunistic attack born of spur-of-the-moment rashness. The weapon used in the crime a long-bladed knife must have been brought by the perpetrator to the scene; the attack took place in one of the few easily accessible yet largely invisible areas of the Heath, indicating a degree of premeditation; and it is possible, given witness statement J276⁄98⁄STP, that he came equipped with the means of his escape, viz a bicycle. I would therefore incline to the view that we are looking for a man who has a high degree of confidence in his abilities. Such criminal maturity comes only with experience. While he may not have killed before, there is a high probability that he has previously committed serious sexual attacks. If he has a criminal record, the likelihood is that it will have begun with incidences of voyeurism and possibly flashing, escalating through minor sexual assault to rape. However, it is entirely possible that he has avoided establishing an arrest and conviction record. I would therefore recommend a thorough trawl of both solved and unsolved rapes and serious sexual assaults over the last five years in an attempt to establish crime linkage and develop a suspect. The key factors to look for are:

  Offences that have occurred out of doors research indicates that rapists tend either to commit their offences indoors or in the open, seldom mixing the two.

  Most rapists tend to offend against members of the same ethnic group, although this is not invariable. Since the victim here is white and blonde, the chances are high that his previous victims share similar characteristics.

  He was not disconcerted by the presence of small children. It may even be that this provides an element of his satisfaction. Therefore any incidents which include the element of child witnesses and which fit the above patterns are even more likely to be among his previous crimes.

  Offences where the perpetrator has made his escape on a bicycle. If this has worked well for him in the past, he is more likely to have repeated it.

  Offences where the offender has used or has threatened to use a knife. It is clear that he must have brought the knife to the Heath with him, so it is likely that it forms part of his previous activities. With the results of such a trawl, it may be possible to establish escalation through crime linkage and thus to develop a geographical profile that could lead to the identification of a valid suspect.

  As always, he thought, Fiona was succinct and to the point. And, as she had generously failed to remind him the previous evening, she had picked up on the possible significance of the bicycle straightaway. At the end of the formal report, she had attached a Post-it note in her small, neat writing. I know, it read, that you have a couple of witnesses describing a running man near the scene of the crime. I don’t think this is your killer. Whoever committed this murder was together enough to make his escape in a much less attention-grabbing way. If I had to stick my neck out, I’d say the mysterious cyclist who hasn’t, as far as I can see from the statements, come forward to admit being on the Heath at the crucial time is a far more likely suspect.

  Let’s talk soon. F.

  Although the case of Susan Blanchard’s murder was officially closed, Steve had managed to shame his boss into a
llowing him a small staff to continue the inquiry that none of them would publicly admit to until and unless it produced a culprit who could credibly replace Francis Blake in the eyes of the public as well as the Crown Prosecution Service. He had one detective sergeant and two detective constables assigned full-time under his command, as well as a pool of goodwill among most of the officers who had worked with him on the original inquiry.

  Mentally reviewing what the members of his team were doing, he decided to use DC Joanne Gibb for the records trawl. Joanne was a meticulous researcher and she was also skilled in developing relationships with officers both in other divisions and outside the Met. He’d seen her soothe and cajole hostile case officers in other forces, making them forget their resentment at having the big boots of the Met trampling over their patches. Nobody would be more dogged in tracking down cases with similar MOs to those suggested by Fiona; nobody would be better at extracting details from investigating officers.

  Steve carefully copied out the parameters Fiona had laid down and left a note for Joanne to start on the job first thing in the morning. He stretched luxuriously, both relieved and energized by having put something positive in train. Tonight, he might actually sleep properly, instead of the ragged hours of tossing and turning that had been his recent lot.

  He unfolded his long lean body from the chair and took his jacket off the hanger depending from the hook he’d super glued to the side of the filing cabinet immediately behind his desk. Functional, not aesthetic, like so much of his life, as Fiona had pointed out more than once from the earliest days of their friendship. Perhaps if he’d had Kit’s style, things might have worked out otherwise, he mused as he patted his pocket to check he had his keys. Pointless to speculate, he decided. To have had Kit’s style, he would have had to be a different man. And a different man might not have reaped the rewards of a constant friendship with Fiona as he had done.