by Val McDermid
Back at the Yard, Steve summoned Joanne into his office. Neil was busy watching Francis Blake, and John was off duty, so his resources were minimal, in spite of the new possibilities that Terry’s study had produced.
Steve tossed the maps across the table to her, unable to keep his exultation off his face. “Looks like we’re on the way to somewhere at last. Geographic profile of your rapes. When the Susan Blanchard murder was factored into the analysis, the central red area didn’t change at all.”
Joanne looked up, the excitement sparkling in her eyes. “That’s brilliant. Wow! So, what do you want me to do?”
“I’m afraid it’s time for drudgery. Identify the streets outlined in red — and one street either side, for the sake of my peace of mind and get the electoral roll.”
Joanne sighed. “And go through the electoral roll checking it against CROs?”
“Unless you can think of a better way of doing it.”
“When I rule the world, they’ll organize the criminal records database so you can search it with any one of a dozen parameters,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m on it.”
“Thanks, Joanne. Oh, and thanks for the restaurant tip.”
She raised her eyebrows. “I hope you enjoy it.”
Steve grinned. “I fully intend to.”
Joanne turned on her way out of the door. “If you get there, of course. I mean, if I get lucky, we could all be checking out a new number one suspect this evening. Right, sir?”
“Get lucky, Jo. But try not to get lucky before tomorrow morning if you want to remain my favourite DC.”
After she left, Steve stared at the closed door, feeling the buzz in his veins that came from the knowledge that at last they might be only hours from a lucky break. Thinking of lucky breaks reminded him that there had been a message on his desk asking him to ring Sarah Duvall.
Part of him dreaded the call. If Georgia Lester had been found dead, he wanted to put off the knowledge and its implications for as long as possible. On the other hand, it was feasible that she’d turned up alive. Steve reached out and punched in Sarah’s number. Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13⁄4599 Azoqf tqkru zpsqa dsumx qefqd edqym uzeyk xurqe sauzs fasqf mxaft mdpqd. Ftqkx xtmhq faefm dfeqq uzsft qbmff qdzft qzuze bufqa rftqp gynet ufbmp pke.
Once they find Georgia tester’s remains, my life’s going to get a lot harder. They’ll have to start seeing the pattern then. But it’ll take them a day or two to go official with it. They won’t want to admit what’s going on because that’ll cause a panic. So I need to hit my next target fast, while he’s unsuspecting. But I’ve got to be careful not to rush things. Patience, that’s the secret. Never snatch at half a chance. Never lose your cool. Just sit it out. Even when the waiting’s hard and bitter. Take the courier’s uniform. I knew right from the beginning what I needed to get Kit Martin. But I had no idea how I was going to lay my hands on it. Then the gods smiled. I was in the launderette one evening, watching my clothes tumble around in the washer. There was only one other man there, and when he dragged out his damp clothes and stuffed them in the drier, I couldn’t miss the logo of Capital City Couriers blazing across the dark-blue drill jacket. And there were matching trousers. Pure manna from heaven. After he dropped some tokens in the slot, he looked at his watch and headed across the road to the local boozer. I waited a few minutes, and then loaded the courier’s entire wash into my holdall. Piece of piss. I sat and waited for my wash to finish, cool as a cucumber. Ten minutes later, I was walking back to my flat with my wet laundry on top of his. The trousers needed taking up, and the jacket’s a bit tight on the shoulders, but that really doesn’t matter. It’s not like I’ll be wearing it for long. Just long enough to convince Kit Martin to open his front door to Postman Pat.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Fiona looked at the clock on her office wall. Breakfast that morning had been tense, in spite of both their efforts to maintain something like normal life in the face of the fear that flickered below the surface. She had extracted an assurance from Kit that he wouldn’t open the door to strangers, nor would he go out alone, not even for his usual lunchtime walk on the Heath. She could see he was already chafing under these restrictions, but at least he could salvage his pride by telling himself he was doing it to mollify Fiona rather than out of cowardice.
The worst part of it was the not knowing what was going on. She almost wished she had been able to be sanguine about Steve’s refusal to offer Kit any formal protection. At least then they’d be in communication and she would be aware of how the investigation was progressing. But she couldn’t bring herself to forgive his failure to stick his neck out for the sake of friendship. So she would somehow have to deal with her unaccustomed ignorance.
She glanced at the clock again. This was pointless. She was achieving nothing sitting here. The paper she was supposed to be revising before submitting it for publication stared accusingly at her from the computer screen, as neglected as a piece of waste ground In her heart, Fiona knew she couldn’t concentrate in the office. If she took the paper home, she could at least hope to get the work done there. Nothing would happen to Kit while they were in the house together.
The decision made, Fiona was taking her jacket off its peg when her phone rang. She resisted the temptation to ignore it and crossed the office to pick it up on the fourth ring. “Hello, Fiona Cameron,” she said.
“Dr. Cameron? This is Victoria Green from the Mail. I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes?”
“I don’t think so.”
“If I could just explain what it’s about?” The journalist’s voice was warm and ingratiating.
“There’s no point, because I’m not interested. If you bother to look at your cuttings library, you’ll see I don’t do interviews.”
“It’s not an interview we want,” Green said quickly. “We’d like you to write an article for us. I know you write articles, I’ve read you in Applied Psychology Journal.”
“You read APJ?” Fiona said, her surprise holding her back from putting the phone down.
“I have a degree in psychology. I’ve read your work on crime linkage. That’s how I knew you were the best person to talk to about writing an article for us.”
“I don’t think so,” Fiona reiterated.
“You see,” Green continued undaunted, “I’ve got a theory that Drew Shand and Jane Elias were murdered by the same person. And I think Georgia Lester might be the next victim. I’d like you to apply your crime linkage work to these cases to see if I’m right.”
Fiona replaced the receiver without responding. The word was out. It wouldn’t be long before others jumped on Victoria Green’s bandwagon. If she’d had any doubts about going home to Kit, they had ended with the phone call.
The man with the face like a chicken shrugged. “Meat’s meat, innit? Once it’s skinned and off the bone, your human flesh isn’t going to look much different from a piece of beef or venison.”
Sarah Duvall sighed. “I appreciate that.”
“And it’s huge, the market. I can’t begin to count the number of fridges and chill cabinets and freezers in that place. It’s not like walking into your local butcher’s shop, you know. There’s twenty-three trading units in the East Building and another twenty-one in the West.” His dark eyes glittered and his beaky nose twitched in a sniff.
Sergeant Ron Daniels smiled benevolently at the small man. Working as officer in charge of the Smithfield Market policing team, he’d got to know Darren Green, the traders’ representative, over a period of years. He knew that behind his aggression was a reasonable man, provided he was accorded sufficient respect. “Nobody appreciates that more than me, Darren. We’ve got a big job on our hands and that’s why we’ve come to you.”
Duvall turned to the Home Office pathologist. “Professor Blackett, what’s your take on this?”
The balding, middle-aged man sitting behind her looked up from his notebook and frowned. “It is problematic, as Mr. Green points out. But o
n your suggestion, I read the relevant section of Georgia Lester’s book. And if we’re dealing with a copycat killer, then the cuts of meat he would end up with are going to vary from the standard butchery cuts in several key details.”
“It’s still just going to look like meat, though, innit.” Darren Green insisted.
Tom Blackett shook his head. “Trust me, we can spot the difference.” He flicked his pad over to a clean page and began to draw. “Human beings are bipeds, not quadrupeds. Our shoulders and our upper leg muscles are very different from those of a cow or a deer. Particularly the leg. If you take a transverse section through the middle of the thigh, taking off the head of the femur, which is far too obvious to leave in place…” He pointed to the rough sketch he’d made. Darren Green leaned over and looked suspiciously at it. “You’ve got the rounded outline of the shaft of the femur here. In front of it, you’ve got the anterior group of muscles, the rectus fe moris and the vasti. Behind it you’ve got the posterior group, the adduct or magnus and the hamstrings. And here, on the inside, you’ve got the medial group of muscles, which is where most of the blood vessels and nerves are also situated. The chances are you’re also going to have a lot more fat than on the average animal carcass.”
Green’s face broke into a smile as understanding dawned. “Right,” he said. “That arrangement of meat, it’s nothing like what you’d get on a leg of beef or venison.”
“And of course, a joint of human beef is going to be a lot smaller than the corresponding cut from a cow or a deer,” Blackett continued. “Which is something any butcher would recognize at once, I presume?”
“I dare say,” Green said cautiously. “But even if a group of us do help you out with this search, it’s still going to take forever to cover the ground. We’ll never get it done and dusted before the morning’s trading begins. Don’t forget, it’s not like a shop that opens at nine o’clock. We do most of our business between four and seven in the morning.”
“If we were talking about searching the whole market, I’d have to agree with you, Mr. Green,” Duvall said. “But we do have information that will narrow the targets down considerably. We’re looking for freezers that are not in everyday use. Ones that are for more long-term storage. Probably ones that are locked up. That’s why we need the full cooperation of your members. We don’t want to have to go around breaking into their property. So what I need you to do is to contact everyone who has a unit in the market and ask them to make sure they’ll have staff on the spot tonight who can give us access to all their storage. And that they’ll be there all night if need be.”
“Bloody hell,” Green protested. “That’s a tall order.”
“If you don’t have the resources to do it, I can second some of the market police officers to you. But it has to be done,” Duvall said, her voice adamant as her face was implacable.
“They’re not going to like this,” he complained.
Daniels took over. “We’re not doing this for fun, Darren. This is a very serious matter.”
“That’s right,” Duvall said grimly. “Now, I need you and your volunteers at Snow Hill police station for nine o’clock so Professor Blackett can give you a full briefing on what you’ll be looking for, and so you can be assigned to the officers you’ll be assisting. I intend to commence operations at ten precisely. I have no desire to disrupt your night’s trading. But that depends on you and your members. I suggest you get on with it.” The smile on her lips did nothing to diminish the force of the command. With muttered complaints, Green left the others.
“What do you think, Ron? Will it work?” Duvall asked.
The big man nodded. “I think you’ll get all the cooperation you need. I’ll have a word with Darren, make sure he lets people know that the traders aren’t under any suspicion at this point.”
Duvall nodded. “You seem very confident that you can spot what we’re after, Professor,” she said.
“If I’d sounded as dubious as I feel, your Mr. Green would have been as obstructive as possible. It’s not easy to identify human flesh by sight, Chief Inspector. It’s simple enough to run tests to confirm it once we have something suspicious, but whether we find anything depends entirely on how good your killer is.” Blackett paused, then raised his eyebrows. “Always providing he exists.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Detective Constable Neil McCartney was tired. Watching Francis Blake for twelve hours a day was a killer assignment, in no small part because the man led such a bloody boring life. Sometimes he wouldn’t see hide nor hair of his target for the whole shift. At least Neil had swapped over on to days, ten till ten, which was slightly less desperate than the long nights when all Blake seemed to do was watch videos and sleep. But Neil knew this was only a brief respite. With Joanne stuck in the office bashing the computer, it wouldn’t be long before John was hassling to get the day shift again. It wasn’t unreasonable he had a wife and young kids who didn’t want to be quiet all day because daddy was sleeping.
That could have been his life, Neil thought with an edge of sourness. If he hadn’t been stupid enough to choose the wrong woman. He’d met Kim on the job. She was bouncy and vivacious, the life and soul of every party. Not the sort he’d normally have gone for, being a quiet sort of bloke, really. He’d thought the looks he got were envy. It was only a long time later that he realised they were pity. He was her alibi for her affair with one of the custody sergeants, the perfect distraction to fool the man’s wife at every police function. And the best possible alibi was marriage.
At first, his bitterness had been turned on himself. But there was no point in being sour about Kim; she was the woman she was. So his search for somewhere to put the blame had ended with the job.
He could so easily have turned into another rancorous copper, taking out his spite on those he came into contact with professionally. But the transfer he’d sought had taken him into plain clothes and on to Steve Preston’s team. And that had saved him. It had reminded him of why he’d joined the police in the first place. Putting villains away, that was what it was all about, and to hell with the office game-playing. That was how Steve ran his squad, and officers who couldn’t live with that didn’t last long.
So now Neil’s loyalty, first and last, lay with his boss. That was why, however tedious the surveillance got, he was prepared to stick it out. The fiasco of Francis Blake’s entrapment and subsequent trial had only stiffened his resolve. That was what happened when politics got in the way of policing, and he was as determined as his boss to set the record straight and catch Susan Blanchard’s killer. So he stifled his doubts about the point of what he was doing and stuck to Blake like chewing gum.
He yawned. The rain drizzled relentlessly down his windscreen. It seemed a fitting counterpoint to the lack of excitement in his and Francis Blake’s lives. If he had the kind of money that Blake had trousered over his newspaper deal, Neil was bloody sure he’d be living somewhere with a bit more class than this. No two ways about it, this was a dump.
The flat Blake had rented on his release was less than a mile from his old place in King’s Cross. The new place was in a busy but faintly seedy street off the Pentonville Road, the sort of place where the locals were off-duty hookers, the hopelessly unemployed, the elderly poor and the mentally ill. The best you could say about it was that it was handy for public transport. Halfway up the road, some uninspired architect had designed a utilitarian block in grey brick that looked like it had been jerry built in the sixties. It was cut off from the neighbouring terraced houses by a service lane that ran up either side and round the back. On the ground floor were half a dozen shop units, a news agent, an off-licence, a betting shop, a mini market a kebab shop and a minicab office. The two floors above were divided into flats, and it was in one of these drab boxes on the second floor that Blake had taken up residence. It depressed Neil just thinking about it.
Not only would he be living somewhere with a bit more class than this, he’d be doing something a bit more
exciting than the occasional trip to the bookies or the video shop round the corner.
From what Neil could see, Blake might as well still have been locked up in the Scrubs.
A couple of miles away, Steve Preston and Terry Fowler were having a very different evening. For once, Steve had managed to drag himself away from work with time to spare, leaving Joanne ploughing her way through apparently endless criminal record searches. Neil had had nothing of significance to report, so there was no specific professional worry niggling at the back of his mind to distract him from the company.
Terry had been five minutes early, claiming pathological punctuality made it impossible for her to be fashionably late for anything. “I’m always the one who arrives at parties while the hosts are still in the shower,” she’d said. “Makes for an interesting start to the evening.”
Steve didn’t mind in the least. He was perfectly happy with an extra five minutes in the bar to enjoy admiring her. Terry was wearing a simple knee-length black dress in some material he didn’t recognize that seemed to flow and shimmer around her body whenever she moved. For someone who’d been languishing in the doldrums for what he now realized was far too long, Steve allowed himself warily to wonder if his luck had truly changed as much as it appeared. Careful, he cautioned himself. You know as soon as your emotions are engaged you build too much too fast. Take it easy, don’t let her see how much you need this. Just for once, treat your personal life with the same circumspection you bring to building a case.
But nothing happened over dinner to change that feeling of overwhelming luck. He was aware of being an engaging companion, and she seemed more than willing to appreciate him. The conversation never lurched into one of those awkward silences while someone figured out what to talk about next. They’d swapped stories, made each other laugh, started to sketch the details of their lives. For a man accustomed to containing himself in a private place for most of his waking hours, Steve was pleasantly surprised to find that Terry’s apparent candour had the knack of making him open up. For the first time since he’d met Fiona all those years ago at university, he recognized a woman who allowed him to relax, who made no demands other than that he be himself. Ironic, intelligent and apparently lacking all pretension, Terry seemed to Steve to be as attractive inside as she was on the outside. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she’d seen in him. When she left him at one point to go to the toilet, he found himself watching the door, eager for her return as he hadn’t been with anyone for years. I feel like a teenager again, he thought, bemused. This is insane, Preston. Put the brakes on.