Peter Robinson - Sleeping in the Ground

His first impression was that she hadn’t changed very much since he had last seen her more years ago than he cared to remember. It was an uncanny feeling, losing Emily and suddenly finding long lost Jenny again, as if he were leaping through time and space like Doctor Who. True, there were a few more wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, but not many, and they only made her that much more attractive, as did the tan. Her pale pink lips were as full as ever, and her eyes still sparkled with mischief, though he fancied he could sense a sadness in them now, something that hadn’t been there all those years ago. The short page-boy hairstyle suited her, but the light brown colour was not as he remembered. As far as he could see, her shapely figure had hardly changed at all. Unless she was as lucky in her metabolism as he was, she must have worked to keep it that way.

‘I’ve brought Dr Fuller in to give us some sort of profile on our killer,’ said Gervaise. ‘I realise there’s very little for her to go on so far, but I’m hoping we can at least make a general start and then build up an even stronger individual picture as more information comes in.’

Jenny yawned. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, putting her hand over her mouth. No rings, Banks noticed. ‘Haven’t got over the jet-lag yet.’

‘Sorry to call you in at such short notice,’ said Gervaise. She turned to Banks. ‘I got in touch with a friend at the University of York, and she mentioned that Professor Fuller had just returned from abroad and recommended her.’

‘Just?’ said Jenny. ‘I’d hardly got in the door. Still, needs must, I suppose.’

‘Have you had a chance to read the file I sent over yet?’

‘Over coffee this morning. So don’t expect too much from me. I’m afraid you’ll probably get little more than the textbook version.’

‘Talking about coffee...’ Gervaise refilled Jenny’s cup and poured some for Banks. ‘Now let’s get started.’

Banks felt his stomach rumble and hoped they couldn’t hear it. Jenny cleared her throat and took a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses along with a buff folder from her briefcase. They were the kind of glasses you bought off the rack at Boots or Marks and Spencer’s, the same as he used, but they gave her a studious appearance. He could imagine her standing at a podium lecturing a class of randy young students.

‘First off,’ Jenny said, ‘I trust you’ve made arrangements for psychological counselling for the survivors and any of your officers who may need it?’

‘Yes,’ said Gervaise. ‘It’s hard to come up with enough counsellors, but it’s under control.’

‘Good,’ said Jenny. ‘Well, as far as classification goes, I suppose we’d have to categorise this one as a rampage killer. That statistically makes him far more likely to be a man, so I’ll use the male pronoun from now on. Men are more prone to violence. We don’t know for sure why, but it seems to be the case. It may be evolutionary, in that men have throughout history been rewarded for aggression. To the victor, the spoils. James Bond always gets the girl. Also, if you consider animal behaviour, you’ll find any number of aggressive contests for the privilege of taking a mate, or mates, mostly performed by the males of the species.’

‘ Could it be a woman?’ Gervaise asked.

‘It could be,’ said Jenny, ‘but I think it would be more helpful at this point to rule out the more unlikely possibilities along with the traditional list of red flags. A “nutter”, for example. People who are mentally ill rarely kill, especially like this, though of course many would say a person would have to be insane to commit such an act. However, that doesn’t make for a very scientific argument, or for a useful method of approach to an investigation.’ She glanced from Banks to Gervaise over her glasses. ‘While it’s quite true that the killer may well have a long trail of antisocial acts and psychological problems in his background, from abusive parents and pulling the wings off flies to arson, sexual assault, lack of conscience, outbursts of irrational rage and so on, there are many more individuals who have a similar history but never graduate to mass murder. It’s not a natural progression, the way many doctors argue that the route from soft to hard drugs is. I think when you find your man, he will have a history of violence and abuse, and he’s very likely to have served time in prison or been incarcerated in a mental institution. But so have a lot of other people, and that’s not necessarily what will lead you to him. Too many false starts and blind alleys there. That’s why it’s impossible, even armed with all the facts, to pick out the next mass murderer from the millions of other disaffected individuals. A sad comment, but it’s true.’

‘We’re still considering terrorism as a possibility,’ said Banks. ‘Even though the investigators haven’t got anywhere yet.’

Jenny nodded. ‘As you should be. But if that’s the case, you won’t need me. Most of what I say won’t apply if someone kills for ideological reasons, or because he’s under the influence of a powerful personality, though it’s sometimes surprising when you look deeper into the backgrounds of some of these terrorists. You often find the same pattern that you find in other mass murderers.’

‘What will lead us to him?’ Banks asked.

‘I think first you need to know what set him off, what tipped him over the edge. The trigger. This could have been building up for years. He could have felt slighted, humiliated, envious, abused, any number of things — but something pushed him over the edge. Perhaps more than one thing. A combination.’

‘How do we do that?’ Gervaise asked.

‘For a start, we try to push the stereotypes and lists of traits that usually confound cases like this to one side, and then we go from what we know. All I can do is take whatever information you give me and analyse it in the light of scientific and statistical knowledge. It’s not perfect, but then profiling isn’t an exact science, and I won’t try to tell you that it is. Basically, a rampage killer is an umbrella term for a spree killer or a mass murderer. And when we get right down to it, the differences between a spree killer and a mass murderer aren’t great, especially in terms of motivation and criminal history. A mass murderer usually commits his acts in one place. A spree killer kills a number of people in two or more locations, a sort of mobile mass murderer, if you like, before either shooting himself or inviting the police to do it for him.’

‘So we’re dealing with a mass murderer here?’ said Banks.

‘Not necessarily. Though a spree killer operates at two or more locations, there can under certain circumstances be a cooling-off period of up to seven days between killing sprees. Raoul Moat, for example, up in Northumberland in 2010. He shot three people, one of them his ex-girlfriend, and went on the rampage in the countryside. It was seven days before he was found, and then he shot himself.’

‘So our man might not be finished yet?’ said Gervaise.

‘And we have to wait seven days to see if he does it again?’ Banks added.

‘Unless you catch him first,’ said Jenny. ‘Yes, it’s a possibility. But you won’t just be sitting here twiddling your thumbs, will you? A lot can happen in seven days. And it’s not written in stone. He may kill again today, tomorrow, or not at all. He may be a mass murderer who’s finished his work, or a terrorist who’s melted back into the darkness. Moat obviously made a run for it and survived out there for days, but in the end, when it came to the choice, he took his own life rather than face prison. Remember the Hungerford Massacre in 1987? Ryan killed sixteen people and wounded fifteen in and around the Berkshire village of Hungerford. We don’t know why. We assume he had his reasons, but they were explicable only to himself. He also shot himself after being run to ground in a classroom in his old school. You could read all sorts of things into that. And what about Derrick Bird, the taxi driver? Same year as Moat, not far away, in Cumbria. He shot and killed twelve people and wounded eleven more, starting with his twin brother after an argument over a will and tax issues. Then he starts driving around and kills ten people in a forty-five-mile rampage. This all happened on the same day. Bird also shot himself before capture. Or the Dunblane school massacre, sixteen children and one teacher. The killer took his own life. That’s the main thing these killers have in common, except for shooting large numbers of people. They shoot themselves in the end when cornered.’