Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

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 terra cotta 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.

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 overindulged 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 hard arse 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.