Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

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.

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.