Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

Most of the original data had come from the FBI, who had been remarkably generous with details of past cases once they had realized she was happy to have the information stripped of personal details like names of victims and perpetrators. Fiona recognized that like most statistical analyses produced by psychologists, her database was at best only a partial snapshot of the whole, but it did give her some valuable insights into the nature of the crimes she was dealing with. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed her to say with some degree of certainty whether individual crimes were part of a series or likely to be the work of separate offenders.

By the end of her afternoon’s work, she had demonstrated empirically what the police had already decided on the basis of common sense and experience; the two murders were undoubtedly the work of one man. If that had been the only service she could have provided, there wouldn’t have been much point in her making the trip. But she was convinced that by analysing the data she already had, she could point the police towards other crimes the killer might have committed. With access to that information, she might finally be able to construct a useful geographical profile.

What she needed now was to get out of the police station and let her mind roam free over the nuggets of information she had extracted from the files.

She had got back to the room to find a note from Kit propped up on the desk. “Gone down to the bar. Meet me there when you get in, and we’ll have dinner.” She’d smiled then and crossed to the window to check out the view. It was strange to think that the beauty spread out before her concealed all the normal range of human ugliness. Somewhere in that honeycomb maze of buildings, a killer was probably going about his business, unsuspected by anyone. Fiona hoped that she could point the police in the right direction, so they could find him before he killed again.

But that was for later. Fiona turned away from the window and stripped off her clothes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of smoke that lingered in their fibres. A quick shower, then she changed into jeans and a ribbed silk shirt.

Fiona found Kit at a table in the corner of the bar, hunched over his laptop with a glass of inky red wine to hand and a bowl of olives pushed to one side. She put an arm across his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. “Had a good day?” she asked, settling into the leather chair opposite him.

He looked up, startled. “Hi. Just let me save this.” He finished what he was doing and turned off the computer. Folding it closed, he grinned at her. “They let you have an evening off?”

“Sort of. I’ve got to write a report later, but only a short one. It won’t take long. I’m letting it bed down before I commit myself.” A waiter appeared and Fiona ordered a chilled manzanilla. “What have you been up to?”

Kit looked faintly sheepish. “I went for a wander this afternoon. Just to soak up the ambience, you know? This place, it’s steeped in history. You can practically smell it in the air. Every corner you turn, there’s something to see, something to imagine. Anyway, I got to thinking about the Inquisition, about what it must have been like here back then.”

Fiona groaned. “Don’t tell me. It gave you the idea for a book.”

Kit smiled. “It started the wheels turning.”

“Is that what you were doing on the laptop?”

He shook his head. “No, it’s way too early to be writing stuff down. I was just doing a bit of polishing on what I’ve been writing this last week or so. Tickling and tidying, the boring bollocks. What about you? What kind of day have you had?”

The waiter put Fiona’s drink in front of her and she took a sip. “Routine. Going through files by the numbers. Berrocal’s very organized. Very on the ball. You don’t have to explain anything twice to him.”

“That makes your life a bit easier.”

“You’re not kidding. The trouble is, there’s not much to go at. Normally, a killer chooses a body dump for reasons that are very personal to him. But because these body dumps have particular historical significance, it complicates things. I’m not sure how much use geographical profiling will be.”

Kit shrugged. “You can only do your best. They certainly go in for gruesome in these parts. They’ve got this daft little train that takes you through the city and round the ring road on the other side of the river and the commentary is totally bizarre. It’s in Spanish and German and a sort of fractured English, and they tell you all this stuff about the bloody history of the town. They’ve even got this place called the Gorge of the Woman with Her Throat Cut. Can you believe that?”

Fiona was surprised. “They tell you about that on the tourist trip?”

He nodded. “I know, it’s not the sort of thing you’d normally boast about, is it?”

“That’s where one of our murder victims was dumped,” Fiona said slowly. “I was working on the assumption that only locals would be familiar with it.”

“Well, I can tell you all about it,” Kit said. “This woman shagged one of the guards and let the enemy attack the city, so they cut her throat to make sure she wouldn’t be doing that again in a hurry.”

“Did you go down to San Juan de los Reyes? The big monastery church?”

“I walked past it. I’m saving it for tomorrow.”

“Did you notice the chains on the facade?”

“It’s hard to miss them. According to the guide book, Fernando and Isabella had them hung up there after the reconquest of Granada. They were used to shackle the Moors’ Christian prisoners. I must say, if that’s typical of Isabella’s idea of decor, I can’t wait to see the inside. Eat your heart out, Home Front,” he added with an ironic grin. “Why do you ask?”

“That’s where the second body was found. You’ve only been here half a day, and already you know the story behind both body dumps. It makes me wonder if I’m right in what I’m thinking.”

Kit patted her hand and assumed an expression of mock-patronage. “Never mind, love, you can’t be right all of the time. You leave that to me.”

Fiona snorted with laughter. “I’m so glad I’ve got you to rely on. Now, are we going to eat dinner, or what?”

Fiona sipped a glass of brandy and studied the rough ideas she’d sketched out. In the background, the sound of Kit’s fingers tapping the keyboard of his laptop was faintly soothing. Even the mosquito buzz of his Walkman was comforting in its familiarity. He never interfered when she had work to do, something she was eternally grateful for. She had heard too many of her friends complain that if their man wasn’t working, neither were they supposed to be. Kit was always happy to occupy himself with his own work or a book, or to take himself off to a bar and make new acquaintances. I am convinced that the perpetrator’s primary interest is not sexual satisfaction, ( she read. ) However, the nature of the sexual mutilation he has performed postmortem is suggestive. I believe it is a way of demonstrating contempt for what he sees as the ‘weakness’ of his victims, which leads me to postulate that his method of contact with his victims was one of physical or sexual appeal. At its most crude, I would suggest that he picked them up, possibly on an earlier occasion, and arranged to meet them on the nights of the murders. He may have baited his approach with the suggestion that his specialist knowledge might be of use to them in their professional lives. It is clear that he does not appear to pose a threat to those he has selected as victims. He knows the kind of places where his potential victims are to be found. This implies considerable local knowledge and suggests that he is a native of Toledo. These were not killings that occurred out of sexual rage because of failure of performance or over arousal but from a different motive entirely.