Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

But tonight, no one was interested in arguments about the menu. In the two weeks since she’d returned from Toledo, Fiona had finally found the time to give proper attention to the case file on the sting the Met had mounted against Francis Blake. Since she insisted her input was to remain informal, she had suggested outlining her conclusions round the dinner table. So for once there was an air of tense anticipation among them as they sat down and Steve poured a robust red into their glasses.

“Soup first, then we’ll cut to the chase,” Fiona decreed.

Steve gave a wry smile. “Whatever you say, Doctor.” He filled their bowls with steaming, creamy vichyssoise. “So what small talk shall we indulge in?”

“How about your love life?” Kit suggested.

“That should occupy all of ten seconds,” Steve said. He picked up his spoon and examined it critically. “My love life is like the Loch Ness Monster rumours of its existence are greatly exaggerated.”

“What happened to that CPS lawyer you took to dinner the other week?” Fiona asked.

“She was more interested in the rules on disclosure of evidence than she was in me,” Steve said. “I’d have had a more interesting night out with the Commander and his wife.”

Kit whistled. “That good, eh?”

“Hell, I don’t suppose I was much more interesting to her,” Steve said, lifting a spoonful of soup to his lips.

“The trouble with the three of us is that in our own ways we all have a morbid fascination with violent death,” Fiona said. “Maybe Kit should fix you up with a sexy crime writer.”

Kit spluttered. “Easier said than done. When you cross off the ones who are already attached, the ones who have a serious interest in recreational drugs and the dykes, there’s not a lot left over.”

“Besides, you couldn’t stand the competition,” Steve added.

The first course over, Steve cleared the bowls away and Fiona took a couple of pages of notes from her briefcase. “I must say, the material you gave me made for very interesting reading,” she said. “Not least the interpretations that Andrew Horsforth placed on the interaction. It was an object lesson in what happens when you push the theory ahead of the facts. In one sense, the conclusions he drew were valid. If, that is, you concentrate on the margins and ignore the central core of the material. If you look at a series of conclusions as a continuum from most likely to least likely, he’s opted more often than not for the least likely, because that’s what backed up the view he started with, namely that Francis Blake was the killer.”

“But, cleverly, you started from the opposite premise,” Kit said with affectionate sarcasm. “Nobody loves a smart arse you know.”

Fiona stuck her tongue out at him. “Wrong. I started from the neutral position. I tried to ignore my own half-formed opinion that Francis Blake wasn’t the killer. I was concerned with achieving as much objectivity as I could.”

“Not something anyone could ever accuse Horsforth of,” Steve said. “You’ll be pleased to hear that he’s been dropped from the list of Home Office-approved consultants after our debacle at the Bailey.”

“That’s a bit decisive for the Home Office, isn’t it?” Kit asked through a mouthful of salad.

“Horsforth’s an easier scapegoat than senior police officers,” Steve said. “We’re as much to blame as him for what happened, but heaven forbid that any more mud should be slung at the Met right now.”

“Deputy heads will roll,” Fiona observed cynically. “Before I tell you what I think, Steve, I need you to answer one question for me. Although obviously I know more or less where the murder took place, I didn’t actually visit the scene of crime, so I wasn’t sure about this. Is there anywhere on the Heath where someone could have watched the murder without being seen by Susan Blanchard’s killer?”

Steve frowned, his eyes focusing on the corner of the ceiling as he recalled the setting for the murder. When he spoke, his voice was slow, considering. “We found the body in a sort of hollow. There was a line of rhododendrons between Susan and the path. Then the clearing where she was found. Beyond that, the ground rose slightly to another line of shrubs. I suppose someone hidden in those bushes could have escaped observation by a killer who was intent on what he was doing. SOCO will have done a fingertip search of the whole area, though, and I don’t recall anything in the forensics to indicate the presence of a third person.”

“You think Blake saw it?” Kit broke in, unable to keep quiet.

“You’re doing a Horsforth,” Steve said. “Theorizing without the data. It could just as easily have been someone else altogether who told Blake about it. Let’s hear what Fiona’s got to say.”

Kit cast his eyes upwards. “I forgot. We have to have the whole lecture. No skipping to the back page to see whodunnit.” He shook his head in tolerant amusement.

“Why change the habit of a lifetime?” Fiona said sweetly. “OK, here’s what I think. Right from the start, we know we’re looking for a confident criminal. We know this because Hampstead Heath is a public place, and the risk of alerting passers-by to such a violent crime in broad daylight is high. Also, the way the body is displayed indicates a man who is, at least in criminal terms, a mature offender. Blake’s record, on the other hand, is trivial and shows little sign of escalation towards this sort of crime. That was the first thing that made me a little uneasy about him as prime suspect.”

“Hang on a minute, though,” Kit objected. “You can’t say that just because he doesn’t have a criminal record he’d not done the sort of crimes that lead to sexual murder. It might be that he’s either been clever enough or lucky enough to get away with it.”

“That’s true,” Fiona acknowledged. “And so I wouldn’t write Blake off on those grounds alone. Nor would I dismiss him on the basis that the pornography the police found in his flat, although sadomasochistic in content, contained no photographs or descriptions that fit the way the body was displayed. But again, that detail gives me pause for thought, because the killer had to form that image somehow. If it didn’t come from his pornography, it came from some incident in his past, around the time he was forming his sexual identity. And none of Steve’s researches came up with anything comparable in Blake’s history. So as far as I’m concerned, that’s another question mark over Blake.”

Steve was leaning forward now, elbows on the table, an intent frown on his face. So far, Fiona had said nothing he didn’t already believe himself. But he always found her cogent way of stringing things together clarified things, sometimes rearranging details so they formed a different picture. He sensed where she was heading, and he wondered if Kit had been right about what was coming.

“Another thing I would expect from this killer is that he’d have poor hetero social skills,” Fiona continued. “But again, that doesn’t fit Blake. He had a girlfriend, but as well as that he was comfortable with contacting strange women through personal ads. We know from some of the women who have come forward that he managed to have sex with them, even if most of them found him too domineering a partner to want to continue the relationship. So here we have a man who is good at making social and sexual connections with women.”

“Better than me,” Steve pointed out. “You’re right, though. That was one of the main reasons I never liked Blake for this job. He wasn’t some frustrated virgin or someone whose head was wired for no beating women up as the best means of achieving sexual satisfaction.”

“I knew all that before I read the entrapment transcripts,” Fiona continued. “As I’m sure you did too, Steve. However, it became clear from reading what passed between Blake and Erin Richards that he knew more about Susan Blanchard’s murder than he could have gleaned from the press reports. He knew, for example, that her hands were arranged as if in prayer, the fingers linked rather than having the fingertips propped against each other. Blake always maintained after his arrest that he’d heard that in the pub, but he couldn’t identify the person he claimed had told him. I’ll come back to that later, though.”