Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

With best wishes, Salvador Berrocal.

Fiona reached the end of the message and smiled. At least one police officer looked like he was headed for the right result. She’d been nervous that the next time she’d hear from Berrocal would be when he reported that another foreigner had been killed. But for some reason, Delgado — if he was indeed the killer had temporarily stopped.

Either that or they just hadn’t found the body yet.

Whatever, there was nothing she could do about it. Fiona switched off her computer and headed downstairs. As she turned the last corner in the stairs, she saw Kit standing in the doorway of his office, a sheet of paper in his hand and a worried look on his face.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

He looked up, his eyes wide and troubled. When he spoke, his voice was uncharacteristically high in pitch. “I’ve got a death threat.”

Kit held the sheet of paper out to Fiona. Gingerly, she took it by the top left-hand corner. It was a single sheet of A4 paper, folded twice to fit a standard business envelope. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other computer-generated document. Standard font, nothing complicated about the layout. All of this Fiona took in first, bracing herself before she read the words. Kit Martin, you are a thief of other people’s creative endeavour and a traducer of other people’s reputations. You steal what you cannot yourself make. And your lies deprive others of what is rightfully theirs. Your work is a feeble reflection of other people’s light. You have striven to ensure that competition is driven from the field. You take, you destroy, you are a vampire who sucks the blood of those whose gifts you envy. You know this to be true. Search your pathetic grimy soul and you will not be able to deny what you have deprived me of. The time has come for you to pay. You deserve nothing from me but my contempt and my hatred. If killing you is what it takes to grant what is rightfully mine, then so be it. The hour and the day will be of my choosing. I trust you will not sleep easy; you do not deserve so to do. I will enjoy your funeral. From your ashes, I will rise like a phoenix.

Fiona read the poisonous letter twice. Then she carefully put it down on the hall table and stepped forward to hug Kit. “Poor you. What a horrible thing.” She could feel his tension as he buried his face in her shoulder.

“I can’t get my head round it,” he said, his voice muffled. “It makes no sense.”

Fiona said nothing. She just held on tight to him until she felt his body start to relax against her. “Where did it come from?” she asked eventually.

“It was in the post. I was busy when the second delivery came; I didn’t bother picking it off the that till I was going out. I stuck it in the office. I wasn’t expecting anything urgent.”

“Have you got the envelope?”

He nodded. “It’s in the bin, I just chucked it automatically.” He went into his office. Fiona followed him into the chaos of books and papers that covered all of the available surfaces and half of the floor. Not for the first time, she marvelled that anyone could work in such a clutter. But Kit not only worked here, he also seemed to have total recall when it came to the site of any particular book, file or letter. He went straight to the wastepaper bin by the desk and fished out a plain-white self-sealing envelope. He studied it with a frown. Fiona put an arm round his waist and looked at it with him. The address had been printed in the same anonymous typeface.

“West London postmark. Posted two days ago with a second-class stamp,” he said. He gave a snort of nervous laughter. “Well, it’s obviously not an urgent death threat. I suppose that should be some sort of consolation.”

“You should report this to the police,” Fiona said decisively.

Kit dropped the envelope on top of his keyboard. “You think so?” He sounded sceptical.

“I do, yes. It’s a really nasty letter. It’s a death threat, for God’s sake!”

Kit dropped into his chair, swinging round to face her. “I get nasty letters all the time, love. Not death threats, admittedly, but in among the fan mail, I regularly get letters slagging off me and my books. Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells is horrified by the torture scenes in The Dissection Man. Ms Censor of Lambeth is appalled that teenagers have access to the depraved sexual fantasies in The Blade King. And then there are the ones who accuse me of being gutless for not writing about grotesque mutilation and sexual perversion in more detail. It’s not all fan mail, you know.”

“How do they get your address?” Fiona demanded, suddenly struck with an uncomfortable vision of mentally unstable readers beating a path to her front door.

Kit shrugged. “I don’t know. Mostly, they come via my publisher. Some on e — mail. One or two of the more obsessive types have probably trawled the voters’ roll for Dartmouth Park. I’m not that hard to find, love.”

Fiona shivered. “That letter was bad enough. But now you’re really scaring me. Honestly, Kit, I think you should take this to the police.”

He picked up a pencil and fiddled with it restlessly. “They’d laugh at me, Fiona. It’s just a crank letter. There’s nothing specific in it. All it says is that I nick other people’s ideas. Which is bullshit. It’s just some nutter with a bee in his bonnet.”

Fiona looked unconvinced. “I don’t think you should be taking this so lightly, Kit. I really don’t.” She turned away and crossed to the window, where, as usual, the blind was raised. Impatiently, she tugged the cord to shut them off from the outside world. Anything to avoid saying what was uppermost in her mind.

“It’s not that I’m taking it lightly. It’s the police that would think I was wasting their time. Anyway, why should I react to this, any more than the rest of the offensive mail I’ve had in the past? I’ve been getting letters from nutters ever since I was first published. It’s no big deal. Honestly. It was a shock, that’s all. You don’t often get them so vitriolic. But nothing’s ever come of a letter before, so I don’t see why this should be any different.” He was, he knew, protesting too much. But he didn’t want to be scared. He wanted this letter to be in the same class as every other piece of hate mail that had ever dropped on the doormat. Any other response opened a door he wanted to keep firmly closed.

But Fiona was determined to articulate what was in both their minds, however unpalatable it might be. “After what happened to Drew, I don’t think you can afford to ignore this,” she said quietly.

“I knew you were going to say that,” Kit said irritably. “I knew I should never have let you see it. Christ, Fiona, you always have to analyse things, to connect them. Well, sometimes things just don’t connect. They are separate. They just are. OK?”

“No, it’s not OK.” Fiona raised her voice, her cheeks flushing. “Why are you so resistant to this? Two weeks ago, one of your colleagues was murdered in a horrible, ritualistic way. Now you get a death threat, and you don’t think the two might be connected? Reality check, Kit!”

He slammed the pencil down on the desk. “The only connection between this letter and what happened to Drew is that some fuck wit thinks it would be clever to take advantage of his murder to put the shits up me. You read the letter, Fiona. That wasn’t written by the person who killed Drew. There’s no specifics in it, no boasting, none of that, “You’ll get what’s coming to you, like Drew Shand did.””

“That doesn’t prove a thing,” Fiona stormed. “That letter was written by somebody who is off the scale of normal. So was Drew’s killer.”