Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

Kit got to his feet and hit the wall with the side of his fist. “So were Fred and Rosemary West, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t them that wrote this. Look, Fiona. If I go to the police with something as flaky as this, you know what they’re going to say.”

She folded her arms tight across her chest. “Enlighten me.”

“They’re going to say I’m doing a Georgia. They’ll write it off as bandwagon-jumping. Publicity-seeking. They’re not going to take it seriously. What can they do anyway? Send it off to the labs on the off-chance that my correspondent has conveniently left fingerprints and DNA all over it? I don’t think so.”

Fiona couldn’t resist the truth in what he said. She knew he was probably right. But that knowledge did nothing to assuage the chilly lump of apprehension in her stomach. That someone hated Kit or his work enough to pour out such venom on the page was unnerving. To fear that poison might escalate into real violence was, in her opinion, an entirely reasonable reaction.

She pushed past him and into the hall. In the doorway, she turned. “It’s your decision. It’s your letter. But I think you’re wrong.”

“So what’s new?” He turned his back on her. “I’ll live with it.” Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13⁄4599 Tqsaf mxafa ruzwp dqiet mzp. Mxxah qdftq bmbqd etqim e. Ngfft qkpup zfsqf uf. Qhqdk napkt mpftq udaiz ftqad kmzpz afazq arftq yomyq oxaeq.

He got a lot of ink, Drew Shand. But they didn’t get It. Everybody had their own theory and not one of them came close. They soon will, though. Me, I’ve been keeping my head down, being a good little boy, not attracting any attention. Not that anybody is paying any attention. Which means I had no interference with the next stage of my plan. Jane Ellas. She’s American, but lives In Ireland; probably because writers don’t pay any tax there. The bitch wasn’t satisfied with earning more money than Cod, she wanted to keep it all. It wasn’t hard to find where she was living. You can maybe get away with being a recluse somewhere the size of America, but not in Ireland. I knew she had a big estate in County Wicklow, on the shores of a lake. I knew it was about an hour’s drive from Dublin. One of the fan sites on the web had a picture of the house. So I just drove around for a day with a large-scale map and a pair of binoculars till I found it. The next morning, I went back down to Ellas’s estate. I cut down to the shoreline of the lake when I saw what I was looking for a sailing club with lots of little dinghies pulled up on the concrete ramp. There was nobody about. It couldn’t have been better. I hunkered down among the boats and checked out Elias’s property on the other side of the water. I could just make out a landing stage with a couple of boats tied up alongside. If my information was right, she would come down to the lake sometime in the afternoon and go sailing. Sure enough she appeared just after two. She got on one of the boats and went sailing off across the lake. I waited till it got dark and she’d gone back, then I dragged one of the dinghies down to the water’s edge and climbed aboard. I’d sussed a hiding place earlier, further up the lake where the trees came right down to the water’s edge. I was feeling really edgy again with the prospect of what I was going to have to do the next day. There were so many mistakes I could make that would blow it. And then I had to do the killing again. I decided I wasn’t going to stick to the book as closely this time. There was no way I was going to torture somebody for hours. I knew I didn’t have the stomach for it. And besides, I didn’t have the time or the place for something so elaborate. What I would do, I decided, was to kill her quickly with a knife. Then I could do the things to her body that would make it look like the body in the book. It’s the appearance that’s important. I’m not some fetishistic killer who has to obsess about all the details. What I’m doing is sending a message, not satisfying some weird urge inside myself. If there was another way of showing those bastards that they can’t get away with discounting me and my life, I’d have chosen it. I’m trying not to think about what I’ll have to do to her. My stomach’s queasy enough without making it worse. I just have to keep telling myself it won’t take long, and then I’ll be on the road home. They’ll have to pay attention this time.

The early morning light was pearl-grey, a thin curtain of cloud hanging just above the tops of the Wicklow Hills across the steely waters of Lough Killargan. The spectacular autumn colours of the trees were beginning to emerge against the soft green of the hillsides, transforming the landscape from chill to warmth.

Jane Elias stood on the flagged patio and gave a long, low whistle. From a stand of green, ochre and brown sycamores a few hundred yards away, two streaks of black and tan emerged, their shapes resolving into a pair of lean Dobermans as they bounded across the grass towards her. Jane held her hands out to the dogs as they skidded to a halt at her feet and luxuriated in the sensuous warmth of their wet tongues on her skin.

“Enough,” she said after a few moments. The dogs, obedient to their morning ritual, lay at her feet while she went through a series of stretches to loosen up muscles still half-frozen from sleep. Then, as Jane moved off in a slow jog, the dogs scrambled to their feet and raced ahead of her. This was the best part of the day, she thought. No promises broken, no sentences written, no phone calls taken. Everything was still possible.

Gradually, she picked up speed, heading out towards the perimeter wall that ringed her property. Five and a half miles, the perfect length for a morning run. She could beat the bounds of her domain in absolute privacy, secure from prying eyes and free from fear.

She didn’t count the guard monitoring the closed-circuit TV cameras as having prying eyes. After all, she was paying him to make sure she was safe. She didn’t mind him watching her run. They occupied separate universes, he in his windowless office, his bulk crammed into khaki shirt and navy trousers, his walkie-talkie at his hip, his small life somewhere else; she in the fresh air of her personal fiefdom, her streaked blonde hair fastened in a headband, her lean muscled limbs enclosed in lightweight sweats, her feet pounding out a regular rhythm as she thought about the morning’s work that lay ahead of her.

After the run, she let the dogs into the mud room where she fed them on chopped steak and vitamin-enriched dried biscuit. While they were still snuffling down their food, she was already on her way through the kitchen of the Georgian mansion, heading for the private bathroom that no one else was permitted to use, not even her lover Pierce Finnegan. Five precise minutes under the hot shower, then a blast of freezing water to close her pores, and Jane was on to the next stage of her daily routine. A brisk to welling then an application of expensive aroma therapy body milk from chin to toe. Facial moisturizer, eye gel, dark-red lipstick.

Dressed in jeans and a silk and wool plaid shirt, she headed back to the kitchen for fresh fruit salad, a slice of wholewheat toast with organic peanut butter and a tall glass of tomato juice. Once, she’d been twenty-five pounds overweight. That was one of many things that was never going to happen again.

She was in her office by seven-thirty, the day’s work arrayed on one of the two large desks that stood against the walls. Today, the task was to correct the proofs of her forthcoming novel. For the next five hours, she focused on the printed pages, scanning each line for errors, making the occasional change to a sentence she now found clumsy, sometimes reaching for the dictionary to double-check a spelling that looked odd.