Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

Fiona returned his smile. Unbidden, the thought came to her that if Jane Elias had had a lover, someone was in unbearable pain tonight. “Call me when it’s ready,” was all she said. It felt too much like tempting fate to tell him how much she loved him. Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13⁄4599 Uimef afmxx ketmf fqdqp mrfqd vmzqq xume. Mxxui mzfqp fapai meexq qb. Upupz fzqqp mzkbu xxefa wzaow yqagf quftqd…I was totally shattered after Jane Ellas. All I wanted to do was sleep. It was as if I wanted to wipe the memory of it from my brain, and sleep was the best way to do it. I couldn’t even pick up a pen and keep the record straight until today.

Of course, I couldn’t kill her on the boat, because I didn’t want to get blood everywhere. That would have been completely wrong, in the context of the book. So once I’d got her unconscious, I had to sail over to the sailing club landing ramp, get her out of the boat and finish her off in the shallows there. But my luck held. I let her bleed out a bit in the water, then I got her in the back of the 4x4 and set her boat adrift on the lake. Let them work that one out, I thought. Then I did what I had to do. I don’t know why, but it felt worse than doing Drew Shand. Maybe because she was a woman. Or maybe because I had to strip her and she looked much more vulnerable than she did with her clothes on. Everything went according to plan. And from what I read in the papers, it sounds like the message is starting to trickle through. Not before time. Now, it’s time to start thinking about number three. Georgia Lester. I’ve been reading her book again, and why anybody would publish it, never mind turn it into a film, is beyond me. It’s unfortunate that my plan will help sell more copies of her pitiful book. Butthat can’t be helped. I’ve got to keep thinking about the bigger picture. I’ve done a recce on her cottage in Dorset, and it’s perfect for what I want to do. It’s finding when she’s going to be there that’s the difficult bit. I know she’s in London this week, and looking at her engagements on the website, I think she’ll go down to Dorset at the weekend and come back on Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m not looking forward to this one little bit. It’s the worst prospect so far. What I’m going to have to do to her is so horrible. I keep rereading the bit of the book that describes it, and it turns my stomach to think I’m going to have to copy that. But I can’t stop now. That would make everything I’ve done so far completely pointless. When I feel like this, I look around me and see what I’ve been reduced to because of what they did to me. I don’t get any pleasure out of doing this, but it does give me back my self-respect. I haven’t taken everything they’ve thrown at me lying down, and that’s worth something. So I just have to grit my teeth and do what has to be done. Two down, four to go. They should have got the point by then.

Like police officers, fire fighters and journalists, Fiona had discovered that the fastest and most effective tool for putting emotional distance between herself and the terrible things her job forced her to confront was black humour. So when entering Jane Elias’s name on her meta search engine threw up a website called Laughing With the Dead Celebs, she couldn’t resist.

Jane Elias’s death had been in the public domain for less than a day, but already she merited her own cartoon tombstone. Fiona clicked on Jane’s name. The screen dissolved into a coffin-shaped frame. “Jane Elias killed somewhere around forty-seven people in her seven novels. Some would say it’s about time she discovered what it feels like. Not us, of course. If jokes about death offend you, don’t scroll down this page.”

Fiona, naturally, carried on scrolling. So far, there were only four contributions.

Why did Jane Elias have to die?

So she could finally get her hands on a good plot.

Do writers know when they start out how it’s going to end?

Jane Elias obviously didn’t!

What did St. Peter say to Jane Elias at the pearly gates?

“So, Jane, whodunnit?”

What was the motive for Jane Elias’s murder? Sales figures to die for.

Only the first was worth a smile, and a pretty thin one at that, Fiona decided, closing the site and heading for a more conventional tribute web page. The first site she checked out was one that had been created by a fan. It simply said, under that day’s date, “Jane Elias was found murdered today. This site is closed as a mark of respect.”

She had more luck with her second choice, also an act of devotion from one of Jane’s readers. The bare details of the murder were reported and below them were a series of boxes offering hyper links to other areas of the site. Offered a choice of Her Life, Photo Album, The Investigation, Condolence Book and Related Links, she opted for the photographic record first, curious to see what the site’s creator had been able to assemble, given Jane’s notorious camera-shyness.

First came the jacket photograph that had only ever appeared on her first novel. It was an unremarkable face, the sort it would be hard to describe in terms that would differentiate it from a million others. Mid-brown hair in a jaw-length bob, parted on the right; straight brows, dark eyes, an absolutely average nose and full lips that curved in a faint smile, giving nothing away. She was wearing an open-necked shirt, revealing a thin gold chain round her neck. Apart from the blonde highlights and a few more lines etched into the corners of her eyes, she looked exactly the same as she had on the night Fiona had met her.

Next came her high-school yearbook picture. The hair was longer here, hanging straight to the top of small breasts, but still with the same parting. At eighteen, Jane had worn unfashionably heavy-framed spectacles that made her eyes look unfocused. Her face too was fuller, almost plump. If all Fiona had had to go on was this, she doubted she’d have picked Jane out of a crowd.

A third photograph showed Jane accepting the first of her two Edgar awards at a Mystery Writers of America dinner. Her smile was broad and unselfconscious and she looked surprisingly elegant in a figure-hugging black dress that shimmered with sequins.

The final shot in the gallery showed a completely different side of Jane Elias. Taken at the finishing line of a charity half-marathon in Dublin, it revealed Jane in mid-stride, her running shorts and vest showing off the smooth planes of well-developed muscle that covered legs and arms. The camera had caught her in a candid moment, her expression exposing the blissed-out altered state of the athlete who has gone through the pain barrier. She looked more attractive here than anywhere else, Fiona noticed with detachment.

From studying the photographs, Fiona moved to the condolence book. If she’d been involved with the investigation, she’d have suggested the police take a look at the messages posted by fans. Given the tendency of psychopaths to attempt to insert themselves into the inquiry into their crimes, it was an obvious place for Jane’s killer to go. The dozen messages Fiona scrolled through seemed innocuous enough, but there was plenty of time for the strange and bizarre to show up. She book marked the page, resolving to return in a day or two to see if anything resembling Kit and Georgia’s letters showed up.

There was nothing else on the fan site that interested her, so, like a child saving its favourite part of the meal for the last, she directed her web browser to Murder Behind the Headlines. She typed in ‘Jane Elias’ in the search box and hit the return key. Queen of the serial killer thriller Jane Elias has finally found out what it’s like to suffer what she handed out to dozens of victims in her books. Unfortunately, she won’t be able to put her experiences to good commercial effect because the man or woman who abducted her made sure she wouldn’t live to tell the tale. Elias’s body was found on a back road in the early hours of the morning by a forestry worker whose truck ran into the body, strategically placed in the middle of the road just round a blind bend near the novelist’s estate in County Wicklow, Ireland. This shows striking similarities to one of the body dumps in Death on Arrival, Elias’s first novel which was turned into an Oscar-winning vehicle for the luscious Michelle Pfeiffer. And according to MBTH’s sources in the County Wicklow coroner’s office, Elias suffered injuries that have much in common with the description of what happened to the victims in that novel, only in her case they were postmortem, rather than while she was still alive. Maybe her killer was more squeamish than his victim. Here’s the template from the book: