Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

Fiona scrolled through the subjects up for debate and clicked on Jane Elias. She came in on the middle of what seemed to be a heated exchange about the Garda Siochana. Offered the chance by the browser to backtrack on the conversation, she opted for that.

What she read gave her a physical chill in her chest. According to three separate posts, the word locally on the lane Elias murder was that the guards had arrested the wrong man, and they knew it. Allegedly, they’d been railroaded into bringing in John Patrick Regan by senior officials in the Serious Crimes Unit, in spite of the reluctance of local officers. Now, in the absence of any early forensic results linking Regan to the crime, it appeared that the local cops were getting jittery about the arrest and his lawyer was fighting for him to be set free. According to one post, everybody in Kildenny who knew John Regan was adamant that the man didn’t have the brains to organize an abduction, never mind the balls to kill a woman and mutilate her corpse.

That was the point where the discussion had degenerated into a slanging match over the police. Fiona couldn’t have cared less how good or bad the Garda Siochana were in an obscure corner of County Wicklow. She had more important things to think about.

She logged off, turned off her computer and stared at the blank screen. Regan’s arrest had been a far greater reassurance than she had been prepared to admit to Kit. Without him in the frame, the picture looked very different indeed. It wasn’t a matter of the subconscious forcing connections; it became a logical conclusion.

Normally, the murders of two people working in the same field on opposite sides of the Irish Sea would be so insignificant it would pass unnoticed. But when they were both public figures; both award-winning thriller writers; both writers whose work had been adapted successfully for film or TV; and both murdered in styles that followed elements in their work more or less slavishly, it stretched coincidence to a point where notice had to be taken.

Fiona weighed the elements of her knowledge in the balance of her experience. Yes, there were such things as copycat killers out there. And Jane Elias’s killer was as likely to be a copycat as a serial murderer at the start of his series, given the physical distance between the victims and the apparently very different manners of their death.

Fiona, however, had never liked coincidence.

She got up from her desk and ran downstairs to the spare room, where Kit’s vast library of crime fiction covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Nothing as straightforward as alphabetical order, Fiona sighed to herself.

She scanned the shelves, looking for one of Georgia’s books. The first one she found was Last Rights, the final part of a trilogy of legal thrillers she’d completed a couple of years before. Fiona turned to the inside back flap and read the author biography there.

Several of Georgia’s books had been adapted for TV, including the legal thrillers. Only one, a stand-alone psychological suspense novel whose graphic violence had shaken many of her traditional audience to the core, had been made into a movie. And Ever More Shall Be So had been a low-budget British film, made with sponsorship money from Channel 4. Fiona vaguely remembered reading about its success. Something in the film had captured the attention of a mass audience and it had become a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The haunting, ethereal theme tune of an unaccompanied boy soprano singing ‘Green Grow the Rushes-O’ as a lament, a plangent counterpoint to the nightmares of the film, might have had something to do with it. For some reason, she’d never seen it, though Kit certainly would have done.

Now all she needed was to find the book. One among two or three thousand couldn’t be so hard, could it? Methodically, Fiona made her way along the shelves, pausing whenever she encountered Georgia’s name. How the hell did he ever find anything in here, she wondered? And why was he incapable of ever throwing away a book, no matter how crap he pronounced it to be?

About halfway along the second wall, Fiona found what she was looking for. The first edition of And Ever More Shall Be So, a personal dedication on the title page in Georgia’s surprisingly neat handwriting. “To darling Kit, already il miglior fabbro. With lashings of love, Georgia Lester.” How very Georgia, Fiona thought with a sardonic smile.

Fiona turned out the light and made her way back up to her attic. She settled down on the futon, pulling the throw over her legs so she wouldn’t get cold. Then she began to turn the pages. But what she read there put all thought of normal comfort out of her mind.

Steve thrust his arm out to prevent the lift doors closing. They opened fully and he stepped in, coming face to face with DC Joanne Gibb. “Morning, Joanne,” he said.

“Morning, boss. Am I allowed to ask how the grovelling went?”

Steve pulled a face. “Let’s just say we’re heading in the right direction. Dr. Cameron is putting me in touch with one of her graduate students who will do the analysis. If I can find some money to pay for it.”

“But we could be making real progress here,” Joanne protested. “Surely Commander Telford’s going to see the sense in following up this lead?”

Steve smiled. “I think I can persuade him to share our view.” The lift shuddered to a halt at their floor. “Wish me luck. I’ll see you and Neil in my office in fifteen minutes.”

He turned down the corridor, walking past blank-faced doors until he came to his immediate superior’s office. Steve knocked and waited for the invitation to enter. Commander David Telford was sitting behind what Steve would have bet was the tidiest desk in the building. Not a single scrap of loose paper blemished its polished surface. Pens clustered in a metal holder, a pad of paper sat by the phone, and that was it. The walls were blank save for Telford’s framed commendations and his business studies degree from Aston University. “Sit down, Steve,” he said, his face stern. He was determined to obliterate from the collective memory of the Metropolitan Police the notion that anyone other than Steve Preston was to blame for the Francis Blake fiasco. Steve understood that, and knew it was the reason why Telford or Teflon, as he was known to the lower ranks continued to treat him as if he brought a bad smell into the office with him.

“Thank you, sir.” Sometimes playing the game was a killer, but Steve cared too much about catching criminals ever to consider seriously the alternative.

“Still no progress, then?” Telford’s question implied the answer he wanted to hear. He cared more about image than justice, Steve knew. Finding Susan Blanchard’s killer was not at the top of Tenon’s agenda. Better that his team never found the real killer so the world could go on thinking the Met had been cheated of Francis Blake by the trial judge rather than their own maverick operation.

“On the contrary, sir. I think we’ve opened up a new line of inquiry.” Painstakingly, Steve went through the fresh evidence about the cyclist and what Joanne’s trawl of records had produced. “Now I need budget authorization to commission a geographic profile based on this cluster of cases so we can develop viable suspects,” he concluded.

Telford frowned. “It’s all a bit tenuous, isn’t it? Nothing in the way of hard evidence, is there?”

“The problem with this case all along has been the absence of hard evidence, sir. The lack of forensics at the crime scene, the relative lack of witnesses, the lack of apparent relationship between killer and victim. It’s obvious that the killer has some experience in covering his tracks, and that suggests he’s committed sexually motivated attacks before. This is the most promising line of inquiry we’ve had since we began the investigation, sir.”