Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

“Point taken.” She smiled and raised her hands palms outwards in a placatory gesture. “It’s cool, Steve. I understand.”

“I don’t mean to teach you to suck eggs.”

Terry shook her head. “Hey, you’ve never worked with me before, how are you to know I’m not some ditzy blonde?” She widened her eyes, her mobile face a question.

Steve’s turn to grin. “Fiona doesn’t hate me that much. OK, here’s what I’ve got for you. Six rapes and four serious sexual assaults. As Fiona said, I want you to see if there are grounds for believing any or all of them to be linked. If you get a cluster, I’m keen to see what the geographic profile produces. If we get that far, I then want you to enter another location into the geographic profile to see what happens.”

Terry raised one eyebrow. It should have looked pretentious but somehow she avoided that. “Is the other location in the file?”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t want to influence the way you’re thinking. Once I see the results, then we’ll take it from there.”

“Fine by me. How quick do you need it?”

Steve spread his hands. “Yesterday?”

“Yesterday costs extra. But for the regular fee, you can have it tomorrow. On one condition.”

Steve tilted his head slightly, his face suspicious. “One condition?”

“You have dinner with me tomorrow.” Her smile was the calculated flirt of a woman who expects to get her own way.

Steve felt hot blood flushing his cheeks. “I have dinner with you?”

“Is it such a strange idea?”

He forced himself to cling on to his professional reserve. “I just don’t think it’s a very good one.”

“Why? You’re not married, are you?”

“No, but…”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“I’m not in the habit of mixing business and pleasure,” he said, aware as he spoke that he sounded like the kind of stuffed shirt he’d always prayed he’d never become.

“Where else do people like us meet interesting dinner companions? We don’t have to talk about work, you know,” Terry said. “I won’t quiz you about your ten greatest cases if you don’t ask me to define Piagetian theory. Come on, what have you got to lose? Even if you have a totally crap time, it’s only going to be for a few hours. And I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Pleasantly bewildered but still wary, Steve ran a hand through his dark hair. “This is all rather sudden.”

She shrugged. “Life’s too short. You’ve got to seize the moment.”

“But why me?”

“God, you lot know how to ask questions, don’t you?” Now she was laughing, even white teeth gleaming like the big bad wolf. “Because you’ve got a brain and a sense of humour, because you’re a nice-looking geezer and because you’re not a geeky psychologist. Four very good reasons. So, you going to have dinner with me, or what? It’s OK if it’s no, I can take it. I’m a big girl. And I’ll still do your analysis, no hard feelings.”

Steve shook his head, entirely disorientated by the way the meeting had deviated from his expectations. “OK, let’s do it,” he found himself saying, realizing as he spoke that the idea was genuinely exciting.

“Good call, Steve. I’ll ring you tomorrow when I’ve got something for you, OK?” She was already reaching eagerly for the file.

Understanding he was being dismissed, Steve got to his feet. “Er…about dinner? Where shall I book? What sort of food do you like?”

She shrugged. “You choose. I don’t eat meat but I love fish. And I never met a cuisine I didn’t like.”

“Why am I not surprised? Thanks, Terry.” He walked down the corridor to the flight of stairs that would take him to Fiona’s office, grinning from ear to ear. He couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. He’d been blown away by the charisma of a stranger. He’d thrown aside one of his strongest principles, and he was feeling more light-hearted than he had for months. Maybe at last his luck was on the turn.

Steve’s smile didn’t survive his encounter with Fiona. When he walked into her office, she was staring blankly at her computer screen, hands linked behind her head. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” he said blithely, settling on her sofa.

Fiona looked at him as if he’d gone mad. “It is?”

“I think so,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve just had a very interesting encounter with Terry Fowler.”

“Oh good,” Fiona said absently. “She’s very efficient. I’m sure she’ll do an excellent job for you.” Her voice tailed off and she frowned at the wall above his head.

“Earth to Fiona…Is there anybody home?”

“I’m sorry, Steve, I didn’t sleep much last night. I’m…a bit distracted.”

“You wanted to see me about something?” he reminded her.

Fiona scowled and squeezed the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb. “I know. It all made perfect sense when I left the message, but now…Well, I don’t know if I’m overreacting.”

Fiona this distracted was too unfamiliar an experience for Steve to take lightly. “Let’s hear it,” he said. “Then we can both decide.”

She nodded. “Makes as much sense as anything else. I woke up in the middle of the night. You know, the way I do sometimes. No obvious reason, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I went upstairs to surf the web for a while, and I ended up in a chat room where people were discussing the Jane Elias murder. And the general consensus seemed to be that the Garda have arrested the wrong man.”

Fiona took a deep breath. “Now, I know you have a fairly low opinion of the kind of people who hang around in news groups in the middle of the night in cyberspace, but a couple of the people who had posted actually know this guy and they’re saying he just doesn’t have what it takes to plan or to carry out so complex a scheme. Now, if the police do have the wrong man and if Jane’s murder was nothing to do with her relationship with her Garda Siochana lover, then logic suggests that the same person might have murdered Jane Elias and Drew Shand.”

“That’s reaching, Fi, and you know it. Different countries? Totally different MO and no signature that we know of?”

“There is a signature of sorts, Steve. Both Drew and Jane were award-winning authors who wrote serial killer thrillers that have been successfully adapted for TV or film. And they were both killed in ways that mirror deaths that are described in the very books that were adapted.” Fiona was focused now, her previous abstraction history.

“It’s not a conventional signature,” was the only protest Steve could find.

“I know. But I’ve been working another case — the Spanish one — with an unconventional signature, and I suppose that’s why I’m probably more open to the idea than I normally would be. So, humour me. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s a possibility that the two crimes have the same perpetrator.”

Steve nodded. “OK. Out of purely academic interest, let’s see where that takes us.”

“Where it takes us is that Georgia Lester is missing. Having had at least one death threat letter which, when she discovered Kit had also had one, scared her more than a little. Kit, who knows her as well as anyone, seems to think the papers are right and she’s gone to ground as some kind of bizarre publicity stunt. You said last night it’s possible she’s been abducted. Either of these may be the case. For all I know, the police are negotiating with a kidnapper as we speak. That’s something I imagine you could find out with relative ease if you were minded to. But there is another possibility.”

“I have a sinking feeling I know where you’re heading with this,” Steve said.