McDermid, Val: Trick of the Dark

Lisa sipped her drink, studying Charlie over the rim of the white plastic cup, dark eyebrows raised in amused arcs. 'I'm not. But I do have friends who are familiar with my interest in the way people's minds work. I thought it was you this morning, but I made some checks at lunchtime to be certain.'

'It's a free country.'

Lisa laughed. 'Don't be ridiculous. You're here to do a demolition job. You think I'm exploiting gullibility and weakness for profit. Though quite how it ties in with offender profiling, I'm not sure.'

Bang to rights, Charlie thought. 'I did think that. I don't now. As to the professional relevance — manipulation of others is how a lot of serial offenders get away with things for so long.' She got up and moved towards the door. 'It's been an interesting day. But I think it's probably best if I leave.'

'I should be angry with you, Dr Flint. But for some reason I'm not. You really don't have to go.' The words were innocuous enough; the tone was not.

Charlie shook her head. 'I think it's best if I do. I don't want to put you off your stride.'

'You're probably right. Knowing that you know that I know who you are would alter the dynamic in the room.' Lisa dug a card out of the pocket of her loose trousers. 'I seem to have confounded your expectations, which means this has been a waste of your time.' She smiled. 'Let me make it up to you sometime. I really do think we might have some interesting things to share. Here's my card. Let's stay in touch.'

As she walked back to her hotel room, Charlie tried to unravel the nuances in Lisa's voice, but she could never be quite sure that what she thought she'd heard had really been there. Had Lisa been flirting? Was it some kind of professional challenge? Or did she simply enjoy the cat-and-mouse game? Whatever it was, Charlie was snagged on the hook of Lisa's charm.

Puzzling over the exact meaning of Lisa's words had become a familiar experience for Charlie. Since that first encounter the ether had hummed with their electronic interchanges, the professional usually making way for the personal exchanges of two people building a connection.

In Charlie's experience, clinical psychiatrists fell into two groups. The ones who deliberately chose never to question anything about themselves and the ones who subjected every aspect of their lives to the same scrutiny they applied to their patients. Charlie often wished she was not doomed to membership of the 'analyse this' crew. But it went some way to explaining her fascination with Lisa. The more inscrutable the woman's communications, the more Charlie yearned to unpick their meaning. What she was clear about was that they were flirting. Flirting with each other, flirting with ideas, flirting with danger.

Perhaps you should consider what your correspondent has failed to send you? I always like the answer that's not there… What exactly did Lisa mean by that, Charlie wondered, staring at her computer screen. Was she simply referring to the newspaper cuttings, or was this another instance of oblique suggestiveness? The way Lisa made her feel was like a family of termites burrowing through the solid foundation of her relationship with Maria. Charlie knew she had no business playing this risky game, but every time she resolved to leave it alone, there would be a text or an email demanding her attention and requiring a response. She was as hopeless as some of her patients. Unable to resist what she knew was bad for her. She couldn't even be sure the woman was a lesbian. Flirtation and obliquity might just be her natural mode. So little of their communication had been face to face and so much of it had been a teasing joust. Maybe Charlie was completely off the mark. Really, for all she knew, Lisa could be straight. This whole mess could be nothing more than pitiful wishful thinking. With a despairing moan, Charlie turned back to the contents of the envelope.

Clearly, the clippings were only a selection of what had been published in the media. Could it be that the answer lay in the missing stories? Impatiently, she called up Google News and typed in the name of the victim. In a fraction of a second, the search turned up a list of everything the media had produced about the murder of Philip Carling. There were dozens of them, even allowing for Google's winnowing-out of similar stories.

There were other, more urgent, calls on Charlie's time. Reviving her dying career, for one. But sometimes distraction was irresistible. Charlie called up the first story, determined to work through them methodically. The first revelation came in the second story she accessed, a Daily Telegraph article that referred to Dr Magda Newsam. Shocked, Charlie realised that the widowed bride was no stranger to her. The name Magdalene Carling had meant nothing. But the alternate identity jolted Charlie from academic enthusiasm to dismay. She was appalled that she had somehow failed to register that the woman at the heart of this tragedy was someone she had once known. Suddenly, things began to make sense.

'Poor kid,' she said softly, pity in her voice. The realisation of Magda's place in the murder trial made one thing incontrovertible. Whoever had sent the mysterious package had almost certainly been part of college life all those years ago when Charlie had been an undergraduate, a pupil of Magda's mother Corinna and an occasional babysitter of her children. Was it Corinna Newsam herself, or had someone else sent the photocopies? And still the question remained: why?

Methodical as ever, Charlie continued through the archive material. She had almost come to the end when a photograph downloaded to her screen, appearing one slice at a time from the top down. The woman it revealed had the kind of beauty that made people stare. Even a snatched newspaper shot left no room for doubt on that score. Dark blonde hair and apparently perfect skin, the regular features of a fashion model, a mouth whose fullness hinted at sensuality. 'Wow,' Charlie said, admiring the shapely figure and undeniably good legs that gradually appeared.

The caption revealed that this stunning woman in the foreground of the photograph was Philip Carling's widow Magdalene. 'Look how you turned out, Maggot,' she said, amazed at this trick of the genes. But as she studied the wider picture, Charlie realised she needed no caption to recognise the woman at Magda's elbow. Age had not withered Jay Macallan Stewart's fine-boned beauty, nor custom staled her air of dashing danger.

Although it created more questions than it answered, Charlie felt sure she had solved the basic problem of the source of the cuttings. 'If my daughter was hanging out with Jay Stewart, I'd be doing something about it,' she said. And with a few keystrokes, she was in her email program. Subject: More Questions Than Answers

Date: 23 March 2010 15:35:26 GMT

From: cflint@mancit.ac.uk

To: lisak@arbiter.com

I followed your advice. It was obvious I hadn't been sent all the press coverage, so I Googled news to see if I could figure out what was missing. Lo and behold, I discovered almost instantly that none of the versions I had been sent named the widow appropriately. Her real identity is not , it's . AKA Maggot, or at least it used to be when she was 10 and I was 21 and used to babysit her and her siblings. She's the eldest daughter of Corinna Newsam, the junior philosophy fellow at Schollie's who taught me and regularly used me as a babysitter until my final-year obsession with getting a decent degree and still managing to have some fun put a stop to it. Anyway, we've stayed in Christmas card touch since, though not so close that she mentioned Magda's involvement in this case.

Reading on, I came across a photo of Magda — who has grown into a drop-dead gorgeous beauty in the Princess Diana mould. And standing behind her was somebody else I recognised. She used to be plain Jay Stewart but now the world knows her as Jay Macallan Stewart. Dotcom millionaire and bestselling misery memoir author. Now she's the boss of 24/7, the web-based personalised travel guides. You might have seen her on White Knight , she appears sometimes in the guest investor slot. She was a couple of years behind me at Schollie's, but her notoriety was sufficient to overcome that handicap. Even among the dykes of Brighton, the stories about Jay Stewart galloped along the grapevine.