John Gardner - Never send flowers

`But nothing, James. Didn't they tell you to move carefully, to watch your back?" Her face was still pale, and there was a new, concerned, haunted look in her eyes.

`My Chief mentioned it, yes, but only in the context of the poor dead His March's employers." `Well, perhaps he was playing it down. My boss spelled it out to me. Anyone investigating the death is at risk.

If it's a one-off terrorist thing, nobody's claiming responsibility, so they could well have expected a long delay before we worked out the cause of death if we discovered it all." `And if it's some crazy, I suppose he could still be lurking around. That how it goes?" `Exactly.

We've been told to take great care. If it is a crazy, we re all still at risk. If it's terrorists, the same applies. So, yes, James, I am scared, and I'll be surprised if you don't feel something up on that mountain tomorrow.

`There's something else?" Somehow he felt that she was holding back; delaying facing the truth.

`So, what's turned up, Fredericka? They've found where the shooter holed up; we know how the girl was killed. Have the cops had any other ideas?" `She's stayed there before.

`In Interlaken?" `At the same hotel. At the Victoria-Jungfrau.

Three times previously. Each time with the same man. Once a year over the past three years." `They IDed her friend?" `No. I've seen stats of the register. Mr and Mrs March. His passport showed him as March, we have the number, and her former employers ran a check. The passport was applied for in the usual way, three years ago. You're going to love this, James, and it might make you almost as frightened as I am. It's her brother's passport. His name was David.

Bond scowled, suddenly looking up into her face. `She was an only child. That's what her service said." Fredericka smiled, and the nervous, haunted look vanished for a second, then returned. `That's what her service thought. I only saw the signal traffic, and got the documents half an hour before you arrived. It appears that she wasn't quite telling the truth. She did have a brother. An elder brother.

Black sheep of the family. He died in a hospital for the criminally insane five years ago." It was Bond's turn to look serious.

`Which hospital?" `Rampton. He'd been there since the age of twenty, and he was five years older than her.

`And..." Bond began, but the waitress was beside them again, asking about dessert. Without much enthusiasm, Fredericka ordered the cherry tart, and Bond went for the cheese board. `When in Rome,' he smiled.

She remained passive, as though the spectre of this man, David March, lay across the table between them. `It appears,' she said, `that the family moved from the North of England to Hampshire after it happened. It was a pretty big case at the time." `David March,' Bond mused, the name hung on the lip of his memory, but he could not quite get to grips with the man or his crime.

`He killed five girls, in the North of England,' she said, her voice calm now. `At the time, the Press drew some sort of parallel between March and ... oh, who were they? Monsters? The Moors Murderers?" I.

`Brady and Hindley, yes. Kidnapped and abused children, then killed and buried them on the moors above Manchester. Sure, a cause celebre. Brady's in a secure facility for the criminal insane now, and Hindley's still in jail. That case broke, oh,. some time in the early sixties ... An appalling business.

Terrible ... yes, monstrous.

`Well, David March made those two look like good fairies. He did his particular thing in the early seventies. I read the file while I was waiting for you to land. He was quiet, unassuming, polite, an undergraduate at Oxford, reading law. The psychiatrists' reports are interesting; the details of the killings are ... Well, I'd prefer that you read them for yourself, James. I was scared before, but after reading what her brother did. ..` `So we have a whole series of bogeymen terrorists, a lone random crazy, and a victim whose brother ...` He stopped as the name David March suddenly connected with a jigsaw puzzle in his head. `That David March?" He looked at her, knowing his eyes had widened. `The one who kept the heads?" She gave a fast little nod. `See for yourself.

Fredericka reached for the leather shoulder bag, but Bond shook his head.

`No, when we get there. I'll read it then. How in heaven's name?

I mean how didn't her people unearth it during her positive vetting?" `How indeed? I rather gather there're a lot of red faces in London.

She didn't even change her name. Nobody in their right mind should have given her a sensitive job with that family skeleton in her closet." `It was her brother, not her." `Read what the shrinks have to say before you make statements like that. Lord, James, think about it.

If you remember only small details of the case, he was an horrific, walking, talking, living monster. Yet, two years after his death, sweet little Laura, his sister, lets someone forge a passport with his birth details. What's that make her? To allow someone to use his name, his details. Read it, James. Please just read it." She had reached down and taken a heavy folder from out of the bag just as the waitress came over to ask if they would like to take coffee. They could use the residents' lounge, she said.

So it was, amidst the normal, pleasant chatter of guests enjoying holidays, or passing through on business, that Bond glanced at Fredericka, who sat beside him, impassive, as he opened the folder and began to read about Laura March's brother.

He was only two paragraphs into the file when the hair on the back of his neck bristled, and rose in fear.

CHAPTER FOUR

BROTHER DAVID

He had barely read the first four paragraphs before the whole story came flooding back. At least the facts read in the newspapers at the time returned vividly. Some of it had been lurid, sensationally reported, with the usual sensitivity of ghoulish newspaper men, but he was certain that, even with I.

the gruesome highlights which became public knowledge after the trial, there were still some things that had been left out. He recalled talking, some years before, to a senior police officer who had assisted in identifying the body of a child buried in dense woodland and found some six months after her murder.

`We don't even bring some things out in court,' the detective had said. `I identified that child's fingerprints certainly, but they had to remove the hands and bring them down to London. I never saw the poor kid's body." The bulk of the file was a detailed and annotated report on the case by the police officer in charge, a Detective Superintendent Richard Seymour, and, even though the lengthy document was couched in official police jargon, the language did nothing to reduce the sense of blind horror.

The events took place in the town of Preston around thirty-five miles north-west of Manchester deep in the old cottonmill country.

Bond thought of grey granite buildings, and the uncompromising, no-nonsense though cheerful people of Lancashire who were the actors in this story of terror.

When Christine Wright, of 33 Albert Road, Preston, went missing, just before Christmas 1971

her name was simply added to the missing persons file. She was twenty-two, blonde, very pretty and at constant odds with her parents who, she was always telling her friends, still treated her like a child. The file did pass across Superintendent Seymour's desk, but all the indications were that young Christine had run off: she was always talking about getting away, living on her own, or finding Mr Wright-this last was, naturally, a little running joke with her friends. Later it would smack of grim gallows humour.

She did tell her closest confidante-one Jessie Styles, who worked with her at the National Westminster Bank that she had met someone truly exciting. The report gave the friend's exact words: `Chrissy said she thought this lad was right for her. She wouldn't talk much about it. Said he was a bit of a toff, had money. Said it could lead to a new life. They were in love, but then Chrissy was always in love with the latest boyfriend. The difference this time was that she didn't give me any details. Usually she'd have photographs. Tell me everything. She wouldn't even tell me the name of this one." In the early spring of 1972, a pair of hikers literally stumbled over what was left of the missing girl. Christine Wright was identified by her fingerprints-originally, the police had gone through the motions by taking prints from her room at her parents' house in Albert Road.