Killing the Shadows (2000) (2 page)

From:
Kit Martin [[email protected]]

To:
Fiona Cameron [[email protected]]

Subject:
Dinner tonight

Hope you’ve had a good day on the hill. I’ve been productive, 2,500 words by teatime.

Things turned out at the Bailey just like you said they would. Trust that female intuition! (only joking, I know yours was a considered judgement based on weighing up all the scientific evidence…) Anyway, I reckoned Steve would need cheering up, so I’ve arranged to meet him for dinner. We’re going to St. John’s in Clerkenwell to eat lots of dead animal so you probably don’t fancy joining us, but if you want to, that’d be great. If not, I made a salmon and asparagus ri sotto for lunch, and there’s plenty left over in the fridge for you for dinner. Love you.

Fiona smiled. Typical Kit. As long as everyone was fed, nothing too terrible could go wrong with the world. She wasn’t surprised Steve needed cheering up. No police officer relished watching a case fall apart, especially one that had such a high public profile as the Hampstead Heath murder. But for Detective Superintendent Steve Preston, the collapse of this particular case would have left a more bitter taste than most. Fiona knew only too well how much had been at stake in this prosecution, and while she felt personal sympathy for Steve, all she felt for the Metropolitan Police was that it served them bloody well right.

She clicked open the next message, having saved the most intriguing for last.

From:
Salvador Berrocal [[email protected]]

To:
Dr. Fiona Cameron [fcameron@ psych.ulon.ac.uk]

Subject:
Consultation request

Dear Dr. Cameron,

I am a Major in the plain-clothes division of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia based in Madrid. I am in charge of many homicide inquiries. Your name has been given to me by a colleague at New Scotland Yard as an expert in crime linkage and geographic profiling. Please forgive the intrusion of contacting you so directly. I am writing to ask if you would do us the courtesy of providing your services to consult in a matter of great urgency. In Spain we have a little experience with serial killers and so we have no psychological experts to work with policemen.

In Toledo have been two murders inside three weeks and we think they are the crimes of one man. But it is wholly not obvious that they are connected and we need a different expertise to assist us with the analysis of these crimes. I understand that you have experience in the area of crime analysis and linkage, and this would be of great use to us, I think.

I wish to know if in principle you are willing to help us with resolving these murders. You may be assured of proper remuneration for this consultation if you will be our assistant.

I look forward to hearing your response.

Respectfully,

Major Salvador Berrocal.

Cuerpo Nacional de Policia.

Fiona folded her arms and stared at the screen. She knew that behind this cautious request lay a pair of bodies that had almost certainly been mutilated and probably tortured before death. There was likely to be some element of sexual violation in the attacks. She could assume this with some degree of certainty, for police forces were well capable of dealing with routine murders without calling on the specialist help that only she and a handful of others could be relied on to provide. When new acquaintances discovered this aspect of Fiona’s work, they usually shuddered and asked how she could bear to be involved in such appalling cases.

Her typical response was to shrug and say, “Somebody has to do it. Better it’s somebody like me who knows what she’s doing. Nobody can bring back the dead but sometimes it’s possible to prevent more of the living joining them.”

It was, she knew, a glib riposte, carefully calculated to deflect further questioning. The truth was she hated the inevitable confrontation with violent death that her work with various police forces had brought into her life, not least because of the memories it stirred in her. She knew more about what could be inflicted on the human body, more about the sufferings the spirit could sustain than she had ever wished to. But such exposure was inescapable and because it always exacted a heavy toll from her, she only ever accepted a new assignment when she felt sufficiently recovered from her last direct encounter with the victims of a serial killer.

It had been almost four months since Fiona had worked a murder series. A man had killed four prostitutes in Merseyside over a period of eighteen months. Thanks in part to the data analysis that Fiona and one of her graduate students had completed, the police had been able to narrow down their pool of suspects to the point where forensic detection could be applied. Now they had a man in custody charged with three of the four killings, and thanks to DNA matches they were reasonably sure of a conviction.

Since then, her only police consultation project had been a long-term study of recidivist burglars with the Swedish Police. It was, she thought, time to get her hands dirty again. She hit the reply key.

From:
Fiona Cameron [[email protected]]

To:
Salvador Berrocal [[email protected]]

Subject:
Re: Consultation request

Dear Major Berrocal,

Thank you for your invitation to act as consultant to the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia. In principle, I am willing to consider your request favourably. However, before I can be certain that I can be of use to you, I need more detail than you have provided in your e–mail. Ideally, I would like to see an outline of the circumstances of both murders, a digest of the pathology reports and any witness statements. I am reasonably competent in written Spanish, so in the interests of speed, you need not have these documents translated for my benefit. Of course, any communications I receive from you will be treated in complete confidence.

For the sake of security, I suggest you fax these documents to my home.

Fiona typed in the details of her home fax and phone then sent the e–mail. At best, she’d be able to contribute to the prevention of more murders and acquire useful data for her researches in the process. At worst, she’d have a valid excuse for staying out of the way of the fallout from the Hampstead Heath trial collapse. Someone or rather a couple of Spanish someones had paid a high price to keep Candid Cameron out of the headlines.

F
iona walked through the door to the sound of REM telling her that nobody loved a sad professor. As usual, Kit had stacked up half a dozen CDs in the player in his study, hit the random button and walked out the door while there were still hours of playing time left. He couldn’t abide silence. She had learned this early on in their relationship, when she’d taken him walking in her beloved Derbyshire and had been horrified to watch him filling his backpack with cassettes for his Walkman. More than once, she’d come home to an empty house where music spilled out of Kit’s study, the TV in the living room blared like a bull and the radio in the kitchen added a mad counterpoint to the racket. The louder the din, the easier he seemed to find it to escape into his own imagined universe. For Fiona, who needed silence in order to concentrate on anything vaguely creative, it was an incomprehensible paradox.

When they’d first talked about living together, Fiona had insisted that whatever property they bought, it had to be capable of providing her with a quiet space to work in. They’d ended up with a tall thin house in Dartmouth Park whose previous owner had been a rock musician. He’d converted the attic into a soundproof studio that provided Fiona with the perfect eyrie to escape Kit’s background racket. It was even big enough to allow her to install a futon for those nights when Kit was up against a deadline and needed to write into the early hours of the morning. Sometimes she felt deeply sorry for their long-suffering neighbours. They must dread February when, invariably, the end of a book and late-night Radiohead loomed.

Fiona dropped her bags and went into Kit’s ground-floor study to turn off the music. Blessed silence fell like balm on her head. She continued upstairs, stopping off in their bedroom to shuck off her walking gear and pull on her house clothes She trudged up the remaining two flights to her office, feeling the hills in the pull of her leg muscles. The first thing she registered was the flashing light of the answering machine. Fifteen messages. She’d put money on them all being from journalists, and she wasn’t in the mood to listen to them, never mind to respond. This was one occasion where she was absolute in her determination not to provide a single quote that could be twisted to suit someone else’s agenda.

Leaving her laptop by the desk, Fiona noticed that Major Berrocal hadn’t wasted any time. A pile of paper lay accusingly in the fax tray. That she couldn’t ignore. Stifling a sigh, she picked it up, automatically straightening the edges, and headed back downstairs.

As Kit had promised, her dinner sat in the fridge. She wondered fleetingly how many of his fans would credit that the man who created scenes of graphic violence that gave critics nightmares was the same creature whose idea of relaxation after a hard day’s writing was to cook gourmet food for his lover. They’d probably prefer to believe he spent his evenings on Hampstead Heath, biting the heads off small furry animals. Smiling at the thought, Fiona poured herself a glass of cold Sauvignon while she waited for the ri sotto to heat up, then settled down at the kitchen table with the Spanish fax and a pencil. Glancing at the clock, she decided to catch the news headlines before she began the chore of deciphering foreign police reports.

The theme music of the late evening news thundered out its familiar fanfare. The camera zoomed in on the solemn face of the news reader:

Good evening. The headlines tonight. The man accused of the Hampstead Heath murder walks free after a judge accuses the police of entrapment.

Top item, Fiona noted without surprise.

Middle East peace talks are on the verge of breakdown in spite of a personal intervention by the US President. And the rouble tumbles as fresh scandal hits Russia’s banking system.

The screen behind the news reader head changed from the programme logo to a shot of the exterior of the Central Criminal Court.

At the Old Bailey today, the man accused of the savage rape and murder of Susan Blanchard was freed on the order of the trial judge. Mrs. Justice Mary Delancey said there was no doubt that the Metropolitan Police had entrapped Francis Blake in an operation which she described as ‘little short of a witch-hunt’. In spite of the lack of any solid evidence against Mr. Blake, she said, they had decided that he was the killer. Over to our Home Affairs Correspondent, Danielle Rutherford, who was in court today.

A woman in her thirties with mouse-brown hair tangled by the wind gazed earnestly at the camera.

There were angry scenes in court today as Mrs. Justice Delancey ordered the release of Francis Blake. The family of Susan Blanchard, who was raped and murdered as she walked on Hampstead Heath with her twin babies, were outraged at the judge’s decision and at Blake’s obvious jubilation in the dock.

But the judge was unmoved by their protests, saving her condemnation for the Metropolitan Police whose methods she described as an affront to civilized democracy. Acting on the advice of a psychological profiler, the police had set up a sting using an attractive female detective in an attempt to win Mr. Blake’s affections and to lure him into confessing to the murder. The sting, which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds of the police operations budget and lasted for almost three months, did not lead to a direct confession, but police believed they had obtained sufficient evidence to bring Mr. Blake to trial.

The defence argued that whatever Mr. Blake had said had been at the instigation of the female detective and had been calculated to impress the personality she had falsely projected. And this view was upheld by the judge. After his release, Mr. Blake, who has spent eight months in prison on remand, announced he would be seeking compensation.

The picture changed, revealing a stocky man in his late twenties with cropped black hair and deep-set dark eyes. A forest of microphones and hand-held tape recorders blossomed in front of his white shirt and charcoal suit. His voice was surprisingly cultivated and he glanced down frequently at a piece of paper in his hands.

I have always protested my innocence of the murder of Susan Blanchard, and today I have been vindicated by a court of law. But I have paid a terrible price. I have lost my job, my home, my girlfriend and my reputation. I am an innocent man, but I have spent eight months behind bars. I will be suing the Metropolitan Police for false imprisonment and for compensation. And I sincerely hope they will think twice before they set about framing another innocent man.

Then he looked up, his eyes blazing anger and hatred. Fiona shivered involuntarily.

The picture changed again. A tall man in a crumpled grey suit flanked by a pair of stony-faced men in raincoats walked towards the camera, head down, mouth drawn into a thin line. The reporter’s voice said:

The police officer in charge of the case, Detective Superintendent Steve Preston, refused to comment on Blake’s release. In a later statement, New Scotland Yard announced they were not actively seeking anyone else in connection with Susan Blanchard’s murder. This is Danielle Rutherford at the Old Bailey.

Back in the studio, the news reader announced that there would be an in-depth look at the background to the case after the break. Fiona turned off the TV. She had no need of their potted version of the facts. There were powerful reasons why she would never forget the rape and murder of Susan Blanchard. It wasn’t the graphic police photographs of the body or the pathologist’s report or her knowledge as a local resident of the scene of the crime, a mere twenty-minute walk from her own front door, although all of these had been terrible enough. Nor was it the brutality of a killer who had violated and stabbed a young mother in full view of her eighteen-month-old twin sons.