Steve shook his head, a feeling of deep gratification surging through him. “No. Your program thinks that whoever killed Susan Blanchard is the same man who committed four rapes and two serious sexual assaults in the course of the previous two years. And I have to tell you that from where I’m sitting, that’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.”
Terry gave him the grin he was beginning to recognize as a marker that he was about to be challenged. “Yeah right. You have a well weird take on the world, Steve. Not a lot of people think a serial rapist turned killer falls into the good-news category. You should get out more.”
“I thought you were already taking steps to rectify that,” he said, returning the smile.
“It’s a dirty job, saving the filth, but somebody’s got to do it,” she said flippantly. “So where are we going?”
“There’s a new brasserie opened in Clerkenwell. The chef trained with Marco Pierre White and he specializes in fish. I managed to get a cancellation for seven-thirty. How does that sound?”
“Sounds cool.”
For a brief moment, Steve thought about offering to pick her up, but he knew he was unlikely to have the time. He didn’t want to start letting her down so soon. If things worked out between them, his job would provide plenty of opportunities for dislocated social engagements in the future. Besides, he didn’t want to appear the pushover he secretly knew himself to be. Instead, he scribbled the name and address of the restaurant on a piece of scrap paper. “I’ll see you there.” He stood up. “I’ve got to get back to the Yard and get my team working on this. Can you give me a printout of the map?”
Terry turned back to her computer. “You want a blow-up of the red areas?” she asked.
“Please.”
“You need a written report?” she asked.
“Might as well get my money’s worth,” Steve said.
“Fax or e–mail?”
“Both, if you don’t mind.”
“Be with you by the end of the morning.” Terry winked. “See you tonight.”
Steve nodded and walked to the door. As he turned to leave, she blew him a kiss. The blush lasted all the way down the stairs. So did the smile. Terry Fowler had done more than waken his dormant case from its slumber. She’d wiped all his fear for Kit from his mind for as long as he’d been with her. And that was worth far, far more than the Metropolitan Police could ever imagine paying her.
Back at the Yard, Steve summoned Joanne into his office. Neil was busy watching Francis Blake, and John was off duty, so his resources were minimal, in spite of the new possibilities that Terry’s study had produced.
Steve tossed the maps across the table to her, unable to keep his exultation off his face. “Looks like we’re on the way to somewhere at last. Geographic profile of your rapes. When the Susan Blanchard murder was factored into the analysis, the central red area didn’t change at all.”
Joanne looked up, the excitement sparkling in her eyes. “That’s brilliant. Wow! So, what do you want me to do?”
“I’m afraid it’s time for drudgery. Identify the streets outlined in red—and one street either side, for the sake of my peace of mind and get the electoral roll.”
Joanne sighed. “And go through the electoral roll checking it against CROs?”
“Unless you can think of a better way of doing it.”
“When I rule the world, they’ll organize the criminal records database so you can search it with any one of a dozen parameters,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m on it.”
“Thanks, Joanne. Oh, and thanks for the restaurant tip.”
She raised her eyebrows. “I hope you enjoy it.”
Steve grinned. “I fully intend to.”
Joanne turned on her way out of the door. “If you get there, of course. I mean, if I get lucky, we could all be checking out a new number one suspect this evening. Right, sir?”
“Get lucky, Jo. But try not to get lucky before tomorrow morning if you want to remain my favourite DC.”
After she left, Steve stared at the closed door, feeling the buzz in his veins that came from the knowledge that at last they might be only hours from a lucky break. Thinking of lucky breaks reminded him that there had been a message on his desk asking him to ring Sarah Duvall.
Part of him dreaded the call. If Georgia Lester had been found dead, he wanted to put off the knowledge and its implications for as long as possible. On the other hand, it was feasible that she’d turned up alive. Steve reached out and punched in Sarah’s number.
Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13⁄4599
Azoqf tqkru zpsqa dsumx qefqd edqym uzeyk xurqe sauzs fasqf mxaft mdpqd. Ftqkx xtmhq faefm dfeqq uzsft qbmff qdzft qzuze bufqa rftqp gynet ufbmp pke.
Once they find Georgia tester’s remains, my life’s going to get a lot harder. They’ll have to start seeing the pattern then. But it’ll take them a day or two to go official with it. They won’t want to admit what’s going on because that’ll cause a panic.
So I need to hit my next target fast, while he’s unsuspecting. But I’ve got to be careful not to rush things. Patience, that’s the secret. Never snatch at half a chance. Never lose your cool. Just sit it out. Even when the waiting’s hard and bitter.
Take the courier’s uniform. I knew right from the beginning what I needed to get Kit Martin. But I had no idea how I was going to lay my hands on it. Then the gods smiled. I was in the launderette one evening, watching my clothes tumble around in the washer. There was only one other man there, and when he dragged out his damp clothes and stuffed them in the drier, I couldn’t miss the logo of Capital City Couriers blazing across the dark-blue drill jacket. And there were matching trousers. Pure manna from heaven.
After he dropped some tokens in the slot, he looked at his watch and headed across the road to the local boozer. I waited a few minutes, and then loaded the courier’s entire wash into my holdall. Piece of piss.
I sat and waited for my wash to finish, cool as a cucumber. Ten minutes later, I was walking back to my flat with my wet laundry on top of his. The trousers needed taking up, and the jacket’s a bit tight on the shoulders, but that really doesn’t matter. It’s not like I’ll be wearing it for long.
Just long enough to convince Kit Martin to open his front door to Postman Pat.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Fiona looked at the clock on her office wall. Breakfast that morning had been tense, in spite of both their efforts to maintain something like normal life in the face of the fear that flickered below the surface. She had extracted an assurance from Kit that he wouldn’t open the door to strangers, nor would he go out alone, not even for his usual lunchtime walk on the Heath. She could see he was already chafing under these restrictions, but at least he could salvage his pride by telling himself he was doing it to mollify Fiona rather than out of cowardice.
The worst part of it was the not knowing what was going on. She almost wished she had been able to be sanguine about Steve’s refusal to offer Kit any formal protection. At least then they’d be in communication and she would be aware of how the investigation was progressing. But she couldn’t bring herself to forgive his failure to stick his neck out for the sake of friendship. So she would somehow have to deal with her unaccustomed ignorance.
She glanced at the clock again. This was pointless. She was achieving nothing sitting here. The paper she was supposed to be revising before submitting it for publication stared accusingly at her from the computer screen, as neglected as a piece of waste ground In her heart, Fiona knew she couldn’t concentrate in the office. If she took the paper home, she could at least hope to get the work done there. Nothing would happen to Kit while they were in the house together.
The decision made, Fiona was taking her jacket off its peg when her phone rang. She resisted the temptation to ignore it and crossed the office to pick it up on the fourth ring. “Hello, Fiona Cameron,” she said.
“Dr. Cameron? This is Victoria Green from the Mail. I wonder if you could spar
e me a few minutes?”
“I don’t think so.”
“If I could just explain what it’s about?” The journalist’s voice was warm and ingratiating.
“There’s no point, because I’m not interested. If you bother to look at your cuttings library, you’ll see I don’t do interviews.”
“It’s not an interview we want,” Green said quickly. “We’d like you to write an article for us. I know you write articles, I’ve read you in Applied Psychology Journal.”
“You read APJ?” Fiona said, her surprise holding her back from putting the phone down.
“I have a degree in psychology. I’ve read your work on crime linkage. That’s how I knew you were the best person to talk to about writing an article for us.”
“I don’t think so,” Fiona reiterated.
“You see,” Green continued undaunted, “I’ve got a theory that Drew Shand and Jane Elias were murdered by the same person. And I think Georgia Lester might be the next victim. I’d like you to apply your crime linkage work to these cases to see if I’m right.”
Fiona replaced the receiver without responding. The word was out. It wouldn’t be long before others jumped on Victoria Green’s bandwagon. If she’d had any doubts about going home to Kit, they had ended with the phone call.
The man with the face like a chicken shrugged. “Meat’s meat, innit? Once it’s skinned and off the bone, your human flesh isn’t going to look much different from a piece of beef or venison.”
Sarah Duvall sighed. “I appreciate that.”
“And it’s huge, the market. I can’t begin to count the number of fridges and chill cabinets and freezers in that place. It’s not like walking into your local butcher’s shop, you know. There’s twenty-three trading units in the East Building and another twenty-one in the West.” His dark eyes glittered and his beaky nose twitched in a sniff.
Sergeant Ron Daniels smiled benevolently at the small man. Working as officer in charge of the Smithfield Market policing team, he’d got to know Darren Green, the traders’ representative, over a period of years. He knew that behind his aggression was a reasonable man, provided he was accorded sufficient respect. “Nobody appreciates that more than me, Darren. We’ve got a big job on our hands and that’s why we’ve come to you.”
Duvall turned to the Home Office pathologist. “Professor Blackett, what’s your take on this?”
The balding, middle-aged man sitting behind her looked up from his notebook and frowned. “It is problematic, as Mr. Green points out. But on your suggestion, I read the relevant section of Georgia Lester’s book. And if we’re dealing with a copycat killer, then the cuts of meat he would end up with are going to vary from the standard butchery cuts in several key details.”
“It’s still just going to look like meat, though, innit.” Darren Green insisted.
Tom Blackett shook his head. “Trust me, we can spot the difference.” He flicked his pad over to a clean page and began to draw. “Human beings are bipeds, not quadrupeds. Our shoulders and our upper leg muscles are very different from those of a cow or a deer. Particularly the leg. If you take a transverse section through the middle of the thigh, taking off the head of the femur, which is far too obvious to leave in place…” He pointed to the rough sketch he’d made. Darren Green leaned over and looked suspiciously at it. “You’ve got the rounded outline of the shaft of the femur here. In front of it, you’ve got the anterior group of muscles, the rectus fe moris and the vasti. Behind it you’ve got the posterior group, the adduct or magnus and the hamstrings. And here, on the inside, you’ve got the medial group of muscles, which is where most of the blood vessels and nerves are also situated. The chances are you’re also going to have a lot more fat than on the average animal carcass.”
Green’s face broke into a smile as understanding dawned. “Right,” he said. “That arrangement of meat, it’s nothing like what you’d get on a leg of beef or venison.”
“And of course, a joint of human beef is going to be a lot smaller than the corresponding cut from a cow or a deer,” Blackett continued. “Which is something any butcher would recognize at once, I presume?”
“I dare say,” Green said cautiously. “But even if a group of us do help you out with this search, it’s still going to take forever to cover the ground. We’ll never get it done and dusted before the morning’s trading begins. Don’t forget, it’s not like a shop that opens at nine o’clock. We do most of our business between four and seven in the morning.”
“If we were talking about searching the whole market, I’d have to agree with you, Mr. Green,” Duvall said. “But we do have information that will narrow the targets down considerably. We’re looking for freezers that are not in everyday use. Ones that are for more long-term storage. Probably ones that are locked up. That’s why we need the full cooperation of your members. We don’t want to have to go around breaking into their property. So what I need you to do is to contact everyone who has a unit in the market and ask them to make sure they’ll have staff on the spot tonight who can give us access to all their storage. And that they’ll be there all night if need be.”
“Bloody hell,” Green protested. “That’s a tall order.”
“If you don’t have the resources to do it, I can second some of the market police officers to you. But it has to be done,” Duvall said, her voice adamant as her face was implacable.
“They’re not going to like this,” he complained.
Daniels took over. “We’re not doing this for fun, Darren. This is a very serious matter.”
“That’s right,” Duvall said grimly. “Now, I need you and your volunteers at Snow Hill police station for nine o’clock so Professor Blackett can give you a full briefing on what you’ll be looking for, and so you can be assigned to the officers you’ll be assisting. I intend to commence operations at ten precisely. I have no desire to disrupt your night’s trading. But that depends on you and your members. I suggest you get on with it.” The smile on her lips did nothing to diminish the force of the command. With muttered complaints, Green left the others.
“What do you think, Ron? Will it work?” Duvall asked.
The big man nodded. “I think you’ll get all the cooperation you need. I’ll have a word with Darren, make sure he lets people know that the traders aren’t under any suspicion at this point.”
Duvall nodded. “You seem very confident that you can spot what we’re after, Professor,” she said.
“If I’d sounded as dubious as I feel, your Mr. Green would have been as obstructive as possible. It’s not easy to identify human flesh by sight, Chief Inspector. It’s simple enough to run tests to confirm it once we have something suspicious, but whether we find anything depends entirely on how good your killer is.” Blackett paused, then raised his eyebrows. “Always providing he exists.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Detective Constable Neil McCartney was tired. Watching Francis Blake for twelve hours a day was a killer assignment, in no small part because the man led such a bloody boring life. Sometimes he wouldn’t see hide nor hair of his target for the whole shift. At least Neil had swapped over on to days, ten till ten, which was slightly less desperate than the long nights when all Blake seemed to do was watch videos and sleep. But Neil knew this was only a brief respite. With Joanne stuck in the office bashing the computer, it wouldn’t be long before John was hassling to get the day shift again. It wasn’t unreasonable he had a wife and young kids who didn’t want to be quiet all day because daddy was sleeping.
That could have been his life, Neil thought with an edge of sourness. If he hadn’t been stupid enough to choose the wrong woman. He’d met Kim on the job. She was bouncy and vivacious, the life and soul of every party. Not the sort he’d normally have gone for, being a quiet sort of bloke, really. He’d thought the looks he got were envy. It was only a long time later that he realised they were pity. He was her alibi for her affair with one of the custody sergeants, the perfect distraction to fool the man’s w
ife at every police function. And the best possible alibi was marriage.
At first, his bitterness had been turned on himself. But there was no point in being sour about Kim; she was the woman she was. So his search for somewhere to put the blame had ended with the job.
He could so easily have turned into another rancorous copper, taking out his spite on those he came into contact with professionally. But the transfer he’d sought had taken him into plain clothes and on to Steve Preston’s team. And that had saved him. It had reminded him of why he’d joined the police in the first place. Putting villains away, that was what it was all about, and to hell with the office game-playing. That was how Steve ran his squad, and officers who couldn’t live with that didn’t last long.
So now Neil’s loyalty, first and last, lay with his boss. That was why, however tedious the surveillance got, he was prepared to stick it out. The fiasco of Francis Blake’s entrapment and subsequent trial had only stiffened his resolve. That was what happened when politics got in the way of policing, and he was as determined as his boss to set the record straight and catch Susan Blanchard’s killer. So he stifled his doubts about the point of what he was doing and stuck to Blake like chewing gum.
He yawned. The rain drizzled relentlessly down his windscreen. It seemed a fitting counterpoint to the lack of excitement in his and Francis Blake’s lives. If he had the kind of money that Blake had trousered over his newspaper deal, Neil was bloody sure he’d be living somewhere with a bit more class than this. No two ways about it, this was a dump.
The flat Blake had rented on his release was less than a mile from his old place in King’s Cross. The new place was in a busy but faintly seedy street off the Pentonville Road, the sort of place where the locals were off-duty hookers, the hopelessly unemployed, the elderly poor and the mentally ill. The best you could say about it was that it was handy for public transport. Halfway up the road, some uninspired architect had designed a utilitarian block in grey brick that looked like it had been jerry built in the sixties. It was cut off from the neighbouring terraced houses by a service lane that ran up either side and round the back. On the ground floor were half a dozen shop units, a news agent, an off-licence, a betting shop, a mini market a kebab shop and a minicab office. The two floors above were divided into flats, and it was in one of these drab boxes on the second floor that Blake had taken up residence. It depressed Neil just thinking about it.