Killing the Shadows

TWELVE

The arrival of their room-service dinners forced both Fiona and Kit to surface from the salve of work. She had been entering data into her laptop and had started running various combinations through the geographic profiling software, but so mechanical a task left too much of her mind free to rerun her own memories. Trying to drown the voices in her head with alcohol was tempting. But Fiona had watched her father turn to drink, an accelerant that had plunged him into paranoid nightmares that had destroyed his life as surely as her murderer had destroyed Lesley’s. If acute liver failure had not killed him four years earlier, she suspected he’d have taken his own life sooner rather than later. So the whisky bottle was, for her, no choice.

But burying herself in work wasn’t doing the trick either. Sitting down with Kit to eat forced her to realize that Lesley’s ghost hadn’t stopped tormenting her since Kit had mentioned her name earlier. And by the looks of him, Kit was equally lost in his own thoughts. They ate their baked fish in virtual silence, neither knowing how to broach the subject that was uppermost in their minds.

Fiona finished first, pushing the remains of her meal to one side of the plate. She took a deep breath. “I think I might be better able to settle if I could find out more about what happened to Drew. Not because I think I can help in any practical way, but…” She sighed. “I know that what always helps me is information.”

Kit looked up briefly from his plate, seeing the pain of memory in Fiona’s face. He knew that in the aftermath of her sister’s murder what had woken Fiona screaming from her sleep night after night was ignorance. She needed to know every detail of what had happened to Lesley. Against the wishes of her mother, who was adamant in her desire to possess as little information as possible about her younger daughter’s fate, Fiona had pursued all the avenues she could think of to absorb every fact relating to her sister’s terrible ordeal. She had made friends of the local reporters, she had exerted every ounce of her charm to persuade the detectives to share their information with her. And gradually, as she pieced together Lesley’s last hours, the nightmares had receded. Over the years, as she had learned more about the behaviour patterns of serial rapists and killers, that picture had become even clearer, giving texture and shape to her understanding, filling in the outlines of the transaction between Lesley and her killer.

While part of him felt this was an unhealthy obsession, Kit had to admit that knowledge did seem to have provided some sort of balm for Fiona. And as far as he was concerned, that was what mattered. Even though she couldn’t adequately explain why it helped her to have so detailed a reconstruction in her head, neither of them could deny its force. And Kit had also come to realize that as it was with her personal relationship to murder, so it was with her professional one. The more she knew, the more secure she felt. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps the best way to make sure her sleep wasn’t riven with nightmares about Lesley was to garner what she could about what had happened to Drew Shand. And it might just help him too.

“What were you thinking about doing?” he asked.

“See what they’re saying on the Net,” she said. “How do you feel about that?”

He shrugged then topped up his glass. “It can’t be worse than the movies my imagination is running for me.”

Kit gathered the dirty plates and put the trays outside the door while Fiona logged on to the Internet and connected to her favourite meta search engine, which combed the vast virtuality of the worldwide web at her command. “Where can I find Drew Shand?” she typed. Within seconds, she had the answer at her fingertips. Shand had had his own website, as well as a couple of fan sites dedicated to his work.

“We might as well try the fan sites first,” Kit said. “I don’t think Drew’s going to be updating his own site any time now.”

The first page Fiona clicked on had a black border round the publisher’s jacket photograph of the dead novelist. Beneath it were the dates of his birth and death and the atmospheric opening paragraph of Copycat. The haar moves up from the steel-grey waters of the Firth of Forth, a solid wall of mist the colour of cumulus. It swallows the bright lights of the city’s newest playground, the designer hotels and the smart restaurants. It becomes one with the spectres of the sailors from the docks who used to blow their pay on eighty-shilling ale and whores with faces as hard as their clients’ hands. It climbs the hill to the New Town, where the geometric grid of Georgian elegance slices it into blocks before it slides down into the ditch of Princes Street Gardens. The few late revellers staggering home quicken their steps to escape its clammy grip.

Fiona shivered. “It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?” Kit observed. “Bloody great opening paragraph. The kid really had something special. Did you read Copycat?”

“It was one of the pile you gave me for Christmas.”

“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten.”

Fiona grinned. “There were so many.” Ever since they’d first been together, Kit had given Fiona his personal pick of the year’s crime fiction for Christmas. It was a genre she’d scarcely ever read before they’d become lovers. Now, she enjoyed keeping up with her partner’s competition, as long as it was a guided trip and not a random harvest of the crime section of the book shops.

Scrolling down, Fiona ignored the hagiography and focused on any details of the crime. Nothing they didn’t already know. The second fan site had little more to offer, except a rumour that Shand had frequented a pub in Edinburgh where gay sadomasochistic group sex allegedly took place in an upstairs room. “See what I mean?” Kit said angrily. “It’s starting already. The deserving-victim syndrome. You can see it now. He was murdered because he asked for it. He enjoyed the kind of sex that could turn nasty, and it killed him.”

“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” said Fiona. “Unless they pick someone up quickly and it turns out to be nothing to do with the gay scene.”

“Yeah, right. If AIDS doesn’t get you, the bogeyman will.”

Fiona called up the menu of her favourite sites on the web and ran her cursor down the list. Kit leaned into her, reading over her shoulder.

“I wonder how many people’s favourite places list includes the RCMP, the FBI, various serial killer sites and a forensic pathology discussion group?” Kit asked.

“More than is healthy, I suspect,” Fiona muttered. Towards the bottom of the list was a site that she knew infuriated most of the law enforcement officers she knew. Officially, Murder Behind the Headlines was run jointly by a journalist in Detroit, a private eye in Vancouver who was reported to have had a murky past in the CIA, and a postgraduate in criminology in Liverpool. Given the depth of detail they managed to come up with on sensational murder cases, Fiona suspected there were a few serious hackers involved in putting together the site. Not to mention a very large base of anonymous contributors who enjoyed the prospect of sharing whatever privileged information or hearsay they encountered. Several attempts had been made to close them down on the basis that they were making public information that allowed scope both for copycat killings and for false confessions, but somehow they always seemed to resurface with ever more sophisticated graphics and gossip. Fiona sincerely hoped that the more faint-hearted relatives of the victims never logged on to Murder Behind the Headlines.

Seeing where her cursor had paused, Kit groaned. “Gossip central,” he complained.

“You’d be surprised how often they get it right,” she said mildly.

“Maybe so, but they always leave me feeling like I need a bath. And they can’t write for toffee.”

Fiona couldn’t resist a smile as she connected to the site. “Never mind the morality, feel the semicolons,” she said ironically. When she was prompted for her area of interest, she typed, ‘Drew Shand’. In the top left-hand corner of the page that unfurled before them, the same photograph of Drew brooding handsomely into the camera appeared. This time, however, the text was very different. Scottish thriller writer Drew Shand has been found murdered in the historic heart of the city he lived in and used as the background to his first gruesome novel, the award-winning Copycat. His mutilated body was found just behind St. Giles Cathedral, only feet away from the pavements pounded daily by millions of tourists. So far, no suspects have been arrested. MBTH hears from a source inside the investigation that there are some very spooky coincidences connecting Shand’s own death and the graphic violence he turned to good commercial effect in Copycat. The plot of his serial killer novel centres round a contemporary recreation of the celebrated Whitechapel Murders a sort of Jock the Ripper gore fest. The original Jack the Ripper’s fourth victim was found by a policeman on his beat. So was Shand’s fourth victim. And so too was Shand. The police surgeon at the time of the Whitechapel Murders, Dr. Frederick Brown, reported that: The body was on its back, the head turned to the left shoulder. The arms by the side of the body as if they had fallen there. Both palms upwards, the fingers slightly bent…Left leg extended in a line with the body. The abdomen was exposed. Right leg bent at thigh and knee. The throat cut across. The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder…A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and left arm. The lobe and auricle of the right ear was cut right through…There was a cut…through the lower left eyelid dividing the structures completely through…The right eyelid was cut through to about half an inch. There was a deep cut over the bridge of the nose…This cut went into the bone and divided all the structures of the cheek except the mucous membrane of the mouth. The tip of the nose was quite detached…There was on each side of the cheek a cut which peeled up the skin, forming a triangular flap of about an inch and a half The actual cause of death was haemorrhage from the left carotid artery. Each of these grim facts was annexed by Shand for his novel. And according to our source, they were all present in the murder of the writer himself. Apparently one of the murder squad detectives called to the scene of the crime had read Copycat and was immediately struck by the similarities. It was only when the police surgeon itemized the injuries and the detective went back and checked both with Shand’s book and accounts of the original Ripper case that the police became convinced that they were dealing with a Copycat copycat. Apparently the theory doing the rounds at police HQ is that Shand was into hardcore S&M sex. They reckon that made him vulnerable to a perp who had fixated on his book and wanted to try it out for real. Shand was apparently a creature of habit his daily routine is outlined on his website for all to see. So it wouldn’t have been too hard for the hunter to track him down and, providing the killer was Shand’s type, it would all fall into place. And of course, the easy thing about killing somebody who’s into S&M is they think you’re only playing when you tie them up. Doesn’t matter that, like Shand, your victim works out down the gym every day, because he’s trussed up like a chicken all ready for you. One other detail the cops think he was killed somewhere else then brought to the body dump, unlike both the Whitechapel Murders and the slayings in Copycat But Shand’s flat was clean, so they’ve no idea as yet where the murder actually took place. One thing they can be pretty sure of, though somebody’s got a helluva cleaning job on his hands.

REMEMBER YOU READ IT FIRST ON MURDER BEHIND THE HEADLINES

Kit whistled softly. “That is seriously creepy shit.”

Fiona logged off. “You’re not kidding.”

“So what’s your take on it?”

“Probably much the same as yours,” Fiona said. “He clearly planned his crime to mirror the circumstances of one of the murders in Shand’s book. Which in turn mirrors one of the original Ripper murders, apart from the gender of the victim. That he’s succeeded so accurately indicates a high degree of control and organization. His intelligence therefore is likely to be significantly above average. He has a highly developed fantasy life and would probably use violent pornography to support that. He would be unlikely to respond well to authority, so if he had a job it wouldn’t be commensurate with his intelligence, which in turn would be a source of irritation to him.” She pulled a face. “But saying that is simply a matter of playing the probabilities.”

“But what about his relationship to Drew? Is he a stalker, a jilted lover, or some sort of fucked-up wannabe acolyte? What do you think?”

She dropped into one of the chairs by the window and stared out at the city. When her answer came, she spoke slowly, feeling her way from sentence to sentence. “That is without doubt the most interesting question, Kit.” She gave him a quick smile. “Hardly surprising that it was you who asked it. That the murderer fixated on the book and copied its crimes isn’t particularly remarkable. Often killers who display their victims’ bodies ritualistically are replicating images they’ve seen in pornography or in some situation that was particularly meaningful to them. But most sexually motivated killers would be satisfied with wreaking their havoc on any victim who broadly fitted their fantasy. To have chosen to hunt and destroy the creator of the very fiction that fuelled his desire to kill is curiously personal. And in a crime where depersonalizing the victim is often crucial to the process, it’s distinctly unusual.”

Kit ran his hands over his scalp, his face a mixture of amusement and exasperation. “It’s always got to be a lecture with you, hasn’t it? You still didn’t answer the question.”

Fiona grinned. “I sort of hoped you hadn’t noticed. If you pushed me on it, I’d probably plump for a stalker who has become obsessed with Copycat. But that’s purely speculation.”

“So is Murder Behind the Headlines, but it doesn’t stop you reading that,” Kit pointed out. He got up and wandered round the room. “It’s a bit freaky, isn’t it? The thought of somebody following Drew around like a shadow, invisible till the last moment when he shows himself. You never think of anything like that when you’re writing. That some nutter is going to read their life story into your words.”

“You’d probably never write another book if you give that possibility space in your head,” Fiona said. “Other people’s madness is not your responsibility. Come here, give me a hug.”

He crossed to her and gently pulled her to her feet, wrapping his arms around her. She turned her face up to his. “There are other ways of taking your mind off things, Kit,” she said softly as his lips came down to meet hers.

Inside the city walls of Toledo, the evening paseo was in full swing. Around the Plaza de Zodocover, people strolled in couples, families and groups, taking the evening air and catching up on the business of the day as they moved between pools of yellow light. Restaurants, many half-empty now the height of the tourist season was past, served dinner to tourists and locals, greeting their regular customers with smiles and the small change of social intercourse. The bars were doing a thriving trade, their tables full inside and out as older clients enjoyed a digest if with their coffee and the young men checked out the women gossiping and giggling in their separate groups. It was a sharp contrast to the dimly lit alleys and narrow streets that radiated out from the plaza, linking it with the rest of the city.

In one of the cafes on the edge of the square, Miguel Delgado smiled across at the Englishwoman who worked behind the reservation desk at the Hotel Alfonso VI. Two nights before, he’d engineered an encounter where he’d tripped over her handbag and knocked over her drink. She’d been with friends, so she’d suspected no ulterior motive when he bought her a drink to replace the one he’d spilled. Tonight, though, her friends were absent. For the price of another drink, he could make the down payment on his next act of revenge.

He swallowed the last of his café solo and folded up his newspaper. Careful not to draw attention to himself, he crossed to her table, inclined his head in a small bow and smiled. “Buenas tardes” he said.

The woman returned his smile, without a trace of uncertainty. Minutes later, they were deep in conversation. Delgado was back in business.