Killing the Shadows

SEVENTEEN

Kit held the sheet of paper out to Fiona. Gingerly, she took it by the top left-hand corner. It was a single sheet of A4 paper, folded twice to fit a standard business envelope. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other computer-generated document. Standard font, nothing complicated about the layout. All of this Fiona took in first, bracing herself before she read the words. Kit Martin, you are a thief of other people’s creative endeavour and a traducer of other people’s reputations. You steal what you cannot yourself make. And your lies deprive others of what is rightfully theirs. Your work is a feeble reflection of other people’s light. You have striven to ensure that competition is driven from the field. You take, you destroy, you are a vampire who sucks the blood of those whose gifts you envy. You know this to be true. Search your pathetic grimy soul and you will not be able to deny what you have deprived me of. The time has come for you to pay. You deserve nothing from me but my contempt and my hatred. If killing you is what it takes to grant what is rightfully mine, then so be it. The hour and the day will be of my choosing. I trust you will not sleep easy; you do not deserve so to do. I will enjoy your funeral. From your ashes, I will rise like a phoenix.

Fiona read the poisonous letter twice. Then she carefully put it down on the hall table and stepped forward to hug Kit. “Poor you. What a horrible thing.” She could feel his tension as he buried his face in her shoulder.

“I can’t get my head round it,” he said, his voice muffled. “It makes no sense.”

Fiona said nothing. She just held on tight to him until she felt his body start to relax against her. “Where did it come from?” she asked eventually.

“It was in the post. I was busy when the second delivery came; I didn’t bother picking it off the that till I was going out. I stuck it in the office. I wasn’t expecting anything urgent.”

“Have you got the envelope?”

He nodded. “It’s in the bin, I just chucked it automatically.” He went into his office. Fiona followed him into the chaos of books and papers that covered all of the available surfaces and half of the floor. Not for the first time, she marvelled that anyone could work in such a clutter. But Kit not only worked here, he also seemed to have total recall when it came to the site of any particular book, file or letter. He went straight to the wastepaper bin by the desk and fished out a plain-white self-sealing envelope. He studied it with a frown. Fiona put an arm round his waist and looked at it with him. The address had been printed in the same anonymous typeface.

“West London postmark. Posted two days ago with a second-class stamp,” he said. He gave a snort of nervous laughter. “Well, it’s obviously not an urgent death threat. I suppose that should be some sort of consolation.”

“You should report this to the police,” Fiona said decisively.

Kit dropped the envelope on top of his keyboard. “You think so?” He sounded sceptical.

“I do, yes. It’s a really nasty letter. It’s a death threat, for God’s sake!”

Kit dropped into his chair, swinging round to face her. “I get nasty letters all the time, love. Not death threats, admittedly, but in among the fan mail, I regularly get letters slagging off me and my books. Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells is horrified by the torture scenes in The Dissection Man. Ms Censor of Lambeth is appalled that teenagers have access to the depraved sexual fantasies in The Blade King. And then there are the ones who accuse me of being gutless for not writing about grotesque mutilation and sexual perversion in more detail. It’s not all fan mail, you know.”

“How do they get your address?” Fiona demanded, suddenly struck with an uncomfortable vision of mentally unstable readers beating a path to her front door.

Kit shrugged. “I don’t know. Mostly, they come via my publisher. Some on e — mail. One or two of the more obsessive types have probably trawled the voters’ roll for Dartmouth Park. I’m not that hard to find, love.”

Fiona shivered. “That letter was bad enough. But now you’re really scaring me. Honestly, Kit, I think you should take this to the police.”

He picked up a pencil and fiddled with it restlessly. “They’d laugh at me, Fiona. It’s just a crank letter. There’s nothing specific in it. All it says is that I nick other people’s ideas. Which is bullshit. It’s just some nutter with a bee in his bonnet.”

Fiona looked unconvinced. “I don’t think you should be taking this so lightly, Kit. I really don’t.” She turned away and crossed to the window, where, as usual, the blind was raised. Impatiently, she tugged the cord to shut them off from the outside world. Anything to avoid saying what was uppermost in her mind.

“It’s not that I’m taking it lightly. It’s the police that would think I was wasting their time. Anyway, why should I react to this, any more than the rest of the offensive mail I’ve had in the past? I’ve been getting letters from nutters ever since I was first published. It’s no big deal. Honestly. It was a shock, that’s all. You don’t often get them so vitriolic. But nothing’s ever come of a letter before, so I don’t see why this should be any different.” He was, he knew, protesting too much. But he didn’t want to be scared. He wanted this letter to be in the same class as every other piece of hate mail that had ever dropped on the doormat. Any other response opened a door he wanted to keep firmly closed.

But Fiona was determined to articulate what was in both their minds, however unpalatable it might be. “After what happened to Drew, I don’t think you can afford to ignore this,” she said quietly.

“I knew you were going to say that,” Kit said irritably. “I knew I should never have let you see it. Christ, Fiona, you always have to analyse things, to connect them. Well, sometimes things just don’t connect. They are separate. They just are. OK?”

“No, it’s not OK.” Fiona raised her voice, her cheeks flushing. “Why are you so resistant to this? Two weeks ago, one of your colleagues was murdered in a horrible, ritualistic way. Now you get a death threat, and you don’t think the two might be connected? Reality check, Kit!”

He slammed the pencil down on the desk. “The only connection between this letter and what happened to Drew is that some fuck wit thinks it would be clever to take advantage of his murder to put the shits up me. You read the letter, Fiona. That wasn’t written by the person who killed Drew. There’s no specifics in it, no boasting, none of that, “You’ll get what’s coming to you, like Drew Shand did.””

“That doesn’t prove a thing,” Fiona stormed. “That letter was written by somebody who is off the scale of normal. So was Drew’s killer.”

Kit got to his feet and hit the wall with the side of his fist. “So were Fred and Rosemary West, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t them that wrote this. Look, Fiona. If I go to the police with something as flaky as this, you know what they’re going to say.”

She folded her arms tight across her chest. “Enlighten me.”

“They’re going to say I’m doing a Georgia. They’ll write it off as bandwagon-jumping. Publicity-seeking. They’re not going to take it seriously. What can they do anyway? Send it off to the labs on the off-chance that my correspondent has conveniently left fingerprints and DNA all over it? I don’t think so.”

Fiona couldn’t resist the truth in what he said. She knew he was probably right. But that knowledge did nothing to assuage the chilly lump of apprehension in her stomach. That someone hated Kit or his work enough to pour out such venom on the page was unnerving. To fear that poison might escalate into real violence was, in her opinion, an entirely reasonable reaction.

She pushed past him and into the hall. In the doorway, she turned. “It’s your decision. It’s your letter. But I think you’re wrong.”

“So what’s new?” He turned his back on her. “I’ll live with it.” Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13⁄4599 Tqsaf mxafa ruzwp dqiet mzp. Mxxah qdftq bmbqd etqim e. Ngfft qkpup zfsqf uf. Qhqdk napkt mpftq udaiz ftqad kmzpz afazq arftq yomyq oxaeq.

He got a lot of ink, Drew Shand. But they didn’t get It. Everybody had their own theory and not one of them came close. They soon will, though. Me, I’ve been keeping my head down, being a good little boy, not attracting any attention. Not that anybody is paying any attention. Which means I had no interference with the next stage of my plan. Jane Ellas. She’s American, but lives In Ireland; probably because writers don’t pay any tax there. The bitch wasn’t satisfied with earning more money than Cod, she wanted to keep it all. It wasn’t hard to find where she was living. You can maybe get away with being a recluse somewhere the size of America, but not in Ireland. I knew she had a big estate in County Wicklow, on the shores of a lake. I knew it was about an hour’s drive from Dublin. One of the fan sites on the web had a picture of the house. So I just drove around for a day with a large-scale map and a pair of binoculars till I found it. The next morning, I went back down to Ellas’s estate. I cut down to the shoreline of the lake when I saw what I was looking for a sailing club with lots of little dinghies pulled up on the concrete ramp. There was nobody about. It couldn’t have been better. I hunkered down among the boats and checked out Elias’s property on the other side of the water. I could just make out a landing stage with a couple of boats tied up alongside. If my information was right, she would come down to the lake sometime in the afternoon and go sailing. Sure enough she appeared just after two. She got on one of the boats and went sailing off across the lake. I waited till it got dark and she’d gone back, then I dragged one of the dinghies down to the water’s edge and climbed aboard. I’d sussed a hiding place earlier, further up the lake where the trees came right down to the water’s edge. I was feeling really edgy again with the prospect of what I was going to have to do the next day. There were so many mistakes I could make that would blow it. And then I had to do the killing again. I decided I wasn’t going to stick to the book as closely this time. There was no way I was going to torture somebody for hours. I knew I didn’t have the stomach for it. And besides, I didn’t have the time or the place for something so elaborate. What I would do, I decided, was to kill her quickly with a knife. Then I could do the things to her body that would make it look like the body in the book. It’s the appearance that’s important. I’m not some fetishistic killer who has to obsess about all the details. What I’m doing is sending a message, not satisfying some weird urge inside myself. If there was another way of showing those bastards that they can’t get away with discounting me and my life, I’d have chosen it. I’m trying not to think about what I’ll have to do to her. My stomach’s queasy enough without making it worse. I just have to keep telling myself it won’t take long, and then I’ll be on the road home. They’ll have to pay attention this time.