Killing the Shadows

THIRTY-ONE

The clock read 3:24. Fiona had no idea what had woken her, but her eyes had snapped wide open, her brain firing on all cylinders. No point in trying to get back to sleep, she knew that. Insomnia seldom afflicted her, but when it struck, she knew the only answer was to get up and keep her mind occupied until sleep felled her again.

She slipped out of bed. Kit grunted, turned over and began breathing rhythmically again. Fiona padded across the carpet, taking her dressing gown off its peg and moving out on to the landing. The distant hum of traffic was the only sound. She had no sense of another presence besides her and Kit. As she mounted the stairs, she looked out of the window to the garden below. The dim light of a three-quarter moon turned it into an eerie conglomeration of monochrome shapes. But none were unfamiliar. Whatever had disturbed her sleep, it wasn’t a stranger in either house or garden.

In her office, Fiona turned on the desk lamp and took a can of Perrier out of the tiny fridge by her desk, one of Kit’s more bizarre birthday presents. She’d been less than thrilled at the time though she hoped she’d disguised her disappointment but she’d come to appreciate its benefits since. He was good at that, coming up with things she’d never have imagined she needed. She popped the top of the can. It was so still in the soundproofed attic that she could hear the bubbles ping as they broke against the metal.

She switched on her computer and waited for it to boot up. Then she went straight on line. America was awake; there would be plenty of people up and about in the chat rooms to keep her amused. As she logged on, she remembered it was the night once a month when Murder Behind the Headlines had an on-line discussion that ran from ten till midnight. She pointed her browser at their site and waited to be connected.

Fiona scrolled through the subjects up for debate and clicked on Jane Elias. She came in on the middle of what seemed to be a heated exchange about the Garda Siochana. Offered the chance by the browser to backtrack on the conversation, she opted for that.

What she read gave her a physical chill in her chest. According to three separate posts, the word locally on the lane Elias murder was that the guards had arrested the wrong man, and they knew it. Allegedly, they’d been railroaded into bringing in John Patrick Regan by senior officials in the Serious Crimes Unit, in spite of the reluctance of local officers. Now, in the absence of any early forensic results linking Regan to the crime, it appeared that the local cops were getting jittery about the arrest and his lawyer was fighting for him to be set free. According to one post, everybody in Kildenny who knew John Regan was adamant that the man didn’t have the brains to organize an abduction, never mind the balls to kill a woman and mutilate her corpse.

That was the point where the discussion had degenerated into a slanging match over the police. Fiona couldn’t have cared less how good or bad the Garda Siochana were in an obscure corner of County Wicklow. She had more important things to think about.

She logged off, turned off her computer and stared at the blank screen. Regan’s arrest had been a far greater reassurance than she had been prepared to admit to Kit. Without him in the frame, the picture looked very different indeed. It wasn’t a matter of the subconscious forcing connections; it became a logical conclusion.

Normally, the murders of two people working in the same field on opposite sides of the Irish Sea would be so insignificant it would pass unnoticed. But when they were both public figures; both award-winning thriller writers; both writers whose work had been adapted successfully for film or TV; and both murdered in styles that followed elements in their work more or less slavishly, it stretched coincidence to a point where notice had to be taken.

Fiona weighed the elements of her knowledge in the balance of her experience. Yes, there were such things as copycat killers out there. And Jane Elias’s killer was as likely to be a copycat as a serial murderer at the start of his series, given the physical distance between the victims and the apparently very different manners of their death.

Fiona, however, had never liked coincidence.

She got up from her desk and ran downstairs to the spare room, where Kit’s vast library of crime fiction covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Nothing as straightforward as alphabetical order, Fiona sighed to herself.

She scanned the shelves, looking for one of Georgia’s books. The first one she found was Last Rights, the final part of a trilogy of legal thrillers she’d completed a couple of years before. Fiona turned to the inside back flap and read the author biography there.

Several of Georgia’s books had been adapted for TV, including the legal thrillers. Only one, a stand-alone psychological suspense novel whose graphic violence had shaken many of her traditional audience to the core, had been made into a movie. And Ever More Shall Be So had been a low-budget British film, made with sponsorship money from Channel 4. Fiona vaguely remembered reading about its success. Something in the film had captured the attention of a mass audience and it had become a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The haunting, ethereal theme tune of an unaccompanied boy soprano singing ‘Green Grow the Rushes-O’ as a lament, a plangent counterpoint to the nightmares of the film, might have had something to do with it. For some reason, she’d never seen it, though Kit certainly would have done.

Now all she needed was to find the book. One among two or three thousand couldn’t be so hard, could it? Methodically, Fiona made her way along the shelves, pausing whenever she encountered Georgia’s name. How the hell did he ever find anything in here, she wondered? And why was he incapable of ever throwing away a book, no matter how crap he pronounced it to be?

About halfway along the second wall, Fiona found what she was looking for. The first edition of And Ever More Shall Be So, a personal dedication on the title page in Georgia’s surprisingly neat handwriting. “To darling Kit, already il miglior fabbro. With lashings of love, Georgia Lester.” How very Georgia, Fiona thought with a sardonic smile.

Fiona turned out the light and made her way back up to her attic. She settled down on the futon, pulling the throw over her legs so she wouldn’t get cold. Then she began to turn the pages. But what she read there put all thought of normal comfort out of her mind.