Killing the Shadows

FIFTY-ONE

Caroline pulled up at a roundabout on the edge of Inverness and killed the stereo. “Where to now?” she asked.

Fiona yawned and scrubbed her eyes with the edge of her fists. She had that empty nauseous feeling that comes with too little sleep and too much adrenaline. The rain had stopped and there was a thin grey mist hanging in the air, leaving Inverness looking even more like a ghost town than the hour itself. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “All I know is that the guy who owns the garage where Kit keeps the Land Rover is called Lachlan Fraser.”

Caroline snorted. “Like that really narrows it down.”

“I take it Fraser’s a pretty common name hereabouts, then?”

“You could say that. The ancestral seat of the clan chief is about half a dozen miles up the road. Fraser is about as common a name round Inverness as Smith would be in London.” She put the car in gear and cruised towards the centre.

“Where are you going?” Fiona asked.

“When in doubt, ask a policeman.” Caroline headed on down the main road. “We’ll either find the police station, or we’ll find some night-shift woolly suits in a patrol car sneaking a fly bacon butty at the all-night snack bar.”

“You think Inverness runs to an all-night snack bar?” Fiona said, the professional sceptic.

Caroline flashed her a dark grin. “Don’t make the mistake of falling for the tourist board propaganda. Inverness is a lot more Morvern Callar than it is Local Hero.”

“Does that mean you know where to score me a wrap of speed?”

Caroline’s eyebrows rose. “I suspect you’re either too early in the morning or too late at night for any action like that round here. I take it that was a joke?”

Fiona’s grin was savage. “Only technically. Jokes are supposed to be funny, and the way I’m feeling right now is anything but. Better make do with the all-night snack bar and a shot of caffeine. If I do end up in the arms of the law, the last thing I need is for them to discover I’m pumped full of amphetamines.”

“Hang on, there we go.” Caroline was off on a tangent, waving over to her left where a DIY super store occupied most of the horizon. Its vast car park contained a fish and chip van, a police car and the business end of an articulated lorry. She veered into the slip road and cruised across to the police car.

“You get the directions. You’ve got the right accent. I’ll get the breakfast,” Fiona instructed, clambering out of the car and stretching. Desperate as she was to get to the bothy, she needed food and drink more than the five minutes she might save by not stopping now. She leaned on the high counter, smelling the rancid agglomeration of stale fat, cheap vinegar, fried onions and diesel. The menu was written in magic marker on what had once been a white board Describing its present colour was beyond Fiona’s vocabulary. Old men’s underwear was about the closest she could come to it. The board offered fish, chips, burgers, sausages, rolls and pies. Another sign announced the availability of ‘Tea, coffee, asorted skoosh’. Fiona smiled at the large man behind the counter. Judging by his pallor, he lived off his own cooking.

“Two chip rolls, please,” Fiona said. It was probably the safest option. Besides, all that complex carbohydrate would keep her going for a few hours. “And two teas,” she added.

“Aye, right,” the lard mountain said. He turned away and tended his hissing fryer. Fiona turned to see how Caroline was getting on with the police officers. She was bent over, leaning into an open window, her face all cheerful openness. Would she and Lesley have made it, Fiona wondered? Probably not. First love seldom did. And then she’d almost certainly have lost Caroline as a friend. With a sense of dawning amazement, Fiona reached the complex realization that Lesley’s death had actually given her a gift. She scratched her head, deciding to file away the thought for another time, when she could consider it properly. Right now, she was struggling to hang on to any sense of reality in what was increasingly resembling a nightmare.

Caroline straightened up with a nod and a smile and set off back towards the car. Catching Fiona watching her, she gave the thumbs-up sign. “There you go, darling’,” the chip van man said, plonking down two overstuffed bread rolls on a pair of paper napkins. Fiona handed over a fiver and waved away the change, concentrating instead on juggling the two chip rolls and the two polystyrene beakers of tea.

Back in the car, they fell on the food and drink. Between mouthfuls of surprisingly tasty chip butty, Caroline explained where they were heading. “Lachlan Fraser’s place is out towards the airport. The bobbies knew him, right enough. Not for any bad reasons, you understand. Just because…well, they know these things.” She drove intently, sandwich in one hand, tea between her thighs, careful on the corners not to spill her drink.

The streets started to waken as they drove, yellow oblongs of light suddenly breaking the grey facades of houses. Now the occasional car or milk float hummed past them, and the first blurring of light in the east started to leak into the night sky. Fiona wondered where Kit was. Whether she’d be in time, or whether she was already too late. Whether the killer would stick to the plot, or settle for an approximation.

If she had allowed her imagination to run away with her instead of forcing what she knew from The Blood Painter into a locked box in the back of her mind, she could probably have conjured up a reasonable approximation of what was happening right then a couple of hours’ drive away.

Kit was groggily struggling back to consciousness, a woozy giddiness shot through with flashes of excoriating pain. He’d taken a second strike to the head, his long containment in darkness leaving him unequal to avoiding the blow that fell as soon as the tailgate of the Toyota was opened.

Apart from pain, the first sensation he was aware of was cold. He was freezing. He managed to open his eyes and found himself in the middle of a scene that felt like the worst sort of deja vu. He knew this place because it was his; he knew this situation because he had created it. He was sitting naked on the toilet, both arms handcuffed to steel eyes that had been bolted into the wall. His legs were chained together, the chain passing round the back of the toilet bowl, rendering him almost incapable of movement.

He was alone. But he didn’t expect that to last.

He knew what was coming next.

Caroline pulled up outside an old two-storey stone building with a peeling red and white sign that read ‘Fraser’s Garage’. It looked as if it had been there long before the existence of the internal combustion engine. Most of the facade was taken up by a pair of wide wooden doors with a Judas gate cut into one. To one side, there was a plain wooden door with the number thirty-one on it. On the upper storey, a light shone from behind a frosted-glass window. Fiona leaned across to hug Caroline. “Thank you,” she said. “I owe you big time.”

“Hey, it’s not over till it’s over,” Caroline said. “You don’t think I’m pulling out now, do you?”

Fiona leaned back in her seat. “Don’t, Caroline. You have to go home now.”

Caroline shook her head. “No way. I’ve not come this far to turn my back and leave you to it. You can’t bring me all this way and then send me home when the trouble really starts.”

“This isn’t a game, Caro. If I’m right, the man who’s got Kit has already killed three people. Without compunction. He won’t think twice about killing anyone who stands between him and what he wants to achieve. I won’t put you in that place.” Fiona’s resolve was clear in her voice as well as her face.

“Since he’s that ruthless, you need to even up the odds a bit.”

“No. I know what I’m doing. I can’t take the chance of ending up with your blood on my hands. I can’t live with that.” Fiona undid her seatbelt and opened the door. “Please, Caro. Go home. I’ll call you later, I promise. I’m getting out of the car now, and I’m not going any further till I see you turn around and drive away.” She pushed the door wide and climbed out, then leaned back in. “I mean it.” She closed the door gently and stepped back.

Caroline smacked the flat of her hand against the steering wheel in a gesture of frustration, then put the car in gear and moved off. Fiona watched as she did a three-point turn and headed back in the direction they’d come from. As the taillights of the Honda disappeared round the corner, she turned to face the small door. She took a deep breath and pressed the doorbell.

There was a long moment of silence, then heavy feet thundered down a flight of stairs. The door opened to reveal a man in his late twenties dressed in work boots, jeans and a padded tartan shirt hanging loose over a grey T — shirt. In one hand, he held a mug of tea. His expression revealed a mild and friendly curiosity.

“Lachlan Fraser?” Fiona asked.

He nodded. “Aye, that’s me.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you so early…”

He grinned. “It’s not that early. And I’m not disturbed. How can I help you?”

“My name is Fiona Cameron”

His grin widened as he interrupted her. “You’re Kit’s bidie-in. Of course! I should have recognized you from that picture Kit’s got up in the bothy. Hey, it’s great to meet you at last.” He looked past her. “The man himself isnae with you, then?”

“No, I got a lift up with a friend of mine. I’m meeting up with Kit later. I’m supposed to pick up the Land Rover. Is that OK?”

“Aye, fine, nae bother.” Lachlan fished in his pocket and shooed her forward. “I’ll just get the keys.” He passed her and unlocked the Judas gate. “They’re in here. I’ll no’ be a minute.” He disappeared indoors and a light came on. He emerged moments later with a bunch of keys. “Follow me. It’s round the back. It’s got a full tank, and the jerry cans for the generator are all diesel led up,” he added over his shoulder as he led the way down a narrow alley to an area of waste ground behind the garage. Half a dozen elderly vehicles appeared to be parked at random. Lachlan headed towards a Land Rover that looked like a relic from some forgotten war.

“There you go,” he said, unlocking the driver’s door and standing back to allow Fiona to climb up into the driver’s seat. “You driven one of these before?”

She shook her head. “I’ve never had that pleasure,” she said ironically.

Lachlan took her through the vagaries of the Land Rover, explaining the four-wheel-drive, then waited while she manoeuvred it out of its parking space and into the mouth of the alley. Then he waved cheerfully as she headed out into the grey morning.

In the area under the jurisdiction of the City of London Police, there are three hundred and eighty-five separate closed circuit camera systems. Together, they employ one thousand, two hundred and eighty cameras. Smithfield Market is well served by their system, with almost every nook and cranny covered by one camera or another. Inevitably, some of the cameras produce better images than others, given the variation in lighting and lines of sight.

One of the first steps Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Duvall had taken was to bring every available videotape from the previous ten days to the City police station in Snow Hill, where she had set up her incident room. All through the night, detectives had been scanning the hours of videotape, trying not to lose concentration as they searched for Charles Cavendish Redford.

Duvall herself had managed four hours’ sleep. They had persuaded a magistrate to allow an extension to Redford’s custody, then she had snatched her nap. She hadn’t bothered going home to her riverside flat in the Isle of Dogs, just made her way to her own office and curled up on the two-seater sofa she’d had installed for precisely that purpose. Four hours was a lot less than her body craved, but it was enough to function on. Probably.

She was back in the incident room just after seven, eagerly scanning the overnight reports to see if anything confirming Redford’s involvement had turned up yet. When she had confronted him with the discrepancy between his statement and the discovery of the outhouse, there had been no flicker of discomfort. He had simply shrugged and said, “Isn’t that what you wanted? To catch me out in a lie? Isn’t that what criminals are supposed to do?” It went some way towards confirming her belief that he intended to give them nothing that could corroborate his confession.

Sooner or later, either one of her own team or one of the Dorset detectives was going to come up with that crucial piece of information that would tie Redford indisputably to Georgia Lester’s brutal murder. Anything would do, she thought bleakly. Anything at all, since all they had right now was a big fat zero.

As she flicked through what seemed to be a large pile of nothing, one of the officers called her name. She looked up to see him holding a phone. “Yes?”

“Can you pop down to the video room, ma’am? One of the lads there says he’s got something he wants you to take a look at.”

Duvall was out of the door before the phone was back in its cradle. Her long strides swallowed the corridor leading to the room where her officers were scanning the CCTV videos from the market. She’d scarcely crossed the threshold when one of the detective constables started speaking. “I need you to have a look at this, ma’am,” he said, his voice high and eager.

“What is it, Harvey?” Duvall stood behind him, looking over his shoulder at the screen. “Have you found him?”

“I’ve been looking at the tapes of the corridor you have to go down to get to the maintenance area. It doesn’t show the door itself, but you can’t get there any other way. Anyway, this is from the Friday, two days after Georgia Lester went missing.” He pressed play. With the jerky movement of time-lapse photography, a man came into view, seen from the rear. He was dressed in a white coat and dark trousers, with the jaunty-brimmed trilby-style hat worn by all the butchers for hygiene reasons. He appeared to be carrying a large plastic tray of packaged meat. Harvey pointed to the screen. “It caught my attention because you can see there’s something wrapped in black plastic in the tray. Just there, see what I mean?”

“I see it,” Duvall said cautiously. “But that’s not Redford. The body shape’s all wrong. Do we get him coming back?”

“That’s what I wanted you to see.” He pressed the fast forward button and the scene jerked into movement. Suddenly, a man came back into view. Harvey froze the frame when the man was about ten feet from the camera. “That’s the best view we get of his face.”

Duvall frowned. There was something familiar about the image on the screen in front of her, but she couldn’t place it.

Harvey looked up at her expectantly.

She peered into the screen, willing the image to become clearer. Then suddenly, something clicked in the recesses of her memory. It made no sense, but she was sure she was right. The implications of that were almost too terrible to contemplate. She straightened up. “Let’s get this enhanced, soon as possible. I’m going to get right on to the Met about this. I’ll be in my office. Well spotted, Harvey.”