That was something she knew all about from personal experience. And she wouldnt wish it on her worst enemy. Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P134599 Ufime zftmd pfapa pdqie tmzp. Yqeek ngfza ftmdp. Mrqit agdea regdr uzsft qiqnm zpuwz qiftq pqfmu xeart uepmu xkdag fuzq.
It wasnt hard to do Drew Shand. Messy, but not hard. They dont realize how vulnerable they are. A few hours of surfing the web and I knew the details of his daily routine. I didnt think it would be too difficult to pick him up. His sort are always suckers for flattery. It was just a matter of finding somewhere to see him off. Then I found the perfect place: a boarded-up butchers shop. The back was tiled from floor to ceiling. There was a butchers block In the middle of the room and a couple of big sinks along one wall. Judging by the dust and cobwebs everywhere, nobody had been here for ages, and I didnt think anybody would be coming through any time soon. So I decided it would be safe just to leave whatever mess I made. The next day, I parked near his flat, where I could see him come and go. He got back from the gym right on schedule, and an hour later, he was walking back towards Broughton Street. I slipped into his wake and followed him into the Barbary Coast bar. It was already quite busy, and I could see a few blokes giving me the once-over. It made me feel sweaty and uncomfortable. After all, I didnt want anybody remembering me afterwards. Drew was at the bar and I moved up beside him. Hed ordered a drink and when it arrived, I held out a tenner and said, This ones on me. He didnt argue. We moved over to a corner where it was darker, and I acted surprised when he said who he was. I said I thought the torture scenes in his book were brilliant. He went on about how the critics had complained that the violence was over the top, so I told him I thought it was great. Sexy, almost. He gave me a funny look then. But he didnt say anything, just went to the bar and got another round in. When he came back, he asked me if that was what I was into, a bit of the rough stuff. It couldnt have gone better if Id scripted it. Cutting a long story short, he invited me upstairs to what he called the dark room. Then I told him I had something better than that. I said I worked for a property development company, and Id managed to get the keys to an old shop that Id turned into a fantasy dungeon. I couldnt believe how easy it had been. Id thought I might actually have had to have sex with him before I could get him to come with me, and Id been dreading that even more than what I had planned for him. But he was a pushover. The worst bit was when we pulled up in the back lane and he leaned across and started kissing me. I pushed him away, a bit roughly but that just made him all the more keen. When I was undoing the padlock, he pressed right up against me so I could feel his cock hard against my backside. If Id been having second thoughts, that would have seen them off sharpish. I pulled the door open, and as he reached for the switch, I smashed my heavy metal torch down on the side of his head just above his ear. He went down like a tree. I dont want to think about the next bit. It wasnt nice. Its a lot harder to strangle somebody than it looks. Especially when youre wearing latex gloves and your hands start sweating and slipping around inside them. Then I had to do the cutting. That was really disgusting. Horrible. Not just the blood, but the smell. I nearly threw up. Ive had some shitty nights, but this beat the lot of them hands down. Once Id done what I had to do, I zipped his jacket back up to sort of hold things in place. Then I picked him up and carried him out to the 4 x 4. I couldntjust throw him over my shoulder or his guts would have gone everywhere. Id already decided where I was going to dump the body. The actual site described in Shands book was out of the question. It was far too exposed. It would have been asking to be caught. But then, what do you expect? One hundred percent accuracy? Id settled on dumping him round the side of the cathedral. When I got there, there was nobody around, so I arranged him on the steps leading up to an office building. I undid his jacket, and displayed him by the book. God, that nearly had me throwing up all over again. Then I took off as if I had the four horsemen of the apocalypse on my heels. Time to head back to where I was supposed to be. I expected it to give me nightmares. But it didnt. Its not like I enjoyed it or anything. It was a job that had to be done, and I did it well. I take pride in that. But no pleasure.
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 Lesleys. If acute liver failure had not killed him four years earlier, she suspected hed have taken his own life sooner rather than later. So the whisky bottle was, for her, no choice.
But burying herself in work wasnt doing the trick either. Sitting down with Kit to eat forced her to realize that Lesleys ghost hadnt 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 Fionas face. He knew that in the aftermath of her sisters 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 daughters fate, Fiona had pursued all the avenues she could think of to absorb every fact relating to her sisters 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 Lesleys 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 couldnt 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 wasnt 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 theyre saying on the Net, she said. How do you feel about that?
He shrugged then topped up his glass. It cant 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 dont think Drews going to be updating his own site any time now.
The first page Fiona clicked on had a black border round the publishers 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 citys 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, doesnt 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, Id forgotten.
Fiona grinned. There were so many. Ever since theyd first been together, Kit had given Fiona his personal pick of the years crime fiction for Christmas. It was a genre shed scarcely ever read before theyd become lovers. Now, she enjoyed keeping up with her partners 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 didnt 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. Its 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.