At the thought of Kit, her sadness shifted. That she had found the one man who could save her from the prison of her introspection was a blessing she never ceased to find miraculous. The world might never see behind the tough-guy charm he turned on in public, but beyond his sharp-edged intelligence, she had discovered generosity, respect and a sensitivity shed all but given up hope of ever finding. With Kit, she had finally arrived at a kind of peace that mostly kept the demons of Stanage Edge at bay.
As she strode on, she glanced at her watch. Shed made good time. If she kept up her pace, shed have time for a drink in the Fox House pub before the bus that would carry her back down into Sheffield for the London train. Shed have had five hours in the open, five hours when she had seen scarcely another human being, and that was enough to sustain her. Until the next time, she thought grimly.
The train was quieter than shed expected. Fiona had a double seat to herself, and the man opposite her was asleep within ten minutes of leaving Sheffield, allowing her space to spread herself over the whole of the table between them. That was fine by her since she had more than enough work to occupy the journey. She had an arrangement with the landlord of a pub a few minutes walk from the station. He looked after her mobile phone and her laptop when she was out walking in exchange for signed first editions of Kits books. It was safer than the left-luggage facilities at the station and certainly cheaper.
Fiona flipped open her laptop and attached it to her mobile so she could collect her e mail. A message appeared on her screen announcing she had five new pieces of mail. She downloaded them then disconnected. There were two messages from students, and one from a colleague in Princeton writing to ask if he could have access to some data she had collected on solved rape cases. Nothing there that couldnt wait till morning. She opened the fourth message, from Kit.
From: Kit Martin [KMWriter@trashnet.com]
To: Fiona Cameron [fcameron@psych.ulon.ac.uk]
Subject: Dinner tonight
Hope youve had a good day on the hill. Ive been productive, 2,500 words by teatime. Things turned out at the Bailey just like you said they would. Trust that female intuition! (only joking, I know yours was a considered judgement based on weighing up all the scientific evidence) Anyway, I reckoned Steve would need cheering up, so Ive arranged to meet him for dinner. Were going to St. Johns in Clerkenwell to eat lots of dead animal so you probably dont fancy joining us, but if you want to, thatd be great. If not, I made a salmon and asparagus risotto for lunch, and theres plenty left over in the fridge for you for dinner. Love you.
Fiona smiled. Typical Kit. As long as everyone was fed, nothing too terrible could go wrong with the world. She wasnt surprised Steve needed cheering up. No police officer relished watching a case fall apart, especially one that had such a high public profile as the Hampstead Heath murder. But for Detective Superintendent Steve Preston, the collapse of this particular case would have left a more bitter taste than most. Fiona knew only too well how much had been at stake in this prosecution, and while she felt personal sympathy for Steve, all she felt for the Metropolitan Police was that it served them bloody well right.
She clicked open the next message, having saved the most intriguing for last.
From: Salvador Berrocal [Sberroc@cnp.mad.es]
To: Dr. Fiona Cameron [fcameron@ psych.ulon.ac.uk]
Subject: Consultation request
Dear Dr. Cameron,
I am a Major in the plain-clothes division of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia based in Madrid. I am in charge of many homicide inquiries. Your name has been given to me by a colleague at New Scotland Yard as an expert in crime linkage and geographic profiling. Please forgive the intrusion of contacting you so directly. I am writing to ask if you would do us the courtesy of providing your services to consult in a matter of great urgency. In Spain we have a little experience with serial killers and so we have no psychological experts to work with policemen. In Toledo have been two murders inside three weeks and we think they are the crimes of one man. But it is wholly not obvious that they are connected and we need a different expertise to assist us with the analysis of these crimes. I understand that you have experience in the area of crime analysis and linkage, and this would be of great use to us, I think. I wish to know if in principle you are willing to help us with resolving these murders. You may be assured of proper remuneration for this consultation if you will be our assistant. I look forward to hearing your response.
Respectfully, Major Salvador Berrocal. Cuerpo Nacional de Policia.
Fiona folded her arms and stared at the screen. She knew that behind this cautious request lay a pair of bodies that had almost certainly been mutilated and probably tortured before death. There was likely to be some element of sexual violation in the attacks. She could assume this with some degree of certainty, for police forces were well capable of dealing with routine murders without calling on the specialist help that only she and a handful of others could be relied on to provide. When new acquaintances discovered this aspect of Fionas work, they usually shuddered and asked how she could bear to be involved in such appalling cases.
Her typical response was to shrug and say, Somebody has to do it. Better its somebody like me who knows what shes doing. Nobody can bring back the dead but sometimes its possible to prevent more of the living joining them.
It was, she knew, a glib riposte, carefully calculated to deflect further questioning. The truth was she hated the inevitable confrontation with violent death that her work with various police forces had brought into her life, not least because of the memories it stirred in her. She knew more about what could be inflicted on the human body, more about the sufferings the spirit could sustain than she had ever wished to. But such exposure was inescapable and because it always exacted a heavy toll from her, she only ever accepted a new assignment when she felt sufficiently recovered from her last direct encounter with the victims of a serial killer.
It had been almost four months since Fiona had worked a murder series. A man had killed four prostitutes in Merseyside over a period of eighteen months. Thanks in part to the data analysis that Fiona and one of her graduate students had completed, the police had been able to narrow down their pool of suspects to the point where forensic detection could be applied. Now they had a man in custody charged with three of the four killings, and thanks to DNA matches they were reasonably sure of a conviction.
Since then, her only police consultation project had been a long-term study of recidivist burglars with the Swedish Police. It was, she thought, time to get her hands dirty again. She hit the reply key.
From: Fiona Cameron [fcameron@psych.ulon.ac.uk]
To: Salvador Berrocal [sberroc@cnp.mad.es]
Subject: Re: Consultation request
Dear Major Berrocal,
Thank you for your invitation to act as consultant to the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia. In principle, I am willing to consider your request favourably. However, before I can be certain that I can be of use to you, I need more detail than you have provided in your e mail. Ideally, I would like to see an outline of the circumstances of both murders, a digest of the pathology reports and any witness statements. I am reasonably competent in written Spanish, so in the interests of speed, you need not have these documents translated for my benefit. Of course, any communications I receive from you will be treated in complete confidence. For the sake of security, I suggest you fax these documents to my home.
Fiona typed in the details of her home fax and phone then sent the e mail. At best, shed be able to contribute to the prevention of more murders and acquire useful data for her researches in the process. At worst, shed have a valid excuse for staying out of the way of the fallout from the Hampstead Heath trial collapse. Someone or rather a couple of Spanish someones had paid a high price to keep Candid Cameron out of the headlines.
TWO
Fiona walked through the door to the sound of REM telling her that nobody loved a sad professor. As usual, Kit had stacked up half a dozen CDs in the player in his study, hit the random button and walked out the door while there were still hours of playing time left. He couldnt abide silence. She had learned this early on in their relationship, when shed taken him walking in her beloved Derbyshire and had been horrified to watch him filling his backpack with cassettes for his Walkman. More than once, shed come home to an empty house where music spilled out of Kits study, the TV in the living room blared like a bull and the radio in the kitchen added a mad counterpoint to the racket. The louder the din, the easier he seemed to find it to escape into his own imagined universe. For Fiona, who needed silence in order to concentrate on anything vaguely creative, it was an incomprehensible paradox.
When theyd first talked about living together, Fiona had insisted that whatever property they bought, it had to be capable of providing her with a quiet space to work in. Theyd ended up with a tall thin house in Dartmouth Park whose previous owner had been a rock musician. Hed converted the attic into a soundproof studio that provided Fiona with the perfect eyrie to escape Kits background racket. It was even big enough to allow her to install a futon for those nights when Kit was up against a deadline and needed to write into the early hours of the morning. Sometimes she felt deeply sorry for their long-suffering neighbours. They must dread February when, invariably, the end of a book and late-night Radiohead loomed.
Fiona dropped her bags and went into Kits ground-floor study to turn off the music. Blessed silence fell like balm on her head. She continued upstairs, stopping off in their bedroom to shuck off her walking gear and pull on her house clothes She trudged up the remaining two flights to her office, feeling the hills in the pull of her leg muscles. The first thing she registered was the flashing light of the answering machine. Fifteen messages. Shed put money on them all being from journalists, and she wasnt in the mood to listen to them, never mind to respond. This was one occasion where she was absolute in her determination not to provide a single quote that could be twisted to suit someone elses agenda.