Killing the Shadows (2000) Read online

  “I’m so sorry, Kit,” she said, holding him close and letting him nestle against her.

  “I’ve never known anybody who was murdered before. I know we’ve talked about Lesley, and I thought I understood how you felt about what happened to her, but now I realize I didn’t really have a clue. And it’s not even as if I knew Drew particularly well. But I just can’t get my head around the idea that anybody would kill him. I just can’t imagine why.”

  Fiona had never met Drew Shand, but she knew too much of murder and its consequences not to feel the horror that lay behind the bare fact of his death. She knew only too well what murder meant to those left behind. It was the reason she had become the woman she was.

  Kit had hit her with the trigger word. Lesley. If she closed her eyes, it would all come flooding back. It had been a Friday night like any other. She’d been in her first year of university teaching and had fallen into the habit of unwinding at the end of the week with the clinical staff from the institute where she was conducting a research study. They’d start in a pub in Bloomsbury, then work their way up towards Euston Station, ending up in a curry house in a side street on the far side of Euston Road. By the time she’d got back to her two-roomed flat in Camden, it had been almost midnight and the rough edges of the week had been blurred into a genial wooziness.

  The light on the answering machine had been flashing crazily, indicating half a dozen messages or more. Intrigued, she’d hit the playback button and carried on walking towards the kitchenette. The first words on the tape stopped her in her tracks. “Fiona? It’s Dad. Phone me as soon as you get in.” It wasn’t what was said, it was the manner of its saying. Her father’s voice, normally strong and confident, had been almost a whisper, a pale quivering echo of its normal self.

  A bleep, then the next message. “Fiona, it’s Dad again. I don’t care how late it is when you get this message, you’ve got to phone.” This time the voice cracked towards the end of the short message.

  Already, she was turning, moving towards the phone. A bleep, then her father’s voice again. “Fiona, I need to talk to you. It won’t wait till the morning.” All her instincts told her it was bad news. The worst kind of news. It must be her mother. A heart attack? A stroke? An accident in the car?

  Fiona grabbed the phone and punched in the familiar number. Almost before it could ring, it was answered. A strange voice said, “Hello? Who is this?”

  “This is Fiona Cameron. Who are you?”

  “One moment, please. I’ll get your father.” There was a muffled exchange then a clatter, then her father’s voice, almost as alien as the stranger’s.

  “Fiona,” he blurted. Then he started sobbing.

  “Dad, what’s wrong? Is it Mum? What’s happened?” All Fiona’s professionally soothing skills vanished in the face of her father’s tears.

  “No, no. It’s Lesley. She’s…Lesley’s been…” He forced his ragged breathing into stillness. She heard a deep, wrenching intake of air, then he said, “Lesley’s dead.”

  Fiona had no idea what he’d said next. She felt an enormous distance build between her and her surroundings, his voice a faraway echo against the ringing in her ears. Her little sister was dead. It wasn’t possible. There had to be a mistake.

  There was none. Lesley, a third-year student at St. Andrews University, had been raped and strangled on her way back to her shared house. No one had ever been charged with the crime. The police believed the killer had raped two other students in the previous eighteen months, but they had no significant clues. A couple of footprints from a popular brand of trainers. A description so vague it could apply to half the adult males in the town. Even if they’d had DNA analysis back then, it wouldn’t have been much use. He’d used a condom. All the attacks had taken place in winter and the women were wearing gloves, so they hadn’t scratched their attacker.

  For six months after Lesley’s death, Fiona had felt as if she was walking around inside a very bad dream. Any minute now, she could force herself to wake up and none of it would have happened. Lesley would be alive. Her mother wouldn’t be suicidally depressed. Her father wouldn’t be drinking too much and writing endless letters to his MP, the press and the police, complaining of the failure to make an arrest. And she wouldn’t be blaming herself for persuading Lesley to spread her wings and go to St. Andrews when she could have joined Fiona in London.

  Then one day, she’d gone to a lecture given by a visiting fellow from Canada. He’d talked about the infant science of crime analysis and how it could be applied in criminal investigations. It was like a light bulb in her head suddenly turning on. The cocoon fell away and with piercing intensity, Fiona knew what she wanted to do with her life.

  An hour in a lecture theatre, and nothing would be the same again. She couldn’t save Lesley. She couldn’t even catch Lesley’s killer. But now Fiona understood that one day she might find her redemption by saving someone else.

  That prospect was enough. Most days, anyway, it was enough. But now murder had touched her life again, even if at one remove. All of this swam through her mind as she sat with Kit in her arms, doing what little she could to comfort him.

  After a lengthy silence, Kit finally drew away from her. “I’m sorry I’m being such a wet nelly,” he said. “It’s not like he was my best mate or anything.”

  “You’re not being a wet nelly. You knew him, you liked him, you respected his work. And it’s a shock to realize he’s just not here any more.”

  Kit stood up and turned on a lamp. “That’s the curse of an imagination at a time like this. I keep thinking what it must have been like for him, how scared he must have been.” He took a deep breath. “I need to do something to keep my mind occupied.” He picked up the pile of paper the printer had spewed out. “Do you mind if we just get something sent up from room service?”

  “Whatever you need.” Fiona hung up her coat and picked up her laptop. “I’ve got plenty I can be getting on with if you want to work.”

  Kit managed a faint smile. “Thanks.” He settled cross-legged on the bed with his pile of manuscript and a pencil. Fiona watched him in the mirror for a few minutes until she was sure he was reading and not brooding. More than anything, she was glad he’d accompanied her to Toledo. The news of Drew’s death wasn’t something he should have had to face on his own.

  That was something she knew all about from personal experience. And she wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy.

  Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13⁄4599

  Ufime zftmd pfapa pdqie tmzp. Yqeek ngfza ftmdp. Mrqit agdea regdr uzsft qiqnm zpuwz qiftq pqfmu xeart uepmu xkdag fuzq.

  It wasn’t hard to do Drew Shand. Messy, but not hard. They don’t realize how vulnerable they are. A few hours of surfing the web and I knew the details of his daily routine.

  I didn’t 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 butcher’s shop. The back was tiled from floor to ceiling. There was a butcher’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t want anybody remembering me afterwards.

  Drew was at the bar and I moved up beside him. He’d ordered a drink and when it arrived, I held out a tenner and said, “This one’s on me.” He didn’t 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t have gone better if I’d 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 I’d managed to get the keys to an old shop that I’d turned into a fantasy dungeon.

  I couldn’t believe how easy it had been. I’d thought I might actually have had to have sex with him before I could get him to come with me, and I’d 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 I’d 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 don’t want to think about the next bit. It wasn’t nice. It’s a lot harder to strangle somebody than it looks. Especially when you’re 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. I’ve had some shitty nights, but this beat the lot of them hands down.

  Once I’d 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 couldn’tjust throw him over my shoulder or his guts would have gone everywhere.

  I’d already decided where I was going to dump the body. The actual site described in Shand’s 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?

  I’d 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 didn’t. It’s 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 Lesley’s. If acute liver failure had not killed him four years earlier, she suspected he’d have taken his own life sooner rather than later. So the whisky bottle was, for her, no choice.

  But burying herself in work wasn’t doing the trick either. Sitting down with Kit to eat forced her to realize that Lesley’s ghost hadn’t 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 Fiona’s face. He knew that in the aftermath of her sister’s 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 daughter’s fate, Fiona had pursued all the avenues she could think of to absorb every fact relating to her sister’s 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 Lesley’s 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 couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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 they’re saying on the Net,” she said. “How do you feel about that?”

  He shrugged then topped up his glass. “It can’t 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 don’t think Drew’s going to be updating his own site any time now.”

  The first page Fiona clicked on had a black border round the publisher’s 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 city’s 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, doesn’t 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, I’d forgotten.”

  Fiona grinned. “There were so many.” Ever since they’d first been together, Kit had given Fiona his personal pick of the year’s crime fiction for Christmas. It was a genre she’d scarcely ever read before they’d become lovers. Now, she enjoyed keeping up
with her partner’s 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 didn’t 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. “It’s 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.”

  “It’ll get worse before it gets better,” said Fiona. “Unless they pick someone up quickly and it turns out to be nothing to do with the gay scene.”

  “Yeah, right. If AIDS doesn’t get you, the bogeyman will.”

  Fiona called up the menu of her favourite sites on the web and ran her cursor down the list. Kit leaned into her, reading over her shoulder.

  “I wonder how many people’s favourite places list includes the RCMP, the FBI, various serial killer sites and a forensic pathology discussion group?” Kit asked.

  “More than is healthy, I suspect,” Fiona muttered. Towards the bottom of the list was a site that she knew infuriated most of the law enforcement officers she knew. Officially, Murder Behind the Headlines was run jointly by a journalist in Detroit, a private eye in Vancouver who was reported to have had a murky past in the CIA, and a postgraduate in criminology in Liverpool. Given the depth of detail they managed to come up with on sensational murder cases, Fiona suspected there were a few serious hackers involved in putting together the site. Not to mention a very large base of anonymous contributors who enjoyed the prospect of sharing whatever privileged information or hearsay they encountered. Several attempts had been made to close them down on the basis that they were making public information that allowed scope both for copycat killings and for false confessions, but somehow they always seemed to resurface with ever more sophisticated graphics and gossip. Fiona sincerely hoped that the more faint-hearted relatives of the victims never logged on to Murder Behind the Headlines.