by Val McDermid
If everything had gone according to plan, Martin should have had good reason to be worried. The man’s lip twitched in a tiny sneer, hidden from view behind his beard and moustache. He watched Martin take his girlfriend by the elbow and steer her through the crowded bookshop to the door. He’d barely paused to say farewell to his cronies, the man observed. The woman’s words had clearly made him very uncomfortable.
With the principal object of his hatred gone, the man slipped through the press of bodies to the table that held the wine. He held his glass out for a refill, nodded his thanks and faded into the background. There were a few authors left, but they were beneath contempt, unworthy of his attentions. His opinion of himself was such that he was only interested in the very best. That, of course, had been the problem all along. He saw that now. They were the ones under pressure to come up with the goods, which explained why they’d done what they had to him.
But that was history. What he was interested in now was retribution.
FIFTEEN
In the cab they took to Steve’s, Kit was uncharacteristically quiet. Fiona knew better than to try to force him to talk about what was on his mind. That would simply lead to a sullen and mean-tempered denial that anything was troubling him. Like most men, a sense of his own vulnerability made him uncomfortable. Rather than make him even more uneasy by pushing him, she placed her hand on one of his and said nothing. Halfway up Pentonville Road, he finally spoke.
“I know it’s hard to credit, but it really hadn’t crossed my mind that Drew’s killer might come after me,” he said, leaning his head against the back of the seat and sighing. “Dumbshit or what?”
“That’s the healthy response,” Fiona said. “Why should you imagine you’re going to be the next victim of a murderer who struck four hundred miles away? If-and it’s still a big if-Drew Shand’s death is the first in a series, we don’t know what it was about him that made him an attractive target. Was it that he was gay? Was it his work? Was it something in his past that we don’t know anything about? Was it his attraction to the dark side of his sexuality? All of those are imponderables and only one of them could apply to you. Statistically, your risk of becoming the victim of a serial killer is somewhere around vanishing point.”
“Even so, you’d think it would have occurred to me in passing that I might just be on some nutter’s hit list,” Kit said sharply. “After all, I’m supposed to be the one with the imagination. You thought of it, after all.”
Fiona squeezed his arm. “Yeah, but my way of looking at the world is even more fucked up than yours. Besides, I’m your lover. I’m legally entitled to worry unreasonably about you.”
Kit grunted, putting an arm round her and pulling her close. “Doesn’t it ever piss you off, being right all the time?”
She grinned. “Find out what you’re good at and stick to it, that’s what I say. And since you’ve just admitted I have a right to worry, you have to promise me you won’t talk to strangers.”
Kit snorted. “That’s an easy promise to keep. At least until the new book comes out.”
The cab juddered to a halt outside the four-storey Islington town house where Steve occupied the garden flat. He could have afforded somewhere bigger, but he spent so little time at home that he couldn’t see the point of moving from somewhere that met his needs perfectly. Two bedrooms one of which doubled as a study a dining-kitchen whose french windows opened out on to the garden and a living room big enough to accommodate two sofas and an armchair was all he needed. He kept the decor simple. Fiona loved the economy of style, but Kit hated its clinical purity. Both suspected Steve barely noticed his surroundings. As long as they were functional, he was content.
Fiona’s low heels clattered on the stone stairs down to the basement entry. Kit, following her, marvelled at her hair as the streetlights caught it, burnishing it to a rich chestnut-brown. She was, he thought, more beautiful than he could ever deserve. Catching up with her as she rang the bell, he put his arms round her and kissed her neck. “I love you, Fiona,” he said gruffly.
Fiona gave a low chuckle. “Don’t I know it.”
Steve opened the door and grinned down from his superior height. “Keep it decent,” he advised. “Some of us have to live here.”
They followed him down the narrow hall into the dining room, where the table was laid with an assortment of breads, cheeses, pates and salads. The air was thick with the aroma of leek and potatoes. Steve lived on soup. There was always a pan of some concoction on the stove, next to the stockpot containing the makings of the next brew. Soup was the only thing he ever cooked. Kit enjoyed mocking Steve’s culinary limitations, but when cornered, he was forced to admit that Steve made the best soup he’d ever tasted and, far from having a restricted repertoire, Steve probably experimented more with combinations of flavours than Kit himself.
“It’s just that it always comes with a bowl and spoon,” he had once complained. “It’s so predictable.”
“At least my guests don’t need a degree in civil engineering to eat their dinner,” Steve had growled. “I remember my first globe artichoke round your house. Besides, given the life I lead, I need something instant when I come in the door, and my soup’s a damn sight healthier than a bacon butty.”
But tonight, no one was interested in arguments about the menu. In the two weeks since she’d returned from Toledo, Fiona had finally found the time to give proper attention to the case file on the sting the Met had mounted against Francis Blake. Since she insisted her input was to remain informal, she had suggested outlining her conclusions round the dinner table. So for once there was an air of tense anticipation among them as they sat down and Steve poured a robust red into their glasses.
“Soup first, then we’ll cut to the chase,” Fiona decreed.
Steve gave a wry smile. “Whatever you say, Doctor.” He filled their bowls with steaming, creamy vichyssoise. “So what small talk shall we indulge in?”
“How about your love life?” Kit suggested.
“That should occupy all of ten seconds,” Steve said. He picked up his spoon and examined it critically. “My love life is like the Loch Ness Monster rumours of its existence are greatly exaggerated.”
“What happened to that CPS lawyer you took to dinner the other week?” Fiona asked.
“She was more interested in the rules on disclosure of evidence than she was in me,” Steve said. “I’d have had a more interesting night out with the Commander and his wife.”
Kit whistled. “That good, eh?”
“Hell, I don’t suppose I was much more interesting to her,” Steve said, lifting a spoonful of soup to his lips.
“The trouble with the three of us is that in our own ways we all have a morbid fascination with violent death,” Fiona said. “Maybe Kit should fix you up with a sexy crime writer.”
Kit spluttered. “Easier said than done. When you cross off the ones who are already attached, the ones who have a serious interest in recreational drugs and the dykes, there’s not a lot left over.”
“Besides, you couldn’t stand the competition,” Steve added.
The first course over, Steve cleared the bowls away and Fiona took a couple of pages of notes from her briefcase. “I must say, the material you gave me made for very interesting reading,” she said. “Not least the interpretations that Andrew Horsforth placed on the interaction. It was an object lesson in what happens when you push the theory ahead of the facts. In one sense, the conclusions he drew were valid. If, that is, you concentrate on the margins and ignore the central core of the material. If you look at a series of conclusions as a continuum from most likely to least likely, he’s opted more often than not for the least likely, because that’s what backed up the view he started with, namely that Francis Blake was the killer.”
“But, cleverly, you started from the opposite premise,” Kit said with affectionate sarcasm. “Nobody loves a smart arse you know.”
Fiona stuck her tongue out at him. “Wrong. I started
from the neutral position. I tried to ignore my own half-formed opinion that Francis Blake wasn’t the killer. I was concerned with achieving as much objectivity as I could.”
“Not something anyone could ever accuse Horsforth of,” Steve said. “You’ll be pleased to hear that he’s been dropped from the list of Home Office-approved consultants after our debacle at the Bailey.”
“That’s a bit decisive for the Home Office, isn’t it?” Kit asked through a mouthful of salad.
“Horsforth’s an easier scapegoat than senior police officers,” Steve said. “We’re as much to blame as him for what happened, but heaven forbid that any more mud should be slung at the Met right now.”
“Deputy heads will roll,” Fiona observed cynically. “Before I tell you what I think, Steve, I need you to answer one question for me. Although obviously I know more or less where the murder took place, I didn’t actually visit the scene of crime, so I wasn’t sure about this. Is there anywhere on the Heath where someone could have watched the murder without being seen by Susan Blanchard’s killer?”
Steve frowned, his eyes focusing on the corner of the ceiling as he recalled the setting for the murder. When he spoke, his voice was slow, considering. “We found the body in a sort of hollow. There was a line of rhododendrons between Susan and the path. Then the clearing where she was found. Beyond that, the ground rose slightly to another line of shrubs. I suppose someone hidden in those bushes could have escaped observation by a killer who was intent on what he was doing. SOCO will have done a fingertip search of the whole area, though, and I don’t recall anything in the forensics to indicate the presence of a third person.”
“You think Blake saw it?” Kit broke in, unable to keep quiet.
“You’re doing a Horsforth,” Steve said. “Theorizing without the data. It could just as easily have been someone else altogether who told Blake about it. Let’s hear what Fiona’s got to say.”
Kit cast his eyes upwards. “I forgot. We have to have the whole lecture. No skipping to the back page to see whodunnit.” He shook his head in tolerant amusement.
“Why change the habit of a lifetime?” Fiona said sweetly. “OK, here’s what I think. Right from the start, we know we’re looking for a confident criminal. We know this because Hampstead Heath is a public place, and the risk of alerting passers-by to such a violent crime in broad daylight is high. Also, the way the body is displayed indicates a man who is, at least in criminal terms, a mature offender. Blake’s record, on the other hand, is trivial and shows little sign of escalation towards this sort of crime. That was the first thing that made me a little uneasy about him as prime suspect.”
“Hang on a minute, though,” Kit objected. “You can’t say that just because he doesn’t have a criminal record he’d not done the sort of crimes that lead to sexual murder. It might be that he’s either been clever enough or lucky enough to get away with it.”
“That’s true,” Fiona acknowledged. “And so I wouldn’t write Blake off on those grounds alone. Nor would I dismiss him on the basis that the pornography the police found in his flat, although sadomasochistic in content, contained no photographs or descriptions that fit the way the body was displayed. But again, that detail gives me pause for thought, because the killer had to form that image somehow. If it didn’t come from his pornography, it came from some incident in his past, around the time he was forming his sexual identity. And none of Steve’s researches came up with anything comparable in Blake’s history. So as far as I’m concerned, that’s another question mark over Blake.”
Steve was leaning forward now, elbows on the table, an intent frown on his face. So far, Fiona had said nothing he didn’t already believe himself. But he always found her cogent way of stringing things together clarified things, sometimes rearranging details so they formed a different picture. He sensed where she was heading, and he wondered if Kit had been right about what was coming.
“Another thing I would expect from this killer is that he’d have poor hetero social skills,” Fiona continued. “But again, that doesn’t fit Blake. He had a girlfriend, but as well as that he was comfortable with contacting strange women through personal ads. We know from some of the women who have come forward that he managed to have sex with them, even if most of them found him too domineering a partner to want to continue the relationship. So here we have a man who is good at making social and sexual connections with women.”
“Better than me,” Steve pointed out. “You’re right, though. That was one of the main reasons I never liked Blake for this job. He wasn’t some frustrated virgin or someone whose head was wired for no beating women up as the best means of achieving sexual satisfaction.”
“I knew all that before I read the entrapment transcripts,” Fiona continued. “As I’m sure you did too, Steve. However, it became clear from reading what passed between Blake and Erin Richards that he knew more about Susan Blanchard’s murder than he could have gleaned from the press reports. He knew, for example, that her hands were arranged as if in prayer, the fingers linked rather than having the fingertips propped against each other. Blake always maintained after his arrest that he’d heard that in the pub, but he couldn’t identify the person he claimed had told him. I’ll come back to that later, though.”
Kit nodded. In spite of himself, he was as fascinated by Fiona’s dissection as Steve. He was sure he’d guessed where she was heading, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t interested in seeing how she justified reaching that conclusion. Even after all this time, he was still intrigued by the way her mind worked, so analytical in contrast to his own intuitive approach. “Consider our breath well and truly hated,” he said.
Refusing to be thrown off her stride, Fiona ignored him and carried on. “What I want to deal with next is the fantasies that Blake outlined in his letters and conversations with DC Richards. Based on my experience, I would expect the killer to have very specific fantasies. I would expect the object of his fantasies to be a teenage girl or a woman in her early twenties, as Susan Blanchard was. They’re easier to manipulate, both in fantasy and reality. In the scenarios he plays out in his head, this killer will objectify women. He’ll fantasize about control, submission, violent activity that causes the object of his attention to show extreme fear. He’ll imagine threatening her with a knife, tying her up, causing her pain, cutting her, making her beg for mercy.” Fiona paused and took a long draught of her wine. “And because he killed her out of doors, I’d expect the setting for those imaginary sexual encounters to be in a park or in woodland.
“But that’s not what we find in Blake’s fantasies at all. Almost everything he outlined to DC Richards involves voyeurism. He talks and writes about a third person watching their sex games, being turned on by them, often joining in. Admittedly, there are some strong elements of submission and domination in there too, but they’re much more in the realm of playfulness rather than the real infliction of pain. But the clincher for me is that in all of the scenarios he outlines for this woman he’s aiming to bed, this woman he’s been taking on walks through the parks of London in each and every scene he describes, where they are going to have sex is indoors. At the undertaker’s where he works, at the office where she works, in a deserted warehouse, in his flat. Not a single one of these elaborately detailed, pornographically described situations is out of doors.
“And finally, there’s the question of the pornography that your officers found in Blake’s flat. It’s true there was a lot of it, both magazines and videos. And it’s true that most of it was what would be classified as hardcore, mostly involving young women or teenage girls. But if the catalogue in the file is accurate, surprisingly little of it focuses on rape or S&M. What there was a lot of was threesomes and voyeurism. Plus a bit of bondage.”
“You’re saying Blake doesn’t match the crime,” Steve said flatly.
“Based on the product of your operation, I think any qualified psychologist with an open mind would come to that conclusion,” Fiona agreed.
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“There’s more, though, isn’t there?” Kit chipped in. “You think you know what really happened, don’t you, Fiona?”
Steve paused halfway through spreading pate on a piece of bread. “You do?”
Fiona fiddled with her napkin. “That’s not what I’m saying, Kit. I don’t know who did kill Susan Blanchard. But I’d stake my reputation that Francis Blake didn’t.” She took a deep breath. “However, I believe he saw the man who did. Blake’s a voyeur. That’s why he looks at parks the way he does. He likes to watch. I think this is what happened that morning on Hampstead Heath. He was lurking in the shrubbery hoping he’d see a couple making love. What he actually saw was very different. Francis Blake stood and watched while somebody else raped and murdered Susan Blanchard. And it was the most exciting thing he’d ever seen in his life.”
SIXTEEN
The silence that followed Fiona’s conclusion had the quality of empty air after the shock wave of a bomb blast. Even though Kit had guessed where she was heading right at the start of her exposition, the certainly of her judgement chilled him into stillness. Steve closed his eyes and dropped his head on to one hand, massaging the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “That’s a bit of a leap,” he said softly.
“It makes sense of all the information in a way nothing else does,” she said, reaching for the bottle and refilling her glass, as if girding her loins for a challenge to her reasoning.
Steve raised his head and met her eyes. He wanted to believe her, not least because it might give him fresh avenues to explore. But he was aware that his own feelings for her had always made him willing to give her the benefit of any doubt. He’d stuck his neck out to defend her reports to his bosses, and it had paid off in the past. This time, though, his very future hung on what he did with the Susan Blanchard case. If he screwed it up even more than it already had been his career was effectively over. No one would criticize him if he let the case slide into the unsolved regions; the public assumption would remain that they’d got the right man but had wrecked the case against him. But if he took a chance and pursued the possibilities thrown up by Fiona’s theorizing, he’d better be damn sure he got it right. He cleared his throat. “Or maybe Blake is entirely innocent,” he said.
