It’s not hard to track down thriller writers. I’m used to watching people, I’ve been doing it for years. It doesn’t hurt that they’re all so vain. The Internet is clogged up with their websites and they give interviews right, left and centre. And they’re always doing public appearances.
So it made sense to start with somebody who has a really high profile, to make my job as easy as it could be. I decided the best way to make my point was to give them a real taste of their own medicine. It wouldn’t be enough just to kill them. I wanted it to be clear right from the word go that there was nothing accidental about what was going on. And knowing what was coming would make them suffer all the more. Satisfaction, that’s what I want.
To make the punishment fit the crime, I have to get the crime right, and now I’ve made my list. I ranked them according to how easy I thought it would be to do them and that’s how I got my candidates for execution.
1 Drew Shand
2 Jane Elias
3 Georgia Lester
4 Kit Martin
5 Enya Flannery
6 Jonathan Lewis
Now all I have to do is figure out exactly how to take them down.
They put me in this cage. But they should know that caged animals turn savage.
They’ve brought this on their own heads.
Fiona scrambled down the narrow path, glad she’d worn flat-soled loafers to travel in. It wasn’t that it was particularly steep, but the beaten ochre earth was dotted with small stones that would have been perilous to the ankles in any sort of heel. She made a mental note to check what footwear Martina Albrecht had been wearing at the time of her death. It might give her some indication as to how willingly she’d accompanied her killer to the scene of her murder.
Berrocal slowed down ahead of her and turned back, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke that reminded Fiona of the dried camel dung fires of the Northern Sahara. ‘You OK?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ she answered, catching up and using the pause to scan her surroundings. They were in a narrow, flat-bottomed valley that curved away from the road. The high bluffs on either side had already cut off the line of sight to the viaduct that carried the circunvalacion around the southern bank of the Tagus. From here in, there would have been no chance of being caught in the headlights of a passing car. The sides of the valley were covered in scrubby vegetation, with a few small trees straggling up the gentler slopes.
‘We are almost there,’ Berrocal said. ‘You see those bushes ahead? It’s just past there.’ He set off again, Fiona in his wake.
‘He must have had a torch,’ she observed as the tall shrubs closed around them, almost meeting over their heads. Berrocal’s smoke was forced back into her face and she tried to avoid breathing through her nose until they were in the open again.
‘I don’t think she would have come with him otherwise,’ Berrocal said. ‘There’s no sign of a struggle anywhere by the road or on the path.’
‘What was she wearing on her feet?’
Berrocal turned and flashed her a smile, as if rewarding a bright pupil. ‘Flat sandals. Yes, she probably walked into the trap without thinking twice about it.’
They emerged on the other side of the bushes in a small clearing. On the far side, a pair of gnarled olive trees flanked the path. A single uniformed officer stood in the shade at the entrance to the glade. He started forward, his hand going to his pistol butt. When he saw it was Berrocal, he snapped a salute and stepped back. The whole area was still enclosed in the familiar plastic crime-scene tapes, now looking weatherbeaten and untidy. Fiona could see the irregular reddish-brown stain on the path and the surrounding vegetation, the only obvious sign that this had been the scene of violent death. Incongruously, she could hear the twittering of birds above the distant hum of traffic. She always found herself marvelling at the way the world managed to continue apparently oblivious to the tragedy that had played itself out only yards away.
After Lesley, she had found herself walking the streets of the city where it had happened, angry and frustrated that people could carry on as if nothing had changed, as if it was nothing to do with them. Of course, in a narrow sense, it was no direct concern of theirs. But Fiona had believed then as she believed now that societies got the criminals they deserved. Brutal crimes didn’t spring from nowhere; their seeds lay in the wider crimes of the community they impinged on. It wasn’t a popular view among law enforcement, and when she was working with the police, Fiona kept her views to herself.
So she looked around without comment. There wasn’t much to say other than the obvious. And Fiona had never liked stating the obvious.
Berrocal pointed to the bloodstained area, grinding his cigarette butt underfoot. ‘She was found lying towards the rear of the blood, not in it. It adds weight to the theory that he was behind her and she was standing up when he cut her throat. Mercifully quick, the pathologist says. Then, it looks as if he stepped back and let her fall.’
‘The vaginal injuries were postmortem?’ Fiona asked.
‘Yes. He straddled her, we think. The grass is flattened on either side of her hips, as if someone had kneeled there. He cut her panties away, probably with the same blade. There were smudges of blood on the material. Then he broke the wine bottle on the ground and’—Berrocal cleared his throat—‘he inserted the broken bottle into her vagina. With considerable force. Several times. The glass fragments are on the right-hand side of the body, which supports the idea that he was right-handed.’
Fiona crossed to the side of the clearing and looked at the crime scene from the point of view the killer would have had. ‘The thing that strikes me most about this is what I mentioned earlier. The sexual mutilations are postmortem, which is unusual. There’s no sign of any kind of sexual activity before the attack. He went straight for the kill. No foreplay.’
Berrocal nodded. ‘You think this is significant?’
‘It’s a marker of someone who feels very lacking in power. There’s nothing tentative about it either. It reveals a great deal of anger. So when I’m looking for linked crimes, I’ll be bearing in mind that they will probably exhibit similar markers.’ Fiona hitched up her trousers, crouched down and studied the ground. There was no particular reason for her to do this. In truth, she learned very little from looking at crime scenes. She had never discovered anything that wasn’t covered by the files she would read later. But police officers expected her to absorb something from where the body had been found. It was almost a superstition, and so she’d long ago decided it was easier to humour them rather than start a partnership wrong-footed.
She stood up. ‘Thanks for letting me see this.’
‘Does it tell you anything you didn’t know before?’ Berrocal asked, stepping to one side and indicating she should precede him up the path.
The dreaded question. ‘It confirms one hypothesis,’ she said. ‘Your killer knows his territory well. This isn’t the sort of place that a casual visitor would know about.’
‘A local man, then?’
‘I think that’s a safe assumption,’ she said firmly. ‘He doesn’t just know about the existence of this place, he knows what happened here and what it means.’ She heard the click