‘Why not?’
‘More than twenty-four hours had gone by since the body was discovered. It was hopelessly compromised: any forensic evidence discovered there would have been absolutely useless in court. We didn’t even have a reliable time of death, because the autopsy had been delayed so long.
‘Steele began with the parents, looking to build up a list of Stacey’s acquaintances, since nine times out of ten the victim knows the killer, but before that he spoke to Chippy Grade, who mentioned the Rusty remark. As I said, he was her dog, a Westie. She walked him every morning; her mother said that sometimes she stayed away for two or three hours looking at the seascape and such, stopping to sketch on occasion, and so there was nothing unusual about her not returning. She’d gone out around eight that day, so that gave us a firmer idea of the time of death. Or rather deaths: we found the poor wee mutt Rusty a couple of days later, washed up in Granton, with its lead still attached to its collar. It had been shot and, yes, we had a vet do an autopsy, and the bullets matched, so that’s something else we’re going to do this bastard for when we run him to ground.’
‘Did Stevie make any progress?’ asked Paula.
‘He eliminated a lot of people. He and his officers created a pretty thorough model of Stacey’s life. She was a full-time artist: she graduated last year from the art college up in Lauriston, and worked out of a studio in her folks’ attic.’
‘Did she sell much?’
‘For a newcomer she was doing all right; she specialised in coastal views, not just scenery, though, impressionistic and very colourful. I saw some of her work in the Scottish Gallery; it’s good, very good, and as far as I can tell, unique. It’s going for about a grand on average, depending on the size; her records showed her gross income since last October as just under fourteen thousand, less commission.
The gallery people said that wasn’t bad at all for a newcomer, that she’d found a niche for herself and could have looked forward to making a good living from prints as well as sales of original works.
‘Apparently she was quite a talented portrait painter too. Stevie told me that he saw pictures of her mum and dad in the house. She didn’t do much of that, though: one or two freebies for friends, but that was all. She was a very focused girl, and wanted to cement her reputation in what she did best, before branching out into less commercial work.’
‘What about her social life? Boyfriends?’
‘Not active. She had a circle of art-school friends, a mix of guys and gals. The team interviewed them all, and were pretty certain that there was nobody special. One bloke told us that he’d had a thing with her in their first year at college, but it ended when Stacey asked if they could just be friends. That’s what they’ve been ever since, he said.
‘Stevie dug as deep into her background as he could. He looked into her e-mails, her mobile records, calls to the family phone: nothing. He put out the usual request for information, but all he got were responses from the three people who’d walked past her on the path above the beach. Stacey wasn’t the only one who walked her dog there in the morning. None of them were any bloody use at all, though: they all said they’d thought she was sleeping.’
‘They would, wouldn’t they?’ Louise murmured. ‘Those who behave like Levites rarely own up to the fact. So where does the investigation stand now?’
‘Until this afternoon it was standing still. Now, it’s got some momentum again, and a new urgency. I’m pretty sure we have a double murderer on our patch. And the scary question is, if we don’t catch him will he stop at two?’
Five
‘When does a multiple murderer become a serial killer?’ Margaret Rose Steele put the question to her husband as he dried his hair with a towel in their big kitchen watching her remove the stone from an avocado. It was his unshakeable practice to take a shower as soon as he returned home after witnessing an autopsy before doing anything else.
‘You’re a copper,’ he retorted. ‘You should know that.’
‘Maybe, but I don’t. “Serial killer” is one of those phrases the media loves to throw about, but I’ve never seen it defined.’
‘What are we having for supper?’
‘Just a couple of prawn thingies. It’s nearly ten: we shouldn’t eat too much. But don’t change the subject. Come on, tell me. Or don’t you know either?’
‘As it happens, I do. We had a guest lecturer on a course I was on at the police college who specialised in the subject. He said that the FBI came up with the term thirty years ago.’
‘So it’s an American phenomenon?’
‘Hell, no, it’s as old as time. The definition we were given is that serial killers are people who commit three or more murders over a period with gaps between. Often they will appear quite normal, and their hobby goes unsuspected by their friends and neighbours. Usually, there’s a sexual aspect to their crimes, but there doesn’t have to be; there wasn’t with Shipman, for example.’
Maggie shrugged. ‘So they’re just mass murderers.’
‘No,’ her husband contradicted her. ‘That’s different: mass murderers are defined as those who kill three or more people in a single event and at a single location. Suicide bombers are the classic modern example. And there’s an accepted third category, spree killers, people who go on a rampage, popping victims off all over the place. They don’t revert to normal behaviour between kills, though: they’re driven by an overwhelming homicidal urge, and they carry on until they’re caught or killed. It doesn’t mean a lot to the public, though; whatever you call them, they’re all seriously disturbed.’
‘Crackers,’ said Maggie, tersely.
‘But not legally so; not in the case of serial killers, anyway. Most of them, when they’re brought to trial, will try to plead not guilty on the ground of insanity, but very few of them succeed. The legal definition of who’s nuts and who isn’t is still based on the McNaughten rules. They date back to a case of that name in the nineteenth century, in England; it set the principle that a person is sane if he knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of each crime. The premeditation in serial cases, plus the murderer’s clear success in avoiding detection for what can be long periods, makes an insanity defence very difficult to sustain.’
‘So if you’re right about these two killings being connected. .’
‘I am right. It’s not just me, either: Mario’s just as certain. Neither of us saw Stacey Gavin’s body at the scene, but we did see the only two photos that were taken. The mere description of the second body made him drop everything, head out to East Lothian and call for me. But we’ll know for sure when we get the result of the ballistics comparison between the two bullets.’
‘So: what will you have?’
‘We’ll have a bad bastard.’
Maggie frowned, as she spooned cooked prawns from a sieve and arranged them over the halves of the avocado. ‘That covers all of your definitions. Be specific, Inspector.’
‘That may depend on who the second victim is. Does her circle of acquaintances overlap with Stacey’s? I’ve already checked. . or, rather, I had a detective constable, Tarvil Singh, check. . all of the interviewees in the Gavin investigation. He got hold of them all, so she isn’t one of them, but tomorrow we’ll go round them all and show them a touched-up photo, see if we get any reactions.’
‘I’ll bet you do; just give their breakfast time to go down, that’s all. But so what if the two are connected? Where does that take you?’
Stevie stared at her, as she finished preparing their light supper and carried two plates across to the refectory table in the corner of the kitchen. ‘What’s with you?’ he asked. ‘It’s not so long since you were an ace detective yourself.’
‘Maybe being back in uniform’s made my brain go soft.’
‘Well, let’s toughen it up,’ he retorted, as he uncapped a bottle of sparkling water, and began to fill two glasses. ‘You tell me what I’ll have.’