For, like his optimism, his pessimism was both professional and personal. There was no escaping the fact that he had done serious damage to his oldest friendship. Fiona had demanded more of him than was in his power to give, but she was bound to feel he’d failed her. Her and Kit both. He’d tried to phone several times the previous evening, but the answering machine had been switched on. Doubtless Fiona had decided they should monitor their calls, and he was clearly not on the approved list.
The trouble was, she was right in emotional and moral terms. But he was right in practical terms. And those two certainties were mutually incompatible. All his adult life, he’d been glad that the job he loved had never turned on him and threatened to destroy something that was important to him. He’d seen it happen with colleagues marriages crumbled, children become enemies, friendships betrayed and he’d always known that, but for fortune, it could have been him.
Now, he’d run out of grace. His oldest friend estranged and his best male friend at risk, and there was nothing he could do about it. It wasn’t even his case. All he knew about what was going on he knew because Sarah Duvall had had the courtesy to tell him. But he had been a senior CID officer for long enough to know that this was the worst kind of case to resolve. No criminal was harder to catch than a killer who killed without apparent connection to his victim, who operated on a logic clear only to himself, who left few traces and who was smart enough to stay several steps ahead of any pursuit. When such killers were caught, it was often almost by accident. Neighbours complained about the smell of the drains; a spot check of a number plate revealed it belonged to another car entirely; a police officer stopped a random speeder.
That Kit’s life might hang by so slender and serendipitous a chance was almost more than Steve could bear to contemplate. How much worse it must be for Fiona, who had already had to live through one such apparently random loss. And now, when he should be at her side, supporting them both, he was the outsider.
Steve carried the remains of his coffee through to the bedroom and contemplated his wardrobe. He couldn’t rely on being able to get home to change before the evening. He chose a lightweight navy wool suit that he knew didn’t easily crease. A white shirt and a blue tie for now; a dark grey shirt, carefully folded and bagged, and a scarlet silk tie for the evening. Fiona had given him the tie, he remembered. Strange that it was the exact shade of Terry’s lipstick. Even in something so basic, the two strands of his life were intertwined.
As he dressed, Steve tried to put his personal feelings far from the front of his mind. He had important things to do today, and he needed to be clear-headed. But it didn’t work, and as he walked to his car, he knew that whatever broke with the Blanchard case, he wouldn’t settle until he knew what Sarah Duvall was doing.
What Sarah Duvall was doing was wondering why she’d ever imagined that authors’ agents and publishers’ editors would be able to tell her anything about the death threat letters that Kit Martin, Georgia Lester and at least three other crime writers had received.
The five people she’d just had breakfast with had listened with rapt attention to what she had to say. Then they’d dropped their quiet bombshell. “We get over three thousand unsolicited manuscripts a year,” one of the agents had said. “Out of those, we might ultimately take on perhaps a maximum of three new authors. That means there are a lot of unhappy people out there, and frankly, DCI Duvall, if you’d read some of those typescripts, you’d realize we’re not always dealing with the most balanced of individuals.”
“I regularly get abusive letters,” an editor said, backing up the agent. “Usually from people I’ve turned down, but once or twice from authors I’ve dropped from my list because of poor sales. People take it very personally, because writing is a very personal thing. But it never goes beyond that. They let off steam, add you to their mental hate list, they bad-mouth you round the business, but that’s all.”
They’d passed the letters round from hand to hand, commenting only that they seemed rather more hostile than usual. But they all agreed that none of them would have bothered the police, or even their company door security with them. “We’re in a very emotive business,” another of the agents had said. “Feelings run high. But we’re dealing with people who regard words as weapon enough.”
However, Duvall had extracted from each of them a promise that they would take copies of the letters back and check them against any hate mail in their own files on the off-chance that they might spot some congruence. It had been a long shot, so she wasn’t unduly surprised that it hadn’t paid off.
That didn’t stop her feeling disappointed. She hoped it wasn’t an omen for the rest of the day. She didn’t want to end up with egg on her face after an operation as major as the search of Smithfield Market.
It never occurred to her that, indirectly, what she was hoping for was the murder of Georgia Lester.
Terry Fowler looked as relaxed as she had done the day before. She was wearing a thin black cardigan over a white T — shirt and what looked like the same pair of black jeans. She had pulled up a chair next to her so Steve could look over her shoulder at the computer screen. “Interesting results,” she said, her fingers tapping the keys. He noticed her hands were surprisingly broad, with strong fingers that ended in short, blunt nails carefully trimmed, as if to remove the temptation to chew them. She wore a heavy silver ring on the third finger of her right hand. “I was able to use a set of parameters that Fiona’s already developed for serial rapes. It needed one or two modifications, but because I was working with a more or less off-the-shelf package it was a lot quicker than starting from scratch. And since you seemed to be in a bit of a hurry…”
“Habit, I’m afraid. Another day or two probably wouldn’t have made a lot of difference.”
“Urgency’s not a bad habit in your line of business, I imagine,” Terry said, half turning to give him a grin. “You gotta try and get to the bad guys before they do worse things.”
“Something like that.” Steve sighed. “Sometimes it’s more a matter of getting things done before the bureaucrats notice how much of the budget you’re draining.”
“Yeah, right. Well, this particular budget drainage ran the crime linkage program on the files you gave me.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Including the four that you slipped in to see whether I was doing it properly.”
“That’s not why I put them in,” Steve protested. “It’s not about putting you on the spot, it’s about showing my colleagues that this isn’t a load of mumbo jumbo. It strengthens the value of the results if I can demonstrate that the programme weeds out the cases we know to be irrelevant.”
“Just testing,” she murmured. “It’s OK, I’m not really offended, I understand the principle of control groups…Anyway, having run all the cases through the computer, it appears you do have a cluster here.” Her tone became more brisk as she got into the meat of her results. “Four of the rapes and two of the serious sexual assaults. The Hertfordshire case has a slightly lower probability than the other five, but it still comes in at eighty-seven percent, which I would regard as a definite positive.”