“Would you like some background on profiling, then?” Robson asked.
“Not particularly, to tell you the truth.”
Robson observed him evenly. His eyes behind his spectacles looked shrewd, but he made no remark other than to say obscurely, “Right. We’ll see about it, won’t we.” He took up his legal pad without further ado.
They were looking, he told Lynley, for a white male between twenty-five and thirty-five. He would be neat in his appearance: close shaven, short haired, in good physical condition, which was possibly the result of weight training. He would be known to the victims, but not well known. He would be of high intelligence but low achievement, a man with a decent school record but with disciplinary problems stemming from a chronic failure to obey. He would likely possess a history of job losses, and while he would probably be working at this time, it would be in employment below his capabilities. They would find criminal behaviour in his childhood and adolescence: possibly petty arson or cruelty to animals. He would be at this time unmarried and living either alone or with a dominant parent.
Despite what he already knew about profiling, Lynley felt doubtful about the number of details Robson had provided. He said, “How can you know all this, Dr. Robson?”
Robson’s lips moved in a smile that tried-and failed-not to look satisfied. He said, “I do assume you know what profilers do, Superintendent, but do you know how and why profiling actually works? It’s rarely inaccurate, and it’s nothing to do with crystal balls, tarot cards, or the entrails of sacrificed animals.”
At this, smacking of the gentle correction a parent gives to a wayward child, Lynley considered half a dozen ways to regain dominance. They were all a waste of time, he concluded. So he said, “Should we begin again with each other?”
Robson smiled, genuinely this time. “Thank you,” he said. He went on to tell Lynley that to know a killer, one merely had to look at the crime committed, which was what the Americans had begun doing when the FBI had developed their Behavioural Science Unit. By gathering information over the decades of pursuing serial killers and by actually interviewing incarcerated serial killers by the dozens, they’d discovered there were certain commonalities that could be depended upon to be present in the profile of the perpetrator of a certain kind of crime. In this particular crime, for example, they could rely upon the fact that the killings were bids for power although their killer would tell himself that the killings had another reason entirely.
“Not just killing for the thrill of it?”
“Not at all,” Robson answered. “This actually has nothing to do with thrill. This man’s striking out because he’s been frustrated, contradicted, or thwarted. Whatever thrill there is, is secondary.”
“Thwarted by the victim?”
“No. A stressor has set him on this course, but its source isn’t the victim.”
“Who is it, then? What?”
“A recent job loss that the killer thinks is unfair. The breakup of a marriage or another amorous relationship. The death of a loved one. The rejection of a proposal of marriage. A court injunction. A sudden loss of money. The destruction of a home by fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane. Think of something that would put your world or anyone’s world into chaos and you’ll have a stressor.”
“We all have them in our lives,” Lynley said.
“But not all of us are psychopaths. It’s the combination of the psychopathic personality and the stressor that’s deadly, not the stressor alone.” Robson fanned out the crime-scene photographs.
Despite the aspects of the crime suggesting sadism-the burnt hands, for example-their killer felt a certain amount of remorse for what he’d done once he’d done it, Robson said. The body in each case told them that: its position traditional to corpses placed in coffins prior to burial, not to mention the fact that the final victim wore what amounted to a loincloth. This, he said, was called psychic erasure or psychic restitution.
“It’s as if the killing were a sad duty that the perpetrator believes and tells himself he must perform.”
Lynley felt this was going too far. The rest he could swallow; there was sense to it. But this…restitution? Penance? Sorrow? Why do it four times if he felt remorse afterwards?
“The conflict for him,” Robson said, as if in reply to the questions Lynley hadn’t asked, “is the compulsion to kill, which has been triggered by the stressor and can only be relieved by the act of killing itself, versus the knowledge that what he’s doing is wrong. And he does know that, even as he is driven to do it again and again.”
“So you believe he’ll strike another time,” Lynley said.
“There’s no question about it. This is going to escalate. It’s actually escalated from the first. You can see that in how he’s been upping the stakes. Not only in where he’s put the bodies-taking bigger risks of discovery every time he positions one-but also in what he’s done to the bodies.”
“Increasing the marking on them?”
“What we call making his signature more apparent. It’s as if he believes the police are too stupid to catch him, so he’s going to taunt you a bit. He’s burned the hands three times, and you’ve failed to make the connection between the killings. So he’s had to do more.”
“But why so much more? Wouldn’t it have been enough just to slice open the final victim? Why add the mark on the forehead? Why the loincloth? Why take the navel?”
“If we discount the loincloth as psychic restitution, we’re left with the slice, the missing navel, and the mark on the forehead. If we see the slice as part of a ritual that we as yet don’t understand and the missing navel as a gruesome souvenir that allows him to relive the event, then what we really have is the mark on the forehead to serve as a conscious escalation of the crime.”
“What do you make of that mark?” Lynley asked him.
Robson took up one of the photographs that featured it particularly. “It’s rather like a cattle brand, isn’t it? I mean the mark itself, not how it was made. A circle with two two-headed crosses quadrisecting it. It clearly stands for something.”
“So you’re saying it’s not a signature on the crime like the other indicators?”
“I’m saying it’s more than a signature because it’s too deliberate a choice to be merely a signature. Why not use a simple X if you just want your mark on the body? Why not a cross? Why not one of your initials? Any of those would be quicker to put on your victim than this. Especially when time is probably of the essence.”
“You’re saying this mark serves a dual purpose, then?”
“I’d say so. No artist signs a painting till it’s done, and the fact that this mark was made with the victim’s blood tells us that it was likely put on his forehead after death. So yes, it’s a signature, but it’s something more. I think it’s a direct communication.”
“With the police?”
“Or with the victim. Or the victim’s family.” Robson handed the photographs back to Lynley. “Your killer has an enormous need to be noticed, Superintendent. If it isn’t satisfied by the current publicity-which it won’t be because his sort of need is never actually satisfied by anything, you see-then he’ll strike again.”
“Soon?”
“I’d say you can depend upon that.” He handed Lynley the reports as well. He included with them his own report, which he took from the manila folder, neatly typed and official, with a cover sheet on the letterhead of Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Lynley added the reports to the photographs Robson had already handed over, along with his card. He thought about everything the profiler had said. He knew other officers who believed completely in the art-or perhaps it was a real science based on irrefutable empirical evidence-of psychological profiling, but he had never been one of them. Put to the test, he’d always preferred his own mind and a sifting through concrete facts to trying to take those same facts and from them create a portrait of someone utterly unknown to him. Besides, he couldn’t see how it actually helped the situation. At the end of the day, they still had to locate a killer among the ten million people who lived in Greater London, and he wasn’t clear on how the profile Robson had provided was going to help do that. The psychologist appeared to know this, however. He added a final detail, as if to put a full stop to his report.