He paused for a moment, then, steepling his fingers, continued, ‘He’s above-average intelligence. I think whatever he’s trying to work out through these murders is a philosophical issue for him. He’s not a passionate man. I doubt he has a wife or a long-term partner, although I’d put him at over thirty-five. I don’t think he has any sexual hang-ups, but the concept of love maybe eludes him, so his sexual relationships will likely have been short-lived. Physically, I imagine he won’t be unattractive. He might even be charismatic. You’ve got no sign of any struggle and no reports of these women being dragged kicking and screaming to their final destinations. He is likely to have persuaded them to go with him willingly, maybe for sexual reasons, but not necessarily. He’s probably average height, maybe taller, and relatively strong. Physical fitness would tie in with his feelings of superiority.’
‘He sounds like a model citizen,’ Cass commented, ‘the murdering of innocents aside.’
‘That’s likely just how he appears on a day-to-day level - but there will be glitches, flaws jittering under the surface. He brings to mind Harold Shipman a little. Do you remember him? Suspected of killing two hundred and fifty pensioners? It was nearly twenty years ago now. He committed suicide back in 2004 while serving life for fifteen murders.’
‘I remember him. The GP who injected his patients, right?’
‘That’s the one. On the surface he was a mild-mannered, very calm man, but underneath there was this huge ego at work. He was treated for an addiction to prescription drugs early on in his career, and there was evidence that he was using again later on. If you look closely, there’ll always be signs of things that aren’t well.’
‘How did he get caught?’
‘Some relatives and an undertaker became suspicious - but ultimately he was caught because he changed his MO. He forged the will of one of his victims so that she left everything to him.’ He shrugged. ‘There are those who say he did it in order to get caught, but I don’t go along with that. I think he wanted the money so he could retire abroad and his ego convinced him he could get away with it.’ His shrewd eyes met Cass’s. ‘It’s nearly always the ego that gives them away. That sense of self-importance that grows with each life taken often leads to some kind of slip-up. Or what your killer is doing will lead to his arrest.’
Cass looked quizzical. ‘What’s our killer doing?’
‘He’s speeding up, of course. The gap between murders is getting shorter. Whatever satisfaction he’s getting from watching these women die isn’t lasting so long. On some level, even if he doesn’t realise it himself yet, he’s losing control, and as he keeps on killing, he’ll make a mistake. He’s bound to.’
‘But in the meantime I’ve got more bodies to look forward too?’
The profiler nodded. ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.’
Neither man smiled.
Chapter Five
C
ass took a note of the hotel where Dr Hask was staying and left a constable to find him a ride into the West End. He headed down to the Incident Room and tossed the tape onto Blackmore’s desk. The young sergeant was talking into a phone and was about to end the call but Cass shook his head. It wasn’t as if he had much to tell him.
A light hand touched his shoulder.
‘How did it go with the profiler?’ He caught the scent of vanilla perfume. At some point in the past year, Claire May had shed the last traces of girlishness and become all woman. It suited her.
Cass shrugged. ‘The only time-saver is that we can stop looking at the boyfriends. Neither Jade Palmer’s collection of one-night-stands nor Amanda Carlisle’s bloke fit Hask’s profile.’ He nodded at Blackmore’s desk. ‘It’s all on the tape. You’ll get a copy when it’s typed up. See what you think.’
‘So he didn’t tell us the killer’s an albino dwarf with one leg?’ she asked. ‘That’s a real pity. Can’t be many of them in London.’ She kept her face deadpan.
‘Unfortunately not.’ Cass let the seriousness drain out of his own face and winked. ‘But that would stop all our fun.’
When she smiled, Cass noticed her skin was still fresh, wrinkle-free.
‘Well, I may not be Dr Hask, Profiler Extraordinaire, but I do have something positive to tell you.’
‘Go on.’
‘The lab rats got something from that envelope.’
Cass felt his heart pick up. He didn’t need cocaine to get it going this time. This was the thrill of the chase kicking into his system.
‘It’s a print,’ she continued, ‘but don’t get too excited; it’s pretty smeared. They’re going to do what they can with it and then run it through the system to try and find a match.’
‘It’s a whole lot better than nothing,’ Cass grinned.
He checked his watch. He felt like he’d done a day’s work already but it was only half-ten. It had barely started. ‘What time are we expected at the Jacksons’?’
‘I told them eleven. The Millers will be there too.’
‘Then let’s go. Blackmore can hold the fort here. I need to pick up a decent coffee on the way.’
‘You look like you need one.’
Although she delivered the line with a teasing smile, Cass felt his neck burn a little under his collar. He caught sight of his ghostly reflection in the glass and knew she was right. His eyes were like dark pebbles at the bottom of a muddy pond, and the lines that patterned his rough skin seemed to be sinking in even further. He tore his eyes away from the shadowy outline of the man he had become. For a moment he considered diving into the toilets and flushing away the coke, but Claire was too far ahead of him, her car keys already in hand. It would have to wait.
As he followed his sergeant, his ex-lover, into the stairwell, he tried to ignore the small flutter of relief in the pit of his stomach.
In the ten days since the two boys had been gunned down, the media had started taking liberties with the truth. Since the turn of the century, knife and gun crime had risen steeply as more and more teenagers found themselves out of place in the world around them. Instead, they sought some sense of belonging in the gangs that ruled the poverty-ridden estates across the city, like the one where Carla Rae had died the previous day. Young black kids growing up on the estates had little choice but to join one of the gangs; those few who tried to keep their heads down rarely lasted long. The gangs had become training grounds for the criminals of the future and they were efficient at it. Those who survived childhood graduated to the firms, where they discovered colour was no longer an issue. They’d become part of a new breed, their skills honed and their hearts hardened, where the divisions had nothing to do with race or colour and everything to do with them and us, ‘them’ being normal society. Cass hated the new-style crims taking over London’s streets. They had none of the honour of those old dogs like Artie Mullins. Artie was a bastard, right enough, and he’d done some evil things to keep his grip on the top, but he never involved civilians.
When Justin Jackson and John Miller died, the media held them up as an example of how things could be: two children who had maintained their friendship despite their different skin colours. Difference was, Justin Jackson didn’t live on a bleak housing estate. In fact, Cass thought, as he followed his sergeant into the Jacksons’ elegant lounge, if anything had kept Jackson and Miller’s friendship firm, it was probably that they still had beautiful lives in a world where everyone else was busy tightening their belts. But the press didn’t focus on that. Perhaps they felt people would have less sympathy for rich children than they did for poor. Cass didn’t get why there had to be more to the tragedy than two children being accidentally gunned down. What exactly did the readers need in order to actually feel something?
‘Take a seat, please.’ Clara Jackson’s clipped English accent cut off Cass’s internal rant and he moved across to one of the two large cream sofas that faced each other across a glass coffee table. It looked as if no one had ever sullied it with anything as common as a coffee cup. She returned to her own place beside Eleanor Miller as Cass sat opposite. It seemed to him that the two women, although both still holding onto the kind of beauty money definitely could buy, had diminished somewhat since he’d first met them. The early lines they’d obviously pampered and massaged out of existence had crept back, sinking into the hollows under their eyes. The clothes they wore were still expensive, but they no longer looked as if each garment had been carefully chosen, more as if they had just donned whatever came to hand. Both faces were bare of make-up, though their highlighted and styled hair still hung perfectly despite being mostly ignored other than a quick, distracted shampoo in the shower. That was the kind of cut that cost money.
But Clara Jackson and Eleanor Miller had suffered a reality check. They were both facing the appalling prospect of having to continue with life in the face of death.
As Clara took her seat, the women’s hands automatically joined, thin, knotted fingers grabbing each other. Cass thought the papers should run a picture of those hands. Maybe then they’d see that sometimes elaboration wasn’t necessary. The two women sat in silence, their pain filling the room.
‘Have you got something to tell us?’ Paul Miller stood behind his wife. He was thirty-eight, but over the past ten days all the years that his son would never see had etched themselves into his flesh. Where the women clung together, their grief gripped tight in those manicured hands, the men stood stiff, side by side, but a world apart. Clara and Eleanor’s eyes flickered to each other, a tight ghost of a smile passing between them, as sharp as a sliver of glass. Paul Miller and Isaac Jackson kept their dead eyes focused entirely on Cass. The foot between them was like an ocean; cold and endlessly deep. What would happen if they touched? Cass wondered. Would their terrible controlled heartache finally flow free?
Cass pitied them. Despite their big salaries, another world had crossed paths with theirs. Choices had been made by people they would never meet, and they needed to find some meaning in it, not just that their children’s deaths were merely the outcome of someone else’s bad choices. These were men used to making decisions and calling the shots, and the fact that this random event had been so completely out of their control must surely be tearing Paul Miller and Isaac Jackson to shreds. They could call it bad luck, or fate, but naming it would not ease their pain. They’d realise that soon enough.
‘There has been a development,’ he said, trying, in the presence of ladies, to gentle his rough accent. ‘We’ve been sent a film of the shooting.’ Eleanor Miller flinched slightly as if the word itself were a gunshot.
‘A film?’ Isaac Jackson’s eyes widened in his grey face. Like Paul Miller, his usual veneer of success had abandoned him. ‘Someone filmed it? But why—?’ For the first time, the two men glanced at each other, for the briefest moment.
‘We’re not sure yet. But hopefully it’ll give us some fresh leads.’
‘Fresh leads?’ Eleanor Miller snorted, a mockery of a laugh. ‘You haven’t
got
any leads.’ Tears filled her bloodshot eyes and Cass saw her knuckles whiten as she gripped Clara Jackson’s hand. They were a contradiction, these two, locked into each other’s pain and yet completely alone. It didn’t look like their men were giving them much in the way of comfort. Cass thought of John Miller, still fixated on his broken friend’s body as the bullets ripped through him, and then Carla Rae, dead in the rotting flat. Everyone was alone in the end.
‘I appreciate your pain and frustration, Mrs Miller.’ He chose his words carefully. He hadn’t ever experienced their pain, and he wouldn’t insult them by suggesting he had. ‘But you have to believe that I really want to get the bastards who did this.’ Behind him, a mobile rang and Claire moved out into the hall to answer it.
The tension in the room was threatening to swallow him. ‘And I just wanted to let you know that we do now have some more information to go on.’ He watched her eyes as the anger was replaced by a fragile and terrible hope. ‘I wanted you to know that first.’
Both women nodded, slowly and carefully, as if the action might snap their necks like autumn twigs.
‘But I can’t tell you what those leads are,’ he continued, talking slowly now, as if to a child. ‘It’s important they stay confidential. But I promise you that I will do everything that I can to find out who was responsible for killing your boys.’ He couldn’t tell them that the leads were minimal; that the best they had was a licence plate for a taxi-cab, a partial print and a few minutes of grainy image. They had leads now, for the first time, and that was all that mattered.
‘Cass.’ Claire stood in the doorway, chewing her bottom lip. She looked very young.
‘Cass, we have to go.’
Cass frowned. She never called him by his first name; not in front of other people. He stared at the slight flush in her cheeks and the way her eyes bored into his. His stomach froze.
‘What’s happened?’ He hadn’t realised he’d already got to his feet. For a brief moment he saw his father, screaming as the flames raged, and then the image was gone. The sickly feeling in the pit of his stomach remained.
‘We have to go. Kate’s at home waiting for you.’ She couldn’t look at him, but her own eyes were reddening, like Eleanor Miller’s had only seconds ago.
There was a roaring in Cass’s ears, drowning out any other sound. He stood in the doorway now, examining the cream-coloured walls. He could almost smell the paint. Behind Claire, a painting hung unevenly. It looked expensive, and Cass thought it was a shame no one could be bothered to straighten it. His heartbeat quickened. Behind him, the Millers and Jacksons watched from where they stood, enveloped in their own bubble of grief.
‘Just tell me what’s happened.’ His voice was low, and every hair on his body trembled. Something in his world had changed beyond recognition, beyond fixing.