Killing the Shadows. Val McDermid
with dark-blue eyes that were never still. His charcoal-grey suit looked as if it had been freshly pressed that morning, and his black boots shone with a military gleam. Both were at odds with a shock of untidy black wavy hair, worn long enough to cover the back of his shirt collar. He acknowledged her with a polite but abrupt nod of the head, saying, ‘Thank you for coming, Doctor.’
‘Thank you for meeting us. Major, this is my partner, Kit Martin. I mentioned he’d be travelling with me.’
Kit extended a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. Don’t worry, I won’t be getting under your feet.’
Berrocal’s nod was noncommittal. ‘I have a car waiting, Doctor,’ he said to Fiona. He reached for her briefcase and laptop. ‘Señor Martin, if you wouldn’t mind going to the baggage carousel, one of my men will meet you there. He will take you and your luggage to your hotel in Toledo.’ He pulled a card out of his breast pocket. ‘This is my mobile number. You can reach Dr Cameron, she will be with me.’ He flashed a cool smile and set off down the pier towards the main concourse.
‘Mr Friendly,’ Kit said.
‘Mr Under Pressure, I think,’ Fiona replied. She put one arm round Kit and gave him a quick squeeze. ‘Ring me on my mobile, if you need me.’
They set off in Berrocal’s wake, Fiona almost having to break into a trot to keep him in sight. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Kit said. ‘I’ve got the guide book. I will be pursuing my own investigations into Toledo. Either that or I’ll be hunched over a hotel bedside table trying to write.’
They caught up with Berrocal who was waiting by a security door. ‘You must go through customs and immigration,’ he said to Kit, pointing down a corridor to the left.
‘Nice to meet you,’ Kit said. Being pleasant was cheap, especially since Berrocal had taken the trouble to lay on a car for him. He gave Fiona a swift peck on the cheek, said, ‘See you later,’ and headed off without a backward glance.
‘He really won’t be any trouble,’ Fiona said as they strode towards the customs and immigration area. ‘Kit has no problem with his own company.’
Berrocal flashed his badge and steered her ahead of him past the formalities. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to have brought him otherwise,’ he said briskly. ‘I have arranged for you both to stay at the parador in Toledo, but I would prefer to go straight to the scenes of the crimes. Also, I wanted to be able to discuss the case on the way there, which would not have been possible in front of Señor Martin.’
A uniformed officer stood by an unmarked saloon car, snapping to attention as Berrocal approached. He opened the rear door, and Fiona climbed in, Berrocal walking round to the far side to slide in beside her. ‘Toledo is about an hour’s drive from the airport,’ he told her. ‘If you have any questions for me, I can answer them on the way.’
Clearly not a man for small talk, Fiona thought. None of those polite and pointless queries about her flight that usually marked her arrival in strange cities. Nor did he feel the need to make polite conversation about Kit’s books, as had usually happened when he had accompanied her on foreign trips. ‘What lines of inquiry have you pursued?’ she asked. ‘Apart from looking for witnesses, of course.’
Berrocal shifted in his seat so he could look directly at her. ‘We have examined our records of violent sexual assaults. Several people have been interviewed. But either they have an alibi for the first or the second murder or both. Or else we have no reason to keep them in custody.’
‘Your English is very fluent,’ Fiona couldn’t help remarking.
‘I speak better than I write,’ he said, flashing a smile for the first time since they’d met. ‘My wife is Canadian. We go to Vancouver every year on holiday. So when we talked about bringing in an English expert on crime linkage and serial offenders, I was the obvious choice for the liaison officer. As I said in my e-mail, we have no local expertise in this area.’
‘I don’t know if any of us have what I would term expertise in crime linkage,’ Fiona said dryly. ‘I have some experience, but every time I do this, it seems like I’m feeling my way almost as much as the detectives. Every case is different, and sometimes the lessons of the past are not entirely helpful.’
He nodded. ‘I understand. Nobody is expecting a miracle from you, Dr Cameron. But in a case like this, we need all the help we can get. It is no secret to you that when a killer targets a stranger, most of our usual police procedures are useless. So we need a different kind of insight and that is what you can bring to the case.’
Fiona raised her eyebrows and turned away from his penetrating eyes, staring out of the window at the speeding motorway traffic. On one side of the motorway, she could see the city sprawling towards the centre; on the other the scarred red earth of the central Spanish plain, exposed by some sort of construction work. The terracotta soil, the almost metallic blue sky and the heavy shadows of the earth-moving equipment turned the vista into a moving De Chirico painting, resonating with heat and menace. For some reason, it reminded Fiona of the surrealism of Cervantes’ imagination. Like Don Quixote, she thought, she’d be out there tilting at windmills, trying to separate the shadows from the reality, with this restless man as her Sancho Panza to mitigate her confusion.
‘I read the material you sent me,’ she said, pushing her fantastical thoughts to one side and turning to meet his gaze again. ‘I’m not convinced your offender will have a record of sexual offences.’
Berrocal frowned. ‘Why do you say that? From what I’ve read, I thought serial murderers generally had a history of some sort of sexual violence. And he has committed brutal sexual acts on the corpses of both of his victims.’
‘That’s true. But in each case, the violations were committed after death. And the penetration was with a foreign object, not the penis. Not that that necessarily discounts a sexual motive of itself,’ Fiona added, almost absently. ‘But I don’t think the gratification sought here is primarily sexual,’ she continued with more firmness. ‘These crimes may appear superficially to be about sexual power but it seems to me that they are about desecration. Almost vandalism,’ Fiona said.
Berrocal stirred. He looked as if he was wondering whether bringing her along had been such a good idea after all. ‘If that is the case, why are the faces not mutilated also?’ His chin came up in apparent challenge.
Fiona spread her hands. ‘I don’t know. But I imagine it was probably because the killer wanted his victims recognized quickly. They were neither of them locals, so it might have taken a little longer to identify them if their faces had been damaged beyond recognition.’
He nodded, partially satisfied by her response. He decided to reserve judgement on this woman who apparently had no difficulty in finding ways to discard the conventional wisdom. ‘I think it’s better if I don’t ask you your theories now,’ he said with another flash of his bright smile. ‘Better to wait until you have seen where the crimes took place, and then perhaps we could go to the local police headquarters. I have established a control centre there for the investigation.’
‘You’re not based in Toledo, I think you said?’
Berrocal shook his head. ‘I work in Madrid normally. But cities like Toledo have few murders in the course of a year, and most of those will be domestic situations. The result is that they have no one with experience of the more complex type of homicide and so they must bring in a specialist from Madrid. Unfortunately, we have more murders in the city and so someone like me is sent to organize the investigation.’
‘That can’t be easy,’ Fiona observed. ‘You must have to be careful of local sensibilities.’
Berrocal shrugged, his fingers drumming on the window ledge. ‘In some respects. In other ways, it makes it easier for the Toledo officers. When I tread on people’s feet, the local men can spread their hands and say, “Hey, it’s not our fault, it’s that stupid bastard from the big city, coming here and stirring things up and rubbing everybody up the wrong way.” Of course, some of the detectives are a little sensitive, they