Killing the Shadows. Val McDermid
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…On a professional note, I heard last night that Blake has done a deal with one of the Sunday tabloids. You know the kind of thing—my life of hell as the falsely accused Hampstead Heath killer. And on the strength of that, he’s gone off to Spain, allegedly to get away from all the pressure. Of course, we’ve been keeping tabs on him, albeit at arms’ length, and according to the travel agent, Blake has rented a villa outside Fuengirola for the next month. At least you’re far enough away in Toledo not to stand any chance of walking into a neighbourhood café and finding him propping up the bar. Let me know when you’re coming back and we’ll get together for dinner.
Love
Steve
Fiona cleared Steve’s e-mail from the screen. She’d get round to replying later. It was thoughtful of him to pass on the news about Drew, but she didn’t want to be distracted from the task in hand by thinking about Francis Blake right now. While she waited for Berrocal to arrive, she double-checked that she had plotted her crime scenes correctly on the map. Just as she finished, Berrocal strode through the door, full of apologies for keeping her waiting. ‘So, what do you have to show me?’
The map of Toledo was monochrome on the screen, the streets and alleys black lines over the off-grey background. ‘This is how it works,’ Fiona explained. ‘I started off with the street grid. Last night I entered the locations of the events that interest me.’ She omitted to mention the news from England that had stirred memories, turning her sleep into exhausting restlessness. She wasn’t looking for Berrocal’s sympathy, nor, more importantly, did she want to give ammunition to anyone who might suggest her work failed to come up to the required standard. So she mainlined the cartons of industrial-strength coffee that the junior detectives had deposited on her desk and tried to keep the weariness out of her voice. ‘First of all, the vandalism cluster.’
She tapped a couple of keys and the screen came alive in an irregular spread of radiant neon colours, from sea-green, grading through blues and purples to red. There were only two small blocks of red, both to the west of the cathedral and the Plaza Mayor. ‘The program assigns different colours to different degrees of probability. The perpetrator of the acts of vandalism I’ve identified as a cluster is most likely to live within the boundaries of those red blocks,’ she told him, pointing to them with her pencil.
‘Very interesting,’ Berrocal said softly.
‘Don’t ask me how it works. The maths is way beyond me. I leave that to the techies. All I know is that it does have a frighteningly high degree of accuracy.’ She cleared the colours from the screen. ‘Now, this is the picture we get from the muggings.’ Again, the screen pulsed with vibrant colours. This time, there were three red blocks. One of them appeared almost identical to the larger of the two on the previous display, while the other two were more northerly.
‘I think the reason for these two is that the location of the crimes was circumscribed by where our mugger knew there were likely to be late-night victims,’ she continued, pointing to the aberrant blocks of crimson. ‘But look what happens when I amalgamate both sets of results and we look at the vandalism and the mugging together.’
Fiona clicked the mouse a couple of times. Now the larger of the original two red blocks was the only bright-scarlet patch on the screen, the others fading to deep purple. ‘If I were a Toledo police officer looking to clear up these instances of vandalism and mugging, I’d focus my attention on people who live right there, around the bottom end of Calle Alfonso the Tenth.’
‘Fascinating,’ Berrocal acknowledged. ‘But what happens when you consider the murders too?’
‘It’s far from clear-cut,’ she admitted. ‘We’re looking at two instances, which is a very small base to work with. And, as I said to you before, because these crime scenes have historical rather than specifically personal significance, that could distort our results.’ Again she cleared the screen. ‘On their own, they don’t provide us with anything like pinpoint accuracy.’ This time, there was no small red block, just a jagged purple mass that covered most of the west of the old city and spread like a port-wine birthmark out towards the suburbs.
‘However, I’m working on the principle that my theories of crime linkage and the escalation of violence are correct. Now, if I’ve got it right and these three groups of crimes have all been committed by the same person, then when I add the murder sites to the other two series, I should still have my red block in more or less the same place. But if I’m wrong, then the resulting picture will show a significant distortion.’ She looked up at Berrocal and gave a wicked grin. ‘Ready?’
‘The suspense is killing me,’ he said.
Fiona hit a couple of keys and the screen reconfigured itself. The red block was still there, though not in quite such a strong shade. But the purple areas had spread and become noticeably more blue. Fiona circled the red block with the end of her pencil. ‘It doesn’t significantly distort the key area. Which indicates that the person who committed the murders could well be the same person as the vandal and the mugger. But you see this purple zone?’
Berrocal nodded. ‘That’s the fallback zone, is it? If he’s not in the red zone, he might be in the purple?’
‘That’s right. Now, the way that has changed with the murder input may not mean much in itself, given how specific he is about the body dumps and given that the places where he displays his victims are central to the nature of his crimes. But I’m tempted to go out on a limb here and suggest that he might possibly have moved house in between the muggings and the first murder.’
Berrocal frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘It doesn’t matter how high-tech a system is, there’s still room for gut instinct when it comes to interpretation. I’d defend myself by saying that I’ve used this geographic profiler a lot now, and I’ve developed a sense of what the pictures mean that goes beyond what’s in the manual. And there’s something about the shape of this that makes me wonder if we’re looking at a change of address. I’m sorry, I can’t be more scientific than that.’
‘So what we have learned is useless.’
‘No, far from it. If he has moved, it’s been relatively recent. Between the last of the muggings and the first of the murders. There must be civic records that would reveal who lives there and if anybody’s gone in the last couple of months. I could be wrong, he could still be living there. But if I was the investigating officer here, I’d make it my first priority to look at residents inside the red block who have moved out.’
‘You think he moved to make it harder for us to find him?’ Berrocal asked.
‘No, I don’t think he was planning that far ahead. And he may not have left his home from choice. He may have been forced out because the building was being developed for some tourist-related business. He’ll have seen this as a terrible provocation. If that’s what happened, it could have been the factor that tipped him over the edge into murder. He’s been nursing his hatred for a while now, judging by the length of time these earlier offences cover. Perhaps this tourist development has been on the cards for a long time and he’d been fighting it. Then finally, he lost. And he decided to take revenge on the people he thought were to blame.’ Fiona leaned back in her seat. ‘I know it might sound far-fetched, but as psychopathic motives for murder go, it’s as coherent as any. And it makes sense of these events in a way that conventional theories of sexual homicide don’t.’
‘The way you explain it is certainly logical,’ Berrocal acknowledged. ‘Can you print these maps out for us? I’d like to get started on this line of inquiry as soon as possible.’
Fiona nodded. ‘No problem. I’m also in the process of writing a full report for you that incorporates all my reasoning. I’ll include a basic behavioural profile of the perpetrator.’
Berrocal frowned. ‘I thought you didn’t approve of behavioural analysis?’