not easy to do these days,’ Jarratt continued. ‘Billionaire drug dealers, bent City accountants, corrupt governments – they all spend fortunes trying to hide the money in the legitimate banking system. You can’t keep millions of pounds under the mattress and, even if you could, no one accepts cash any more, not for major purchases. Cash makes people nervous. You’ve got to get it into the banking system. That’s where we so often catch them out and recover the money, but not with Korsakov. He was too cunning.
‘So tell me, DS Jones. He’s committed another rape or murder, hasn’t he?’
Sally hesitated before answering. She was unsure why. ‘We don’t know if it’s Korsakov. There are similarities between your case and one we’re investigating. So we’re doing a little background digging. One thing’s bothering me though.’
Jarratt looked at her, expressionless. ‘Go on.’
‘Everything points to Korsakov being a repeat offender. You said it yourself, that he’d offend again.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yet he hasn’t come to police notice at all. No convictions, arrests, no information reports. Nothing.’
‘Then he’s either out of the country or he’s dead,’ Jarratt answered. ‘Only pray it’s the latter.’
‘Or maybe we just haven’t caught him.’
Jarratt gave a low laugh. ‘I know we’re not perfect, but there’s never been a repeat offender who hasn’t been caught within a couple of years. Even in the dark ages, before computer cross-referencing, DNA, Crimewatch, we still caught the people eventually. They would always make a mistake.
‘No. If he was in the country he would be offending. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself any more than we could stop treating everybody with suspicion. It’s in his nature. Or he may have become a ghost, never keeping one identity too long, never staying in one place longer than a couple of months. He’s capable.’
‘I’ll check with public records,’ said Sally. ‘See if they have anything on him. And thanks to you, we’ll have a set of fingerprints for him. I’ll have them compared to any marks recovered from our scene.’
Jarratt’s eyes narrowed. ‘If it’s a death certificate or fingerprints you find, then please call me. If he’s sunning himself in Thailand, I’d rather not know.’
Sally thought Jarratt suddenly looked old. She wouldn’t push him any further. ‘Well, thanks for your time,’ she said, and stood to leave. ‘Oh, one more thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘You did take photographs of Korsakov, when you charged him?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s just, when I checked his intelligence records at Richmond, there were no photographs attached.’
‘Unfortunate, but not unusual,’ Jarratt replied.
‘Can you think of anyone else who may have wanted or needed photographs of Korsakov?’ Sally asked. ‘Maybe I can still track them down.’
‘Not really,’ Jarratt answered. ‘No one’s ever approached me about him.’
Sally sighed. ‘Oh well, never mind.’
Jarratt led her to the front door. His hand rested on the handle, but he didn’t turn it. ‘Can I ask what put you on to Korsakov?’ he asked. ‘What put you on to me?’
‘Method Index,’ Sally told him. ‘You were down as the officer in the case.’ Jarratt said nothing. ‘Oh shit,’ Sally suddenly said, fumbling in her handbag. ‘I almost forgot. Could you do me a favour and have a look at this photo?’ She pulled the surveillance photograph of Hellier out and handed it to Jarratt. ‘Do you recognize him?’
Jarratt held the photograph and looked at it without interest. Sally saw nothing in his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Is it someone I should know?’
‘Just a loose end I wanted to tie up, and now I have. Anyway, thanks for your time.’
‘Anytime,’ Jarratt said. ‘It’s nice to feel useful again.’ They shook hands before Sally left and headed to her car.
‘He’s a sly one, all right,’ Donnelly said, ‘thinking on his feet. Covering our evidence as we find it.’
‘Then we’ll have to find more,’ said Sean.
‘How about DNA? Body samples?’
‘Irrelevant,’ Sean reminded him. ‘He admits to having sex with the victim, and now he admits to being in his flat − any samples we find prove nothing. That wouldn’t matter if we were to find the victim’s blood on Hellier or his clothing, but it’s going to take the lab days to process the things we seized today.’
‘So what are we going to do – just let him walk out of here?’
‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do,’ Sean answered. ‘We charge him now, we’re saying we’ve got enough evidence to convict him. We both know that’s the rule. Once he’s charged, we lose the right to question further or to take more samples. We charge him now and we couldn’t even make him take part in a fucking identification parade. I’ve made that mistake before. I’m not going to make it again. We have to come at him from another angle. One he won’t be expecting.’
‘You’re talking about identifying another crime he’s committed?’ Donnelly asked, without enthusiasm.
‘I am,’ Sean confirmed, noting Donnelly’s scepticism. ‘Something occurred to me during the interview. What if he’s making it up – the whole story about having an ongoing client-customer relationship?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘What if he wasn’t having any sort of relationship with Graydon? What would that mean?’
Donnelly shrugged in confusion.
‘It could mean he’d selected Graydon. Simply picked him from the crowd and killed him. All this bollocks about seeing him every few weeks, Graydon taking care of his physical needs, it’s all a smokescreen, trying to confuse us – throw us off the scent. He’s trying to lead us by the nose in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s so much simpler than we were thinking: he went looking for a victim and found one, then he killed him. But he made mistakes – he was recognized in the club and he left a single print at the scene. Now he’s covering his tracks, trying to make up for those mistakes. He knows that if he admits he’s only ever seen Graydon once, then he’s flagging himself up as a predator. He’ll bring us right down on top of him. Much better this way. He thinks he’s smart enough to get away with it, and that will be his downfall.’
‘But we know he did see the victim at least once before,’ Donnelly reminded him. ‘The doorman, Young, saw them together outside the club, remember? He was a distance away, but he was sure it was them and he was sure they headed off together, so he couldn’t have just picked him up the night he killed him.’
Sean had already considered everything Donnelly had said. ‘Of course he’d seen
