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 see my presence as a criticism of them, but I just have to charm them.’ His eyes crinkled in a wry smile. ‘But you must be familiar with these responses too. Like me and my team, you are what my wife calls the visiting fireman.’
Fiona acknowledged his idiom with a half-smile. ‘Sometimes that has other disadvantages too. It’s possible that my unfamiliarity with a place and its local customs may lead me to place more—or less—significance on something than it should have.’
He shrugged again. ‘The other side of the coin is that locals can take for granted what strikes you as an alteration in a pattern, I think.’
‘Toledo is very much a tourist city, is that right?’ Fiona asked.
‘That is correct. It is also the seat of the archbishop, so the bureaucracy of the Church occupies a significant share of the buildings around the cathedral. Between the Church and the tourist trade, there is little room for anything else in the old city. With every year that passes, fewer people live in the old part of Toledo, fewer traditional businesses survive.’
Fiona made a mental note and continued, aiming for a tone of casual interest. ‘Does that cause ill-feeling among those who are pushed out by the demands of the tourist industry?’
Berrocal grinned. ‘I think most people are happy to trade a gloomy medieval apartment up five flights of narrow stairs for a building with air and light and an elevator. And a patio or a balcony where they can sit outside and enjoy the air. Not to mention constant running hot water.’
‘All the same…’ Fiona chose her words carefully. ‘I grew up in a small town in the north of England. Not much more than a village, really. It’s a very pretty village, right in the heart of the Derbyshire Peak District. The perfect place to go walking from, or to visit the caverns that are open to the public. Over the years, more and more tourists came. Whenever cottages went on the market, they were bought up by outsiders and turned into holiday homes. Every shop in the main street became a tearoom or a craft shop. All the pubs were more interested in catering to day-trippers than locals. You couldn’t stroll down the main street or park your car near your own house in the summer months. By the time I left home, half the population would change weekly,
