But he didn’t say anything, just went to the bar and got another round in. When he came back, he asked me if that was what I was into, a bit of the rough stuff. It couldn’t have gone better if I’d scripted it. Cutting a long story short, he invited me upstairs to what he called the dark room. Then I told him I had something better than that. I said I worked for a property development company, and I’d managed to get the keys to an old shop that I’d turned into a fantasy dungeon.
I couldn’t believe how easy it had been. I’d thought I might actually have had to have sex with him before I could get him to come with me, and I’d been dreading that even more than what I had planned for him. But he was a pushover. The worst bit was when we pulled up in the back lane and he leaned across and started kissing me. I pushed him away, a bit roughly but that just made him all the more keen. When I was undoing the padlock, he pressed right up against me so I could feel his cock hard against my backside. If I’d been having second thoughts, that would have seen them off sharpish.
I pulled the door open, and as he reached for the switch, I smashed my heavy metal torch down on the side of his head just above his ear. He went down like a tree.
I don’t want to think about the next bit. It wasn’t nice. It’s a lot harder to strangle somebody than it looks. Especially when you’re wearing latex gloves and your hands start sweating and slipping around inside them.
Then I had to do the cutting. That was really disgusting. Horrible. Not just the blood, but the smell. I nearly threw up. I’ve had some shitty nights, but this beat the lot of them hands down.
Once I’d done what I had to do, I zipped his jacket back up to sort of hold things in place. Then I picked him up and carried him out to the 4 × 4. I couldn’t just throw him over my shoulder or his guts would have gone everywhere.
I’d already decided where I was going to dump the body. The actual site described in Shand’s book was out of the question. It was far too exposed. It would have been asking to be caught. But then, what do you expect? One hundred per cent accuracy?
I’d settled on dumping him round the side of the cathedral. When I got there, there was nobody around, so I arranged him on the steps leading up to an office building.
I undid his jacket, and displayed him by the book. God, that nearly had me throwing up all over again. Then I took off as if I had the four horsemen of the apocalypse on my heels. Time to head back to where I was supposed to be.
I expected it to give me nightmares. But it didn’t. It’s not like I enjoyed it or anything. It was a job that had to be done, and I did it well. I take pride in that. But no pleasure.
The arrival of their room-service dinners forced both Fiona and Kit to surface from the salve of work. She had been entering data into her laptop and had started running various combinations through the geographic profiling software, but so mechanical a task left too much of her mind free to rerun her own memories. Trying to drown the voices in her head with alcohol was tempting. But Fiona had watched her father turn to drink, an accelerant that had plunged him into paranoid nightmares that had destroyed his life as surely as her murderer had destroyed Lesley’s. If acute liver failure had not killed him four years earlier, she suspected he’d have taken his own life sooner rather than later. So the whisky bottle was, for her, no choice.
But burying herself in work wasn’t doing the trick either. Sitting down with Kit to eat forced her to realize that Lesley’s ghost hadn’t stopped tormenting her since Kit had mentioned her name earlier. And by the looks of him, Kit was equally lost in his own thoughts. They ate their baked fish in virtual silence, neither knowing how to broach the subject that was uppermost in their minds.
Fiona finished first, pushing the remains of her meal to one side of the plate. She took a deep breath. ‘I think I might be better able to settle if I could find out more about what happened to Drew. Not because I think I can help in any practical way, but…’ She sighed. ‘I know that what always helps me is information.’
Kit looked up briefly from his plate, seeing the pain of memory in Fiona’s face. He knew that in the aftermath of her sister’s murder what had woken Fiona screaming from her sleep night after night was ignorance. She needed to know every detail of what had happened to Lesley. Against the wishes of her mother, who was adamant in her desire to possess as little information as possible about her younger daughter’s fate, Fiona had pursued all the avenues she could think of to absorb every fact relating to her sister’s terrible ordeal. She had made friends of the local reporters, she had exerted every ounce of her charm to persuade the detectives to share their information with her. And gradually, as she pieced together Lesley’s last hours, the nightmares had receded. Over the years, as she had learned more about the behaviour patterns of serial rapists and killers, that picture had become even clearer, giving texture and shape to her understanding, filling in the outlines of the transaction between Lesley and her killer.
While part of him felt this was an unhealthy obsession, Kit had to admit that knowledge did seem to have provided some sort of balm for Fiona. And as far as he was concerned, that was what mattered. Even though she couldn’t adequately explain why it helped her to have so detailed a reconstruction in her head, neither of them could deny its force. And Kit had also come to realize that as it was with her personal relationship to murder, so it was with her professional one. The more she knew, the more secure she felt. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps the best way to make sure her sleep wasn’t riven with nightmares about Lesley was to garner what she could about what had happened to Drew Shand. And it might just help him too.
‘What were you thinking about doing?’ he asked.
‘See what they’re saying on the Net,’ she said. ‘How do you feel about that?’
He shrugged then topped up his glass. ‘It can’t be worse than the movies my imagination is running for me.’
Kit gathered the dirty plates and put the trays outside the door while Fiona logged on to the Internet and connected to her favourite metasearch engine, which combed the vast virtuality of the worldwide web at her command. ‘Where can I find Drew Shand?’ she typed. Within seconds, she had the answer at her fingertips. Shand had had his own website, as well as a couple of fan sites dedicated to his work.
‘We might as well try the fan sites first,’ Kit said. ‘I don’t think Drew’s going to be updating his own site any time now.’
The first page Fiona clicked on had a black border round the publisher’s jacket photograph of the dead novelist. Beneath it were the dates of his birth and death and the atmospheric opening paragraph of Copycat.
The haar moves up from the steel-grey waters of the Firth of Forth, a solid wall of mist the colour of cumulus. It swallows the bright lights of the city’s newest playground, the designer hotels and the smart restaurants. It becomes one with the spectres of the sailors from the docks who used to blow their pay on eighty-shilling ale and whores with faces as hard as their clients’ hands. It climbs the hill to the New Town, where the geometric grid of Georgian elegance slices it into blocks before it slides down into the ditch of Princes Street Gardens. The few late revellers staggering home quicken their steps to escape its clammy grip.
Fiona shivered. ‘It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?’ Kit observed. ‘Bloody great
