Berrocal <[email protected]>
To: Dr Fiona Cameron
Subject: Consultation request
Dear Dr Cameron
I am a Major in the plain-clothes division of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia based in Madrid. I am in charge of many homicide inquiries. Your name has been given to me by a colleague at New Scotland Yard as an expert in crime linkage and geographic profiling. Please forgive the intrusion of contacting you so directly. I am writing to ask if you would do us the courtesy of providing your services to consult in a matter of great urgency. In Spain we have a little experience with serial killers and so we have no psychological experts to work with policemen.
In Toledo have been two murders inside three weeks and we think they are the crimes of one man. But it is wholly not obvious that they are connected and we need a different expertise to assist us with the analysis of these crimes. I understand that you have experience in the area of crime analysis and linkage, and this would be of great use to us, I think.
I wish to know if in principle you are willing to help us with resolving these murders.
You may be assured of proper remuneration for this consultation if you will be our assistant.
I look forward to hearing your response.
Respectfully
Major Salvador Berrocal
Cuerpo Nacional de Policia
Fiona folded her arms and stared at the screen. She knew that behind this cautious request lay a pair of bodies that had almost certainly been mutilated and probably tortured before death. There was likely to be some element of sexual violation in the attacks. She could assume this with some degree of certainty, for police forces were well capable of dealing with routine murders without calling on the specialist help that only she and a handful of others could be relied on to provide. When new acquaintances discovered this aspect of Fiona’s work, they usually shuddered and asked how she could bear to be involved in such appalling cases.
Her typical response was to shrug and say, ‘Somebody has to do it. Better it’s somebody like me who knows what she’s doing. Nobody can bring back the dead but sometimes it’s possible to prevent more of the living joining them.’
It was, she knew, a glib riposte, carefully calculated to deflect further questioning. The truth was she hated the inevitable confrontation with violent death that her work with various police forces had brought into her life, not least because of the memories it stirred in her. She knew more about what could be inflicted on the human body, more about the sufferings the spirit could sustain than she had ever wished to. But such exposure was inescapable and because it always exacted a heavy toll from her, she only ever accepted a new assignment when she felt sufficiently recovered from her last direct encounter with the victims of a serial killer.
It had been almost four months since Fiona had worked a murder series. A man had killed four prostitutes in Merseyside over a period of eighteen months. Thanks in part to the data analysis that Fiona and one of her graduate students had completed, the police had been able to narrow down their pool of suspects to the point where forensic detection could be applied. Now they had a man in custody charged with three of the four killings, and thanks to DNA matches they were reasonably sure of a conviction.
Since then, her only police consultation project had been a long-term study of recidivist burglars with the Swedish Police. It was, she thought, time to get her hands dirty again. She hit the <reply> key.
From: Fiona Cameron
To: Salvador Berrocal <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Consultation request
Dear Major Berrocal
Thank you for your invitation to act as consultant to the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia. In principle, I am willing to consider your request favourably. However, before I can be certain that I can be of use to you, I need more detail than you have provided in your e-mail. Ideally, I would like to see an outline of the circumstances of both murders, a digest of the pathology reports and any witness statements. I am reasonably competent in written Spanish, so in the interests of speed, you need not have these documents translated for my benefit. Of course, any communications I receive from you will be treated in complete confidence.
For the sake of security, I suggest you fax these documents to my home.
Fiona typed in the details of her home fax and phone then sent the e-mail. At best, she’d be able to contribute to the prevention of more murders and acquire useful data for her researches in the process. At worst, she’d have a valid excuse for staying out of the way of the fallout from the Hampstead Heath trial collapse. Someone—or rather a couple of Spanish someones—had paid a high price to keep Candid Cameron out of the headlines.
Fiona walked through the door to the sound of REM telling her that nobody loved a sad professor. As usual, Kit had stacked up half a dozen CDs in the player in his study, hit the random button and walked out the door while there were still hours of playing time left. He couldn’t abide silence. She had learned this early on in their relationship, when she’d taken him walking in her beloved Derbyshire and had been horrified to watch him filling his backpack with cassettes for his Walkman. More than once, she’d come home to an empty house where music spilled out of Kit’s study, the TV in the living room blared like a bull and the radio in the kitchen added a mad counterpoint to the racket. The louder the din, the easier he seemed to find it to escape into his own imagined universe. For Fiona, who needed silence in order to concentrate on anything vaguely creative, it was an incomprehensible paradox.
When they’d first talked about living together, Fiona had insisted that whatever property they bought, it had to be capable of providing her with a quiet space to work in. They’d ended up with a tall thin house in Dartmouth Park whose previous owner had been a rock musician. He’d converted the attic into a soundproof studio that provided Fiona with the perfect eyrie to escape Kit’s background racket. It was even big enough to allow her to install a futon for those nights when Kit was up against a deadline and needed to write into the early hours of the morning. Sometimes she felt deeply sorry for their long-suffering neighbours. They must dread February when, invariably, the end of a book and late-night Radiohead loomed.
Fiona dropped her bags and went into Kit’s ground-floor study to turn off the music. Blessed silence fell like balm on her head. She continued upstairs, stopping off in their bedroom to shuck off her walking gear and pull on her house clothes. She trudged up the remaining two flights to her office, feeling the hills in the pull of her leg muscles. The first thing she registered was the flashing light of the answering machine. Fifteen messages. She’d put money on them all being from journalists, and she wasn’t in the mood to listen to them, never mind to respond. This was one occasion where she was absolute in her determination not to provide a single quote that could be twisted to suit someone else’s agenda.
Leaving her laptop by the desk, Fiona noticed that Major Berrocal hadn’t wasted any time. A pile of paper lay accusingly in the fax tray. That she couldn’t ignore. Stifling a sigh, she picked it up, automatically straightening the edges, and headed back downstairs.
As
