dark glasses shielding her, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth. The camera panned slowly round, showing rows of people sombrely dressed, most with their heads bowed, no one talking. Elaine choked a sob back in her throat.
‘I don’t understand,’ she stuttered.
‘Let’s not play dumb,’ King replied, taking her left hand in his and rubbing its back with his thumb. ‘This is your memorial service. The police won’t release your body yet, of course. Who knows how long they’ll hang on to that bag of bones? But this is your grand exit. Your fifteen minutes of fame.’
‘I don’t want to watch any more,’ she said, looking away.
‘But I require you to. I really must insist.’
She didn’t look away again. Elaine Buxton was a fast learner. That was why he’d chosen her.
Her family sat in the front pews. King knew each by name and recited details about them so Elaine could appreciate the depth of his research into her life. It was a tremendous compliment that he’d dedicated so much of his precious time to her. Her cousin, Maureen, did a reading followed by another hymn. After that came a eulogy, delivered beautifully by a man King didn’t know. The man spoke about her when she was younger, a person King didn’t recognise from the description, a tale of a disastrous skiing trip, a girl who worked hard but played harder, private jokes that the world would otherwise never have been party to. Now, it seemed, her life was public property. It had irritated him as he’d filmed. Too many had gathered and the church was full, necessitating the outside screen. The police had been there in droves.
‘A bit flowery, I thought,’ King commented at the end.
‘Michael,’ Elaine said, as if calling from sleep. King pinched her hand roughly.
‘Who was he?’
‘My friend from law school,’ Elaine answered. ‘We lost touch. He moved to New York.’ He glared as tears filled her eyes. She really was insufferable.
‘You should be grateful. How many people get to see and hear the things I brought you? You were respected, loved, admired and you got to hear it all without dying. I liberated you!’
‘Let me go,’ Elaine begged in a hushed voice. ‘I won’t tell anyone. I’ll pretend I have concussion. I don’t think you’re a bad person, just, well, confused.’
King was breathing hard. He could feel hot colour rising in his cheeks. The sound of his own grinding teeth echoed within his skull, and then he could smell her. Unwashed, festering on that mattress. She’d been there twenty days already, and hadn’t even bothered requesting use of the bathing facilities. He’d provided a shower stall in the corner of the room for exactly that purpose, and would happily have supervised had she been suitably placid. All she had to do was ask. Putrid cunt. She’d tricked him, hadn’t learned a thing. He hated being duped. His judgment had been flawed. Badly flawed. Perhaps she wasn’t the right one, after all.
King brought a hand up from beneath the laptop brutal and fast, smashing plastic and metal into Elaine’s face as she reeled back in horror.
‘Confused, you dumb whore? I’m not the one who’s confused. You’re dead! Don’t you get it? Everyone thinks you’re gone. They have your blood, your clothes, a body and your teeth. They have consigned you to history. Do you know what that means, miss smarter-than-me fucking lawyer?’ He grabbed the neck of her t-shirt and pushed his face into hers. ‘It means you’re mine. You belong to me and that’s the way it’s going to be. So you’ll do what you’re told, when you’re told and learn to like it. No one’s coming to save you. Their grief will fade and they’ll forget. Nobody’s searching for you any more.’ He shoved her onto the pillow, straightening his own clothes, knowing he had to calm down.
‘You’re right,’ she hissed from the bed. ‘They’re not looking for me. But they are looking for you. You’ll never find a moment’s peace, never stop looking over your shoulder. One day they’ll be waiting at your door when you get home and that’ll be …’
He smashed his arm across her mouth, whipping her head round and sending blood flying from her mouth. He felt soothed immediately. It was what she’d wanted. Oblivion. But he wouldn’t be forced into killing her. He still had important plans. Only perhaps he’d have to improvise a little. King left her twisted body as it was and exited. She could wake up and consider her fate alone.
The lack of progress was driving Callanach crazy. He’d attended Elaine Buxton’s memorial service and watched the vast crowd outside weeping for a woman most of them didn’t know personally but who’d been stolen from their city. He knew what the collective was thinking. That it could have been them. That it could have been their wife, sister, daughter or mother. Such crimes left scars on the landscape of a community as vivid as the scorched earth that was once a mountain bothy. The crowd had come not only to mourn, but to jointly experience that unspoken truth. Thank God it was not me. And there was nothing wrong with that, Callanach thought, the clinging on to life. That was what policing was about, after all. Protecting, valuing, cushioning a too short, too fragile existence.
In the fortnight since then, the hours had started to drag. His phone rang less and less often. Public appeals for information had proved fruitless. The police had trawled Elaine’s computer files, diary, emails, current and past cases. Nothing had raised a red flag. She’d avoided social media, tended to call friends rather than texting, had never gone near an internet dating site. The usual lines of enquiry were dead-ending. Callanach had even found the time not only to tip the contents of his boxes into drawers, but to organise them into some semblance of order.
‘Is it a bad time?’ Ava Turner asked, putting her head round his office door.
‘I’m not exactly busy, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ he replied. He’d seen her a handful of times in the last couple of weeks, but never in circumstances when he could apologise for his behaviour. Now too much time had passed and he felt ridiculous referring back to her offer of a drink and his negative reaction.
‘I need a couple of spare bodies to chase up a development on a case. Can I borrow some help from your team for the week?’ She parked herself in a chair opposite him.
‘Absolutely,’ Callanach replied. ‘It would be good for them to get working on something else.’
‘No breakthroughs?’ she asked. ‘That’s tough.’
‘It’s wrong,’ Callanach muttered. ‘For a murderer to be so meticulous in their planning, to have thought so far ahead. It’s completely at odds with the chaos or fanaticism it takes to kill.’
Ava sat forward, transforming from colleague to detective as she considered it. ‘That’s because you’re looking for a well-organised murderer. You’ve stopped thinking about him or her as a person. Whoever did this couldn’t employ those sorts of skills from thin air. You’re looking for someone who’s meticulous in their whole life, probably obsessively so, who’s never missed an appointment or favourite radio show, who reviews their time expenditure each month on different activities, who diarises when they last changed their sheets. Look for the person first. You’ll meet the killer later.’ Ava got up. ‘So I can take two from your team?’
‘As long as one of them is DS Lively,’ he said.
‘Not
