ajor Salvador Berrocal was not waiting for them by the arrivals gate. He was actually standing impatiently tapping his foot by the door of the plane when it swung open. He had obviously arranged for a message to be transmitted ahead, for as soon as the cabin crew were back on their feet after landing, a steward was by Fiona's side, asking her to come forward to the front of the plane so she could disembark ahead of the other passengers. Kit followed in her wake, giving the steward his best smile and saying, "We're travelling together."

Fiona's first impression of the Spanish policeman was of tremendous energy barely held in check. He was of medium height, slender and pale-skinned, with dark-blue eyes that were never still. His charcoal-grey suit looked as if it had been freshly pressed that morning, and his black boots shone with a military gleam. Both were at odds with a shock of untidy black wavy hair, worn long enough to cover the back of his shirt collar. He acknowledged her with a polite but abrupt nod of the head, saying, "Thank you for coming, Doctor."

"Thank you for meeting us. Major, this is my partner, Kit Martin. I mentioned he'd be travelling with me?"

Kit extended a hand. "Pleased to meet you. Don't worry, I won't be getting under your feet."

Berrocal's nod was noncommittal. "I have a car waiting, Doctor," he said to Fiona. He reached for her briefcase and laptop. "Senor Martin, if you wouldn't mind going to the baggage carousel, one of my men will meet you there. He will take you and your luggage to your hotel in Toledo." He pulled a card out of his breast pocket. "This is my mobile number. You can reach Dr. Cameron, she will be with me." He flashed a cool smile and set off down the pier towards the main concourse.

"Mr. Friendly," Kit said.

"Mr. Under Pressure, I think," Fiona replied. She put one arm round

Kit and gave him a quick squeeze. "Ring me on my mobile, if you need me."

They set off in Berrocal's wake, Fiona almost having to break into a trot to keep him in sight. "Don't worry about me," Kit said. "I've got the guide book. I will be pursuing my own investigations into Toledo. Either that or I'll be hunched over a hotel bedside table trying to write."

They caught up with Berrocal who was waiting by a security door. "You must go through customs and immigration," he said to Kit, pointing down a corridor to the left.

"Nice to meet you," Kit said. Being pleasant was cheap, especially since Berrocal had taken the trouble to lay on a car for him. He gave Fiona a swift peck on the cheek, said, "See you later," and headed off without a backward glance.

"He really won't be any trouble," Fiona said as they strode towards the customs and immigration area. "Kit has no problem with his own company."

Berrocal flashed his badge and steered her ahead of him past the formalities. "I wouldn't expect you to have brought him otherwise," he said briskly. "I have arranged for you both to stay at the parador in Toledo, but I would prefer to go straight to the scenes of the crimes. Also, I wanted to be able to discuss the case on the way there, which would not have been possible in front of Senor Martin."

A uniformed officer stood by an unmarked saloon car, snapping to attention as Berrocal approached. 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 terra cotta 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's 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 of fences

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, holiday makers who turned up with a carload of shopping. All they ever bought locally was bread and milk. The village lost its heart. It became a tourist dormitory. And the locals who were pushed out in the process weren't happy at all. At a guess, I'd say there must be some native Toledans who don't like what's happening to their city."

Berrocal gave her a shrewd look. He was sharp enough to realize this was no idle conversation. Following on as it had from her easy dismissal of the obvious analysis of the background of the killer, he understood that she was trying to tell him something. "You think someone is killing people because he doesn't like tourists?" He tried to keep the incredulity from his voice. This woman had, after all, come with the imprimatur of Scotland Yard.

Fiona turned away from his eyes and stared out across the rolling green fields they were now passing through. "I don't think it's quite that simple, Major Berrocal. And really I don't want to theorize ahead of the data.

But I do think your killer is motivated by something rather more out of the ordinary than sexual frustration."

"OK. How do you want to work this?"

"What I'd like to do is precisely what you've suggested. I'd like to look at the sites where the bodies were displayed and then back at your incident room, I'd like to look at the crime-scene photographs and read the pathology reports in full. I'd also like to see the guide books that were found at the scenes of the crimes, if that would be possible. And then I would like to go back to my hotel room and think about what I've seen."

He nodded. "Whatever you wish."

"I would also appreciate it if you could extract from your Toledan colleagues any reports of vandalism against tourist sites or hotels or businesses that cater to the tourist trade. And any attacks on tourists themselves. Going back, say, a couple of years. Solved and unsolved, if that's possible." She smiled. "I'll also need a reasonably detailed map of the city that can be scanned into a computer."

"I will arrange it." He inclined his head in a half-bow. "Already you have shown me a different way of looking at these cases."

Fiona shifted in her seat so she was staring ahead over the driver's shoulder. "I hope so. When I look at a crime, I don't look with the same eyes as a detective. I'm searching for the psychological as well as the solid practical elements that link that one crime to others. I'm also looking for geographical clusters. But as well as that, I'm watching out for other signals that can tell me something about the criminal."

"So then you can figure out the way his mind works?"

Fiona frowned. "It's not so much his motivation I'm trying to get at. It's more about developing a sense of how he looks at the world. Motivation is highly individualistic. But what we all have in common is that we construct our own identities based on what we've learned of the world. So the way a criminal commits his crimes is a reflection of the way he lives the rest of his life. Where he feels comfortable, both physically and mentally. I'm looking for patterns of behaviour in the crime that give me clues to how he behaves when he's going about his ordinary business."

She gave a wry smile and continued. "Some of my colleagues have a different approach which you're probably more familiar with. They look at the crimes and seek a set of symptoms in an offender's past that have produced a particular way of life in the present. I've never found that very helpful. For my money, too many people share the same sort of background and don't turn out to be psychopathic serial offenders for it to be a precise diagnostic tool. I'm not saying that my methods necessarily always produce a more accurate result, but that's more because I seldom have sufficient data rather than that the methods themselves are flawed. There isn't a magic formula, Major. But my training is so divergent from that of a police officer that I'm bound to look at things from a different perspective. Between us, we see this thing in stereo, rather than in mono. I can't help believing that has to give us an advantage over the criminal."

"That's why you're here, Doctor." Berrocal leaned forward and said something in rapid Spanish to the driver. They were approaching a sprawl of modern suburban housing, the road lined with concrete boxes containing furniture stores, car showrooms and small businesses. He sat back and took out a packet of cigarettes, twiddling them restlessly between his fingers. "Ten minutes more. Then I can have a cigarette and you can go to work."

This time, Fiona's smile was grim. "I can hardly wait."

Extract from Decoding of Exhibit P13/4599

Uzqhq dftag stfyg dpqdo agxpn qeaqm ek. Upuym suzpq ufarf qzngf uzykt qmpuf tmpnq qzyqe ekmzp rdust fqzuz s .. .

The document in question utilizes a simple transliteration (am, b=n, etc) and the arrangement of letters into groups of five instead of the normal layout of the words. What follows is a transcription of the coded material, with appropriate punctuation added for sense. J. M. Arthur, Document Examiner.

I never thought murder could be so easy. I'd Imagined It often, but in my head it had been messy and frightening. The reality is quite different. The power surge, that's what carries you through it. Imagination really doesn't prepare you for the real thing.

The other mistake I made was in thinking murder always had to be part of something else. But the truth is, murder can be an end in itself. Sometimes, people have to pay for what they have done, and taking their lives is the only way to do it.

I never thought I was going to be a murderer. I had my life sorted out. Bat then something shifted, and I could see them laughing at me, flaunting their so-called success in my face. I'd be a poor excuse for a man if I just took provocation like that on the chin.

Nobody knows how they'll react when their life gets stolen by people who don't give a toss who gets hurt. Well, I've never been the sort who just sits back and lets things happen, and I'm going to make them pay. I'm going to change the rules. But I'm not going to be obvious. I'm going to be subtle and choose my targets carefully.

This time, they won't be able to ignore me. They won't be able to write me off. I'll be writing them off, writing their names in blood, and sending a message loud and clear. They're responsible for their own downfall, that's what I'll be saying. Live by the word, die by the word.

It's not hard to track down thriller writers. I'm used to watching people, I've been doing it for years. It doesn't hurt that they're all so vain. The Internet is clogged up with their websites and they give interviews right, left and centre. And they're always doing public appearances.

So it made sense to start with somebody who has a really high profile, to make my job as easy as it could be. I decided the best way to make my point was to give them a real taste of their own medicine. It wouldn't be enough just to kill them. I wanted it to be clear right from the word go that there was nothing accidental about what was going on. And knowing what was coming would make them suffer all the more. Satisfaction, that's what I want.

To make the punishment fit the crime, I have to get the crime right, and now I've made my list. I ranked them according to how easy I thought it would be to do them and that's how I got my candidates for execution.

1. Drew Shand

2. Jane Ellas

3. Georgia tester

4. Kit Martin

5. Enya Flannery

6. Jonathan Lewis

Now all I have to do is figure out exactly how to take them down.

They put me in this cage. But they should know that caged animals turn savage.

They've brought this on their own heads.