hapter 8

Drew Shand sat back and rotated his shoulders, grimacing as they cracked and popped. He'd tried every possible adjustment on the expensive orthopaedic chair, but he always stiffened up like this by the end of the working day, exactly the same as he had when he'd sat on a cheap kitchen chair hunched over his second-hand laptop. The electrically adjustable seat had been one of the first treats he'd bought with the famously substantial advance for his first novel. But still he got backache.

He'd thought that his debut was a pretty good read when he'd finished the first draft, but he'd struggled and failed to hide his astonishment when his agent rang him with the news that it had been sold for a mid-six-figure sum. Each of which was to the left of the decimal point. Hot on the heels of that deal, Copycat had been sold to TV, its adaptation winning a clutch of awards for its charismatic star, and sending Drew's paperback tie-in straight to the top of the bestseller lists on its coat-tails.

More than the acclaim, more even than the rave reviews and the Crime Writers' Association Dagger award for best first novel of the year, Drew appreciated his release from the soul-destroying job of teaching English to the overindulged brats of the Edinburgh middle classes. The demands of keeping a roof over his head had forced him to write Copycat late into the night and in snatched hours at weekends over a period of eighteen months. It had been a hard grind, earning him derision from his pals, who kept telling him to get a life. But now, he was the one with the absolutely brilliant life, while they were still stuck in the nine-to-five. Drew didn't work to anybody else's schedule. He wrote when it suited him. OK, that turned out to be most days, but he was still in charge. Drew was the one who made the decisions, not some slave-driving boss acting the hard arse because his own sad wee job was on the line.

And he loved his life. He usually woke some time between ten and eleven. He'd make himself a cappuccino with his shiny new chrome

Italian machine, browse the morning papers then energize his brain under the needle jets of his power shower. By noon, he'd be sitting in front of his state-of-the-art computer with a pair of bacon-and-egg rolls. He'd work his way through brunch while he reread what he'd written the day before, then he'd check out his e-mail. Round about half past one, he'd be ready to go to work.

It was only his third novel. Drew still got a helluva charge out of hammering the words down on screen, pausing momentarily to figure out the direction of the next few paragraphs before his fingers thundered across the keys with the heavy touch of a man who'd learned piano as a reluctant child. Not for him the slow composition of a sentence or the check with the word count at the end of every paragraph. Drew didn't set himself anything as mechanical as a daily word target. He just wrote and wrote till he ran out of steam. That mostly happened about five o'clock. Funnily enough, he usually found he'd written about four thousand words, give or take a couple of hundred. At first he'd reckoned it was just coincidence, then he'd decided that four thousand words was just about the limit that his brain could produce in one day without it degenerating into gibberish.

Well, it was as good an excuse as any for knocking it on the head for the day. He switched off the computer, shrugged off his dressing gown and put on his sweats. The gym was a couple of streets away from his four-roomed Georgian flat on the edge of the New Town, and he enjoyed the walk through the darkening streets, the cold air turning to smoke as it left his nostrils. Poof the Magic Dragon, he thought ironically as he turned off Broughton Street and walked up the steps to the gym.

Drew loved the gym too. He had a circuit that lasted precisely an hour. Fifteen minutes on the Nordic track, half an hour on the Nautilus machines working all the different muscle groups, ten minutes with free weights, then five minutes on the bike. The perfect mix of aerobic and strength exercises, just enough weight and reps to keep him hard without turning him into Stallone.

But it wasn't just the pleasure of feeling his thirty-one-year-old body respond to the routine that turned Drew on to the gym. It was also the opportunity it gave him to check out the other men who were there. It didn't matter if they were straight or gay. He didn't go to the gym to cruise, although he had got lucky a couple of times. Mostly, though, he just liked the chance to watch their bodies as they pushed themselves to their limits, to admire a neat bum, a taut pair of thighs, a well-defined set of shoulders. It wound his spring nice and tight for whatever the rest of the evening might hold for him.

After his work-out, Drew relaxed in the gym's sauna. Again, it wasn't the sort where sex was on offer, but it didn't hurt to eye up the talent, casting the odd sideways glance at a well-hung companion. Sometimes, the glance would be returned and they'd wait till they had the sweaty pine box to themselves before arranging to meet for a drink afterwards in one of the nearby gay bars.

That was another thing he didn't have to worry about these days. When he'd still been teaching, he'd been incredibly wary about responding to any kind of come-on anywhere that wasn't a bona fide gay establishment. Even then, he always scanned the bars as carefully as he could before he settled in for the evening. It might be OK for cabinet ministers to be out and proud, but for a teacher in Edinburgh, being a known gay out and about on the scene would still be the quickest route to the dole queue. Now, he could make eye contact anywhere he chose with anybody he chose. The biggest risk he faced was getting a punch in the face, but that hadn't happened yet. Drew prided himself on having an instinct for who was safe to come on to; he reckoned it was part of the sensibility that made him such a fucking great writer.

He smiled inwardly as he dressed. The guy he'd noticed on the rowing machine was new to the gym or at least, new to this time of day but he'd seen him before in the Barbary Coast bar round the corner. The Barbary was one of the newest gay bars in town and it boasted Drew's absolutely favourite place in the whole of Edinburgh. When you walked right through to the back of the bar, there was a small door set in the wall guarded by a couple of beefy leather men. If they knew your face, they simply stepped aside. If they didn't, they asked what you were looking for. If you knew you were looking for the Dark Room, they let you pass. If you didn't, they politely suggested you might want to stay in the main bar. Drew was on first-name terms with them both.

Drew had seen the guy on the rowing machine eyeing him in one of the floor-length mirrors that lined the gym. He reckoned that if he wandered into the Barbary within the next hour, he might just find him leaning on the bar. And if he knew about the upstairs room, well, that would do Drew very nicely for the evening.

God, he loved the Dark Room. There was a sense that anything could happen, and in his experience, it usually did. Several times. The people who had complained about the lovingly detailed graphic violence in

Copycat would have a cardiac arrest if they knew a quarter of what men did to each other under cover of darkness in an upstairs room a short walk from the genteel Heart of Midlothian. He wouldn't mind betting it would shake a few real serial killers to the core as well.

Back at the flat, he took his time dressing. Tight black jeans that gave sharp definition to cock and balls, topped with a white T-shirt with the cover of his book screen-printed across it. He placed a single gold ring in one ear and threaded a studded leather belt through the hoops of his trousers. He slipped his feet into a pair of thick-soled biker boots and tightened the Velcro fastenings. He reached for his battered leather jacket and slipped his arms into the sleeves, admiring himself in the long cheval mirror. Not bad at all, he congratulated himself. Great fucking haircut, he thought, jittering his fingers through the short dark crop that he thought made him look dangerous and sexy. That new guy in the salon was worth every penny.

Drew slid open the drawer in his bedside table and took out a small silver snuffbox, a tiny silver spoon, a silver straw and an expired credit card. He flipped open the lid of the box and scooped out a generous helping of the white powder. Using the credit card, he chopped the cocaine into a pair of thick lines. He inserted the straw into his left nostril, closed his right nostril with a finger and expertly snorted one of the lines. He threw his head back and sniffed a couple of times, revelling in the numbness that spread across his soft palate. He repeated the process with his right nostril, then stood for a moment, enjoying the initial buzz as the coke hit his bloodstream. It was good stuff; he'd feel it for a while yet. And if he needed a top-up, he knew he could always score some more in the pub. It might not be up to the quality of his personal stash, but it would do the business nicely.

Finally, he snapped the steel bracelet of his chunky Tag Heuer round his wrist, taking care not to trap any of his fine dark hairs in the catch. He was ready for the time of his life.

He couldn't have known it would be the last time.

Chapter 9

Fiona pushed open the shutters and gazed across the gorge at Toledo basking in the silvery glow of a rising moon. Over on her left, she could identify the spotlit grandeur of San Juan de los Reyes, where James Palango's body had been left dangling from the shackles. From this distance, it looked far too innocuous for such a display. Certainly when they'd visited it that afternoon, it had appeared an unlikely setting for so degrading a crime. A few tourists had ambled past, reading their guide books, taking photographs and paying no attention to her and Berrocal. Fiona had to remind herself that this was the church built by the two monarchs who presided over the launch of the Inquisition. In all probability, San Juan de los Reyes had seen far worse than this latest corpse.

The visit to the church had added nothing to her knowledge, but it had given Berrocal the chance to run through the details of the crime scene and smoke another three of his execrable cigarettes. Afterwards, they had walked through the town to the police headquarters where Berrocal had made his base. "It's easier than driving," he had pointed out. "So, what do you need to do now?" he asked as they set off.

"I need to familiarize myself with all the details of the cases. That way I can draw up a full list of the key correspondences between them. There's no point in trying to do a geographical profile with only two cases. There's not enough information, particularly since these two sites have been chosen for their historical significance. But what I hope to do is to be able to suggest where you should look in your criminal records for the crimes he has probably committed in the past," Fiona explained.

"That's easily arranged. All the relevant material is in our incident room. I've set aside a desk for you there." He took out his mobile phone and dialled. He spoke curtly into it, a brief exchange where he said little. He ended the call with a tight smile. "The files will be waiting for you."

"Thanks. What I'll probably do is read through it all, make some notes then go back to my hotel. I like to mull things over for a little while before I write my preliminary report, but I'll have it ready for you first thing in the morning."

There was nothing high-tech about the incident room Salvador Berrocal had at his disposal. A dingy windowless room at the end of an airless corridor, the walls were grimy and streaked with stains that Fiona didn't want to think too closely about. It smelled of cigarette smoke, stale coffee and male sweat. Four desks had been crammed into the space, only one of which held a computer terminal. A couple of large-scale maps of the city and the surrounding suburbs were tacked to the walls, and an easel held a familiar sight the crime board, complete with photographs of the victims and various scrawled notations. Two of the desks were staffed by harassed-looking detectives who gabbled into phones and barely looked up when Berrocal ushered her in.

He pointed to the farthest desk, where two stacks of files leaned against each other at a precarious angle. "I thought you could work over there," he said. "I'm sorry our accommodation is so poor, but this was the only space available. At least the coffee is drinkable," he added with a sardonic smile.

And at least there was a power point nearby, Fiona thought as she squeezed into the tiny gap between the chair and the desk. "Are these the murder files?" she asked.

Berrocal nodded. "All ready for you."

It took her a few hours to plough through dozens of separate reports, stretching her Spanish to the limits of her dictionary and beyond. There had been a couple of occasions when she'd had to concede defeat and ask Berrocal for a translation of passages that baffled her. She had made notes as she'd gone along, working with the database painstakingly evolved by her and one of her PhD students which assigned probabilities to particular features of the two murders. The program then analysed which common features were significant in terms of attributing the crimes to one particular perpetrator. For example, most stranger killings took place after dark; that any two crimes in a series had happened at night was therefore not of much significance when it came to linking them. But it was relatively rare to commit a sexual assault on a dead body with a broken bottle, so the fact that these two crimes exhibited that particular feature was given a much higher significance by the program.

Most of the original data had come from the FBI, who had been remarkably generous with details of past cases once they had realized she was happy to have the information stripped of personal details like names of victims and perpetrators. Fiona recognized that like most statistical analyses produced by psychologists, her database was at best only a partial snapshot of the whole, but it did give her some valuable insights into the nature of the crimes she was dealing with. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed her to say with some degree of certainty whether individual crimes were part of a series or likely to be the work of separate offenders.

By the end of her afternoon's work, she had demonstrated empirically what the police had already decided on the basis of common sense and experience; the two murders were undoubtedly the work of one man. If that had been the only service she could have provided, there wouldn't have been much point in her making the trip. But she was convinced that by analysing the data she already had, she could point the police towards other crimes the killer might have committed. With access to that information, she might finally be able to construct a useful geographical profile.

What she needed now was to get out of the police station and let her mind roam free over the nuggets of information she had extracted from the files.

She had got back to the room to find a note from Kit propped up on the desk. "Gone down to the bar. Meet me there when you get in, and we'll have dinner." She'd smiled then and crossed to the window to check out the view. It was strange to think that the beauty spread out before her concealed all the normal range of human ugliness. Somewhere in that honeycomb maze of buildings, a killer was probably going about his business, unsuspected by anyone. Fiona hoped that she could point the police in the right direction, so they could find him before he killed again.

But that was for later. Fiona turned away from the window and stripped off her clothes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of smoke that lingered in their fibres. A quick shower, then she changed into jeans and a ribbed silk shirt.

Fiona found Kit at a table in the corner of the bar, hunched over his laptop with a glass of inky red wine to hand and a bowl of olives pushed to one side. She put an arm across his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. "Had a good day?" she asked, settling into the leather chair opposite him.

He looked up, startled. "Hi. Just let me save this." He finished what he was doing and turned off the computer. Folding it closed, he grinned at her. "They let you have an evening off?"

"Sort of. I've got to write a report later, but only a short one. It won't take long. I'm letting it bed down before I commit myself." A waiter appeared and Fiona ordered a chilled manzanilla. "What have you been up to?"

Kit looked faintly sheepish. "I went for a wander this afternoon. Just to soak up the ambience, you know? This place, it's steeped in history. You can practically smell it in the air. Every corner you turn, there's something to see, something to imagine. Anyway, I got to thinking about the Inquisition, about what it must have been like here back then."

Fiona groaned. "Don't tell me. It gave you the idea for a book."

Kit smiled. "It started the wheels turning."

"Is that what you were doing on the laptop?"

He shook his head. "No, it's way too early to be writing stuff down. I was just doing a bit of polishing on what I've been writing this last week or so. Tickling and tidying, the boring bollocks. What about you? What kind of day have you had?"

The waiter put Fiona's drink in front of her and she took a sip. "Routine. Going through files by the numbers. Berrocal's very organized. Very on the ball. You don't have to explain anything twice to him."

"That makes your life a bit easier."

"You're not kidding. The trouble is, there's not much to go at. Normally, a killer chooses a body dump for reasons that are very personal to him. But because these body dumps have particular historical significance, it complicates things. I'm not sure how much use geographical profiling will be."

Kit shrugged. "You can only do your best. They certainly go in for gruesome in these parts. They've got this daft little train that takes you through the city and round the ring road on the other side of the river and the commentary is totally bizarre. It's in Spanish and German and a sort of fractured English, and they tell you all this stuff about the bloody history of the town. They've even got this place called the Gorge of the Woman with Her Throat Cut. Can you believe that?"

Fiona was surprised. "They tell you about that on the tourist trip?"

He nodded. "I know, it's not the sort of thing you'd normally boast about, is it?"

"That's where one of our murder victims was dumped," Fiona said slowly. "I was working on the assumption that only locals would be familiar with it."

"Well, I can tell you all about it," Kit said. "This woman shagged one of the guards and let the enemy attack the city, so they cut her throat to make sure she wouldn't be doing that again in a hurry."

"Did you go down to San Juan de los Reyes? The big monastery church?"

"I walked past it. I'm saving it for tomorrow."

"Did you notice the chains on the facade?"

"It's hard to miss them. According to the guide book, Fernando and Isabella had them hung up there after the reconquest of Granada. They were used to shackle the Moors' Christian prisoners. I must say, if that's typical of Isabella's idea of decor, I can't wait to see the inside. Eat your heart out, Home Front," he added with an ironic grin. "Why do you ask?"

"That's where the second body was found. You've only been here half a day, and already you know the story behind both body dumps. It makes me wonder if I'm right in what I'm thinking."

Kit patted her hand and assumed an expression of mock-patronage. "Never mind, love, you can't be right all of the time. You leave that to me."

Fiona snorted with laughter. "I'm so glad I've got you to rely on. Now, are we going to eat dinner, or what?"

Fiona sipped a glass of brandy and studied the rough ideas she'd sketched out. In the background, the sound of Kit's fingers tapping the keyboard of his laptop was faintly soothing. Even the mosquito buzz of his Walkman was comforting in its familiarity. He never interfered when she had work to do, something she was eternally grateful for. She had heard too many of her friends complain that if their man wasn't working, neither were they supposed to be. Kit was always happy to occupy himself with his own work or a book, or to take himself off to a bar and make new acquaintances.

"I am convinced that the perpetrator's primary interest is not sexual satisfaction," she read. "However, the nature of the sexual mutilation he has performed postmortem is suggestive. I believe it is a way of demonstrating contempt for what he sees as the "weakness" of his victims, which leads me to postulate that his method of contact with his victims was one of physical or sexual appeal. At its most crude, I would suggest that he picked them up, possibly on an earlier occasion, and arranged to meet them on the nights of the murders. He may have baited his approach with the suggestion that his specialist knowledge might be of use to them in their professional lives. It is clear that he does not appear to pose a threat to those he has selected as victims. He knows the kind of places where his potential victims are to be found. This implies considerable local knowledge and suggests that he is a native of Toledo.

"These were not killings that occurred out of sexual rage because of failure of performance or over arousal but from a different motive entirely."

So far, so good, she thought. She didn't think there was much to argue with there. "These crimes demonstrate a relatively high level of sophistication and planning. It is therefore unlikely that the perpetrator is new to the world of criminal activity. He is far too comfortable with what he is doing. But if we accept that the motivation behind these murders is not primarily sexual, it therefore follows that it's unlikely his previous crimes have been sexual in their nature.

"Given that both crime scenes are significant tourist sites, and that both victims were foreigners, I believe the key to the killer's motivation is his view of visitors to his city. He sees them not as a benefit but as interlopers who are not to be welcomed. I think it most likely that his past crimes will have targeted either tourists or businesses related to tourism. He most probably began with acts of vandalism against hotels or businesses catering for tourists, such as souvenir shops. This may have escalated into attacks on tourists themselves, such as muggings."

Fiona sat back and considered. What she was suggesting was by no means a conventional profile of a serial killer, but she had been struck from the first by the unusual nature of the crime scenes. Most killers left their bodies where they killed them or chose carefully selected body dumps that had significance only because they were unlikely to be spotted abandoning the corpse. This killer had taken a high risk with his second victim, so the sites were clearly symbolic for him at a deep level. For once, where the bodies had been found seemed at least as important as the selection of the victims. They weren't just places that symbolized violence. They would also have meaning for the casual visitor to the city, as Kit's experience demonstrated.

She was pleased with the progress she had made. Now it was up to Salvador Berrocal to persuade the local police to give her the data she needed on crimes against property and persons related to tourism. Armed with that information, Fiona would be able to apply her theories of crime linkage to figure out which crimes had common offenders.

Once she had established which acts were part of series as opposed to isolated events, she would map the relevant scenes of crime on a street plan of the city that had been scanned into her computer. The powerful geographical profiling software loaded on her laptop would apply a complex series of algorithms to the points on the map. It would then chart probable areas where the perpetrator of those crimes might live or work. She could add the murder scenes to the mix, and if they didn't significantly distort the areas the computer had suggested, she might be able to indicate to Berrocal the area of the city the killer called home.

Ten years ago, Fiona mused, she'd have been laughed off the platform if she'd dared to suggest that a mixture of psychological profiling, crime linkage and geographical profiling could lead to the capture of a killer. Back then, there simply hadn't been powerful enough computer programmes to crunch the numbers fast enough, even if anyone had considered this an area worth investigating. The world of criminal investigation had changed faster than anyone could have imagined. At last, technology was outstripping the ability of criminals to keep one step ahead of it. And she was lucky enough to be part of the revolution.

And in the morning, she could put her skills to the test once more. Working with the police to capture killers was the most exciting thing she had ever done. But she never lost sight of the fact that she was dealing with real lives, not just a series of mathematical events and computer calculations. If what she did couldn't save lives, it was ultimately meaningless. And so, every case she was involved in became not only a professional challenge. It was nothing less than a measure of herself.

Chapter 10

Fiona walked into the smoky office just after eleven. Berrocal and his two detectives were all deep in telephone conversations, barely looking up at her arrival. She'd faxed her report to Berrocal at eight, knowing he'd need some time to assemble the material she needed. She'd used the three hours to have a leisurely breakfast in bed with Kit then to accompany him to see the definitive El Greco, the Burial of the Count of Orgaz, displayed in splendid isolation in an annex to the church of San Tomas. It had been a better start to the day than reading police files.

The stacks of folders on her desk looked the same as they had the day before. She waited for Berrocal to replace the receiver, then spoke. "Hi. Are the reports on the vandalism and assaults not here yet?"

Berrocal nodded. "That's them on your desk. Unsolved are on the left, the solved on the right. These are from the last twelve months."

"Quick work."

He shrugged. "They knew I'd be on their back till they came up with what you asked for. They like a quiet life. Can anyone help you with this, or is it something you must do yourself?"

"Unfortunately, I need to analyse the data myself," Fiona told him. "What about a map of the city?"

Berrocal raised a finger, admonishing himself. "I have them here." He turned to the remaining empty desk and raked around in the top drawer, coming up with a small tourist map and a larger, more detailed street map. "I wasn't certain which one would meet your needs best," he added, handing them to her.

"I don't suppose they've got a scanner here?" Fiona asked without hope.

Berrocal shrugged. "There must be one somewhere."

"I need the detailed map scanned in as a GIF file," she said, opening her laptop case and fishing out a blank floppy. "If you can have it put on the floppy, I can transfer it to my system."

He nodded, turning to the nearer of the two detectives. He snapped something in fast Spanish. The detective quickly ended his call and gave his boss a quizzical look. Berrocal thrust the map and the floppy at him and rattled off a string of short sharp sentences. The detective gave Fiona a radiant smile and made for the door. Clearly even being a gopher for the English consultant was preferable to being cooped up in this box. "E cafe con leche para dos," Berrocal added with a wicked grin at the disappearing back.

"Thanks," Fiona said, reaching for the first file. She had to devise a checklist of significant factors; time of the offence, date of the offence, what form the vandalism had taken, and a dozen other particulars. Then she had painstakingly to enter the details. Where there was a known offender, she also had to input every piece of information relevant to his history and his previous crimes. There were forty-seven files to work through and the fact that everything was in Spanish slowed things down even further. It made for a long day, punctuated by regular cartons of coffee and snacks that she couldn't have itemized five minutes after she'd eaten them, so intense was her concentration.

Finally, she sat back and waited while the computer sorted the data and offered up the results of its calculations. Unsurprisingly, most of the incidents came up as discrete events. But among those, there were three groupings of crime reports that each appeared likely to have the same perpetrator. The first was a series of attacks on souvenir shops. In every case, the crimes had taken place between two and three in the morning on weekdays. The first three involved paint being thrown across the windows. But then there had been an escalation. Four further attacks had taken place where the windows had been smashed and paint thrown on to the shops' stock. All the crimes were from the unsolved pile.

A second series featured graffiti daubed on the walls of restaurants and hotels. But here, the slogans were political right-wing rants about Spain for the Spanish, and the banishment of immigrants. Fiona immediately discounted these as the work of her killer.

A third series emerged from the unsolved pile. Within the past four months, three tourists had been attacked on their way back to their hotels in the early hours of the morning. Berrocal had already told her that Toledo was, by Spanish standards, an early-to-bed city, with most of the cafes and restaurants closed by eleven. But there were a few late-night bars, and the victims had all been in one or other of those. They had been walking back to their hotels alone when a masked man had jumped out from the mouth of an alley and attacked them. There had been no demand for money, just a silent and savage assault lasting a few minutes before their assailant ran off into the maze of narrow passages nearby.

Fiona gave a deep sigh of satisfaction. When crime linkage worked well, it was like a small miracle unfolding before her. Now she could enter the locations of the two significant series into her geographic profiling software and see what emerged.

Kit had watched Fiona walk up the hill from San Tomas, admiring her smooth stride and the way the cut of her trousers gave emphasis to the gentle swell of her hips. I am a lucky bastard, he congratulated himself, luxuriating briefly in the memory of their leisurely morning in bed. Even if she did his head in sometimes with her perpetual need to analyse and dissect everything and everyone who crossed her path, he wouldn't have swapped her for any woman he'd ever met. One of the things he loved about her was her dedication to the job she did. But even when she was possessed by a case, she never lost sight of the importance of their relationship.

This morning, for example. She could have played the "I'm indispensable' card and headed straight for the police station. But she'd assured him there would be nothing yet for her to get her teeth into and she'd taken time out to share something he'd wanted to do. He tried to do the same thing himself, but he knew he was worse at it than she was. When he was head down, going flat out for the finishing line of a book, he could think of nothing but the next chunk of text he had to get on to the screen. The only way he could show his love for her then was to cook for her and take the time to sit down and eat with her. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.

He spent the rest of the day being a tourist, and got back to the hotel just after six, taking a bottle of red wine up from the bar to their room. He had no idea how long Fiona would be, but that wasn't a problem. He turned the TV on to MTV Europe, poured a glass of wine, booted up his computer and collected his e-mail. The only significant message was from his agent, confirming a deal with the independent film makers who wanted to adapt his first novel for TV. Personally, he thought The Dissection Man was unfilmable, but if they were prepared to pay him large sums of money to find that out for themselves, he wasn't about to complain.

Not that he cared much about money. Both his parents were teachers and he and his brother had grown up in an environment where money had never really been an issue. There had always been enough and he'd never been conscious of having been deprived of anything because his parents couldn't afford it. He hadn't had much of an advance for his first or his second novel, and he reckoned no one had been more surprised than his publishers when The Blood Painter had become an overnight cult sensation then made the crossover to mainstream success. As a result, he guessed he'd earned more money in the previous two years than his parents had in the past ten.

And he didn't know what to do with it. A large chunk had gone on buying the house, but other than that, he and Fiona had few material desires. He didn't care about designer clothes, he had no interest in performance cars and he still preferred the kind of holiday where they'd fly somewhere, pick up a hire car and stay in cheap motels or guest houses His biggest expenditure was probably on music, but even there he economized by waiting till he was in the States or Canada on a book tour and indulging himself in a CD-buying spree at their lower prices.

The only real indulgence he'd craved was a retreat where he could escape to write when the book was going through that difficult middle period. Beginnings were always easy, but by the time he'd worked through the first hundred pages, depression would strike as he realized he was already falling far short of what he'd aspired to. At that stage, every interruption was a torment. Fiona was about the only person who didn't piss him off, but that was because she knew when to leave him alone.

It was Fiona who had suggested he buy a cottage in the wilds where he could go and work undisturbed for however long it took him to get over the hump of dissatisfaction. Usually, the truly terrible phase lasted for about six weeks or a hundred and fifty pages, and Fiona had informed him that she'd rather do without his company if that helped him to return more quickly to his normal cheerful self.

So he'd bought the bothy. It never ceased to amaze him that anywhere on the British mainland could feel so isolated. From the two-roomed cottage, no other human habitation was visible in any direction. To get there, he had to fly to Inverness, pick up the elderly Land Rover he garaged there, stock up with a supply of groceries, then drive for another two hours to the eastern fringe of the vast wilderness of Sutherland. His power came from a diesel generator, his water from a nearby spring, his warmth from a wood-burning stove that also heated enough water to half fill his bath. At Fiona's insistence, he'd invested in a satellite phone, but he'd only ever used it to link up his computer for e-mail.

The isolation was more than most people could have borne. But for

Kit, it was a lifeline. With the only distraction an occasional excursion to shoot rabbits for the pot, he invariably found he ploughed through the hardest sections of his books in far less time than it took in London. And the quality of his work had improved as a result. He knew it, and so did his readers.

And there was no denying that absence enriched his relationship with Fiona. Even though they were in daily e-mail contact often swapping posts that would have qualified as pornography in any other context their reunions had all the ardour of the first days of their affair, when no amount of physical contact was too much and no demand too outrageous. Just thinking about it excited him. Who would imagine that behind Fiona's cool exterior was a sensualist who had turned the hard man of British crime fiction into a romantic fool?

She was always at her most passionate when she'd been forced to confront violent death. It was as if she needed to reaffirm her connection to life, to reassert her own vitality in defiance of a killer. Kit might deprecate the source, but he had to confess he wasn't averse to reaping the benefits.

Mentally, he shook himself. Anticipation of Fiona's return was the surest way to distract him from what he was supposed to be doing. He had decided to do one of the periodic revisions he routinely ran through to check that everything in the book was flowing smoothly. He typed in the commands to print out the last sixty pages and flicked the TV over to BBC World to check out the news headlines.

The early evening news magazine programme was in full flow, the interviewer winding up what sounded like a deeply dull item about the state of the Euro, courtesy of a junior Treasury minister. The studio anchor's voice suddenly picked up urgency. "And news just in. Police in Edinburgh have identified the victim of a brutal murder that took place in the heart of the Scottish capital in the early hours of this morning as the international best selling thriller writer Drew Shand."

Kit's forehead wrinkled in an incredulous frown. "Over to our correspondent James Donnelly in Edinburgh," the presenter continued.

A young man with a serious expression stood in front of a grey-stone building. "The mutilated body of Drew Shand was found by a police officer on a routine patrol of the Royal Mile just after three this morning. Police cordoned off an area behind St. Giles' Cathedral which remains the scene of police activity. At a press conference earlier this afternoon, Detective Superintendent Sandy Galloway revealed that the victim's throat had been cut and his face and body mutilated with a knife. He appealed for anyone who was in the area between the hours of midnight and three a.m. to come forward.

"In the last few minutes, the identity of the victim was revealed as award-winning thriller writer Drew Shand. Thirty-one-year-old Shand was hailed as one of the new stars of British crime fiction when his first novel, Copycat, shot to the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic and won the John Creasey Memorial Dagger and the Mcvitie prize. The television adaptation of Copycat also went on to win several major awards and has been widely screened abroad.

"A former English teacher, Shand lived alone in the New Town area of the city. His second novel, The Darkest Hour, is due to be published next month. Shand, who was openly homosexual, was known to frequent several Edinburgh gay bars, including at least one believed to cater for those whose tastes run to sadomasochistic practices. At this point, police are refusing to suggest any possible motive for the killing."

"Fucking typical, blame the victim," Kit snarled, slamming his glass down so hard the stem broke, sending a stream of red wine across the marble floor. Ignoring it, he took a swig straight from the bottle. He scarcely registered its taste. "Drew Shand," he muttered, tilting the bottle to his mouth again. He shook his head in disbelief. "Poor bugger." He had a sudden flashback to the panel they'd done together at the last Edinburgh Book Festival, the one and only chance he'd had to appear with the rising star. He remembered Drew leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands spread open, face earnest as he struggled to make the point that the violence in Copycat had always been functional, never gratuitous. The audience had been won over, Kit recalled, although he'd had his doubts. Then afterwards, sitting outside the Spiegeltent, drinking Becks straight from the bottle, the pair of them had carried on the discussion, lacing their seriousness with the gallows humour beloved of police officers and crime writers alike. A vivid image of Drew throwing his handsome head back and laughing imploded behind his eyes like a terrible firework.

Kit suddenly realized how he longed for Fiona's presence. A reviewer had once remarked that Kit made his readers care so much for his fictional victims that the reader felt the shock of losing a real friend when he killed them off. At the time, he'd been proud of the comment. But back then, he'd never personally known someone who had been murdered. Sitting in a strange hotel room in an unfamiliar city, numbed with the shock of Drew Shand's death, he finally recognized the critical comment for the absurdity it had been. Now he knew the truth.