The wind was blowing out of the west so McBride headed into it. He would fight it for a few miles then turn for home so it would be at his back just as fatigue was setting into his legs.
He decided against his familiar route along the edge of the river where the gusts were snapping the flags on the lifeboat shed and, instead, turned off the Esplanade and headed at an angle towards the main road taking the early morning traffic into Dundee. Even at 7.20 a.m., the cars from the eastern suburbs were hanging on to each other’s bumpers.
As he ran, McBride thought of two things. Why did so many people who drove off-road vehicles only ever use them to go to the office or supermarket? And why did a killer or killers take the lives of their victims by different methods? The whole point about sequential homicides was their similarities, not their differences.
He was no nearer a solution to either of the riddles when the mobile he carried in the front zipped pocket of his running jacket chimed rhythmically to life.
McBride did not carry the phone at that time of day to receive messages. He did not know more than a handful of people who would be conscious at that hour and none of them would be alert enough to want a conversation. He took the mobile with him in case he lost an argument with an off-road monster and needed to call an ambulance. Besides, he did not permit a wide distribution of his number. That someone should interrupt him in the middle of his training unreasonably irritated him. Every run he ever undertook, even the ones that did not matter, was precisely timed and the full details written into a running log. It was of no relevance that he never looked at the entry again.
He drew reluctantly to a halt and extracted the mobile, touching the green answer button and pressing a finger against his spare ear so he might have some chance of hearing the caller over the cacophony of traffic noises surrounding him.
The woman who spoke to him was unknown yet familiar. ‘Campbell?’ The voice was gentle, accent-less, enquiring. He wondered why so many people seemed not to expect the person who owned the mobile they were calling to be the person who actually answered it. It was another of life’s paradoxes. So, he reflected, was the fact that he could be at his most philosophical and fractious in the earliest part of the day.
‘Campbell who?’ he asked with mock awkwardness. It had the desired effect. Silence. He visualised the consternation on the face of the mystery caller.
After several moments. ‘Oh, McBride … Campbell McBride. Is he there?’ Her poise had vanished.
‘You’re in luck. This is he.’ He immediately felt guilty. ‘Sorry,’ he hurried, ‘just my little early-morning joke. Now, tell me who you are.’
‘Anneke … Anneke Meyer. We met at Next Generation. Petra Novak introduced us.’
McBride’s recall was instant. The face of the athletic blonde with the sensual nose sprang into his mind. He regretted his flippancy even more. He apologised again. As he gushed his words of contrition, he struggled to think of a reason she would be calling him and at 7.20 a.m. He knew it would not be for the purpose he might have wanted.
‘I need a sample – DNA. Petra gave me your number so we could arrange it,’ she said.
He had forgotten she was employed in the science lab of Tayside Police. ‘No problem. When? Where? I’m completely at your disposal.’ McBride grovelled in his attempt to atone for his off-putting levity at the start.
‘ASAP. I’m going out of town before lunchtime. That’s why I’m calling so early – sorry about that by the way but Petra said you were an early riser. Don’t know how she knows that. Not even exactly sure what she meant by it!’ Now it was Anneke Meyer who was being provocative.
McBride permitted himself a smile at how Petra might have reacted had she heard the last part of the conversation. He laughed at the thought and also at what he was about to say in response to her veiled enquiry. ‘Are you asking how I stand with Petra?’ This time both of them chuckled but it conveniently left the unasked question hanging in midair.
When Anneke spoke again, it was to arrange when she would enter his mouth with a swab. ‘Your place or mine?’ she offered. ‘Whatever is most convenient. I’m based at headquarters in West Bell Street but I can drop round to your flat if it’s better for you.’
McBride mentally debated the alternatives for one-tenth of a second.
‘Make it my place in two hours, then.’
All the way home, he thought about women. Even when he fought with the convoys of vehicles pouring through the confused Claypotts junction and its forest of traffic lights, he could not get three dead females and two very-much-alive ones out of his mind. The corpses should have taken up most of his deliberations but it was Petra Novak and Anneke Meyer who kept displacing them.
The two women were the same but different. Both magnetically attractive but one raven haired, the other blonde. Both athletic but one fragile like a ballet dancer, the other powerfu1l with a well-defined physique. Both successful in their careers but one vulnerable and sensitive. He was attracted to each of them but knew which he preferred. He also knew he would move for the other one.
He was still struggling to work out the logic of that contradiction when he passed under the 400-foot twin wind turbines powering the giant Michelin tyre plant at Baldovie. The two whirling brutes, the most massive in a urban setting anywhere in the world, were said to resemble graceful pieces of industrial sculpture. Fine if you only had to view them on the journey home, not so satisfactory if your home sat in their endlessly rotating shadows.
When McBride finally turned out of the wind, he allowed the breeze at his back to help him pick up his pace. He ran away from the factories on either side of him and set off along a narrow road dividing a patch of countryside. As he pushed up an incline that would soon take him back to his apartment on the riverside, he realised he was within the telescopic range of Adam Gilzean. Idly, he wondered if the man who had been responsible for bringing him back to live in the area had his eyepiece focused upon him. He lifted a hand and waved in Gilzean’s direction without knowing why.
When he was half a mile from home, McBride accelerated again, this time to raise his heart rate as close as possible to its maximum 190 beats a minute. The only other occasions when it reached such a level were when he was engaged in a different kind of activity and always with a woman. He thought of Anneke Meyer and the light sweat that covered his body and wondered whether he should still be in his after-shower towel when she arrived to sample him.
Such musings disappeared the moment he opened the front door of his apartment. Lying on the carpet was a long white envelope, of the identical type he had recently passed to Detective Sergeant Rodger. The neatly folded piece of paper inside bore only two computer-generated words: ‘Wrong library!’