3

 

‘What do you think?’

A lock of Adele’s hair brushed by his face, as she lowered to rest her forearms on his desk. The scent of her conditioner drew him towards comforting home images, with her hijacking the bathroom of their bedroom, when drying her hair, and that aroma pervading everything while he tried to reach out to the cabinet door, but ended up observing her in the mirror, guessing where her pensive mind might be lost.

It was precisely the kind of distraction he needed, to prevent the conversation he’d had with Miriam from playing like a loop in his brain, and himself from analysing every word a thousand times.

‘Eric?’

‘Yes …’ Eric shook himself out of his thoughts. Actually, there was another, more urgent kind of distraction: the case they were working on. ‘Well, I’m not convinced of any involvement by Phillips.’

He was about to tell her that those who worked in the Forensic Services or Murder Investigation Teams also had to deal with violent crimes every day, and somehow were fascinated by them, but it didn’t mean that a crazy criminal was hiding behind each one of them. Fortunately, he realised in time his example wasn’t fitting, at least as far as she was concerned. In fact, he certainly understood why she was looking for a culprit in the less likely places. And he, more than anyone else, should use the same reasoning; except associating Adele with frivolous matters like occupying the bathroom for hours, as time went on, had made it almost inconceivable for him to think that the same hand now using his mouse with some difficulty, because it wasn’t set for a left-handed person, had taken the lives of other people who had been defenceless. Perhaps they’d been bad people, but some of them had left behind all the evil they’d caused, just like she was trying to do now. Yet she’d felt entitled to kill them, and never, not even for a moment, would she compare herself to them.

After all, the objective reality of things didn’t exist; everything was a perception, an interpretation.

‘Anyway, I’ll suggest Marvin takes care of it.’ Eric pressed his fingers against his temples. Tiredness coming from having poorly slept the night before was starting to show, together with hunger. ‘He’s the MIT’s detective in charge of the case. It’s up to him to go about questioning people; we’d better stick to evidence.’ Right after uttering those words, he realised he’d used them a bit too much of late. Adele’s fleeting sideways look confirmed that thought. He’d moved from bending the rules to his purposes to following them blindly. He’d been so unaccustomed to this habit that sometimes he wondered whether he was exaggerating. ‘Anyway, we cannot check every single thing.’ He decided to change the subject. ‘If the pattern is the same as three years ago, we’re running out of time before he kills again. We need to set priorities.’

‘In my opinion, this is one of them.’ Adele expanded a picture to full screen, which showed the card delivered to Belmarsh a few days ago and addressed to Robert Graham. ‘The other messages may mean anything or nothing, but what I see here is a plausible context.’ She pointed at the decoration of the edge. ‘The honeycomb makes me think about wax.’ She touched the wrong button on the mouse, opening a menu. A cry of frustration escaped her mouth, then she awkwardly pushed the right one, thus showing the next photograph. ‘And here in the text, she’s speaking about cakes that look like wax. It cannot be a coincidence.’ She tilted her head towards him. ‘I think they’re all coded messages and we should check them one by one with this in mind.’ She gestured at the screen. ‘Someone is talking to him, and it may be that someone who killed Emma Taylor.’

‘What if the message isn’t for him, but for us? The author must have figured out that any correspondence is checked and recorded.’

‘Okay.’ Adele straightened up, forcing him to look up at her. ‘Let’s say that you’ve got it all wrong. You guys put an innocent man in prison …’

Unwittingly, Eric reacted, raising an arm. He was the one who’d taken the conversation in that direction and now was getting anxious, because he realised he’d done so in the certainty he would be contradicted.

‘I’m just hypothesising. Let me speak.’

Adele and her hypotheses. It was only the two of them. Nobody else was listening, nobody else was judging. There was no reason to get defensive. ‘All right, go on.’

She pulled away from the desk and started walking past it. ‘The real killer is sending these messages to get attention, but he doesn’t succeed, so he decides to become more explicit: he sends a message about wax and kills a person in a waxworks museum.’ She stopped and almost pirouetted to turn to him. ‘For it to make sense, we must suppose that the Plastic Surgeon is interested in getting our attention, somehow. Here, it’s beyond me why they should be.’

‘Reasons aren’t always clear, but maybe this person is just crazy.’

‘Yes, yes, like in the films.’ Adele waved her arms. ‘But in real life, crazy people playing with the police, while following the homicidal compulsions they can’t resist, are rare unless they have some unfinished business with the police themselves.’ Her gaze met his.

She was talking about Damien Johnson, who a year ago, after escaping from a police transport van, instead of going into hiding had tried to lure Eric into a trap along a trail of dead bodies, because the latter had sent him to prison, by framing him with forged evidence.

‘If the hypothesis is true, the only person having something to complain about the work of the police would be Graham himself, but he couldn’t have killed anybody from his cell.’ Adele walked between the two chairs across the desk and tapped it with her fingers. ‘So instead, it could be that Graham really is a serial killer and that someone who was involved with him at the time decided to indulge in the same sport right now, to help him during the appeal or at least give him the impression they want to.’ She waved a hand and sat down on the left chair. ‘Here we have two people who know what really happened. One is in prison and claims he’s been innocent since the first day. The other is free and knows they could end up there too, if the first one wanted. If neither of them has spoken about the existence of the other, there’s only one explanation.’

‘They are equally responsible.’

During all those hours, Eric’s mind had bounced between hoping that a connection between the two cases didn’t exist and finding a way not to feel responsible if the investigations had been stopped ahead of time. All that had been preventing him from doing his job: analysing the evidence.

‘Graham cannot say there’s another person involved without incriminating himself.’ Eric leant forwards on his desk, his arms folded, while focusing his gaze on her. ‘At least until he has any hope for the appeal trial, he must hold on. Only it isn’t easy, because if his conviction is upheld, if after lying for all this time he tried to involve someone else, nobody would believe him. He should’ve spoken up right away, when the evidence confirming his words was still hot.’ While he was speaking, a satisfied expression lit up Adele’s face. It was the reflection of what he himself felt while realising how their minds worked in total harmony. ‘So his accomplice tries to encourage him to keep his mouth shut with coded messages from an unsuspecting old lady living in a nursing home, letting him believe they’ll do something to help him, sooner or later.’

Adele reached out to point at the back of the screen. ‘But with that last message, they’ve become a bit too much explicit and might end up not helping him at all.’

‘They aren’t playing games with us, but with Graham.’ Eric leant against the backrest. ‘You’re right, these messages are important. They might tell us something about this person’s intentions.’ He shook his head. That revelation would not help them. ‘But I’m sure this won’t help us get ahead of them or unveil their identity.’

‘Not the messages, but perhaps their origin.’ A chair scraping the floor revealed that Adele was standing up before he turned his attention on her again. ‘The envelope, at least by a first comparison, seems the one from the Golden Days House’s stationery. We’ll need a sample to confirm, but I bet it is. Also, people with some health problems, given their age, live there too. The new surgeon knows how to handle a scalpel, had a medical-surgical background, might occasionally have something to do with that place and, for this reason, might have thought that this trick of using an old woman suffering from senile dementia was funny and convenient, and credible in the eyes of Graham.’ She resumed walking around the desk, but this time went over to him from the left. ‘This person had dealings with Graham three years ago, and not only because of their passion for killing female students. We immediately thought about a colleague, but what if the link was about the victims?’

Justine Steele, the first victim of Graham, had been his ex. Regardless of the method with which he’d punished her, there was a motive. But not for the other three girls. And what if they’d been targeted for a reason because of which someone else had decided to punish them?

Eric sprang to his feet. ‘Another student.’ He grabbed the phone. ‘We need to get the list of everybody working at Golden Days House, including any volunteers, and find out if anyone was attending St George’s in January 2014.’

 

 

The usher looked at the entrance again, then his watch, and finally his colleague, who shrugged in his direction.

For a while they’d noticed a woman outside, on the pavement. She was talking with someone they couldn’t see. Perhaps the other person was leaning against the wall beside the entrance. The woman said a few words, but she was mostly nodding and sometimes smiling. It was unclear whether she would enter. The show started at half past seven, which was in two minutes, and that was when they were supposed to close the door, because access afterwards was forbidden, to avoid disturbing the people in the audience and the actors.

‘Ma’am?’ The usher took a few steps forward, but the woman didn’t seem to hear him. ‘Ma’am?’ he called louder, managing to draw her attention. ‘You need to get in? The performance is about to begin.’

The woman resumed looking at her mysterious interlocutor. She nodded again and then walked through the doorway, heading for the usher, her ticket in hand. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise it was already time to go in.’ She smiled.

‘No problem.’ The usher tore her ticket and signalled for her to walk on.

His colleague was waiting for her up ahead. He asked to see her ticket, then walked her down the stairs.

The first usher followed them.

The hall of the Savoy Theatre was located below street level. It included two circles, a grand and a dress one, and the stalls. And, considering that the two people in front of him kept going down, the latter must be their destination.

He found himself observing the woman from behind, while she climbed down the steps with agility. She was wearing flat shoes, a pair of jeans, and a dark leather jacket. She was alone, but it wasn’t rare to see people going to shows alone, especially on a day like Monday. For many of them, a musical wasn’t an occasion for a social outing. Maybe she was a dancer as well and wasn’t there merely for pure pleasure. She surely had the body for it: tall, slender. She gave him the impression she was athletic. Or she was a friend or partner of someone in the theatre company, so her loneliness was just temporary.

Finally, they reached the stalls level. The usher stopped by the door and followed his colleague with his gaze, while he walked the woman to her seat in row H, more or less in the middle of the hall, a little to the right of the stage.

Right after she sat down, the lights went out.

 

 

The police car was slowly driving along Bedford Street, in what was perhaps the tenth cruising through the streets of the West End. Mills was in the driver’s seat, so that he could take advantage of all his caution in driving a car. Instead, Miriam alternated her attention between the people walking on the pavements and her mobile phone, hoping she would soon receive a call or at least a text message.

While leaving King’s Cross Station, she’d tried to get in touch with William again. But his phone was always off. After all, he’d said he was at the hospital for an emergency and she could understand he’d rather switch it off than give the impression he was ignoring any incoming call. When she’d talked to him over two hours ago, she’d got the sense he was worried about Megan, but it was also true that he didn’t know what was happening and Miriam had preferred not to alarm him without a good reason.

She herself, from time to time, wondered whether she was overreacting. Eric had told her there was no direct connection between the new victim and those from three years ago, so she had no logical reason to think that Megan could be a target. Yet her instinct was there, urging her, pushing her into action. She was used to letting herself be freely led by it, whilst her godfather was the one who relied on a thorough analysis of the evidence. By working together, they complemented each other. Now that she’d managed to be assigned to a different area of the city, to avoid collaborating with his team, something had broken in a balance that was perfect in its imperfection.

Miriam wiped her wet cheek with her forefinger. She really missed Eric. With each passing day, she realised new ways in which his absence affected her life, and not really for the better. Her reason told her she could only blame herself for that situation, which made her suffer, but her instinct accused him.

‘I know about your passion to look for the proverbial needle in a haystack, and I admit you have a certain talent, so much that I’ve heard more than one person call you a … lucky witch.’ Mills raised a hand from the steering wheel to stress the last two words, and that movement brought her back inside the car where they had been sitting for way too long.

‘I think the word is bitch. Lucky bitch.’

Mills let out a controlled laugh. ‘But at this point, I feel a bit stupid, I mean, more than usual, while we’re driving around here in the streets, in the hope of coming across a person who may very well be inside a restaurant or a theatre or even someone else’s house. How do you know she isn’t seeing a lover while her fiancé is at work?’

Miriam sighed. Everything was possible and her partner was right. Keeping on moving would not increase the chances of encountering her. Maybe in the meantime she’d gone home and hadn’t realised her mobile phone was off. She wouldn’t know they were looking for her until William’s return.

While the car turned left in the Strand, Miriam opened the contacts on her phone and looked for Megan’s landline number. There it was. ‘We can stop here, if you like.’ She tapped the green icon to start the call, and then the speakerphone one.

The police car pulled up on the left beside the pavement, a few metres before the Adelphi Theatre. Its entrance was lit up, but deserted. At that time, the show must have already started.

The gloomy dial tone started sounding inside the compartment. Once, twice, three times, four, five, six. Miriam’s breath was following the rhythm of it. She let it ring. At least landline phones kept doing it indefinitely.

Mills gave her a grave look. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so worried. I’m trying.’ He shook his head. ‘But I really can’t. I really don’t get it.’

Annoyed by the sound, which did nothing but increase her agitation, Miriam ended the call. She almost slammed her phone on the dashboard. As she let her hand rest on her lap, it twitched.

The traffic noise came from the open windows. A group of young people passed by on the pavement beside her door. The one leading them turned and said something, which was covered by the screeching of a motor scooter, but he managed to raise loud laughter amongst his friends. A siren was wailing in the distance.

‘It’s clear we won’t find her dead somewhere, given that she wasn’t kidnapped months ago.’ The sergeant raised his eyebrows. ‘Reynolds last saw her this morning, right?’

Miriam leant the side of her head against the headrest. ‘She may have been kidnapped today.’

Mills’s face contracted in confusion. ‘Why do you think so? I mean …’ He turned in his seat to look straight at her. ‘Okay, she was a victim in 2014, but we got her out of there. It’s far from certain that she is a target again. And anyway, even if the two cases are linked, I’m not buying Graham is innocent. It must be someone else with other goals.’

‘Don’t you remember?’ She sighed. ‘When we found her three years ago, she’d been in the hands of the killer for more than a week.’ She paused, waiting for a hint of understanding from her partner, which didn’t come through. ‘She was kidnapped between the first and the second murder a few days later. Whether it’s a copycat or an accomplice …’ She half-closed her eyes and emitted a short groan. ‘Or, heaven forbid, the real Surgeon, the killer is already recruiting his next victims, and Megan is the only potential target we know.’

‘Do you really think there will be a second murder?’

She opened her eyelids again and met his serious gaze. ‘I think that checking in on Megan might be a way to catch that son of a bitch before he commits it. That’s what I think.’

There was also another thought tormenting her. Megan hadn’t been able to recognise Graham and help convict him. Even though she’d stated she remembered there was a single man, the fact she could not identify him couldn’t rule out there had been two of them, who had never showed themselves to her at the same time. Her being confused about his appearance might depend on this. And this new lone killer could not be sure she wouldn’t recognise him now.

The siren wailing had become louder, meaning that it was getting closer. Miriam turned to the back of the car, then resumed looking forward. As usual, it was difficult to understand which way it came from, because the sound bounced off the walls of the building overlooking the Strand.

A car slowed down and stopped in front of them, imitating the one preceding it, while the one following it was forced to pull up right beside the police vehicle.

‘Don’t fret. It’s an ambulance,’ Mills said, looking at the right wing mirror.

Miriam turned just when the emergency vehicle arrived, and followed it with her eyes as it overtook them. In spite of the good intentions of the drivers who’d moved aside to let it drive by, it was forced to proceed at a moderate speed, although still faster than the one allowed in the streets of the city centre during rush hour. In silence, she watched its progress, accompanied by the increasing of a dark omen that seemed to threaten her since Eric had talked to her about the case. It was nothing compared to the memories of the past that had stupidly pushed her to stay away from work that day. But even her problems were nothing, only a slight discomfort, when compared to the actions of the criminal they were trying to catch. Since she’d been working with the Criminal Investigation Department, she’d been taught to consider the crimes as a routine and to put them aside once she stopped being a detective and returned to the small daily gestures of her private life. But it was just a story she liked to tell herself. Perhaps with age and experience it would really be possible to compartmentalise, although just observing her godfather, or father, she doubted it happened. Surely she couldn’t right now. All the violence, horror, and atrocity she was forced to see found a way through the cracks of the armour she’d tried to build around herself, and crept into her thoughts, fuelling the fears she’d been carrying around since her childhood. But sometimes that was a relief because, as it was happening right now, they ended up making the latter laughable and easier to face, at least apparently.

After the ambulance had driven for about a hundred metres, the brake lights lit up and the right indicator followed suit, which caused the vehicles coming from the opposite direction to screech to a halt.

‘It’s turning on Savoy Court,’ Miriam murmured, describing what she could see. ‘You said she might be in a theatre?’ She turned her eyes to Mills.

‘You’re not thinking …?’ Her partner looked at her and made a wry face. ‘Well, I suppose we may go and take a look, since we’re here.’ He flicked on the siren and the indicator. ‘Let’s be good coppers.’

The cars on the Strand had resumed moving, but entering the flow wouldn’t be easy for a normal vehicle. Fortunately, theirs was not.

Squealing of brakes emphasised the immediate reactions of the drivers. Moving in jerks to force its way, the police car accessed the lane to its right, and sped up. In a few seconds, it reached the entrance to the alley that ended against a building hosting both the theatre and the hotel named Savoy. But as it turned, it was forced to slow down.

The ambulance, whose back doors were both open, had stopped in front of the entrance to the theatre. A pretty large group of onlookers had already crowded behind it; some were holding a mobile phone, although there didn’t seem to be anything to photograph or film. As soon as they noticed the police, they parted, although without any haste.

A uniformed usher stood beside the main door. He was a taller man than average, which was the probable reason he’d been assigned the task of guarding it.

As soon as the police car stopped, Miriam thrust the door open and jumped out. Without even bothering to close it properly, she walked around the car and headed straight to the man. She pulled out her warrant card from her pocket, in order to have it ready in hand when she was in front of him, although it was quite pointless given the vehicle whence she’d come.

In fact, the usher opened the door, allowing her into the theatre without her having to slow down. ‘They’re downstairs, in the stalls.’

She nodded by way of thanking him and entered the foyer. Her heart raced in her chest, fuelling her muscles, yet that sudden energy threatened to abandon her at any moment.

Another employee of the theatre beckoned her. ‘I’ll show you the way.’ Her face was distraught, her eyes red like she was on the verge of tears.

Miriam didn’t even pay attention to the woman. Those words had reached her as distant, covered by the sound of her breath. She rushed down the stairs. The flights seemed endless. An increasingly louder din of voices welcomed her at each level until she reached the stalls.

As she walked through the door, for a moment she was dazzled by that sight. All the lights were on and illuminated the walls with warm hues, which were slightly dimmed in the upper half of the room, because of the shadow created by the dress circle. The welcoming atmosphere was amplified by the dark red carpeting. The audience was still there, but instead of sitting in an orderly fashion, they were scattered everywhere. Some were standing, their eyes fixed. Others were discussing. Someone was even laughing, like nothing was wrong. On the stage, the actors talked among themselves. Two women sat on the edge, their legs dangling. Curiosity and fear emanated from their faces as they looked ahead.

Miriam followed their line of sight towards the middle of the stalls, where a greater gathering of people was evident.

‘Clear the way, please,’ a commanding voice ordered, which caused a sudden movement in the crowd, without making it any easier to walk through it.

It was then that Miriam noticed the paramedics’ uniforms. Two of them were holding a woman’s body over the seats and moving towards the side aisle to her left. Or at least she looked like a woman, from what little she could see: dark skinny jeans, trainers with fuchsia markings.

An increasing number of people were moving in front of her. Others instead stood in the vicinity of their seats, perhaps in the hope that the incident would be resolved soon and then the show would resume from where it had been interrupted. Some were holding their phones over their head, pointed at the subject of such clamour.

‘Metropolitan Police! Let me through!’

Her order startled those closer to her, who immediately parted, and retracted the smartphones.

With difficulty, she made her way through the thicket of people, who flattened against a wall or stepped back between the rows of seats. The side aisle, which in itself was quite narrow, had become a rutted trail sprinkled with racket, humidity and more or less pleasant fragrances.

When she reached the first of the paramedics, the other two had already rested the woman on a stretcher and were leaning over her.

As Miriam took a further step forward, she bumped into a spectator, but the latter didn’t even notice. The woman was hugging her own body, her unblinking eyes staring at what must be the cause of her terror.

‘Metropolitan Police …’ The impetus of Miriam’s words trailed off as she got the paramedic before her to move away, providing her with a view of the woman being rescued. She took another step.

‘I’ve got a pulse, but it’s weak,’ one of the two kneeling paramedics said. Then he lifted the woman’s eyelids, one by one, and pointed a light into her eyes. ‘Pupils poorly reactive.’

The other one had just finished intubating her and was fastening a balloon to the tube.

Miriam’s look was focused on the rest of the pale face, the half-closed eyes, the tousled hair, which would reach her chin if she had been sitting. Wavy, blonde hair.

It wasn’t Megan.

But she looked familiar.

‘Excuse me.’ She felt a touch on her arm. The first paramedic stepped forward again and lowered to fasten the belts of the stretcher around the woman’s body. ‘When you’re ready, we’ll go.’

‘Are you from the police?’

Bewildered by the thousand thoughts running about in her mind, it took a few moments for Miriam to realise that question had come from the man squeezing the Ambu bag with a regular rhythm.

She nodded vigorously. ‘Detective Inspector Leroux.’

‘Before we intubated her, just now … well, there’s something odd.’ The man exchanged a glance with his colleague kneeling across the stretcher. ‘Show her.’

The latter lifted a transparent plastic bag from the floor. ‘I’m not quite sure what it is. I just figured to put it in here.’ She could make out a small square shape inside it.

A cold hand clamped Miriam’s heart, but instead of paralysing her, led her to throw herself at her interlocutor. She took the bag off his hand and focused on the white square. A letter T was printed on it. ‘Merde …’

Pushing the man aside, she crouched down beside the patient and started touching her right arm with the other hand. She immediately felt something at the crook of the elbow.

She pocketed the bag. ‘Give me a hand at taking her jacket off.’

‘What?’

‘Now!’ She pointed to the paramedic at the end of the stretcher. ‘You, on the other side.’

Without further objections, the two rescue workers helped her slip the leather jacket from the blonde’s shoulders, while the third one continued with the artificial ventilation.

As soon as the right arms were free, Miriam lifted the sweatshirt sleeve and saw exactly what she’d feared to find: a needle stuck in the skin, from which a tiny tube went up to the armpit. ‘She’s overdosing on morphine. You have to immediately give her an antagonist.’ With an abrupt move, she pulled out the IV circuit from the woman’s vein. A dark slick of blood formed at the point where she’d removed it.

‘No, it can’t be,’ the paramedic beside her protested. She bent over and checked the blonde’s eyes again. ‘A morphine overdose causes miosis, but the pupils of this woman, besides being poorly reactive to the light, are quite dilated. That is, they’re showing an onset of mydriasis.’

‘It’s the effect of scopolamine that’s contrasting the contraction of the pupils.’ Miriam had moved to check the woman’s abdomen, where there was an evident bulge by the big pocket on the sweatshirt front, one of those used to store a phone and provided with a hole to pass through the earphone wire. She resisted the urge to put her hand in there. She’d already left her fingerprints on the tube; she didn’t want to risk altering more possible evidence.

‘Morphine and scopolamine, together?’

‘Fuck! Just do what I say.’ She turned and confronted the paramedic a few inches away from his face. ‘I’m from a Murder Investigation Team and this woman is a victim of a murder attempt by a serial killer. The second victim in two days. Whether or not the bastard is successful now is up to you.’

The man glared at her for a few seconds, indecision cleaving his face with deep wrinkles. He looked at his colleagues, then stood up. ‘Let’s bring her up, come on,’ he finally ordered. ‘We have naloxone in the ambulance.’

‘Miriam!’

It was Mills’s voice. Only now did she realise he hadn’t followed her inside the theatre. What took him so long?

She rose to her feet and saw him coming over in haste through the most curious spectators. The number of those filming the incident had grown dramatically. She’d just mentioned the existence of a serial killer and, in a matter of minutes, her words would spread like wildfire on social media.

Merde.

‘I was on the phone.’ Finally, the sergeant reached her. ‘It rang right after you entered the theatre.’

Miriam pressed herself up against the wall while the stretcher was lifted.

‘Out of the way!’ A paramedic was holding it at the patient’s feet and, with the other arm, waved the crowd to make way. In a few moments, they reached the door.

‘Megan Rogers.’ Mills smiled at her. ‘I was right: she’s home.’

The stretcher had disappeared from view, followed by those impromptu reporters, but Miriam kept looking in its direction. She felt stifled. She couldn’t believe what had just happened, at the absurd combination of events that had brought her there.

He touched her arm. ‘Hey, did you hear what I said? Megan is fine. I was right.’

‘I told you we might use her as bait to stop him before he did it again.’ Miriam turned her eyes to her partner again and pulled the plastic bag out of her pocket. She put it in front of him. ‘Well, unlike you, I was wrong.’

 

 

He walked into the intensive care unit, bringing his equipment with him. Police Constable Cora Patel, from the Murder Investigation Team led by DCI Bennet, was showing him the way.

Less than a half-hour ago, Eric had been home with Adele. They’d had dinner. Then he’d pulled out from the lumbar room the notes related to the Plastic Surgeon and had started reading them again. They had to wait at least until tomorrow morning to get the list of personnel at Golden Days House, but meanwhile he wanted to check those sheets again to find out whether, amongst the thousand things he’d written, there was some information about the friends of the victims, those who’d been questioned, especially the classmates at university, the teachers and other people from the staff who knew them. Could the new killer be one of them?

Since then there had been so many cases, and most details he believed he remembered had been distorted by the passing of time. Some had even been deleted or replaced by inexistent ones. He knew well those tricks of the memory, and that was why, since he’d become a detective, he’d made a habit of making notes about the tiniest piece of information, writing down any idea of his and any connection between the proofs, any relevant fact he realised, even though it was beyond his specific duties. Now that habit of his had come in handy, but from each single mark left on paper, all the sensations felt when it’d been made resurfaced as well. It was like he’d boarded a time machine and let it bring him back to one of the less pleasant periods of his life. Together with the memories about the case, also those about his loneliness of that time resurfaced, as well as how the horror at those crimes had crept under his skin, like a disease.

He withdrew from them when the phone rang. Then he headed for the University College London Hospital, where the victim had been taken, while Adele left to join Miriam at the Savoy Theatre.

A particular emotion guided Eric’s footsteps now. The victim was still alive and might become a witness. They might disrupt the killer’s plans, identify them, and once for all he’d know whether, over three years ago, he’d made a huge mistake by following his instinct instead of evidence.

His hope, which had grown during the car ride and the few minutes already spent at the hospital, faltered as he approached the woman’s room and could look inside it. She was alive, yes, but on life support and unconscious.

Bennet, standing beside the bed together with a doctor, looked up. He nodded a greeting, without it bearing the slightest hint of a good mood.

At last, Eric resolved to step in. Dejected, he observed the woman on the bed.

‘Dr Payne, this is Detective Chief Inspector Eric Show from the Forensic Services.’

Good manners would require at least a handshake, but Eric just exchanged a few pleasantries while putting his kit and camera on the floor and donning a pair of latex gloves. ‘How is she?’ he asked then.

Payne addressed a distraught expression at him. ‘It’s hard to tell right now. The intervention of the paramedics was timely in counteracting the overdose, but the patient is still unconscious. We’ll better understand the extent of the damage when she wakes up, if she wakes up.’

A sigh escaped Eric’s mouth as his attention shifted to the victim again. Her appearance was altered by the tube connected to life support, but he could recognise her hairstyle. He went over and lifted an eyelid. Her eyes were blue. No contact lenses this time. He brushed a strand of hair, revealing a livid scar next to her ear, which stood out in her pale face.

‘Doctor?’

Everybody turned to the door, where a nurse holding a big box was standing. Behind him, PC Patel guarded the corridor.

Payne beckoned him to come in, then looked at Eric. ‘These are the personal effects of the patient.’

Eric took the box from the other man, who left the room right after. He crouched down and put it beside his kit, and examined its contents. He moved the clothes and shoes aside, and found what he was looking for; the IV circuit. As he stood up again, he was still holding it.

‘Same story, isn’t it?’ Bennet asked.

‘Yeah.’ It was identical to the one found on the victim at Madame Tussauds. ‘Less than a day and a half has passed.’ Then he realised that the doctor was still there.

Perhaps Payne quickly understood, since he checked his watch as if he’d just remembered about something else he had to do. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ And adding nothing else, he crossed the room and left.

Bennet put his hands on his hips. ‘Two victims in two days and the only thing we have is a connection with a case we were supposed to have solved three years ago.’

‘A partial connection,’ Eric pointed out. ‘The type of victim is different. The way our killer murders them is different, because he or she makes them commit suicide, by nullifying their free will. And also the way we find them is different.’ He stepped closer to the bed again. ‘They are still public places, but in situations where the victims might be saved, at least in theory.’

‘That’s true.’ Bennet unpocketed his mobile phone and looked at the screen, but he didn’t seem to check anything in particular. ‘At Madame Tussauds, Emma Taylor died in plain sight because nobody realised she was a real person, but something unexpected could’ve happened.’

‘As it happened at the Savoy,’ Eric added, turning his attention to the IV circuit in his hand and then again to his colleague across the bed. ‘The show was interrupted because someone noticed that she was passed out.’

‘Our killer likes to take risks.’

‘The question is: is it a reckless person or is the risk a calculated one?’

There was a complex premeditation in that case, yet it seemed that the killer cared little about the success of the final act of their criminal actions. It was as if killing the victim wasn’t important. If the same individual had been involved in the first cases, something must have changed in them. But they also must know that if any of their victims were saved she might point the finger at them. Did they think they were safe? How much did those women know about the perpetrator? Perhaps they believed they had made a certain decision, like Taylor, who had stopped working and left her flat and disappeared. What they were looking for was a change, or was it a final way out?

Or was it the killer who tried to escape from their condition, leaving it to chance?

Perhaps they were only giving free rein to their fantasies of finding out how far they could go before being stopped, maybe killed.

On instinct his thoughts went to Adele, to the way she, when killing Garnish’s men and framing him, had left behind some clues only Eric could fully understand and link to her. There had been a lot of small flaws in her plan, some mechanisms that might not have worked thus making the house of cards she’d created collapse, starting from the fact that Garnish might have survived and accused her. Eric didn’t know to what extent that man would’ve been able to prove his accusations, but all that would’ve been enough to arouse some suspicions of her that, little by little, would’ve uncovered her plan.

But Adele hadn’t been worried about it. Her first goal had been to get revenge for her family. The second one, instead, to win Eric’s heart. Her attempted suicide in front of him had been a farce, but only because she’d been persuaded she’d reached both goals. Otherwise, Eric was sure she had seriously considered that kind of escape or hadn’t been afraid of spending the rest of her life in prison, because her own life was worthless to her. She hadn’t the slightest desire for self-preservation, much less she’d had any in that period. Everything revolved around the people she loved or had loved, who came prior to her and her very existence.

Deep down, Eric hoped Adele wasn’t living anymore as a prisoner of such depression, able to push her towards self-destruction, or at least he wished she were coming out of it. But knowing her hell closely provided him with further insight for understanding what motivated the actions of other criminals who were so obsessed by their mission that they didn’t care about the consequences to themselves.

‘What are you thinking?’ Bennet’s question made him focus on his colleague’s face again, at which he’d been staring for a while without really seeing it.

Eric shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

He realised he was still holding the IV circuit. There was still some work to do on the facts, so he couldn’t afford any premature considerations, not there, not with the fatigue of those hectic days that showed its burden. He put it back in the box. Later, he would bag those proofs one by one, but now he had to analyse the victim, in the hope that her body was still able to give him some information, in spite of the fact that any trace might’ve been contaminated by the intervention of the medical staff.

He took a bag from his kit, and a comb, which he started carefully running along her hair to collect possible small debris.

On the other side of the bed, Bennet had moved closer to the window and was swiping a finger across his mobile phone’s screen.

Once the first bag was stored, Eric took a second one. With a small spatula, he scraped under the fingernails of the victim’s left hand. A microscopic powder gathered inside it. He was almost certain it was generated by filing the nails.

He walked around the bed and was about to repeat the same procedure on the right hand, but as he lifted it from the sheet, he immediately noticed the difference. ‘Marvin, look.’

A swish, and Bennet was now standing beside him.

Eric showed him the victim’s knuckles. There were some evident calluses by the forefinger and the ring finger. ‘It’s Russell’s sign. Taylor had it, too.’ He looked up to meet Bennet’s eyes, to find out whether the other detective knew what he was talking about.

‘Another victim with bulimia.’

Eric nodded. ‘We have a link between them now.’

Bulimia was no more a coincidence, an anomaly. What the victims from 2014 had in common was that they all were medical students at the same university, almost at the same age, and they knew each other, although they didn’t seem to be friends, or meeting somewhere else. These victims had a different thing in common: a serious eating disorder. That finally provided a trace to follow.

There was a sudden chatter by the door. Mills had just arrived and was greeting Patel. Then he walked in, followed by his colleague. ‘DCI Shaw, I’ve come to brief you.’ He raised a hand in greeting. ‘Good evening, DCI Bennet.’

‘Where’s Miriam?’ Eric placed the woman’s hand back on the bed. He had yet to pass the spatula under the nails, but he first wanted to take some photographs of those scars.

‘She’s at the Savoy; I left her there with Pennington, who was running some forensics on the scene, even though, well, with all the people there, I doubt she’ll find something useful.’ He spread his arms. ‘Miriam was about to finish questioning the staff. Anyway, when I was there she’d already talked with the two ushers who’d accompanied the woman to her seat. She was alone, but one of the two said he’d seen her talking with someone just outside the entrance. Only from his position he had no visual on her possible interlocutor.’

‘Are we sure she wasn’t talking on the phone?’

‘No phone came up at the theatre. Unless it was in her jacket pocket …’

Eric pointed at the box resting on the floor to Mills’s right.

The officer saw it and crouched down in front of it. He reached out to Eric’s open kit and took a latex glove. After donning it, he put a hand inside the box and pulled out a black leather jacket.

Eric, who had already left both the spatula and the plastic bag for the fingernail scrapings on the edge of the bed, reached the sergeant just as the latter stood up again. He checked the pockets. ‘Empty.’

‘So our killer was there,’ Bennet suggested. ‘Patel, find out whether there is any traffic or other cameras in Savoy Court, or pointed towards that street.’

While he was speaking, the officer had already pulled out her phone. ‘Yes, sir.’

At the mention of Patel’s name, Mills had turned to her in what looked like an automatic gesture, which made Eric smile.

‘If you want my opinion, I don’t think we’ll find any,’ he said, refocusing on the case. ‘They must have been standing in the right place to avoid being filmed. My team thinks he was inside Madame Tussauds while Taylor was sitting down on the chair. Remember when she stopped in the video?’

Bennet nodded.

‘The call was already in progress. Someone who could see her was guiding her from a distance, yet we’ve so far been unable to spot them in all that footage.’ Eric resumed addressing Mills. ‘The letter. Did you give her to Adele?’

‘Yes, and it was a T.’

First an N and then a T. Unlike the three found in 2014, it didn’t seem to be the beginning of a word. Perhaps was it an initialism? Another kind of abbreviation? That detail was haunting him. It had to mean something for the killer, but nobody had ever given an interpretation of it.

‘There’s one more thing,’ Mills continued. ‘The theatre ticket. A quick check at the ticket office showed that it was purchased online through the official retailer linked to the theatre’s website. We should soon receive the credit card details of the purchaser.’

‘I bet it’s in the name of a woman.’ Eric turned to look at the one lying on the bed in a coma. ‘It was simple to trace the identity of the victims, even three years ago.’

‘But back then, that was precisely what led you to Graham,’ Bennet commented, then shook his head in a gesture of apology.

‘Yeah.’ Eric felt it anyway. And the doubt emerged once more. ‘Now we have two victims showing signs of a recent eating disorder, and this could be the reason they were chosen. Somehow, the killer must have got in touch with them in a personal way, only this situation is much different from the one of the students. It isn’t like people walk around with a sign that says: “I’m bulimic”.’

Bennet pointed his eyes to a spot behind him. ‘Yes, Patel?’

As Eric turned, he could see the woman with her hand in the air. ‘Maybe both visited the same psychoanalyst specialised in this kind of disorders.’

‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘That’s the kind of link we’re looking for.’

‘Detective, if you allow me the suggestion …’ Mills extended an arm towards his colleague. ‘As soon as we have the identity of the victim, Patel and I can get right down to this trail.’

Eric checked his watch. It was just past nine. ‘Now?’ He’d said that on purpose. He hadn’t been able to hold it back.

As if nothing had happened, Mills shrugged. ‘Why not? We can start taking a look now and then pick it up from there tomorrow morning. Why put it off?’

Patel covered her mouth with a hand, in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal the onset of a laugh.

‘If that’s all right with her boss,’ Eric commented, doing his best to keep a composed attitude. Then he turned to Bennet, who cast an understanding look at him.

 

 

‘Sorry to drag you here at this hour,’ Miriam said when Adele reached her, and together they started walking on the pavement. ‘The news is already spreading and will be all over the press tomorrow morning. I want to be the one who tells her about it first.’

After sending Mills to the hospital to brief Eric and Bennet on the incident, Miriam had been left without her personal driver for the day. So for her next trips she’d been forced to rely on her many colleagues who arrived at the Savoy to take witness statements from the personnel, and the audience who claimed to have something to say about the mysterious blonde who had got sick during the show. And then there was Adele, who came to the scene to carry out the forensics. Although they didn’t meet much, even at work lately, she was the most suitable person to come to talk to Megan Rogers. She didn’t wear a uniform, which tended to frighten people, especially the anxious ones, and moreover she was a woman.

‘No problem; actually I think Eric will be late tonight, too.’ She noticed Adele was giving her an inquisitive look. She’d mentioned him on purpose, of course.

Miriam didn’t comment. At the same time, she couldn’t help but think back to the conversation of that afternoon at the cemetery. The subsequent agitation had allowed her to put her personal stuff aside for a few hours, but now it was coming back in force.

‘You should give him a second chance,’ Adele said, after a few seconds.

‘I’d appreciate if you stayed out of it.’ Miriam sped up. The crackling rising from the wet concrete matched the rhythm of her breath. ‘That’s no concern of yours.’

The other woman did the same, avoiding being left behind. ‘Of course it is. Whatever hurts Eric is definitely my concern.’

Miriam stopped and confronted her. ‘You’re in no position to understand how I feel. He broke my trust.’

She’d expected that conversation as soon as she’d seen the other woman arrive at the Savoy. She knew that sooner or later, once they were alone, Adele would try to broach the subject, but then they’d travelled by car in silence and Miriam had thought she’d got away with it. Instead, Eric’s girlfriend had just waited to catch her off guard.

‘Eric is by no means perfect.’ Adele spread her hands. ‘Nobody of us is. He made a mistake, yes, but this cannot erase everything else.’

‘A mistake?’ Miriam echoed her. She let out a sarcastic laugh. ‘He’s been deceiving me for over twenty years!’ She shook her head and resumed walking.

‘He’s loved you for all these years.’ Adele’s footsteps were following her closely. ‘He was there for you, tried to protect you from a possible truth he knew would’ve hurt you.’

She tried to leave her behind.

‘He adores you, you’re his little girl,’ the other woman continued louder, from a distance. It seemed she’d stopped. ‘You do not know how much he’s suffering because of the way you barred him from your life.’

Tears welled up in her eyes. Eric wasn’t the only one suffering from that situation, but Miriam couldn’t just get over it, as much as she wanted to. She stopped walking as soon as she reached the front of the house where Megan lived with her fiancé.

‘I don’t know how you could …’ Now Adele’s voice was very close again. ‘You don’t know what I’d give to still have a father. And you have one, but act as if he didn’t exist.’

‘I don’t even know if he’s really my father.’ Miriam went up the few steps separating her from the front door and rang the doorbell.

‘Whether or not there’s a biological connection, he’s been a father to you during all this time, a good father, and he doesn’t deserve all this resentment from you. You have to give him a second chance.’

Miriam turned to look at Adele, who was at her side again, and couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe. The woman was a couple of years younger than her, but ever since she’d known her she’d always felt inadequate in front of her, especially after learning about what had happened to her as a child. Both of them had lost their parents when they were very young, but their experiences couldn’t be compared at all. She knew that behind every word of that woman was a wisdom forged by an unimaginable pain.

When she’d realised that Adele and Eric were developing feelings for each other, she’d been upset because of the difference in age, and most of all the circumstances in which they’d first met. She’d felt something unhealthy in their relationship and wanted to believe it all had started because of a whim of his. It was easy to figure out how a single man in his fifties who’d just gone through a divorce could be attracted to a beautiful young woman. But there was something beyond her physical appearance. She was good at her job, as much as and even more than other colleagues with longer experience. Also, she emanated a sense of maturity that transcended her chronological age. Faced with that, Miriam was no longer surprised that between the two of them there was an equal partnership, bound to be a long-term one, despite everything.

And even now she was affected by Adele’s personality, whose peremptory words were opening a breach in her emotional defences.

But just at that moment, the door opened.

The tall figure of William Reynolds stood out against a faint light coming from the adjacent room behind him. Instead, the one from a lamp post located a few metres from the entrance lit up his face. An expression of recognition dawned on it, followed by a tired smile. His tiredness was also demonstrated by the deep rings around his eyes and enhanced by his sallow complexion. It’d been months since she last met him in person, and he looked older than she remembered him.

‘Good evening, Will.’ Miriam raised a hand to indicate the person who’d just reached her. ‘She’s a colleague of mine: Adele Pennington.’

Adele greeted him with a nod.

‘Please, come in.’ Will stepped aside to let them in.

At a few metres from the entrance, a steep flight of stairs led to the upper floor. A corridor extended on the left, with three doors overlooking it, including the one at its end.

‘Is it Miriam?’ Megan’s loud voice had emerged from that very door.

‘Yes, it’s her!’ Will answered.

While hearing the door being closed behind her, Miriam started walking down the corridor. She’d reached almost halfway when the other woman appeared. ‘Come on into the kitchen.’ She was smiling and beckoning at her. ‘I’m cooking something for Will. I can’t get away from the stove.’

Seeing her so quiet and relaxed clashed with the tumult stirring Miriam’s thoughts. She felt bad also because she was about to shatter her serenity.

‘Will told me you tried to contact me several times today.’

As she entered the room, Miriam found her friend stirring the contents of a pot with a spoon.

‘You must excuse me, I’m messy as usual.’ Megan looked up. ‘Oh, but you aren’t alone.’

‘Good evening.’ Adele gave her a shy smile. She seemed uncomfortable to be there.

How funny. Miriam didn’t remember having ever seen such an expression on her face. To tell the truth, during the little time she’d spent with Adele today, she’d sensed there was something different about the woman. As usual, she was very focused on her work, but in that case there wasn’t really much to do, so she’d been amiably chatting with her colleagues and even with the personnel of the theatre. She might have given the idea she was a friendly girl.

‘Yes, she’s Adele Pennington. She works with me.’

Megan’s face darkened and her arm stopped. ‘What’s happening? Is this perhaps an official police visit?’

‘More or less. There’s something I need to talk to you about, and yes, it’s a work thing.’

Will made his way between Miriam and Adele, and reached his fiancée. Attentively, he took the spoon from her hand and turned off the stove. ‘I can handle this, don’t worry. Go talk to them.’

But Megan didn’t seem to be willing to move. ‘Is it perhaps something concerning Graham’s appeal?’ Her jaw clenched. She grabbed the flaps of her little jacket. ‘I’ve already told your colleague yesterday. Three years ago, I made a statement. I have nothing to add. I’m not really able to say with certainty whether the man I saw was him.’ She raised a shoulder. ‘Or anyone else.’

‘What colleague?’ Adele had asked that question, beating Miriam to the punch.

Megan’s eyes snapped to Adele. Her previous friendliness had completely vanished. ‘A detective. He came to the Skinners’ Academy yesterday at the start time for my class, at about five. A man in his fifties.’

‘At five?’ Miriam turned to Adele, looking for help.

Emma Taylor’s corpse had been found in the early afternoon, so at that time only a few people knew about the link with the cases of the Plastic Surgeon. Very likely, the reports on the intervention at Madame Tussauds hadn’t been filled out yet, so nobody, besides those present at the scene, was aware of the details.

Adele made a shake of refusal, as though she’d read her mind.

The only detectives at the scene had been Eric and Bennet, but it didn’t make much sense that one of them had gone to talk with Megan a few hours later. What for? They didn’t even know the cause of death, because the autopsy would be performed the next morning.

‘He told me his name, but it was strange. I can’t remember exactly. It sounded like he was Polish. Something ending with a “ski”.’

Adele’s eyes widened at that last statement.

Miriam resumed looking at Megan. ‘Perhaps … Jankowski?’ She was sure it was the first name that came to mind also to the forensic investigator.

‘Yes, Jankowski, I believe that’s it …’ Megan nodded. ‘Yes, these were his exact words: Detective Chief Inspector Jankowski.’

Why had Jankowski gone to talk to her yesterday? Neither his team nor he had ever worked on that case. What did he care about Graham’s appeal?

Adele walked behind her, and Miriam followed the woman with her gaze. The forensic investigator showed signs of the same impatience she was feeling right now. But they couldn’t talk about it before the couple, nor give the impression there had been something irregular in the behaviour of a team chief at the Forensic Services. Actually, she was sure that Megan hadn’t the slightest idea Jankowski occupied that role.

She faced her friend’s anxious expression again. ‘Anyway, I’m not here about the appeal.’

The other woman’s concern turned into a cautious perplexity. ‘Aren’t you?’

Miriam sighed and gestured at the table. ‘There’s something you need to know, but I think you’d better sit down before I tell you.’