He sighed. ‘Almost as soon as the fan started dispersing the shit, we pulled out all the stops. . and came up blank. Stacey was a genuinely nice girl, and if she had an enemy in the world, we couldn’t find him, at that point at any rate. No blame was attached to Stevie Steele, who led the team; once all the available lines of enquiry were exhausted, he had nowhere else to go. He did a reconstruction, even got it on Crimewatch, but there was no arrest, not even a viable suspect.’ He glanced at McIlhenney. ‘Does that sum it up accurately, Neil?’
The superintendent nodded. ‘Yes. Stevie reported to me. He didn’t miss anything; former boyfriends, family members, life-sentence prisoners out on licence, he checked them all out. And then. .’
‘A couple of months later,’ McGuire continued, ‘a second body, another young woman, was found on a beach near Gullane, killed and laid out in exactly the same way as Stacey had been. There was nothing on her to tell us who she was. . nor was there on Stacey, by the way. By sheer chance, the driver of the vehicle that came to collect the body had been at school with her.
‘It took some time, some forensic evidence and a bus driver with a good memory to help us identify the second victim as Zrinka Boras, another artist, the daughter of the businessman Davor Boras, address, a flat just off Princes Street. We found the tent that she’d camped in the night before she was killed, and a short while later we also found the body of her boyfriend, a poor lad called Harry Paul. There was nothing neat about his death. He was killed and his body stuffed away in the bushes for the foxes to get at.’
‘Was there any sign of a struggle this time, near the woman’s body?’ Stallings asked.
‘None at all. We decided, in the absence of any evidence, that she had left young Harry asleep and gone for a walk, or maybe to wash herself in the sea. . they’d had sex. The killer tracked her and shot her. Maybe he killed Harry first, or maybe he went back and did it.’
‘Probably the latter,’ McIlhenney interjected. ‘It must have taken him some time to dispose of the lad’s body.’
‘True,’ McGuire conceded. ‘Anyway, this time, we had something to go on. Zrinka’s mother told us about an ex of hers, a man named Dominic Padstow. They’d had a thing until she’d dumped him. Straight away, this opened a lot of doors for us. We took the name to the Gavins and discovered that Padstow and Stacey had also had a relationship, post-Zrinka, serious enough for her to have painted him in the nude. We also found out that Zrinka and Stacey knew each other.’
Stallings frowned. ‘The parents didn’t mention this?’
‘No. Doreen Gavin was deeply shocked by her kid’s death, plus she’s a bit unworldly at the best of times. As for her husband, it turned out that he’d been giving Zrinka one on the side, so he wasn’t for volunteering much. To be fair, though, he might not even have known about Padstow. Whatever, our information on Zrinka led us to a third woman, a hairdresser called Amy Noone. She’d met Padstow, and couldn’t stand him; she told us that Zrinka and Stacey fell out over him, and that eventually Stacey binned him too. We started looking for Padstow, and when we did, we discovered that he didn’t exist; the name was a phoney.’
The head of CID sighed again, even more heavily. ‘I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Neil was on leave, and Stevie was reporting to me. Amy was a key witness, the only person who could place him with both women. I should have given her protection, straight away, but I didn’t, and she was killed too, shot dead in her flat and laid out in the same way as Stacey and Zrinka. The only difference was that she was naked.’
‘Had she been sexually assaulted?’
‘No. He wasn’t into that, it seems.’ McGuire paused. ‘But this is more or less where you came into the story, Becky. We identified Padstow as a fairly seedy investigative journalist called Daniel Ballester, out to dig the dirt on the dealings of Davor Boras. . and there was dirt in plenty. Then you and Stevie Steele traced him to a cottage in Wooler, in what’s now called Northumbria, and Stevie went up there, alone. When he looked through a window, he saw Ballester, hanged by the neck from a light fitting. He charged in there, but the door was booby-trapped: end of Stevie.’
‘Only it wasn’t Ballester who rigged the door, was it?’ McIlhenney growled grimly. ‘The Borases knew where he was too, before we did, thanks to a very iffy security firm that Davor had on his payroll. Dražen went up there; he beat Stevie to it. He killed Ballester, made it look like a suicide, right down to a goodbye note on his computer confessing to the four murders, then he rigged the door, not to get Stevie but to eliminate the security guys his dad had sent up there: the only people who could put the two of them in the frame. It was meant to look like a last vicious killing by Ballester, one that could never be pinned on them.’
‘Or so they thought,’ said McGuire, ‘until Bob Skinner got involved, and found a witness, and some DNA evidence that nailed Dražen fair and square. It did hand us Ballester as our multiple murderer, though. We found all the evidence we needed hidden around the cottage: the gun, personal effects from all three women, including a couple of Zrinka’s paintings that had vanished from the scene of her death. It all went to prove that Daniel Ballester committed all four murders; we reported our findings, the case was written up by the procurator fiscal, and signed off, closed.’
Becky Stallings looked at him. ‘And now?’ she murmured.
‘And now we’ve got a body in that wood, not as fresh as the others, but laid out in more or less the same way. Neil and I have going on for forty years’ police service between us; I know he’s as worried as I am that the pathologist is going to find a bullet in the back of that woman’s head.’
McIlhenney nodded, firmly, in agreement.
The inspector took a breath. ‘You’re saying we’ve got a copycat killer on our hands.’
‘That I am, Becky; that I am.’
Four
Maggie Rose Steele passed her daughter to her sister, and stood up from the sofa. ‘I need to stretch,’ she said, as she stood the baby’s empty feeding bottle on the coffee-table. ‘In fact, I need to exercise. My abdominal muscles are still weak from the surgery.’
‘Margaret,’ Bet reminded her unnecessarily, ‘you’re having chemotherapy; you’re supposed to be taking it easy.’
Maggie raised her right hand and touched her head. Much of her hair had gone; that which was left felt rough under her fingers. ‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘You don’t have to lecture me. The drugs are holding me back anyway: I’m truly knackered.’ She looked across the room, catching her reflection in a mirror. ‘One thing I am going to do, though; I’m going to take the hospital up on its offer of a wig. My treatment nurse gave me a form today, and told me where to go for a fitting. Tomorrow morning I’m going to look out Stevie’s grooming set and crop this lot right down with the clippers, then I’m off to the hair studio.’
Bet smiled. ‘What colour do you fancy?’
Her sister made a face. ‘I’ve always had a secret notion that I’d have liked to be a blonde, like you.’
‘You know I fake it.’
‘And a wig is real? Hell, I’ll see what they’ve got. I don’t imagine they’ll have a colour chart.’ She moved back to the sofa and sat down again.