‘It’s pretty clear that the Northumbrian force isn’t telling you anything, Ms Lock.’
‘Joanna, please.’
‘Joanna, then. The fact is, they’re in possession of a report, based on some forensic work done in our lab, that indicates quite clearly that there was somebody else in Ballester’s cottage at the time of his death.’
‘Who?’
‘That doesn’t matter; as you said, it has nothing to do with your remit. Gregor knows about it. He wouldn’t have signed off on your document if it hadn’t been legally correct. If he hasn’t chosen to share it with you. . that’s between the two of you. Forget all that; I asked if you were familiar with the cases, that’s all.’
‘And I am.’ The assistant fiscal’s tone had become curt.
‘To hell with it.’ McIlhenney sighed. ‘I’ll leave this until Gregor gets back.’
He was in the act of rising when Lock held up a hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Let’s start again.’
The big detective relented; he sank back into his chair. ‘Okay,’ he continued. ‘I asked the question because I’ve just come from a post-mortem on the body of a woman found dead this morning in woodland on the east side of Corstorphine Hill.’ He took a photograph from his pocket and passed it across the desk. ‘That’s how she was found,’ he said. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to see the close-ups. Anything strike you about it?’
Lock’s eyes narrowed as she looked at the print. ‘How long?’ she murmured.
‘Ten to twelve days, the pathologists reckon.’
‘Cause of death?’
‘Single shot to the back of the head from a small-calibre weapon.’
The lawyer leaned back in her absent boss’s chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘Oh, no,’ she moaned. ‘There’s another of them.’
‘It looks that way, doesn’t it?’
Her eyes switched back to the detective. ‘You don’t think so?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes, I do. We’re agreed that Daniel Ballester was responsible for the other four murders. The confession contained in his suicide note on his lap-top was almost certainly faked, or he was forced to write it, but there was so much evidence in and around his house that it had to be him. The real clincher, though, were death photos of all the victims: they were found on the computer too.’
‘What about the man you think killed him? Couldn’t he have planted it all?’
‘No,’ McIlhenney replied firmly. ‘We’ve checked that out. The man who did Ballester, and who set the trap that killed Detective Inspector Steele, couldn’t have committed any of the four murders. When Stacey Gavin died he was in Taiwan, and when the other three were killed he was in Jamaica. We’re pretty much certain of that.’
‘So why did he kill Ballester?’
The detective superintendent smiled. ‘There’s an even better question than that, if you think about it.’
Lock gazed back at him, puzzled, then her forehead creased in concentration. ‘How did he know to kill Ballester? I remember now: your team didn’t identify him until very late in the day. They were looking for him under another name. Are you saying that he was Ballester’s accomplice, and that he did him in to protect himself?’
‘No, I’m not. The guy didn’t have any accomplice. The man who killed him had his own sources of information. His father had dealings with him before; as soon as he saw his image, he knew who he was, and put specialists on to tracing him.’
‘You’re talking about Zrinka’s brother, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, and we can prove it. Forget him: let’s address the things that are troubling me.’
‘What are they?’
‘For a start, the degree of similarity, and the speed with which this copycat’s appeared. It took almost a century for the second Ripper to emerge. Ballester’s last kill was less than three months ago.’
‘They didn’t have electronic media in the eighteen eighties.’
‘No, nor police officers smart enough to keep the details of those murders from the press that did exist at the time. We did, though, or at least we held on to some of them; we released the cause of death, but we didn’t say anything about the calibre of weapon used. Nobody ever described the way the three women were killed, or the way their bodies were laid out. Yet this new murder differs in only one respect, the fact that the body appears to have been concealed.’
‘What do you know about the victim?’
‘Nothing. We haven’t linked her to any missing person yet. We don’t know who she is.’
‘So you don’t know if she’s an artist?’
‘That goes without saying, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so, but if she is that would tie it up, wouldn’t it?’
‘Tie what up? In the Ballester investigation, we started off looking for a serial killer with a down on female artists, and wound up with a disillusioned hack who’d murdered two women with whom he’d had affairs and who’d dumped him, and who’d taken out two other people just because they were in the way. What have we got here? What’s the motive? So far, all I can see is that we might have someone who’s taking the piss!’
‘Or someone who doesn’t know what Ballester’s real motive was, and who thinks he’s carrying on his mission in some bizarre way.’
‘That may well be so,’ McIlhenney conceded. ‘Meanwhile. . and this is the real reason I wanted to see Gregor. . I need something from you. I want you to identify everybody who could possibly have seen your report to the Crown Office. I’m doing the same thing at my end. It may all be a coincidence, but it looks to me as if this second killer might have had access to inside information.’
Eight
‘That list of members looks pretty formidable,’ said Becky Stallings. ‘There must be a few hundred of them.’
‘Yes,’ DS McGurk agreed, ‘but I can shrink it if I cross-reference it against playing records to identify those people who’re known to have been on the course in the period when the woman was killed.’
‘Do that, Jack, but I doubt if it’ll be that simple. Sure, we might get lucky and find an eye-witness who saw the woman and her killer and can give us a description, but still, our first job is just to identify her. So we need to find out from the members, not just those who were on the course that day, whether she used that path regularly, and if she did, whether any of them knew who she was.’
‘That’s assuming she walked it at all. Maybe she was taken there at gun-point.’
‘Across the golf course?’
‘Through the woods: you can get in there from the other side of the hill, off Clermiston Road.’
‘From what I’ve been told, they’re pretty thick. They’re also bounded by the zoo to the north. No, let’s start with the premise that she went there of her own accord.’
‘Regularly.’
‘Why?’
The detective stretched his long body in his chair. ‘As I see it, she either knew her killer, and he was with her, or he followed her. If he did that, my gut tells me that he didn’t pick her at random. He was watching her, he got to know her movements, and he chose his moment. From what we’ve been told, Daniel Ballester was meticulous in his preparation for each kill. He caught his targets off-guard every time, with nobody else around. I’d say we assume that the mark-two version is doing the same.’
‘Then let’s get after him, and let’s be meticulous ourselves. Prioritise if you want, but we need to interview all the members and staff as quickly as we can. Luckily we have telephone numbers for all of them, so we can do it that way. I want a dozen uniforms and a dozen phones, mobiles if necessary; give them each a batch of names and a question template.’
Stallings turned to look at a young officer seated at a desk behind her, a telephone held to his ear. She waited for him to finish. ‘Sauce,’ she said, when he had, ‘how are you getting on with putting together that list of artists?’
‘I’m getting there, ma’am,’ Detective Constable Harold Haddock replied. ‘I’ve contacted seven art galleries so far and built up a list of female painters on their books aged between twenty and thirty-five. So far I have eleven names.’