‘What do you mean, he wasn’t your dad?’ Ambrose demanded as they drove off.
‘I never knew him. I didn’t even know his name till he died and left me the house.’
Ambrose gave a long whistle. ‘That’d fuck with your head.’
Especially if your head was already fucked up to start with. ‘You could say that.’
‘So this job must have felt like you were getting a message from beyond the grave to come and check out his ground, right?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. More that it was a chance I couldn’t ignore. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I just didn’t expect the house to have such an effect on me.’ I thought it would be alien, distant, untouchable. Instead, it had felt like a homecoming, which was a reaction too uncomfortable for Tony to want to revisit right now.
‘All the same, the DI’s not going to be thrilled when he hears about this. He already thinks you’re on the wrong side of normal.’
‘A perceptive man, your DI Patterson. However, he might be a bit happier when you tell him that I do have some suggestions about your killer.’
Ambrose took his eyes off the road and gave him a quick appraising glance. ‘Terrific. How do you normally go about this?’
Tony smiled with relief. The fact that Ambrose was interested in the process of profiling suggested that he’d decided to forgive him. And given that there was nothing more fascinating to Tony than what he did professionally and how he did it, there was plenty of scope for satisfying Ambrose’s curiosity. He was off and running. ‘There’s two parts to it, I suppose. The first part is a sort of reverse logic - instead of reasoning from cause to effect, I go the other way. I start with the victim. Getting a picture of who they are and what it is in their life that might make them attractive to a predator. Then I look at what’s been taken from them. Their lives, obviously. But also the other aspects. Their individuality. Their gender. Their power. That sort of thing. And finally, I look at what’s been done to them. The actuality of what the killer has done and the order he’s done it in. And when I’ve absorbed all that, I start going backwards. I ask myself questions. If I’m the killer, what’s in it for me? What do these actions mean to me? What am I getting from this? Why does it matter to me that I do these things in this particular order? Then I go further back. What is it that happened to me in the past that makes this meaningful? And by that stage, I’m hopefully well on the way to figuring out what’s going on in the killer’s head.’ His hands were making patterns in the air, a physical representation of the twists and turns going on inside his head.
‘And then I look at the probabilities. What sort of life is possible for a person with this sort of history? What impact has their damage had on their life? What kind of relationships are possible for them?’ He spread his hands and shrugged. ‘It’s not an exact science, obviously. And every case throws up different questions.’
Ambrose sighed. ‘Fascinating. But that wasn’t actually what I meant. What I was asking was how you present your profile. On paper or in person?’
‘Oh.’ Tony knew Ambrose’s response should have knocked the wind from his sails but he was unabashed. One thing he didn’t envy the normal world was what he saw as a depressing lack of curiosity. As far as he was concerned, Ambrose should have been pleased to be on the receiving end of his explanation. But if all he wanted was the prosaic, Tony could provide that too. ‘Usually I write it up on the laptop then fire it over to the SIO. If they want clarification, I’ll go through any points they’re not clear on. But I’m not quite ready to profile. I’ve not got enough of a sense of Jennifer yet. I really want to talk to the best friend, Claire thingie.’
‘Darsie. Claire Darsie.’
‘Yes, of course, sorry.’
‘That’s where we’re headed now,’ Ambrose said. ‘I cleared it with the school for her to get out of class to talk to you. You can take a walk through the school grounds, or find a quiet corner to sit down in.’
‘Perfect. Thanks.’
‘So, what can you tell me now? About what you think?’
‘Not much. Because at this point, I’m not thinking very much that’s concrete.’ There was one thing that he had to drive home, though, and it was so counter-intuitive, Tony knew he’d have to lay the ground for it. ‘I mean, I’m thinking this is not as straightforward as we first thought, and I’m wondering if that’s deliberate or incidental.’
‘What do you mean?’
Tony pulled a face. ‘I’m not convinced this is a sexual homicide. ‘
‘Not sexual?’ Ambrose was incredulous. ‘He virtually raped her with that knife. How can that not be sexual?’
‘See, this is what I mean. I’m not ready to do a full profile yet so I’ve not got all my ducks in a row. But humour me for a moment. For the sake of argument, let’s say this isn’t about sexual gratification.’ He looked expectantly at Ambrose, who sighed again.
‘OK. It’s not about sexual gratification. For the sake of argument. ‘
‘But he cut her vagina, really drove that knife deep into her. Like you said, he made it look like she’d been raped with the knife. What I need to work out is whether he did that deliberately to make us think it was sexual. Or whether he did it for another reason and the fact that it looks sexual is just by the by.’
‘That’s crazy,’ Ambrose said.
He wasn’t the first cop who’d had that response to some of Tony’s wilder ideas. Not all of them had been wrong, but they were in the overwhelming majority. ‘Possibly,’ Tony said. ‘But like I said, I don’t know enough yet for a full profile, and theories based on half the information are more likely to be half-baked. However, when you get away from the unscientific stuff that I specialise in and turn to the hard science options, you can get a lot further with not much to go on.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Algorithms. I spoke to a colleague who’s more familiar with the geographic profiling process than I am. It’s her view that your killer probably lives in South Manchester.’
‘Manchester? You serious?’
‘My colleague is. And she knows this stuff better than anyone. If you remember, when we were at the dump scene I said I thought the location made most sense if the killer wasn’t from round here? Well, it looks like I was right on that at least. Well, if we believe Fiona, I was.’
‘Manchester, though? She can be that accurate?’
‘She’s cautiously confident. She’s sending me a map with the red zone marked on it. It’s the part of town that thinks it’s hip. Students, green politics, vegan grocery store, artisan bakery, media types and lawyers. Very cool. Not the natural stomping ground for a stalker killer, I’d have said. But the algorithms don’t lie. Although because a trail of computer use has different criteria from a series of crimes, they maybe don’t tell quite as accurate a story as usual.’
‘I didn’t know serial killers had a particular habitat,’ Ambrose said.
Tony pondered for a moment. ‘They tend towards rented accommodation. Mostly because they’re not very good at holding down jobs long-term. So their employment history isn’t helpful when it comes to getting a mortgage. So yes, the balance of probabilities is that he lived in rented accommodation. ‘
‘That makes sense.’
Time to turn back to the one thing he knew was important. ‘And so does what I said before, Alvin. I know you said it was crazy, but the more I think about it, the more I believe that really, truly, you need to listen to me on this one. And not just for the sake of argument. This is not a sexual homicide.’
Again, Ambrose took his eyes off the road to look at Tony. This time the car jittered in a slight swerve before he righted it. ‘It still sounds crazy to me.’ He sounded completely incredulous. ‘How could it not be a sexual homicide? Did you not look at the crime-scene photos? Did you not see what he did to her?’