He never seemed to be in a hurry, but by the time I'd thought to object to his inspection, it was too late, he'd already done it. I left him to it and carried on scraping more of the sofa stuffing into another bag.
By the time I'd finished he was back in the lounge, staring with a touch of wistfulness out of the window at the quay and the river below.
I straightened up and regarded him bleakly. The Superintendent reminded me of some of the best martial arts experts I'd come across. There was a deadly kind of calm about him. He was the sort who could walk into a pub where there was a full scale brawl going on and practically quieten the room with a half-dozen carefully chosen words.
He had an authority that doesn't just come with rank. And he was perceptive. I got the impression that very little escaped those muddy green eyes. He rattled me, and I was trying hard not to let it show.
I tied the top of the bag with string and chucked it onto the growing pile. He watched me in silence until my patience gave out. He'd probably intended that it should. “So, what's the script?”
“You tell me, Miss Fox,” he said, turning away from the window with reluctance. “You told my inspector that you'd had a threatening phone call last night. What did this man say? I assume it was a man, by the way?”
“I think so,” I told him. “It was difficult to tell, but the speech rhythms were more male.”
He frowned. “Difficult to tell – how?”
“I think he was using a voice changer. They're popular with women who live alone. It makes you sound more masculine, but there's a slight artificial note when you're using it.”
“You sound very well informed.”
I shrugged. “I teach self-defence to women,” I said, adding with remarkable composure, “and I used to have one myself.”
Used to, being the operative way of putting it. I'd spent a couple of fruitless hours searching the flat before he got there, but I'd singularly failed to turn up my voice changer box. I had to admit it – it was gone.
That was a nasty coincidence I didn't really want to believe in, but I didn't have much of a choice. For the moment, however, I pushed it to the back of my mind and tried to make like it wasn't there.
I repeated what my mystery caller had said to me as closely as I could remember. It wasn't difficult. The words were acid-etched into my brain.
When I finished the Superintendent looked pensive. He came and perched on my sofa, rubbing his chin absently. I noticed he was old-fashioned enough to be wearing neat gold cuff-links.
“You do realise, of course,” he said, “that we have reason to believe the incident last night is linked to the serious assault on another young woman a few weeks ago, and a more recent rape and murder?”
My heart over-revved so hard it bumped painfully in my chest. My mouth was suddenly dry. “It's the same man who killed Susie Hollins?” I said faintly. “But she was raped, and so was the other girl. Does that mean – Joy – did he—?”
MacMillan's face was shuttered, giving absolutely nothing away. It wasn't difficult to imagine him sitting quietly behind a table in a darkened interview room somewhere, watching some villain sweat as he twisted on the hook of a confession. People would talk just to fill the silence in him.
I opened my mouth to ask, “If it's the same bloke, how does Terry fit in?”, but then I remembered I wasn't supposed to know about that. There hadn't been much in the press about his death yet. Not enough for me to have a viable reason to believe they were linked, at any rate.
I glanced up and found MacMillan studying me, as though he'd been eavesdropping on my thoughts. Instead of my question about Terry, I swallowed and said, “So, what happens now?”
“Well, we could put a tap your phone and trace all your calls, intercept your mail, and put a watch on the place – if you really want us to go to those lengths, of course,” he said, his voice casual, even as he was studying me with a sudden intensity. “If someone really is threatening you, we can probably get them by one of those means.”
“What d'you mean, if?” I could feel my voice rising, and made an effort to control it. “You mean you don't believe me?”
He cocked his head on one side. “Well, let's look at the facts for a moment shall we, Miss Fox? We've got a rapist and murderer on the loose. A very dangerous man, but at the same time one who's shown himself to be both clever, and careful. So far, he's been selecting his victims apparently at random, probably because he knows how difficult that makes it for us to catch him.”
MacMillan started to pace again, measured steps, light on his feet. “But now,” he continued in an almost silky tone, “now, miraculously, he's made the seemingly ludicrous mistake of telegraphing his next move to us by ringing you up and nicely telling you that you're to be his next target.”
I felt the knife twist in my side. I'd been faced with this kind of suspicion before, and it had damned near finished me.
“Why would I lie?”
“Well now, Miss Fox,” he said quietly, “it wouldn't be the first time you've cried this particular brand of wolf, would it?”
I wanted to speak, but my tongue seemed to have stuck itself to the roof of my mouth.
“I have to ask,” he went on remorselessly, “why you think that claiming people have threatened to kill you would work any better in civilian life than it did four years ago when you were facing being thrown out of the armed forces? What do you hope to gain this time, Miss Fox?” There was something about the stress he put on my surname that alerted me to the dangers of this soft-spoken man. Much more than the actual words.
I met his eyes, and realised with a cold clutch of dread that he knew. He knew everything.
“I suppose I shouldn't really call you Miss Fox at all, should I?” MacMillan said, with the slow inevitability of a steam traction engine. “Seeing as it was only when you moved to Lancaster that you changed your name, wasn't it? To Fox from Foxcroft. Now, why was that, exactly?”
There was no point in prevarication, or lying. “You've obviously done your digging,” I said instead, feeling my face curling up like a salted slug. “Why don't you tell me?”
My words were empty bravado. I didn't need the Superintendent to remind me what had happened.
My case at the court martial had rested mainly on the testimony of another soldier, Kirk Salter. A man I barely knew, but one who'd saved my life.
Kirk had scraped onto the course mainly because of his physical prowess. His head might have been little more than a life support system for a beret, but he could carry a GPMG and two hundred rounds of belted ammunition over an assault course without breaking sweat. And his heart was firmly in the right place.
If he hadn't stumbled on my attackers before they'd put their cover-up plan into action, I'd have ended up as another tragic crime statistic. If my body had ever been found.
Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay.
They'd been fully intending to snap my neck like a winged pheasant and bury me in shallow grave somewhere in the nearest woods. Kirk had stopped them going through with it, and I'd always be grateful to him for that.
Then he'd been pressured – bullied, cajoled – into denying, under oath, that such a plot had ever existed. I reckoned that just about cancelled out the debt.
“Was changing your name your idea, or your parents'?” MacMillan asked now. “It caused quite a scandal at the time, didn't it? First the court martial, then when you tried to pursue the matter in the civil courts.” He looked at me briefly and I thought I saw the pity in his face before he lowered his gaze to concentrate on adjusting his cuff-link. “The tabloids had a high old time of it with you, didn't they, Charlie?”