TWELVE
The arrival of their room-service dinners forced both Fiona and Kit to surface from the salve of work. She had been entering data into her laptop and had started running various combinations through the geographic profiling software, but so mechanical a task left too much of her mind free to rerun her own memories. Trying to drown the voices in her head with alcohol was tempting. But Fiona had watched her father turn to drink, an accelerant that had plunged him into paranoid nightmares that had destroyed his life as surely as her murderer had destroyed Lesley’s. If acute liver failure had not killed him four years earlier, she suspected he’d have taken his own life sooner rather than later. So the whisky bottle was, for her, no choice.
But burying herself in work wasn’t doing the trick either. Sitting down with Kit to eat forced her to realize that Lesley’s ghost hadn’t stopped tormenting her since Kit had mentioned her name earlier. And by the looks of him, Kit was equally lost in his own thoughts. They ate their baked fish in virtual silence, neither knowing how to broach the subject that was uppermost in their minds.
Fiona finished first, pushing the remains of her meal to one side of the plate. She took a deep breath. “I think I might be better able to settle if I could find out more about what happened to Drew. Not because I think I can help in any practical way, but…” She sighed. “I know that what always helps me is information.”
Kit looked up briefly from his plate, seeing the pain of memory in Fiona’s face. He knew that in the aftermath of her sister’s murder what had woken Fiona screaming from her sleep night after night was ignorance. She needed to know every detail of what had happened to Lesley. Against the wishes of her mother, who was adamant in her desire to possess as little information as possible about her younger daughter’s fate, Fiona had pursued all the avenues she could think of to absorb every fact relating to her sister’s terrible ordeal. She had made friends of the local reporters, she had exerted every ounce of her charm to persuade the detectives to share their information with her. And gradually, as she pieced together Lesley’s last hours, the nightmares had receded. Over the years, as she had learned more about the behaviour patterns of serial rapists and killers, that picture had become even clearer, giving texture and shape to her understanding, filling in the outlines of the transaction between Lesley and her killer.
While part of him felt this was an unhealthy obsession, Kit had to admit that knowledge did seem to have provided some sort of balm for Fiona. And as far as he was concerned, that was what mattered. Even though she couldn’t adequately explain why it helped her to have so detailed a reconstruction in her head, neither of them could deny its force. And Kit had also come to realize that as it was with her personal relationship to murder, so it was with her professional one. The more she knew, the more secure she felt. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps the best way to make sure her sleep wasn’t riven with nightmares about Lesley was to garner what she could about what had happened to Drew Shand. And it might just help him too.
“What were you thinking about doing?” he asked.
“See what they’re saying on the Net,” she said. “How do you feel about that?”
He shrugged then topped up his glass. “It can’t be worse than the movies my imagination is running for me.”
Kit gathered the dirty plates and put the trays outside the door while Fiona logged on to the Internet and connected to her favourite meta search engine, which combed the vast virtuality of the worldwide web at her command. “Where can I find Drew Shand?” she typed. Within seconds, she had the answer at her fingertips. Shand had had his own website, as well as a couple of fan sites dedicated to his work.
“We might as well try the fan sites first,” Kit said. “I don’t think Drew’s going to be updating his own site any time now.”
The first page Fiona clicked on had a black border round the publisher’s jacket photograph of the dead novelist. Beneath it were the dates of his birth and death and the atmospheric opening paragraph of Copycat. The haar moves up from the steel-grey waters of the Firth of Forth, a solid wall of mist the colour of cumulus. It swallows the bright lights of the city’s newest playground, the designer hotels and the smart restaurants. It becomes one with the spectres of the sailors from the docks who used to blow their pay on eighty-shilling ale and whores with faces as hard as their clients’ hands. It climbs the hill to the New Town, where the geometric grid of Georgian elegance slices it into blocks before it slides down into the ditch of Princes Street Gardens. The few late revellers staggering home quicken their steps to escape its clammy grip.
Fiona shivered. “It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?” Kit observed. “Bloody great opening paragraph. The kid really had something special. Did you read Copycat?”
“It was one of the pile you gave me for Christmas.”
“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten.”
Fiona grinned. “There were so many.” Ever since they’d first been together, Kit had given Fiona his personal pick of the year’s crime fiction for Christmas. It was a genre she’d scarcely ever read before they’d become lovers. Now, she enjoyed keeping up with her partner’s competition, as long as it was a guided trip and not a random harvest of the crime section of the book shops.
Scrolling down, Fiona ignored the hagiography and focused on any details of the crime. Nothing they didn’t already know. The second fan site had little more to offer, except a rumour that Shand had frequented a pub in Edinburgh where gay sadomasochistic group sex allegedly took place in an upstairs room. “See what I mean?” Kit said angrily. “It’s starting already. The deserving-victim syndrome. You can see it now. He was murdered because he asked for it. He enjoyed the kind of sex that could turn nasty, and it killed him.”
“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” said Fiona. “Unless they pick someone up quickly and it turns out to be nothing to do with the gay scene.”
“Yeah, right. If AIDS doesn’t get you, the bogeyman will.”
Fiona called up the menu of her favourite sites on the web and ran her cursor down the list. Kit leaned into her, reading over her shoulder.
“I wonder how many people’s favourite places list includes the RCMP, the FBI, various serial killer sites and a forensic pathology discussion group?” Kit asked.
“More than is healthy, I suspect,” Fiona muttered. Towards the bottom of the list was a site that she knew infuriated most of the law enforcement officers she knew. Officially, Murder Behind the Headlines was run jointly by a journalist in Detroit, a private eye in Vancouver who was reported to have had a murky past in the CIA, and a postgraduate in criminology in Liverpool. Given the depth of detail they managed to come up with on sensational murder cases, Fiona suspected there were a few serious hackers involved in putting together the site. Not to mention a very large base of anonymous contributors who enjoyed the prospect of sharing whatever privileged information or hearsay they encountered. Several attempts had been made to close them down on the basis that they were making public information that allowed scope both for copycat killings and for false confessions, but somehow they always seemed to resurface with ever more sophisticated graphics and gossip. Fiona sincerely hoped that the more faint-hearted relatives of the victims never logged on to Murder Behind the Headlines.