“Deputy heads will roll,” Fiona observed cynically. “Before I tell you what I think, Steve, I need you to answer one question for me. Although obviously I know more or less where the murder took place, I didn’t actually visit the scene of crime, so I wasn’t sure about this. Is there anywhere on the Heath where someone could have watched the murder without being seen by Susan Blanchard’s killer?”
Steve frowned, his eyes focusing on the corner of the ceiling as he recalled the setting for the murder. When he spoke, his voice was slow, considering. “We found the body in a sort of hollow. There was a line of rhododendrons between Susan and the path. Then the clearing where she was found. Beyond that, the ground rose slightly to another line of shrubs. I suppose someone hidden in those bushes could have escaped observation by a killer who was intent on what he was doing. SOCO will have done a fingertip search of the whole area, though, and I don’t recall anything in the forensics to indicate the presence of a third person.”
“You think Blake saw it?” Kit broke in, unable to keep quiet.
“You’re doing a Horsforth,” Steve said. “Theorizing without the data. It could just as easily have been someone else altogether who told Blake about it. Let’s hear what Fiona’s got to say.”
Kit cast his eyes upwards. “I forgot. We have to have the whole lecture. No skipping to the back page to see whodunnit.” He shook his head in tolerant amusement.
“Why change the habit of a lifetime?” Fiona said sweetly. “OK, here’s what I think. Right from the start, we know we’re looking for a confident criminal. We know this because Hampstead Heath is a public place, and the risk of alerting passers-by to such a violent crime in broad daylight is high. Also, the way the body is displayed indicates a man who is, at least in criminal terms, a mature offender. Blake’s record, on the other hand, is trivial and shows little sign of escalation towards this sort of crime. That was the first thing that made me a little uneasy about him as prime suspect.”
“Hang on a minute, though,” Kit objected. “You can’t say that just because he doesn’t have a criminal record he’d not done the sort of crimes that lead to sexual murder. It might be that he’s either been clever enough or lucky enough to get away with it.”
“That’s true,” Fiona acknowledged. “And so I wouldn’t write Blake off on those grounds alone. Nor would I dismiss him on the basis that the pornography the police found in his flat, although sadomasochistic in content, contained no photographs or descriptions that fit the way the body was displayed. But again, that detail gives me pause for thought, because the killer had to form that image somehow. If it didn’t come from his pornography, it came from some incident in his past, around the time he was forming his sexual identity. And none of Steve’s researches came up with anything comparable in Blake’s history. So as far as I’m concerned, that’s another question mark over Blake.”
Steve was leaning forward now, elbows on the table, an intent frown on his face. So far, Fiona had said nothing he didn’t already believe himself. But he always found her cogent way of stringing things together clarified things, sometimes rearranging details so they formed a different picture. He sensed where she was heading, and he wondered if Kit had been right about what was coming.
“Another thing I would expect from this killer is that he’d have poor hetero social skills,” Fiona continued. “But again, that doesn’t fit Blake. He had a girlfriend, but as well as that he was comfortable with contacting strange women through personal ads. We know from some of the women who have come forward that he managed to have sex with them, even if most of them found him too domineering a partner to want to continue the relationship. So here we have a man who is good at making social and sexual connections with women.”
“Better than me,” Steve pointed out. “You’re right, though. That was one of the main reasons I never liked Blake for this job. He wasn’t some frustrated virgin or someone whose head was wired for no beating women up as the best means of achieving sexual satisfaction.”
“I knew all that before I read the entrapment transcripts,” Fiona continued. “As I’m sure you did too, Steve. However, it became clear from reading what passed between Blake and Erin Richards that he knew more about Susan Blanchard’s murder than he could have gleaned from the press reports. He knew, for example, that her hands were arranged as if in prayer, the fingers linked rather than having the fingertips propped against each other. Blake always maintained after his arrest that he’d heard that in the pub, but he couldn’t identify the person he claimed had told him. I’ll come back to that later, though.”
Kit nodded. In spite of himself, he was as fascinated by Fiona’s dissection as Steve. He was sure he’d guessed where she was heading, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t interested in seeing how she justified reaching that conclusion. Even after all this time, he was still intrigued by the way her mind worked, so analytical in contrast to his own intuitive approach. “Consider our breath well and truly hated,” he said.
Refusing to be thrown off her stride, Fiona ignored him and carried on. “What I want to deal with next is the fantasies that Blake outlined in his letters and conversations with DC Richards. Based on my experience, I would expect the killer to have very specific fantasies. I would expect the object of his fantasies to be a teenage girl or a woman in her early twenties, as Susan Blanchard was. They’re easier to manipulate, both in fantasy and reality. In the scenarios he plays out in his head, this killer will objectify women. He’ll fantasize about control, submission, violent activity that causes the object of his attention to show extreme fear. He’ll imagine threatening her with a knife, tying her up, causing her pain, cutting her, making her beg for mercy.” Fiona paused and took a long draught of her wine. “And because he killed her out of doors, I’d expect the setting for those imaginary sexual encounters to be in a park or in woodland.
“But that’s not what we find in Blake’s fantasies at all. Almost everything he outlined to DC Richards involves voyeurism. He talks and writes about a third person watching their sex games, being turned on by them, often joining in. Admittedly, there are some strong elements of submission and domination in there too, but they’re much more in the realm of playfulness rather than the real infliction of pain. But the clincher for me is that in all of the scenarios he outlines for this woman he’s aiming to bed, this woman he’s been taking on walks through the parks of London in each and every scene he describes, where they are going to have sex is indoors. At the undertaker’s where he works, at the office where she works, in a deserted warehouse, in his flat. Not a single one of these elaborately detailed, pornographically described situations is out of doors.
“And finally, there’s the question of the pornography that your officers found in Blake’s flat. It’s true there was a lot of it, both magazines and videos. And it’s true that most of it was what would be classified as hardcore, mostly involving young women or teenage girls. But if the catalogue in the file is accurate, surprisingly little of it focuses on rape or S&M. What there was a lot of was threesomes and voyeurism. Plus a bit of bondage.”
“You’re saying Blake doesn’t match the crime,” Steve said flatly.
“Based on the product of your operation, I think any qualified psychologist with an open mind would come to that conclusion,” Fiona agreed.
“There’s more, though, isn’t there?” Kit chipped in. “You think you know what really happened, don’t you, Fiona?”
Steve paused halfway through spreading pate on a piece of bread. “You do?”
Fiona fiddled with her napkin. “That’s not what I’m saying, Kit. I don’t know who did kill Susan Blanchard. But I’d stake my reputation that Francis Blake didn’t.” She took a deep breath. “However, I believe he saw the man who did. Blake’s a voyeur. That’s why he looks at parks the way he does. He likes to watch. I think this is what happened that morning on Hampstead Heath. He was lurking in the shrubbery hoping he’d see a couple making love. What he actually saw was very different. Francis Blake stood and watched while somebody else raped and murdered Susan Blanchard. And it was the most exciting thing he’d ever seen in his life.”