‘A possibility,’ said Moss, jotting down another thought, ‘but they’ve already had enough of the victims. They’ve been running pictures of Laura Tindall on the catwalk and Benjamin Kemp in his fatigues holding a weapon that, in my opinion, is similar to the one the victims were shot with. People are getting tired of the ex-supermodel and the war hero.’
‘And you say we’re not dealing with a bunch of kids suffering from ADHD?’ said Banks.
Gervaise gave him a warning glance. ‘So, what’s your suggestion, Adrian?’ she asked. ‘I assume you have an alternative in mind?’
‘Yes.’ Moss paused for effect before his pronouncement. ‘It’s Edgeworth’s story now.’
‘What?’ said Banks.
‘You said it yourself. The details of the investigation aren’t very interesting. The manhunt wound down too soon, held no real excitement, and the weather’s been too bad to do much location filming, anyway. You followed a paper trail. It led you to Edgeworth. Simple.’
‘You’re saying we solved the case and stopped a mass murderer too quickly?’ Banks said.
Moss managed a thin smile. ‘If you care to put it that way, yes. You’ve left the table bare, Superintendent. Well, not quite.’
‘Once again,’ said Gervaise, ‘what do you suggest?’
Moss leaned forwards, put both feet firmly on the floor and tossed his pad on the table, where it landed with a loud slap. ‘People are fascinated by what motivates killers like Edgeworth,’ he said. ‘What makes them tick. Look at all the books on mass murderers like Moat and Bird and the rest. Dunblane. Hungerford. Or Columbine and Sandy Hook in the States. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando. And serial killers? For crying out loud. Just pick one. They give them nicknames and make movies about them: the Yorkshire Ripper, Son of Sam, the Moors Murderers, the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, the Green River Killer. I mean, why are we still fascinated with Jack the Ripper after all these years? How many people can remember the names of any of his victims? But how many books have been written about him and these killers? Most of them by journalists.’
‘Mary Kelly,’ said Banks.
‘What?’
‘Mary Kelly. One of the Ripper’s victims.’
‘Oh, I see. Right.’
‘OK, Adrian,’ said Banks, holding up his hand. ‘I take your point. People are interested in the grotesque, in the aberrations, deviations from the norm. That’s why they read Silence of the Lambs and so on. Why Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates are such cultural icons.’
‘Exactly! And they’re interested because, no matter how much has been written, no matter how many of these monsters we’ve studied, no matter how many reports and learned dissertations there have been, we still don’t understand them. There’s still a need, a hunger, for more knowledge about such things, such people. What makes them tick. What went wrong. How they became defective. They can’t be pigeon-holed, filed, put away in a box marked read and understood. They’re still viable. No matter how much we think we know, the bloke next door could still be a serial killer or a mass murderer. That’s the angle to exploit.’
‘But that isn’t our job,’ said Banks. ‘And to be perfectly honest, neither is this. I certainly didn’t sign up to waste my time sitting around coming up with angles for the media to use.’
Banks moved to stand up, but Gervaise waved him down. ‘Hang on a minute, Alan. Hear him out.’
Banks sat reluctantly.
‘Please don’t think for a minute that I’m trying to tell you how to do your job,’ said Moss, ‘or what your job is, but it’s been my experience over the years that the boundaries have changed, and the media expect people like you to do a lot more than keep order and put bad guys away — in fact, half the time they criticise you for doing those very things.’
‘What then?’ asked Gervaise.
Moss leaned back and crossed his legs again. ‘They want to understand, to explain to their readers, listeners, viewers, and they want us to help them to understand. Half the explanations the police come up with for what’s happening in society are unbelievable. Hardly surprising, as they’re cobbled together from lies and bullshit and obfuscated by the appalling use of language. Have you ever tried to read a chief constable’s report? People would like to trust us, but they don’t. They’d like to understand us, but we don’t make ourselves clear. We come on as if we’re always trying to cover something up, keeping our guilty secrets from the general public and failing to face up to things. As if we’re some sort of superior private club. They think we know something they don’t, and that we’re deliberately keeping it from them. And they’re right. They feel excluded. The only thing that dispels that feeling and is likely to bring us any closer together is if we attempt to publicly make sense of things like this. Of people like Martin Edgeworth.’
‘So you’re saying we should be psychologists as well as officers of the law?’ Banks argued.
‘You already are, to a large extent. One could hardly do your job without some understanding of the criminal mind. But there are criminal minds, and then there are people like Martin Edgeworth. He’s not a drug dealer or a mugger or a burglar or a wife-beater. He passed all the psychological and physical tests he needed to acquire his firearms certificate. How many more people like him are out there? That’s what people are interested in. They want to know what makes him different. Is that so difficult to understand?’
‘No, Adrian,’ said Gervaise. ‘Not at all. It’s just that we’ve been rather too busy catching the man to think very much about what set him off.’
‘I know. Believe me, I understand your priorities. But now you’ve got him, one way or another, you can afford to direct your attention elsewhere. We all know that it was a terrible thing he did, but what we want to know now is why he did it. And maybe how we can stop something like that from happening again. You’ve already been using a profiler, Dr Jenny Fuller. I’ve met her. It’s not as if you’ve had zero interest in what sort of person did this.’
‘Not at all,’ said Banks. ‘That kind of profile can be very important. And if things had gone on much longer, and we’d had more information to feed Dr Fuller, then her work might well have been instrumental in leading us to Edgeworth. It just wasn’t the way things worked out this time.’
‘And now?’ asked Moss.
‘You said it yourself. Now we’ve got him.’
‘So it’s all over?’
‘The killing is over, which is the main thing. And the killer himself has saved us the expense of a trial.’
‘And your Dr Fuller? Do you just pat her on the head and send her home? You might not have noticed, but she also happens to be very photogenic. Perhaps a bit long in the tooth, but most presentable for a woman her age. She’ll do well on Newsnight or Panorama. The media will lap her up.’
Banks held back from punching Moss. ‘Don’t be so fucking patronising,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, but I think you know what I mean.’
Banks glanced at Gervaise then turned back to Moss and said, ‘I, for one, am certainly still interested in Edgeworth’s psychology, in who he is and why he did what he did. Just because it’s over on one level doesn’t mean we’re going to stop studying him. All I’m saying is that our main job is over.’ Banks knew that Jenny would continue with her profile, and he was intending to put Annie Cabbot and Gerry Masterson on the other angles of the case. Gerry was good at digging up stories and background, seemed to have a pretty firm grasp of basic human psychology, and she could use the experience. Annie could steer her. ‘We also need to make absolutely certain that Edgeworth was acting alone,’ he added.