That was met with a glare. “All the courses are oversubscribed,” Cameron said with pride.
“That could be why you haven’t seen me, then.”
“You could go on the waiting list.”
There was a dangerous lack of contact here. Diamond tried not to curl his lip. “The list that interests me is the approved list of offender profilers.”
“Oh?”
“I was told you deal with it. Each request for assistance goes through your office.”
Everyone in the police knew why the list was centrally controlled. After psychological offender profiling burst into the headlines in January 1988 following the conviction of John Duffy, the serial rapist and killer, forces up and down the country had turned to psychologists for help in tracking down serial offenders. Not all of the so-called experts were up to the challenge. A top-level decision had been made to oversee the use of profilers.
Personally, Diamond had never consulted a profiler. This wasn’t from any prejudice, but simply because the cases he’d investigated weren’t serial crimes in the usual sense of the term.
“But I understood from your call,” Cameron said, “that this isn’t a routine request.”
“Right,” Diamond responded. “It’s about the murder of one of the profilers on your list, Dr Emma Tysoe.”
“Which is why I made an exception and agreed to meet you. We’re not unaware of the case.”
“Did you meet her personally?”
“Yes, several times,” Cameron said. “Everyone we approve has been vetted.” He glanced at his notes. “Dr Tysoe has been on the list since February nineteen ninety-nine. She worked on five inquiries.”
“I heard she was good at it.”
“Exceptionally good.”
“Do you mind telling me how it works? When an SIO asks you to recommend someone, do you look at your list and choose a name?”
“It isn’t just a matter of seeing who is available,” Cameron said acidly. “The matching of the profiler to the case is far from simple. All kinds of criteria come into play.”
“Such as where they live?”
Not a good suggestion. Diamond got a basilisk stare from the seeing eye. “That’s of trifling importance. You really ought to do the course.”
This was not a comfortable interview. “You mentioned all kinds of criteria,” Diamond prompted him.
Cameron braced himself with a wriggle of the shoulders and a tilt of the chin and started again. “The term psychological offender profiler is a useful label, but I have to point out that it includes several different types of expert. There are currently twenty-six on my list-twenty-five, now, unfortunately-and if you asked each of them to provide a job description you’d get twenty-five different answers. Some stress the statistical element and others the clinical. There are those who like to be detached about the whole business and those who involve themselves closely with the police team. Those who use strict scientific methodology and those who are more intuitive.”
“How did you class Emma Tysoe?”
“She was one of the latter.”
“Intuitive?”
Cameron sighed and rolled the eye. “I thought you’d jump on that word. It gives the impression of guesswork.”
“I didn’t take it that way.”
A better response, it seemed. A note of conciliation, if not approval, crept into the conversation. “All right. She was a psychologist, as you know, not a psychiatrist, not medically trained. Her approach was more theoretical than hands-on. But it was based on a remarkable understanding of the criminal mind. I’ve heard from officers who worked with her that she somehow immersed herself in the thinking of the offender and predicted what would happen next, and very often where, and when.”
“That’s the intuitive part?”
“Yes, but only as a result of minute observation of all the data from the previous crimes. To give you an example, she assisted on a case of serial rape in North Wales. The attacks were spread over a long period, about six or seven years, and the local force were getting nowhere. Emma Tysoe was brought in, read the statements, visited the scenes, spoke to all of the victims, including several who were stalked but not attacked. By analysing the data-and interpreting the behaviour of the rapist- she decided he had spent most of his youth in custody or institutions and lived with someone of his own sex who dominated him-his elder brother, as it turned out. She said because of the way he picked his victims it was clear he was actually in awe of women. He would spend weeks or months stalking them, but not in a threatening way, and only rarely choosing to attack them.”
“More like a Peeping Tom?”
“Not at all.”
Another wrong note.
“He was on the lookout for certain women who appeared even more submissive than he was. Dr Tysoe produced her findings, estimated the perpetrator’s age, intelligence and the type of work he would do, and it led them to a man they’d disregarded much earlier, a farm worker. Broken home, fostering, youth custody, just as she’d said. On his release he’d ended up living with the bullying brother. He confessed straight away. That’s only one example.”
“So Emma got to be one of your star performers.”
The staring eye told Diamond he still hadn’t clicked with this mandarin. “Please. This isn’t show business. Her name came up more frequently after that. Word travels from one authority to another.”
“Do you, personally, deal with all the requests?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Her latest assignment?”
“That’s confidential, also.”
He couldn’t take much more of this evasion. “I’m investigating a murder, Mr Cameron. I’m entitled to some answers.”
“Correction. Bognor Police are handling the investigation, not you. Chief Inspector Mallin is the SIO.” Cameron was well briefed.
“But the victim lived on my patch. In that sense it’s a joint enquiry.”
“Does she know you’re here?”
“Hen Mallin? She will, if I manage to chip out any information at all.”
“In other words, you’re doing this off your own bat,” Cameron said. “That’s the way you work, I’m told. Bull at a gate.”
Better a bull at a gate than a dog in a manger, Diamond thought, and wisely kept it to himself. Instead, he said with so much tact it was painful, “You obviously have a high regard for Dr Tysoe’s work as a profiler. Why not help us find her murderer?”
“By passing on classified information?”
“Sensitive, is it?”
“We run this service on the need to know principle. Our judgement is that you don’t need to know.”
Great, he thought. More malpractice and corruption is perpetrated under the banner of the need to know principle than in the mafia. “So I’ve come all this way for nothing.”
Cameron didn’t answer. He looked at the ceiling with the air of a bored host waiting for the last guest to leave.
“If Hen Mallin came, would you do business with her?”
“We don’t ‘do business’.”
“Would you tell her any more than you’ve told me?”
“No-for the same reason.”
All this stonewalling had incensed Diamond. He couldn’t pull his punches any longer. “In the real world, Mr Cameron, I’d have you for obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty.”
“I’m sure you’d try, superintendent.”
“She was one of your experts. Don’t you give a toss what happened to her?”
That touched a raw nerve. “Of course we care, damn it! There’s no evidence of a link between her murder and the case she was advising on.”
“The evidence isn’t there because it hasn’t been investigated.”
“The incidents are unrelated.”
“How can you be so sure? She was strangled for no apparent reason.”
“Have you enquired into her personal life?” Cameron asked in an unsubtle shifting of the ground.
“There isn’t much to speak of.”
“Her work, then? The university?”