The Dead Place

For now, Hitchens was the man who had to make that judgement. He’d want firm evidence of a serious crime before he pressed the alarm button. A vague message from a disturbed individual wasn’t adequate justification – not enough to look good on paper when the DI’s handling of the case was reviewed. But add a scream in the night, a dropped mobile phone and a missing woman, and the equation became much more difficult. All Fry could hope for was that it added up on the right side for Sandra Birley.

6 (#uce2fb08c-cad3-5e36-9d8f-5a4ca0280486)

Dr Rosa Kane wasn’t what Fry had expected at all. New experts with fresh ideas were fine, but they weren’t supposed to be young and attractive, with Irish accents and the shade of red hair that DI Hitchens had a weakness for. These were factors that distracted Fry from the start, and somehow interfered with her ability to listen to what Dr Kane was saying with serious attention.

‘We can make some tentative deductions from the language he uses, of course,’ said Dr Kane, some time after the introductions had been made and the content of the calls summarized.

‘Can we?’ said Fry.

Then she realized immediately that her surprised tone might give away the fact that it was the first comment from the psychologist she’d really heard.

‘For a more detailed analysis, you’ll need the services of a forensic linguist. But some of it is fairly obvious. If you’d like my opinion, that is …?’

‘Please go ahead, Doctor,’ said Hitchens, smiling as he saw an opportunity to save on the expense of another expert.

‘Well, for a start, there’s his tendency to make grammatical switches from first person singular to first person plural, and then to third person. That’s very interesting. When he says “I”, “me” and “my”, he’s almost certainly telling the truth. But when he switches to the plural or third person, or to a passive form, that’s when he’s concealing something. It’s an unconscious sign of evasion.’

Intrigued now, Fry hunched over the transcript. She ran a yellow highlighter pen through some of the phrases. Perhaps I’ll wait, and enjoy the anticipation … I can smell it right now, can’t you? … Ipromise … My kind of killing … And then there was a change halfway through a sentence: as a neckslithers in my fingers …

There were a few more sentences with ‘me’ and ‘my’. But then the entire final section was couched in the first person plural, as if to draw his listeners into a conspiracy. The question isn’t whether we kill, but how we do it. That section contained all the stuff about Freud and Thanatos, too. No ‘I’ in it anywhere. ‘I see what you mean,’ Fry said, reluctantly.

She pushed the highlighted transcript across to the DI, who smiled. A cheap result.

‘As for the second message, some of the phrases don’t fit at all,’ said Dr Kane.

Fry was taken aback. In a speech written by someone so disturbed, it hadn’t occurred to her there might be some phrases that didn’t fit. Because none of it fit, did it? Not with anything rational.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Hitchens. He pulled his reading glasses out of his pocket and looked at the transcript with an intelligent smile. ‘Which phrases were you thinking of in particular, Doctor?’

‘“A cemetery six miles wide”, for example. What does that have to do with anything? It’s too specific.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. “Here I am at its centre.” Also “the signs at the gibbet and the rock”. The most significant thing about these phrases is that all three of them occur in the second message, the one which is obviously scripted. In my opinion, he was making sure that he included those phrases. They were important, for some reason.’

‘“Six miles wide”,’ said Hitchens. ‘Do you think …?’

‘They’re clues,’ said Fry suddenly. ‘He’s left us some clues to a location. It’s a location within a six-mile radius of … Well, of what?’

‘His own position?’ said Dr Kane. ‘The place where he was making the call from?’

‘Of course. “Here I am at its centre.”’

She took off her glasses, and Hitchens did the same.

‘That would suggest he knew in advance where he was going to make the call,’ said the DI.

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Well, it isn’t the scenario we had in mind. We think he had the speech prepared, but not the location.’

‘It could be that he simply inserted an appropriate figure according to where he eventually made the call,’ said Dr Kane. ‘A six-mile radius? He might have driven around a specific area until he found somewhere suitable that he knew was within that range.’

Hitchens looked worried. ‘Damn it, he might just have been guessing at the three miles, in that case. How many people know even the approximate distance from one spot to another across the countryside? I don’t suppose he’s using GPS.’

‘And that’s only if he meant the distance as the crow flies, rather than the distance by road, which people might be more familiar with.’

Fry saw from the DI’s expression that he was starting to lose faith in his expert. Dr Kane seemed to be setting up more obstacles than she was helping to overcome. But experts loved to make things look more complex than they really were, didn’t they? It helped to justify their fees.

‘So what about the dead place?’ said Fry. ‘And the gibbet? The flesh eater?’

But the psychologist had begun to gather her papers together. ‘That’s your job, I believe. You have an individual here who’s trying to draw attention to himself, perhaps because he knows subconsciously that he needs help. Right now, he’s doing his best to assist you. His clues are a little obscure and ambiguous, certainly. That’s because he has to appear to be demonstrating his superior intelligence. But if you listen properly to what he’s telling you, I’m sure it will help you far more than I can at this stage.’

Dr Kane stood up ready to leave, then paused. She was looking at Fry, not at Hitchens, when she delivered her parting advice.

‘It’s generally true,’ she said, ‘that you can learn a lot by listening to what other people have to say.’

The regional manager for PNL Parking was called Hicks. Cooper found him in a cramped office on the street level with an attendant in a yellow fluorescent jacket.

‘We’re bound by all the rules, you know,’ said Hicks. ‘We have to register the CCTV system and make sure we’re compliant with the Data Protection Act.’

‘No one is suggesting you’ve broken any rules,’ said Ben Cooper for the third time.

But Hicks barely blinked. ‘Apart from anything else, footage won’t be accepted as evidence in court if we don’t comply with the rules,’ he said. ‘And registering the system means we have to deal with requests from people for copies of film.’

‘Do you get many requests?’

‘Some. A lot of them are too vague, though. They have to give us an idea of what time they might have been filmed, where they were and what they look like.’ He shrugged. ‘Most of them give up when they’re asked for details. They’re just fishing. And then there are some where we have to admit we didn’t film them at all, because the camera they saw was a dummy. Well, we don’t say dummy. We just say the camera wasn’t functioning at the time.’

‘And the camera on Level 8 would be one of those dummies?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes.’

‘Has it always been non-functioning?’

‘For as long as I can recall.’ Hicks hesitated. ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure it was installed like that. It’s a bit ridiculous really, but at the time it was considered more economical. Cameras were supposed to be a deterrent, as much as anything else.’

‘I’d like to see any requests you have on file for copies of film from the camera on Level 8.’

‘As I said, we don’t give out copies of film from that camera, because it’s non-functioning.’

‘Exactly,’ said Cooper. ‘You know that, and I know that. And anyone who’s ever requested film from it must know that, too.’

Hitchens got up to escort Dr Kane out of the building, leaving Diane Fry on her own. She watched them walking away down the corridor, the DI’s hand lightly touching the doctor’s elbow as he chatted to her about his student days in Sheffield.

Fry knew that seeing visitors off the premises would normally be a job the DI delegated to somebody more junior. But for Dr Kane, Hitchens was making an exception. Probably because she was an expert and had to be treated with respect. Probably.

To prevent herself from thinking about it any more, Fry lowered her gaze and found herself staring at the yellow highlighter marks on the transcript in front of her. She wished she hadn’t used yellow. Now that the colour had dried, it looked faintly rancid and unhealthy, like a four-day-old bruise or a urine stain. Pink or orange would have been much more cheerful.