Hanging Hill

‘Good. Now…’ The superintendent rubbed his hands together, as if he was about to announce an unexpected treat. ‘You can see we’ve got a lot of meat to chew on, a lot of standard routes to walk up, but there’s something else I want you to put into your pipes. We’ve got a visitor today.’

Everyone in the room automatically turned their eyes to the young woman who’d been sitting patiently in the corner throughout the meeting. With long, well-groomed dark hair, she was very neat and quiet, dressed in a white blouse and very tight bottlegreen trousers with high-heeled sandals just peeping out under the hems. Her skin was lightly tanned, her nails polished and well kept. Zoe had noticed a lot of the men looking at her.

‘This is Debbie Harry. Not, I am reliably informed, related to the other Debbie Harry.’

‘Sadly.’ Debbie shook her head ruefully. ‘In my dreams, you know.’

One or two of the men laughed. Goodsy, standing in the back row, whispered in his neighbour’s ear. Zoe could guess what he was saying.

‘Now, you’re from Bristol University, it says here, and you’re a forensic psychiatrist.’

‘Psychologist.’

‘Psychologist, sorry. A bit like Cracker?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Funny.’ The superintendent put a hand up to his mouth and said, in a stage whisper, to the team, ‘Doesn’t look much like Robbie Coltrane to me.’

This time almost everyone laughed. Not Zoe, though. She clearly recalled the superintendent saying over and over again that he’d never, ever, let a ‘fucking head doctor’ within a mile of his incident room. That they were all quacks and poofs and had their heads up their arses. Evidently he’d never met a ‘head doctor’ who looked like this. To see her, you’d think honey would ooze out of her mouth the moment it opened. She got up and came to the front, leaning back on the desk casually, as if this was her own lecture room, half crossing one leg over the other. Just enough to be flirtatious without being totally provocative. Clever girl, Zoe thought. She knew the effect it would have on a roomful of men.

‘Look,’ said Debbie, a bright, open expression on her face. ‘This is going to be a big leap of faith for some of you if I ask you to approach this not from an evidentiary perspective but from a psychoanalytical perspective, to ask you to think in terms of profiling the offender. Probably sounds like voodoo to a lot of you.’ She smiled. ‘But if you’re prepared to make that leap of faith then, I can assure you, I’ll be right alongside you.’

Zoe took a long, patient breath. She’d been here before, heard psychologists talking the talk. Spiels about anger excitation, power reassurance, long analyses of why the bastard had done what he did, what he was thinking when he did it, what his eye colour was, what underpants he wore, what he’d had for breakfast the day he did it. In her experience they weren’t worth much as investigative tools, and sometimes they were positively destructive. Still, some investigators swore by them and she could see from the glowy light in the superintendent’s eyes that he was a new convert. Amazing what a nice pair of legs and a smile could do.

‘First,’ Debbie said clearly, ‘I suppose the question that’s in the front of everyone’s minds, the biggest one, is, what’s the writing all about?’ She turned her eyes to the whiteboard where the blown-up photos of Lorne’s abdomen had been pinned. Next to them, in a round, cursive hand, the words had been written out.

No one.

‘I wonder,’ Debbie said ruminatively, ‘I wonder – is that a message to us? Could be. Or to Lorne? Or a statement to the killer himself? Let’s think carefully about that wording: “no one”. Does that mean Lorne is no one to him? A nothing? Worthless? Or is it something else? Does it mean that he’s a no one? That no one cares. No one understands me. I’m inclined to think it’s something like that – which would mean we have someone here with very low self-esteem. He could be the type to form unnaturally intense relationships with people – the type to become jealous or aggrieved easily. Now that he’s killed Lorne he could enter a period of self-recrimination. There may be a suicide attempt. There may already have been a suicide attempt, so I’d suggest that would be something you could check on – suicides and admissions since the time of her death.’ Debbie turned back to the board. She was enjoying this. Like a reception teacher with a class full of bright-faced children gazing up at her raptly. ‘Let’s move on to the next sentence. He’s written something on her thigh that looks like “all like her”. Any ideas on that?’ She scratched her head, a subtle suggestion to the team that they were thinking with her, that she wasn’t just cramming her theories down their throats. ‘Any thoughts?’

The men shrugged, waiting for her to provide the answer.

‘OK.’ She linked her hands round her knees and tipped her head shyly. ‘Let me be a bit bold. Let me take you by the hand and lead you out on a limb. Let me say that, in my opinion, Lorne knew her killer.’

There was a ripple of attention. People murmuring among themselves. Zoe glanced at Ben to see his reaction. His head was lowered and he was busily scribbling notes to himself on his customary yellow legal pad, probably to stop himself laughing out loud, she thought.

Debbie held up her hand to quieten the muttering. ‘I know – a leap of faith, but let me just work with it for a moment. What do we know about Lorne?’

‘That she was popular,’ said the intelligence cell sergeant. ‘Had lots of friends, lots of male admirers. So that sentence could be “they all like her”.’

‘Exactly,’ Debbie said triumphantly, beaming at him. ‘Exactly. This is a direct comment about Lorne. And, in case you think I’m grasping at straws to support a flimsy theory, let me say something else. I’ve analysed Lorne’s tragic injuries, and those just confirm my conclusions about who attacked her that night. He definitely approached her from the front. The pathologist said it was a single blow that incapacitated her, and caused the bleeding to the nose. There are no signs she tried to run – no screams heard. Her attacker had got really close to her, really close, and she’d allowed it. Now, would she have done that if she didn’t know him? No, is the answer. She wouldn’t. In fact…’ she did a little mime of a tightrope walker – arms out, trying to keep her balance ‘… now I’m out on my limb – whoa! – I may as well go all the way and say I wouldn’t rule out that the offender may have had, or at least believed he was having, a relationship with Lorne. I also think he could be quite near Lorne’s age. Maybe a year or two older – and probably the same ethnic and socio-political background. Could even be a member of her peer group.’

The superintendent held up his hand. ‘A question.’

Oh, please, Zoe thought, ask her why she’s talking such crap. Go on, ask her.

‘You say he’s about her age?’

‘Within a year or so, yes.’

‘And what makes you think he’s known to her?’

‘She had a blow to the face. That’s a classic sign. Depersonalization, we call it. But before I go any further…’ Debbie gave them a million-dollar smile, with the expensive dentistry on show ‘… I’m going to come back off my limb. See? I’m nice and safe in the tree now, and I want to make one thing very, very clear. OK?’

‘OK,’ one or two voices said.

‘I want it clear that my thoughts are only for guidance. Only for guidance and only my opinion. You’re all adults, and I don’t want to be patronizing, but you should always keep an open mind. Please.’ She sighed as if this was the one drawback in her job – the way everyone took her word as gospel. ‘I reiterate: you must keep an open mind.’

‘Christ Christ Christ.’ After the meeting Zoe swung into Ben’s office without knocking. She was the only one in the building allowed to do that. She dropped into a chair and folded her arms, her legs pushed out, heels dug into the carpet. ‘Can you fucking believe it? The superintendent is being led by his dick. Known to her killer? The same age? All this from her injuries? “This blow to her face is a classic sign of depersonalization”? I mean, shit, Ben, it’s the same injury you see in about eighty per cent of the muggings we go to and most of those victims had never met their attacker before. Don’t you remember those photos of depersonalization they showed us on that course – that was de-bloody-personalization. Eyeballs out. Things carved into the forehead. Noses cut off. Twenty-seven wounds to the face. But Debbie “not the Debbie” Harry is saying a single blow to the…’ She trailed off. Ben wasn’t shaking his head ruefully, regretting the appalling situation. Instead he was sitting in silence. Watching her without expression.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What’s that look for? You don’t agree with her, do you?’

‘Of course not – she treated us like two-year-olds.’

‘But?’

‘What she said about the wording wasn’t totally off piste. Some of it kind of had merit.’