knew that now more than ever. He was the first man she had ever truly let into her life. He had hurt her, but she realised that she had been hurt so deeply because she loved him so deeply. She held him as though she could bind him to her for ever. Jack Delaney was part of her now and she would never let him go.
Delaney pulled out his phone. 'Dave, it's Delaney. I need to get a couple of units down here. Kate Walker's house has been trashed.'
Ten minutes later, Kate put down the small suitcase that she had packed, and locked her front door. Delaney picked up her suitcase and walked towards her car as she fished in her pocket for her car keys. She was just thinking that at least the Clarice Cliff sugar sifter hadn't been in the house, when a shot rang out in the night air like a sudden crack of thunder. Kate instinctively looked up at the sky then screamed as Delaney rocked on his heels, a surprised look on his face, then stumbled and fell sideways to crumple on to the cold, wet pavement.
Kate rushed over to him, calling his name, begging him to speak. But Delaney was beyond speech; he was beyond comprehension. She tried to shield his body with her own as she fumbled in her pocket for her phone, looking about desperately to see where the shot had come from.
'Stay with me, Jack. Stay with me.'
Her voice was no more than a whisper, but it echoed in her mind like a thunderous prayer. Before her trembling fingers could punch in 999 on her phone keypad, the sound of police sirens from the squad cars that Delaney had asked for came roaring into her street. And she prayed continually as she tried to find a pulse. 'Stay with me, Jack. Please stay with me.'
He rubbed the soft fabric over the gleaming grip of the gun. He had already anointed the wood with beeswax and polished it in with an old yellow duster. He was just giving the final finish with the superior cloth. He rubbed it some more, seeing his reflection looking back at him, distorted in the smooth surface of the wood. His eyes were widened and smiling.
He held the cloth to his nose and sniffed deeply as though it were an oxygen mask. Then he opened it out and lay it on the coffee table, like a trophy. It was a pair of plain, white cotton panties that he had stolen, like the scarf, from Dr Kate Walker's house.
DAY THREE
The rain had stopped sometime in the middle of the night. But the ground wasn't cold enough yet to freeze, and so the paths that ran through Hampstead Heath like veins through a body were slick with wet mud and leaves. Gillian Carter, a twenty-seven-year-old bookshop assistant, picked her way carefully down one of the paths. Not an easy task as the dog she had on the other end of the lead, a Briard, weighed nearly as much as she did and had the energy of a roomful of pre-school children on a diet of Red Bull. A bird clattered out of the trees ahead and the dog leapt after it. Gillian Carter, faced with the choice of losing control of the dog or herself on the slippery downward slope, chose the former and let the lead fly from her hand.
'Jake!' she called after the dog, but he was focused on the bird swirling upwards through the air and soon disappeared deep into the bracken. Gillian stopped to catch her breath and sighed. It wasn't even her dog. She was looking after him for some neighbours whilst they went for a holiday to Tenerife. Lucky buggers, she thought, as she skirted around a particularly large puddle on the path. She didn't envy them Tenerife, just the sun. Gillian would kill for a week of sunshine. She absolutely detested England in the winter, and even though every year she promised herself a trip to sunnier climes, she had yet to deliver on that promise.
'Jake!' she called again as she followed his trail through the bracken, more in hope than expectation, but was pleasantly surprised to see the frisky dog bounding up to her. There was some cloth in his mouth.
She bent down to take it from him and realised that it was a Burberry scarf. Some chav and his girlfriend getting jiggy with it on the heath, she speculated with
