Friend of the Devil

“You know damn well what. The Lucy Payne murder. I’ve got the press so far up my arse I can taste their pencil lead, and absolutely bugger all to tell them. It’s been a week now, and as far as I can see you’ve just been marking time.”

F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

3 0 7

In an odd way, Annie felt relieved that it was about the case and not about Eric. He hadn’t been in touch since Annie had paid him her visit on Friday, and that, she thought, was a good sign. Maybe he’d got the hint, which had been about as subtle as a blow to the head with a blunt object.

This was professional. This she could deal with. “With all due respect, sir,” she said, “we’ve done everything we can to trace this mystery woman, but she seems to have disappeared into thin air. We’ve questioned everyone at Mapston Hall twice—staff and patients alike, wherever possible—but no one there seems able to provide us with any kind of a lead or information whatsoever. No one knew anything about Karen Drew. It’s not as if most of the people there lead active social lives.”

Brough grunted. “Is someone lying?”

“Could be, sir. But all the staff members are accounted for during the time of the murder. If anyone there was involved, it was in passing over the information that Karen Drew was Lucy Payne, and not in committing the actual murder itself. Believe me, sir, we’re working on it.”

“Why is it all taking so long?”

“These things do take a long time, sir. Background checks. Ferret-ing out information.”

“I hear you’ve been going off on a tangent over some old case, gal-livanting off to Leeds and Eastvale to talk to your old boyfriend. I’m not running a dating service here, DI Cabbot. You’d do well to remember that.”

“I resent that implication,” Annie said. She could take only so much from authority, and then her father’s streak of anarchy and re-bellion broke through, and to the devil with the consequences. “And you’ve no right to speak to me like that.”

Brough seemed taken aback by her angry outburst, but it sobered him. He straightened his tie and settled back in his chair. “You don’t know how much pressure I’m under to get a result here,” he said, by way of a lame explanation.

“Then I suggest you do it by encouraging your team and supporting them, rather than by resorting to personal insults. Sir.”

Brough looked like a slapped arse. He f lustered and blathered and 3 0 8

P E T E R R O B I N S O N

then got around to asking Annie exactly where she thought she was going with the Kirsten Farrow angle.

“I don’t know for certain that I’m going anywhere yet,” said Annie,

“but it’s starting to appear very much as if the same killer—whoever it is—has now killed again.”

“That Eastvale detective, yes. Templeton. Bad business.”

“It is, sir. I knew Kev Templeton.” Annie stopped short of saying he was a friend of hers, but she wanted Brough to dig into whatever reserves of police solidarity and sympathy he might have. “And in my opinion he was killed by the same person who killed Lucy Payne.

We don’t have that many murders around here, for a start, the distance isn’t that great, and how many do we have that, according to witnesses, were committed by a mysterious woman using a straight razor, or some such similar sharp blade, to slit the throat of the victim?”

“But Templeton’s not our case, damn it.”

“He is if it’s the same killer, sir. Do you really believe there are two women going around slitting people’s throats—people they believe to be dangerous killers?”

“Put like that it does sound—”

“And do you find it so hard to believe that these might be related to an unsolved case in which a woman also may have killed two men, one of whom was a serial killer and one of whom she may have mistaken for him?”

“May have. You said ‘May have.’ I’ve looked over the files, DI Cabbot. There’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Greg Eastcote was murdered, either by a woman or by anyone else. He could have faked his disappearance because he thought the police were getting too

close. In fact that’s the most logical explanation.”

“He could have,” Annie agreed. “But the police weren’t getting close. And a woman was seen with Jack Grimley and with the Australian boy, Keith McLaren, and she conveniently disappeared, too.”

“But this was eighteen years ago, for God’s sake. You can’t even prove that this Kirsten, or whoever she was, knew that Eastcote had attacked her. It’s absurd.”

“No more than most cases when you don’t have all the pieces, sir.

F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

3 0 9

I’m also trying to locate Kirsten’s psychiatrist. She had a course of hypnosis in Bath in 1988, and it might have helped her recover some of her memory of the attack.”

Brough grunted. Not impressed by the idea of hypnotherapy, Annie guessed. “The MO is completely different,” he went on. “The attacker used a rock on Keith McLaren and some sort of sharp blade on Lucy Payne.”

“MOs can change. And perhaps if she only kills killers, or people she mistakes for them, she hasn’t come across any in the last eighteen years? Perhaps she’s been abroad?”

“It’s all speculation.”