cornered him.
‘Even though I didn’t say that, I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m wrong,’ he said.
Fry didn’t smile. She didn’t smile often enough at the best of times. But this afternoon she looked as though she just didn’t have the energy.
‘One of our people had the idea of obtaining a twenty centimetre slicing knife out of the Henckels Professional S range from one of the stores in town. That didn’t match the victim’s wounds either. It almost matched, but not quite. Not enough to satisfy our meticulous pathologist.’
‘So what’s the conclusion? Unknown weapon?’
‘Somebody was sent to see Dawn Cottrill,’ said Fry. ‘And they asked her to rack her brains about her sister’s kitchen equipment.’
Cooper was starting to feel sorry for Mrs Cottrill. She was an intelligent, and no doubt imaginative, woman. Though the officers who’d spoken to her would have been discreet, she
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could certainly have worked out for herself what they were doing with all the knives.
‘Poor woman,’ he said.
‘Who?’ said Fry vaguely.
‘Never mind.’
‘She got us a result, anyway. She remembered that when Rebecca was equipping the kitchen in her new house, she wanted something a bit longer for slicing. Apparently, she used to buy large joints of meat from some organic place and had to cut them up into smaller portions for herself.’
‘So Rebecca had the knife in the set replaced with a longer one,’ said Cooper.
‘Correct.’
‘And I think you were about to tell me why the killer didn’t necessarily know what he was doing when he chose that particular knife?’
‘So I was. Well, Ben, imagine a block full of knives with their handles pointing towards you. If you’re going to grab at one of the handles, which would be the nearest to you?’
The longest one,’ said Cooper.
‘Correct again. The handle of the longest knife would be sticking out of the block furthest, yes? And the item we have missing from the crime scene is a twenty-six centimetre Henckel slicing knife. Twenty-six centimetres. That’s over ten inches long.’
‘Nasty.’
Fry sneezed and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. ‘Nasty is right. It looks as though Mansell Quinn could turn out to be a very dangerous man indeed. When we find him.’
As Fry drove her Peugeot out of the E Division car park, she was still thinking about that book. She didn’t know why she let Ben Cooper do it to her. As soon as he started one of his conversations, she knew that he’d be sticking some kind of pin into her that she wouldn’t be able to pull out for days.
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It had been years since she’d thought about that book. She’d been in Birmingham, studying for her degree back then; deluded into thinking of herself as educated and literate, just because she went every day to a place that called itself a university. In those days she could still read books for escape, letting her mind drift off into somebody else’s world without her subconscious throwing up horrific flashbacks. Since then, events had taken place that had changed her life in ways a book never could - they had altered it permanently and painfully.
The book in question had been so vile that it hadn’t been enough to pick it up and throw it at the wall. That was the fate of the merely bad books, the ones that irritated or annoyed her. This one had been different. This one she’d felt obliged to remove completely from her life. Normally, her unwanted books would have gone to a charity shop or into the recycling bank. But this particular book had been different. She hadn’t been able to bear the thought that someone else would pick the thing up. Besides, she had needed some small act of protest against the author’s unpleasant thoughts being forced into her own.
So she’d started a fire in the garden incinerator with some dead branches. Then she’d torn as many pages as she could from the book and burned them. She had finally dropped the mutilated cover into the flames and watched the glue of its binding melt on to the boards before it caught light and the author’s name had blackened and charred, letter by letter.
Simon Lowe was being allowed home from hospital this afternoon. Overnight observation following a blow to the head that was all you got these days.
‘I didn’t see a thing, to be honest,’ he said, fiddling with the plaster on a cut to his hand. ‘The first blow stunned me. And it was dark, anyway.’
‘Did your assailant say anything?’ asked Fry.
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‘Not a word.’
‘Did you notice any other details? A sound, a smell?’
Simon shook his head. ‘I wish I could think of something.’
‘A car parked nearby, perhaps?’
‘There were cars parked on the street near the church, but I didn’t take any notice of them. It was dark.’
‘Yes, you said. And you spoke to no one in the pub, apart from the landlord?’
‘No one.’ Simon looked at her. ‘Do you think I might have lost my memory? Did I get into an argument with someone in the George?’
Fry sighed. ‘No. The landlord confirms that you spoke to no one, and there was no sign of any trouble.’
‘So that means … ?’
‘That means you’re going to take much more care from now on, aren’t you, Mr Lowe? Don’t go out on your own at night again. Take sensible precautions.’
She said the words without much hope. Nobody seemed to heed her warnings.
