Fry walked to the outside wall of the car park and looked over the ledge at the buildings in Clappergate. Far below, a group of youths wearing rucksacks went by with their skateboards, whistling between their teeth as they entered the shopping precinct. She tugged at the wire mesh, but it didn’t shift an inch.
A movement caught Fry’s attention, and she saw Liz Petty again, walking across to the crime scene van to speak to Abbott, who was now her supervisor. She had pushed her hood back from her face, and she looked flushed. SOCOs didn’t like wearing the hoods of the scene suits if they could help it, especially the female officers. Petty brushed her hair back and tried to confine it in the clip behind her head. She saw Fry watching her, and smiled again.
‘I’ll get everything under way, sir,’ Hitchens was saying. ‘DS Fry and I have an appointment with the psychologist.’
‘The phone calls?’ said Kessen.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I don’t suppose we’ve had a call since Mrs Birley disappeared?’ ‘No. And it’s difficult to know whether we should hope for one or not.’
‘At least we’d know where we stand. You need to make the right call on this one, Paul.’
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Fry felt a little sorry for Hitchens. Nine times out of ten there were other reasons why people went missing, especially adults. They usually turned up alive and well, with surprised looks on their faces at all the fuss they’d caused. That could waste a lot of time and resources if a hasty decision was made.
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.
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6
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,
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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… 7 can smell it right now, can’t you? … I promise … My kind of killing … And then there was a change halfway through a sentence: as a neck slithers in my fingers …
There were a few more sentences with The’ 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
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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.’
