Murfin laughed. ‘Please dispose of your hypotheticals safely, in the interests of the staff.’
Fry glared at him, but he kept his head down. Cooper thought of the legend of the Gorgon, whose gaze could turn you to stone if you looked at her face. Gavin must have read that story. He rarely met Fry’s eye these days.
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‘The point is,’ she repeated, ‘even the precious Rosa doesn’t know what it’s like to kill someone. Despite all her theories, she can’t actually tell us what goes on in a killer’s head, how he feels before and after the act. Let alone during.’
‘She must have talked to a lot of convicted murderers,’ said Cooper.
‘And do you think any of them told her the truth about their crimes? The clever ones will have told her what they thought she wanted to hear. The less clever ones couldn’t articulate a complex emotion if their lives depended on it.’
‘Which sometimes it does,’ said Cooper.
‘Yes,’ agreed Fry. ‘Sometimes it does.’
‘And in the meantime, all we can do is rely on the expertise of someone like Dr Kane. Theories may be all we have.’
‘But we don’t have to take them as gospel,’ said Fry. ‘Just because somebody once wrote a thesis for their doctorate expounding their own theories, everyone takes that as proof. It may be all we have, but we don’t have to assume it’s all there is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There may be reasons for killing that no psychiatrist has ever thought of.’
Cooper threw his hands in the air and let his pen fall on the desk. ‘Well, if that’s the case, we’re in the shit, aren’t we? A killer we can’t identify planning the death of a victim we don’t know for reasons we can’t imagine. That’s just great.’
Fry didn’t answer. But Murfin’s response was to raise his hand and drop his own pen on his desk with a loud clatter.
‘Hey, are we giving up?’ he said. ‘Throwing in the towel? Does this mean I can go to the pub?’
Fry stood up, her body tense. ‘What I’m trying to do here is encourage a bit of independent thinking. It would be nice to hear a few ideas that haven’t been borrowed from some so-called expert. I’d like to see open minds from my team,
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not a ragbag of second-hand psychoanalysis and sociological mumbo-jumbo. Is that so difficult to understand?’
Cooper and Murfin tried to look suitably chastened.
‘OK, Diane,’ said Cooper.
He watched her leave the room. It wasn’t clear where she was going. Probably just to stamp up and down the corridor swearing under her breath.
‘There were some big words in that last bit,’ said Murfin.
Cooper picked up his pen. ‘She’s right, though, Gavin.’
‘Yes, I know. But it’s like telling jokes, isn’t it? Some people know how to be right. And others don’t.’
Then Fry came back into the room to answer her phone. Her face changed as she listened, and she looked at Cooper.
‘That was your idea, too - the new search at Litton Foot,’ she said.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘I don’t know whether you’d call it a problem or not. They’ve just found some more bones.’
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18
Fry had expected dense undergrowth, a thick covering of trees on a steep slope, to make the location inaccessible. But the new site was just above the tree line. There were plenty of rocks, though - thousands of them scattered across the hillside in both directions, clustering downwards as far as she could see. There was no pattern to the rocks, no logic to the way they’d tumbled and come to rest. Many had weathered over the years into smooth, hunched shapes. They covered the hillside like a vast flock of deformed sheep lying asleep or dead in the cold shadows of the north-facing slope.
Yes, there were certainly a lot of rocks. Even so, it seemed incredible that a body could have lain here unnoticed for so long.
She looked around for the crime scene manager. Wayne Abbott was there, already watching her. When Fry gestured, he came towards her slowly, picking his way among the stones.
‘Yes, it’s north-facing,’ he said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘There will never be enough sun on this slope to show details from a distance. If you were standing across the other side of the valley there, you could look for as long as you like, but see nothing unless it moved. These rocks must create all
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kinds of deceptive shapes, and a lot of interplay of shadows. Very misleading to the eye.’
‘And would nobody ever walk across the slope itself?’
‘Not unless you had a particular reason to. It’s difficult going, as you can see. You’d break an ankle very easily.’
‘So how the hell did the killer get the body down here?’
‘He didn’t carry it, that’s for sure.’
Abbott was sweating inside his scene suit, though the weather was cool. Fry could see two trickles of perspiration starting at his temples and clinging to the black bristles on his jawline. She wasn’t sure why she disliked him so much. She could only explain it as an instinctive reaction. Wayne Abbott certainly wouldn’t have been her choice for a supervisor. But he had the qualifications and experience, so here he was.
