The trouble was, the book was back home with everything else.
She returned to the hotel, and in her room she investigated the computer connection Nick Surtees had told her about. In fact it was simple and logical: her mains adaptor went straight in, and the batteryrecharge light came on.
She worked for a while, concentrating on the newspaper material she had downloaded that afternoon, transferring it to her hard disk before loading it into her word processor so she could edit it and sort it out.
What she was trying to do was build up a detailed picture of the day of Grove's outburst: not only what he had done, but also where his victims had been, where the witnesses had seen him. From there she intended to use Bureau methodology, analysing backwards from the known facts into Grove's mental and emotional framework, to draw up a profile of his personality, psychology, motives, and so on. The newspaper reports were the bare bones of this. Next would come what police and video material was available, then the more interesting but infinitely more difficult work of interviewing witnesses.
She felt she hadn't done too well with Steve Ripon's
mother. She opened a file for her, but it was as short and uninformative as the interview itself had been. She merely noted down the two main facts she had elicited: first, that Steve Ripon would probably not want to speak to her, and, second, that he was receiving money from the benefit office. Teresa was aware of how little she knew about the British welfare system, and therefore had no idea what this would mean, or how she could investigate it.
She had to decide what to do next. Probably the most urgent and important matter was to start her researches with the police. This was not a step to be lightly taken, because even with her FBI accreditation there would probably be limits on what she would be allowed access to, and she was too unfamiliar with the system to be able to bend the rules. Her network of insider contacts did not exist here, of course. And there were other difficulties. She knew for instance that there was no equivalent to the Freedom of Information legislation in Britain, which meant progress would probably be slow.
The remaining witnesses presented a different kind of obstacle, because after her unsuccessful interview with Mrs Ripon, Teresa was not eager to rush into another encounter for which she was unprepared.
She was tired; the jetlag was still affecting her. As she stared at the LCD screen of her laptop, she allowed her eyes to drift: out of focus, and two images of the screen floated away from each other. She snapped her attention back, and the two images resolved into one, but the focus was gone. She felt that sense of being dazed by something, in such a way that you cannot tear your gaze away, even though you know it is simply a matter of deciding to do so.
She stared at the screen, trying to will it back into focus; even moving her head to one side neither released her transfixed gaze nor brought back sharpness to what she was looking at.
Finally, she blinked and the spell was broken.
She glanced around the room. lt was already looking familiar and homey, reminding her in its neat efficiency of a hundred hotel rooms she had used in the past. She only wished it could have been in a Holiday Inn or a Sheraton, something that was faceless outside as well as in.
Everyone in town knew the White Dragon, and it wouldn't be long before everyone she met knew she was staying there.
Looking at the window, Teresa felt her gaze starting to lock again. This time she was too tired to resist it. The square of fading daylight, the four panes of glass, dominated her view.
Nothing of interest could be seen beyond it: part of a wall, a grey sky. She knew if she walked across to the window she could look down to see on one side part of the hotel car park and on the other a glimpse of the main road, but she was in a state of mental passivity and she simply stayed where she was and stared at the window. She felt as if her mind had stopped, and her energy had leached away.
Gradually, the window began to look as if it was breaking up: crystals of bright light, primary colours and white, coruscating together so vividly that it was impossible to look at them, crept in across her view of the sky. The wall containing the window darkened in her vision, becoming merely an undefined frame for the square of light that was all she could see.
But the unsteady, crystalline brilliance was eating up the image of the window, blinding her to it.
Nausea began to grow in her, and once again Teresa snapped out of the reverie. She realized at last what was happening, and in a state approaching panic she groped around to find her bag, and fumbled for her Migraleve tablets. They were in a foil shield, and she snapped two of them out and threw them straight into her mouth without pausing to wash them down with water. They stuck briefly in her throat, but she forced them down.
Leaving her computer, leaving the chair and table, turning away from the deadly window, she crawled across the floor, searching ahead of her for the bed. She crept up on top of it and fell across the covers, not caring how she was lying or where her head was. She lay still, waiting for the attack to pass. Hours went by, then at last she fell asleep.
CHAPTER 9
t was many years before.
mm
mie and her
Her name was Sam ie jessup. Sam i husband Rick were eating at a family restaurant called AI's Happy Burgabar, in a small town called Oak Springs along Highway 64 between Richmond and Charlottesvine. It was 1958. Sammie and Kick had their three children with them.
The table was in a window booth, semicircular, with a central pedestal. The kids had piled in, noisily sliding into the centre of the padded couch seat, but Sammie knew from long experience that if Doug and Cameron sat next to each other they would end up fighting, and if Kelly sat between them she wouldn't eat anything, so she piled them all out again. She sat in the centre herself, wedged between Cameron and Kelly, with Doug next to Kelly on one end and Rick next to Cameron on the other.
They had eaten their burgers and fried chicken and salad and fries, and were waiting for the ice creams they had ordered, when a man carrying a semiautomatic rifle walked in quietly through the door.
