After a moment he picked up one of the photographs she’d seen earlier—the one of an untidy bedroom. He passed it to her over the desk. It was clear immediately that something terrible had happened in the room. Shoes and bags were scattered on the floor, and there were dark patches of what was clearly blood on the carpet—not a huge amount, but enough to imply a certain level of violence.
“This is Fiona Graham’s bedroom,” Parker said, somewhat unnecessarily. “There’s more blood on the landing, on the stairs. Pictures knocked off the wall, stuff like that. She didn’t leave under her own steam, Heather.”
“No. No, I guess not.” Heather stared at the photo, trying to take in every detail. “Inspector, if there is a link between my parents and Fiona Graham … what would that mean? What if my mother was sitting on something, something she knew and felt she couldn’t tell anyone, not even me? I mean, my mother killed herself just as these murders started and now this?”
The sad, scuffed trainers, the pile of dogeared paperbacks on the bedside table. It could be her room. There was a story here, the sort of story that could get her back onto any newspaper she wanted, but more and more it looked like writing that story would mean discovering a side to her mother she couldn’t have guessed.
Parker stood up suddenly.
“Listen, the coffee here is bloody awful. Do you want to go and, uh, get some lunch?”
Looking up, she saw that there was a faint blush across the tops of his cheeks. Smiling, she put the photo down.
“Let’s do that.”
They went to a place around the corner, a small cozy restaurant that Heather guessed wasn’t a regular police hangout. Parker ordered a kind of complicated sandwich that promptly fell apart when he tried to pick it up. Heather stuck to a pasta salad, from which she picked out all the bits of meat. To her surprise, he ordered a beer, and when she raised her eyebrows he just smiled.
“So, what’s your history with Michael Reave?” she asked, when she was halfway through her demolished salad. “You’ve had to deal with him before, I’m guessing.”
“I’m too young to have been involved in the original investigation—as my DCI keeps reminding me—but I had to talk to him about another case a few years ago.” He tapped his fingers against the neck of his beer bottle. They sat with their back to the large window at the front of the restaurant, and a shard of autumn daylight fell across the shoulder of his shirt. “It was relating to a cold case, a woman who went missing in 1979 that we had always thought he was responsible for. It turned out she had links with an old East End gang, and suddenly it seemed possible that she’d gone missing for entirely different reasons, so I went in there to talk to him about it. This was back when I had just moved up to CID. It was a small, probably pointless job, so they gave it to the newest recruit.” He smiled lopsidedly. “It was pointless. He barely said anything at all. But he did listen, he didn’t show off or shout. As these things are measured, that was almost a success in itself. So the case moved on. But I didn’t forget Reave.”
“He made an impression?”
“I’d read all about him during my degree. It was quite the thing, to meet him face to face. A serial killer as strange and as singular as him. He’s a real outlier, as strange as Bundy was, really.”
He was warming up now, she realized, getting into the subject. She thought of the notebook in her bag, and with it came a pang of guilt. He was opening up to her, when she hadn’t been entirely honest with him—all those notes she’d been making all along were looking more and more like an article.
“Bundy?”
“Ted Bundy. They’re not similar, not really, but Bundy was remarkable in the way he was able to shut himself off from what he’d done. Like he was two different people, living in the same body. Right up until the end, he was trying to explain it all away, as though he wasn’t responsible.”
“And Reave is the same?”
“Reave is very certain he’s not responsible.” Parker smiled grimly. “But with him it’s the ritualization of what he did to the bodies, the care he took to lay them out. It’s hugely risky, what he did—spending so much time with them was only ever going to make it easier to find and convict him—but every victim we know of was arranged in these strange, I don’t know, displays. Tableaus. And there are so many other identifying marks of the Red Wolf. The flowers, often in the mouth. The item of clothing soaked with blood. And their hearts.”
“Their hearts?” Heather felt her hand tighten around her fork, and she forced herself to relax. “What do you mean?”
“None of them were ever found. He took them out, hid them somewhere or bloody ate them, I don’t know.” He stopped, glancing down at the remains of her lunch. “Sorry. Christ, sorry, this really isn’t appropriate lunch conversation is it?”
Heather shrugged and took a sip of her drink. Hearts. Perhaps the article could examine the overall mythology of the Red Wolf. She could already see how it would hang together; pieces on his sketchy background, his time in the commune at Fiddler’s Mill, and sections on the details of the murders—people loved that stuff. And interspersed throughout, her own impressions of the man himself, drawn from the interviews. Her mother wouldn’t even need to come into it. And it could wait—the papers would still be interested once this new killer was safely caught and behind bars. Even more so, perhaps. She could reach out to Diane, let her see some of her notes. For the first time in weeks she felt a little sliver of hope; a brightness in
