about it.
'You wanted to speak to someone,' he said, in what he hoped were soft and sympathetic tones.
'Yes,' she said.
Well, it was a start. 'My name is Inspector Rebus. And yours is …?’
'Jan Crawford.'
'Okay, Jan. Now, how can I help you?'
She swallowed, gazing at the window behind Rebus's left ear. 'It's the killings,' she said. 'They call — him the Wolfman.'
Rebus was undecided. Maybe she was, a crank, but she didn't seem like one. She just seemed jumpy. Perhaps she had good reason.
'That's right,' he cajoled. 'The papers call him that.'
'Yes, they do.' She had become suddenly excitable, the words spilling from her. 'And they said last night on the radio, this morning in the paper …' She pulled ' a newspaper clipping from her bag. It was the photograph of Rebus and Lisa Frazer. 'This is you, isn't it?'
Rebus nodded.
'Then you'll know. I mean, you must. The paper says he's done it again, they're saying you've caught him, or maybe you've caught him, nobody's sure.' She paused, breathing heavily. All the time her eyes were on the window.. Rebus kept his mouth shut, letting her calm down. Her eyes were filling, becoming glossy with tears. As she spoke, one droplet squirmed out from the corner of an eye, and crept down towards her lips, her chin. 'Nobody's sure whether you've caught him, but I could be sure. At least, I think I can be sure. I didn't get, I mean, I've been scared so long now, and I haven't said anything. I didn't want anybody to know, my mum and dad to know. I just wanted to shut it out, but that's stupid, isn't it?’ when he could do it again if he's not caught. So I decided to, I mean, maybe I can …' She made to stand up, thought better of it, and squeezed her hands together instead.
'Can what, Miss Crawford?'
'Identify him,' she said, her voice almost a whisper. now. She searched in the sleeve of her blouse, found a tissue, and blew-her nose. The tear dripped onto one knee. 'Identify him,' she repeated, 'if he's here, if you've caught him.'
Rebus was staring hard at her now, and at last his eyes found hers. Her brown eyes, covered with a film of liquid. He'd seen cranks before, plenty of them. Maybe she was, and maybe she wasn't.
'What do you mean, Jan?'
She sniffed again, turned her eyes to the window, swallowed. 'He almost got me,' she said. 'I was the first, before all the others. He almost got me. I was almost the first.'
And then she lifted her head. At first Rebus couldn't understand why. But then he saw. Under her right ear, running in a crescent shape towards her white throat, there was a dark pink scar, no more than an inch long.
The kind of scar you made with a knife.
The first intended kill of the Wolfman.
'What do you think?'
They faced one another across the desk. Four inches of fresh paperwork had appeared in the in-tray, threatening to overbalance the pile and send it slewing down across the floor. Rebus was eating a cheese and onion sandwich from Gino's. Comfort food. One of the nice things about being a bachelor was that you could eat, without, fear of regrets, onions, Branston pickle, huge sausage, egg and tomato sauce sandwiches, curried beans on toast and all the other delicacies favoured by the male.
'What do you think then?'
Flight sipped from a can of cola; giving slight closed-mouth burps between times. He had listened to Rebus's story and had met with Jan Crawford. She had now been taken to an interview room to be fed tea and sympathy by a WPC while a detective took her statement. Flight and Rebus both hoped she would not have to deal with Lamb.
'Well?'
Flight rubbed a knuckle against his right eye. 'I don't know, John. This case has gone ga-ga. You're off telling porkies to the press, your picture's all over the front pages, we've got our first — maybe not our last — copycat killing, then you come up with some idea of flea markets and false teeth. And now this.' He opened his arms wide, pleading for help to put his world back into some semblance of order. 'It's all a bit much.'
Rebus bit into the sandwich, chewing slowly. 'But it fits the pattern, doesn't it? From what I've read about serial killers, the first attempt is often botched. They're not quite ready, ' they haven't planned well enough. Somebody screams, they panic. He didn't have his technique honed. He didn't go for the mouth, so she was able to scream. Then he found that human skin and muscle is tougher than it looks. He'd probably seen too many horror films, thought it was like cutting through butter. So he scraped her, but not enough to do serious damage. Maybe the knife wasn't sharp enough, who knows. The point is, he got scared and he ran.'
Flight merely shrugged. 'And she didn't come forward,' he said. 'That's what bothers me.'
'She's come forward now. Tell me this, George. How many rape victims do we actually see? I heard tell somebody reckons it's; less than one in three. Jan Crawford is a timid little woman, scared half to death. All she wanted to do was forget about it, but she couldn't. Her conscience wouldn't let her. Her conscience brought her to us.'
'I still don't like it, John. Don't ask me why.'
Rebus finished the sandwich and made a show of wiping his hands.together. 'Your copper's instinct?' he suggested, just a little sarcastically.
'Maybe,' said. Flight, appearing to miss, or at least to ignore, Rebus's tone. 'There's just something about her.'
'Trust me. I've talked to her. I've been through it all with her. And, George, I believe her. I think it was him. Twelfth of December last year. That was, his first time.'
'Maybe not,' said Flight. 'Maybe there are others who haven't come forward.'
'Maybe. What matters is one did.'
'I still don't see what good this does us.' Flight picked up a sheet of paper from the desk and read the scribbled details. 'He was about six feet tall, white, and I think he had brown hair. He was running away with his back to me, so I couldn't see his face. Flight put down the paper. 'That narrows things down nicely, doesn't it?'
Yes, Rebus wanted to say, it does. Because now I think I'm dealing with a man, and before this I wasn't sure. But he kept that particular thought to himself. He'd given George Flight enough grief in the past few days.
'That's still, not the point,' he said instead.
.'Then what in God's name is the point?' Flight had finished the can of cola and now tossed it into a metal wastepaper- bin, where it rang against, the side, the reverberation lasting for what seemed like an age.
When all was quiet again, Rebus spoke. 'The point is the Wolfman doesn't know she didn't get a good look, at him. We've got to persuade Miss Crawford to go public. Let the TV cameras feast on her. The One Who Got Away. Then we say that she's given us a good description. If that doesn't panic the bastard, nothing will.'
'Panic! Everything you do is designed to panic him. What good does that do? What if it simply frightens, him off? What if he just stops killing and we never find him?'
'He's not the type,' Rebus said with authority. 'He'll go on killing because it's taken him over. Haven't you noticed how the murders are coming at shorter and shorter intervals? He may even have killed again since Lea Bridge, we just haven't found the body yet. He's possessed, George.' Flight looked at him as though seeking a joke, but Rebus was in deadly earnest. 'I mean it.'
Flight stood up and walked to the window. 'It might not even have been the Wolfman.'
'Maybe not,' Rebus conceded.
'What if she won't go public?'
'It doesn't matter. We still issue the news story. We still say we've got a good description.'
Flight turned from the window. 'You believe her? You don't think she's a crank?'
'It's possible, but I really don't think so: She's very plausible. She kept the details just vague enough to be convincing. It was three months ago. We can check on her if you like.'
'Yes, I'd like that very much.' The emotion had left Flight's voice. This case was draining him, of every
