Val McDermid - Killing the shadows

home@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; } KILLING THE SHADOWS [181-142-066-4.8] By: VAL MCDERMID Category: Fiction Thriller Synopsis: A killer is on the loose, blurring the line between fact and fiction. His prey the writers of crime novels who have turned psychological profilers into the heroes of the nineties. But this killer is like no other. His bloodlust shatters all the conventional wisdom surrounding the motives and mechanics of how serial killers operate. And for one woman, the desperate hunt to uncover his identity becomes a matter of life and death. Professor Fiona Cameron is an academic psychologist who uses computer technology to help police forces track serial offenders.

She used to help the Met, but vowed never to work for them again when they went against her advice and badly screwed up an investigation as a consequence. Still smarting from the experience, she's working a case in Toledo when her lover, thriller writer Kit Martin, tells her a fellow crime novelist has been murdered. It's not her case, but Fiona can't help taking an interest. Which is just as well, because before too long the killer strikes again. And again. And Fiona is caught up in a race against time not only to save a life but to bring herself redemption, both personal and professional.

Rich in atmosphere, Killing the Shadows uses the backdrops of city and country to create an air of threatening menace, culminating in a tense confrontation between hunter and hunted, a confrontation that can have only one outcome.
home@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; } Last printing: 08/17/02 `>-3-' BY THE SAME AUTHOR A Place of Execution The Wire in the Blood The Mermaids Singing Kate Brannigan novels Star Struck Blue Genes Clean Break Crack Down Kick Back Dead Beat Lindsay Gordon novels Booked for Murder Union Jack Final Edition Common Murder Report for Murder Non-fiction A Suitable Job for a Woman Killing the Shadows VAL McDERMID This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. HarperCollins Publishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB The HarperCollins website address is: www.fireandwater.com Published by HarperCollins Publish 2000 3579 10 8642 Lines from "In Memory of W.B. Yeats' by W.H.

Auden are reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 0-5102- 00 226108 1 Typeset in Minion by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St. Ives plc All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Acknowledgements Several people contributed their expertise in the hope it would prevent me making too many mistakes. So thanks for linguistic expertise to Dr. Sandra Truscott; for sharing her knowledge of her native tongue and for helping break the logjam to Karin Slaughter; for everything I know about crime linkage and geographic profiling to Ron Mackay; for forensic expertise to Dr.

Sue Black; for details of police procedure to Peter N. Walker and Roger Forsdyke; for last-minute legal queries to Sue Cragg; and for the tireless efforts on my behalf, that incomparable researcher Mary Carter, and the endlessly patient Daphne Wright. Most of all, thanks to Brigid Baillie for the customary legal advice and for always being the right person in the right place at the right time. And of course, to Lara Croft. Without whom I would certainly have gone mad. This one's for BB.

Because it takes two to jump over the rocks in the road. The haar moves up from the steel-grey waters of the Firth of Forth, a solid wall of mist the colour of cumulus. It swallows the bright lights of the city's newest playground, the designer hotels and the smart restaurants. It becomes one with the spectres of the sailors from the docks who used to blow their pay on eighty-shilling ale and whores with faces as hard as their clients' hands. It climbs the hill to the New Town, where the geometric grid of Georgian elegance slices it into blocks before it slides down into the ditch of Princes Street Gardens. The few late revellers staggering home quicken their steps to escape its clammy grip.

By the time it reaches the narrow split-level streets and twisting venn els of the Old Town, the haar has lost its deadening solidity. It has metamorphosed into wraiths of pale fog that turn tourist traps into sinister looming presences. Peeling posters advertising recent Festival Fringe events flit in and out of visibility like garish ghosts. On a night like this it's easy to see what inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to create The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

He may have set the book in London, but it's unmistakably Edinburgh that comes eerily off the page. Behind the soot-black facades of the Royal Mile lie the old tenements surrounding their barren courts. Back in the eighteenth century, these were the equivalent of today's council-housing schemes overcrowded with the dispossessed of the city, home to drunks and laudanum addicts, haunts of the lowest whores and street urchins. Tonight, like a tormented replay of the worst historical nightmare, a woman's body lies close to the head of a stone staircase that provides a steep short cut from High Street down the slope of The Mound. Her short dress has been pulled up, the cheap seams splitting under the strain. If she had screamed when she was attacked, it would have been II smothered by the blanket of foggy air.

One thing is certain. She will never scream again. Her throat is a gaping scarlet grin. To add insult to injury, the gleaming coils of her intestines have been draped over her left shoulder. The printer who stumbled over the body on his way home from a late shift cowers in a crouch at the mouth of the close leading to the court. He is close enough to the pool of his own vomit to gag on the rancid stench held hovering by the oppression of the haar.

He has used his mobile phone to call the police, but the few minutes it is taking them to arrive feel like an eternity, his recent vision of hell stamped ineradicably on his mind's eye. Flashing blue lights loom suddenly before him as two police cars swoop to a halt at the kerb. Running footsteps, then he has company. Two uniformed officers gently help him to his feet. They lead him towards their squad car where they hand him into the rear seat. Two others have disappeared down the close, the woolly sound of their footsteps swallowed almost immediately by the clinging mist.

Now the only sounds are the crackling of the police radio and the chattering of the printer's teeth. Dr. Harry Gemmell hunkers by the body, his gloved fingers probing things that Detective Inspector Campbell Grant doesn't want to think about. Rather than study what the police surgeon is doing, Grant looks instead at the scene-of-crime officers in their white overalls. They are taking advantage of the portable lights to search the area round the body. The haar is eating into Grant's very bones, making him feel like an old man.

Eventually, Gemmell grunts and pushes himself to his feet, stripping the blood-streaked latex from his hands. He studies his chunky sports watch and gives a satisfied nod. "Aye," he says. "September the eighth, right enough." "Meaning what, Harry?" Grant asks wearily. He is already irritated by the prospect of enduring Gemmell's habit of forcing detectives to drag information out of him piecemeal. "Your man here, he likes to play follow-my-leader.