Page 28 of Watching You

Connie and Baarda were on a video call from their temporary office at the police station.

On the screen was a young woman. In the background were patio doors that opened onto an orchard, and in the distance two figures could be seen wandering around and occasionally picking something off a bush or a tree.

‘I’m not sure how soon we’re going to be finished here, Midnight,’ Connie said. ‘So don’t accept any new consultations. This is proving harder than I thought it’d be. The lack of evidential leads is confounding.’

‘Confounding?’ Midnight laughed. ‘Either you’ve spent too long in the UK or Baarda is brainwashing you. Did you get the request I sent for a series of training workshops with the FBI in October?’

‘I did, and we’ll do it as long as nothing serious comes into the diary that’s a conflict. Could you reply with that caveat?’

‘Sure,’ Midnight said, making notes as they spoke.

Midnight Jones was their human hub, dealing with all the vital admin that Connie hated and that she insisted Baarda not get sidetracked by. She was organised, astute, available to help twenty-four hours a day, and was an impressive profiler herself albeit with a more technological leaning.

‘And Brodie, we had a solicitor’s letter delivered here for you.’ She frowned as she spoke and they all knew it was bad news before she delivered it. ‘I opened it in case it was urgent. It’s from your ex-wife’s lawyer.’

‘Go on,’ Baarda said.

‘Now that your ex has changed her name since remarrying, she’s asking your agreement to change your children’s surname too. Something about maintaining the family unit so things are less confusing for them.’

Connie opened her mouth to speak but Baarda held up a hand.

‘Thanks, Midnight. Could you scan the letter and email it to me, please? I’ll deal with it.’

‘Brodie, she can’t just—’

‘I said I’ll deal with it, Connie,’ he interjected. ‘Can we talk about the Edinburgh murders instead?’ His voice was giving nothing away, but there was no mistaking the clenched muscles in his jaw and the narrowing of his eyes.

‘Of course,’ Midnight said. ‘I started with Dale Abnay’s body.

There are no other missing persons in the Edinburgh area who seem to have similar interests to Abnay regarding the incel group, so it doesn’t look as if his disappearance is part of a wider plan or group retribution.

I checked in with DS Salter who let me have his mobile messages and emails.

There was nothing there to suggest any active threat, no planned liaisons with people who are red flags, and no debt.

However, he did have an app on his mobile confirming that he was a hiking enthusiast – it shows the trails he’d walked previously – so it looks as if he was genuinely at Jupiter Artland for recreation. ’

‘That’s a diverse CV then. “In my spare time I enjoy hiking and imagining the violent repression of women.” Mr Abnay was just full of surprises. Do we have verification of the planned kidney donation?’ Connie asked.

‘We do. There are emails from the donor service, proposed dates for the operation, advice for recuperation and a request for him to take independent medical and legal advice before he signed the documentation. Things never progressed that far, though.’

Another woman burst into the room holding hands with a much older lady. The younger of the two was a carbon copy of Midnight but grinning from ear to ear, and waving into the camera.

‘Wooly!’ she cried. ‘Look!’ She held up a handful of early summer fruit from the garden then popped a raspberry into her mouth.

‘Dawn,’ Connie said. ‘That looks nice. And hello Doris. You two look like life is treating you well.’

‘It certainly is that, dearie,’ Doris said. ‘The garden’s giving us so much fruit and veg, we don’t know what to do with it all. I’ve got jam coming out of my ears! We miss you down here. Time for a visit before you two go gadding off again?’

‘Wooly!’ Dawn said again. It was her pet name for Connie, and she was the only person in the world who could get away with giving her a nickname, but Midnight’s twin, though fate had been cruel at birth and left her with severe special needs, had the sweetest of souls.

Doris, in her seventies with purple hair and huge, colourful earrings and beads, had left London to live with the sisters as the mother figure they so badly wanted.

Together, the three of them had created a home as full of joy as any Connie had ever visited.

‘We’ll make sure to visit you in the beautiful West Country before we leave the UK,’ Connie said. ‘A proper visit this time, not just an hour.’

‘Careful, Dr Woolwine, we’ll end up domesticating you if you’re not careful. You won’t want to leave,’ Doris said. ‘I need to cook for you for a few days, anyway. Put a bit of meat on those bones. You do look thin, lovey.’

‘Thank you, Doris,’ Connie said. ‘I will eat whatever you put in front of me.’

‘Okay, that’s enough chatter, back to work,’ Midnight said, giving her sister a kiss on the cheek.

‘Righty ho, time to bake some tea loaf, I think. Come on, Dawn. Let’s leave this lot to it!’

They left in a burst of chatter and laughter.

‘As I was saying,’ Midnight continued. ‘Dale Abnay’s offer of a kidney appears to be real and valid. Also, I couldn’t find any suggestion that money was going to be exchanged, although that’s not something I’d expect to see in writing anyway.’

‘Okay. What about Archie Bass? Has anything turned up on him?’ Baarda asked.

‘No. Edinburgh had a spate of murders of homeless people a few years ago, but nothing recently. This one is much less puzzling than Dale Abnay, though. Homeless people can be prey to drug users, mentally ill people, or just someone with an amount of rage who feels like finding an easy target. Without CCTV – the only cameras there were focused on the rear doors of the property to catch burglars going in or staff removing goods – it’ll be hard to pin down a suspect.

Interestingly, neither Abnay nor Bass had any close, regular ties in the community other than Bass’s sister Jane, who saw him only sporadically, and Leslie Wolfe, who wanted the kidney.

Both men would have appealed to a killer who wanted victims where there would be minimal public outcry. ’

‘That’s a good point,’ Connie said. ‘Let’s move on to talk about Divya Singh.’

‘Different set-up, really impersonal modus operandi. Whoever killed her really didn’t want to get their hands dirty, same as using a gun but without the possibility of having to look a victim in the eyes,’ Baarda noted.

‘There are a lot more possibilities here. We can’t exclude people who knew her.

There was an insurance policy on her life, it could have been a personal vendetta, potentially she was a victim of a racist attack.

It could even have been mistaken identity or a thrill-killer. ’

‘This killer certainly doesn’t have poor impulse control,’ Connie said.

‘The scene looks chaotic but the kill was the opposite. They attacked her away from CCTV, away from witnesses, not even with a view from a window. It was fast and left no possibility of survival, and they didn’t leave a forensic trail.

That’s a perfectly executed murder. In terms of categorising it, it’s more like a professional hit. ’

‘An assassination?’ Midnight asked.

‘It’s as clean as a professional hit, although there would have been ways of killing Mrs Singh that might have looked more like suicide. Brodie, how much was the insurance policy worth?’ Connie asked.

‘Only a hundred and fifty thousand, which isn’t nothing but it’s not a lot compared to others I’ve dealt with.’

‘Most hits cost in the region of thirty thousand depending on how high-profile the target is, so the profit is relatively low given the risks. Still, it’s an area to look at,’ Connie noted.

‘So you have three separate cases: one dead incel, a homeless man and a person of colour,’ Midnight said. ‘If they were linked, I’d say this was looking like a far-right evangelical murderer who thinks they have a divine right to rid the world of anyone not in their chosen societal group.’

Connie played along. ‘If it were a far-right evangelist psychopath, Dale Abnay’s death could even be because he agreed to a kidney transplant. Presumably that goes against the will of God.’

Baarda sat forward.

‘It’s not impossible,’ he said.

‘Brodie, I was kidding. There’s nothing linking these deaths,’ Connie said.

‘Not all links are positive in nature. Sometimes similarities are found in the things that are missing. There’s a lack of ritual, no torture, every crime scene is left immediately, it’s forensically clean, no weapons have been found, out of reach of CCTV.’

‘Archie Bass didn’t die immediately though,’ Midnight noted.

‘Not for want of trying, and he was only saved by excessive layering of clothing,’ Baarda said. ‘Maybe they couldn’t risk opening the clothing to check the wounds or find a pulse because of trace DNA. Rather than carelessness, it might actually be more evidence of good practice.’

‘Serial killers choose one method and stick with it, almost exclusively, not to mention the fact that you can usually find a link between the victim types,’ Connie said.

‘What’s the motivation? The gratification element of these deaths would have to be something like a god-delusion or a power play.

But surely then they’d want some recognition of their work.

I’d expect the killer to have at least kept a trophy. ’

‘A photo, maybe,’ Baarda suggested. ‘Something easy to erase, without risking any transfer of DNA material onto the body.’

‘But a photo would be a definite link to the murders if the mobile phone was found, and this killer has done only one thing the same at every crime scene – they’ve made themselves untraceable.

A photo would be too risky. Deleting it fully isn’t the same as hitting a button. Even teenagers know that,’ Connie said.

‘I feel like I’ve started something that I can’t justify,’ Midnight said, starting to type.

‘I have some statistics here. Scotland’s homicide rate is at an all-time low.

Last year there was only one homicide in the whole of Scotland where a single perpetrator killed more than one victim.

As for Divya Singh, women being killed by strangers account for an incredibly low proportion of deaths in Scotland.

And in the last year, sixty-seven per cent of all homicides up there happened inside residential premises.

All of which means that the chances of this being the work of a single killer is statistically almost impossible. ’

‘Goddammit,’ Connie said. ‘You know that as soon as we declare something almost impossible, it becomes the most likely scenario, right?’

Midnight and Baarda thought about it, and neither commented.

‘So in terms of a profile, we have someone purposeful, careful, capable of learning, someone who is aware of what not to do. Intelligent, but driven and single-minded,’ Midnight said.

‘And flexible. Able to adapt to kill however best suits the moment or the victim. It would, at least, explain the sudden rise in Edinburgh’s homicide rate.

’ She sighed. ‘All right. Do we agree, then, that in the absence of any leads indicating individual killers, we should proceed to consider the possibility that a single person has committed all these deaths?’ Connie asked.

Baarda and Midnight nodded.

‘Then we need to brief the rest of the squad,’ Connie said. ‘We should do that sooner rather than later. Brodie, gather the troops. I’ll deal with them, you go and break the news to the superintendent.’

‘I feel rather as if I’ve drawn the short straw,’ Brodie said. ‘Any particular reason why that’s falling to me?’

‘It’s that Old Etonian charm.’ Connie winked at him. ‘You’re hard to resist when you decide to switch it on. Also, for some reason, I feel as if she’s less likely to be sarcastic to you.’

‘Because I don’t provoke her.’

‘And that is why you’re my perfect secret weapon. And I’ll buy you dinner if you do it.’

‘Not worth it,’ Baarda said, already knowing he’d do it anyway. It was impossible to say no to Connie Woolwine.