The Book of Souls (Inspector McLean #2)(35)
The detective constable hurried away with obvious relief, and McLean stepped carefully into the position on the bank he had been occupying. Cadwallader sported a pair of fishing waders, Tracy thigh-length galoshes that were just about adequate for standing in the flow. They both looked chilled to the bone, but nothing like as bad as the dead woman.
‘How long have you been here?’ McLean asked.
‘About half an hour. I don’t think the call’s long in.’ Cadwallader bent down, the better to examine his subject, then stood up again. ‘Where’re those bloody lights. I can hardly see a thing here.’
As if in reply, twin arc lamps banged into life directly overhead and a voice called down: ‘That better, doc?’
McLean didn’t hear what Cadwallader muttered in reply; his attention was on the young woman. Like long-gone fireworks overhead, the details came to him in flashes. Plastic cable ties fixed her wrists to two rusty metal poles bashed into the riverbed. A third, at her feet, wobbled dangerously in the flow. Water bubbled up between her white legs and that neatly trimmed dark triangle. Washed over her flat stomach and barely noticeable breasts. Gurgled around the raw gaping wound that was her throat. Billowed her hair out around her head like an auburn halo.
‘I can’t tell you anything here, Tony.’ Cadwallader levered himself out of the water and helped his assistant join him on the bank. ‘She’s been in the water too long to give you an accurate time of death, but it’s at least twelve hours ago.’
24
He sits towards the front of the courtroom; media attention has waned and the public have lost their appetite for the spectacle. No doubt they’ll be back for the verdict and sentence, but for now this farcical drama is played out to judge, jury and few else. Donald Anderson sits in the dock, his face impassive. Two burly constables stand behind him, but it’s inconceivable that this slight, mild-mannered man would do anything untoward. Would never abduct women, one a year for ten years, rape and torture them in the basement underneath his respectable antiquarian bookshop, then murder them when he had grown tired of them. Never wash down their battered bodies and stake them out in fast-flowing water, under a bridge where they would be easily found.
‘The psychosis is not that unusual, though of course not often seen in such an extreme example.’
He focuses on the man in the witness box. Professor Matthew Hilton. A psychiatrist occasionally used by the police to create profiles of murderers. If memory serves, Hilton originally suggested that the Christmas Killer would be in his mid-forties, a frustrated underachiever with below-average intelligence either living with an elderly, domineering parent or abused by one who had subsequently died. Somehow that doesn’t quite tally with the sixty-plus, wealthy bookshop owner standing in the dock.
‘The trigger for the behaviour is often obscure, hidden deep in the subconscious. Perhaps a traumatic event in childhood, long suppressed, is brought out by a chance occurrence in later life. The violence is compartmentalised along with that suppressed memory, and so the patient genuinely feels that those acts are perpetrated by another person.’
The patient. Hah. Murdering rapist bastard, more like. Or is it all part of Hilton’s act? Label the accused as a loony and you’re halfway towards persuading the jury that’s what he is.
‘Faced with the realisation of what he has done, the true horror of his crimes, he constructs a false reality around him, based on his life and work. Thus we have a fixation with an ancient book, somehow possessing the soul of any man who reads it and forcing them to do unspeakable things. It’s quite a wonder how inventive the human mind can be.’
He slumps back in his hard plastic chair, looking from the smug face of Hilton, to Anderson, to the judge and then the jury. Are they buying into this bullshit? Will they acquit on grounds of diminished responsibility?
‘So in your opinion, Professor Hilton, Donald Anderson cannot be held responsible for his actions. He is, in short, insane.’ This from the counsel for the defence. Sneaky little shit of an advocate. How can he sleep at night, knowing he’s defending a monster?
‘He’s psychotic and delusional. I’d say classic schizophrenic.’ Hilton turns to face the jury, letting a smile play across his features. ‘I don’t like the word, but it is one which most lay-people understand, so yes, I’d say Donald Anderson is insane.’
25
‘You seem very tense, inspector. Could it be that my profession puts you on your guard?’
McLean sat in Chief Superintendent McIntyre’s office, on one of the comfy-looking but surprisingly hard armchairs in the informal side of the room. The chief superintendent herself had gone to a meeting at Force HQ, and her door, normally open to all, was firmly closed. In the other chair, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes, Professor Matt Hilton tapped an idle pencil against his hand.
‘I don’t know if you’re aware,’ McLean said. ‘But we found a body out in the Pentland Hills last night. Young woman, throat cut, staked out in a running burn, under a bridge.’
‘Yes, I had heard. And you found another one a fortnight ago.’ Hilton had chubbed-up a bit since last they had met. His hair was unfashionably long, tied in a greying ponytail that snaked down his back and seemed to be sucking everything from the front, as if it had been pulled too often by the school bullies.