Deputy Chief Constable Caroline Flint glanced out of the window at the clouds scudding by and, despite the warmth of the room, she shivered. London was enjoying temperatures of sixteen and more, the crocuses were covering the parklands all over the capital and yet here winter had still to lose its icy grip. Her recent promotion had not been a step that Caroline had taken lightly though most women in the force these days would have bitten her hand off for a chance to be at this level in Police Scotland. There were not many officers from the Met up here these days though the journey north had been worth it for a few people in years past.

  She thought of the detached house and its empty garden, a new-build in a village outside Glasgow, comparing it with the Surrey cottage that she and Gregory had let out on a long lease, then heaved a sigh. It would look better in the summer months when the bare trees put out their leaves and she and her husband had spent weekends planting annuals from the garden centre. He had looked on this move to Scotland’s largest city as an adventure, or so he had said. But did he really feel like that now? Before Christmas they had been so occupied with packing up and saying goodbye to friends that Caroline had hardly noticed whether her husband’s enthusiasm had waned or not. And she had been so busy since taking on this new role that she’d never thought to ask. Ten years her senior, Gregory Flint was glad to have retired from his position in the city law firm, his sights firmly on the opportunities to see more of Scotland and its outdoor delights.

  Caroline glanced over the wintry landscape, pale grasses blowing sideways as a bitter wind flattened them. Somewhere out there he was climbing a hill, knapsack over his shoulders, a walking pole in each mittened hand.

  A second sigh was cut short as Caroline heard a rap on her door.

  ‘Come in!’ Her throaty voice, the result of a sixty-a-day habit, boomed across the room.

  The door opened to reveal a tall, dark-haired man whose blue eyes fixed on her the moment he entered the room.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Lorimer, ma’am,’ he announced.

  There was a small moment as they looked at one another and Caroline wondered just what he saw. A tired, older woman who had reached the pinnacle of her career? He looked his age anyway, mid forties, she knew from his file.

  ‘Lorimer.’ She smiled and reached out a welcoming hand, glad to feel the strength in his grasp. ‘Come and sit down. D’you want a coffee or anything?’ she asked briskly, hoping that he would decline. She’d rather concentrate on what he had to tell her than be bothered with cups and saucers.

  ‘Thanks, but I just had one,’ he replied, a hint of smile around his lips as though he had guessed her thoughts.

  ‘Right, then, let’s begin.’ DCC Flint folded her hands and placed them on the lap of her black skirt. ‘You spoke to me on the telephone about that case from last year. I remember it,’ she added, looking at him intently. ‘We gave you a bit of help at our end. The so-called banker, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s correct, ma’am,’ Lorimer replied. ‘We managed to arrest all but one of the gang.’

  She watched as he made a face.

  ‘The one we believe to be behind the entire operation,’ he added.

  ‘And you think he may be stirring up the same sort of business again?’

  Lorimer nodded. ‘We think he was sometimes posing as a doctor, sometimes a community nurse, and now he appears to have been working as a hospital orderly. Under an assumed name.’

  ‘Gordon Smith,’ Flint said. ‘Yes, I read your report when you sent it yesterday. Made interesting bedtime reading,’ she added with a wry smile. ‘So, Lorimer. What do you want me to do about it?’

  He leaned forward and placed a small object into her hand. ‘I think you may wish to have a look at this, ma’am.’

  Caroline took it between her finger and thumb and turned it over speculatively as though it might explode at any moment.

  ‘And this contains evidence?’ she murmured.

  Lorimer nodded. ‘You’ll see that the man behind the Queen Elizabeth hospital robbery is one and the same as our man from Quiet Release, so I think there are grounds to reopen the case.’

  ‘With you heading up a team from Stewart Street? Was that your idea?’

  ‘With your permission, ma’am,’ he said, his blue eyes watching her own.

  Caroline sat back and stared at him. She was willing to bet that this man had broken a few criminals in his day with that blue gaze. There was something she wanted to trust about that face. And yet the rumours had reached even DCC Flint’s ears. Was he fit to be given such responsibility so soon after his rehabilitation? She recalled the nasal voice of that fair-haired fellow, Mitchison, a man to whom she had taken an instant dislike when he’d tried to charm her. That sort of thing simply didn’t cut it with Caroline Flint. Her years as an undercover officer had made her good at seeing the real person beneath the façade; it was one of the strengths that had put her where she was today, she thought as she inserted the memory stick into the computer.

  ‘How about we give the case over to the MIT?’ she suggested a few minutes later. ‘See if a crack team can hunt this person down?’ She waved a hand at the screen with its image of the bearded man.

  She watched closely as Lorimer stifled a sigh and tried not to chew his lower lip. He wants this to prove himself as much as to finish the job, she thought suddenly.

  ‘If you say so, ma’am,’ he replied at last. But she could see the disappointment in these blue eyes as they shifted away from her stare.

  ‘With you heading up the team, of course,’ she added slyly. ‘Superintendent Renton is unlikely to come back from her sick leave, I’m afraid, and her job will be up for consideration as soon as she decides on a retirement package. Detective Superintendent Mitchison has been covering for her. Temporarily, you understand.’ She watched Lorimer’s face as her words sank in, hoping that he had noticed her emphasis on Mitchison’s role, and Caroline Flint smiled faintly as though she could read the thoughts behind that serious expression: was she offering him another job? A chance to head up the MIT?

  ‘I believe you know one of the officers there: DCI Cameron?’ the DCC continued smoothly. ‘I think perhaps you’d find him very useful in putting a team together. What do you say?’

  The man’s raised eyebrows were almost comical as he looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Yes, of course!’

  ‘Very well, then. I’ll let Stewart Street know that you’ve been seconded over to Govan at my request and Superintendent Mitchison can be relieved of the extra burden of his current duties,’ Flint replied, standing to show that the meeting was now over.

  Lorimer tilted his head and regarded her with the ghost of smile as though he in his turn were trying to guess what was inside her mind at that moment.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, clasping her hand once again.

  ‘Nothing to thank me for, Lorimer. It isn’t going to be easy. But then, I suspect you aren’t really one to look for an easy berth, are you?’

  She smiled at him properly now and was rewarded with a grin that changed instantly from a solemn expression to one that lit up his whole countenance.

  Yes, Caroline told herself as she closed the door on the tall detective. She liked the cut of this one’s jib, all right. And she had a notion that Detective Superintendent William Lorimer was a man who’d be a good friend if ever she needed one.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Money, Solly had told them. That was what had been at the root of the entire Quiet Release case. There were only a few motives for murder, really, he told his students. Jealousy, desire for power and greed being three that he had seen most in his years as a criminal profiler. Every one of the people behind Quiet Release, including Mary Milligan, had strenuously denied being the person that had administered the lethal injections and Solly had pondered long and hard about the mysterious bearded man, the one who had escaped. Why not delegate the task of injecting morphine to others, particularly a health professional like Mary? The question that had troubled him at the time returned once more to tax his brain. The simple answer was that this person actually wanted to take away the lives of his victims. And not, Solly believed, through any altruistic instinct. Oh, goodness me no, he thought, stroking his beard as he sat beside the window of his office. That would be to endow him with some sort of pity. And he was certain that this individual lacked any empathy whatsoever for his fellow man. The psychopathic personality was one that he was certain fitted this man’s profile and the professor was beginning to toy with the idea that this man enjoyed the act of killing simply because it gave him power over the moment of life and death.

  What sort of childhood produced a person like this? Had he been the only son of domineering parents, forced to do things that he didn’t want to? Kicking against an authority that he yearned to escape? Or maybe he’d been one of several kids, striving for attention, wanting to make his parents notice him. Well, weren’t most teenagers like that for a time? Rebellious phases were natural but few ever led to a longing to take the lives of other people.

  Money had become a secondary motive for the notorious Dr Shipman’s killing spree but evidence pointed to the fact that the general practitioner had rarely benefited financially from murdering his patients. No, the man had lusted after the God-like power to decide when a person was to die, a megalomania so intense that it was estimated there may have been more than two hundred and fifty victims, though he was charged with but fifteen deaths.

  What had Shipman’s background been like? Solly turned his thoughts to a lecture that he had given recently on the subject. Shipman had been the son of a devout couple, the mother dying when Harold had been in his teens. He’d been the one to give her morphine to release her from her pain, Solly reminded his students, a statement that always elicited a gasp from the audience.

  Perhaps they needed to look a little further into the past, to investigate the background of doctors whose parents had died when they were young. Or was that the best way to go? Solly sighed, imagining the nightmare of tracking that sort of information down. What if…? His thoughts raced around as he tried to focus on his subject and what little they knew about him.

  When he’d been spotted by Lorimer on that national news programme the bearded man had been acting as a hospital orderly, not as a qualified medical person. And he’d been seen that early morning last year outside the home of an elderly victim, posing on that occasion as a district nurse.

  What if, unlike Shipman, he wasn’t a qualified doctor at all, but had some knowledge of medical training? Solly tapped a pencil against his even white teeth, a memory twitching in his brain. Hadn’t he’d compiled some information from the internet, intending to write up lecture notes on the subject? There had been a medical student who had been kicked out of his course here at Glasgow University but had returned under an assumed name, trying again and again to obtain his degree. A local chap, if he remembered correctly. It had been a newspaper sensation at the time, opinion divided between those who thought the fellow a dangerous crank and those who felt sorry for his failed efforts to become a doctor.

  What if a sense of failure had led the man behind Quiet Release to carry out these acts of killing? Was he trying to prove something? To his parents? To a society that had rejected him? Solly heaved a sigh. He could follow a line of thought like this all day and still it was all conjecture. But the pattern of behaviour was a sort of evidence after all. And he was beginning to see that this was a very dangerous individual who would never stop killing, especially now that he had obtained such a large quantity of morphine. Just where, wondered Solly, would he strike next?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Why did he not simply buy a ticket to some warm part of the world and live out his life comfortably overseas? Yet the notion of such enforced idleness lacked appeal. Wouldn’t he be better to head for a country further north, like Denmark, where he could continue his work? Now, here was a place that attracted him. The Danes were sensible folk, after all, and he could see them sharing his vision for an end-of-life strategy. He stood staring moodily out of the picture window that overlooked the River Clyde, his penthouse apartment giving him a panoramic view south-west of the city. Today the distant hills were obscured by low cloud and the water below him was being blown into squally waves as the fierce wind ran across its leaden surface.

  What was he doing here in Glasgow? There was no sense of nostalgia for his home town, nothing like that to keep him here, after all. Both of his parents were long gone and he had no siblings or offspring tugging at his coat-tails. And as for a woman… well, he could find one anywhere he chose. Not that he relished the thought of a long-term attachment. Having a woman stay here, cluttering up his domain, did not appeal in the slightest.

  Mary Milligan was one of the few that had stayed with him overnight, but caution had made him move away from that previous flat in the West End after she was committed to the State Mental Hospital. He’d taken advantage of a quick sale by a Glasgow footballer, who was heading to the big time down south, and moved here in the weeks before Christmas, a slack period for the estate agent who was eager to meet his price. And if the man’s eyebrows had been raised when he’d paid with a briefcase full of cash, then that was too bad. The bloke could think whatever he liked.

  He could tell that the persona of Charles Graham had charmed Gallagher, all right, and he smiled as he saw his clean-shaven reflection in the dull glass. Was that what was keeping him here? The thought of doing business with the gangster? Had he even felt a thrill when Gallagher had approved his ideas? Not really, he admitted to himself. It was a bit of fun to play the part but he knew deep down that what really kept him here was a pull of a different sort.

  His list was growing week by week, these vagrant addicts, all on the lookout for drugs, whose identities he aimed to secure for his own use. They would do anything for a fix, anything at all. And once they had outlived their usefulness he would take pleasure in putting them to sleep, one by one, thus ridding the city of more undeserving mouths to feed.

  The image of that old woman in the East End flat came back to him and he clenched his fists, imagining it all again…

  His fingers twitched as he remembered wielding the syringe, plunging his poison into the tired old veins and watching closely until that last gasp took Ellen Blackburn from the world. He wanted to do that again. And again…

  Turning away from the rainswept view, he began to plan how he would ensnare his next victim.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ‘You’ve got to be joking!’

  Lorimer was sitting in the staff car park at Govan police station listening to his friend. ‘There is no way on earth that resources could be found for an investigation into something as tenuous as that, Solly.’

  There was the customary silence from the professor of psychology and Lorimer waited, frowning despite being used to the other man’s lengthy pauses in conversation. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, casting a glance at the digital clock. There were still several minutes before the officers inside the building expected to greet him. Lorimer gritted his teeth, then remembered what he had been told at Castlebrae about releasing tension. He breathed in and out then held his breath for a count of four.

  ‘You don’t mind, then, if I look into that myself.’ Solly’s voice came back to him but he heard no sign of a question there.

  ‘So long as you’re careful not to muddy the waters, Solly. And report back to me personally with anything you find, okay?’

  He could imagine the smile and the nod from his friend as he cut the call. It would not be the first time that Professor Solomon Brightman had conducted a little unofficial investigation. Police Scotland had been glad of the expert services of the profiler in some cases of multiple murder, but there had been other times when his friend had stepped out on his own, intent on pursuing a line of thought without the least regard for his time and trouble, never mind his own safety.

  Lorimer knew only too well what skills his friend could bring to a situation like this where they continued to seek the man behind Quiet Release. He just hoped that the men and women inside this building would be as prepared to throw their resources into finding him at last.