Lorimer sat reading the report on his computer screen, taking in the details. There was no doubt. The man that had taken the lives of these women had murdered this poor young man in Edinburgh. A cold shiver went down his spine.

  Maggie.

  She must have been selected, like those others, for the attention of this madman. He reached for his mobile, thinking only one thing: she must come home at once. But she’d have hers switched off right now, he remembered, tossing the phone back on to the pile of papers on his desk.

  Lorimer ran a hand through his hair, trying to gather his thoughts. How best to proceed with this? He wanted to rush out this very moment and drive to wherever Maggie was, bring her home to safety. But there were other considerations that had not escaped his thoughts. His wife’s involvement might change things completely, could even preclude him from heading up the case now that he had a personal interest. That decision was surely up to Iain Macintosh, the Fiscal. He sat back, drumming impatient fingers on his desk top, thinking hard.

  Molly Newton listened as the detective superintendent took them through the latest revelation. That murder in Edinburgh had been committed by the same perp who’d killed the Donovan woman and Carolyn Kane, effectively ruling out Jake Richardson. She breathed in a sigh of despair at all the man hours spent trawling through irrelevant data not to mention the countless interviews with members of the public.

  ‘The discovery of Celia Gemmell’s body only adds to our view that the same man targeted these women who so resembled one another,’ she heard Lorimer saying. ‘I am waiting for confirmation about who will continue to lead this case,’ he said, fixing them all with his blue gaze. ‘But it seems I may have a conflict of interest.’

  Molly listened, appalled, as he went on to describe Mrs Lorimer’s involvement with the young man in Edinburgh who had sought her out at several book signings.

  ‘The bogus security man, styling himself Christopher G. Stevenson – though that is almost certainly an alias – is our number-one priority now.’

  Murmuring amongst the team broke out as Lorimer turned to sip from his glass of water. Who would take over if the Fiscal decreed that Lorimer was off the case? Molly glanced at DCI Cameron, sitting next to the boss, his long legs stretched out, arms folded as he regarded Lorimer. Probably, she thought. He was close to Lorimer and would keep him well informed every step of the way. But then, perhaps Lorimer would be permitted to continue with the case, given that it had been the Edinburgh DI who had interviewed Margaret Lorimer.

  She watched as Lorimer switched on the overhead projector and fiddled with the device, getting the focus right.

  ‘Here’s an artist’s impression of the man,’ he told them, standing slightly to one side so that everyone had a good view of the suspect. ‘My wife had several conversations with him and has a good recall for faces,’ he added.

  Molly stared at the image, seeing a man in his fifties, perhaps, with thinning grey hair and moustache over a downturned mouth and eyes that were couched in small folds of flesh. A military type in his youth, she wondered, though maybe it was the moustache that suggested that.

  ‘Medium height, maybe five feet nine or ten,’ Lorimer continued. ‘Well spoken but with no particular accent, certainly not recognisably Aberdeen or Edinburgh. Maggie thought he had a nice voice,’ he added bitterly. The irony of this observation was not lost on any of them, Molly decided, noticing the small silence that followed his remark. Whoever this guy was, he had an avuncular sort of appearance, not the face of a deranged madman with rolling bloodshot eyes. And, she knew, this might make it all the harder to find him. Her thoughts flashed back to the images of other men who had seemed perfectly nice and she shuddered remembering the face of Thomas Hamilton, the man who had taken all those precious young lives in the Dunblane massacre.

  ‘Until we have further instructions from the Fiscal we do not know if we are going to go public with this,’ Lorimer said, tapping the edge of the screen. ‘I’d prefer to keep it in-house for now, though, so nothing has to be talked about outside these walls, okay?’

  Again an approving murmur met Molly’s ears. None of their officers would dream of spilling information that might endanger a case, particularly one as fraught as this.

  ‘Is Mrs Lorimer back home, sir?’ someone asked and Molly was surprised to see the boss shake his head.

  ‘No, not yet. She decided to carry on with her book tour since there are just two days left,’ he said. His voice sounded perfectly normal, Molly thought, but the shadows under those eyes told a different story.

  A knock on the door made everyone look towards it and Molly saw one of the detective constables slip in, walk smartly up to Lorimer and hand him a sheet of paper.

  She could not make out the whispered words, but the DC’s eyes were shining with excitement as she spoke. And Lorimer’s open-mouthed reaction as he read whatever was on that paper made every officer in the room look towards the front, Molly leaning forwards expectantly. Something was happening, anyone could see that.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said as the DC took a seat just beyond the table. Then, taking a deep breath he waved the paper in the air.

  ‘This has just come in,’ he told them. ‘A report from forensics that confirms another match to the mud found on Celia Gemmell’s wellington boots.’ He paused, letting them all puzzle out what this might mean.

  ‘The water butt outside Patricia Donovan’s home was examined as part of an extensive search by our forensic team recently,’ he explained. ‘And traces of the same mud were found attached to the wooden rim. They conclude that someone had been standing on top of that barrel,’ he continued. ‘And a partial print has been found that looks as if it came from the sole of a size-eight hiking boot.’

  ‘The stalker!’ Molly blurted out before she could stop herself.

  ‘That’s what we can presume.’ Lorimer nodded, looking directly at her and making her cheeks flush. ‘And it gives us yet one more link between Celia Gemmell’s place of burial, the same area she had visited wearing her new wellingtons some time earlier, and whoever had stood on top of that water butt.’

  It was all coming together, Lorimer thought, but just as it did, there was every chance he might be taken off the case. He had given the team all of the up-to-date information plus that latest report from the forensic scientists in Gartcosh, and now the main thrust of the investigation was to find out the identity of this middle-aged man who had haunted these women. And who had succeeded in befriending his own wife.

  There was a certain excitement now that different strands were being linked, thanks both to the painstaking work of the MIT team and to Professor Dawson’s expertise. There was one other person he needed to speak to, however, and just at that moment a knock on his door heralded the very man he wanted to see.

  ‘Solly, come on in. You were there to hear all this latest news?’ Lorimer stood up to greet his friend. Solly had indeed been seated at the back of the boardroom, legs crossed, listening intently to the detective superintendent.

  ‘You wanted an update on the profile,’ Solly said smoothly, sitting on one of the pair of comfortable armchairs that Lorimer used for visitors. ‘But there is something else we need to discuss first,’ he said, looking Lorimer straight in the eye.

  ‘Oh?’

  Solly heaved a sigh and shook his head slightly. ‘Hard to know how to tell you this,’ he began. ‘Maggie called me and asked if I might help her,’ he said. ‘I think the woman who has been taking her around Scotland these past few days has had an agenda of her own, shall we say.’

  Lorimer frowned. ‘Ivy Thornton? What has she been doing?’

  ‘I suspect that she has been trying to deliberately frighten Maggie with a bogus stalker,’ Solly said, still looking carefully at his friend to see his reaction.

  ‘She … what? Good God! I knew there was something about that woman,’ he exclaimed, thumping the arm of his chair. ‘Never took to her from the outset. Not at all like Maggie’s nice agent in Edinburgh. How do you know all this?’

  Solly explained about Maggie’s misgivings and what she had overheard Ivy saying on her mobile. ‘My contacts in the publishing world tell me that she has a reputation for being quite unscrupulous when it comes to getting media coverage for her authors,’ he told Lorimer. ‘Now I think Maggie is ready to confront her about the nuisance call and other stuff that was designed to make it look as though she had a stalker.’

  ‘This complicates things,’ Lorimer muttered darkly. ‘Maggie already made the mistake of thinking Christopher Stevenson, or whatever the hell his name is, was sent by me to protect her. Now you’re telling me that the Thornton woman’s been playing games like this?’

  Solly nodded slowly. ‘But I do not think that she had anything to do with the man whose image you just showed us,’ he said. ‘He has been the real stalker, following Maggie around on at least part of her book tour, whilst Ivy Thornton set up a chap in the London publishers named Paul Fellows to make that filthy phone call.’

  ‘I’ll have the woman’s guts for garters,’ Lorimer growled.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry unduly.’ Solly gave a faint smile. ‘Once the truth comes out in the press then her career will be finished. Something rather fitting about doing it that way, don’t you think?’

  Lorimer nodded. He’d still like to pursue the woman on a criminal charge, all the same, but perhaps Martin Enderby would be happy to take on a scoop if he were to ask him? It would indeed be appropriate if the very journo the Thornton woman had duped were to be part of her downfall.

  ‘Right,’ he said, leaning forward and handing Solly a copy of the artist’s impression he’d so recently shown the team. ‘Let’s get on with the other business now, shall we? What do you make of this man?’

  Solly looked at the image for a while as though pondering something then sat back and recrossed his legs.

  ‘It isn’t the sort of face one would expect to see on a multiple murderer or a man that stalks young women,’ he murmured. ‘But then we are always dealing with appearance and reality, aren’t we?’

  Lorimer nodded his agreement. The face he had shown the team was one that was hardly memorable and not in the least suggesting a deviant personality.

  ‘Let me take you through one theory I have,’ Solly began, uncrossing his legs and sitting forward a little. ‘It’s to do with mapping,’ he continued. ‘The areas where the deaths occurred and where the two were found in parkland interested me particularly. It suggested that our perpetrator might live not too far away.’

  ‘But Celia Gemmell—’ Lorimer began to protest but was stopped by Solly’s raised hand.

  ‘Hear me out,’ the psychologist interrupted. ‘Celia worked in roughly the same area of the Southside. Bankbrae is approximately halfway between Shawlands and Bellahouston. Now, your own home is in Giffnock, about the same distance from Shawlands as here, right?’

  Lorimer nodded. Helen Street, where the MIT was housed in the large police office, was across the road from one side of Bellahouston Park.

  ‘Say our killer goes on foot from wherever he lives and meets up with Carolyn last summer and Patricia much more recently. Who’s to say he hadn’t already selected Celia when she was working in Bankbrae?’

  Lorimer frowned. ‘You think he stalked her?’ he asked doubtfully.

  Solly gave a vague smile. ‘Actually, no,’ he admitted. ‘I think his relationship with Celia was rather different. The deposits in her bank account could be the proceeds from a different sort of work.’ He nodded meaningfully, catching Lorimer’s eye.

  ‘You think she may have been on the game?’

  ‘Yes. Now, bear with me for a moment. Say our man was in the habit of picking Celia up after work at or near the primary school then taking her off in his car. That might explain why her body was found out in the countryside.’

  Lorimer’s thoughts turned to the rugged blond PE teacher. He was big and strong enough to have overpowered a woman like Celia. And he had admitted to being interested in amateur dramatics. Could he have disguised himself as an older man to stalk Maggie? But what about the place with the ruined house? Did Johnstone have any connection with that? PE teachers were involved in crosscountry runs, after all, weren’t they?

  ‘But why did he kill her in the first place? Surely, if he was a regular client then he’d have wanted to keep her alive for his own purposes?’

  ‘Ah.’ Solly smiled. ‘Now that is the question. And why, one might ask, was there no sign of sexual activity with the other victims? Not a trace of semen anywhere.’

  ‘What are you trying to say, Solly?’

  The psychologist gave another sigh, the smile fading from his face. ‘I’m not quite sure yet,’ he admitted, ‘but I have an inkling about these women and why he eventually killed them. One, how similar they are in appearance, suggests to my mind that there was a woman in his past whose memory was triggered by seeing them. And two,’ he held up his thumb and index finger, ‘I imagine this chap is physically incapable of a sexual act.’

  Lorimer breathed out slowly. Solomon Brightman had obviously given the case a great deal of thought though these theories were surely tenuous at best. He stifled the impulse to object, remembering so many cases in the past when Solly’s expertise had drawn a profile of a killer that had been uncannily correct in many ways.

  ‘You’ll have all of this down I writing, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Solly nodded. ‘And if someone else takes over from you they will have my fullest cooperation,’ he added firmly.

  ‘Hello, you.’ Maggie’s voice made his heart soar for a moment then he sat back on his office chair, Solly’s revelation still in his thoughts.

  ‘Hello yourself,’ he replied gruffly. ‘Where are you now? Think I’ve lost track.’

  ‘Dumfries,’ Maggie replied. ‘I’m actually sitting in the loo next to the green room in a theatre. Only place I could talk to you without being overheard.’ She giggled.

  ‘I’ll understand when I hear a toilet flushing, then,’ Lorimer said drily. ‘I guess it’s hard to talk when she’s always around. Have you said anything to her yet?’ he asked. ‘Solly’s brought me up to speed with all of her shenanigans,’ he added sourly.

  ‘No,’ Maggie replied. ‘Not yet. I think we’ll be having a little chat once we get back to our hotel, though. And it’s just one more overnight in Ayr then we’re back on home territory. A bookshop in Newton Mearns, then home.’ There was a pause as each of them considered this statement. Then Maggie spoke again. ‘Don’t suppose there’s any chance you could pick me up from Newton Mearns and take me home?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be there, I promise. Tell you what. Keep your phone switched on for now. Never know when I might need to contact you.’ He bit his lip. He’d give anything to drive down to see her right now but meantime they simply had to wait and depend on the assistance of local police officers to keep an eye on Maggie. Tomorrow the decision of whether to allow him to continue heading up this case would be known. But he wouldn’t tell Maggie that just yet.

  ‘Got to go,’ Maggie whispered. ‘I can hear you-know-who calling me.’

  And with that Lorimer heard the click that signalled the end of the call.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  It was a lovely theatre, Maggie thought, smoothing down her velvet skirt and smiling out at the audience. Perhaps some of its charm came from the fact that it was in Dumfries, last home to Scotland’s national bard. She had been a bit put out earlier as they’d entered the town, Ivy pointing out some derelict shopfronts and charity shops while Maggie had been gazing at the old buildings and imagining the streets as they were in the days when Robert Burns had walked them. For a person who worked in the world of literature, Ivy had little real interest in books other than how to promote them, Maggie had gradually realised. If her career did take off Ivy Thornton would be the last person she’d want around. She was a phony as well as unscrupulous.

  There were sufficient numbers in the audience to justify a stop here and the local Waterstones bookstore had set up their stall out in the foyer. Now it simply remained to speak to the people who had come to hear her and read some excerpts from the book. She ought to be an old hand at this by now, Maggie thought, but for some reason she was more nervous than ever. The lady by her side was a celebrated children’s author who had agreed to interview Margaret Lorimer on stage tonight and Maggie had warmed to the woman as they’d chatted in the green room. So why should she be so tense? The answer came all too easily: what if Christopher was here, in this audience? Her stomach churned, imagining the dreadful things this man had done. And he’d selected her. Just because she reminded him of someone in his past, Solly had hinted. The thought of him somewhere in the crowded theatre, watching and listening to her, made Maggie feel sick. She’d read about stalkers; how their quest to hunt down the woman with whom they were obsessed was totally relentless. They never gave up and years could pass before they made any sort of move. If the police failed to catch this predator would she have to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder? Maggie took several deep breaths to quell her nerves.

  Be sensible, she told herself. What on earth can go wrong? After all, there was a local chap from CID standing near the theatre entrance who had been given the image that had been drawn in Edinburgh, a picture that had not really satisfied Maggie in the end. It looked like anyone’s dad at a Sixth year parents’ night, though the moustache was rather old-fashioned.

  Now the local children’s author was introducing her and Maggie felt a familiar glow of warmth on her cheeks as the white-haired lady showered praise on Gibby the Ghost of Glen Darnel.

  *

  He had shed the moustache and added a pair of thick spectacles, the fisherman’s hat pulled down over his hair to complete the disguise. Looking at his reflection earlier in the bathroom mirror of his B&B out in the countryside, he had chuckled at what he had seen: a chap in a tweed jacket and green trousers, the epitome of a country gentleman. Of course he would be sure to keep well away from Margaret’s gaze tonight.