so fascinated by a report in her entire career. If this was the future of policing, she desperately wanted to be part of it. At last, she came to the end of the main body of text and turned to a separate sheet.
Points to pursue: i. Had any of the victims ever mentioned to a friend relative that they had been the subject of an unwanted homosexual approach? If so, when, where and from whom?
1. The killer is a stalker. His first encounter with his victims probably takes place quite a long time before he kills weeks rather than days. Where is he encountering them? It may be something as banal as where they take their dry-cleaning, where they have their shoes heeled, where they buy sandwiches, where they have tyres or exhausts put on their cars. Given that they all lived close to the tram network, I think we should check whether the victims regularly used the trams to go to and from work, or to go out in the evenings. I suggest that in-depth background checks are done, going through bank accounts, credit-card statements and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, girlfriends and family members. This may help develop suspects.
3. Is there any indication that the victims were keeping the night in question free for any particular purpose? Gareth Finnegan lied to his girlfriend about it - did any of the others?
4. Where is he doing his killing? It's unlikely to be in his home, since he will have calculated the possibility of being arrested, and will have taken pains to avoid leaving forensic traces there. It's also got to be big enough for him to build and use the torture engines we are assuming in these cases. It may be an isolated lock-up garage, or a unit on an industrial estate which is deserted at night. Bearing in mind that he almost certainly lives in Bradfield, it's possible that there exists an isolated rural property that he has undisturbed access to.
5. He must have found out about instruments of torture somewhere so that he could construct his own. It might be worth checking with book shops and libraries to see if any of their customers has enquired about or ordered books on torture.
Carol flicked back a few pages, rereading a couple of paragraphs which had particularly struck her first time through. She found it hard to credit how quickly Tony had assimilated the stacks of files she'd delivered. Not only that, but he'd drawn out of them the key points that created for the first time in Carol's mind a picture, albeit shadowy, of the man she was hunting.
But the profile raised questions in her mind. At least one of those questions didn't seem to have occurred to Tony. She wondered if it wasn't referred to because he had dismissed it out of hand. Either way, she had to know. And she had to find a way of asking that didn't sound like an attack.
I hated to keep Gareth hanging on, but I had to leave him for one little errand. In his car, I'd found a few of the Christmas cards his company sent out to favoured clients, already signed by all the partners. Inside one, with a fountain pen, a stencil set and Gareth's blood, I'd written in block capitals, 'a merry christmas to all your
READERS; YOUR EXCLUSIVE CHRISTMAS GIFT IS WAITING IN THE SHRUBBERY OF
CARLTON PARK BEHIND THE BANDSTAND. COMPLIMENTS OF THE
season from santa claws. " It wasn't easy to write with the blood; it kept congealing on the nib, which I had to clean every few letters.
Luckily, there was no shortage of ink.
I addressed a Jiffy bag to the editor of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times and put the card in it, along with a video I'd made a couple of weeks before, when I'd started to plan what to do with Gareth. I'd already decided to change my modus operandi slightly.
Temple Fields was bound to be risky now, even if the queens were too drunk or stoned to be vigilant, the police would be keeping an eye open for more than the occasional cottaging poof. But the nature trail through the shrubbery of Carlton Park is almost as notorious a pick-up area.
Early on a rainy Sunday morning, when there was nobody about, I'd driven out to Carlton Park with my cam corder I started off by the wrought-iron bandstand. I walked around it, filming it from every angle. It wouldn't take long before somebody