Shooting in the Dark

head. ‘It’s not like that. You have to make your own diagnosis.’
    ‘Then I’m not,’ she said. She sniffed at her glass and took a sip. ‘I like a drink and I can’t remember the last time I fell down.’
    ‘OK. So you’re doing good.’
    Angeles turned towards him, tried to imagine the expression on his face. ‘Then what happened? After they arrested him?’
    ‘Hardwicke arrived with a van-load of guys. They combed the house, took away armfuls of documents, different devices. He had a home-made torture chamber in there.’
    ‘And his girlfriend. What about her?’
    ‘They picked her up from the café. Took her down the station.’
    ‘What kind of torture?’
    ‘Heavy. He had something to cause electric shocks. There was leather gear and knives.’
    She tried to imagine being cut or electrocuted and enjoying it. She shook her head from side to side. ‘So he’s a random killer? He’s a sadist who fixated on Isabel and me? Is that what we’re saying?’
    ‘I don’t think so. The guy himself s not saying anything. But it looks and feels like something personal to me. Plus he’s a psychologist, you’d expect him to have a reason.’ Her sensitive fingers found the edge of the brass fender and she traced the floral patterning. ‘I don’t know any psychologists and I’m certain that Isabel didn’t. How old is he?’
    ‘About your age, maybe a couple of years older.’
    ‘What’s he called?’
    ‘Jenkins. Rod Jenkins.’
    She shook her head. ‘Why me, Sam? Why Isabel and me? There’s got to be a reason.’
    ‘D’you want to tell me about the accident at the pond?’ She whirled around on him. ‘Why? How can that have anything to do with it?’
    ‘I don’t know. Everything else comes up blank. It might lead somewhere, give us a clue.’
    She sat upright on the rug, crossed her legs. She’d found the fire-fork and as she spoke she rocked it backward and forward on the stone hearth. It set up a tapping rhythm, somehow comforting, as she recollected the events of a day far in the past.
    ‘I was tiny,’ she said. ‘Five years old, Isabel would be about three. It was a Sunday morning. Daddy was going to take us out in the car that afternoon. Mummy was baking a cake in the kitchen, making sandwiches. We would be sledding and then have a picnic in the car.
    ‘I said I’d look after Isabel, we’d play around in the paddock outside the house. And Mummy wanted us out from under her feet. “Not on the road.” She always said that.
    ‘I don’t know how we got to the pond. I suppose we just wandered. You know what it’s like in the countryside after the snow has fallen, the landscape was magical. Everything was glistening and new and I remember showing Isabel that there were no footprints in the snow, and then looking back and seeing our own footprints, like the only footprints in the whole world.
    ‘It was a big pond, not very deep. In the summer, the rest of the year, there were ducks. Sometimes you could walk around the edge and disturb frogs and they’d jump in, almost too late, so you’d nearly stand on them.
    ‘That morning it was frozen over. I remember throwing stones on to the ice and watching them bounce around. It was while I was throwing stones that Isabel went on to the ice. She didn’t walk on to it; she fell on to it, rolled down the bank and landed on the ice. She didn’t cry, just sat there beaming up at me as though she’d done something special. She was a beautiful child, always smiling.
    ‘I picked my way down the bank and on to the ice, but as soon as I got there my feet slid away under me and then we were both sitting there. It felt as though the pond was frozen right through. It was completely hard, like concrete.
    ‘I ran into the middle and Isabel came wobbling after me. We were dancing, singing and dancing on the ice, slipping and sliding and falling over. We must have been making a racket because someone rang the fire brigade.
    ‘When my foot went through the ice it only added to the fun. There was no sense of danger with us. We carried on dancing and jumping around. At some point I remember hearing the ice cracking. It was as if the earth was splitting apart. It was loud, the kind of noise that you stop and listen to. We couldn’t see anything but we could hear the run of the fissures and breaks as the surface cracked up around us.
    ‘I didn’t understand what was happening but a sixth sense took over and I made Isabel sit down with me. I put