Waiting for Wednesday

Maybe he would even paint the
walls.
    He took a lasagne from the freezer and put
it into the oven. The back of the packet said fifty minutes from frozen. That would give
him time. He went to his study. This was theone part of the house
that had always been tidy, clean and organized. He took the map from the desk, unfolded
it and laid it out on the floor. He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out the
card covered with red stickers. He peeled off one sticker and carefully placed it on the
village of Denham, just south of Oxford. He stood back. There were seven of them now and
a pattern was clearly forming.
    Fearby took a sip of whisky and asked
himself the question he’d asked himself many times before: was he fooling himself?
He’d read about murderers and their habits. How they were like predatory animals
that operated in territories where they felt comfortable. But he’d also read about
the dangers of seeing patterns in random collections of data. You fire arbitrary shots
at a wall, then draw a target around the marks that are closest together and it looks as
if you were aiming at it. He examined the map. Five of them were close to the M40 and
three to the M1, no more then twenty minutes’ drive from a motorway exit. It
seemed completely obvious and compelling. But there was a problem. As he’d read
through newspapers, checked online, for missing teenage girls, one of his main criteria
in weeding them out was looking for families near motorways, so maybe he was creating
the pattern himself. But he thought of the girls’ faces, the stories. It felt
right to him. It smelled right. But what good was that?



FORTY-FIVE
    Karlsson sat down opposite Russell Lennox.
Yvette started the recorder and sat to one side.
    ‘You know you’re still under
caution,’ Karlsson said, ‘and that you’re entitled to legal
representation.’ Lennox gave a faint nod. He seemed dazed, barely responsive.
‘You need to say it aloud. For the tape, or chip, or whatever it is.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Lennox. ‘I
understand. I’m fine.’
    ‘You’re quite a family,’
said Karlsson. Lennox looked blank. ‘You seem to do damage to everyone you come
into contact with.’
    ‘We’re a family in which the
wife and mother was killed,’ said Lennox, hoarsely. ‘Is that what you
mean?’
    ‘And now your daughter’s
boyfriend.’
    ‘I didn’t know about that, until
I heard about the death.’
    ‘The murder. Zach Greene was hit with
a blunt instrument. Like your wife.’ There was a pause. ‘How did you feel
about him?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘About your fifteen-year-old
daughter’s relationship with a twenty-eight-year-old man.’
    ‘As I said, I didn’t know about
it. Now that I do, I feel concern for my daughter. For her welfare.’
    ‘Mr Greene died some time during the
day yesterday. Can you tell us where you were?’
    ‘I was at home. I’ve been at
home a lot lately.’
    ‘Was anyone with you?’
    ‘The children were at school. I was
there when Dora came home at about ten past four.’
    ‘What did you do at home?’
    Lennox seemed terribly tired, as if even
talking was a great effort. ‘Why don’t you just ask me if I killed that man?
That must be why you brought me in here.’
    ‘Did you kill him?’
    ‘No, I didn’t.’
    ‘All right, so what did you do at
home?’
    ‘I pottered around. Sorted through
some things.’
    ‘Maybe you can help us by coming up
with something we can check. Did someone call round? Did you make any calls? Did you go
online?’
    ‘Nobody came round. I probably made
some calls and went online.’
    ‘We can check that.’
    ‘I watched a bit of TV.’
    ‘What did you watch?’
    ‘The usual rubbish. Probably something
to do with antiques.’
    ‘Probably something to do with
antiques,’ said Karlsson, slowly, as if he was thinking about it as he repeated
it. ‘I’m going to stop this now.’ He leaned forward and pressed a
button on the recorder. ‘You’re going to go away and have a think, maybe
talk to a lawyer and come up with something better than what you’ve said. And
meanwhile we’ll make our own checks on who you were phoning and where you
were.’ He stood up. ‘You need to think of your children, your family. How
much more of this are they meant to take?’
    Lennox rubbed his face, like a man checking
whether he’d shaved. ‘I think about them every minute of every day,’
he said.
    Chris Munster was waiting for Karlsson in his
office. He had just