Shallow Ground (Detective Ford) by Andy Maslen (to read list txt) 📕

left you have a partial latent I lifted from the tin of beans the killer used to stun Angie. On the right, one from Paul Eadon’s front door.’

‘Any points of comparison?’

‘That’s what I’m looking for. I’ve found three, but you know that’s insufficient evidence to even think of taking to the CPS.’

‘I’m leaving for the day. I need to be in for Sam. Do you want to start work on our profile? I thought, if you didn’t mind, we could work at mine.’

She scrubbed at her eyes and smiled up at him, nodding. ‘I drove in today, so I’ll see you at Windgather.’

‘OK. I have a few things to finish up, so don’t worry if you get there before me. Sam can always let you in.’

A little later, Ford pulled on to his drive to see Hannah getting out of a shiny black Mini. Correction: a sparkling black Mini, with glossy, wet-look tyres.

He pointed at it. ‘Nice. New?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve had it for one year, three months and four days.’

‘Wow! Did you just have it valeted?’

‘No,’ she said, a note of surprise evident in her answer. ‘I like to look after it myself.’

Ford turned back and clocked his own car. The Discovery was coated with a fine brown powder. According to the weather forecast that morning, it had been blown all the way to England from the Sahara. Then he saw Hannah’s number plate.

SC13NCE

‘Cool plate for a CSI.’

‘It is, isn’t it? I bought it at auction and I paid £1,650.73, including VAT and buyer’s premium.’

Ford smiled, shaking his head. He didn’t think she could help it. In fact, he didn’t think she knew she was doing it. But he liked her for it. How lovely to be that unselfconscious.

‘Hi, Sam,’ Hannah said when they arrived in the kitchen. ‘Homework?’

Sam looked up from under his mop of curls. ‘Biology. It sucks.’

‘I got an A-star in A-level biology and studied human endocrinology as a subsidiary during my BSc. I took a starred first. Maybe I can help?’

Ford watched as his son, sometimes as uncommunicative as a stroppy suspect with a savvy brief, bonded with a virtual stranger over the science of monoclonal antibodies. He smiled, shaking his head and putting the kettle on. His ears pricked as he heard Sam talk about ‘cancer treatment’ and ‘measuring blood hormones’.

There it was again. Blood. Cancer. Fentanyl. Medics. A dead nurse and a dead inpatient at SDH. Are you the key, Abbott?

Later, after a brief meal, Ford took Hannah up to the spare room he’d kitted out as a home office.

‘Have a seat,’ he said, indicating a worn leather armchair.

He grabbed an A4 notepad and a sharp pencil from a clay pot on his desk, glazed with ‘Daddy’ in childish brushstrokes.

‘Do you want to start?’ he said.

‘We’re looking for a man. I’m ninety-nine per cent sure. It could be a tall, powerfully built woman, but’ – she wrinkled her nose – ‘I don’t think it is.’

‘Agreed. A man fixated by blood.’

She nodded. ‘As I said to Detective Superintendent Monroe, I am prepared to say that we are looking for a psychopath.’

‘No emotions.’

‘That’s a common misconception. Psychopaths have what we call shallow affect. It means his emotional responses are very basic. Anger, frustration, lust. When interviewed they will talk about love, but if you probe, all they mean is sex.’

Ford had a flash of insight. ‘Have you ever interviewed a psychopath? Is that what you were doing in the US?’

Immediately, she dropped her gaze from his. ‘I prefer to not talk about that.’

There it was again. That closed-down look in her eyes. A fractional shift in her posture to shield herself.

What is it, Hannah? What happened to you? I sense it was bad, because you’re so open about everything else. Wanting to help her but unwilling to probe her well-established defences, Ford decided to leave it. For now.

‘Let’s talk about the killer. Our killer,’ he said instead.

‘He has no empathy,’ Hannah said flatly. ‘He sees other human beings purely as things he can use to gratify his desires.’

‘So he won’t understand that other people have feelings?’

‘He might know it, on an intellectual level. But he won’t care. And he won’t be able to imagine what those feelings are. Plenty of psychopaths enjoy inflicting pain,’ she said. ‘So we can assume they at least understand the pain response as some sort of feeling. But he’ll feel no remorse.’

‘Clever? Below-average IQ?’

‘He can talk his way into people’s homes. He’s forensically aware, as we’ve not found any DNA so far, and minimal physical evidence. Psychopaths can be very high achievers. Plenty of corporate CEOs score highly on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.’

‘What if I go out on a limb and say I think he’s organised and therefore on the clever end of the spectrum?’

She blinked. ‘What do you mean, “spectrum”?’

‘The scale of how intelligent psychopaths tend to be. You just said—’

‘Oh. Yes. Let’s say cunning, though,’ she said. ‘For your information, we tend not to talk about organised versus disorganised killers these days. Many cases have come to light where the perpetrator’s levels of control shift over time. But using the term for now, organised serial killers often live with a partner,’ she said. ‘So we won’t find a six-foot-tall, shaggy-haired monster driving a grey transit van with a red stripe over the roof. And I think he has some level of medical knowledge.’

Ford picked up on the oddly detailed hypothetical description. Filed it. Moved on.

‘Although he could just have got that off the internet,’ he said.

‘Yes, or by working in a hospital.’

‘When you were investigating the scenes, did you get any sense he might have taken a trophy?’

She shook her head. ‘Not from the bodies. The trouble is, you can’t see what’s missing if you don’t know what was there before. What philosophers call a known unknown.’

‘Fair enough. We’ll leave that for now. But if we find something on a suspect or at their property, it’ll be fantastic in court,’ he said. ‘So we have