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Jackie was the key. Perhaps, with a little help and a little luck, she wouldn’t face losing him.
    By the third, she saw that it was just a question of juggling her plans for the evening, and keeping the right people on her side.

SIX

    DI Marks reached the top of the stairs and headed down the corridor, towards his office. He was reviewing the statement he’d just made to the local paper, turning it over again in his head. It preoccupied him, though no one would have known because he had always found it so easy to remain expressionless.
    For example, he knew that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Emily, currently had a crush on a lad called Pip. Pip was taking his GCSEs and liked The Kooks, ice hockey and skateboarding. Marks imagined that Pip would have shoulder-length wavy hair, chewed nails and a total vocabulary of about two dozen varying grunts.
    Meanwhile, his wife swapped flirty emails with a builder called Gordon, who lived near Inverness and claimed to share her interest in daisy growing. Marks didn’t take it too seriously, and was pretty confident that his wife didn’t either.
    But the point was no one suspected that he knew, and whether it was really a skill, or just his natural demeanour, it was something he’d often found useful when dealing with both his detectives and his suspects.
    This evening, he’d used it as a mask for his concern. He’d left the team finishing a three-hour stint in the city centre, handing out leaflets and reminding women that most of the recent spate of rapes had occurred between 5 and 8 p.m. As though they needed reminding. He was sure that every office worker within fifty miles was fully aware that any one of them might become the next target and, unless a swift arrest followed, there would undoubtedly be a ‘next target’. Forensics had managed to isolate a sample of the attacker’s DNA and Marks had made a statement to the press using words like ‘confident’, ‘imminent’ and ‘positive identification’, thankful that they couldn’t read the helplessness he really felt. Yes, he was certain that they would catch the man, but without a stroke of luck, he doubted that it would happen before they had the details of at least one more traumatized woman added to their files.
    He walked into his office, flicked the light switch and spotted a manila envelope left squarely in the centre of his otherwise empty desk. He drew a sharp breath of recognition and his memory flashed back three months to the first time this had happened. Despite the official line, he found himself hoping that this might provide the same sort of luck that had helped close their last serious case.
    Initially, he didn’t touch the envelope. He hooked his jacket over the hat stand, walked around the desk and lowered himself slowly into his chair. He paused for several seconds, tapping the desk in indecision, as he considered calling a SOCO down to open it, letting them fingerprint it pending an investigation. Then he considered the next victim and slid it closer. He’d look first, then decide.
    He tore open one end of the envelope, and tipped its contents onto the desk. The first item to slip out was a toothbrush in a clear plastic bag, the second was a single page of white A4. It had been folded in half, just as before, and he could see the shadow of print showing through from the other side of the sheet. In his top drawer he kept a pack of sterile gloves, and he slipped a pair over his hands before touching the paper. He smoothed it open on the desk.
    The text was brief, and to the point. ‘This toothbrush belongs to Ian Knott, 205 York Road, Cambridge, and will be a DNA match for the Airport Rapist.’
    He smiled; he liked the note-maker’s use of the words ‘will be’, and he also liked the way they thus crushed his pessimism. Next, he found his own evidence bag and scooped up the envelope and its contents.
    He realized that the notes had to stop before they began to undermine the official