‘She must have talked to a lot of convicted murderers,’ said Cooper.

‘And do you think any of them told her the truth about their crimes? The clever ones will have told her what they thought she wanted to hear. The less clever ones couldn’t articulate a complex emotion if their lives depended on it.’

‘Which sometimes it does,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes,’ agreed Fry. ‘Sometimes it does.’

‘And in the meantime, all we can do is rely on the expertise of someone like Dr Kane. Theories may be all we have.’

‘But we don’t have to take them as gospel,’ said Fry. ‘Just because somebody once wrote a thesis for their doctorate expounding their own theories, everyone takes that as proof. It may be all we have, but we don’t have to assume it’s all there is.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There may be reasons for killing that no psychiatrist has ever thought of.’

Cooper threw his hands in the air and let his pen fall on the desk. ‘Well, if that’s the case, we’re in the shit, aren’t we? A killer we can’t identify planning the death of a victim we don’t know for reasons we can’t imagine. That’s just great.’

Fry didn’t answer. But Murfin’s response was to raise his hand and drop his own pen on his desk with a loud clatter.

‘Hey, are we giving up?’ he said. ‘Throwing in the towel? Does this mean I can go to the pub?’

Fry stood up, her body tense. ‘What I’m trying to do here is encourage a bit of independent thinking. It would be nice to hear a few ideas that haven’t been borrowed from some so-called expert. I’d like to see open minds from my team, not a ragbag of second-hand psychoanalysis and sociological mumbo-jumbo. Is that so difficult to understand?’

Cooper and Murfin tried to look suitably chastened. ‘OK, Diane,’ said Cooper.

He watched her leave the room. It wasn’t clear where she was going. Probably just to stamp up and down the corridor swearing under her breath.

‘There were some big words in that last bit,’ said Murfin.

Cooper picked up his pen. ‘She’s right, though, Gavin.’

‘Yes, I know. But it’s like telling jokes, isn’t it? Some people know how to be right. And others don’t.’

Then Fry came back into the room to answer her phone. Her face changed as she listened, and she looked at Cooper.

‘That was your idea, too – the new search at Litton Foot,’ she said.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘I don’t know whether you’d call it a problem or not. They’ve just found some more bones.’

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen