‘What are they using – a carrier pigeon?’

Hitchens turned to look at her then. He smoothed his hands along the sleeves of his jacket, a mannerism he’d developed over the past few weeks, as if he were constantly worrying about his appearance. Tonight, he looked particularly uncomfortable. Perhaps he wasn’t sleeping well, either.

‘Diane, I’ve heard this tape,’ he said. ‘This guy is convincing. I think he’s serious.’

When the footsteps outside the door moved on, Fry followed their sound and let her mind wander the passages of E Division headquarters – down the stairs, past the scenes of crime department, the locked and darkened incident room, and into a corridor filled with muffled, echoing voices. By the time the sounds had faded away, her thoughts were aimless and disoriented, too. They were lost in a maze with no way out, as they so often were in her dreams.

‘No, he’s laughing,’ she said. ‘He’s a joker.’

Hitchens shrugged. ‘Don’t believe me, then. Wait until you hear the tape, and judge for yourself.’

Fry regarded the DI curiously. Despite his faults as a manager, she knew he had good instincts. If Hitchens had heard the tape and thought it should be taken seriously, she was inclined to believe him. The printed words on the page weren’t enough on their own. The caller’s real meaning would be captured in the sound of his voice, the manner of his speech, in the audible layers of truth and lies.

‘He seems to be hinting that he’s killed before,’ she said.

‘Yes. There are some significant phrases. “Not this time”, for a start.’

‘Yet in the same breath he’s disapproving of something. Disapproving of himself, would you say?’

With a nod, Hitchens began to smooth his sleeve again. He had strong hands, with clean, trimmed fingernails. A white scar crawled all the way across the middle knuckles of three of his fingers.

‘He could turn out to be an interesting psychological case for someone to examine,’ he said.

The DI’s voice sounded too casual. And suddenly Fry thought she knew why he was looking so uncomfortable.

‘Don’t tell me we’ve got a psychologist on the case already?’

‘It wasn’t my decision, Diane. This has come down to us from Ripley, remember.’

She shook her head in frustration. So some chief officer at Derbyshire Constabulary HQ had got wind of the phone call and decided to interfere. That was all she needed. She pictured one of the ACPO types in his silver braid strolling through the comms room at Ripley, demonstrating his hands-on approach to visiting members of the police committee, hoping they’d remember him when promotion time came round.

‘OK, so who’s the psychologist?’ said Fry. ‘And, more to the point, who did he go to school with?’

‘Now, that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Hitchens. He pulled an embossed business card from the clip holding the case file together. As she took the card, Fry noticed that it was a pretty slim file so far. But it wouldn’t stay that way, once reports from the experts started thumping on to her desk.