Intrigued now, Fry hunched over the transcript. She ran a yellow highlighter pen through some of the phrases. Perhaps I’ll wait, and enjoy the anticipation … I can smell it right now, can’t you? … I promise … My kind of killing … And then there was a change halfway through a sentence: as a neck slithers in my fingers …

There were a few more sentences with ‘me’ and ‘my’. But then the entire final section was couched in the first person plural, as if to draw his listeners into a conspiracy. The question isn’t whether we kill, but how we do it. That section contained all the stuff about Freud and Thanatos, too. No ‘I’ in it anywhere. ‘I see what you mean,’ Fry said, reluctantly.

She pushed the highlighted transcript across to the DI, who smiled. A cheap result.

‘As for the second message, some of the phrases don’t fit at all,’ said Dr Kane.

Fry was taken aback. In a speech written by someone so disturbed, it hadn’t occurred to her there might be some phrases that didn’t fit. Because none of it fit, did it? Not with anything rational.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Hitchens. He pulled his reading glasses out of his pocket and looked at the transcript with an intelligent smile. ‘Which phrases were you thinking of in particular, Doctor?’

‘“A cemetery six miles wide”, for example. What does that have to do with anything? It’s too specific.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. “Here I am at its centre.” Also “the signs at the gibbet and the rock”. The most significant thing about these phrases is that all three of them occur in the second message, the one which is obviously scripted. In my opinion, he was making sure that he included those phrases. They were important, for some reason.’

‘“Six miles wide”,’ said Hitchens. ‘Do you think …?’

‘They’re clues,’ said Fry suddenly. ‘He’s left us some clues to a location. It’s a location within a six-mile radius of … Well, of what?’

‘His own position?’ said Dr Kane. ‘The place where he was making the call from?’

‘Of course. “Here I am at its centre.”’

She took off her glasses, and Hitchens did the same.

‘That would suggest he knew in advance where he was going to make the call,’ said the DI.

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Well, it isn’t the scenario we had in mind. We think he had the speech prepared, but not the location.’

‘It could be that he simply inserted an appropriate figure according to where he eventually made the call,’ said Dr Kane. ‘A six-mile radius? He might have driven around a specific area until he found somewhere suitable that he knew was within that range.’

Hitchens looked worried. ‘Damn it, he might just have been guessing at the three miles, in that case. How many people know even the approximate distance from one spot to another across the countryside? I don’t suppose he’s using GPS.’

‘And that’s only if he meant the distance as the crow flies, rather than the distance by road, which people might be more familiar with.’