“Without being back at the morgue to compare, I’d say you’re looking at the same perpetrator,” answered Jeffries. “The marks are identical in width and length; a similar knife was used. The only difference being . . .”

“. . . the number of marks,” finished Grant. “Bastard must think we can’t keep count.”

“Any chance this leaked?”

“We’ve managed to keep it out of the papers and it hasn’t been on the telly.” The commander indicated the three marks. “We made sure to keep those to ourselves—especially after we got the second one.”

“How long do you think you’ll be able to keep it that way?”

“I need to figure that out. How soon can I get a full report?”

“End of the day? Good thing about it being Sunday—it’s quiet.”

“Not for long,” Grant said wearily. He wished he wasn’t so certain about that—but he could feel the storm rising.

Three murders in a week.

Each more horrific than the last.

V

The first body was discovered on the second of December.

It was an easy enough date for Grant to remember. It had been Allison’s birthday. So he was already in a glum mood to begin with.

A visiting Oxford professor of Greek mythology had not returned to the college after lecturing at the British Library the previous evening. When the Yard was alerted, a couple of constables were dispatched to the library, where a search located the dead man stuffed inside a WC off a back stairwell on the third floor.

After the lecture, Professor Lionel Frey had ducked inside the loo but had never exited the stall. His killer had turned out the lights and placed an “Out of Order” placard on the doorknob after carving a vertical line on Frey’s forehead to go with the deadly slash across the professor’s throat.

The sheer audacity of the murder had drawn Grant into the case.

Grant’s brother, Everett, a philosophy don at Oxford, had said someone had done a great service sending Frey to that big university in the sky. The mythology professor was a “pompous arse” who looked down on anyone who wasn’t taken with the Greek gods Frey had made his life’s work.

None of the other Oxford faculty were as overt as Everett, but Grant could tell that Lionel Frey wasn’t going to be missed by his colleagues. But none seemed to have an actual motive or interest in traveling down to London to sit through a two-hour lecture and then kill its orator in a tight-fitting WC stall either.

Grant’s thinking went to the obvious—a discarded mistress or some other affronted Londoner, but Frey’s schedule, credit cards, and wife’s statement showed he hadn’t set foot in the city for over six months. Any further theorizing was thrown to the wind when the second murder occurred.

Melanie Keaton.