Morgan smiled triumphantly. ‘Like I said, she’s perfect. The target won’t be able to resist.’

Thorson pursed her lips. ‘For all our sakes, I hope not. But before we make a final decision, I want to see her in action. Agreed?’

The two men looked at each other. Morgan nodded. ‘Agreed. Let’s see how she performs under pressure.’

Chapter 3

3

The sun was slanting at an awkward angle as Tony Hill drove up the long hill out of St Andrews. He pulled the sun visor down and glanced in the rear-view mirror. Behind him, the green of the Tentsmuir Forest contrasted with the blue sparkle of the Firth of Tay and the North Sea beyond it. He glimpsed the jagged grey skyline of the town, ruins cheek by jowl with imposing nineteenth-century architecture, each indistinguishable from the other at this distance. It had become a familiar sight over the past eighteen months since he’d taken up his post as Reader in Behavioural Psychology at the university, but he still enjoyed the tranquillity of the view. Distance lent enchantment, turning the skeletons of St Regulus Tower and the cathedral into gothic Disney fantasies. Best of all, from a distance he didn’t have to deal with colleagues or students.

Although his professor had acted as if acquiring someone with his reputation had been a major enhancement of their departmental prospectus, Tony wasn’t sure he’d lived up to expectations. He’d always known he wasn’t really suited to the academic life. He was bad at politics, and lecturing still left him sweaty-palmed and panicky. But at the time he’d been offered the job, it had seemed a better option than continuing with work he no longer felt fit for. He’d started out as a clinical psychologist, working at the sharp end in a secure mental hospital, dealing with serial offenders. When the Home Office had started taking an interest in the effectiveness of offender profiling in police investigations, he’d been one of the obvious candidates to run the feasibility study.

It had helped his reputation almost as much as it had damaged his psyche that in the course of the study, he’d been directly caught up in the capture of a psychopathic killer who had been targeting young men. In the process, his own vulnerabilities had come close to destroying him. The degree of his involvement still gave him screaming nightmares from which he woke drenched in sweat, his body racked with echoes of past pain.