With this case, it had been clear from his first glance at the police reports that this wasn’t true of Geronimo. Unusually, what remained absolutely constant and inviolable was the ritual. There seemed no sign of escalation or variation caused by a lack of satisfaction with previous efforts. The victims themselves varied widely, from de Groot’s trimly muscled frame to Margarethe’s neat slenderness to Neumann’s comfortable bulk. That meant there had to be another element at play in the selection process, and Tony had been utterly convinced it must lie in a shared professional interest, since this was the one thing that connected the dead. Which only went to show how foolish it was to theorize ahead of the data, he reminded himself as he carried his cup back through to the living room. ‘What is it about psychologists that winds you up, Geronimo?’ he asked out loud. ‘Do you hate them? Did a psychologist make decisions that adversely affected the way your life has turned out? Or do you think they need to be put out of their misery? Is this personal, or do you see yourself as an altruist? Are you doing them a favour or are you doing the world a favour?’

He flicked back through the information he’d garnered from the web. ‘If this is about something somebody did to you, why are you going for academics? If you were fucked up by some educational psychologist or some pre-sentence report in the courts, why aren’t you going for practitioners? What do academics do that clinicians don’t?’

If anyone could answer that question, it should be him. He’d walked on both sides of the wire, after all. He’d started out as a clinician and turned to academe only relatively recently. What was different about his own working life these days, apart from the obvious one – that he didn’t see patients? Was that it? ‘Are you taking it out on academics because they’re not putting their training to proper use, Geronimo?’ he asked of the hazy shade who was refusing to take shape in his mind.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he continued. ‘That’s too ridiculous. Nobody kills people because they’re not fucking with people’s heads.’ He rubbed his tired eyes with his knuckles and leaned back in the chair. What did university staff do? They lectured. They supervised graduate students. They did research.

‘Research,’ he said softly, jerking upright. Hastily, he looked back through the articles and papers written by the three victims. This time, he saw it. ‘Experiments,’ Tony exclaimed with satisfaction. The one thing that academics did, that all three of these victims had done, that could remotely be defined as messing with people’s heads was to carry out experiments with live human subjects.