The man who had likely been stalking me turns up dead, the day after I finally tell someone about my problem. Make that someones, plural. The only people who knew about the car thing were Paul, Uncle Phil and Maggie, who I finally fessed up to last night. I knew Maggs well enough to know she wouldn’t squash a spider, let alone kill a man, and I thought I knew Paul well enough to know his idea of ‘checking it out’ wouldn’t involve permanently checking out the weirdo. Which left Uncle Phil. Which didn’t make sense. He was the epitome of the mild-mannered and endearing absent-minded professor. But he was the only other person who knew, and he had offered to do something about it for me, ‘have a word’, as he’d put it. But this? Surely not.

Coincidence?

It had to be because there was no way in hell I could imagine Uncle Phil being a killer. Uncle Phil was the kind of man who would return a man’s wallet if he found it, not mug him for it. And God knew he didn’t need the money. But then, if that cold, twitching feeling between my shoulder blades was anything to go by then Cameron Ellison was not mugged and left for dead for the contents of his wallet; it was just made to look that way. A smokescreen to divert attention from the real reason for his death: that he chose the wrong person to stalk?

That cold, twitching feeling spread back up into my scalp and across my cheeks. There had been some other, very complex and spectacular smokescreens happening recently. Could there be a connection?

No, Sam, you’re making way too much out of a possible connection, based on a name you can’t even verify, from a dodgy-quality cellphone message. Be logical about this.

But that was the scary thing, I was being logical about this – farfetched, but logical. What if Cameron Ellison was killed because he was stalking me, and what if the same person who did that, had also covered up some other killings? And by process of elimination, there was only one person left who knew, who fit the profile. Although even entertaining the idea of Uncle Phil as cold-blooded killer gave me the head-spins, the more I considered it, the less unlikely it became. There were some distinct parallels.

I had to think rationally about this, before I leapt to some ludicrous conclusion. I’d run through the checklist, the profile Maggie and the hotshot had come up with for our serial killer.

He would be highly intelligent – check.

White male, thirty to fifty years of age – a little older than the range, but not too far out of that envelope – check.

Someone at the university, in a position of power – check.