‘That’s bullcrap, of course this is about me. I’ve been brought in from the outside, and I’m advocating for psychological profiling when half of them are still stuck in the 1970s. Would they rather have nothing to go on at all?’

‘It’s not a complete dead end. They’re continuing to attempt to track the murderer by traditional means. They’ll be filming a reconstruction of the attack on Xavier, which will air as soon as the edit is complete, working around the clock, and they’ve drafted in every spare officer from other Police Scotland areas to provide backup. In the meantime, we’ve been invited to present the Cotard’s syndrome theory to MIT as a whole and to the powers that be.’

‘By then, we’ll have lost valuable hours, when we could have had every medical professional in the area checking their files and compiling a list of possible subject matches. That’s great.’

‘The superintendent’s view was that asking medical professionals to report any male from his twenties to his forties with a history of hypochondria and weight loss might be such a broad outline that we’d receive too much information to process.’

‘It’s not just that. We have a rough image of him, height, weight, he’s Caucasian, Scots accent. We even have some information about his car to cross-reference possible suspects. Cotard’s syndrome is very psychologically specific. Any decent medical practitioner would have picked up the uniqueness of his presentation.’

‘Maybe, if he weren’t being dealt with by an overstretched National Health Service, but the reality is that he may rarely have seen the same doctor, nurse or psychiatrist twice, and he could well have described different symptoms on each occasion.’ Baarda sighed. ‘Connie, I’m on your side, but these people need persuading and not without cause. We’re asking them to put all their eggs in one basket. This is more than just a generic profile. It’s a diagnosis based on a practitioner’s instinct when she hasn’t even come face to face with her patient. It’s no good just stamping your feet and telling me they’re all idiots. They were hoping for a profession, an address, a social group, a list of his likely hobbies. Instead, they got something that sounds like it came out of a movie.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Connie muttered, glaring at the ceiling. ‘Fine. If they want persuading, then that’s what I’ll have to do. But we’re going to need help. How long do we have?’

‘Two hours,’ Baarda said.

‘So let’s use it. We need your car, my laptop, and some private information about a government employee. Can you get that?’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘No,’ Connie told him. ‘Let’s go.’