Killing the Shadows. Val McDermid

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      Then, two weeks later, a second body had turned up. A relatively short interval, Fiona noted. This time, the scene of the crime was the vast monastery church of San Juan de los Reyes. She remembered the cloisters, a massive quadrangle festooned with absurd gargoyles. It was there, she reminded herself, that one of their group had spotted the bizarre image of a reverse gargoyle—instead of a grotesque face adorning the water spout, this statue consisted of a body from the waist down, as if its owner had been rammed head first into the wall.

      The unique feature of the church itself was the array of manacles and shackles that hung along its facade. They were the very shackles the Moorish conquerors used to chain up the Christian prisoners taken at Granada, and when Fernando and Isabella’s vast army captured Granada from the Moors, the monarchs decreed the chains should be hung on the church as a memorial. Fiona remembered vividly how bizarre they had looked, hanging black in the sunlight against the golden stone of the ornamented facade.

      The second victim was an American graduate student of religious art, James Paul Palango. His body had been discovered at dawn by a street cleaner who had been sweeping alongside the monastery cloisters of San Juan de los Reyes. He’d turned the corner on the paved area in front of the church when his eye had been caught by something above his head. Palango was hanging suspended from two sets of manacles. In the puffy flesh of his neck, something glinted in the early morning light. When the body was lowered to the ground, it became clear that he’d been strangled with a dog’s choke chain then attached to the manacles with two pairs of handcuffs. The pathologist also reported that Palango’s corpse had been repeatedly sodomized with the broken neck of a wine bottle, which remained inside his torn rectum. Again, there appeared to be no significant forensic traces. Interestingly, in Palango’s pocket there was a guide to Toledo.

      Police inquiries revealed that Palango was an evangelical Christian from a wealthy Georgia family. He had been staying at the parador which perched on a high bluff looking across the river to the city. According to the hotel, Palango had eaten an early dinner then gone out in his hired car sometime around nine o’clock. The car was later discovered in a parking garage opposite the Alcazar. Extensive questioning in the neighbourhood revealed that the American had taken coffee in the Plaza de Zocodover at the heart of the old town, but in the general melee of the evening paseo no one had noticed when he had left the café or whether he’d been alone. No one had come forward to say they’d seen him since.

      Fiona leaned back in her seat and rubbed her eyes. No wonder Major Berrocal was so keen to enlist her help. The only significant information the police had gleaned from the second murder was that the killer was physically powerful enough to carry a ten-stone man up a ladder, and that he was bold enough to display his victim in a public place. In a handwritten note, Major Berrocal had pointed out that once the nearby café had closed in the early hours of the morning, the area around the church was quiet and although it was overlooked by several houses, the killer had chosen the farthest point of the facade for his exhibition, where he would be least likely to be spotted.

      She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms above her head while she contemplated the information she’d laboriously worked her way through. It was professionally intriguing, no question of that. What she needed to consider was whether she could offer anything constructive to the investigation. She had worked with European police forces on several occasions, and had sometimes felt handicapped by her lack of visceral understanding of how their societies worked. On the other hand, she already felt the faint stirrings of an idea of how this killer operated and where the police might start their search for him.

      One thing was certain. While she dithered, he would be planning his next murder. Fiona refilled her glass and made her decision.