Last Kiss by Louise Phillips Page B

confirming that he had liked physical punishment during sex, including being brought to the edge with a rope around his neck. Had it not been for the knife attack, it might have been dismissed as a sexual act gone awry, one of the participating parties going a step too far. The police had also found friction burns on the victim’s wrists and ankles, consistent with bondage, only this time they had occurred prior to death. Pierre Laurent might have been little more than a lowly art student, but if it was the same killer, he had attracted their interest, just as Rick Shevlin had. What else, other than the obvious, had the two men had in common?
    He couldn’t delay talking to Kate any longer, but he was still staring at the screen as she walked in.

    ‘You wanted to see the images from Paris, Kate. Here they are.’ He barely turned towards her.
    ‘First tell me why you’re so engrossed.’
    ‘There’s something about them,’ he pointed to the screen, ‘that’s bothering me.’
    ‘I’m listening.’ She sat on the chair opposite, folding her legs, causing her skirt to rise above her knees. As he turned to face her, she caught him eyeing her legs, and pulled the lower part of her trench coat over them.
    ‘Feeling the cold, are we?’ he asked.
    ‘A slight chill.’ She hoped he would take the hint. ‘You were saying about the images …’
    ‘The victim was younger than Rick Shevlin. He was also laid out differently, and with a different cause of death. The slash and puncture wounds to the body, unlike Shevlin’s, were concealed, and if there was any lipstick residue on the lips, either it was missed or it had deteriorated due to the delay in finding the body. Having said that, there is plenty to link the two deaths – a capital city, the murder taking place in a hotel room, the frenzied knife attack, a suspected female killer, a tentative art association, an inclination for kinky sex and, of course, the potential Tarot card connection, which led us to tie them together via the Europol database in the first place.’
    ‘And the level of detail,’ she added. ‘Don’t forget that. You were about to tell me what irked you.’
    ‘Although the images are different, I can’t shake the notion there’s something else about the two scenes that unites them.’
    ‘Like the images are telling you more than you actually see.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I felt the same way, Mark, about the photographs from the Earlbrook Hotel.’ She pulled her chair in closer, flicking through the images on the screen, including those from the morgue. She finally ended up where she’d begun, on the wide shot from the hotel bedroom. Knowing what she was looking for this time made it easier. ‘The scenes from the Earlbrook Hotel look savage in comparison. These images take on the appearance of something serene, and again, a practical replica of a Tarot card. The killer is re-creating the images to the point of obsession. Even though they depict different scenes, they have a visual hallmark.’
    ‘Do you mean like an artistic style?’
    ‘Exactly, but there’s more than that. Remember how Rick Shevlin’s image was re-created in the dressing-table mirror?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Look at this,’ she pointed to the screen, ‘the image with the opened bathroom door.’ There was no denying Pierre Laurent’s clear reflection: it perfectly framed the corpse, and again, as if it was part of a Tarot-card image.
    ‘Look at the room,’ she continued. ‘It’s small. There isn’t a lot of floor space.’
    ‘Meaning the options for creating the image would be limited.’
    ‘And only one likely spot from which the image we’re looking at could have been taken.’
    ‘At the window again. Are you saying the killer is taking photographs?’
    ‘Perhaps, but even if she isn’t, she’s setting up the potential shot. The position of the body looks like it was determined by the position of the mirror and the potential viewing point.’
    ‘You do