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horrified that she’d joined the team tasked with tracking down a serial killer, had suggested that her job was doing her more harm than good. They were almost certainly right, yet Tina was capable neither of leaving the career that she seemed to love and loathe in equal measure, nor of coping with its constant pressures.
    ‘The hammer looked like the one we found at Kent’s place, didn’t it?’ she said at last.
    ‘Impossible to tell for sure, and that’s exactly what a defence lawyer would say in court. There must be plenty of hammers like that one in existence.’
    ‘It’ll be a lot harder for him to argue about the fact that Adrienne’s DNA was on it, and that there’s a video of the murder on his laptop.’ She shook her head, annoyed with herself for doubting even for a moment that Kent was the Night Creeper. He was just one of the better actors she’d come across in the interview room, and she should have remembered that that was exactly what true psychopaths were. Consummate actors who liked nothing more than pulling the wool over the eyes of those around them.
    MacLeod gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I’m sorry you had to watch that, Tina. I hope it doesn’t bring back any memories.’
    She guessed he was referring to when she’d been kidnapped and shot the previous year, but if so, he was wrong, because the memories had never gone away, and as far as Tina was concerned they were her business and no one else’s. ‘I’m sorry you had to watch it too, sir,’ she told him. ‘And don’t worry, it didn’t.’
    ‘Good,’ he said simply, then turned to face DC Grier, who was approaching the two of them almost gingerly. He still looked pale, and Tina felt a renewed respect for him. At least he wasn’t trying to be all macho about it, pretending that it hadn’t affected him.
    ‘There’s another film on there along the same lines,’ he said. ‘It captures Diane Woodward’s murder.’ Diane was the third victim, and at thirty-seven, the oldest. She’d died ten months earlier in very similar circumstances.
    ‘Any clues as to the identity of the perpetrator on that one?’ asked MacLeod.
    Grier shook his head. ‘It was all handheld stuff similar to the one you’ve just seen. There’s also a lot of further footage of the victims taken while they were still alive, but before he broke in to kill them.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I mean he must have put hidden cameras in the apartments when he was fitting the alarms because it shows the victims going about their daily lives. It’s clear he’s edited it down a lot because it’s mainly of an intimate nature. Them getting changed, walking round naked. In one case having sex. That sort of thing. I suppose it made it more fun for him. Stalking them like that but without running any risk of getting caught.’
    ‘And is there footage like this of all of the victims?’
    ‘Three that we’ve found so far.’
    MacLeod ran a hand across his brow. ‘Good God.’
    ‘Is there any way it could have been planted on his laptop?’ Tina asked.
    Grier looked at her like she was mad, and she remembered immediately why she didn’t like him. ‘No way. There’s so much of it for a start, and the dates the footage was first added to the system tie in with the dates of the murders. This stuff’s been put on there over a long period of time. It’s authentic, and it belongs to that computer.’
    ‘Were the files well hidden?’
    ‘They were in a folder within a folder within a folder, squirrelled away among a lot of other files in the My Documents section, all with bland, irrelevant names. It was quite a trawl to locate them.’
    ‘They weren’t that well hidden though, were they? They didn’t have password protection or an encryption system like some of the paedophile networks put on their PCs to stop us accessing the hard drive?’
    Grier looked defensive. ‘Are you suggesting they were easy to find, ma’am?’ he asked her.
    ‘I don’t think