Cracking Open a Coffin. Gwendoline Butler
Читать онлайн.| Название | Cracking Open a Coffin |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Gwendoline Butler |
| Жанр | Полицейские детективы |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Полицейские детективы |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9780007545490 |
GWENDOLINE BUTLER
Cracking Open a Coffin
HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992
Copyright © Gwendoline Butler 1992
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780006472919
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007545490
Version: 2014–07–07
CONTENTS
Letter to John Coffin from Professor Lessingham, The Institute of Mental Health, Bury Hill.
‘I am coming to the opinion that there are certain types of killers who might be called periodic serial killers in as much as they will only kill when the victim offers exactly what is required. So there may be long gaps in the cycle.
‘In these cases there is a symbiotic relationship between killer and victim: they move towards each other.
‘The rules as to the victim, manner of killing, disposal of the body have to be kept … But even the most dedicated of serial killers will be frustrated by circumstances, something the killer did not take into account, or could not control. There will always be cases out of pattern, that do not conform.’
A day in early autumn
One day in early autumn the neighbourhood newspaper, Second City News, carried a special supplement on the university, then celebrating its fifth birthday and welcoming that year’s intake of students. As well as a large photograph of the head of the university, Sir Thomas Blackhall, there was a page of photographs in colour of some of the students.
Students at tutorials, seen in a booklined room, are neatly posed around their tutor. One of them is reading an essay, the others listen.
Students at lectures, observing the lecturer write an equation on a large board spread across the wall behind him. He does it with some electronic device that he does not understand because he would prefer old-fashioned chalk. Once he failed, unknowingly, to use it correctly, so that nothing appeared on the board, and then, absent-mindedly back in the days of chalk, he turned round and wiped what wasn’t there clean away with the back of his sleeve. This brought down the house.
Students in the library, heads bent over their books. Because this is not Oxford (where the habit was abandoned years ago) and because the university is so young, it is the fancy here for all the students to wear shortish academic gowns.
Students at parties, at their summer ball. A crowded scene with many outsiders, among whom John