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with the boys she would have to get used to the occasional bout of tasteless humor.
“And do they have anything else?” Rayley prompted.
“Not yet,” Trevor said. “Further studies will cover such issues as method and manner. How
does the rapist choose his victim, for example, or how long he goes between attacks. If there is a
body, how does he dispose of it, and if the victim is left alive, how does he escape? Does he engage
with the police, as the Ripper did, or keep souvenirs? So far the Railway Rapist isn’t showing any
such tendencies, which indicates a different type of mentality. Even the selection of a weapon can be
telling. You can threaten someone with a gun from a great distance but an attack with a knife is closer,
more personal.”
“It’s absolutely enthralling,” Rayley said. “Just as a fingerprint or footprint tells us what sort of
body our perpetrator has, so criminal profiling can give us insight into his mind.”
“And if we know how he thinks, we can better predict what he’ll do next,” Davy said, seeming
to come round at last. “Maybe figure how to trap him.”
Trevor nodded. “They’re studying the same sort of thing with murderers by the way, drawing
conclusions about how well the perpetrator might have known his victim by the methodology of the
attack. You can poison someone without being in the room, so it’s a more distant, calculating sort of
crime. But if you smother or choke them, in contrast, that implies a personal rage. You want to be
there in the moment of the death, to actually see them suffer.”
“I’m sorry to likewise muffle your collective enthusiasm,” Tom said, leaning even farther back
and putting his boots on the table, “or mock this shiny new forensics toy that you are all so eager to
play with. But I must say that in comparison to medicine or chemistry, criminal profiling doesn’t
seem like much of a science at all.”
“I doubt any science seems like much of a science when it begins,” Trevor said amicably.
“Apples falling from trees, kites and keys in thunderstorms and all that sort of rot. Admittedly, we are
dealing with an unformed arena of study, but I expect it shall evolve in time, as they all do. And I
should be delighted to think the people at this table might in some small way aid that evolution.”
“What if the scarf isn’t to hide his face?” Emma abruptly asked.
“I don’t follow,” Trevor said.
“We’ve assumed that he covers her face so that she cannot see him,” Emma said. “But what if
just the opposite is true, that he covers her face so that he cannot see her? Then she becomes a