She was running. Familiar paths and sights danced in and out of her imaginings. She was invisible, feet pounding the pavements under a burnt sky until, as so often in reality, the streets gave way to greenery. Her usual ‘long’ run, her endorphin fix, took in Horfield Common, a mile or so of streets, and then the ten-hectare oasis of Badock’s Wood. She followed the path, revealing the odd recognisable image, and some that had no place there.

Shipwright appeared as she ran, incongruous on a bicycle on the wooded path, face straining from the effort, looking as if he might topple at any moment. Across a field, a man in a grey tracksuit grinned at her, his hands shackled to the earth beneath him. He opened his mouth. It kept opening like a basking shark’s, hopelessly, abnormally wide, until it took up half the space of his head. Yet though his grotesque jaw moved, no words reached her. But his presence disturbed her enough to turn away.

Now she was in a different place. A strange, unfamiliar woodland, the trees ancient and gnarled high above her, looking down on where she tried to run. The long straight path was gone. Now she followed a winding track, fending off denuded branches that hung like elongated fingers and brushed at her face and clothes. Black peaty water oozed up from around her feet where she stepped, her breath like dragon smoke in front of her. The way became more difficult and she slowed, dark branches crossing, brambles snagging her legs. But something drove her on.

She glanced behind. Still the grey man in the field was shouting. She pushed on, breaking through into a treeless depression, looking down into a gouged-out leaf-strewn bowl in the landscape.

She stood, surveying this place that had drawn her to it. A noise, high up near the sentinel trees drew her gaze. The thud of steel against wood echoing in the air. An axe.

At the edge of her vision, down in the hollow bowl, something moved beneath the leaves. The movement grew into a shape.

She wanted to turn and run, capture the freedom she’d had moments before, but her feet had sunk into the peat. They would not, could not move.

The axe again, louder this time. She jerked her gaze up but there was no one there. When she turned back, Emily Risman stood just feet away, hand outstretched, looking at her with white, dead, coagulated corneas.

---

Anna jerked awake, the memory of the dream pounding the pulse in her throat as she gasped. Was there something in Emily’s hand? But it shimmered and shifted like a pixelated face as she tried to recall it. Unsettled, she got up and drank some water, letting the image fade, but knowing it would not be the last time she would see it. Her curse, whenever crime-scene photographs were pored over, was to dream of the case. Dreams that were vivid and startling, taunting her with meaning.

During her time as a student at Goldsmiths she’d volunteered for some tests in the psychology department. One of them involved measuring memory. Anna had always been good at exams, but to be told that she was off the psychometric scale for a certain type of visual recall came as a complete shock. Like a colour-blind child, who knew no better, she’d assumed that everyone could remember the way she did.

But it had motivated her to reflect on the personality traits she’d struggled with over the years. She had always disappointed her mother by wanting to dress only in jeans, never been big on hugs and kisses. She’d never fitted in, striving for achievement as a teenager and being labelled an arrogant princess for it. At school, she’d learned early on to deliberately flunk the less important tests, or the odd question even in the important ones, so as to avoid the worst of the name-calling. ‘Geek Anna’ hurt at ten years of age. Her gifts, she very quickly realised, came with consequences, and her initial survival response in the sprawling state school she’d attended had been to deliberately underachieve. And as for boys… they had to be at least as good as her at everything to even stand a chance.

She ran and reran tests on herself in the college library, introspective self-report questionnaires, which put her in the category of an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. So appropriate that she should find out in a library annexe; the kind of calm, silent place she’d always gravitated to.

INTJ: an Intuitive Introvert who prioritised Thinking and Judgement. Big words that didn’t mean a great deal to anyone outside a psychology department. But it was a big deal to the doctorate student she’d discussed it with.

‘Way to go, Anna. You and Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates, too. Oh, and there was Lewis Carroll. Seen any white rabbits lately?’

‘That doesn’t exactly make me feel better.’

‘OK, well, only four in every five hundred women end up with this. How about Jane Austen and Jodie Foster?’

She’d liked that. She wasn’t big on literature, but Jodie Foster she could certainly live with. Still she remained sceptical, but the doctorate student was adamant.

‘I’ve seen you sitting alone in the refectory, reading a novel. So, you’re happy to be alone, right?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘When you go shopping, you’ll make a list and try and combine everything into one trip?’

‘That’s just efficiency.’

‘Not big on surprises? Parties need planning and an exit strategy? Oh, and not a big hugger, am I right?’

That made her sit up and take notice.

‘Better wear a badge to work though,’ the doctorate student had grinned. ‘Hate the mundane, independent, despise authority. Hate the water cooler even more, and people will confuse your confidence with arrogance. Ever thought of medicine?’

She hadn’t. She’d thought about the police instead.

The doctorate student had asked her out, but he’d only lasted one date, falling at the first hurdle by not knowing that Ray Bradbury had written the screenplay for Moby Dick. An obscure fact of little importance, but something he’d argued with her about. Given his analysis of her, he should have known better.

She’d never told Shipwright. In fact, she’d only ever told Kate and one significant other about any of this, but the chief inspector read it in her anyway and had couched it in his own, inimitable terms.

What I like about you, Anna, is that you see patterns where others see mess, you ask questions no one else does, and you don’t let emotion cloud your judgement. That’s rare in this job.

In fact, knowing what she was at last helped only to an extent and four letters could hardly do justice to a whole personality. But it had provided insight into how others saw her. What people had the most difficulty with was reconciling her natural reserve with her physical appearance. Blondes were meant to have all the fun, weren’t they? And hazel-eyed, physically fit, imperious-looking ones especially. But that was simply the wrapping. This blonde genuinely enjoyed being alone. Happy to be in her own mind, even energised by the thought of it. She needed reason and logic and liked to plan. Meet Anna Gwynne, freak.

She blew out a dismissive snort and went back to bed pondering these thoughts and knowing that they needed to be put away, back in the cupboard where they belonged. Perhaps it was the hour, or that she was alone, or that she’d spent the day dealing with the very worst that humanity could offer in a poky interview room at Whitmarsh. Whatever the reason, as she lay in bed waiting for sleep to come again, Anna couldn’t shake the irrational conviction that seeing Emily Risman rise from her grave had connotations besides the simple explanation of her brain not letting her forget.

Beyond the transient horror of the dream lay reason. Emily Risman was calling to her. Asking her unspoken questions that echoed inside her own head. Where would the key be? What hidden thing needed to reveal itself to her? What smell, or sight, or sound? What buried thing that the original team had missed?

‘Seeing the patterns,’ Shipwright had said. The N, the misnomer in INTJ, stood for intuition. Drawing from the deep well of experience, other people, books, art and personal interactions, which were filed away and stored in her capacious memory. That was what she needed to do now. Then she could do the ‘T’, the thinking bit, the analysis. And the outcome would be closure. Judgement was something she craved more than anything.

She was made to be good at this job.

Come on then, Anna. Prove it.