The Eternal Circle: Part Two

Chapter Six: Recollections

Claire sat at the edge of the narrow cot, staring at the cracked plaster of the safehouse wall. The room smelled faintly of mildew and cigarette smoke, the kind of place the police kept for emergencies, never meant to be comfortable. Outside, somewhere in the alley, a cat screeched and scrabbled against a dustbin. She flinched, her nerves still raw, though she told herself she was calmer now.

She wasn’t.

Hill poured himself another coffee from the dented percolator. He looked older than she remembered, the lines around his eyes deepened, shoulders sagging beneath the cheap white shirt. Sommers leaned against the wall near the window, arms crossed, scanning the street below as though expecting a familiar face to rise out of the shadows. The two detectives had always carried a weight, but tonight the air around them felt leaden, as though the past had pushed its way into the present and refused to let go.

“You should try to sleep,” Hill said, his voice low, careful. “You’ve been through enough.”

“I’ve slept,” Claire lied.

Her eyes lingered on him a moment longer, and then the wall behind him blurred. For a moment, she wasn’t here at all.

It had been nearly a year ago, in her office at Harley Street. Hill had sat across from her in silence for the better part of ten minutes, his gaze fixed not on her but on the framed print of Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed that hung on the wall. She’d allowed the silence to breathe, to work on him. Officers who had seen too much needed patience before words.

She glanced at Sommers, who remained by the window. Claire remembered another session, just a few weeks after Cutter’s arrest. Sommers had arrived in civilian clothes, stiff and immaculate, her hair tied back in a severe bun as though she were reporting for duty. She had resisted therapy; that much was clear, but someone higher up had insisted.

“Detective Sergeant,” Claire had begun gently, “you don’t need to perform here. This isn’t an evaluation.”

Sommers’ eyes, cool and pale, had flicked toward her. “Then what is it?”

“A place to speak freely.”

Sommers had allowed herself a mirthless smile. “Freely. Right. You want me to say it out loud. That we didn’t stop it. We only stopped him.”

Claire had felt a chill then, not from the words alone but from the way Sommers had said it, as if the thing they had failed to stop was nameless but very much alive.

She had pressed further, but Sommers had folded inward, refusing to elaborate. All Claire had left was the echo of that phrase. We didn’t stop it; we only stopped him.

Now, sitting in this dim room with both of them again, Claire finally understood what her patients had been trying to say — not consciously, not deliberately, but in the fragmented language of people standing too close to the abyss.

“You knew,” she whispered.

Hill turned from his coffee. “What?”

“Back then. When you came to me. Both of you. You couldn’t admit it, but you knew Cutter wasn’t… just a man.”

Neither answered. Hill’s eyes lowered, ashamed. Sommers’ jaw tightened.

The silence pressed harder than denial.

Claire leaned forward, her voice trembling but resolute. “And now this Circle — these symbols in the house, the whispers in the walls. My parents died in a fire no one ever explained. And I remember—” She stopped, her throat tightening. She hadn’t meant to speak it aloud, not here, not with them.

“You remember what?” Sommers asked.

Claire’s hands clenched into fists. “I was seven. I woke up choking on smoke. But before the heat reached me, before the beams came down… I heard a voice. A man’s voice. Calm, deliberate. He whispered something. I never told anyone. I thought it was shock. But tonight, in that house, I heard the same cadence. The same voice.”

Hill swore under his breath and rubbed his temples. Sommers finally turned from the window, her face paler than the streetlight behind her.

“Claire,” Hill said carefully, “if what you’re saying is true, then this isn’t just coincidence. Cutter wasn’t the first. He wasn’t the last.”

“No,” Claire whispered. “He was only a vessel.”

Sleep claimed her in restless fragments, and in the early hours her mind slipped into that half-world between memory and dream. She was back in her childhood bed, the air thick with smoke, her lungs screaming for air. She coughed, tears streaming down her face, and then — as real as breath against her ear — a voice spoke.

“You will live. You are marked. You are mine.”

She woke with a start, drenched in sweat, the taste of ash still in her throat. The safehouse room was dark, Hill once again claimed by sleep, snoring softly in the next cot.

Sommers remained awake by the window. But Claire knew what she had heard then, and what she had heard tonight in Coldwater Lane.

The same voice. The same master.

And now it was closer than ever.

Chapter Seven

Brother Moreau

The cellar beneath the villa had once been a wine vault, carved deep into the limestone of the Avignon hills. Now the shelves where vintages had rested for centuries were bare. In their place, a long oak table stretched beneath the curve of the vaulted ceiling. Candles guttered in iron holders fixed along the walls, not for atmosphere but necessity — no electricity ran here.

Around the table sat twelve men and women, their clothes plain, almost drab: suits, jackets, blouses, nothing that would mark them as belonging to any sect. No robes, no hoods, no symbols etched on their skin. They looked like bankers, teachers, and civil servants. Only their stillness betrayed them, the unnatural calm with which they folded their hands and turned their faces to the figure at the head of the table.

The Master.

His features were half in shadow, the candlelight never touching them fully, as though the flames themselves recoiled. He was not young, not old. His hair was dark, or perhaps grey, his eyes impossible to fix upon. When he spoke, his voice was soft but carried easily along the stone, every syllable precise.

“Brother Cutter is no more,” he said, as though announcing a business colleague’s death. “His vessel destroyed, his thread cut short. And yet…”

He allowed the silence to linger, let it stretch until his listeners leaned inward unconsciously, hungry for what came next.

“…his work continues.”

The words stirred a ripple of assent around the table. Not applause, not murmurs, but a subtle shifting, the recognition that what was spoken was an undeniable truth.

The Master steepled his fingers. “Two names. Hill. Sommers. They meddled. They stopped the shell, the body. But they did not touch the hand that moved him, nor the spirit that clothed him. Even now, as we sit here, that spirit works elsewhere. Works well.”

He lifted a hand and gestured toward the far end of the table. A young man sat there, his hair neatly combed, his suit immaculate. He could have passed for a clerk, or a student, or a man waiting for an interview. Only his eyes betrayed him: a glint too sharp, too knowing.

“Stand, Brother Moreau.”

The young man rose. His lips twitched into a smile that was not his own.

“Eleven,” the Master said. “Eleven gifts you have made. Eleven offerings. Each left in order, each arranged with care. As our Brother Cutter once did. As Brother Bundy before him.”

Moreau inclined his head. His voice, when it came, was light, mocking, carrying the arrogance of something ancient wearing youthful skin. “The French police stumble like cattle. Inspector Henri Duvall… Lieutenant Rousseau. They are blind, pompous. I hear them bicker in their precinct like clowns. Rousseau with his cigarettes, Duvall with his wine. They chase shadows while I choose freely. They are as sharp as… what is the name? The films. Yes. Clouseau.”

A ripple of dry amusement passed through the table. One or two allowed themselves thin smiles.

Moreau’s eyes glittered. “They are chasing pink panthers while I am sculpting eternity.”

The Master raised his hand. The room stilled.

“Brother Moreau speaks truth. They are blind. But blindness does not last forever. We must be vigilant.” He leaned forward, his face still blurred by the candlelight, voice sinking to a near whisper. “Remember: one vessel falls, another rises. The entity is not chained to time, nor place. America. Britain. France. Tomorrow, perhaps Moscow. Or Lagos. Or Rome. The face changes. The work endures.”

One of the women at the table spoke for the first time, her voice clipped, professional. “And if Hill and Sommers pursue further?”

The Master turned his head slightly. “They will. It is their nature. They cannot let go. But their strength is finite, their years numbered. They may harry one Brother, perhaps two. They will not stem the tide. Not while the Circle endures.”

Another man leaned forward, his voice tinged with unease. “And the woman? The psychiatrist?”

Claire. The Master did not speak her name, yet every person in the cellar felt it hang in the air.

The Master’s lips curved faintly. “Her story is not yet written. She is marked, though she does not yet understand the ink upon her soul. In time, she will be… useful.”

The air in the vault seemed to grow heavier, the flames of the candles bending inward as though pulled by a draught that had no source.

The Master whispered then, words that slid across the room like oil: not French, not Latin, not any human tongue. The shadows in the stone grooves shivered, elongated, twisting into shapes like grasping hands before snapping back.

At last, he spread his arms, voice clear again. “Brother Cutter was stopped. Brother Moreau will not be. And if he is… another will rise. Evil does not end. It only changes its face.”

The Circle bowed their heads in perfect silence.

Chapter Eight

London To Marseilles

The phone call came just after midnight. Inspector Henri Duvall was half-asleep at his desk, a cold cup of coffee at his elbow, the paper ashtray beside him filling with crumpled Gauloises. His office smelled of smoke, sweat, and weariness. Eleven women in twelve months. He knew the number before the call, yet hearing it aloud twisted his stomach as though for the first time.

The voice on the other end was shaky, female, middle-aged.  “She has not come home, Monsieur. She always comes home. Please—you must find her, she is a student from England.”

Duvall had tried to reassure her, tried to offer the routine phrases. Young people go missing. A late-night party. A bus missed. But even as he spoke, he felt the lie in his throat. He had lived with this shadow for a year, and he knew the rhythm of it. A girl goes missing. By dawn, they find her body.

When he hung up, Rousseau was standing in the doorway, tie loosened, hair sticking up like a man already defeated.

“Another?” Rousseau asked softly.

“Yes,” Duvall said, lighting another cigarette. “Another.”

London — Morning

Dr. Claire Hammond closed her office file and set her pen aside. The constable she had just finished speaking with, a young man who had discharged his weapon in a robbery gone wrong, had left pale but steadier than when he arrived. Claire sighed, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. She lived in other people’s trauma, soaking it like rainwater into stone.

Her phone rang. When she saw the caller ID, her pulse quickened. George Hill.

“Claire,” his voice came tight, as if he had been holding his breath. “We need to meet. Today. Can you clear your schedule?”

She frowned. “Is this about—?”

“It’s about Cutter,” Hill cut in. “Or what came after.”

Claire froze, gripping the receiver harder. Cutter. She had heard his name whispered in those therapy sessions, both Hill and Sommers speaking around it as though its very sound were toxic. She had pieced fragments together—Cutter the killer, the trial, the night he died. But the weight in Hill’s voice told her this was something else. Something unfinished.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I can meet.”

Marseille — Two hours earlier

The crime scene was a deserted lot at the edge of the old port, surrounded by weeds and rusted iron fencing. The girl lay in the dirt, her hair brushed smooth across her face, her hands placed carefully at her sides.

Duvall crouched beside her, lips pressed in a thin line. Rousseau stood behind him, shifting uneasily.

“Strangled,” Rousseau muttered. “Like the others.”

Duvall nodded, though he didn’t need Rousseau to tell him. The killer’s signature was undeniable. The neatness, the almost reverent arrangement. Not murder as impulse but murder as ritual.

“Perhaps,” Rousseau tried, forcing a weak laugh, “it is Clouseau we should call. We bumble around while he makes a mockery of us.”

Duvall shot him a glare so sharp it silenced him. “This is not comedy. This is repetition. And he does not mock us, Rousseau. He worships something. He serves.”

He stood, staring down at the girl’s body, the edges of her British passport peeking from her bag nearby. That detail struck him harder than anything else. She was the British student who was reported missing.

That clinched it. He would have to reach across the Channel.

London — Afternoon

“I have been contacted by Henri Duval, an officer of the Surete - the French police.” Hill explained, “We met some years ago at an Interpol convention in Paris. He will be sending an official request for assistance later; in the meanwhile, he has sent me these.” Hill spread several photographs across Claire’s desk. Black-and-white crime scene images, smuggled across by fax and file transfer. Claire pressed a hand to her mouth.

Melanie Sommers stood by the window, arms folded tight. She looked pale, her sharp features softened by strain.

“Another girl in Marseilles,” Hill said. “The eleventh in twelve months. Look closely, Claire.”

Claire forced herself to study the photo. The girl’s hands, arranged with uncanny care. The face, almost peaceful. “It’s—” She faltered.

“It’s Cutter’s work,” Sommers said flatly. “But Cutter’s dead.”

Hill nodded slowly. “Two days after Cutter’s death, the first body appeared in Marseilles. Same method. Same arrangement. And it hasn’t stopped.”

Claire’s throat tightened. “You’re saying—”

“I’m saying this isn’t coincidence,” Hill interrupted. “And you already know that, don’t you?”

She looked between them, her mind tugged back to a year ago, to the hushed confessions of officers broken by what they had seen.

One year ago, Sommers had sat stiffly in the leather chair, her eyes rimmed red, her voice flat.

“It should have been just another case,” she muttered. “But when I looked into Cutter’s eyes that night, it wasn’t him looking back. It was—” She stopped, catching herself. “Forget it.”

“No,” Claire had pressed gently, pen still in her lap. “What did you see?”

Sommers rubbed her forehead. “Darkness. Something vast. Like the man was a shell. And when we shot him, it didn’t feel like we killed him. It felt like we released it.”

She had laughed then, short and bitter, and shut herself down. But the words had lingered with Claire like a bruise.

Marseille — Evening

In the Interpol office, Duvall typed his request with rigid formality. He masked desperation with bureaucracy.

To Metropolitan Police, Serious Crime Unit, London. Requesting cooperation in ongoing serial investigation. Victim Eleven, female, British national. Case similarities to a previous matter concerning a subject known as Cutter. Request immediate liaison.

He stopped, fingers hovering above the keys, then added one final line.

This is not a coincidence. This is a continuation.

He signed his name, his hand trembling.

London — Evening

Claire looked between Hill and Sommers, her heart hammering.

“You believe Cutter was… possessed?” she said carefully.

Hill’s jaw tightened. “We don’t believe. We know. And now it’s happening again.”

Sommers finally turned from the window. “And if Duvall’s right, it hasn’t stopped since the night Cutter died. We just thought we’d closed the book. We didn’t.”

Claire sank into her chair, pale but resolute. She had spent years peeling apart trauma, learning that the human mind could carry more horror than flesh could bear. Yet this was something different, something beyond.

“Then tell me what you need from me,” she whispered. “Because if this is true, you can’t fight it alone.”

Marseille — Late Night

The exchange student’s body was wheeled away under white sheets. Reporters circled at the edges of the lot, their voices hushed but hungry.

Rousseau muttered curses, waving them back. Duvall barely noticed. His eyes were fixed on the empty space where the girl had lain.

She had praised her killer’s English, her friends had said. Fluent, polished, charming.

Luc Moreau had been the last person seen with her, Duvall thought bitterly. He could almost see the man’s smirk, his careful neatness. Not a monster in appearance, but in spirit.

Duvall lit another cigarette, exhaling into the night. He thought of Cutter. He thought of the headlines from a year ago.

And he thought of London. Of Hill and Sommers, names carried in whispers. Hill, he recalled, from the time they met in Paris, was a very astute detective. He had a feeling, a strong feeling that he would require his help on this case, and that is why he had contacted him personally earlier that day.

“This was no longer just France,” Duvall murmured to himself. “This was something older. Darker. And now it has crossed the sea.”

Chapter Nine

The Interview

Luc Moreau arrived at the Préfecture clean and composed, as if he had stepped out of a café and into a different room rather than into the teeth of an investigation. His blazer fit neatly, shirt pressed, hair combed with the same casual care of a man who believed every surface deserved to reflect him at his best. He walked with the polite gait of someone used to being received and never accused.

Inspector Henri Duvall watched him across the holding cell with a slow, clinical attention. Rousseau hovered by the door, hands tucked into his coat pockets, tension balanced on the edge of his jaw. They had brought Moreau in on suspicion—on pattern, on angle—but pattern did not make proof, and suspicion did not make arrest.

They led him into the interview room, the fluorescent light buzzing with the tired earnestness of bureaucracy. A single table, two chairs, a recorder that clacked awake when Duvall thumbed the switch. The photographs lay face-down for a moment; Duvall would not give himself the sight until he had to.

“Sit,” Duvall said. He kept his voice quiet, the kind of low tone that believed in the small economy of words.

Moreau sat without fuss and folded his hands. “Comfortable?” he asked, the sound almost guileless.

Rousseau’s patience thinned. “Mr. Moreau, we have questions for you.”

“Questions I have answers to,” Moreau replied, and that smile—one half student, one half predator—tugged at the corners of his mouth.

Duvall placed the first photo on the table, turning it slowly so Moreau could see. It was the face of the latest victim: nineteen, exchange student from Britain. She looked almost asleep beneath the autumn leaves, her hands composed as if arranged by careful fingers.

“Do you recognise her?” Duvall asked.

Moreau glanced, eyes flicking the surface like a man judging a photograph’s exposure. “A sad face. Poor lighting for such a careful composition.” His tone held a critique rather than concern. “Who is she?”

“Harper Langley,” Rousseau said flatly. “A British student. Fluent in French, according to her friends. She praised her companion’s English in messages found on her phone.”

Moreau’s smile sharpened. “Humour me. Was she good-looking?”

Rousseau’s fist clenched. “This is neither the time nor the place for levity.”

“You’re right,” Moreau said, mock contrition folding his features. “Forgive me. I find myself wondering at the way the press frames things.” He leaned forward slightly, curious. “You think in headlines. You like patterns.” He said it as if it were an observation, not an accusation.

Duvall spread more photographs. The hands. The hair brushed smooth. The neatness of placement. The strangulation marks visible in forensic close-ups. The same choreography that had defined the cases whispered of America and Britain months before, a cadence that had kept Duvall awake on nights when the city slept.

“Eleven victims in a year,” Duvall said. “Each arranged. Each strangled. We have reasons to think the same hand—or the same idea—works here.”

Moreau’s eyes sharpened, and for the briefest breath, the man’s face became something older. “You mean Bundy,” he said, the name a spice on his tongue. “And Cutter, yes? You have English policemen on the phone saying as much. Very flattering.” He made a small, theatrical bow. “To be discussed with those great names.”

Rousseau’s tone was brittle. “You mock the dead.”

“I mock nothing,” Moreau replied, his voice cordial but cold. “I am amused by pomp. And I am curious about clever men who think matching a pattern gives them omniscience. Patterns are comforting. They tell you there is a beginning and an end. There is rhythm. There is meaning.”

“Do you know anything about those rhythms?” Duvall asked. He pushed another sheet across: a grainy still from a trial sketch of Cutter; a yellowing clipping of Bundy from an archive.

Moreau picked up the sketch as if considering a book. He studied it for a long moment, then set it down with the deliberation of a man closing a fine volume. “They were fine craftsmen,” he said, almost reverently. “They understood the human face, how to put people at ease. They practiced. They learned. They sang a little hymn only they could hear. But they were not the orchestra. They were instruments.”

Rousseau laughed, a short, hard sound. “So it’s not the man, then. It’s some—some choir?”

“If you must label it,” Moreau said, eyes glittering, “call it a tradition. A succession of attention.” He shrugged. “People like to imagine solitary devils. They like to hold one man accountable and then sleep.”

“Why mock us then?” Duvall asked, the fatigue in him a line of iron. “Why taunt?”

Moreau leaned back, palms up—open, disarmingly human. “Because you wear honesty like a cloak. You believe in your tools. You show me pictures and expect fear. You offer me a table and think that the squeak of the recorder will confess me. It will not. You have no proof.” He smiled that patient smile. “And without proof, patience becomes…necessary.”

Rousseau slammed his hand on the table. “So what? We release you? You walk, and another girl dies?”

“You release because you must,” Moreau said. “Perhaps you will hold me longer if some fool in your lab discovers a hair. Perhaps not. This is France. This is the law. I can speak of it because I studied it; I admire it.”

Duvall’s throat moved. He turned the conversation, aware that threatening men like Moreau meant risking the one weapon they had: uncertainty. “You were in the vicinity of the harbour on three nights when a murder occurred. Witness logs place you in that quarter.”

Moreau’s expression flickered—an actor’s careful tremor—and then he smiled. “What a compelling mosaic you make. Allow me to provide an alibi. Sophie Lemaire. My girlfriend. Restaurant receipts. Two witnesses. CCTV from the rue. Would you like to call them, Inspector? Or is it easier to hold on to the romantic idea of a man walking the night, doing careful work while lovers can attest to his absence?”

Sophie Lemaire. The name had the ring of plausibility. Duvall felt the familiar, sickening calculus of police work: motive, opportunity, proof. Motive was invisible here. Opportunity ambiguous. Proof lacking. They had photographs and pattern, but those were not enough to charge in law. They needed a strand of dirt, a shred of fiber, a latent print. In Moreau’s history, pristine.

“You’re fortunate,” Rousseau muttered. “Too neat.”

Moreau’s smile widened. “Fortune, Monsieur Rousseau, is the indulgence of those who believe fate can be purchased by charm.” He paused, and the room seemed to tighten. “But perhaps you misunderstand the scale of the thing you chase. Do you think Bundy was just cruelty? Do you think Cutter was merely a man? How provincial.”

“I am saying that you read legends as history and history as myth.” Moreau’s tone softened into something almost tender. “There are hands that reach beyond national borders, Inspector. Minds that shape corners of the world you do not notice. You think you are chasing flesh, but flesh is merely the surface. If you cut at the flesh, another grows. If you stop one instrument, there are others waiting in the wings.”

Rousseau’s face went a hard line. “You speak like a man with a library of evil.”

“I speak like a man who reads,” Moreau said. “There is elegance to cruelty. There is devotion. It is not lunacy. Lunacy tears itself apart.” He leaned in, voice low and intimate. “This is craft. And craft survives interrogation.”

There was a silence in which Duvall could almost hear the city’s distant pulse. He wanted to drag Moreau into the dirt and see what crawled out—wanted to choke the theatricality out of him and find the place where the man bled. But the law had rules. Evidence had to be lawfully gathered, then presented in the bright, uninterested light of a courtroom. Tonight, they had nothing that would endure the test.

“Do you have anything else to say?” Duvall asked because he had to ask something.

Moreau folded himself with the same patient grace. “Only that I hope you find consolation in your chase. There is poetry in pursuit.” He paused. “And a suggestion: do hurry, Inspector. The next one is almost ready.”

Rousseau’s hand twitched toward the door. “You will be detained, monsieur. We have means.”

“You have watches that tick and seasons that turn,” Moreau said softly. “I have time.”

They released him later that night, not because they believed his protestations but because the law demanded it. Sophie Lemaire corroborated his presence in a boulangerie; CCTV showed him laughing over coffee. No fibres, no blood, no latent print. A man built on careful days and airless alibis. He walked out into the rain like someone leaving an inner-room and returned to the outer.

At the steps of the Préfecture, he paused, turned once, and looked at Duvall. The look was not angry; it was pitying and almost amused.

“Bonne chance, Inspector,” he said, the words a small dismissal.

Duvall did not answer. He watched Moreau melt into the city’s late hour and thought of Cutter, of headlines, of the meticulous arrangement of bodies. Of Bundy’s grin. Of Hill and Sommers, Sommers, whom he had yet to meet in person. He struck a match and lit a cigarette, the flame brief, stubborn.

Rousseau spat into the gutter. “We let him walk.”

Duvall inhaled, the smoke sharp in his lungs. “We let law walk,” he said. “And there will be other things that walk, regardless.”

He watched the streetlights tremble over puddles and felt for the first time the old, terrible understanding: this would not end with a man’s arrest. They had caught a face and had not caught the hand.

He turned back to his report, hands steady now, and he wrote the words that would later travel across the Channel:

Luc Moreau interviewed and released. No prosecutable evidence at this time. Pattern similarity noted. Requesting liaison with Metropolitan Homicide.

Outside, somewhere in the city, a young woman—unseen, unattended—moved through a corridor. The night held its breath.

Chapter Ten

Marseille, France

The plane touched down with a jarring bump that rattled the cutlery in the galley. From her window seat, Claire Hammond gazed out at the tarmac shimmering in the mid-afternoon heat. Marseilles spread beyond in an expanse of pale buildings and sunburned hills, the Mediterranean glinting like hammered steel at the horizon. It was a city drenched in history, yet for Claire the air seemed almost too bright, the light itself pressing into her eyes as though it were covering something darker.

Beside her, Detective Sergeant Melanie Sommers stretched her legs, groaning softly after the long flight. She had the wiry energy of someone who disliked being still too long, and the enforced hours in a narrow seat had only wound her tighter. Hill, as ever, was unreadable, his pale gaze fixed ahead with the sort of calm one finds in a soldier prepared for any terrain. Claire envied that stillness. For her, the journey had carried with it a slow accumulation of dread.

“Marseilles,” Sommers muttered, brushing her dark hair back from her face. “City of sun, sea, and stabbings.”

Hill didn’t turn. “Keep the humour. We’ll need it.”

Claire gave a faint smile. “I thought you two promised me we’d keep this one professional.”

Sommers smirked. “That was professional. If you can’t laugh at it, it’ll eat you alive.”

Hill glanced at Claire then, and though his expression barely shifted, she caught the flicker of reassurance in his eyes. “It will be, Dr. Hammond. But professionalism and gallows humour often walk the same road.”

They were met at the arrivals hall by a tall, dark-suited man whose presence seemed to part the crowd without effort. Inspector Henri Duval carried the sort of charisma Claire associated with certain senior officers — cultivated confidence, but touched with fatigue. At his side was Lieutenant Rousseau, younger, sharper, his scepticism worn openly on his features.

“Detective Chief Inspector Hill,” Duval greeted warmly, extending a hand. “We meet again. Though I confess, I hoped it would be at another conference and not under such circumstances.”

“Likewise,” Hill replied, clasping the hand firmly. He inclined his head towards Claire. “This is Dr. Claire Hammond, consulting psychiatrist. And Detective Sergeant Sommers, my partner.”

Duval’s dark eyes appraised them swiftly. “Bien. You will be most welcome here. Though I warn you — the case is as frustrating as it is grim.”

“Then let’s get to it,” Sommers said, her voice brisk, no-nonsense.

Rousseau gave her a thin smile. “An Englishwoman’s appetite for work. Or perhaps you are simply eager to escape the airport?”

Sommers tilted her head. “Both.”

The briefing took place in the central commissariat, an imposing nineteenth-century building whose walls seemed to carry the weight of countless unsolved crimes. Files were spread across the table in a bare conference room: photographs of young women, their faces once alive with promise, now frozen in death.

Claire felt her stomach knot. She had braced herself for this, but the reality was different from the clinical detachment she usually fostered in sessions. These women could have been her patients — or her students from the seminars she occasionally gave in London. Each had been strangled, left posed with uncanny neatness.

“The first was almost one year ago to the day,” Duval said, his tone clipped. “Two days after, the Englishman Cutter was killed in London. Since then, nine more. And now — the eleventh.” He tapped a photograph of a young woman with auburn hair and a lively smile. “Harper Langley, an exchange student from Manchester. Nineteen years old.”

Hill’s face betrayed no reaction, but Claire saw his jaw tighten. Sommers leaned back in her chair, exhaling sharply through her nose.

Duval continued. “We have questioned suspects. We have examined patterns. But our killer is meticulous. He leaves nothing but the echo of himself behind. Nothing that can be held in a court.”

Rousseau leaned forward. “Except, perhaps, his arrogance. We brought one man in yesterday. Luc Moreau. He is polite, charming, with perfect English. He knew Harper Langley socially. But there is no evidence, nothing beyond our suspicions. We had to release him.”

Claire felt the air shift. “And yet you believe it’s him.”

Duval’s eyes narrowed. “I do not believe. I know. But knowledge without proof is like smoke in your hands.”

Hill picked up one of the photos, studying it intently. “You said he speaks perfect English.”

“Oui.” Rousseau’s mouth twisted. “He mocks us in it, at times.”

Claire spoke carefully. “That in itself may be significant. Men like this… if he is the one… they often cannot resist leaving a trail of personality. Not evidence, but fingerprints of the mind. The arrogance, the mocking tone, the performative English. It’s part of the compulsion.”

Duval gave her a long look, then nodded once. “We thought the same.”

Across the city, Luc Moreau sat in a café overlooking the harbour. His hair was dark and immaculately groomed, his shirt crisp, his posture one of elegant nonchalance. He sipped his coffee as though the world itself existed merely to amuse him.

Inside him, the entity stirred — ancient, patient, and cruel. It whispered without words, filling him with a cold elation. This body was strong, this city ripe. The girl had screamed beautifully, her final breath a gift.

Moreau smiled faintly, remembering the faces of Duval and Rousseau as they tried to break him in the interview room. Their questions had been clumsy tools; their suspicion a sweet perfume. He had told them they had no idea what they were dealing with. And it was true. They were children groping in shadows.

He thought of the Master and of Brother Cutter before him. The work had not ended in London. It had only shifted, finding new soil in which to root. Soon, there would be another. Always another.

Back at the commissariat, Hill leaned forward, studying the map Duval had pinned to the wall. Red markers bloomed across the city — the sites where bodies had been found.

“They form a pattern,” Claire said suddenly, her voice sharper than she intended.

All eyes turned to her. She rose, approaching the map, tracing the locations with her finger. “Not geometrical, but… a rhythm. Each within a certain distance of the waterfront. Almost as though he wants to keep close to the sea.”

Sommers frowned. “Why?”

“Symbolic, maybe,” Claire said. “Or practical. The sea represents escape, power, infinity. Men who kill often align themselves with symbols, even if they don’t articulate them. He may not even know why he’s doing it.”

Duval studied her, his expression unreadable. “You have insight, Doctor. But you must understand — Moreau is not merely a killer of women. He is a killer of reason. He thrives because he mocks us, because he turns our own methods into chains around us. I fear that if we are not careful, we will become his next victims — not of death, but of ridicule.”

Claire felt a chill despite the heat of the room. She thought of Cutter, and of the photographs Hill had shown her in London. The neatness of the bodies, the cold certainty of the hands that had placed them. And she thought of the mocking smile Hill had described, the smile now reborn in another city, in another man.

That night, after the briefing, Claire found herself unable to sleep. The hotel room was too quiet, the air too heavy. She stood at the window, gazing out at the city lights scattered across the hills. Somewhere out there, she thought, Luc Moreau was awake. Somewhere out there, the entity moved, choosing its next victim.

She pressed her hand against the glass, as though the city might feel her presence. For the first time in years, she wondered if her training, her careful science of the mind, could stand against something that seemed larger than human.

And yet she knew, with a certainty that both terrified and steadied her: she had to try.