Outwardly, he might have been recalling a favourite holiday or reliving some other fond memory, but in fact his mind was churning over the facts of his current investigation. For him this was a pleasurable exercise, in spite of the gruesome details. Naturally, he wanted to solve the puzzle as quickly as possible. He had Superintendent Hughes breathing down his neck for a start, and she would have her boss, Commander Ferguson, breathing down hers, but Pendragon had become a policeman primarily because he loved solving puzzles. For him the thrill of what he did lay in the intellectual exercise, the chase. But there was no denying that this case was proving frustrating, to say the least. Three murders, each incredibly contrived … the most contrived he had ever experienced, in fact. In spite of what he had said to Gemma Locke about the choice of paintings, he couldn’t get out of his head the idea that there was some sort of message in the way the bodies had been arranged. Why would anyone do this?
