Читать книгу The Wire in the Blood - Val McDermid, Val McDermid - Страница 8

Tony Hill lay in bed and watched a long strip of cloud slide across a sky the colour of duck eggs. If anything had sold him on this narrow back-to-back terraced house, it was the attic bedroom with its strange angles and the pair of skylights that gave him something to look at when sleep was elusive. A new house, a new city, a new start, but still it was hard to lose consciousness for eight hours at a stretch.

It wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t slept well. Today was the first day of the rest of his life, he reminded himself with a wry smile that scrunched the skin round his deep-set blue eyes into a nest of wrinkles that not even his best friend could call laughter lines. He’d never laughed enough for that. And making murder his business had made sure he never would.

Work was always the perfect excuse, of course. For two years, he’d been toiling on behalf of the Home Office on a feasibility study to see whether it would be useful or possible to create a national task force of trained psychological profilers, a hit squad capable of moving in on complex cases and working with the investigative teams to improve the rate and speed of clean-up. It had been a job that had required all the clinical and diplomatic skills he’d developed over years of working as a psychologist in secure mental hospitals.

It had kept him off the wards, but it had exposed him to other dangers. The danger of boredom, for example. Tired of being stuck behind a desk or in endless meetings, he’d allowed himself to be seduced away from the job in hand by the tantalizing offer of involvement in a case that even from a distance had appeared to be something very special. Not in his wildest nightmares could he have imagined just how exceptional it could be. Nor how destructive.

He clenched his eyes momentarily against the memories that always stalked on the edge of his consciousness, waiting for him to drop his guard and let them in. That was another reason why he slept badly. The thought of what his dreams could do to him was no enticement to drift away and hand control over to his subconscious.

The cloud slipped out of sight like a slow-moving fish and Tony rolled out of bed, padding downstairs to the kitchen. He poured water into the bottom section of the coffee pot, filled the mid-section with a darkly fragrant roast from the freezer, screwed on the empty top section and set it on the gas. He thought of Carol Jordan, as he did probably one morning in three when he made the coffee. She’d given him the heavy aluminium Italian pot when he’d come home from hospital after the case was over. ‘You’re not going to be walking to the café for a while,’ she’d said. ‘At least this way you can get a decent espresso at home.’

It had been months now since he’d seen Carol. They’d not even taken the opportunity to celebrate her promotion to detective chief inspector, which showed just how far apart they’d grown. Initially, after his release from hospital, she’d come to visit whenever the hectic pace of her job would allow. Gradually, they’d both come to realize that every time they were together, the spectre of the investigation rose between them, obscuring and overshadowing whatever else might be possible for them. He understood that Carol was better equipped than most to interpret what she saw in him. He simply couldn’t face the risk of opening up to someone who might reject him when she realized how he had been infected by his work.

If that happened, he doubted his capacity to function. And if he couldn’t function, he couldn’t do his job. And that was too important to let go. What he did saved people’s lives. He was good at it, probably one of the best there had ever been because he truly understood the dark side. To risk the work would be the most irresponsible thing he could ever do, especially now when the whole future of the newly created National Offender Profiling Task Force lay in his hands.

What some people perceived as sacrifices were really dividends, he told himself firmly as he poured out his coffee. He was permitted to do the one thing he did supremely well, and they paid him money for it. A tired smile crossed his face. God, but he was lucky.

Shaz Bowman understood perfectly why people commit murder. The revelation had nothing to do with the move to a new city or the job that had brought her there, but everything to do with the cowboy plumbers who had installed the water supply when the former Victorian mill-owner’s mansion had been converted into self-contained apartments. The builders had done a thoughtful job, preserving original features and avoiding partitions that wrecked the fine proportions of the spacious rooms. To the naked eye, Shaz’s flat had been perfect, right down to the French windows leading to the back garden that was her exclusive domain.

Years of shared student dives with sticky carpets and scummy bathtubs, followed by a police section house and a preposterously expensive rented bedsit in West London had left Shaz desperate for the opportunity to check out whether house-proud was an adjective she could live with. The move north had provided her first affordable chance. But the idyll had shattered the first morning she had to rise early for work.

Bleary-eyed and semi-conscious, she’d run the shower long enough to get the temperature right. She stepped under the powerful stream of water, lifting her hands above her head in a strangely reverent gesture. Her groan of pleasure turned abruptly to a scream as the water switched from amniotic warmth to a scalding scatter of hypodermic stings. She hurled herself clear of the shower cubicle, twisting her knee as she slipped on the bathroom floor, cursing with a fluency she owed to her three years in the Met.

Speechless, she stared at the plume of steam in the corner of the bathroom where she had stood moments before. Then, as abruptly, the steam dissipated. Cautiously, she extended a hand under the water. The temperature was back where it should be. Inch by tentative inch, she moved under the stream of water. Letting out her unconsciously held breath, she reached for the shampoo. She’d got as far as the halo of white lather when the icy needles of winter rain cascaded on her bare shoulders. This time, her breath went inwards, taking enough shampoo with it to add a coughing retch to the morning’s sound effects.

It didn’t take much to work out that her ordeal was the result of someone else’s synchronous ablutions. She was supposed to be a detective, after all. But understanding didn’t make her any happier. The first day of the new job and instead of feeling calm and grounded after a long, soothing shower, she was furious and frustrated, her nerves jangling, the muscles in the nape of her neck tightening with the promise of a headache. ‘Great,’ she growled, fighting back tears that had more to do with emotion than the shampoo in them.

Shaz advanced on the shower once again and turned it off with a vicious twist of the wrist. Mouth compressed into a thin line, she started running a bath. Tranquillity was no longer an option for the day, but she still had to get the suds out of her hair so she wouldn’t arrive in the squad room of the brand new task force looking like something no self-respecting cat would have bothered to drag in. It was going to be unnerving enough without having to worry about what she looked like.

As she crouched in the bath, dunking her head forward into the water, Shaz tried to restore her earlier mood of exhilarated anticipation. ‘You’re lucky to be here, girl,’ she told herself. ‘All those dickheads who applied and you didn’t even have to fill in the form, you got chosen. Hand-picked, elite. All that shit work paid off, all that taking the crap with a smile. The canteen cowboys going nowhere fast, they’re the ones having to swallow the shit now. Not like you, Detective Constable Shaz Bowman. National Offender Profiling Task Force Officer Bowman.’ As if that wasn’t enough, she’d be working alongside the acknowledged master of that arcane blend of instinct and experience. Dr Tony Hill, BSc (London), DPhil (Oxon), the profiler’s profiler, author of the definitive British textbook on serial offenders. If Shaz had been a woman given to hero-worship, Tony Hill would have been right up there in the pantheon of her personal gods. As it was, the opportunity to pick his brains and learn his craft was one that she’d cheerfully have made sacrifices for. But she hadn’t had to give up anything. It had been dropped right into her lap.

By the time she was towelling her cap of short dark hair, considering the chance of a lifetime that lay ahead of her had tamed her anger though not her nerves. Shaz forced herself to focus on the day ahead. Dropping the towel carelessly over the side of the bath, she stared into the mirror, ignoring the blurt of freckles across her cheekbones and the bridge of her small soft nose, passing over the straight line of lips too slim to promise much sensuality and focusing on the feature that everyone else noticed first about her.

Her eyes were extraordinary. Dark blue irises were shot through with striations of an intense, paler shade that seemed to catch the light like the facets of a sapphire. In interrogation, they were irresistible. The eyes had it. That intense blue stare fixed people like superglue. Shaz had a feeling that it had made her last boss so uncomfortable he’d been delighted at the prospect of shipping her out in spite of an arrest and conviction record that would have been remarkable in an experienced CID officer, never mind the rookie of the shift.

She’d only met her new boss once. Somehow, she didn’t think Tony Hill was going to be quite so much of a pushover. And who knew what he’d see if he slid under those cold blue defences? With a shiver of anxiety, Shaz turned away from the remorseless stare of the mirror and chewed the skin on the side of her thumb.

Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan slipped the original out of the photocopier, picked up the copy from the tray and crossed the open-plan CID room to her office with nothing more revelatory than a genial, ‘Morning, lads,’ to the two early bird detectives already at their desks. She presumed they were only there at this hour because they were trying to make an impression on her. Sad boys.

She shut her door firmly behind her and crossed to her desk. The original crime report went back into the overnight file and onwards into her out tray. The photostat joined four similar previous overnight despatches in a folder that lived in her briefcase when it wasn’t sitting on her desk. Five, she decided, was critical mass. Time for action. She glanced at her watch. But not quite yet.

The only other item that cluttered the desk now was a lengthy memo from the Home Office. In the dry civil service language that could render Tarantino dull, it announced the formal launch of the National Offender Profiling Task Force. ‘Under the supervision of Commander Paul Bishop, the task force will be led by Home Office clinical psychologist and Senior Profiler Dr Tony Hill. Initially, the task force will consist of a further six experienced detectives seconded to work with Dr Hill and Commander Bishop under Home Office guidelines.’

Carol sighed. ‘It could have been me. Oh yeah, it could have been me,’ she sang softly. She hadn’t been formally invited. But she knew all she’d have had to do was ask. Tony Hill had wanted her on the squad. He’d seen her work at close quarters and he’d told her more than once that she had the right cast of mind to help him make the new task force effective. But it wasn’t that simple. The one case they’d worked together had been personally devastating as well as difficult for both of them. And her feelings for Tony Hill were still too complicated for her to relish the prospect of becoming his right-hand woman in other cases that might become as emotionally draining and intellectually challenging as their first encounter.

Nevertheless, she’d been tempted. Then this had come along. Early promotion in a newly created force wasn’t an opportunity she felt she could afford to miss. The irony was that this chance had emerged from the same serial killer hunt. John Brandon had been the Assistant Chief Constable at Bradfield who’d had the nerve to bring in Tony Hill and to appoint Carol liaison officer. And when he was promoted to Chief Constable of the new force, he wanted her on board. His timing couldn’t have been better, she thought, a faint pang of regret surfacing in spite of herself. She stood up and took the three steps that were all she needed to cross her office and stare down at the docks below where people moved around purposefully doing she knew not what.

Carol had learned the Job first with the Met in London and then with Bradfield Metropolitan Police, both leviathans fuelled by the perpetual adrenaline high of inner city crime. But now she was out on the edge of England with East Yorkshire Police where, as her brother Michael had wryly pointed out, the force’s acronym was almost identical to the traditional Yorkshire yokel greeting of ‘Ey-up’. Here, the DCI’s job didn’t involve juggling murder inquiries, drive-by shootings, gang wars, armed robberies and high-profile drug deals.

In the towns and villages of East Yorkshire, there wasn’t any shortage of crime. But it was all low-level stuff. Her inspectors and sergeants were more than capable of dealing with it, even in the small cities of Holm and Traskham and the North Sea port of Seaford where she was based. Her junior officers didn’t want her running around on their tails. After all, what did a city girl like her know about sheep rustling? Or counterfeit cargo lading bills? Besides which, they all knew perfectly well that when the new DCI turned up on the job, she wasn’t so much interested in finding out what was going down as she was in sussing out who was up to scratch and who was busking it, who might be on the sauce and who might be on the take. And they were right. It was taking longer than she’d anticipated, but she was gradually assembling a picture of what her team was like and who was capable of what.

Carol sighed again, rumpling her shaggy blonde hair with the fingers of one hand. It was an uphill struggle, not least because most of the blunt Yorkshiremen she was working with were fighting a lifetime’s conditioning to take a woman guv’nor seriously. Not for the first time, she wondered if ambition had shoved her into a drastic mistake and backed her flourishing career into a cul-de-sac.

She shrugged and turned away from the window, then pulled out the file from her briefcase again. She might have opted to turn her back on the profiling task force, but working with Tony Hill had already taught her a few tricks. She knew what a serial offender’s signature looked like. She just hoped she didn’t need a team of specialists to track one down.

One half of the double doors swung open momentarily ahead of the other. A woman with a face instantly recognizable in 78 per cent of UK homes (according to the latest audience survey) and high heels that shouted the praises of legs which could have modelled pantyhose strode into the make-up department, glancing over her shoulder and saying, ‘… which gives me nothing to work off, so tell Trevor to swap two and four on the running order, OK?’

Betsy Thorne followed her, nodding calmly. She looked far too wholesome to be anything in TV, dark hair with irregular strands of silver swept back in a blue velvet Alice band from a face that was somehow quintessentially English; the intelligent eyes of a sheepdog, the bones of a thoroughbred racehorse and the complexion of a Cox’s Orange Pippin. ‘No problem,’ she said, her voice every degree as warm and caressing as her companion’s. She made a note on the clipboard she was carrying.

Micky Morgan, presenter and only permissible star of Midday with Morgan, the flagship two-hour lunchtime news magazine programme of the independent networks, carried straight ahead to what was clearly her usual chair. She settled in, pushed her honey blonde hair back and gave her face a quick critical scrutiny in the glass as the make-up artist swathed her in a protective gown. ‘Marla, you’re back!’ Micky exclaimed, delight in her voice and eyes in equal measure. ‘Thank God. I’m praying you’ve been out of the country so you didn’t have to look at what they do to me when you’re not here. I absolutely forbid you to go on holiday again!’

Marla smiled. ‘Still full of shit, Micky.’

‘It’s what they pay her for,’ Betsy said, perching on the counter by the mirror.

‘Can’t get the staff these days,’ Micky said through stiff lips as Marla started to smooth foundation over her skin. ‘Zit coming up on the right temple,’ she added.

‘Premenstrual?’ Marla asked.

‘I thought I was the only one who could spot that a mile off,’ Betsy drawled.

‘It’s the skin. The elasticity changes,’ Marla said absently, completely absorbed in her task.

‘Talking Point,’ Micky said. ‘Run it past me again, Bets.’ She closed her eyes to concentrate and Marla seized the chance to work on her eyelids.

Betsy consulted her clipboard. ‘In the wake of the latest revelations that yet another junior minister has been caught in the wrong bed by the tabloids, we ask, “What makes a woman want to be a mistress?”’ She ran through the guests for the item while Micky listened attentively. Betsy came to the final interviewee and smiled. ‘You’ll enjoy this: Dorien Simmonds, your favourite novelist. The professional mistress, putting the case that actually being a mistress is not only marvellous fun but a positive social service to all those put-upon wives who have to endure marital sex long after he bores them senseless.’

Micky chuckled. ‘Brilliant. Good old Dorien. Is there anything, do you suppose, that Dorien wouldn’t do to sell a book?’

‘She’s just jealous,’ Marla said. ‘Lips, please, Micky.’

‘Jealous?’ Betsy asked mildly.

‘If Dorien Simmonds had a husband like Micky’s, she wouldn’t be flying the flag for mistresses,’ Marla said firmly. ‘She’s just pig sick that she’ll never land a catch like Jacko. Mind you, who isn’t?’

‘Mmmm,’ Micky purred.

‘Mmmm,’ Betsy agreed.

It had taken years for the publicity machine to carve the pairing of Micky Morgan and Jacko Vance as firmly into the nation’s consciousness as fish and chips or Lennon and McCartney. The celebrity marriage made in ratings heaven, it could never be dissolved. Even the gossip columnists had given up trying.

The irony was that it had been fear of newspaper gossip that had brought them together in the first place. Meeting Betsy had turned Micky’s life on its head at a time when her career had started curving towards the heights. To climb as far and as fast as Micky meant collecting an interesting selection of enemies ranging from the poisonously envious to the rivals who’d been edged out of the limelight they thought was theirs of right. Since there was little to fault Micky on professionally, they’d homed in on the personal. Back in the early eighties, lesbian chic hadn’t been invented. For women even more than men, being gay was still one of the quickest routes to the P45. Within a few months of abandoning her formerly straight life by falling in love with Betsy, Micky understood what a hunted animal feels like.

Her solution had been radical and extremely successful. Micky had Jacko to thank for that. She had been and still was lucky to have him, she thought as she looked approvingly at her reflection in the make-up mirror.

Perfect.

Tony Hill looked around the room at the team he had hand-picked and felt a moment’s pity. They thought they were walking into this grave new world with their eyes open. Coppers never thought of themselves as innocents abroad. They were too streetwise. They’d seen it all, done it all, got pissed and thrown up on the T-shirt. Tony was here to instruct half a dozen cops who already thought they knew it all that there were unimaginable horrors out there that would make them wake up screaming in the night and teach them to pray. Not for forgiveness, but for healing. He knew only too well that whatever they thought, none of them had made a genuinely informed choice when they’d opted for the National Offender Profiling Task Force.

None of them except, perhaps, Paul Bishop. When the Home Office had given the profiling project the green light, Tony had called in every favour he could claim and a few he couldn’t to make sure the police figurehead was someone who knew the gravity of what he was taking on. He’d dangled Paul Bishop’s name in front of the politicians like a carrot in front of a reluctant mule, reminding them of how well Paul performed in front of the cameras. Even then it had been touch and go till he’d pointed out that even London’s cynical hacks showed a bit of respect for the man who’d headed the successful hunts for the predators they’d dubbed the Railcard Rapist and the Metroland Murderer. After those investigations, there was no question in Tony’s mind that Paul knew exactly the kind of nightmares that lay ahead.

On the other hand, the rewards were extraordinary. When it worked, when their work actually put someone away, these police officers would know a high unlike any other they’d ever experienced. It was a powerful feeling, to know your endeavours had helped put a killer away. It was even more gratifying to realize how many lives you might have saved because you shone a light down the right path for your colleagues to go down. It was exhilarating, even though it was tempered with the knowledge of what the perpetrator had already done. Somehow, he had to convey that satisfaction to them as well.

Paul Bishop was talking now, welcoming them to the task force and outlining the training programme he and Tony had thrashed out between them. ‘We’re going to take you through the process of profiling, giving you the background information you need to start developing the skill for yourself,’ he said. It was a crash course in psychology, inevitably superficial, but covering the basics. If they’d chosen wisely, their apprentices would go off in their own preferred directions, reading more widely, tracking down other specialists and building up their own expertise in particular areas of the profiling craft that interested them.

Tony looked around at his new colleagues. All CID-trained, all but one a graduate. A sergeant and five constables, two of them women. Eager eyes, notepads open, pens at the ready. They were smart, this lot. They knew that if they did well here and the unit prospered, they could go all the way to the top on the strength of it.

His steady gaze ranged over them. Part of him wished Carol Jordan was among them, sharing her sharp perceptions and shrewd analyses, tossing in the occasional grenade of humour to lighten the grimness. But his sensible head knew there would be more than enough problems ahead without that complication.

If he had to put money on any of them turning into the kind of star that would stop him missing Carol’s abilities, he’d go for the one with the eyes that blazed cold fire. Sharon Bowman. Like all the best hunters, she’d kill if she had to.

Just like he’d done himself.

Tony pushed the thought away and concentrated on Paul’s words, waiting for the signal. When Paul nodded, Tony took over smoothly. ‘The FBI take two years to train their operatives in offender profiling,’ he said, leaning back in his chair in a deliberate attitude of relaxed calm. ‘We do things differently over here.’ A note of acid in the voice. ‘We’ll be accepting our first cases in six weeks. In three months’ time, the Home Office expects us to be running a full case-load. What you’ve got to do inside that time frame is assimilate a mountain of theory, learn a series of protocols as long as your arm, develop total familiarity with the computer software we’ve had specially written for the task force, and cultivate an instinctive understanding of those among us who are, as we clinicians put it, totally fucked up.’ He grinned unexpectedly at their serious faces. ‘Any questions?’

‘Is it too late to resign?’ Bowman’s electric eyes sparkled humour that was missing from her deadpan tones.

‘The only resignations they accept are the ones certified by the pathologist.’ The wry response came from Simon McNeill. Psychology graduate from Glasgow, four years’ service with Strathclyde Police, Tony reminded himself, reassuring himself that he could recall names and backgrounds without too much effort.

‘Correct,’ he said.

‘What about insanity?’ another voice from the group asked.

‘Far too useful a tool for us to let you slip from our grasp,’ Tony told him. ‘I’m glad you brought that up, actually, Sharon. It gives me the perfect lead into what I want to talk about first today.’ His eyes moved from face to face, waiting until his seriousness was mirrored in each of their faces. A man accustomed to assuming whatever personality and demeanour would be acceptable, he shouldn’t have been surprised at how easy it was to manipulate them, but he was. If he did his job properly, it would be far harder to achieve in a couple of months’ time.

Once they were settled and concentrating, he tossed his folder of notes on to the table attached to the arm of his chair and ignored them. ‘Isolation,’ he said. ‘Alienation. The hardest things to deal with. Human beings are gregarious. We’re herd animals. We hunt in packs, we celebrate in packs. Take away human contact from someone and their behaviour distorts. You’re going to learn a lot about that over the coming months and years.’ He had their attention now. Time for the killer blow.

‘I’m not talking about serial offenders. I’m talking about you. You’re all police officers with CID experience. You’re successful cops, you’ve fitted in, you’ve made the system work for you. That’s why you’re here. You’re used to the camaraderie of team work, you’re accustomed to a support system that backs you up. When you get a result, you’ve always had a drinking squad to share the victory with. When it’s all gone up in smoke, that same squad comes out and commiserates with you. It’s a bit like a family, only it’s a family without the big brother that picks on you and the auntie that asks when you’re going to get married.’ He noted the nods and twinges of facial expression that indicated agreement. As he’d expected, there were fewer from the women than the men.

He paused for a moment and leaned forward. ‘You’ve just been collectively bereaved. Your families are dead and you can never, never go home any more. This is the only home you have, this is your only family.’ He had them now, gripped tighter than any thriller had ever held them. The Bowman woman’s right eyebrow twitched up into an astonished arc, but other than that, they were motionless.

‘The best profilers have probably got more in common with serial killers than with the rest of the human race. Because killers have to be good profilers, too. A killer profiles his victims. He has to learn how to look at a shopping precinct full of people and pick out the one person who will work as a victim for him. He picks the wrong person and it’s good night, Vienna. So he can’t afford to make mistakes any more than we can. Like us, he kicks off consciously sorting by set criteria, but gradually, if he’s good, it gets to be an instinct. And that’s how good I want you all to be.’

For a moment, his perfect control slipped as images crowded unbidden to the front of his mind. He was the best, he knew that now. But he’d paid a high price to discover that. The idea that payment might come due again was something he managed to reject as long as he was sober. It was no accident that Tony had scarcely had a drink for the best part of a year.

Collecting himself, Tony cleared his throat and straightened in his seat. ‘Very soon, your lives are going to change. Your priorities will shift like Los Angeles in an earthquake. Believe me, when you spend your days and nights projecting yourself inside a mind that’s programmed to kill until death or incarceration prevents it, you suddenly find a lot of things that used to seem important are completely irrelevant. It’s hard to get worked up about the unemployment figures when you’ve been contemplating the activities of somebody who’s taken more people off the register in the last six months than the government has.’ His cynical smile gave them the cue to relax the muscles that had been taut for the past few minutes.

‘People who have not done this kind of work have no notion of what it is like. Every day, you review the evidence, raking through it for that elusive clue you missed the last forty-seven times. You watch helplessly as your hot leads turn out colder than a junkie’s heart. You want to shake the witnesses who saw the killer but don’t remember anything about him because nobody told them in advance that one of the people who would fill up with petrol in their service station one night three months ago was a multiple murderer. Some detective who thinks what you’re doing is a bag of crap sees no reason why your life shouldn’t be as fucking miserable as his, so he gives out your phone number to husbands, wives, lovers, children, parents, siblings, all of them people who want a crumb of hope from you.

‘And as if that isn’t enough, the media gets on your back. And then the killer does it again.’

Leon Jackson, who’d made it out of Liverpool’s black ghetto to the Met via an Oxford scholarship, lit a cigarette. The snap of his lighter had the other two smokers reaching for their own. ‘Sounds cool,’ he said, dropping one arm over the back of his chair. Tony couldn’t help the pang of pity. Harder they come, the bigger the fall.

‘Arctic,’ Tony said. ‘So, that’s how people outside the Job see you. What about your former colleagues? When you come up against the ones you left behind, believe me, they’re going to start noticing you’ve gone a bit weird. You’re not one of the gang any more, and they’ll start avoiding you because you smell wrong. Then when you’re working a case, you’re going to be transplanted into an alien environment and there will be people there who don’t want you on the case. Inevitably.’ He leaned forward again, hunched against the chill wind of memory. ‘And they won’t be afraid to let you know it.’

Tony read superiority in Leon’s sneer. Being black, he reasoned, Leon probably figured he’d had a taste of that already and rejection could therefore hold no fears for him. What he almost certainly didn’t realize was that his bosses had needed a black success story. They’d have made that clear to the officers who controlled the culture, so the chances were that no one had really pushed Leon half as hard as he thought they had. ‘And don’t think the brass will back you when the shit comes down,’ Tony continued. ‘They won’t. They’ll love you for about two days, then when you haven’t solved their headaches, they’ll start to hate you. The longer it takes to resolve the serial offences, the worse it becomes. And the other detectives avoid you because you’ve got a contagious disease called failure. The truth might be out there, but you haven’t got it, and until you do, you’re a leper.

‘Oh, and by the way,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘when they do nail the bastard thanks to your hard work, they won’t even invite you to the party.’

The silence was so intense he could hear the hiss of burning tobacco as Leon inhaled. Tony got to his feet and shoved his springy black hair back from his forehead. ‘You probably think I’m exaggerating. Believe me, I’m barely scratching the surface of how bad this job will make you feel. If you don’t think it’s for you, if you’re having doubts about your decision, now’s the time to walk away. Nobody will reproach you. No blame, no shame. Just have a word with Commander Bishop.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Coffee break. Ten minutes.’

He picked up his folder and carefully didn’t look at them as they pushed back chairs and made a ragged progress to the door and the coffee station in the largest of the three rooms they’d been grudgingly granted by a police service already strapped for accommodation for their own officers. When at last he looked up, Shaz Bowman stood leaning against the wall by the door, waiting.

‘Second thoughts, Sharon?’ he asked.

‘I hate being called Sharon,’ she said. ‘People who want a response go for Shaz. I just wanted to say it’s not only profilers that get treated like shit. There’s nothing you said just now that sounds any worse than what women deal with all the time in this job.’

‘So I’ve been told,’ Tony said, thinking inevitably of Carol Jordan. ‘If it’s true, you lot should have a head start in this game.’

Shaz grinned and pushed off from the wall, satisfied. ‘Just watch,’ she said, swivelling on the balls of her feet and moving through the door on feet as silent and springy as a jungle cat.

Jacko Vance leaned forward across the flimsy table and frowned. He pointed to the open desk diary. ‘You see, Bill? I’m already committed to running the half-marathon on the Sunday. And then after that, we’re filming Monday and Tuesday, I’m doing a club opening in Lincoln on Tuesday night – you’re coming to that, by the way, aren’t you?’ Bill nodded, and Jacko continued. ‘I’ve got meetings lined up Wednesday back to back and I’ve got to drive back up to Northumberland for my volunteer shift. I just don’t see how we can accommodate them.’ He threw himself back against the striped tweed of the production caravan’s comfortless sofa bench with a sigh.

‘That’s the whole point, Jacko,’ his producer said calmly, stirring the skimmed milk into the two coffees he was making in the kitchen area. Bill Ritchie had been producing Vance’s Visits for long enough to know there was little point in trying to change his star’s mind once it was made up. But this time, he was under sufficient pressure from his bosses to try. ‘This documentary short’s supposed to make you look busy, to say, “Here’s this amazing guy, busy professional life, yet he finds time to work for charity, so why aren’t you?”’ He brought the coffees to the table.

‘I’m sorry, Bill, but it’s not on.’ Jacko picked up his coffee and winced at its scalding heat. Hastily, he put it down again. ‘When are we going to get a proper coffee maker in here?’

‘If it’s anything to do with me, never,’ Bill said with a mock-severe scowl. ‘The lousy coffee’s the one thing guaranteed to divert you from whatever you’re going on about.’

Jacko shook his head ruefully, acknowledging he’d been caught out. ‘OK. But I’m still not doing it. For one, I don’t want a camera crew dogging my heels any more than I already have to put up with. For two, I don’t do charity work so I can show off about it on prime-time telethons. For three, the poor sick bastards I spend my nights with are terminally ill people who do not need a hand-held camera shoved down their emaciated throats. I’ll happily do something else for the telethon, maybe something with Micky, but I’m not having the people I work with exploited just so we can guilt-trip a few more grand out of the viewers.’

Bill spread his hands in defeat. ‘Fine by me. Do you want to tell them or will I?’

‘Would you, Bill? Save me the aggravation?’ Jacko’s smile was bright as a shaft of sunlight from a thundercloud, promising as the hour before a first date. It was imprinted on his audience like a race memory. Women made love to their husbands with more gusto because Jacko’s sexually inviting eyes and kissable mouth were flickering across the inside of their eyelids. Adolescent girls found their vague erotic longings suddenly focused. Old ladies doted on him, without connecting the subsequent feelings of unfulfilled sadness.

Men liked him too, but not because they found him sexy. Men liked Jacko Vance because he was, in spite of everything, one of the lads. A British, Commonwealth, and European gold medallist and holder of the world javelin record, Olympic gold had seemed like an inevitability for the darling of the back pages. Then one night, driving back from an athletics meeting in Gateshead, Jacko drove into a dense bank of fog on the A1. He wasn’t the only one.

The morning news bulletins put the figures at between twenty-seven and thirty-five vehicles in the multiple pile-up. The big story wasn’t the six dead, however. The big story was the tragic heroism of Jacko Vance, British athletics’ golden boy. In spite of suffering multiple lacerations and three broken ribs in the initial impact, Jacko had crawled out of his mangled motor and rescued two children from the back of a car seconds before it burst into flames. Depositing them on the hard shoulder, he’d gone back into the tangled metal and attempted to free a lorry driver pinioned between his steering wheel and the buckled door of his cab.

The creaking of stressed metal turned to a shriek as accumulated pressures built up on the lorry and the roof caved in. The driver didn’t stand a chance. Neither did Jacko Vance’s throwing arm. It took the firemen three agonizing hours to cut him free from the crushing weight of metal that had smashed his flesh to raw meat and his bones to splinters. Worse, he was conscious for most of it. Trained athletes knew all about pushing through the pain barrier.

The news of his George Cross came the day after the medics fitted his first prosthesis. It was small consolation for the loss of the dream that had been the core of his life for a dozen years. But bitterness didn’t cloud his natural shrewdness. He knew how fickle the media could be. He still smarted at the memory of the headlines when he’d blown his first attempt at the European title. JACK SPLAT! had been the kindest stab at the heart of the man who only the day before had been JACK OF HEARTS.

He knew he had to capitalize on his glory quickly or he’d soon be another yesterday’s hero, early fodder for the ‘Where Are They Now?’ column. So he called in a few favours, renewed his acquaintance with Bill Ritchie and ended up commentating on the very Olympics where he should have mounted the rostrum. It had been a start. Simultaneously, he’d worked to establish his reputation as a tireless worker for charity, a man who would never allow his fame to stand in the way of helping people less fortunate than himself.

Now, he was bigger than all the fools who’d been so ready to write him off. He’d charmed and chatted his way to the front of the sports presenters’ ranks in a slash and burn operation of such devious ruthlessness that some of his victims still didn’t realize they’d been calculatedly chopped off at the knees. Once he’d consolidated that role, he’d presented a chat show that had topped the light entertainment ratings for three years. When the fourth year saw it drop to third place, he dumped the format and launched Vance’s Visits.

The show claimed to be spontaneous. In fact, Jacko’s arrival in the midst of what his publicity called ‘ordinary people living ordinary lives’ was invariably orchestrated with all the advance planning of a royal visit but none of the attendant publicity. Otherwise he’d have attracted bigger crowds than any of the discredited House of Windsor. Especially if he’d turned up with the wife.

And still it wasn’t enough.

Carol bought the coffees. It was a privilege of rank. She thought about refusing to shell out for the chocolate biscuits on the basis that nobody needed three KitKats to get through a meeting with their DCI. But she knew it would be misinterpreted, so she grinned and bore the expense. She led the troops she’d chosen with care to a quiet corner cut off from the rest of the canteen by an array of plastic parlour palms. Detective Sergeant Tommy Taylor, Detective Constable Lee Whitbread and Detective Constable Di Earnshaw had all impressed her with their intelligence and determination. She might yet be proved wrong, but these three officers were her private bet for the pick of Seaford Central’s CID.

‘I’m not going to attempt to pretend this is a social chat so we can get to know each other better,’ she announced, sharing the biscuits out among the three of them. Di Earnshaw watched her, eyes like currants in a suet pudding, hating the way her new boss managed to look elegant in a linen suit with more creases than a dosser’s when she just looked lumpy in her perfectly pressed chain-store skirt and jacket.

‘Thank Christ for that,’ Tommy said, a grin slowly spreading. ‘I was beginning to worry in case we’d got a guv’nor who didn’t understand the importance of Tetley’s Bitter to a well-run CID.’

Carol’s answering smile was wry. ‘It’s Bradfield I came from, remember?’

‘That’s why we were worried, ma’am,’ Tommy replied.

Lee snorted with suppressed laughter, turned it into a cough and spluttered, ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

‘You will be,’ Carol said pleasantly. ‘I’ve got a task for you three. I’ve been taking a good look at the overnights since I got here, and I’m a bit concerned about the high incidence of unexplained fires and query arsons that we’ve got on our ground. I spotted five query arsons in the last month and when I made some checks with uniform, I found out there have been another half-dozen unexplained outbreaks of fire.’

‘You always get that kind of thing round the docks,’ Tommy said, casually shrugging big shoulders inside a baggy silk blouson that had gone out of fashion a couple of years previously.

‘I appreciate that, but I’m wondering if there’s a bit more to it than that. Agreed, a couple of the smaller blazes are obvious routine cock-ups, but I’m wondering if there’s something else going on here.’ Carol left it dangling to see who would pick it up.

‘A firebug, you mean, ma’am?’ It was Di Earnshaw, the voice pleasant but the expression bordering on the insolent.

‘A serial arsonist, yes.’

There was a momentary silence. Carol reckoned she knew what they were thinking. The East Yorkshire force might be a new entity, but these officers had worked this patch under the old regime. They were in with the bricks, whereas she was the new kid in town, desperate to shine at their expense. And they weren’t sure whether to roll with it or try to derail her. Somehow she had to persuade them that she was the star they should be hitching their wagons to. ‘There’s a pattern,’ she said. ‘Empty premises, early hours of the morning. Schools, light industrial units, warehouses. Nothing too big, nowhere there might be a night watchman to put the mockers on it. But serious nevertheless. Big fires, all of them. They’ve caused a lot of damage and the insurance companies must be hurting more than they like.’

‘Nobody’s said owt about an arsonist on the rampage,’ Tommy remarked calmly. ‘Usually, the firemen tip us the wink if they think there’s something a bit not right on the go.’

‘Either that or the local rag gives us a load of earache,’ Lee chipped in through a mouthful of his second KitKat. Lean as a whippet in spite of the biscuits and the three sugars in his coffee, Carol noted. One to watch for high-strung hyperactivity.

‘Call me picky, but I prefer it when we’re setting the agenda, not the local hacks or the fire service,’ Carol said coolly. ‘Arson isn’t a Mickey Mouse crime. Like murder, it has terrible consequences. And like murder, you’ve got a stack of potential motives. Fraud, the destruction of evidence, the elimination of competition, revenge and cover-up, at the “logical” end of the spectrum. And at the screwed-up end, we have the ones who do it for kicks and sexual gratification. Like serial killers, they nearly always have their own internal logic that they mistake for something that makes sense to the rest of us.

‘Fortunately for us, serial murder is a lot less common than serial arson. Insurers reckon a quarter of all the fires in the UK have been set deliberately. Imagine if a quarter of all deaths were murder.’

Taylor looked bored. Lee Whitbread stared blankly at her, his hand halfway to the cigarette packet in front of him. Di Earnshaw was the only one who appeared interested in making a contribution. ‘I’ve heard it said that the incidence of arson is an index of the economic prosperity of a country. The more arson there is, the worse the economy is doing. Well, there’s plenty unemployed round here,’ she said with the air of someone who expects to be ignored.

‘And that’s something we should bear in mind,’ Carol said, nodding with approval. ‘Now, this is what I want. A careful trawl through the overnights for CID and uniform for the last six months to see what we come up with. I want the victims re-interviewed to check if there are any obvious common factors, like the same insurance company. Sort it out among yourselves. I’ll be having a chat with the fire chief before the four of us reconvene in … shall we say three days? Fine. Any questions?’

‘I could do the fire chief, ma’am,’ Di Earnshaw said eagerly. ‘I’ve had dealings with him before.’

‘Thanks for the offer, Di, but the sooner I make his acquaintance, the happier I’ll feel.’

Di Earnshaw’s lips seemed to shrink inwards in disapproval, but she merely nodded.

‘You want us to drop our other cases?’ Tommy asked.

Carol’s smile was sharp as an ice pick. She’d never had a soft spot for chancers. ‘Oh, please, Sergeant,’ she sighed. ‘I know what your case-load is. Like I said at the start of this conversation, it’s Bradfield I came from. Seaford might not be the big city, but that’s no reason for us to operate at village bobby pace.’

She stood up, taking in the shock in their faces. ‘I didn’t come here to fall out with people. But I will if I have to. If you think I’m a hard bastard to work for, watch me. However hard you work, you’ll see me matching it. I’d like us to be a team. But we have to play by my rules.’

Then she was gone. Tommy Taylor scratched his jaw. ‘That’s us told, then. Still think she’s shaggable, Lee?’

Di Earnshaw’s thin mouth pursed. ‘Not unless you like singing falsetto.’

‘I don’t think you’d feel a lot like singing,’ Lee said. ‘Anybody want that last KitKat?’

Shaz rubbed her eyes and turned away from the computer screen. She’d come in early so she could squeeze in a quick revision of the previous day’s software familiarization. Finding Tony at work on one of the other terminals had been a bonus. He’d looked astonished to see her walk through the door just after seven. ‘I thought I was the only workaholic insomniac around here,’ he’d greeted her.

‘I’m crap on computers,’ she’d said gruffly, trying to cover her satisfaction at having him to herself. ‘I’ve always needed to work twice as hard to keep up.’

Tony’s eyebrows had jumped. Cops didn’t generally admit weaknesses to an outsider. Either Shaz Bowman was even more unusual than he’d initially appreciated or else he was finally losing his alien status. ‘I thought everybody under thirty was a wizard on these,’ he said mildly.

‘Sorry to disappoint you. I was behind the door when the anoraks were being handed out,’ Shaz replied. She settled in front of her screen and pushed up the sleeves of her cotton sweater. ‘First remember your password,’ she muttered, wondering what he thought of her.

Two forces seethed under Shaz Bowman’s calm surface, taking it in turns to drive her. On the one hand, fear of failure gnawed at her, undermining everything she was and all she achieved. When she looked in the mirror, she never saw her good points, only the thinness of her lips and the lack of definition in her nose. When she reviewed her accomplishments, she saw only the places where she had fallen short, the heights she had failed to scale. The countervailing force was her ambition. Somehow, ever since she’d first begun to formulate the ambitions that drove her, those goals had restored her damaged self-confidence and shored up her vulnerabilities before they could cripple her. When her ambition threatened to tip her over into arrogance, somehow the fear would kick in at the crucial point, keeping her human.

The setting up of the task force had coincided so perfectly with the direction of her dreams, she couldn’t help but feel the hand of fate in it. That didn’t mean that she could let up, however. Shaz’s long-term career plan meant she had to shine brighter than anyone else in this task force. One of her tactics for achieving that was to pick Tony Hill’s brains like a master locksmith, extracting every scrap of knowledge she could scavenge there while simultaneously worming her way inside his defences so that when she needed his help, he’d be willing to provide it. As part of her approach, and because she was terrified that otherwise she’d fall behind and make a fool of herself in a group that she was convinced were all better than her, she was covertly taping all the group sessions, listening to them over and over again whenever she could. And now, luck had dropped a bonus opportunity into her lap.

So Shaz frowned and stared at the screen, working her way through the lengthy process of filling out an offence report then setting in motion its comparison against the details of all the previous crimes held in the computer’s memory banks. When Tony had slipped out of his seat, she’d vaguely registered the movement, but forced herself to carry on working. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was trying to ingratiate herself.

The intensity of the concentration she imposed upon herself was sufficient for her not to notice when he came back in through the door behind her desk until her subconscious registered a faint masculine smell which it identified as his. It took all her willpower not to react. Instead, she carried on striking keys until his hand cleared the edge of her peripheral vision and placed a carton of coffee topped with a Danish on the desk beside her. ‘Time for a break?’

So she’d rubbed her eyes and abandoned the screen. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘You’re welcome. Anything you’re not clear about? I’ll take you through it, if you want.’

Still she held back. Don’t snatch at it, she cautioned herself. She didn’t want to use up her credit with Tony Hill until she absolutely had to, and preferably not before she’d been able to offer him something helpful in return. ‘It’s not that I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I don’t trust it.’

Tony smiled, enjoying her defensive stubbornness. ‘One of those kids who demanded empirical proof that two and two were always going to be four?’

A prick of delight that she’d entertained him, quickly stifled. Shaz moved the Danish and opened the coffee. ‘I’ve always been in love with proof. Why do you think I became a cop?’

Tony’s smile was lopsided and knowing. ‘I could speculate. It’s quite a proving ground you’ve chosen here.’

‘Not really. The ground’s already been broken. The Americans have been doing it for so long they’ve not only got manuals, they’ve got movies about it. It’s just taken us forever to catch on, as per usual. But you’re one of the ones who forced the issue, so there’s nothing left for us to prove.’ Shaz took a huge bite of her Danish, nodding in quiet approval as she tasted the apricot glaze on the flaky pastry.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Tony said wryly, moving back to his own terminal. ‘The backlash has only just started. It’s taken long enough to get the police to accept we can provide useful help, but already the media hacks who were treating us profilers like gods a couple of years ago are jumping all over our shortcomings. They oversold us, so now they have to blame us for not living up to a set of expectations they created in the first place.’

‘I don’t know,’ Shaz said. ‘The public only remember the big successes. That case you did in Bradfield last year. The profile was right on the button. The police knew exactly where to go looking when it came to the crunch.’ Oblivious to the permafrost that had settled over Tony’s face, Shaz continued enthusiastically. ‘Are you going to do a session on that? We’ve all heard the grapevine version, but there’s next to nothing in the literature, even though it’s obvious you did a textbook job on the profile.’

‘We won’t be covering that case,’ he said flatly.

Shaz looked up sharply and realized where her eagerness had beached her. She’d blown it this time, in spades. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I get carried away, and tact and diplomacy, they’re history. I wasn’t thinking.’ Thick git, she berated herself silently. If he’d had the therapy he would have needed after that particular nightmare, the last thing he’d want would be to expose the details to avid prurience, even if it was masquerading as legitimate scientific interest.

‘You don’t have to apologize, Shaz,’ Tony said wearily. ‘You’re right, it is a key case. The reason we won’t be covering it is that I can’t talk about it without feeling like a freak. You’ll all have to forgive me. Maybe one day you’ll catch a case that leaves you feeling the same way. For your sake, I sincerely hope not.’ He looked down at his Danish as if it were an alien artefact and pushed it to one side, appetite dead as the past was supposed to be.

Shaz wished she could rerun the tape, pick up the conversation at the point where he’d put the coffee down on her desk and there was still the possibility of using the moment to build a bridge. ‘I’m really sorry, Dr Hill,’ she said inadequately.

He looked up and forced a thin smile. ‘Truly, Shaz, there’s no need. And can we drop the “Dr Hill” bit? I meant to bring it up during yesterday’s session, but it slipped my mind. I don’t want you all feeling that I’m the teacher and you’re the class. At the moment, I’m the group leader simply because I’ve been doing this for a while. Before long, we’ll all be working side by side, and there’s no point in having barriers between us. So it’s Tony from now on in, OK?’

‘You got it, Tony.’ Shaz searched for the message in his eyes and his words and, satisfied it contained genuine forgiveness, wolfed the rest of her Danish and returned to her screen. She couldn’t do it while he was here, but next time she was in the computer room alone, she intended to use her Internet access to pull up the newspaper archives and check out all the reports of the Bradfield serial killer case. She’d read most of them at the time, but that had been before she’d met Tony Hill and everything had changed. Now, she had a special interest. By the time she was finished, she’d know enough about Tony Hill’s most public profile to write the book that, for reasons she still couldn’t understand, had never been written. After all, she was a detective, wasn’t she?

Carol Jordan fiddled with the complicated chrome coffee maker, a housewarming present from her brother Michael when she’d moved to Seaford. She’d been luckier than most people caught in the housing market slump. She hadn’t had far to look for a buyer for her half of the warehouse flat she and Michael owned; the barrister he’d recently been sharing his bedroom with had been so eager to buy her out that Carol had begun to wonder if she’d been even more of a gooseberry than she’d imagined.

Now she had this low stone cottage on the side of the hill that rose above the estuary almost directly opposite Seaford; a place of her own. Well, almost, she corrected herself, reminded by the hard skull head-butting her shin. ‘OK, Nelson,’ she said, stooping to scratch the black cat’s ears. ‘I hear what you’re saying.’ While the coffee brewed, she scooped out a bowl of cat food to a rapture of purring followed by the sloppy sound of Nelson inhaling his breakfast. She walked through to the living room to enjoy the panorama of the estuary and the improbably slender arc of the suspension bridge. Gazing out across the misty river where the bridge appeared to float without connection to the land, she planned her coming encounter with the fire chief. Nelson walked in, tail erect, and jumped without pause straight on to the window sill where he stretched out, arching his head back towards Carol and demanding affection. Carol stroked his dense fur and said, ‘I only get one chance to convince this guy that I know arse from elbow, Nelson. I need him on my side. God knows, I need somebody on my side.’

Nelson batted her hand with his paw, as if responding directly to her words. Carol swallowed the rest of her coffee and got to her feet in a movement as smooth as the cat’s. One of the advantages she’d soon found with a DCI’s office hours was that she actually managed to use her gym membership more than once a month, and she was already feeling the benefit in firmer muscle tone and better aerobic fitness. It would have been a bonus to have someone to share it with, but that wasn’t why she did it. She did it for herself, because it made her feel good. She took pride in her body, revelling in its strength and mobility.

An hour later, enduring the tour of the central fire station, she was glad of her fitness as she struggled to keep pace with the long legs of the local chief of operations, Jim Pendlebury. ‘You seem to be better organized here than CID ever manages,’ Carol said, as they finally made it to his office. ‘You’ll have to share the secret of your efficiency.’

‘We’ve had so much cost-cutting, we’ve really had to streamline everything we do,’ he told her. ‘We used to have all our stations staffed round the clock with a complement of full-time officers, but it really wasn’t cost effective. I know a lot of the lads grumbled about it, but a couple of years back we shifted to a mix of part-time and full-time officers. It took a few months to shake down, but it’s been a huge advantage to me in management terms.’

Carol pulled a face. ‘Not a solution that would work for us.’

Pendlebury shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You could have a core staff who dealt with the routine stuff and a hit squad that you used as and when you needed them.’

‘That’s sort of what we have already,’ Carol said drily. ‘The core staff is called the night shift and the hit squad are the day teams. Unfortunately, it never gets quiet enough to stand any of them down.’

With part of her mind, Carol added to her mental profile of the fire chief as they spoke. In conversation, his straight dark eyebrows crinkled and jutted above his blue-grey eyes. Considering how much time he must spend flying a desk, his skin looked surprisingly weathered, the creases round his eyes showing white when he wasn’t smiling or frowning. Probably a part-time sailor or estuary fisherman, she guessed. As he dipped his head to acknowledge something she’d said, she could see a few silver hairs straggling among his dark curls. So, probably a few years the far side of thirty, Carol thought, revising her initial estimate. She had a habit of analysing new acquaintances in terms of how their description would read on a police bulletin. She’d never actually had to produce a photofit of someone she’d encountered, but she was confident her practice would have made her the best possible witness for the police artist to work with.

‘Now you’ve seen the operation, I take it you’re a bit more willing to accept that when we say a fire’s a query arson, we’re not talking absolute rubbish?’ Pendlebury’s tone was light, but his eyes challenged hers.

‘I never doubted what you were telling us,’ she said calmly. ‘What I doubted was whether we were taking it as seriously as we should.’ She snapped open the locks on her briefcase and took out her file. ‘I’d like to go through the details on these incidents with you, if you can spare me the time.’

He cocked his head to one side. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

‘Now that I’ve seen the way you run your operation, I can’t believe the idea of a serial arsonist hasn’t already crossed your mind.’

He tugged at the lobe of one ear, sizing her up. Finally, he said, ‘I was wondering when one of your lot would notice.’

Carol breathed out hard through her nose. ‘It might have been helpful if we’d been given a nudge in the right direction. You are the experts, after all.’

‘Your predecessor didn’t think so,’ Pendlebury said. He might as well have been commenting on the price of fish. All of the enthusiasm he’d shown earlier for his job had vanished behind an impassive mask, leaving Carol to draw her own conclusions. They didn’t make a pretty picture.

She placed the file on Pendlebury’s desk and flipped it open. ‘That was then. This is now. Are you telling me you’ve got query arsons that predate this one?’

He glanced down at the top sheet in the file and snorted. ‘How far back would you like to start?’

Tony Hill sat alone at his desk, ostensibly preparing for the following day’s seminar with the task force officers. But his thoughts were far away from those details. He was thinking about the psychopathic minds out there, already set in the moulds that would generate pain and misery for people they didn’t even know yet.

There had long been a theory among psychologists that discounted the existence of evil, ascribing the worst excesses of the most sociopathic abductors, torturers and killers to a linked series of circumstances and events in their past that culminated in one final stress-laden event that catapulted them over the edge of what civilized society would tolerate. But that had never entirely satisfied Tony. It begged the question of why some people with almost identical backgrounds of abuse and deprivation went on not to become psychopaths but to lead useful, fruitful lives, integrated into society.

Now the scientists were talking about a genetic answer, a fracture in the DNA code that might explain this divergence. Somehow, Tony found that answer too pat. It seemed as much of a cop-out as the old-fashioned notion that some men were simply evil and that was that. It evaded responsibility in a way he found repugnant.

It was an issue that had always held particular resonance for him. He knew the reason he was so good at what he did. It was because for so many of the steps down the road that his prey had taken, he had walked in their footprints. But at some point he could never quite identify there had come a parting of the ways. Where they became hunters at first hand, he became a hunter at second hand, tracking them down once they had crossed the line. Yet his life still held echoes of theirs. The fantasies that drove them were about sex and death; his fantasies about sex and death were called profiling. They were chillingly close.

It sometimes seemed chicken and egg to Tony. Had his impotence started because he was afraid the unfettered expression of his sexuality might lead him to violence and death? Or had his knowledge of how often the sexual urge led to killing worked on his body to make him sexually inadequate? He doubted he would ever know. However the circuit worked, it was undeniable that his work had profoundly affected his life.

For no apparent reason, he recalled the spark of uncomplicated enthusiasm he’d seen in Shaz Bowman’s eyes. He could remember feeling that way too, before his fascination had been tempered by exposure to the horrors humans could inflict upon each other. Maybe he could use what he knew to give his team better armour than he’d had. If he achieved nothing else with them, that alone would be worthwhile.

In another part of the city, Shaz clicked her mouse button and closed down her software. On autopilot, she switched off her computer and stared unseeingly as the screen faded to black. When she’d decided to explore the resources of the Internet as her first stop on the road to disinterring Tony Hill’s past, she’d expected to come across a handful of references and, if she was lucky, a set of cuttings in one of the newspaper archives.

Instead, when she’d input ‘Tony, Hill, Bradfield, killer’ as key words in the search engine, she’d stumbled upon a darkside treasure trove of references to the case that had put his face on the front pages a year before. There was a grisly handful of websites entirely devoted to serial killers which incorporated Tony’s headline case. Elsewhere, journalists and commentators had posted their articles on that specific case on their personal websites. There was even a perverse rogues’ gallery, a montage of photographs of the faces of the world’s most notorious serial killers. Tony’s target, the so-called Queer Killer, featured in more than one guise in the bizarre exhibit.

Shaz had downloaded everything she could find and had spent the rest of the evening reading it. What had started out as an academic exercise to figure out what made Tony Hill tick had left her sick at heart.

The facts were not in dispute. The naked bodies of four men had been dumped in gay cruising areas of Bradfield. The victims had been tortured before death with a cruelty that was almost beyond comprehension. After death, they had been sexually mutilated, washed clean and abandoned like trash.

As a last resort, Tony had been brought in as a consultant, working with Detective Inspector Carol Jordan to develop a profile. They were moving close to their target when hunter became hunted. The killer wanted Tony for a human sacrifice. Captured and trussed, he was on the point of becoming victim number five, the torture engine in place, his body screaming in pain. He was saved in the nick of time not by the arrival of the cavalry but by his own verbal skills, honed over years of working with mentally disturbed offenders. But to claim his life, he’d had to kill his captor.

As she’d read, Shaz’s heart had filled with horror, her eyes with tears. Cursed with enough imagination to create a picture of the hell Tony had lived through, she found herself sucked into the nightmare of that final showdown where the roles of killer and victim were irrevocably reversed. The scenario made her shudder with fear and trepidation.

How had he begun to live with that? she marvelled. How did he sleep? How could he close his eyes and not be assailed with images beyond most people’s imagination or tolerance? Little wonder that he wasn’t prepared to use his own past to teach them how to manage their futures. The miracle was that he was still willing to practise a craft that must have pushed him to the edge of madness.

And how would she have coped if she’d been the one in his shoes? Shaz dropped her head into her hands and, for the first time since she’d heard of the task force, asked herself if she hadn’t perhaps made a terrible mistake.

Betsy mixed a drink for the journalist. Heavy on the gin, light on the tonic, a quarter of a lemon squeezed so that the tartness of the juice would cut the oily sweetness of the gin and disguise its potency. One of the principal reasons that Micky’s image had survived untainted by scandal was Betsy’s insistence that they trust no one outside the trio that held their secret close. Suzy Joseph might be all smiles and charm, filling the airy sitting room with the tinkle of her laugh and the smoke from her menthol cigarettes, but she was still a journalist. Even if she represented the most accommodating and sycophantic of the colour magazines, Betsy knew that among her drinking cronies there would be more than one tabloid hack ready to dip a hand in a pocket for the right piece of gossip. So Suzy would be plied generously with drink today. By the time she came to sit down to lunch with Jacko and Micky, her sharp eyes would be blurred round the edges.

Betsy perched on the arm of a sofa whose squashy cushions engulfed the anorectically thin journalist. She could keep an eye on her easily from there, while Suzy would have to make a deliberate and obvious shift of position to get Betsy in her line of sight. That also made it possible for Betsy to signal caution to Micky without being seen. ‘This is such a lovely room,’ Suzy gushed. ‘So light, so cool. You don’t often see something so tasteful, so elegant, so – appropriate. And believe me, I’ve been in more of these Holland Park mansions than the local estate agents!’ She twisted round awkwardly and said to Betsy in the same tones she’d have used to a waiter, ‘You have made sure the caterers have all they need?’

Betsy nodded. ‘Everything’s under control. They were delighted with the kitchen.’

‘I’m sure they were.’ Suzy was back with Micky, Betsy dismissed again. ‘Did you design the dining room yourself, Micky? So stylish! So very, very you! So perfect for Junket with Joseph.’ She leaned forward to stub out her cigarette, giving Betsy an unwanted view of a creped cleavage that fake tan and expensive body treatments couldn’t entirely disguise.

Being commended on her taste by a woman who could without any indication of shame wear a brash scarlet and black Moschino suit designed for someone twenty years younger and an entirely different shape was a double-edged compliment, Micky felt. But she simply smiled again and said, ‘Actually, it was mostly Betsy’s inspiration. She’s the one with the taste round here. I just tell her what I want the ambience to be like, and she sorts it out.’

Suzy’s reflexive smile held no warmth. Another wasted opening; nothing quotable there, it seemed to say. Before she could try again, Jacko strode into the room, his broad shoulders in their perfect tailoring thrusting forward so he appeared like a flying wedge. He ignored Suzy’s fluttering twitters and made straight for Micky, descending upon her with one enveloping arm, hugging her close, though not actually kissing. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, his professional, public voice carrying the thrum of a cello chord. ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’ He half-turned and leaned back against the sofa, giving Suzy the full benefit of his perfectly groomed smile. ‘You must be Suzy,’ he said. ‘We’re thrilled to have you here with us today.’

Suzy lit up like Christmas. ‘I’m thrilled to be here,’ she gushed, her breathy voice losing its veneer and revealing the unmistakable West Midlands intonation she’d devoted herself to burying. The effect Jacko still had on women never ceased to astonish Betsy. He could turn the sourest bitch Barsac sweet. Even the tired cynicism of Suzy Joseph, a woman who had the same relationship to celebrity as beetles to dung, wasn’t sufficient armour against his charm. ‘Junket with Joseph doesn’t often give me the chance to spend time with people I genuinely admire,’ she added.

‘Thank you,’ Jacko said, all smiles. ‘Betsy, should we be heading through to the dining room?’

She glanced at the clock. ‘That would be helpful,’ she said. ‘The caterer wants to start serving round about now.’ Jacko jumped to his feet and waited attentively for Micky to get up and move towards the door. He ushered Suzy ahead of him too, turning back to roll his eyes upwards in an expression of bored horror for Betsy’s benefit. Stifling a giggle, she followed them to the dining-room door, saw them seated and left them to it. Sometimes there were distinct benefits in not being the official consort, she reminded herself as she settled down with her bread and cheese and The World at One.

There was no such relief for Micky, who had to pretend she didn’t even notice Suzy’s vapid flirting with her husband. Micky tuned out the boring ritual dance going on next to her and concentrated on freeing the last morsels of lobster from a claw.

A change in Suzy’s tone alerted her that the conversation had shifted a gear. Time for work, Micky realized. ‘Of course, I’ve read in the cuttings how you two got together,’ Suzy was saying, her hand covering Jacko’s real one. She wouldn’t have been so quick to pat the other, Micky reflected grimly. ‘But I need to hear it from your own lips.’

Here we go, Micky thought. The first part of the recital was always hers. ‘We met in hospital,’ she began.

By the middle of the second week, the task force office felt like home to the entire team. It was no accident that all six of the junior officers chosen for the squad were single and unattached, according both to their records and the unofficial background checks that Commander Paul Bishop had pursued in canteens and police clubs up and down the country. Tony had deliberately wanted a group of people who, uprooted from their former lives, would be thrown together and forced to develop team spirit. That at least was something he seemed to have got right, he thought, looking around the seminar room where six heads were bowed over a set of photocopied police files he’d prepared for them.

Already, they had started to form alliances, and so far they’d done well to avoid the personality clashes that could split a group beyond salvaging. Interestingly, the associations were flexible, not fixed in rigid pairs. Although some affinities were stronger than others, there was no attempt to make any of them exclusive.

Shaz was the one exception, as far as Tony could tell. It wasn’t that there was a problem between her and the others. It was more that she held herself apart from the easy intimacy that was growing between the rest. She joined in the jokes, took part in the communal brainstorming, but somehow there was always distance between her and her fellows. He sensed in her a passion for success that the rest of the squad lacked. They were ambitious, no denying that, but with Shaz it went deeper. She was driven, her need burning inside her and consuming any trace of frivolity. She was always first there in the mornings and last out at night, eagerly snatching any opportunity to get Tony to expand on whatever he’d been talking about last. But her very need for success made her correspondingly more vulnerable to failure. What he recognized as a desperate desire for approval was a blade that could be used against her with devastating effect. If she didn’t learn to drop her defences so she could use her empathy, she’d never achieve her potential as a profiler. It was his job to find a way of making her feel she could relax her vigilance without risking too much damage.

At that moment, Shaz looked up, her eyes direct on his. There was no embarrassment, no awkwardness. She simply stared for a moment then returned to what she was reading. It was as if she had raided his memory banks for a missing piece of information and, having found it, had logged off again. Slightly unnerved, Tony cleared his throat. ‘Four separate incidents of sexual assault and rape. Any comments?’

The group had moved beyond awkward silences and polite hanging back to give others a chance. In what was becoming an established pattern, Leon Jackson dived straight in. ‘I think the strongest link is in the victims. I read somewhere that serial rapists tend to rape within their own age group, and all these women were in their mid-twenties. Plus they all have short blonde hair and they all took time and trouble to stay fit. You got two joggers, one hockey player, one rower. They all did sports where it wouldn’t be hard for a weirdo stalker to watch them without attracting any attention.’

‘Thanks, Leon. Any other comments?’

Simon, already the devil’s advocate designate of the group, weighed in, his Glasgow accent and habit of staring out from under his heavy dark eyebrows multiplying the aggression factor. ‘You could argue that that’s because the kind of woman who indulges in these kind of sports is exactly the sort that’s confident enough to be out in risky places on her own, convinced it’s never going to happen to her. It could easily be two, three or even four attackers. In which case, bringing in a profiler is going to be a total waste of time.’

Shaz shook her head. ‘It’s not just the victims,’ she stated firmly. ‘If you read their evidence, in each case their eyes were covered during the attack. In each case, they mention that their assailant verbally abused them continually while he was actually assaulting them. That’s more than sheer coincidence.’

Simon wasn’t ready to give up. ‘Come on, Shaz,’ he protested. ‘Any bloke who’s so powerless he needs to resort to rape to feel good about himself is going to need to talk himself up to it. And as for their eyes being covered – there’s nothing in common there except with the first and third where he used their own headbands. Look –’ he waved the papers – ‘case number two, he pulled her T-shirt over her head and tied a knot in it. Case number four, the rapist had a roll of packing tape that he wound round her head. Way different.’ He sat back, a good-natured grin defusing the force of his words.

Tony grinned. ‘The perfectly contrived lead into the next subject. Thanks, Simon. Today, I’m going to hand out your first assignment, the preamble to which is the beginner’s guide to signature versus MO. Anybody know what I’m talking about?’

Kay Hallam, the other woman on the team, raised her hand half a dozen inches and looked questioningly at Tony. He nodded. She tucked her light brown hair behind her ears in a gesture he’d come to recognize as Kay’s keynote mechanism for looking feminine and vulnerable to defuse criticism, particularly when she was about to make a point she was absolutely sure of. ‘MO is dynamic, signature is static,’ she said.

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Tony said. ‘However, it’s probably a bit too technical for the plods among us,’ he added with a grin, pointing his finger one by one at the other five. He pushed back his chair and started moving restlessly round the room as he talked. ‘MO means modus operandi. Latin. The way of doing. When we use it in a criminal context, we mean the series of actions that the perpetrator committed in the process of achieving his goal, the crime. In the early days of profiling, police officers, and to a large degree psychologists, were very literal about their idea of a serial offender. It was somebody who did pretty much the same things every time to achieve pretty much the same results. Except that they usually showed escalation, moving, say, from assaulting a prostitute to beating a woman’s brains out with a hammer.

‘As we discovered more, though, we realized we weren’t the only ones capable of learning from our mistakes. We were dealing with criminals who were intelligent and imaginative enough to do exactly the same. That meant we had to get our heads round the idea that the MO was something that could change quite drastically from one offence to the next because the offender found that a particular course of action wasn’t very effective. So he’d adapt. His first murder could be a strangulation, but maybe our killer feels that took too long, was too noisy, frightened him too much, stressed him rather than allowing him to enjoy his fulfilment. Next time out, he smashes her skull in with a crowbar. Too messy. So number three, he stabs. And the investigators write them off as three separate killings because the MO looks so different.

‘What doesn’t change is what we call, for the sake of giving it a name, the signature. The sig, for short.’ Tony stopped pacing and leaned against the window sill. ‘The sig doesn’t change because it’s the raison d’être of the offence. It’s what gives the perpetrator his sense of satisfaction.

‘So what does this signature consist of? Well, it’s all the bits of behaviour that exceed what is actually necessary to commit the crime. The ritual of the offence. To satisfy the perpetrator, the signature elements have to be acted out every time he goes out on a mission, and they have to be performed in the same style every time. Examples of signature in a killer might be things like: does he strip the victim? Does he make a neat pile of the victim’s clothes? Does he use cosmetics on the victim after death? Is he having sex with the victim postmortem? Is he performing some kind of ritualistic mutilation like cutting off their breasts or penises or ears?’

Simon looked faintly queasy. Tony wondered how many murder victims he’d seen so far. He would have to grow a thicker skin or else be prepared to put up with the jibes of colleagues who would enjoy watching the profiler lose his lunch over another vitiated victim. ‘A serial offender must accomplish signature activities to fulfil himself, to make the act meaningful,’ Tony continued. ‘It’s about meeting a variety of needs – to dominate, to inflict pain, to provoke distinct responses, to achieve sexual release. The means can vary, but the end remains constant.’

He took a deep breath and tried to keep his mind off the very particular variations he’d seen at first hand. ‘For a killer whose pleasure comes from inflicting pain and hearing victims scream, it’s immaterial whether he …’ his voice faltered as irresistible images climbed into his head. ‘Whether he …’ They were all looking at him now and he desperately struggled to look momentarily distracted rather than shipwrecked. ‘Whether he … ties them up and cuts them, or whether he …’

‘Whether he whips them with wire,’ Shaz said, her voice casual, her expression reassuring.

‘Exactly,’ Tony said, recovering fast. ‘Nice to see you’ve got such a tender imagination, Shaz.’

‘Typical woman, eh?’ Simon said with a grunt of laughter.

Shaz looked faintly embarrassed. Before the joke could escalate, Tony continued. ‘So you might have two bodies whose physical conditions are very different. But when you examine the scenario, things have been done that were additional to the act of killing and the ultimate gratification has been the same. That’s your signature.’

He paused, his control firmly in place again, and looked around, checking he was taking them all with him. One of the men looked dubious. ‘At its most simplistic,’ he said, ‘think about petty criminals. You’ve got a burglar who steals videos. That’s all he goes for, just videos, because he’s got a fence who gives him a good deal. He robs terraced houses, going in through the back yard. But then he reads in the local paper that the police are warning people about the video thief who comes in through the back yard, and they’re setting up neighbourhood watch teams to keep a special eye on back alleys. So he abandons his terraced houses and instead he goes for between-the-wars semis and gets in through the side windows in the downstairs hall. He’s changed his MO. But he still only nicks the videos. That’s his signature.’

The doubter’s face cleared. Now he’d grasped it. Gratified, Tony picked up a stack of papers divided into six bundles. ‘So we have to learn to be inclusive when we’re considering the possibility of a serial offender. Think “linking through similarity”, rather than “discounting through difference”.’

He stood up again and walked around among their work tables, gearing himself up to the crucial part of the session. ‘Some senior police officers and profilers have a hypothesis that’s more confidential than the secrets of the Masonic square,’ he said, capturing their attention again. ‘We believe there could be as many as half a dozen undetected serial killers who have been operating in Britain over the past ten years. Some could have claimed upwards of ten victims. Thanks to the motorway network and the historic reluctance of police forces to exchange information, nobody has sat down and made the crucial connections. Once we’re up and running, this will be something we’ll be considering as and when we have time and staff available to look at it.’ Raised eyebrows and muttering filled his momentary pause.

‘So what we’re doing here is a dummy run,’ Tony explained. ‘Thirty missing teenagers. They’re all real cases, culled from a dozen forces over the last seven years. You’ve got a week to examine the cases in your spare time. Then you’ll have the chance to present your own theories as to whether any of them have sufficient common factors to give us grounds for suspicion that they might be the work of a serial offender.’ He handed them each a bundle of photostats, giving them a few moments to flick through.

‘I should emphasize that this is merely an exercise,’ he cautioned them, walking back to his seat. ‘There’s no reason to suppose that any of these girls or lads has been abducted or killed. Some of them may well be dead now, but that’s probably got more to do with the attrition of life on the street than foul play. The common factor that links them is that none of these kids were regarded by their families as the kind who would run away. The families all claimed the missing teenagers were happy at home, there had been no serious arguments and there were no significant problems with school. Although one or two of them had some history of involvement with the police or social services, there weren’t any current difficulties at the time of the disappearances. However, none of the missing kids subsequently made contact with home. In spite of that, it’s likely that most of them made for London and the bright lights.’

He took a deep breath and turned to face them. ‘But there could be another scenario lurking in there. If there is, it’ll be our job to find it.’

Excitement started like a slow burn in Shaz’s gut, powerful enough to dim the memories of what she’d read about Tony’s last close encounter with a killer. This was her first chance. If there were undiscovered murder victims out there, she would find them. More than that, she would be their advocate. And their avenger.

Criminals are often caught by accident. He knew that; he’d seen programmes about it on the TV. Dennis Nilsen, killer of fifteen homeless young men, found out because human flesh blocked the drains; Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, despatcher of thirteen women, nicked because he’d stolen a set of number plates to disguise his car; Ted Bundy, necrophiliac murderer of as many as forty young women, finally arrested for speeding past a police car at night with no lights. This knowledge didn’t frighten him, but it added an extra frisson to the adrenaline buzz that inevitably accompanied his fire-setting. His motives might be very different from theirs, but the risk was almost as great. The once soft leather driving gloves were always damp with his nervous sweat.

Somewhere around one in the morning, he parked his car in a carefully chosen spot. He never left it on a residential street, understanding the insomnia of the elderly and the late-night revels of the young. Instead, he chose the car parks of DIY stores, the waste ground beside factories, the forecourts of garages closed for the night. Secondhand car pitches were best; nobody noticed an extra car there for an hour or two in the small hours.

He never carried a holdall either, sensing it to be suspicious at that time of night. A policeman spotting him would have no cause to think he’d been out burgling. And even if a bored night-beat bobby fancied the diversion of getting him to turn out his pockets, there wouldn’t be much to arouse suspicion. A length of string, an old-fashioned cigarette lighter with a brass case, a packet of cigarettes with two or three missing, a dog-eared book of matches with a couple remaining, yesterday’s newspaper, a Swiss Army knife, a crumpled oil-stained handkerchief, a small but powerful torch. If that was grounds for arrest, the cells would be full every night.

He walked the route he’d memorized, staying close to the walls as he moved silently down empty streets, his blank-soled bowling shoes making no sound. After a few minutes, he came to a narrow alley which led to the blind side of a small industrial estate he’d had his eye on for a while. It had originally been a ropeworks and consisted of a group of four turn-of-the-century brick buildings which had recently been converted to their present uses. An auto electrician’s sat next to an upholstery workshop, opposite a plumbing supplier and a bakery that made biscuits from a recipe allegedly as old as the York Mystery plays. He reckoned anyone who got away with charging such ridiculous prices for a poxy packet of gritty biscuits deserved to have their factory razed to the ground, but there wasn’t enough flammable material there for his needs.

Tonight, the upholstery workshop was going to go up like a Roman candle.

Later, he’d thrill to the sight of yellow and crimson flames thrusting their long spikes into the plumes of grey and brown smoke billowing up from the blazing cloth and the wooden floors and beams of the elderly building. But for now, he had to get inside.

He’d made his preparations earlier that day, dropping a carrier bag into a rubbish bin by the side door of the workshop. Now he retrieved it and took out the sink plunger and the tube of superglue. He walked round the outside of the building until he was outside the toilet window, where he stuck the plunger to the window. He waited a few minutes to be certain the contact adhesive had hardened, then he gripped the plunger with both hands, braced himself and gave a sharp tug. The glass broke with a tiny tinkle, the fragments falling on the outside of the window, just as they would if it had exploded from the heat. He tapped the plunger smartly against the wall to shatter the circle of glass, leaving only a thin ring still glued to the rubber. That didn’t worry him; there would be no reason for any forensic expert to reconstruct the window and reveal a missing circle of glass at the heart of the shards. That done, he was inside within a few minutes. There was, he knew, no burglar alarm.

He took out the torch and flipped it quickly on and off to check his position, then emerged into the corridor that led along the back of the main work space. At the end, he recalled, were a couple of large cardboard boxes of scrap material that local handicraft hobbyists bought for coppers. No reason for fire investigators to doubt it was a place where workers might hang out for a sly fag.

It was a matter of moments to construct his incendiary device. First he opened up the cigarette lighter and rubbed the string with the wadding which he’d previously saturated with lighter fluid. Then he put the string at the centre of a bundle of half a dozen cigarettes held loosely together with an elastic band. He placed his incendiary so that the string fuse lay along the edge of the nearest cardboard box, then laid the oily handkerchief beside it with some crumpled newspaper. Finally, he lit the cigarettes. They would burn halfway down before the string ignited. That in its turn would take a little while to get the boxes of fabric smouldering. But by the time they’d caught hold, there wouldn’t be any stopping his fire. It was going to be some blaze.

He’d been saving this one up, knowing it would be a beauty. Rewarding, in more ways than one.

Betsy checked her watch. Ten minutes more, then she would break up Suzy Joseph’s junket with a fictitious appointment for Micky. If Jacko wanted to carry on charming, that was up to him. She suspected he’d rather seize the opportunity to escape. He’d have finished filming the latest Vance’s Visits the night before, so he’d be off on one of his charity stints at one of the specialist hospitals where he worked as a volunteer counsellor and support worker. He’d be gone by mid-afternoon, leaving her and Micky to a peaceful house and a weekend alone.

‘Between Jacko and the Princess of Wales, you get no peace these days when you’ve got a terminal illness,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m the lucky one,’ she went on, moving from bureau to filing cabinet as she cleared her desk in preparation for a guilt-free weekend. ‘I don’t have to listen to the Authorized Version for the millionth time.’ She imitated Jacko’s upbeat, dramatic intonation. ‘“I was lying there, contemplating the wreck of my dreams, convinced I had nothing left to live for. Then, out of the depths of my depression, I saw a vision.”’ Betsy made the sweeping gesture she’d seen Jacko deploy so often with his living arm. ‘“This very vision of loveliness, in fact. There, by my hospital bed, stood the one thing I’d seen since the accident that made me realize life might be worth living.”’

It was a tale that bore almost no relationship to the reality Betsy had lived through. She remembered Micky’s first encounter with Jacko, but not because it had been the earth-shaking collision of two stars recognizing their counterparts. Betsy’s memories were very different and far less romantic.

It was the first time Micky had been the lead outside broadcast reporter on the main evening news bulletin. She’d been bringing millions of eager viewers the first exclusive interview with Jacko Vance, hero of the hottest human story on the networks. Betsy had watched the broadcast at home alone, thrilled to see her lover the cynosure of ten million pairs of eyes, hugging herself in delight.

The exhilaration hadn’t lasted long. They’d been celebrating together in the flickering glow of the video replay when the phone had interrupted their pleasure. Betsy had answered, her voice exuberant with happiness. The journalist who greeted her as Micky’s girlfriend drained all the joy from her. In spite of Betsy’s frostily vehement denials and Micky’s scornful ridicule, both women knew their relationship was poised on the edge of the worst kind of tabloid exposure.

The patient campaign Micky had gone on to wage against the sneak tactics of the hacks was as carefully planned and as ruthlessly executed as any career move she’d ever made. Every night, two separate pairs of bedroom curtains would be closed and lights turned on behind them. The lamps would go off at staggered intervals, the one in the spare room controlled by a timer that Betsy adjusted to a different hour each night. Every morning, the curtains would be drawn back at diverse times, each pair by the same hands that had closed them. The only places the two women embraced were behind closed curtains out of the line of sight of the window, or in the hallway, which was invisible from outside. If both left the house at the same time, they parted at the bottom of the steps with a cheerful wave and no bodily contact.

Giving the presumed watchers nothing to chew on would have been enough to make most people feel secure. But Micky preferred a more proactive approach. If the tabloids wanted a story, she’d make sure they had one. It would simply have to be a more exciting, more credible and more sexy story than the one they thought they had. She cared far too much for Betsy to take chances with her lover’s peace of mind or their relationship.

The morning after the ominous phone call, Micky had a spare hour. She drove to the hospital where Jacko was a patient and charmed her way past the nurses. Jacko seemed pleased to see her, and not only because she came armed with the gift of a miniature AM/FM radio complete with earphones. Although he was still taking strong medication for his pain, he was alert and receptive to any distraction from the tedium of life in his side ward. She spent half an hour chatting lightly about everything except the accident and the amputation, then left, leaning over to give him a friendly peck on the forehead. It had been no hardship; to her surprise, she’d found herself warming to Jacko. He wasn’t the arrogant macho man she’d expected, based on her past experience with male sporting heroes. Nor, even more surprisingly, was he wallowing in self-pity. Micky’s visits might have started out as cynical self-interest, but within a very short space of time she was sucked in, first by her respect for his stoicism, then by an unexpected pleasure in his company. He might be more interested in himself than in her, but at least he managed to be entertaining and witty with it.

Five days and four visits later, Jacko asked the question she’d been waiting for. ‘Why do you keep visiting me?’

Micky shrugged. ‘I like you?’

Jacko’s eyebrows rose and fell, as if to say, ‘That’s not enough.’

She sighed and made a conscious effort to hold his speculative gaze. ‘I have always been cursed with an imagination. And I understand the drive to be successful. I’ve worked my socks off to get where I am. I’ve made sacrifices and I’ve sometimes had to treat people in a way that, in other circumstances, I’d be ashamed of. But getting to where I want to be is the most important thing in my life. I can imagine how I would feel if a chain of circumstances outside my control cost me my goal. I guess what I feel for you is empathy.’

‘Meaning what?’ he asked, his face giving nothing away.

‘Sympathy without pity?’

He nodded, as if satisfied. ‘The nurse reckoned it was because you fancied me. I knew she was wrong.’

Micky shrugged. It was all going so much better than she’d anticipated. ‘Don’t disillusion her. People distrust motives they can’t understand.’

‘You’re so right,’ he said, an edge of bitterness in his voice that she hadn’t heard there before, in spite of the ample reason. ‘But understanding doesn’t always make it possible to accept something.’

There was more, much more behind his words. But Micky knew when to leave well alone. There would be plenty of opportunity to broach that subject again. When she left that day, she was careful to make sure the nurse saw her kiss him goodbye. If this story was to be credible, it needed to leak out, not be broadcast. And from her own journalistic experience, gossip spread through a hospital faster than legionnaire’s disease. From there to the wider community only took one carrier.

When she arrived a week later, Jacko seemed remote. Micky sensed violent emotions barely held in check, but couldn’t be sure what those feelings were. Eventually, tired of conducting a monologue rather than a conversation, she said, ‘Are you going to tell me or are you just going to let your blood pressure rise till you have a stroke?’

For the first time that afternoon, he looked directly into her face. Momentarily, she thought he was in the grip of fever, then she realized it was a fury so powerful that she couldn’t imagine how he could contain it. He was so angry he could barely speak, she realized as she watched him struggle to find the words. At last, he conquered his rage by sheer effort of will and said, ‘My fucking so-called fiancée,’ he growled.

‘Jillie?’ Micky hoped she’d got the name right. They’d met briefly one afternoon as Micky had been leaving. She had the impression of a slender dark-haired beauty who managed sultry rather than tarty by an inch.

‘Bitch,’ he hissed, the tendons on his neck tensing like cords beneath the tanned skin.

‘What’s happened, Jacko?’

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, his wide chest expanding and emphasizing the asymmetry of his once perfect upper body. ‘Dumped me,’ he managed at last, his voice thick with anger.

‘No,’ Micky breathed. ‘Oh, Jacko.’ She reached out and touched the tight fist with her fingers. She could actually feel the pulse beating in his flesh, so tightly was his hand clenched. His rage was phenomenal, Micky thought, yet his control seemed in no real danger of slipping.

‘Says she can’t cope with it.’ He gave a grating bark of cynical laughter. ‘She can’t cope with it? How the fuck does she think it is for me?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Micky said inadequately.

‘I saw it in her face, the first time she visited after the accident. No, I knew before that. I knew because she didn’t come near me that first day. It took her two days to get her arse in here.’ His voice was harsh and guttural, the heavy words falling like blocks of stone. ‘When she did come, she couldn’t stand the sight of me. It was all over her face. I repelled her. All she could see was what I wasn’t any more.’ He pulled his fist away and pounded it on the bed.

‘More fool her.’

His eyes opened and he glared at her. ‘Don’t you start. All I need is one more silly bitch patronizing me. I’ve had that fucking nurse with her artificial cheerfulness all over me. Just don’t!’

Micky didn’t flinch. She’d won too many confrontations with news editors for that. ‘You should learn to recognize respect when you see it,’ she flared back at him. ‘I’m sorry Jillie hasn’t got what it takes to see you through, but you’re better off finding that out now than further down the road.’

Jacko looked astonished. For years now, the only person who’d spoken to him with anything except nervous deference was his trainer. ‘What?’ he squawked, his anger displaced by baffled astonishment.

Micky continued regardless of his response. ‘What you have to decide now is how you’re going to play it.’

‘What?’

‘It’s not going to stay a secret between the two of you, is it? From what you said, the nurse already knows. So by teatime, it’s going to be, “Hold the front page.” If you want, you can settle for being an object of pity – hero dumped by girlfriend because he’s not a proper man any more. You’ll get the sympathy vote, and a fair chunk of the Great British Public will spit on Jillie in the street. Alternatively, you can get your retaliation in first and come out on top.’

Jacko’s mouth was open, but for a moment no words came. At last, he said in a low voice that fellow members of the Olympic squad would have recognized as a signal for flak jackets, ‘Go on.’

‘It’s up to you. It depends whether you want people to see you as a victim or a victor.’

Micky’s level stare felt as much of a challenge as anything that had ever faced him on the field of competition. ‘What do you think?’ he snarled.

‘I’m telling you, man, this is the sticks,’ Leon said, waving a chicken pakora in a sweeping gesture that seemed to include not only the restaurant but most of the West Riding of Yorkshire as well.

‘You’ve obviously never been to Greenock on a Saturday night,’ Simon said drily. ‘Believe me, Leon, that makes Leeds look positively cosmopolitan.’

‘Nothing could make this place cosmopolitan,’ Leon protested.

‘It’s not that bad,’ Kay said. ‘It’s very good for shopping.’ Even outside the classroom, Shaz noticed, Kay slipped straight into the conciliatory role, smoothing down her hair as she smoothed down the rough edges in the conversations.

Simon groaned theatrically. ‘Oh please, Kay, don’t feel you need to glide effortlessly into bland womanly stuff. Go on, make my night, tell me how terrific Leeds is for body-piercing.’

Kay poked her tongue out at him.

‘If you don’t leave Kay alone, us women might well consider piercing some treasured part of your anatomy with this beer bottle,’ Shaz said sweetly, brandishing her Kingfisher.

Simon put his hands up. ‘OK. I’ll behave, just as long as you promise not to beat me with a chapati.’

There was a moment’s silence while the four police officers attacked their starters. The Saturday night curry looked like becoming a regular feature for the quartet, the other two preferring to return to their former home turf rather than explore their new base. When Simon had first suggested it, Shaz hadn’t been sure if she wanted to bond that closely with her colleagues. But Simon had been persuasive, and besides, Commander Bishop had been earwigging and she wanted to avoid a black mark for being unco-operative. So she’d agreed and, to her surprise, she’d enjoyed herself, even though she had made her excuses and left before the nightclub excursion that had followed. Now, three weeks into the Job, she found she was actually looking forward to their night out, and not just for the food.

Leon was first to clear his plate, as usual. ‘What I’m saying is, it’s primitive up here.’

‘I don’t know,’ Shaz protested. ‘They’ve got plenty of good curry houses, the property’s cheap enough for me to afford something bigger than a rabbit hutch, and if you want to go from one part of the city centre to another, you can walk instead of sitting on the tube for an hour.’

‘And the countryside. Don’t forget how easy it is to get out into the countryside,’ Kay added.

Leon leaned back in his seat, groaning and rolling his eyes extravagantly like a terrible caricature of a Black and White Minstrel. ‘Heathcliff,’ he warbled in falsetto.

‘She’s right,’ Simon said. ‘God, you’re such a cliché, Leon. You should get off the city streets, get some fresh air into your lungs. What about coming out tomorrow for a walk? I really fancy seeing if Ilkley Moor lives up to the song.’

Shaz laughed. ‘What? You want to walk about without a hat and see if you catch your death of cold?’

The others joined in her laughter. ‘See, man, it’s primitive, like I said. Nothing to do but walk about on your own two feet. And shit, Simon, I’m not the one that’s a cliché. You know I’ve been stopped driving home three times since I moved here? Even the Met got a bit more racially enlightened than thinking every black man with a decent set of wheels has to be a drug dealer,’ Leon said bitterly.

‘They’re not stopping you because you’re black,’ Shaz retorted as he paused to light a cigarette.

‘No?’ Leon exhaled.

‘No, they’re stopping you for being in possession of an offensive weapon.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That suit, babe. Any sharper and you’d cut yourself getting dressed. You’re wearing a blade, of course they’re going to stop you.’ Shaz held out her hand for Leon to give her five and, amid the hoots of laughter from the other two, he made a rueful face and hit her hand.

‘Not as sharp as you, Shaz,’ Simon said. She wondered if it was only the heat of the spices that was responsible for the scarlet flush across his normally pale cheekbones.

‘Speaking of sharp,’ Kay chipped in as their main courses arrived, ‘you can’t get anything past Tony Hill, can you?’

‘He’s smart, all right,’ Simon agreed, sweeping his wavy dark hair back from his sweating forehead. ‘I just wish he’d loosen up a bit. It’s like there’s a wall there that you get right up to but you can’t see over.’

‘I’ll tell you why that is,’ Shaz said, suddenly serious. ‘Bradfield. The Queer Killer.’

‘That’s the one he did that went well and truly pear-shaped, yeah?’ Leon asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘It was all hushed up, wasn’t it?’ Kay said, her intent face reminding Shaz of a small furry animal, cute but with hidden teeth. ‘The papers hinted at all sorts of stuff, but they never went into much detail.’

‘Believe me,’ Shaz said, looking at her half-chicken and wishing she’d gone for something vegetarian, ‘you wouldn’t want to know the details. If you want to know the whole story, check out the Internet. They weren’t constrained by technicalities like good taste or requests from the authorities to keep things under wraps. I’m telling you, if you can read what Tony Hill went through without having second thoughts about what we’re doing, you’re a fuck of a sight braver than I am.’

There was a moment’s silence. Then Simon leaned forward and said confidingly, ‘You’re going to tell us, aren’t you, Shaz?’