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Days after he lost his Olympic dream saving the lives of two toddlers, Jacko Vance has broken his engagement to his childhood sweetheart Jillie Woodrow.
Heartbroken Jacko, speaking from the hospital bed where he is recovering from the amputation of his javelin-throwing arm, said, ‘I’m setting her free. I’m no longer the man she agreed to marry. It’s not fair to expect her to carry on as before. I can’t offer her the life we’d expected to have, and the most important thing to me is her happiness.
‘I know she’s upset now, but in the long run, she’ll come to see I’m doing the right thing.’
Now Jillie could never deny his version of events without making herself look a complete bitch.
Jacko bided his time, playing along with Micky’s proffered friendship. Then, when he deemed the moment was right, he struck like a rattler. ‘OK, so when’s payback day?’ he asked, his eyes holding hers.
‘Payback day?’ she echoed, puzzled.
‘The story of my love sacrifice,’ he said, larding his words with heavy irony. ‘Don’t they call tales like that a nine-day wonder?’
‘They do,’ Micky said, continuing to arrange the flowers she’d brought in the tall vase she’d charmed from the nurse.
‘Well, it’s ten days now since the media broke the news. Jacko and Jillie are officially no longer headline material. I was wondering when I’d get the account for payment due.’ His voice was mild, but looking into his eyes was like staring into a frozen puddle on high moorland.
Micky shook her head and perched on the edge of the bed, her face composed. But he knew her mind was racing, calculating how best to handle him. ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ she stalled.
Jacko’s smile was laced with condescension. ‘Come on, Micky. I wasn’t born yesterday. The world you work in, you’ve got to be a piranha. Favours don’t get done in your circles without the full understanding that payback day is lurking somewhere in the background.’
He watched her consider lying and reject it; he waited while she considered the truth and rejected that, too. ‘I’ll settle for having one in the bank,’ she tried.
‘That’s the way you want to play it, OK,’ he said nonchalantly. His left hand suddenly snaked out and seized her wrist. ‘But I’d have thought you and your girlfriend were in pretty dire need as of now.’
His large hand encircled her wrist. The sculpted muscles of his forearm stood out in strong relief, a shocking reminder of what he’d lost. The grip wasn’t tight against her flesh, but she sensed it was unbreakable as the bracelet of a handcuff. Micky looked up from her wrist to his implacable face and he saw a momentary clutch of fear as she wondered what lay behind his impenetrable eyes. He made his face relax into a ghost of a smile and the instant passed. He saw himself reflected in her eyes, not a trace of sinister showing now. ‘What a strange thing to say,’ she said.
‘It’s not just journalists who have contacts,’ Jacko said contemptuously. ‘When you started taking an interest in me, I returned the compliment. Her name’s Betsy Thorne, you’ve been together more than a year. She acts as your PA but she is also your lover. For Christmas you bought her a Bulova watch from a Bond Street jeweller’s. Two weekends ago you shared a twin room overnight at a country house hotel near Oxford. You send her flowers on the twenty-third of each month. I could go on.’
‘Circumstantial,’ Micky said. Her voice was cool; the skin under his grip felt like a burning ring of flesh. ‘And none of your business.’
‘It’s not the tabloids’ business either, is it? But they’re digging, Micky. It’s only a matter of time. You know that.’
‘They can’t find what isn’t there to be found,’ she said, slipping into obstinacy as if it were a tailored blazer.
‘They’ll find it,’ Jacko promised her. ‘Which is where I might be able to help.’
‘Supposing I did need help … what form would your help take?’
He released her wrist. Rather than pull her arm to her and rub it, Micky let it lie where he dropped it. ‘Economists say good money drives out bad. It’s like that with journalists. You should know. Give them a better story and they’ll abandon their sordid little fishing expedition.’
‘I won’t argue with that. What did you have in mind?’
‘What about, “Hospital romance for hero Jacko and TV journo”?’ He raised one eyebrow. Micky wondered if he’d practised the gesture before the mirror in adolescence.
‘What’s in it for you?’ she asked, after a moment when they’d each stared appraisingly at the other, as if measuring for romantic congruence.
‘Peace and quiet,’ Jacko said. ‘You have no idea how many women there are out there who want to save me.’
‘Maybe one of them would be the right one.’
Jacko laughed, a dry, bitter sound. ‘It’s the Groucho Marx principle, isn’t it? Not wanting to be a member of any club that would let me in. A woman who’s demented enough to think that, a) I need saving and b) that she’s the person for the job is by definition the world’s worst woman for me. No, Micky, what I need is camouflage. So that when I get out of here – which should be quite soon – I can go about my life without every brain-dead bimbo in Britain thinking I’m her chance at the big time. I don’t want someone who feels sorry for me. Until somebody I choose comes along, I could use the erogenous equivalent of a bulletproof vest. Fancy the job?’
Now it was his turn to guess what was really happening behind her eyes. Micky was back in control of herself, maintaining the air of bland interest that would later stand her in good stead as the housebound nation’s favourite interviewer. ‘I don’t do ironing,’ was all she said.
‘I’ve always wondered what a PA did,’ Jacko said, his smile as wry as his tone.
‘You better not let Betsy hear you say that.’
‘Deal?’
Jacko covered her hand with his. ‘Deal,’ she said, turning her hand over and clasping his fingers in hers.
The stench hit Carol as soon as she opened her car door. There was nothing quite as disgusting as barbecued human flesh, and once smelled, it could never be erased from the memory. Trying not to gag too obviously, she walked the short distance to where Jim Pendlebury appeared to be conducting an impromptu press conference under the fire brigade’s portable arc lights. She’d spotted the journalists as soon as her driver had turned into the car park, and she’d asked to be dropped nearby, well away from the phalanx of scarlet engines where fire officers were still spraying a smouldering warehouse with water. High above his colleagues, one man on a cherry picker sent a soaring arc of water above their heads on to the flaking remains of the roof. Milling around behind the fire brigade were half a dozen uniformed police officers. One or two watched Carol’s arrival with vague interest, but soon turned back to the more absorbing vista of the fag end of the fire.
Carol hung back as Pendlebury gave brief and noncommittal answers for the benefit of local radio and press. Once they realized they would get nothing much out of the fire chief at that stage, they dispersed. If any of them paid attention to the blonde in the trench coat, they probably assumed she was another reporter. Only the crime reporters had met Carol so far, and it was too early for this to have graduated from a news headline into a crime story. As soon as the night-shift news reporters called in that the factory fire was not only fatal but also suspected arson, the jackals on the crime beat would have their morning assignments on a plate. One or two of them might even be turfed out of bed as unceremoniously as she had been.
Pendlebury greeted Carol with a grim smile. ‘The smell of hell,’ he said.
‘Unmistakably.’
‘Thanks for turning out.’
‘Thanks for tipping me off. Otherwise I’d have known nothing about it till I got into the office and read the overnights. And then I’d have missed the joys of a fresh crime scene,’ she said wryly.
‘Well, after our little chat the other day, I knew this one would be right up your street.’
‘You think it’s our serial arsonist?’
‘I wouldn’t have phoned you at home at half past three in the morning if I hadn’t been pretty sure,’ he said.
‘So what have we got?’
‘Want to have a look?’
‘In a minute. First, I’d appreciate a verbal briefing while I’m in a position to concentrate on what you’re saying rather than on what my stomach’s doing.’
Pendlebury looked slightly surprised, as if he expected her to take such horrors in her stride. ‘Right,’ he said, sounding disconcerted. ‘We got the call just after two, from one of your patrol cars, actually. They’d been cruising and saw the flames. We had two units here within seven minutes, but the place was well ablaze. Another three tenders were here inside the half-hour, but there was no way we were going to save the building.’
‘And the body?’
‘As soon as they had the fire damped down at this end of the warehouse – which took about half an hour – the officers became aware of the smell. That was when they called me out. I’m on permanent stand-by for all fatal fires. Your lads called in CID, and I called you.’
‘So where is the body?’
Pendlebury pointed to one side of the building. ‘As far as we can tell, it was in the corner of the loading bay. There seems to have been a kind of alcove at one end. Looking at the ash, there was probably a load of cardboard stashed at the front of it. We’ve not been able to get in yet, it’s still too hot and too chancy in terms of walls coming down, but from what we can see and what we can smell, I’d say the body’s behind or underneath all that wet ash down the back of that recess.’
‘There’s no doubt in your mind that there’s definitely a body in there?’ Carol was grasping at straws, and she knew it.
‘There’s only one thing that smells like roast human, and that’s roast human,’ Pendlebury said bluntly. ‘Besides, I think you can just about see the outline of the body. Come on, I’ll show you.’
A couple of minutes later, Carol stood by Pendlebury’s side at what he claimed was a safe distance from the smoking ruin. It felt uncomfortably warm to her, but she had learned when to trust the expertise of others during her years in the force. To have hung back would have been insulting. As Pendlebury pointed out the contours of the blackened form the fire and water had left at the end of the loading bay, she found herself irresistibly forming the same conclusion as the fire chief.
‘When can the scene-of-crime people start work?’ she asked dully.
Pendlebury pulled a face. ‘Later this morning?’
She nodded. ‘I’ll make sure the team’s on stand-by.’ She turned away. ‘This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen,’ she said, half to herself.
‘It was bound to happen sooner or later. Law of averages,’ Pendlebury said lightly, falling into step with her as she walked back towards her car.
‘We should have been all over this arsonist ages ago,’ Carol said, angrily searching through her pockets for a tissue to wipe the wet ash from her trainers. ‘It’s sloppy policing. He should have been nabbed by now. It’s our fault that he’s still on the loose to kill people.’
‘You’re not being fair on yourself,’ Pendlebury protested. ‘You’ve only been here five minutes, and you picked up on it right away. You mustn’t blame yourself.’
Carol looked up from her attempts at cleaning her shoes and scowled. ‘I’m not blaming myself, though maybe we could have put a bit more effort into the case. I’m saying that somewhere along the line the police on this patch have let down the people they’re supposed to serve. And maybe you should have been a bit more forceful about making the point to my predecessor that you thought you had a firebug.’
Pendlebury looked shocked. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been criticized to his face by a member of another emergency service. ‘I think you’re a bit out of order, Chief Inspector,’ he said, made pompous by his outrage.
‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ Carol said stiffly, standing up and straightening her shoulders. ‘But if we’re going to have a productive working relationship, there’s no room for cosiness at the expense of honesty. I expect you to tell me if we’re not keeping our end of the deal. And when I see things I don’t like, I’ll call them. I don’t want to fall out with you about this. I want to catch this guy. But we’re not going to make any progress if we all stand around saying it can’t be helped that some poor bastard is lying there dead.’
For a moment, they glared at each other, Pendlebury uncertain how to deal with her fiery determination. Then he spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have taken no for an answer.’
Carol smiled and thrust out her hand. ‘Let’s both try and get it right from now on, OK?’
They shook on it. ‘Deal,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to you later, when the forensics team have been all over it.’
As she drove off, Carol had room for only one thought. She had a serial arsonist who had now become a killer on her patch. Catching him was the only show in town. By the time the forensics team had something positive to tell her, she intended to have a draft profile. By the time the inquest opened, she meant to have a suspect in custody. If John Brandon had thought she was driven when they’d worked together in Bradfield, he was in for a surprise. Carol Jordan was out to prove a lot of points to a lot of people. And if she felt discouraged along the way, the stink that clung to her nostrils would be impetus enough to get her moving again.
Shaz turned over and looked at the clock. Twenty minutes to seven. Only ten minutes since she’d looked at it last. She wasn’t going to fall asleep again, not now. If she was honest, she thought as she got out of bed and made for the bathroom, she probably wasn’t going to sleep properly until Chris had delivered on her promise.
Asking the favour had been less awkward than she’d expected, Shaz reflected as she sat on the loo and leaned over to turn on the bath taps. Time seemed to have smoothed the rough edges of her relationship with Detective Sergeant Devine until it was back where it had been before misunderstandings and false moves had abraded it to a series of painful snags.
From the start of Shaz’s career in the Met, Chris Devine had represented everything Shaz aspired to. There had been only two women in CID at the station where Shaz was based in West London, and Chris was the higher ranking. It was obvious why. She was a good cop with one of the best arrest records in the division. Rock solid in a crisis, hard working, imaginative and incorruptible, she also demonstrably possessed a brain and a sense of humour. Even more importantly, she could be one of the lads without ever letting anyone forget she was a woman.
Shaz had studied her like a specimen under a microscope. Where Chris was, she wanted to be, and she wanted that same respect. Already she’d seen too many women officers dismissed as plonks or slits, and she was determined that would never happen to her. Shaz knew that as a brand new uniformed constable, she was an insignificant dot somewhere in Chris’s peripheral vision, but somehow she insinuated herself into the older woman’s consciousness until, whenever they were in the station taking refs at the same time, they could invariably be found in a corner of the canteen drinking brutally strong tea and talking shop.
The very day Shaz became eligible for a CID aide posting, she’d submitted her name. Chris’s recommendation was enough to swing it and, a few weeks later, Shaz found herself on her first night-shift stakeout with Chris. It took her rather longer to realize that Chris was gay, and had been working on the assumption that Shaz’s hot pursuit was sexual rather than professional. The night her sergeant kissed her had been the worst moment of her police career.
For an instant, she’d almost gone along with it, so deep-rooted was her ambition. Then reality had clicked in. Shaz might not have been much good at forming relationships, but she knew enough about herself to be clear that it was very definitely men rather than women that she wasn’t connecting with. She’d recoiled from Chris’s embrace more vigorously than from a sawn-off shotgun. The aftermath was something neither Shaz nor Chris could recall without an uncomfortable mixture of emotions; humiliation, embarrassment, anger and betrayal. The sensible option would probably have been for one of them to seek a transfer, but Chris wasn’t prepared to abandon a patch she knew like her own back garden, and Shaz was too stubborn to give up her first best chance at making it on to a permanent CID appointment.
So they’d established an awkward armistice that allowed them to stay on the same team, though whenever they could avoid working shift together, they did. Six months before Shaz’s move to Leeds, Chris had been promoted and transferred to New Scotland Yard. They hadn’t spoken from that day until Shaz had fetched up on Chris’s doorstep looking for a favour.
Shaz chopped fresh fruit into her muesli and reflected that it had been easier than she’d expected to swallow her pride and ask Chris for help, possibly because Chris had been wrong-footed by the presence in her flat – and, clearly, her bed – of a fingerprint technician Shaz remembered from Notting Hill Gate. When Shaz had explained what she wanted, Chris had agreed immediately, understanding exactly why Shaz was so eager to push far beyond what her course leader expected from his officers. And, again as if fate had taken a hand in Shaz’s life, it happened that Chris was off duty the following day, so garnering Shaz’s information in the minimal time available would be simple.
As she absently shovelled breakfast into her mouth, she imagined Chris spending her day in the national newspaper archives at Colindale, copying page after page of local papers until she’d covered the period surrounding each of the seven disappearances that had captured Shaz’s imagination. Shaz ran her empty cereal bowl under the hot tap with happy anticipation swelling inside. She couldn’t say why she was so certain, but she was convinced that the first steps on her journey of proof would be waymarked in the local press.
She’d never been wrong so far. Except, of course, about Chris. But that, she told herself, had been different.
‘The kind of cases we’ll be working are the ones that leave most police officers feeling edgy. That’s because the perpetrators are dancing to a different beat from the rest of us.’ Tony looked around, double-checking that they were listening to him rather than shuffling through their papers. Leon looked as if he’d rather be somewhere else, but Tony had grown accustomed to his affectations and no longer took them at face value. Satisfied, he continued. ‘Knowing you’re dealing with someone who has manufactured their own set of rules is a very unsettling experience for anyone, even trained police officers. Because we come in from the outside to make sense of the bizarre, there’s a tendency to lump us as part of the problem rather than the solution, so it’s important that the first thing we concentrate on is building a rapport with the investigating officers. You’ve all come here from CID work – any ideas about the sort of thing that might work?’
Simon jumped straight in. ‘Take them out for a pint?’ he suggested. The others groaned and catcalled at his predictability.
Tony’s smile came nowhere near his eyes. ‘Chances are they’ll have half a dozen good excuses why they can’t come to the pub with you. Any other ideas?’
Shaz raised her pen. ‘Work your socks off. If they see you’re a grafter, they’ll give you some respect.’
‘Either that or think you’re brown-nosing the bosses,’ Leon sneered.
‘It’s not a bad idea,’ Tony said, ‘though Leon does have a point. If you’re going to go down that road, you also need to demonstrate a complete contempt for everyone over the rank of DCI, which can be wearing, not to say counterproductive.’ They laughed. ‘What does the trick for me is incredibly simple.’ He gave them a last questioning look. ‘No? How about flattery?’
A couple nodded sagely. Leon’s lip curled and he snorted. ‘More brown-nosing.’
‘I prefer to think of it as one technique among many in the arsenal of the profiler. I don’t use it for personal advancement; I use it for the benefit of the casework,’ Tony corrected him mildly. ‘I have a mantra that I trot out at every available opportunity.’ He shifted his position slightly, but that small change altered his body language from comfortable authority to subordinate. His smile was self-deprecating. ‘Of course,’ he said ingratiatingly, ‘I don’t solve murders. It’s bobbies that do that.’ Then, just as swiftly, he returned to his previous posture. ‘It works for me. It might not work for you. But it’s never going to do any harm to tell the investigating officers how much you respect their work and how you’re just a tiny cog that might make their machine work better.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You have to tell them this at least five times a day.’ They were all grinning now.
‘Once you’ve done that, there’s a reasonable chance they’ll give you the information you need to draw up your profile. If you can’t be bothered making the effort, they’re likely to hold as much back as they can get away with because they see you as a rival for the glory of solving a high-profile case. So. You’ve got the investigating officers on your side, and you’ve got your evidence. It’s time to work on the profile. First you assess probabilities.’
He stood up and began to prowl round the perimeter of the room, like a big cat checking the limits of its domain. ‘Probability is the only god of the profiler. To abandon probability for the alternative demands the strongest evidence. The downside of that is that there will be times when you end up with so much egg on your face you’ll look like an omelette on legs.’
Already, he could feel his heart rate increasing and still he hadn’t said a word about the case. ‘I had that experience myself on the last major case I worked. We were dealing with a serial killer of young men. I had all the information that was available to the police, thanks to a brilliant liaison officer. On the basis of the evidence, I drew up a profile. The liaison officer made a couple of suggestions based on her instincts. One of those suggestions was an interesting idea I hadn’t thought of because I didn’t know as much about information technology as she did. But equally, because it was something only a small proportion of the population would know about, I assigned it a moderately low probability. Normally, that would mean the investigation team would assign it low priority, but they were stuck for leads, so they pursued it. It turned out she’d been right, but in itself it didn’t move the investigation much further forward.’
His hands were clammy with perspiration, but now he was actually confronting the details that still shredded his nights, his stomach had stopped clenching. It was less effort than he’d expected to continue his analysis. ‘Her other suggestion I discounted out of hand because it was completely off the wall. It ran counter to everything I knew about serial killers.’ Tony met their curious stares. His tension had transmitted itself to the entire squad and they sat silent and motionless, waiting for what would come next.
‘My disregard for her suggestion nearly cost me my life,’ he said simply, reaching his seat and sitting down again. He looked around the room, surprised he could speak so levelly. ‘And you know something? I was right to ignore her. Because, on a scale of one to a hundred, her proposition was so unlikely it wouldn’t even register.’
As soon as the formal confirmation of the body in the blaze came through, Carol called a meeting of her team. This time, there were no chocolate biscuits. ‘I expect you’ve all heard this morning’s news,’ she said flatly as they arranged themselves around her office, Tommy Taylor straddling the only chair apart from Carol’s on the basis that he was the sergeant. He might have been brought up never to sit while women were standing, but he’d long since stopped thinking of Di Earnshaw as a woman.
‘Aye,’ he said.
‘Poor bugger,’ Lee Whitbread chimed in.
‘Poor bugger nothing,’ Tommy protested. ‘He shouldn’t have been there, should he?’
Repelled but not surprised, Carol said, ‘Whether he should or shouldn’t have been there, he’s dead, and we’re supposed to be looking for the person who killed him.’ Tommy looked mutinous, folding his arms across the chair back and planting his feet more firmly on the floor, but Carol refused to respond to the challenge. ‘Arson’s always a time bomb,’ she continued. ‘And this time it’s gone off right in our faces. Today has not been the proudest day of my career to date. So what have you got for me?’
Lee, leaning against the filing cabinet, shifted his shoulders. ‘I went through all the back files for the last six months. Leastways, all I could get my hands on,’ he corrected himself. ‘I found quite a few incidents like you told us to look for, some off night-shift CID reports, some off the uniform lads. I was planning on getting them collated on paper today.’
‘Di and me, we’ve been re-interviewing the victims, like you said. There doesn’t seem to be any linking factor that we’ve come across so far,’ Tommy said, his voice distant following Carol’s snub.
‘A variety of insurance companies, that kind of thing,’ Di amplified.
‘What about a racial motive?’ Carol asked.
‘Some Asian victims, but not what you’d call enough to make it look significant,’ Di said.
‘Have we spoken to the insurers themselves yet?’
Di looked at Tommy and Lee stared out of the window. Tommy cleared his throat. ‘It was on Di’s list for today. First chance she’s had.’
