02.The Wire in the Blood

by Val McDermid

  ‘Don’t you feel happier about the kids growing up away from the influence of the inner city? Out of the reaches of the drug lords?’ Carol asked.

  Maggie shook her head. ‘They’re so insular round here, Carol. Back in Bradfield, the kids had friends from all kinds of backgrounds—Asian, Chinese, Afro-Caribbean. Even one Vietnamese lad. Out here, you stick to your own. There’s nothing to do except hang around on street corners. Frankly, I’d take a chance on them having the sense to stay out of trouble in the inner city as a trade-off for all the opportunities they had in Bradfield. This country living is well over-rated.’ She marched through to the kitchen.

  ‘Sorry,’ Carol said. ‘Didn’t realize it was such a sore point.’

  Brandon shrugged. ‘You know Maggie. She likes to get it off her chest. Give it a few more months, she’ll be running the village, happy as a pig. The kids like it well enough. How about you? What’s the cottage like?’

  ‘I love it. The couple I bought it from did an immaculate restoration job.’

  ‘I’m surprised they were selling it, then.’

  ‘Divorce,’ Carol said succinctly.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I think they were both more upset about losing the cottage than the marriage. You and Maggie will have to come over for a meal.’

  ‘If you ever find the time to shop,’ Maggie said darkly, walking back in with a large cafetière.

  ‘Well, worst comes to worst, I’ll send Nelson out to bring us a rabbit back.’

  ‘He’s enjoying the opportunities for murder that living in the country offers?’ Maggie asked drily.

  ‘He thinks he’s died and gone to feline heaven. You might crave the inner city, but he’s turned into a country boy overnight.’

  Maggie poured coffee for John and Carol, then said, ‘I’m going to leave you pair to it, if you don’t mind. I know you’re dying to talk shop and I promised Karen I’d pick her up after the pictures in Seaford. There’s enough coffee there to keep you both awake till dawn, and if you feel peckish in a bit, there’s home-made cheesecake in the fridge. But Andy’s due back around ten, so you’d better help yourself before then. I swear that lad’s got worms. That or hollow legs.’ She swooped down on Brandon and gave him an affectionate peck on the cheek. ‘Enjoy yourselves.’

  Unable to resist the feeling that she’d been set up by professionals, Carol took a sip of her coffee and waited. When it came, Brandon’s question was hardly a surprise. ‘So how are you settling in on the ground?’ His voice was casual, but his eyes were watchful.

  ‘Obviously, they’re wary of me. Not only am I a woman, which on the evolutionary scale in East Yorkshire comes somewhere between a ferret and a whippet, but I’m also the Chief Constable’s nark. Brought in from the big city to crack the whip,’ she said ironically.

  ‘I was afraid you’d get lumbered with that,’ Brandon said. ‘But you must have known how it would be when you took the job on.’

  Carol shrugged. ‘It’s not come as a surprise. But there’s been rather less of it than I anticipated. Maybe they’re all still on their best behaviour, but I think the Seaford Central Division CID are not a bad crew. Because they were stuck out in the boondocks before the reorganization and nobody was paying much attention, they’ve got a bit lazy, a bit sloppy. I suspect one or two might be spending a bit more than they’re earning, but I don’t think there’s any deep-rooted, systemic corruption.’

  Brandon nodded, satisfied. Trusting Carol Jordan’s judgement had been a steep learning curve for him, and he’d known instinctively she was the one senior officer he wanted to tempt away from Bradfield. With her setting the tone in Seaford, word would spread through other divisions and the CID culture would adapt accordingly, given time. Time and a certain amount of stick which Brandon wasn’t afraid to apply. ‘Anything on the books that’s causing you a problem?’

  Carol finished her coffee and poured herself another cup, offering the pot to Brandon, who refused with a shake of the head. She frowned in thought, gathering her arsenal of information. ‘There is something,’ she said. ‘Since we’re talking informally?’

  Brandon nodded.

  ‘Well, I noticed going through the overnights that there seemed to be a positive spate of unexplained fires and query arsons. All at night, all in unoccupied premises like schools, factories, cafés, warehouses. None of them very big in itself, but taken together, you’re looking at a lot of damage. I put a team together to re-interview the previous victims, see if we could find any connection—financially or insurance-wise. Zilch. But I went myself to talk to the local fire chief, and he produced a series of incidents going back about four months. None of the fires could be absolutely, positively put down as arson, but circumstantially, he reckons there have been something between six and a dozen possible deliberate fires per month on his patch,’ Carol said.

  ‘A serial arsonist?’ Brandon said softly.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine another interpretation,’ Carol agreed.

  ‘And you want to do what, exactly?’

  ‘I want to catch him,’ she said with a grin.

  ‘Well, what else?’ Brandon smiled. ‘Did you have something specific in mind?’ he continued mildly.

  ‘I want to carry on working with the team I’ve already got on it, and I want to do a profile.’

  Brandon frowned. ‘Bring someone in?’

  ‘No,’ Carol said sharply. ‘There’s not really enough evidence to justify the expense. I think I can take a pretty good stab at it myself.’

  Brandon looked impassively at Carol. ‘You’re not a psychologist.’

  ‘No, but I learned a lot last year, working with Tony Hill. And since then, I’ve read everything about profiling I could find.’

  ‘You should have applied for the National Task Force,’ Brandon said, keeping his eyes fixed on her.

  Carol felt her skin burn. She hoped the wine and the coffee would account for her heightened colour. ‘I don’t think they were looking for officers of my rank,’ she said. ‘Apart from Commander Bishop, there’s no one above the rank of sergeant. Besides, I prefer to work a patch, get to know the people and the ground.’

  ‘They’re due to be up and running a full case-load in a few weeks,’ Brandon continued implacably. ‘Maybe they’d welcome something like this to cut their teeth on before then.’

  ‘Maybe they would,’ Carol said. ‘But it’s my case. And I’m not ready to let it go.’

  ‘Fine,’ Brandon said, interested that Carol had already developed such fierce possessiveness about the work of the East Yorkshire force. ‘But keep me posted, yes?’

  ‘Of course,’ Carol said. Her sense of relief, she told herself, was entirely because she would now have the chance to cover herself and her team in glory when they cracked the case. Deep down, though, she knew she was lying.

  Sleeping in what the estate agent had referred to as the guest bedroom of Shaz’s flat would have been beyond most people, particularly if they were the sort who needed to read a few pages before they could nod off. While the bookcase in the living room contained an innocuous mix of middlebrow middle-of-the-road modern fiction, the shelves in the room Shaz thought of as her study held only hard-core horror, most of it masquerading as textbooks. There were a few novels by pathologists of psychopathy and anatomists of agony like Barbara Vine and Thomas Harris, but most of Shaz’s working library was both stranger and more brutal than fiction ever dared to be. If there had been a vocational course for serial killers, her library would have comprised the set books.

  The lowest shelves held those items which mildly embarrassed her—pulp true-crime biographies of notorious serial killers with lurid nicknames, sensational accounts of careers that had robbed hundreds of people of their trust and their lives. Arranged above these were the more respectable versions of those same lives, portentous renderings that provided thoughtful revelations and insights sociological, psychological and sometimes illogical.

  Next, at eye-level for anyone
sitting at the table that held Shaz’s notepads and laptop, were the battle stories of the veterans of the war against serial offenders. Since it was the best part of twenty years since the infancy of offender profiling, the pioneers had been trickling into retirement for a few years now, each determined to augment his pension with graphic accounts of his contribution to the latest soft science with the case histories of his notable successes and a passing gloss over his failures. They were, thus far, all men.

  Above these autobiographies was the serious stuff; books with titles like The Psychopathology of Sexual Homicide, Crime Scene Analysis and Serial Rape: A Clinical Study. The top shelf gave the only indications that she aspired to be hunter rather than hunted, with its selection of legal texts, including a couple of guides to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. It was a comprehensive collection and Shaz hadn’t amassed it in the mere couple of months since she’d won her place on the task force; it had been years in the building, helping her prepare for the day she’d always been convinced would come, when she’d be called upon to bring her very own notorious killer to book. If textual familiarity alone caught criminals, Shaz would have had the best arrest record in the country.

  She had begged off the nightclub run following the curry in spite of the blandishments of the other three. It wasn’t just that she had never been a great one for clubbing. Tonight, her spare room was infinitely more tempting than anything a DJ or a barman had to offer. The truth was, she’d been in a ferment all evening, eager to get back to her computer and to finish the comparisons she’d begun to run through her database that afternoon. In the three days since Tony had set their assignment, Shaz had spent every spare moment working her way through the thirty sketchy sets of case notes. At last, the opportunity had come to put into practice all the theories and tricks of the trade she’d picked up in her reading. She’d read the papers from start to finish, not once, but three times. Not until she was fairly sure she had them well differentiated in her head did she approach her computer.

  The database Shaz used hadn’t represented the leading edge of software development way back when she’d copied it from a fellow student, and now it was practically a candidate for display in a computing museum. But while it might not have all the latest bells and whistles, it was more than capable of performing what she needed. It displayed the material clearly, it allowed her to create her own categories and criteria for sorting the information, and she found its procedures in tune with her instincts and logic and thus easy to use. She’d been inputting data since early that morning, so focused on her work that she hadn’t even left the screen to cook lunch, settling instead for a banana and half a packet of digestive biscuits, upending her laptop afterwards to remove the crumbs from the keyboard.

  Now, back in front of her screen, stripped of her glad rags and scrubbed clean of her make-up, Shaz was happy. The mouse pointer flickered as fingers clicked on buttons, summoning up menus that interested her far more than anything on offer at the restaurant. She sorted the so-called runaways by age and printed out the results. She followed the same steps for geographical area, physical type, previous police contact, various permutations on their domestic situation, drink and drugs experience, known sexual contacts and interests. Not that the investigating officers had been much concerned with their hobbies.

  Shaz pored over the print-outs, reading them individually then spreading them over the desktop so she could more readily compare notes. As she gazed at the printed lists, the slow burn of excitement began in the pit of her stomach. She scrutinized them one more time, double-checking against the photographs in the files to make sure she wasn’t willing something into existence that wasn’t there. ‘Oh, you beauty,’ Shaz exclaimed softly, letting out a long sigh.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she looked again, it was still there. A cluster of seven girls. First, the positive similarities. They all had bobbed dark hair and blue eyes. They were all fourteen or fifteen years old, between 5′2″ and 5′4″ tall. They had all lived at home with one or both parents. In each case, their friends and family had told the police they were baffled at the girl’s disappearance, convinced that she had no real reason to run away. In every instance, the girls had taken almost nothing with them, though in each case, at least one change of clothes appeared to have gone missing with them, which was the main reason why the police hadn’t seriously considered them as possible victims of abduction or murder. Reinforcing that view were the times of the disappearances. In each case, the girl concerned had set off for school as usual but had never arrived. She’d also given a false explanation of where she’d be spending the evening. And, although this couldn’t be quantified in a way the computer could digest, they were all of a similar type. There was a flirtatious sensuality in their looks, a knowing quality in the way they embraced the camera that indicated they had left childhood innocence behind. They were sexy, whether they knew it or not.

  Next, the negative similarities. None of the seven had ever been in care. None had ever been in trouble with the police. Friends admitted to a bit of recreational drinking, maybe even the occasional joint or even a dab of speed. But no significant drug usage. In none of the seven cases was there any hint that the girls might have been engaged in prostitution or the victims of sexual abuse.

  There were problems with the cluster, of course. Three had current boyfriends, four did not. The geographical locations were unconnected—Sunderland was the furthest north, Exmouth the most southerly point. In between were Swindon, Grantham, Tamworth, Wigan and Halifax. The reports also spanned six years. The intervals between the disappearances were not constant, nor did they seem to diminish as time went by, which Shaz would have expected if she were really dealing with the victims of a serial killer.

  On the other hand, there might be girls she didn’t know about yet.

  When Shaz woke early that Sunday morning, she tried to will herself back to sleep. She knew there was only one thing she could do that would advance her search for connections among her theoretical victim cluster and that single task wasn’t one that could be hurried. When she’d gone to bed around midnight, she’d promised herself she would achieve it with a lunchtime phone call. But lying wide awake with a racing brain at quarter to seven, she knew she couldn’t hold out that long.

  Irritated by her inability to make progress except at someone else’s hands, she threw back the covers. Half an hour later, she was accelerating up the long incline where the M1 began.

  Showering, dressing and swallowing a coffee with the radio news in the background had kept thought at arm’s length. Now that the empty black three-lane strip stretched out before her, she couldn’t hide behind distraction. The radio presenter’s voice wasn’t enough on its own. Not even Tony Hill’s words of wisdom could hold her today. Impatiently, Shaz pushed a cassette of operatic arias into the stereo and gave up the pretence of concentration. For the next two and a half hours, she had nothing to do but run memories through her mind like old movies on a rainy Sunday.

  It was almost ten when she drove down the ramp to the Barbican complex’s underground car park. She was pleased to see the car park attendant clearly remembered her, as she’d hoped, though he looked startled to see her face smiling uncertainly round the door of his office. ‘Hello, stranger,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ve not seen you around for a long time.’

  ‘I’ve moved up to Leeds,’ she said, carefully avoiding any hint of how recent her move had been. It had been more than eighteen months since she’d last been here, but the reasons for that were nobody’s business but hers.

  ‘Chris didn’t say to expect you,’ the car park attendant said, getting up from his seat and walking towards her. Shaz backed out of the booth and down the steps as he followed her.

  ‘It was all a bit last-minute,’ she said noncommittally, opening her car door.

  That seemed to satisfy the attendant. ‘Are you here overnight?’ he asked, frowning as he scanned the car park for an appropriate sp
ace.

  ‘No, I’m not planning on staying long,’ Shaz said firmly, starting her engine and crawling down the aisles of cars, following the attendant and slotting the car into the space he indicated.

  ‘I’ll let you into the block,’ he said as she joined him. ‘What’s it like up in the frozen north, then?’

  Shaz smiled. ‘The football’s better,’ was all she said as he pulled back the massive glass and metal door and waved her inside. Just as well I’m not a terrorist sleeper, she thought as she waited for the lift.

  On the third floor, she stopped halfway along the carpeted corridor. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the doorbell. In the silence that followed, she breathed out through her nostrils in a slow steady stream, trying to contain the nervousness that was turning her stomach into a jacuzzi. When she’d almost given up hope, she heard the faint whisper of footfalls. Then the heavy door inched open.

  Tousled chestnut hair, bleary brown eyes with dark smudges under them and frown lines between, a snub nose and a yawn half-stifled behind a square hand with blunt, well-manicured fingers appeared in the gap.

  For once, Shaz’s narrow smile made it as far as her eyes. The blaze of warmth melted Chris Devine, and not for the first time. The hand dropped away from the mouth, but the lips remained parted. Astonishment came first, then delight, then consternation. ‘Any chance of a cup of coffee?’ Shaz asked.

  Chris stepped back uncertainly, pulling the door wide. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

  Chapter 4

  Nothing worth having had ever come easy. He told himself that at regular intervals through two days of torment, though it was not a lesson he was ever likely to forget. His childhood had been scarred with oppressive discipline, any rebelliousness or frivolity stifled by force. He had learned not to show the currents that moved under the surface, to present a bland and acceptable face to whatever adversity people threw in his teeth. Other men might have revealed some traces of the seething excitement that swirled inside whenever he thought of Donna Doyle, but not him. He was too practised at dissemblement. No one ever noticed his mind was ranging through entirely different territory, detached from his surroundings, entirely elsewhere. It was a trait that in the past had saved him pain; now it kept him safe.