02.The Wire in the Blood

by Val McDermid

  He knew which ground-floor flat was Shaz’s—he’d given her a lift home after they’d all been out for a drink one evening and, already wistfully hoping he might pluck up the courage to ask her out, he’d lingered long enough to see which set of lights came on. So, just by looking, he could see that the curtains were closed across the deep bay of the master bedroom at the front of the house although it wasn’t long dark. As far as he was concerned, that meant she’d been getting ready to go out. Though not, it appeared, with him. He was about to give up and go to the pub alone to drown his humiliation in Tetley’s when he noticed the narrow passage running down the side of the house. Not giving himself time to wonder whether he was either justified or wise, he slipped down the ginnel, through the wrought-iron gate and into the gloomy darkness of the back garden.

  He rounded the corner of the house and almost tripped over a short flight of steps leading up from the garden to a pair of French windows. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he muttered angrily, catching himself before he pitched headlong. He peered through the glass, cupping his hand round his eyes against the stray beams of light from the next-door house. He could see dim shapes of furniture against a faint glow that appeared to be coming from another room opening off the hall. But there was no sign of life. Suddenly a light snapped on from the floor above, casting an irregular rectangle of light right next to Simon.

  Instantly aware that he must appear more like burglar than policeman to any casual observer, he’d slid back into the darkness against the wall and returned to the street, hoping he’d managed to avoid anyone’s attention. The last thing he needed were jibes from the local uniforms about the Peeping Toms of the profiling squad. Baffled by Shaz’s apparent rebuff, he’d walked miserably down to the Sheesh Mahal to meet Leon and Kay for the agreed meal. He wasn’t in the mood to join in their speculation that Shaz had had a better offer, concentrating instead on getting as much Kingfisher lager down his throat as he could.

  Now, on Monday morning, he was seriously worried. It was one thing standing him up. Let’s face it, she could probably do a lot better than him without trying too hard. But to miss a training session was completely out of character. Oblivious to Paul Bishop’s words of wisdom, Simon sat and fretted, a pair of frown lines dividing his dark brows. As soon as the screech of chairs on floor announced the end of the session, he went in search of Tony Hill.

  He found the psychologist in the canteen, sitting at the table the profiling squad had made their own. ‘Can you spare a minute, Tony?’ he asked, his dark intense expression almost a mirror image of his tutor’s.

  ‘Sure. Pull up a coffee and join me.’

  Simon looked uncertainly over his shoulder. ‘It’s just that the others’ll be down any minute, and…well, it’s a bit…you know, sort of private.’

  Tony picked up his own coffee and the file he’d been reading. ‘We’ll grab one of the interview rooms for a minute.’

  Simon followed him down the corridor to the first witness interview room without a red light showing. The air smelled of sweat, stale cigarettes and, obscurely, burnt sugar. Tony straddled one of the chairs and watched Simon pace for a moment before he leaned into one corner of the room. ‘It’s Shaz,’ Simon said. ‘I’m worried about her. She didn’t turn up this morning and she didn’t phone in or anything.’

  Tony knew without being told there was more to it than that. It was his job to find out what. ‘I agree, it’s not like her. She’s very conscientious. But something could have come up unexpectedly. A family problem, perhaps?’

  One corner of Simon’s mouth twitched downwards. ‘I suppose so,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘But she would have phoned somebody if that’s what it was. She’s not just conscientious, she’s obsessive. You know that.’

  ‘Maybe she’s had an accident.’

  Simon pounced. ‘Exactly. My point exactly. We should be worried about her, shouldn’t we?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘If she has had an accident, we’ll hear about it soon enough. Either she’ll call us or else someone else will.’

  Simon clenched his teeth. He was going to have to explain why it was more urgent than that. ‘If she’s had an accident, I don’t think it was this morning. We had a sort of date on Saturday night. Leon and Kay and me and Shaz, we’ve taken to going out on a Saturday night for a curry and a few bevvies. But I’d arranged to have a drink with Shaz first, just the two of us. I was supposed to meet her at her flat.’ Once he’d started, the words poured out of him. ‘When I turned up, there was no sign of her. I thought she’d had second thoughts. Bottled out, whatever. But now it’s Monday, and she’s not turned up. I think something’s happened to her, and whatever it is, it’s not trivial. She could have had an accident at home. She could have slipped in the shower and hit her head. Or outside. She could be lying in hospital somewhere and nobody knows who she is. Don’t you think we should do something about it? We’re supposed to be a team, are we not?’

  A dreadful premonition shimmered at the edge of Tony’s mind. Simon was right. Two days was too long for a woman like Shaz Bowman to drop out of sight when that meant letting down a colleague and missing work. He got to his feet. ‘Have you tried ringing her?’ he asked.

  ‘Loads of times. Her answering machine’s not on, either. That’s why I thought maybe she’d had an accident in the house. You know? I thought, she might’ve switched the machine off when she came in, and then something happened and…I don’t know,’ he added impatiently. ‘This is really embarrassing, you know? I feel like a teenager. Making a fuss about nothing.’ He shrugged away from the wall and crossed to the door.

  Tony put a hand on Simon’s arm. ‘I think you’re right. You’ve got a policeman’s instinct for when something doesn’t smell right. It’s one of the reasons you’re on this squad. Come on, let’s go round to Shaz’s flat and see what we can see.’

  In the car, Simon leaned forward in his seat as if willing them forward. Realizing any attempt at conversation would be futile, Tony concentrated on following the young officer’s terse directions. They pulled up outside Shaz’s flat and Simon was on the pavement before Tony could even turn off the engine. ‘The curtains are still drawn,’ Simon said urgently as soon as Tony joined him on the doorstep. ‘That’s her bedroom on the left. The curtains were drawn on Saturday night when I was here.’ He pushed the bell marked ‘Flat 1: Bowman’. They could both hear the irritating buzz from within.

  ‘At least we know the bell’s working,’ Tony said. He stepped back and looked up at the imposing villa, its York stone blackened by a century of the internal combustion engine.

  ‘You can get round the back,’ Simon said, finally releasing the bell push. Without waiting for a response, he was off down the ginnel. Tony followed him, but not quickly enough. As he reached the corner, he heard a wail like an agonized cat in the night. He emerged in time to see Simon reel back from a pair of French windows like a man struck in the face. The young policeman sank to his knees and emptied his guts on the grass, groaning incoherently.

  Shocked, Tony took a few hesitant steps forward. As he came level with the steps leading up to the windows, the sight that had stripped Simon McNeill of his manhood turned his stomach to ice. Beyond thought, beyond emotion, Tony stared through the glass at something that looked more like a pastiche of a Bacon painting executed by a psychopath than it did a human being. At first, it was more than he could grasp.

  When realization came a moment later, he’d have sold his soul for that previous incomprehension.

  It was not the first mutilated corpse Tony had ever faced. But it was the first time he’d had any personal connection to a victim. Momentarily, he put a hand over his eyes, massaging his eyebrows with thumb and forefinger. This wasn’t the time to mourn. There were things he could do for Shaz Bowman that no one else was capable of, and crawling round on the grass like a wounded puppy wasn’t one of them.

  Taking a deep breath, he turned to Simon and said, ‘Call this in. Then go round the front and secure
the scene there.’

  Simon looked up at him beseechingly, his baffled pain impossible to ignore. ‘That’s Shaz?’

  Tony nodded. ‘That’s Shaz. Simon, do as I say. Call this in. Go round the front. It’s important. We need to get other officers here, now. Do it.’ He waited until Simon stumbled to his feet and reeled towards the ginnel like a drunk. Then he turned back and stared through the glass at the ruination of Shaz Bowman. He longed to be closer, to move round her body and take in the horrific details of what had been done to her. But he knew too much about crime scene contamination even to consider it.

  He made do with what he could see. It would have been more than enough for most people, but for Tony it was a tantalizing partial picture. The first thing he had to do was to stop thinking of this shell as Shaz Bowman. He must be detached, analytical and clearheaded if he was to be any use at all to the investigating officers. Looking again at the body in the chair, he found it wasn’t so hard to distance himself from memories of Shaz. The deformed freakish head that faced him bore so little resemblance to anything human.

  He could see dark holes where her startling eyes had last looked out at him. Gouged out, he guessed, judging by what looked like threads and strings trailing from the wounds. Blood had flowed and dried round the black orifices, making the hideous mask of her face even more grotesque. Her mouth looked like a mass of plastic in a dozen hues of purple and pink.

  There were no ears. Her hair stuck out in spikes above and behind where the ears should have been, held in place by the dried blood that had sprayed and flowed over them.

  His eyes moved down to her lap. A sheet of paper was propped up against her chest. Tony was too far away to make out the words, but he could distinguish the line drawing easily. The three wise monkeys. A shiver shook him from head to foot. It was too early to tell, but from what he could see, there was no sign of any sexual assault. Coupled with the deadly calculation of the three wise monkeys, Tony read the scene. This was no sex killing. Shaz hadn’t caught the chance attention of some psychopathic stranger. This was an execution.

  ‘You didn’t do this for pleasure,’ he said softly to himself. ‘You wanted to teach her a lesson. You wanted to teach all of us a lesson. You’re telling us you’re better than us. You’re showing off, thumbing your nose at us because you’re convinced we’ll never find anything to incriminate you. And you’re telling us to keep our noses out of your business. You’re an arrogant bastard, aren’t you?’

  The scene before him told Tony things it would never reveal to a police officer trained to look only for the physical clues. To the psychologist, it revealed a mind that was incisive and decisive. This was a cold-blooded killing, not a frenzied, sexually motivated attack. To Tony, that suggested that the killer had identified Shaz Bowman as a threat. Then he’d acted on it. Brutally, coldly and methodically. Even before the SOCOs arrived, Tony could have told them they would find no significant material clues to the identity of this perpetrator. The solution to this crime lay in the mind, not the forensic lab. ‘You’re good,’ Tony murmured. ‘But I’m going to be better.’

  When the sirens tore the silence into shreds and uniformed feet pounded down the ginnel, Tony was still standing at the windows, memorizing the scene, drinking in every detail so it would be there later when he needed it. Then and only then he walked round to the front of the house to offer what consolation he could to Simon.

  ‘Hardly bloody urgent,’ the police surgeon grumbled, opening his bag and pulling out a pair of latex gloves. ‘State she’s in, an hour’s neither here nor there. Not like doctoring the living, is it? Bloody pager, bane of my bloody life.’

  Tony resisted the impulse to hit the chubby doctor. ‘She was a police officer,’ he said sharply.

  The doctor flashed him a shrewd look. ‘We’ve not met, have we? You new here?’

  ‘Dr Hill works for the Home Office,’ the local DI said. Tony had already forgotten the man’s name. ‘He runs this new profiling task force you’ll have heard about. The lass was one of his trainees.’

  ‘Aye, well, she’ll get the same treatment from me as a Yorkshire lass would,’ the doctor said drily, turning back to his grim task.

  Tony was standing outside the now open French windows, looking in on the crime scene where a photographer and a team of SOCOs worked their way round the room. He could not take his eyes off the wreckage of Shaz Bowman. No matter how hard he tried, he could not avoid the occasional flashback image of what she had been. It heightened his resolve, but it was a provocation he could well have done without.

  Worse for Simon, he thought bitterly. He’d been taken, putty-skinned and trembling, back to police HQ to give a statement about Saturday night. Tony knew enough about the workings of the official mind to realize that the murder squad were probably treating him as their current prime suspect. He was going to have to do something about that sooner rather than later.

  The DI whose name he couldn’t remember walked down the steps and stood behind him. ‘Helluva mess,’ he said.

  ‘She was a good officer,’ Tony told him.

  ‘We’ll get the bastard,’ the DI said confidently. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘I want to help.’

  The DI raised one eyebrow. ‘Not my decision,’ he said. ‘It’s not a serial killer, you know. We’ve never seen owt like this on our patch.’

  Tony fought to suppress his frustration. ‘Inspector, this is not a first-time killing. Whoever did this is an expert. He might not have killed on your patch or used this precise method before, but this is not the product of amateur night out.’

  Before the inspector could respond, they were interrupted. The police surgeon had finished his grisly work. ‘Well, Colin,’ he said, walking over to them, ‘she’s definitely dead.’

  With a quick sidelong glance, the policeman said, ‘Spare us the gallows humour for once, Doc. Any idea when?’

  ‘Ask your pathologist, Inspector Wharton,’ the doctor said huffily.

  ‘I will. But in the meantime, can you give me a ballpark figure?’

  The doctor peeled off his gloves with a snap of latex. ‘Monday lunchtime…let me see…Some time between seven o’clock Saturday night and four o’clock Sunday morning, depending on whether the heating was on and how long for.’

  DI Colin Wharton sighed. ‘That’s a bloody big window of opportunity. Can’t you get it tighter than that?’

  ‘I’m a doctor, not bloody Mystic Meg,’ he said caustically. ‘And I’m going back to my game of golf, if you don’t mind. You’ll have my report in the morning.’

  Tony impulsively put a hand on his arm. ‘Doctor, I could use some help here. I know it’s not really your place to say, but you’ve obviously developed a lot of expertise in this kind of thing.’ When in doubt, flatter. ‘The injuries…Do you know if she was still alive, or are they postmortem?’

  The doctor pursed full red lips and stared back consideringly at Shaz’s body. He looked like a small boy puckering up for his maiden aunt, calculating how much of a tip it was going to earn him. ‘A mixture of both,’ he said finally. ‘I reckon the eyes both went while she was still alive. I think she must have been gagged or she’d have screamed the place down. She probably passed out then, a combination of shock and pain. Whatever was poured down her throat was very caustic and that’s what killed her. The total disintegration of her respiratory tract, that’s what they’ll find when they open her up. I’d stake my pension on it. Looking at the amount of blood, I’d reckon the ears came off more or less as she was dying. They’re neatly cut off, though. No trial attempts like you usually get with any kind of mutilation. He must have one hell of a sharp knife and a lot of nerve. If he was trying to make sure she’d end up like them three wise monkeys, he went the right way about it.’ He nodded to the two men. ‘I’ll be off, then. Leave you to it. Good luck finding him. You’ve got a right nutter here.’ He waddled off round the side of the house.

  ‘That bastard’s got the worst bed
side manner in the whole West Riding,’ Colin Wharton said in disgust. ‘Sorry about that.’

  Tony shook his head. ‘What’s the point in dressing up something as brutal as that in fancy words? Nothing alters the fact that somebody took Shaz Bowman apart and made sure we knew why.’

  ‘What?’ Wharton demanded. ‘Have I missed something here? What d’you mean, we know why? I don’t bloody know why.’

  ‘You saw the drawing, didn’t you? The three wise monkeys. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The killer destroyed her eyes, her ears, her mouth. Doesn’t that say something to you?’

  Wharton shrugged. ‘Either the boyfriend’s the killer, in which case he’s a certifiable nutter and it doesn’t matter what screwed-up shite was going round his head. Or else it was some other nutter who’s got it in for coppers because he thinks we stick our noses into things that we’d be better off leaving alone.’

  ‘You don’t think it could be a killer who specifically had it in for Shaz because she was sticking her nose in somewhere it didn’t belong?’ Tony suggested.

  ‘I don’t see how it could be,’ Wharton said dismissively. ‘She’s never worked any cases up here, has she? You lot aren’t catching live ones yet, so she’s not had the chance to get up some local nutter’s nose.’

  ‘Even though we’re not catching new cases, we’ve been working on some genuine old ones. Shaz came up with a theory the other day about a previously unidentified serial killer…’