02.The Wire in the Blood

by Val McDermid

  ‘Which one was that?’ McCormick asked.

  Tony was too smart to walk into that one. ‘You’d better ask Paul about that.’

  Wharton suddenly leaned forward, thrusting his heavy blunt features towards Tony. ‘Find her attractive, did you?’

  ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘About as straightforward as you can get. Yes or no. Did you find the lass attractive? Did you fancy her?’

  Tony paused momentarily, assembling his careful response. ‘I registered that her looks would have made her appealing to a lot of men, yes. I was not myself sexually attracted to her.’

  Wharton sneered. ‘How could you tell? From what I’ve heard, you don’t respond like most red-blooded blokes, do you?’

  Tony flinched as if he’d been struck. A tremor ran through his taut muscles and his stomach grew turbulent. The inquiry that had inevitably followed the case he’d worked with Carol Jordan the year before had had to be told of his sexual problems. He had been promised absolute confidentiality, and if the reactions of the police officers he had encountered since were anything to go by, he had been granted that. Now, overnight, Shaz Bowman’s death seemed to have stripped him of that right. He wondered momentarily where they’d gained their information, hoping this didn’t mean his impotence would now be common gossip. ‘My relationship with Shaz Bowman was purely professional,’ he said, forcing his voice to stay calm. ‘My personal life has nothing to do with this inquiry whatsoever.’

  ‘That’s for us to decide,’ McCormick stated baldly.

  Without pausing, Wharton continued. ‘You say your relationship was purely professional. But we have statements that indicate you spent more time with Bowman than you did with other members of the squad. Officers would arrive of a morning to find the two of you deep in conversation. She would stay behind at the end of group sessions for a word in private. A very close relationship seems to have sprung up between you.’

  ‘There was nothing untoward between Shaz and me. I’ve always been an early starter in the morning. Check it out with anyone who’s ever worked with me. Shaz was having some problems mastering the computer software we’re using so she came in beforehand to put in some extra time. And yes, she did stay behind after group sessions with questions, but that was because she was fascinated with the work, not for any seedy ulterior motive. If your murder inquiry had taught you anything at all about Shaz Bowman, you’d know the only thing she was in love with was the Job.’ He took a deep breath.

  There was a long moment’s silence. Then McCormick said, ‘Where were you on Saturday?’

  Tony shook his head, mystified. ‘You’re wasting your time with this. You should be using us to catch the killer, not trying to make it look like one of us is guilty. We should be talking about the meaning of what this killer did to Shaz, why he left the picture of the three wise monkeys on the body, why there was no sexual interference with the body nor any forensic traces.’

  McCormick’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m interested that you’re so definite about the absence of forensic traces. Now how would you happen to know that?’

  Tony groaned. ‘I don’t know it. But I did see the body and the scene of crime. From my experience of psychopathic killers, I reckoned it was the most likely scenario.’

  ‘A police officer or someone who works closely with the police would recognize the significance of forensic evidence,’ McCormick said cannily.

  ‘Everybody who has a TV set or who can read recognizes the significance of forensic evidence,’ Tony countered.

  ‘But they don’t all know how to erase all traces of their presence like people who are accustomed to watching SOCOs avoiding the contamination of evidence at a crime scene, do they?’

  ‘So you’re saying there was no forensic evidence?’ Tony challenged, latching on to the one piece of information that seemed significant.

  ‘I didn’t say that, no,’ McCormick retorted triumphantly. ‘Whoever killed Sharon Bowman probably thinks they didn’t leave a trace. But they’d be wrong.’

  Tony’s mind raced. It couldn’t be finger or shoe prints; that would be completely at odds with the organized precision of this killer. It might be hairs or fibres. Hair would only be useful if they had a serious suspect to match it against. Fibres, on the other hand, could be tracked down by a forensic expert. He hoped West Yorkshire used the best. ‘Good,’ was all he said. McCormick scowled.

  Wharton opened a folder and placed a sheet of paper in front of Tony. ‘For the tape, I am showing Dr Hill a photostat of DC Bowman’s diary for the week of her death. There are two entries for the day she was murdered. JV, nine thirty. And the letter T. I put it to you, Dr Hill, that you had arranged to meet Shaz Bowman on Saturday. That you did in fact meet her on Saturday.’

  Tony ran a hand through his hair. The confirmation of Carol’s idea that Shaz would have confronted Vance with what she knew gave him no satisfaction. ‘Inspector, I made no such arrangement. The last time I saw Shaz alive was at the end of the working day on Friday. What I was doing on Saturday could not be less relevant to this inquiry.’

  McCormick leaned forward and spoke softly. ‘I’m not so sure about that. T for Tony. She could have been meeting you. She could have met you out of office hours away from the squad room, and the boyfriend could have found out about it and let it wind him up. Maybe he confronted her with it and she admitted she fancied you more than she fancied him?’

  Tony’s lip twitched in contempt. ‘Is that the best you can come up with? That’s pathetic, McCormick. I’ve had patients who came up with more credible fantasies. Surely you must recognize that the crucial thing here is the diary entry that says JV, nine thirty? Shaz may have intended talking to me after that interview, but she never made it. If you’re interested in what the killer was doing on Saturday, you really should be checking out Jacko Vance and his entourage.’ As soon as the name was out of his mouth, Tony knew he’d blown it. McCormick shook his head pityingly and Wharton jumped to his feet, his chair shrieking on the cheap vinyl flooring.

  ‘Jacko Vance tries to save lives, not take them. You’re the one with the track record here,’ Wharton shouted. ‘You’ve already killed somebody, haven’t you, Dr Hill? And as you psychologists are always telling us, once the taboo’s breached, it’s gone for good. Once a killer…Fill in the blanks, Doctor. Fill in the fucking blanks.’

  Tony closed his eyes. His chest hurt, as if a punch to the diaphragm had robbed him of air. All the progress he’d made over the past year was stripped away and again he smelled sweat and blood, felt them slick on his hands, heard the screams ripped from his own throat, tasted the Judas kiss. His eyes snapped open and he looked at Wharton and McCormick with a hatred he’d forgotten he was capable of. ‘That’s it,’ he said, standing up. ‘Next time you want to talk to me, you’ll have to arrest me. And you’d better make sure my lawyer’s on the premises when you do.’

  Only his desire not to give them the satisfaction held him together as he marched out of the interview room, through the police station and out into the fresh air. No one made any move to stop him. He set off across the car park, desperate to make it to the street before his stomach lost its battle with breakfast. Just as he reached the kerb, a car pulled up beside him and the passenger window descended. Simon McNeill’s dark head loomed towards him. ‘Want a lift?’

  Tony recoiled as if from a blow. ‘No…I…No thanks.’

  ‘Come on,’ Simon urged. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. They kept me in half the night. They’ll try and pin this on me given half a chance. We need to find out who killed Shaz before they decide it’s time to make an arrest.’

  Tony leaned into the car. ‘Simon, listen very carefully to me. You’re right that they want it to be one of us. I’m not sure they’d go so far as to manufacture evidence against anybody. But I don’t intend to sit back and wait and see if that happens. I intend to find out who’s behind this, and I can’t have you along. It’s dangerous enough going up against a man
who’s capable of what this guy did to Shaz. It’ll be hard enough for me to watch my own back without having to watch yours as well. You might be a great detective, but when it comes to going head to head with psychopaths like this, you’re an absolute beginner. So do us both a favour. Please. Go home. Deal with your loss. Don’t try to be a hero, Simon. I don’t want to bury another one of you.’

  Simon looked as if he wanted to burst into tears and thump Tony. ‘I’m not a child. I’m a trained detective. I’ve worked on murder squads. I cared about her. You can’t shut me out. You can’t stop me nailing this bastard.’

  A long sigh. ‘No, I can’t. But Shaz was a trained detective. She’d worked on murders. She knew she was rattling a killer’s cage. And she still got demolished. Not just killed, but annihilated. It’s not conventional police methods that are going to sort this out, Simon. I’ve done this once before. Believe me, I know what it’s like and I wouldn’t wish it on another living soul. Go home, Simon.’

  With a screech of rubber on asphalt, Simon’s car streaked away from the kerb. Tony watched it take the next left far too fast, the rear spoiler fishtailing out of sight. He hoped it would be the biggest risk Simon had to take until Shaz’s killer was dealt with. He knew a traffic accident would be the least of his own worries.

  Chapter 19

  There was something to be said for delirium. When feverish sweat ran down her face and added another layer to the sour staleness that covered her sticky skin, it meant she could escape into hallucinations that were infinitely preferable to reality.

  Donna Doyle lay huddled against the wall, holding on to the chimeras of childhood memory as if they could somehow save her. One year, her mum and dad had taken her to the Valentine Fair at Leeds. Candyfloss, hot dogs and onions, the blurry kaleidoscope of lights on the waltzer, the sparkling jeweller’s window of the city spread beneath her from the top of the Ferris wheel as they swung gently in the cold night air, the neon glow of the fair like a carpet at their feet.

  Her dad had won her a big teddy bear, electric pink fun fur with a goofy grin stitched across its white face. It had been the last present he’d given her before he died. It was all his fault, Donna thought, snivelling. If he hadn’t gone and died, none of this would have happened. They wouldn’t have been poor and she wouldn’t have had to think about being a telly star, she could have listened to her mum and stuck in at school and gone to university.

  Tears crept out of the corners of her eyes and she beat her left fist against the wall. ‘I hate you,’ she cried, screaming at the wavering image of a thin-faced man who had adored his daughter. ‘I hate you, you bastard!’

  At least the incoherent sobs tired her out, letting her consciousness slide mercifully from her again.

  Chapter 20

  The brashness that characterized Leon’s performance among his peers was gone. Instead, he was locked behind the blank insolent face he’d seen on too many young blacks, both in custody and on the street. His street. He might have the warrant card that said he was one of them, but he had enough smarts to know that the two Yorkshiremen sitting across the interview room table were still The Man.

  ‘So, Leon,’ Wharton was saying in seemingly expansive mode, ‘what you’re telling us squares with what we’ve already heard from DC Hallam. The pair of you met at four o’clock and went tenpin bowling. Then you went for a drink in the Cardigan Arms, after which you met Simon McNeill for a curry.’ He smiled encouragingly.

  ‘So neither of you two killed Shaz Bowman,’ McCormick said. Leon had him figured for a racist, his pink slab of a face showing no rapport, his eyes hard and cold, his wet mouth permanently a mere twitch away from a sneer.

  ‘None of us killed Shaz, man,’ Leon said, deliberately drawing out the last word. ‘She was one of us. Maybe we’ve not been a team for long, but we know how to stick together. You’re wasting your time on us.’

  ‘We’ve got to go through the motions, lad, you know that,’ Wharton said. ‘You’re going to be a profiler, you know that over ninety per cent of murders are committed by families or lovers. Now, when Simon turned up, how did he seem?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘OK. Did he seem agitated, wound up, in a state?’

  Leon shook his head. ‘None of that, no. He was a bit quiet, but I put that down to Shaz not being there. I reckoned he fancied her, and he was disappointed when she didn’t show.’

  ‘What made you think he fancied her?’

  Leon spread his hands. ‘Stuff. You know? The way he tried to impress her. The way he was always checking her out. The way he’d always be bringing her into the conversation. The way a man does when he’s interested, know what I mean?’

  ‘Did you think she was interested in him?’

  ‘I don’t reckon Shaz was too interested in anybody. Not in the shagging sense. She was too obsessed with the Job to be bothered with it, if you ask me. I don’t think Simon was going to drop lucky and get his leg over. Not unless he had something she wanted bad, like the inside track on a serial killer.’

  ‘Did he say he’d been round her house?’ McCormick interjected.

  ‘He never mentioned it, no. But you wouldn’t, would you? I mean, if you thought a woman had just stood you up, you wouldn’t be telling people about it. Not saying anything isn’t strange behaviour. Saying something, setting yourself up for having the piss taken out of you all round the squad room, now that would be strange.’ Leon lit a cigarette and gave McCormick the blank-eyed stare again.

  ‘What was he wearing?’ Wharton asked.

  Leon frowned with the effort of recollection. ‘Leather jacket, bottle green polo shirt, black jeans, black Docs.’

  ‘Not a flannel shirt?’

  Leon shook his head. ‘Not when we met him. Why? You found some flannel fibres on her clothes?’

  ‘Not her clothes,’ Wharton said. ‘We think she was-’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be going into details about the forensic evidence just now,’ McCormick interrupted firmly. ‘Weren’t you worried when DC Bowman didn’t show up for this big night out?’

  Leon shrugged and blew out a stream of smoke. ‘Not worried, no. Kay figured she’d got a better offer. Me, I thought she probably had her head in her computer, doing her homework.’

  ‘Bit of a teacher’s pet, was she?’ Wharton asked, sympathy to the fore again.

  ‘Nah. She was just a grafter, that’s all. Look, shouldn’t you be out there catching the bastard who did this, instead of wasting your time with us? You’re not going to find her killer in the task force. We signed up to solve shit like this, not commit it, man.’

  Wharton nodded. ‘So the sooner we get this over, the better. We need your help here, Leon. You’re a trained detective, but you’ve also got trained instincts, or else you wouldn’t be on this task force. Give us the benefit of your insights. What do you make of Tony Hill? I mean, you do know that he didn’t want you on the task force, don’t you?’

  Tony stared at the dark blue screen. McCormick and Wharton might have barred him from the task squad offices, but either they didn’t know about the group’s networked computer system or they had no idea how to exclude him from it. The set-up was straightforward. It had to be; the people using it were less computer literate than the average seven-year-old. All the PCs in the office were linked via a central processing and storage unit. A modem connection made it possible for any of the team who was working off site to plug straight into their personal data store as well as any of the general material that was available to everyone. For security reasons, they each had personal logins as well as individual passwords. The trainees had all been instructed to change their passwords weekly to avoid possible leaks. Whether any of them bothered was a moot point.

  What none of the squad knew was that Tony had a list of every individual login. In effect, he could dial up the office computer and pretend to be any of them, with the machine none the wiser. Of course, without the password, he wouldn’t get very fa
r with the private material, but he’d be in the system.

  As soon as he’d returned home from his interview, he’d switched on his home computer. First, he’d called up Shaz’s application form and test responses, all scanned in as soon as she’d been accepted for the squad. He printed them out, along with the progress reports that both he and Paul Bishop had compiled.

  Then he signed off as himself and signed in as Shaz. Now, the best part of two hours and a pot of coffee later, he was no further forward. He’d tried everything he could think of. SHAZ, SHARON, BOWMAN, ROBIN, HOOD, WILLIAM, TELL, ARCHER, AMBRIDGE…He’d run through every character he could think of from the eponymous radio soap opera. He’d tried her parents’ names, every town, city, institution and street name mentioned in her CV. He’d even attempted the obvious JACKO, VANCE and the less obvious MICKY, MORGAN. And still he was staring at a screen that said, ‘Welcome to the National Offender Profiling Task Force. Please type in your password now:-’. The cursor had been flashing so long the only thing he could say with total certainty was that he had no epileptic tendencies.

  He stood up and prowled round the room. He didn’t have an idea to bless himself with. ‘Enough,’ he muttered in exasperation. He lifted his jacket from the chair where he’d thrown it and shrugged it on. A walk down to the shop for the evening paper, that might clear his head. ‘Don’t fool yourself,’ he muttered as he opened his front door. ‘You just want to see what those pillocks have told the latest press conference.’

  He walked down the path bisecting two flower beds where grimy rose bushes fought a rearguard action against urban enemies both human and industrial. As he turned into the street, he noticed a couple of men in a nondescript saloon car opposite. One was scrambling out of the passenger seat to the accompaniment of the engine being over-enthusiastically started. Shocked, Tony recognized all the hallmarks of an amateurish stakeout. Surely they couldn’t be wasting their human resources keeping tabs on him?