by Val McDermid
Inarticulate grumbling came from round the table. ‘We know,’ Simon said scathingly.
‘And Donna Doyle might still be alive,’ Carol pointed out.
The trio of detective constables stared at each other, eyes dark and serious. Leon nodded slowly. ‘And even if she isn’t, the next one is.’
One of the first lessons Tony Hill had learned as a profiler was that preparation was never wasted. It was hard for him and Carol to work up enthusiasm in the stacks of a dusty police document store, but they both knew how important it was to stay alert as they combed the files. The drudgery of poring over every available piece of information was as vital to painting an accurate picture of a killer as the flair that some people seemed naturally to bring to the job. Plodding alone never made a good profiler, but neither did flashy charisma. He’d been happy to be proved wrong about Leon. His superficial approach to the training exercise had confirmed all Tony’s prejudices about his peacock display. But either he’d learned from the humiliation of being shown up in front of the rest of the team or else he was one of the ones who could only ever do it for real. Either way, Tony thought as he and Carol ploughed the identical furrow a day later, he couldn’t fault the job he’d done.
At the end of a couple of hours, they leaned back in their seats almost simultaneously. ‘Looks like Leon didn’t miss a thing,’ Tony said.
‘Looks that way. But if we’re going to talk to the man who ran the case, we needed to know that for ourselves.’
‘I really appreciate your help in this, Carol,’ he said quietly, knocking the papers into a neat pile. ‘You didn’t have to stick your neck out.’
One corner of her mouth twisted in what might have been a smile or a trace of pain. ‘I did, you know,’ was all she said. What she didn’t say was that they both knew she would never be able to turn her back on his need, personal or professional. And that she also knew the feeling was mutual, provided they both stayed within the limits they seemed to have evolved to keep themselves whole.
‘You’re sure you can spare the time away from your arson investigation?’ he asked, understanding what lay unspoken.
She stacked papers in a file box. ‘If anything’s going to happen, it’ll happen at night. That may be the price you have to pay for crashing in my spare room.’
‘I think I can just about afford that,’ he said wryly. He followed her back to the counter where they returned the files to a uniformed PC who looked like his thirty was approaching but not fast enough for him.
Carol gave him her best smile. ‘The officer in charge of this inquiry—Detective Superintendent Scott? I take it he’s retired now?’
‘Finished up ten years ago,’ the man said, hefting the heavy boxes and heading for the distant shelves where they had come from.
‘I don’t suppose you know where I could find him?’ Carol called to his retreating back.
His voice floated back, muffled by the shelves. ‘He lives out Buxton way. Place called Countess Sterndale. There’s only three houses.’
It took a few minutes to obtain directions to Countess Sterndale, which didn’t appear on their map, and another thirty-five to drive there. ‘He wasn’t lying, then,’ Tony said at the end of the single-track road that concluded in a tree-lined loop round a circle of grass. A battered Queen Anne manor house faced them and over to their left was a pair of long, low cottages with heavy slate roofs and thick limestone walls. ‘Which one, d’you reckon?’
Carol shrugged. ‘Not the manor, unless he was on the take. Eeny meeny, miny mo…’ She pointed to the right-hand cottage.
As they walked across the grass, Tony said, ‘You take the lead. He’ll open up more easily to a copper than a mumbo jumbo man.’
‘Even though I’m a woman?’ Carol asked ironically.
‘You have a point. Play it as it lays.’ He opened a smartly painted gate which swung back silently. The path was herringbone brick, not a single weed in the interstices. Tony raised the black iron knocker and let it fall. The sound echoed behind the door. As it died away, heavy footsteps approached and the door opened to reveal a broad man with iron grey hair brilliantined in a side parting and a toothbrush moustache. He looked like a forties matinee idol put out to grass, Carol thought, stifling a smile. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but we’re looking for ex-Detective Superintendent Scott,’ she said.
‘I’m Gordon Scott,’ he said. ‘And you are?’
This was where it got difficult. ‘DCI Carol Jordan, sir. East Yorkshire Police. And this is Dr Tony Hill from the National Profiling Task Force.’ To her surprise, Scott’s face lit up with delight.
‘Is this to do with Barbara Fenwick?’ he said eagerly.
Dismayed, Carol looked helplessly at Tony. ‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.
A laugh rumbled in his chest. ‘I might have been out of the game for ten years, but when three people in two days turn up to look at the files of my only unsolved murder, somebody picks up the phone. Come in, come in.’ He ushered them into a comfortable sitting room, ducking to avoid cracking his head on the door frame. The room felt lived in, with magazines and books in unruly piles by the pair of armchairs that faced each other across the beamed fireplace. Scott waved them into the chairs. ‘How about a drink? My wife’s off doing the shopping in Buxton, but I can just about manage tea. Or a beer?’
‘A beer would be great,’ Tony said, reluctant to wait while Scott brewed tea. Carol nodded agreement and moments later he returned with three cans of Boddington’s.
Scott moved a large ginger cat and settled his bulky frame in the window seat, reducing the light in the room by at least half. He popped the top of his beer, but before he drank, he launched into speech. ‘I was that glad when I heard you were looking at Barbara Fenwick’s murder. I worried at that case for the best part of two years. It kept me awake nights. I’ll never forget the look on her mother’s face when I arrived with the news we’d found the body. It still haunts me. I always thought the answer was out there, we just didn’t have what it took to get it. So when I got the call and I heard it was the profiling task force…well, I have to say, my hopes have been raised. What’s drawn you to Barbara?’
Tony decided to take advantage of Scott’s enthusiasm and offer him frankness. ‘This is a somewhat unorthodox investigation,’ he began. ‘You may have read about the murder of one of my squad.’
Scott nodded his big head sadly. ‘Aye, I saw. You have my sympathies.’
‘What you won’t have read is that she was working on a theory that there is an unsuspected serial killer of teenage girls on the loose and that he’s been doing it for a long time. It started off as a classroom exercise, but Shaz couldn’t sit on it. My team and I think that’s why she was killed. Unfortunately, West Yorkshire Police don’t agree. The main reason for that is the person Shaz put in the frame.’ He glanced at Carol, ready for some seemingly official back-up.
‘There is a significant amount of circumstantial evidence that points to Jacko Vance,’ she said baldly.
Scott’s eyebrows climbed. ‘The telly man?’ He let out a soft whistle and his hand went automatically to the cat, stroking its head rhythmically. ‘I’m not surprised they didn’t want to know. So how does this connect to Barbara Fenwick?’
Carol outlined how Leon’s researches had turned up the clipping that had brought them to Gordon Scott’s case files. When she had finished, Tony said, ‘What we hoped was that there was stuff that never made it on to paper. I know from working with Carol what it’s like on a murder squad. You have a feeling in your water, hunches that you never confide to anybody except your partner, never mind put in a memo. We wondered what the gut feelings were among the officers who actually worked the case.’
Scott took a long draught of beer. ‘Of course you did. And quite right, too. The trouble is, there’s bugger all I can tell you. A couple of times, we got the wrong smell off some of the nonces we had in for questioning, but it was always something else that they were wound up about.
To be honest, the gut feeling on our team was total frustration. We just could not get a handle on the bugger. He seemed to have come out of nowhere and vanished the same way. We ended up convinced it was someone from off our patch who’d stumbled across the girl when she was doing a routine bunk off school. And that would sort of fit in with your idea, wouldn’t it?’
‘Broadly, except that we think he sets it up a lot more carefully than that,’ Tony said. ‘Oh well, it was worth a try.’
‘Sir, there didn’t seem to be a lot of forensic evidence,’ Carol prompted.
‘No. That set us back a bit. Truth to tell, I’d no experience of a sex offender who took that kind of forensic care. Mostly they’re hot-headed, spur of the moment, leave all sorts of traces, go home covered in mud and blood. But there was almost nothing to work off. The only distinctive thing was the crushed arm, according to the pathologist. She wouldn’t stick her neck out on paper, but she had this notion that the girl’s arm had been crushed in a vice.’
The thought of such cold-blooded torture sent a shiver of unwelcome echoes through Tony’s stomach. ‘Ah,’ he said.
Scott struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Of course! Vance lost his arm, didn’t he? He was going for the Olympics and he lost his arm. Perfect sense, why didn’t we think of something like that at the time? God, what an idiot I am!’
‘There’s no reason why you should have considered it,’ Tony said, wishing he meant it, wondering how many lives might have been saved if a psychologist had been brought in all those years ago.
‘Is the pathologist still working?’ Carol asked, as ever straight to the point.
‘She’s a professor now at one of the London teaching hospitals. I’ve got her card somewhere,’ Scott said, getting to his feet and lumbering out of the room. ‘God, why didn’t I think more about the arm?’
‘It’s not his fault, Tony,’ Carol said.
‘I know. I sometimes wonder how many more people have to die before everybody recognizes psychologists aren’t just witch doctors,’ he said. ‘Listen, Carol, in the interests of speed, I think we should get Chris Devine to follow up on this pathologist. She’s desperate to help, and she’s got the experience to know the kind of things she should be looking for. What do you say?’
‘I think that’s a good idea. To tell you the truth, I was dreading telling you that I couldn’t go to London now. I need to be around tonight in case the arsonist decides to have a go.’
He smiled. ‘I remembered.’ It was probably the first time in his career as a profiler that something outside the case obsessing him had impinged. That was the trouble with working with Carol Jordan. She affected him in ways no one else ever had. When he didn’t see her, he could conveniently forget that. Working this closely, it was impossible to ignore. He gave her a grave smile. ‘I’m too scared of upsetting John Brandon to let you chance blowing the arson collar,’ he lied.
‘I know.’ She detected the lie, but did not show it. It was neither the time nor the place for some kinds of truth.
Kay had lost count. She couldn’t remember if this was the seventh or the eighth set of videos she’d inspected. Having drawn the short straw in the division of the sites, she’d set off on the M1 from Leeds before dawn and driven all the way to London. Then she turned the car round and retraced her journey, stopping at every service area she came to. Now it was late afternoon and she was sitting in yet another scruffy office, stuffy with stale sweat and smoke, watching jerky images dancing in front of her as she fast-forwarded through the tapes. She was awash with bad coffee, her mouth still slimy and fat-flavoured from the long ago breakfast at Scratchwood Services. Her eyes were gritty and tired, and she wished she was anywhere else.
At least they’d managed to narrow the time frame down. They reckoned the earliest Shaz or Vance could possibly have hit the first northbound services on the motorway was eleven in the morning, the latest seven at night. Adjusting the times forward for each service area wasn’t difficult.
The tapes took much less running time than real time, since, rather than taping continuously, the cameras only took a certain number of still frames per second. Even so, she’d spent hours working her way through the recordings, fast-forwarding until she saw either a black Volkswagen Golf or one of the cars registered to Jacko Vance—a silver Mercedes convertible or a Land Rover. The Golf was common enough to cause frequent pauses, the other cars turning up less often.
She thought she was faster now than when she’d started. Her eyes were in tune with what she was searching for, though she feared she was beginning to flag and worried that might make her miss something crucial. Forcing herself to concentrate, Kay flicked forward until the familiar black pram-like shape of another Golf appeared. She slowed to normal speed, then almost at once she registered that the driver was a male with grey hair sticking out from under a baseball cap rather than either of her expected targets so her finger moved towards the fast-forward button. Then, suddenly, it swerved to the pause button as she noticed that there was something odd about the man.
But the first thing that struck her on closer scrutiny had nothing to do with the person who’d climbed out of the driver’s seat and headed for the petrol pump. What Kay spotted was quite different. Although the car was sitting at an awkward angle to the pumps, she could make out the last two letters of the number plate. They were identical to the final digits of Shaz’s registration.
‘Ah, shit,’ she breathed softly. She rewound the tape and watched it again. This time she identified what had caught her eye about the driver. He was awkwardly left-handed, to the point where he hardly used his right arm at all. Just as Jacko Vance would inevitably be if he were using equipment that wasn’t specially designed to accommodate his disability.
Kay studied the tape a few more times. It wasn’t easy to make out the man’s features, but she wouldn’t mind betting that Carol Jordan would know someone who could help them over that particular hurdle. Before the night was over, they’d have something on Jacko Vance that even a team of highly paid defence lawyers wouldn’t be able to get him out of. And it would be down to her, the best tribute she could pay to a woman who had been on the way to becoming a friend.
She flipped open her mobile phone and called Carol. ‘Carol? It’s Kay. I think I might have something your brother would like to see…’
It wasn’t that Chris Devine objected to pathologists having a day off. What pissed her off royally was that this particular pathologist spent her free time sitting in the pouring rain in the middle of nowhere waiting for a glimpse of some bloody stupid bird that was supposed to be in Norway but had managed to get lost. There was nothing clever about getting lost, Chris muttered as she felt more rain slide between her neck and her collar. Bloody Essex, she thought bitterly.
She sheltered from the gusting easterly so she could take another look at the rough map the bird warden had sketched out for her. She couldn’t be far away now. Why did these bloody hides have to be so inconspicuous? Why didn’t they just make them look like her nan’s house? She had more bloody birds in her back garden than Chris had seen all afternoon on the marshes. The birds were too flaming sensible to come out on a day like this, she grumbled as she stuffed the map back in her pocket and set off round the edge of the copse.
She almost missed the hide, so well was it camouflaged. Chris pulled back the wooden door and forced the scowl from her face. ‘Sorry to butt in,’ she said to the three people cramped inside, grateful that her head at least was out of the wind. ‘Is one of you Professor Stewart?’ She hoped she was in the right place; it was impossible to tell even genders inside waxed jackets, woolly scarves and thermal hats.
A gloved hand rose. ‘I’m Liz Stewart,’ one of the figures said. ‘What’s going on?’
Chris sighed with relief. ‘Detective Sergeant Devine, Metropolitan Police. I wonder if I could have a word?’
The woman shook her head. ‘I’m not on call,’ she said, her Scottish accent growing stronger in
indignation.
‘I appreciate that. But it is rather urgent.’ Chris unobtrusively edged the door wider so the wind could whip inside the rickety structure.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Liz, go and see what the woman wants,’ an irritated male voice said from under one of the other hats. ‘We’re not going to see anything worthwhile at all if you two stand there screaming like fishwives.’
The grudging professor squeezed past the other two and followed Chris outside. ‘There’s some shelter under the trees,’ Professor Stewart said, pushing past her and scrambling through the undergrowth until they were out of reach of most of the weather. In the clearing, Chris could see she was a sharp-featured forty-something with clear amber eyes like a hawk. ‘Now, what is all this about?’ she demanded.
‘You worked a case twelve years ago. An unsolved murder of a teenage girl in Manchester, Barbara Fenwick. Do you remember it?’
‘The girl with the crushed arm?’
‘That’s the one. The case has cropped up in connection with another investigation. We think we’re looking at a serial killer, and it’s possible that Barbara Fenwick is the only one of his victims where the body’s turned up. Which makes your postmortem pretty significant.’
‘Which it will still be on Monday morning,’ the professor said briskly.
