by Val McDermid
But that way madness lay. Madness and the prospect of poor Simon being arrested as soon as he crossed the threshold of his own home. ‘The victims,’ Tony said. He stared at the laptop screen and started to type.
THE CASE FOR A SERIAL OFFENDER
The first known victim in this putative cluster is Barbara Fenwick whose murder took place twelve years ago (see attached summary prepared by DC Leon Jackson for crime details). We can say with some degree of certainty that this was the first killing by this perpetrator since there is no previous record of this signature behaviour, namely the pulverizing of the lower right arm. This is clearly signature behaviour; there is no need to inflict such an injury in order to commit sexual assault and murder. It is extraneous, it is ritualistic and therefore it is safe to assume that it has particular significance for this offender. Given the ceremonial nature of this signature behaviour, it is likely that he has used the same implement to produce these injuries in all his killings; other victims could therefore be expected to display very similar disfigurement.
There is at least one other indication that this was a first murder. The killer had chosen what he thought was a sufficiently isolated and safe place to carry out his crime undisturbed, but he was in fact almost caught in the act. This will have frightened him considerably and he will have taken immediate steps to secure his future killing grounds. That he was successful in this is shown by the fact that no bodies have been recovered from his subsequent victims.
In the absence of bodies, what possible grounds can there be for assuming a serial offender?
He paused and referred back to the list of common features that Shaz had presented to the profiling team what felt like an age ago. The least he could do was make sure the work she’d left wasn’t wasted. With a few changes and additions, he typed in the list then continued.
While two or three common features are to be expected with any such grouping, the number and congruence we can identify here is of far too high a level to be coincidental. Of particular importance is the degree of physical similarity between the victims. They could be sisters.
Perhaps more significantly, they could also be sisters of a woman called Jillie Woodrow as she looked fifteen or sixteen years ago, when she first became the earliest known lover of Jacko Vance, our prime suspect. It is not coincidence, in my opinion, that Vance was robbed of a brilliant athletic career when he lost his lower right arm in an accident that crushed it beyond hope of restoration.
Further, the date of the killing of Barbara Fenwick was a mere fourteen weeks after Jacko Vance’s accident. For much of that time, he was in hospital recovering from his injuries and subsequently undergoing extensive physiotherapy. It was during this hospitalization that Jillie Woodrow took the opportunity to terminate what had become an increasingly oppressive and unwelcome relationship (see appended notes of interview with JW, conducted by DC Simon McNeill). The combined stress of these two events would be sufficient to trigger a sexual homicide in one who was predisposed to realize his sociopathic responses in violent behaviour.
He has never released his sexual impulses in a normal fashion since. His extremely high-profile marriage is a sham, his wife being a lesbian whose ‘personal assistant’ is in fact her lover and has been since before the wedding took place. Vance and his wife have never had sexual intercourse and his wife assumes he uses ‘high-class call girls’ to provide him with a sexual outlet. There is no suggestion that she has any suspicion of his homicidal activities.
When Vance’s early life is set against the criteria that experience has demonstrated are common features among homicidally active sociopaths, a remarkable degree of commonality is obvious. We have witness interviews that attest to a difficult relationship with a rejecting mother, an often absent father whom the subject was desperate to impress, bullying of younger children, cruelty to animals and sadistic, controlling sexual behaviour, and evidence of powerful and perverse sexual fantasies. His sporting prowess can be identified as a massive overcompensation for the worthlessness he felt in every other area of his life, and the loss of that prowess as a devastating blow to his extremely fragile self-esteem.
In those circumstances, women would be the obvious victim gender. He would perceive his mother and subsequently his fiancée as having emasculated him. But he is far too intelligent to vent his rage on the obvious targets, and so he has assumed a series of surrogates. These are girls who bear a strong resemblance to Jillie Woodrow at the age when he first seduced her.
It should be borne in mind that captured serial killers have in the main been above average intelligence, in some cases well above. We should not therefore be surprised that uncaught and unsuspected serial offenders exist who are using their greater intelligence more effectively. Jacko Vance is, in my opinion, an example of this principle in action.
He leaned back in his chair. So much for the psychology. He’d have to draw up a more detailed table of corresponding preconditions, but that wouldn’t take long. Added to the hard evidence he hoped Carol and Kay would produce that night, he felt sure that there was enough material to make certain that within twelve hours, West Yorkshire would have started to take Jacko Vance seriously.
Detective Sergeant Tommy Taylor knew a pile of crap when he saw it. And surveilling part-time firemen was the biggest pile of crap he’d seen in a very long time. He’d spent the night before watching Raymond Watson, which in effect meant watching Raymond Watson’s house. It wasn’t as if it was packed with architectural detail to keep the mind active. A bogstandard terraced house with a pocket handkerchief front garden that boasted a tired rose bush contorted by the north-east winds into a shape some modern sculptors would have given their eye teeth to achieve. Flaked paintwork, scabby varnish on the front door.
Watson had come home at eleven the night before, after the last race at the dog track. There was no meeting tonight, so he’d arrived home just after seven, according to the seconded uniforms who’d been keeping an eye out in their mufti. Since then, nothing. Unless you counted putting out the milk bottles as a major event.
The lights had gone off about ten minutes after that. An hour later, there was no sign of life anywhere. The back streets of Seaford weren’t noted for their liveliness after midnight. The only thing that was going to get Raymond Watson out of his kip now was a major fire, Taylor reckoned. He grunted and shifted in the car seat, scratching his balls and sniffing his fingers afterwards. Bored shitless, he flicked the switch on his personal radio and called Di Earnshaw. ‘Owt happening your end?’ he asked.
‘Negative,’ came the reply.
‘If Control come through to you with news of a fire that our lads are getting called out on, give me a shout on the PR, OK?’
‘Why? Are you leaving the car on foot pursuit?’ She sounded eager. Probably as bored as him, excited by the thought of some action even at second hand.
‘Negative,’ Taylor said. ‘I need to stretch my legs. These fucking sardine tins weren’t built for the likes of me. Like I said, anything doing, give me a shout. Over and out.’
He turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed to life, sounding freakishly noisy in the quiet side street. Bollocks to Carol Jordan’s daft ideas. Less than a mile away there was a club that kept late doors, catering mainly for the sailors off the foreign ships. There was a pint there with Tommy Taylor’s name on it, unless he was very much mistaken. It was time he checked out the possibility.
Carol and Kay followed the security guard down blindingly white corridors. He opened a door and stood back, waving them into a large, dimly lit room. Computer monitors occupied almost every horizontal surface. A young woman in jeans and a polo shirt, hair dyed platinum blonde and cut flat to her head, glanced over her shoulder, registered the new arrivals and turned back to the screen she’d been engrossed in. Fingers tapped keys and the display changed. Carol caught movement in her peripheral vision and turned her head. A tall man in a suit that screamed money was perched on the edge of a computer desk ov
er to one side. What she’d caught was him unfolding his arms and dropping his hands in preparation for rising to greet them.
He took a step towards them, pushing a persistent cowlick of mid-brown hair out of his eyes. If he was going for boyish, Carol thought, he’d missed it by about a generation. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Jordan,’ he said, clearly relishing the bass resonance of his voice. ‘And Detective Constable Hallam. Welcome to the future.’
God help me, Carol thought. ‘You must be Philip Jarvis,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘I’m impressed and grateful that you were prepared to help me out at this time of night.’
‘Time waits for no man,’ he said, as proudly as if he’d coined the phrase. ‘Or woman, come to that. We recognize the importance of your work and, like you, we operate twenty-four hours a day. We are, after all, in the same business, the business of crime prevention and, when that fails us, catching those responsible.’
‘Mmm,’ Carol murmured noncommittally. It was clearly a prepared speech that placed no reliance on a response.
Jarvis smiled benevolently, revealing the sort of brilliant white dental work more common in New York than Yorkshire. ‘This is the viewing room,’ he said with a sweep of his arm, undaunted by the obviousness of his statement. ‘It’s fed either from our fully automated library or by live feeds from the many cameras we have being road-tested on the site. The operator chooses the source and summons the images he or she wants to look at.’
He ushered Carol and Kay forward until they were standing behind the woman. Close up, Carol could see her skin was older than her face, faded to unhealthy by the lack of natural light and the radiation from the monitors. ‘This is Gina,’ Jarvis announced. He made her sound like royalty. ‘When you told me the date and time period you were interested in and the vehicle index numbers that you wanted to know about, I got Gina on to it right away.’
‘As I said, I really appreciate this. Have you had any luck?’
‘Luck doesn’t enter into it, Chief Inspector,’ Jarvis said with throwaway arrogance. ‘Not with a leading-edge system like ours. Gina?’
Gina tore her eyes from the screen and pushed off with her feet, spinning round to face them, grabbing a sheet of paper from the desk. ‘Seventeen minutes past two on the afternoon in question.’ Her voice was clipped and efficient. ‘The black Volkswagen Golf left the M1 heading for the city centre. Then, at eleven thirty-two p.m., the silver Mercedes convertible did exactly the same thing. We can supply timed and dated tapes and still photographs of both events.’
‘Is it possible to identify the drivers of either vehicle?’ Kay asked, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice and failing. Gina flicked an interested eyebrow upwards and stared.
‘Obviously, the daytime shots pose fewer problems in that respect,’ Jarvis butted in. ‘But we’re using very high-end experimental media with the night filming at present, and with our computer enhancement technology, it would be possible to come up with surprisingly good images.’
‘If you knew who it was you were looking at, you would be able to recognize them. If you were planning on doing a “does anyone know this man” on Crimewatch UK, you might have one or two problems,’ Gina qualified.
‘You say this system’s experimental. How well do you think this evidence would stand up in court?’ Carol asked.
‘One hundred per cent on the vehicles. More like a seventy-five per cent chance on the drivers,’ Gina said.
‘Come on now, Gina, let’s not be so pessimistic. It depends, like so much evidence, on how it’s presented to the jury,’ Jarvis protested. ‘I’d happily testify that I’d stake my reputation on the reliability of the system.’
‘And you’re a qualified expert witness, are you, sir?’ Carol asked. She wasn’t trying to put him on the spot, but time was short and she needed to know how firm was her ground.
‘I’m not, no, but some of my colleagues are.’
‘Like me,’ Gina said. ‘Look, Ms Jordan, why don’t you look at what we’ve got and see if that isn’t enough to help you get the corroborative evidence so it won’t depend on what a jury thinks about our technology?’
When she left half an hour later, Kay was clutching a bundle of video tape and laser-printed stills that both women knew in their bones would corner Jacko Vance. If Donna Doyle remained alive, they were her last best hope. Carol could hardly wait to tell Tony. She looked at her watch when she got back to the car. Half past midnight. She knew he’d want to see what she had, but she needed to get back to Seaford. And Kay could always take the material over to him now. Carol stood by her car, undecided.
To hell with it, she thought. She really wanted to talk over the evidence with Tony. He’d only get one shot at McCormick and Wharton and she needed to make sure he’d prepared a case that would speak directly to a copper’s idea of evidence.
She had her mobile if they really needed her, after all.
Detective Constable Di Earnshaw pushed her shoulders hard back against the car seat, thrusting her pelvis forward in a vain attempt to loosen her stiff spine and find a comfortable position in the unmarked CID car. She wished she’d been able to bring her own little Citroën whose seat seemed moulded to her contours. Whoever had designed the police Vauxhall had obviously been a hell of a lot narrower in the hips and longer in the leg than she had any hope of ever achieving.
At least the discomfort kept her awake. There was a kind of spiteful pride in Di’s determination to stay on the job. She was as convinced as Tommy Taylor that these stakeouts were a total waste of time and money, but she reckoned there were more subtle and effective ways of demonstrating that to the powers that be than skiving off. She knew her sergeant well enough by now to have a pretty shrewd idea of how he was passing the weary hours as night crawled relentlessly towards dawn. If Carol Jordan found out, he’d be back in uniform so fast he wouldn’t know what had hit him. CID was such a gossip factory, she was bound to find out sooner or later. If not on this job, then on another, perhaps one that actually counted.
Di wouldn’t dream of doing anything so obvious to undermine Jordan’s authority. More in sorrow than in anger, that would be her line. The pitying smiles behind Jordan’s back, the back-stabbing, ‘I shouldn’t really say this, but…’ at every opportunity. Make it look like every cock-up emanated from Jordan’s orders, every success from the troops’ initiatives. There was almost nothing as destructive as constant undermining. She should know. She’d experienced plenty of it in her years with the East Yorkshire Police.
She yawned. Nothing was going to happen. Alan Brinkley was tucked up in bed with his wife inside their pretentious modern box on a so-called executive development with ideas above its station. Never mind that it would be easier to keep clean and maintained, Di preferred her little trawlerman’s terraced cottage down by the old docks, even though they were now a tourist trap heritage centre. She loved the cobbled streets and the salt on the air, the sense that generations of Yorkshirewomen had stood on those doorsteps and scanned the horizon for their men. She should be so lucky, she thought with a moment’s self-hatred.
She checked her watch against the clock on the dashboard. In the ten minutes that had passed since she’d last done it, the two had managed to remain precisely five seconds out of sync. Yawning, she switched on her small portable radio. Hopefully the phone-in she personally called prole-speak would be over and the DJ would be playing some decent sounds. Just as Gloria Gaynor stridently revealed that as long as she knew how to love, she knew she’d stay alive, soft light abruptly appeared behind the four frosted glass panels of the mock-Georgian fanlight in the Brinkleys’ front door. Di grabbed the steering wheel tightly and sat up hurriedly. Was this it? Or was it insomnia pushing someone towards a cup of tea?
Just as suddenly as it had appeared, the light vanished. Di slumped back with a sigh, then from under the garage door, a thin rope of brightness stretched across the driveway. Startled, she punched the off button on the radio and wound down the car window,
letting the raw night air flood her airways and sharpen her senses. Yes, there it was. The unmistakable cough of a car engine.
Within moments, the garage door shuddered upwards and the car rolled forward on to the drive. It was Brinkley’s car, no mistake. Or rather, it was the car on which Brinkley had only ever paid three hire-purchase instalments and which would be snatched back just as soon as the repo men figured out how to grab it without actually breaking into Brinkley’s garage. As she watched, Brinkley himself got out of the car and walked back to the garage, reaching inside presumably to hit the button that closed the door behind him.
‘Oh boy,’ Di Earnshaw said, winding up her window. She pressed the record button on her personal microcassette recorder and said excitedly, ‘Alan Brinkley is now leaving his home by car at one twenty-seven a.m.’ Dropping the tape machine on the seat beside her, she grabbed the personal radio that was meant to keep her in close touch with Tommy Taylor. ‘This is Tango Charlie. Tango Alpha, do you read me? Over.’ She started her engine, careful to avoid the reflex of turning on her lights. Brinkley had pulled off the drive now and was driving out of the cul-de-sac, signalling a right turn. She eased her foot off the clutch, still driving without lights, and picked him up on the winding avenue that ran through the housing development and out to the main road.
She clicked the radio as she drove, repeating her message to her sergeant. ‘Tango Charlie to Tango Alpha. Subject on the move, do you read me? Tango Alpha, do you read me? Over.’ At the main road, Brinkley turned left. She counted to five, then switched on her lights and turned after him. He was heading for the city centre three miles away, keeping his speed steady, just above the limit. Not so careful he’d be pulled on suspicion of over-cautious drunk driving, not so fast he’d attract a tug for speeding. ‘Tango Charlie to Tango Alpha.’ She swore silently at her errant boss. She needed back-up and he wasn’t there. She thought about calling in to control, but they’d only send a troop of patrol cars that would scare off any arsonist for three counties.
