by Val McDermid
It sometimes seemed chicken and egg to Tony. Had his impotence started because he was afraid the unfettered expression of his sexuality might lead him to violence and death? Or had his knowledge of how often the sexual urge led to killing worked on his body to make him sexually inadequate? He doubted he would ever know. However the circuit worked, it was undeniable that his work had profoundly affected his life.
For no apparent reason, he recalled the spark of uncomplicated enthusiasm he’d seen in Shaz Bowman’s eyes. He could remember feeling that way too, before his fascination had been tempered by exposure to the horrors humans could inflict upon each other. Maybe he could use what he knew to give his team better armour than he’d had. If he achieved nothing else with them, that alone would be worthwhile.
* * *
In another part of the city, Shaz clicked her mouse button and closed down her software. On autopilot, she switched off her computer and stared unseeingly as the screen faded to black. When she’d decided to explore the resources of the Internet as her first stop on the road to disinterring Tony Hill’s past, she’d expected to come across a handful of references and, if she was lucky, a set of cuttings in one of the newspaper archives.
Instead, when she’d input ‘Tony, Hill, Bradfield, killer’ as key words in the search engine, she’d stumbled upon a darkside treasure trove of references to the case that had put his face on the front pages a year before. There was a grisly handful of websites entirely devoted to serial killers which incorporated Tony’s headline case. Elsewhere, journalists and commentators had posted their articles on that specific case on their personal websites. There was even a perverse rogues’ gallery, a montage of photographs of the faces of the world’s most notorious serial killers. Tony’s target, the so-called Queer Killer, featured in more than one guise in the bizarre exhibit.
Shaz had downloaded everything she could find and had spent the rest of the evening reading it. What had started out as an academic exercise to figure out what made Tony Hill tick had left her sick at heart.
The facts were not in dispute. The naked bodies of four men had been dumped in gay cruising areas of Bradfield. The victims had been tortured before death with a cruelty that was almost beyond comprehension. After death, they had been sexually mutilated, washed clean and abandoned like trash.
As a last resort, Tony had been brought in as a consultant, working with Detective Inspector Carol Jordan to develop a profile. They were moving close to their target when hunter became hunted. The killer wanted Tony for a human sacrifice. Captured and trussed, he was on the point of becoming victim number five, the torture engine in place, his body screaming in pain. He was saved in the nick of time not by the arrival of the cavalry but by his own verbal skills, honed over years of working with mentally disturbed offenders. But to claim his life, he’d had to kill his captor.
As she’d read, Shaz’s heart had filled with horror, her eyes with tears. Cursed with enough imagination to create a picture of the hell Tony had lived through, she found herself sucked into the nightmare of that final showdown where the roles of killer and victim were irrevocably reversed. The scenario made her shudder with fear and trepidation.
How had he begun to live with that? she marvelled. How did he sleep? How could he close his eyes and not be assailed with images beyond most people’s imagination or tolerance? Little wonder that he wasn’t prepared to use his own past to teach them how to manage their futures. The miracle was that he was still willing to practise a craft that must have pushed him to the edge of madness.
And how would she have coped if she’d been the one in his shoes? Shaz dropped her head into her hands and, for the first time since she’d heard of the task force, asked herself if she hadn’t perhaps made a terrible mistake.
* * *
Betsy mixed a drink for the journalist. Heavy on the gin, light on the tonic, a quarter of a lemon squeezed so that the tartness of the juice would cut the oily sweetness of the gin and disguise its potency. One of the principal reasons that Micky’s image had survived untainted by scandal was Betsy’s insistence that they trust no one outside the trio that held their secret close. Suzy Joseph might be all smiles and charm, filling the airy sitting room with the tinkle of her laugh and the smoke from her menthol cigarettes, but she was still a journalist. Even if she represented the most accommodating and sycophantic of the colour magazines, Betsy knew that among her drinking cronies there would be more than one tabloid hack ready to dip a hand in a pocket for the right piece of gossip. So Suzy would be plied generously with drink today. By the time she came to sit down to lunch with Jacko and Micky, her sharp eyes would be blurred round the edges.
Betsy perched on the arm of a sofa whose squashy cushions engulfed the anorectically thin journalist. She could keep an eye on her easily from there, while Suzy would have to make a deliberate and obvious shift of position to get Betsy in her line of sight. That also made it possible for Betsy to signal caution to Micky without being seen. ‘This is such a lovely room,’ Suzy gushed. ‘So light, so cool. You don’t often see something so tasteful, so elegant, so – appropriate. And believe me, I’ve been in more of these Holland Park mansions than the local estate agents!’ She twisted round awkwardly and said to Betsy in the same tones she’d have used to a waiter, ‘You have made sure the caterers have all they need?’
Betsy nodded. ‘Everything’s under control. They were delighted with the kitchen.’
‘I’m sure they were.’ Suzy was back with Micky, Betsy dismissed again. ‘Did you design the dining room yourself, Micky? So stylish! So very, very you! So perfect for Junket with Joseph.’ She leaned forward to stub out her cigarette, giving Betsy an unwanted view of a creped cleavage that fake tan and expensive body treatments couldn’t entirely disguise.
Being commended on her taste by a woman who could without any indication of shame wear a brash scarlet and black Moschino suit designed for someone twenty years younger and an entirely different shape was a double-edged compliment, Micky felt. But she simply smiled again and said, ‘Actually, it was mostly Betsy’s inspiration. She’s the one with the taste round here. I just tell her what I want the ambience to be like, and she sorts it out.’
Suzy’s reflexive smile held no warmth. Another wasted opening; nothing quotable there, it seemed to say. Before she could try again, Jacko strode into the room, his broad shoulders in their perfect tailoring thrusting forward so he appeared like a flying wedge. He ignored Suzy’s fluttering twitters and made straight for Micky, descending upon her with one enveloping arm, hugging her close, though not actually kissing. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, his professional, public voice carrying the thrum of a cello chord. ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’ He half-turned and leaned back against the sofa, giving Suzy the full benefit of his perfectly groomed smile. ‘You must be Suzy,’ he said. ‘We’re thrilled to have you here with us today.’
Suzy lit up like Christmas. ‘I’m thrilled to be here,’ she gushed, her breathy voice losing its veneer and revealing the unmistakable West Midlands intonation she’d devoted herself to burying. The effect Jacko still had on women never ceased to astonish Betsy. He could turn the sourest bitch Barsac sweet. Even the tired cynicism of Suzy Joseph, a woman who had the same relationship to celebrity as beetles to dung, wasn’t sufficient armour against his charm. ‘Junket with Joseph doesn’t often give me the chance to spend time with people I genuinely admire,’ she added.
‘Thank you,’ Jacko said, all smiles. ‘Betsy, should we be heading through to the dining room?’
She glanced at the clock. ‘That would be helpful,’ she said. ‘The caterer wants to start serving round about now.’ Jacko jumped to his feet and waited attentively for Micky to get up and move towards the door. He ushered Suzy ahead of him too, turning back to roll his eyes upwards in an expression of bored horror for Betsy’s benefit. Stifling a giggle, she followed them to the dining-room door, saw them seated and left them to it. Sometimes there were distinct benefits in not being the officia
l consort, she reminded herself as she settled down with her bread and cheese and The World at One.
There was no such relief for Micky, who had to pretend she didn’t even notice Suzy’s vapid flirting with her husband. Micky tuned out the boring ritual dance going on next to her and concentrated on freeing the last morsels of lobster from a claw.
A change in Suzy’s tone alerted her that the conversation had shifted a gear. Time for work, Micky realized. ‘Of course, I’ve read in the cuttings how you two got together,’ Suzy was saying, her hand covering Jacko’s real one. She wouldn’t have been so quick to pat the other, Micky reflected grimly. ‘But I need to hear it from your own lips.’
Here we go, Micky thought. The first part of the recital was always hers. ‘We met in hospital,’ she began.
* * *
By the middle of the second week, the task force office felt like home to the entire team. It was no accident that all six of the junior officers chosen for the squad were single and unattached, according both to their records and the unofficial background checks that Commander Paul Bishop had pursued in canteens and police clubs up and down the country. Tony had deliberately wanted a group of people who, uprooted from their former lives, would be thrown together and forced to develop team spirit. That at least was something he seemed to have got right, he thought, looking around the seminar room where six heads were bowed over a set of photocopied police files he’d prepared for them.
Already, they had started to form alliances, and so far they’d done well to avoid the personality clashes that could split a group beyond salvaging. Interestingly, the associations were flexible, not fixed in rigid pairs. Although some affinities were stronger than others, there was no attempt to make any of them exclusive.
Shaz was the one exception, as far as Tony could tell. It wasn’t that there was a problem between her and the others. It was more that she held herself apart from the easy intimacy that was growing between the rest. She joined in the jokes, took part in the communal brainstorming, but somehow there was always distance between her and her fellows. He sensed in her a passion for success that the rest of the squad lacked. They were ambitious, no denying that, but with Shaz it went deeper. She was driven, her need burning inside her and consuming any trace of frivolity. She was always first there in the mornings and last out at night, eagerly snatching any opportunity to get Tony to expand on whatever he’d been talking about last. But her very need for success made her correspondingly more vulnerable to failure. What he recognized as a desperate desire for approval was a blade that could be used against her with devastating effect. If she didn’t learn to drop her defences so she could use her empathy, she’d never achieve her potential as a profiler. It was his job to find a way of making her feel she could relax her vigilance without risking too much damage.
At that moment, Shaz looked up, her eyes direct on his. There was no embarrassment, no awkwardness. She simply stared for a moment then returned to what she was reading. It was as if she had raided his memory banks for a missing piece of information and, having found it, had logged off again. Slightly unnerved, Tony cleared his throat. ‘Four separate incidents of sexual assault and rape. Any comments?’
The group had moved beyond awkward silences and polite hanging back to give others a chance. In what was becoming an established pattern, Leon Jackson dived straight in. ‘I think the strongest link is in the victims. I read somewhere that serial rapists tend to rape within their own age group, and all these women were in their mid-twenties. Plus they all have short blonde hair and they all took time and trouble to stay fit. You got two joggers, one hockey player, one rower. They all did sports where it wouldn’t be hard for a weirdo stalker to watch them without attracting any attention.’
‘Thanks, Leon. Any other comments?’
Simon, already the devil’s advocate designate of the group, weighed in, his Glasgow accent and habit of staring out from under his heavy dark eyebrows multiplying the aggression factor. ‘You could argue that that’s because the kind of woman who indulges in these kind of sports is exactly the sort that’s confident enough to be out in risky places on her own, convinced it’s never going to happen to her. It could easily be two, three or even four attackers. In which case, bringing in a profiler is going to be a total waste of time.’
Shaz shook her head. ‘It’s not just the victims,’ she stated firmly. ‘If you read their evidence, in each case their eyes were covered during the attack. In each case, they mention that their assailant verbally abused them continually while he was actually assaulting them. That’s more than sheer coincidence.’
Simon wasn’t ready to give up. ‘Come on, Shaz,’ he protested. ‘Any bloke who’s so powerless he needs to resort to rape to feel good about himself is going to need to talk himself up to it. And as for their eyes being covered – there’s nothing in common there except with the first and third where he used their own headbands. Look –’ he waved the papers – ‘case number two, he pulled her T-shirt over her head and tied a knot in it. Case number four, the rapist had a roll of packing tape that he wound round her head. Way different.’ He sat back, a good-natured grin defusing the force of his words.
Tony grinned. ‘The perfectly contrived lead into the next subject. Thanks, Simon. Today, I’m going to hand out your first assignment, the preamble to which is the beginner’s guide to signature versus MO. Anybody know what I’m talking about?’
Kay Hallam, the other woman on the team, raised her hand half a dozen inches and looked questioningly at Tony. He nodded. She tucked her light brown hair behind her ears in a gesture he’d come to recognize as Kay’s keynote mechanism for looking feminine and vulnerable to defuse criticism, particularly when she was about to make a point she was absolutely sure of. ‘MO is dynamic, signature is static,’ she said.
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Tony said. ‘However, it’s probably a bit too technical for the plods among us,’ he added with a grin, pointing his finger one by one at the other five. He pushed back his chair and started moving restlessly round the room as he talked. ‘MO means modus operandi. Latin. The way of doing. When we use it in a criminal context, we mean the series of actions that the perpetrator committed in the process of achieving his goal, the crime. In the early days of profiling, police officers, and to a large degree psychologists, were very literal about their idea of a serial offender. It was somebody who did pretty much the same things every time to achieve pretty much the same results. Except that they usually showed escalation, moving, say, from assaulting a prostitute to beating a woman’s brains out with a hammer.
‘As we discovered more, though, we realized we weren’t the only ones capable of learning from our mistakes. We were dealing with criminals who were intelligent and imaginative enough to do exactly the same. That meant we had to get our heads round the idea that the MO was something that could change quite drastically from one offence to the next because the offender found that a particular course of action wasn’t very effective. So he’d adapt. His first murder could be a strangulation, but maybe our killer feels that took too long, was too noisy, frightened him too much, stressed him rather than allowing him to enjoy his fulfilment. Next time out, he smashes her skull in with a crowbar. Too messy. So number three, he stabs. And the investigators write them off as three separate killings because the MO looks so different.
‘What doesn’t change is what we call, for the sake of giving it a name, the signature. The sig, for short.’ Tony stopped pacing and leaned against the window sill. ‘The sig doesn’t change because it’s the raison d’être of the offence. It’s what gives the perpetrator his sense of satisfaction.
‘So what does this signature consist of? Well, it’s all the bits of behaviour that exceed what is actually necessary to commit the crime. The ritual of the offence. To satisfy the perpetrator, the signature elements have to be acted out every time he goes out on a mission, and they have to be performed in the same style every time. Examples of signature in a kil
ler might be things like: does he strip the victim? Does he make a neat pile of the victim’s clothes? Does he use cosmetics on the victim after death? Is he having sex with the victim postmortem? Is he performing some kind of ritualistic mutilation like cutting off their breasts or penises or ears?’
Simon looked faintly queasy. Tony wondered how many murder victims he’d seen so far. He would have to grow a thicker skin or else be prepared to put up with the jibes of colleagues who would enjoy watching the profiler lose his lunch over another vitiated victim. ‘A serial offender must accomplish signature activities to fulfil himself, to make the act meaningful,’ Tony continued. ‘It’s about meeting a variety of needs – to dominate, to inflict pain, to provoke distinct responses, to achieve sexual release. The means can vary, but the end remains constant.’
He took a deep breath and tried to keep his mind off the very particular variations he’d seen at first hand. ‘For a killer whose pleasure comes from inflicting pain and hearing victims scream, it’s immaterial whether he…’ his voice faltered as irresistible images climbed into his head. ‘Whether he…’ They were all looking at him now and he desperately struggled to look momentarily distracted rather than shipwrecked. ‘Whether he … ties them up and cuts them, or whether he…’
‘Whether he whips them with wire,’ Shaz said, her voice casual, her expression reassuring.
‘Exactly,’ Tony said, recovering fast. ‘Nice to see you’ve got such a tender imagination, Shaz.’
‘Typical woman, eh?’ Simon said with a grunt of laughter.
Shaz looked faintly embarrassed. Before the joke could escalate, Tony continued. ‘So you might have two bodies whose physical conditions are very different. But when you examine the scenario, things have been done that were additional to the act of killing and the ultimate gratification has been the same. That’s your signature.’
