The Wire in the Blood

Bill spread his hands in defeat. ‘Fine by me. Do you want to tell them or will I?’

‘Would you, Bill? Save me the aggravation?’ Jacko’s smile was bright as a shaft of sunlight from a thundercloud, promising as the hour before a first date. It was imprinted on his audience like a race memory. Women made love to their husbands with more gusto because Jacko’s sexually inviting eyes and kissable mouth were flickering across the inside of their eyelids. Adolescent girls found their vague erotic longings suddenly focused. Old ladies doted on him, without connecting the subsequent feelings of unfulfilled sadness.

Men liked him too, but not because they found him sexy. Men liked Jacko Vance because he was, in spite of everything, one of the lads. A British, Commonwealth, and European gold medallist and holder of the world javelin record, Olympic gold had seemed like an inevitability for the darling of the back pages. Then one night, driving back from an athletics meeting in Gateshead, Jacko drove into a dense bank of fog on the A1. He wasn’t the only one.

The morning news bulletins put the figures at between twenty-seven and thirty-five vehicles in the multiple pile-up. The big story wasn’t the six dead, however. The big story was the tragic heroism of Jacko Vance, British athletics’ golden boy. In spite of suffering multiple lacerations and three broken ribs in the initial impact, Jacko had crawled out of his mangled motor and rescued two children from the back of a car seconds before it burst into flames. Depositing them on the hard shoulder, he’d gone back into the tangled metal and attempted to free a lorry driver pinioned between his steering wheel and the buckled door of his cab.

The creaking of stressed metal turned to a shriek as accumulated pressures built up on the lorry and the roof caved in. The driver didn’t stand a chance. Neither did Jacko Vance’s throwing arm. It took the firemen three agonizing hours to cut him free from the crushing weight of metal that had smashed his flesh to raw meat and his bones to splinters. Worse, he was conscious for most of it. Trained athletes knew all about pushing through the pain barrier.

The news of his George Cross came the day after the medics fitted his first prosthesis. It was small consolation for the loss of the dream that had been the core of his life for a dozen years. But bitterness didn’t cloud his natural shrewdness. He knew how fickle the media could be. He still smarted at the memory of the headlines when he’d blown his first attempt at the European title. JACK SPLAT! had been the kindest stab at the heart of the man who only the day before had been JACK OF HEARTS.

He knew he had to capitalize on his glory quickly or he’d soon be another yesterday’s hero, early fodder for the ‘Where Are They Now?’ column. So he called in a few favours, renewed his acquaintance with Bill Ritchie and ended up commentating on the very Olympics where he should have mounted the rostrum. It had been a start. Simultaneously, he’d worked to establish his reputation as a tireless worker for charity, a man who would never allow his fame to stand in the way of helping people less fortunate than himself.

Now, he was bigger than all the fools who’d been so ready to write him off. He’d charmed and chatted his way to the front of the sports presenters’ ranks in a slash and burn operation of such devious ruthlessness that some of his victims still didn’t realize they’d been calculatedly chopped off at the knees. Once he’d consolidated that role, he’d presented a chat show that had topped the light entertainment ratings for three years. When the fourth year saw it drop to third place, he dumped the format and launched Vance’s Visits.

The show claimed to be spontaneous. In fact, Jacko’s arrival in the midst of what his publicity called ‘ordinary people living ordinary lives’ was invariably orchestrated with all the advance planning of a royal visit but none of the attendant publicity. Otherwise he’d have attracted bigger crowds than any of the discredited House of Windsor. Especially if he’d turned up with the wife.

And still it wasn’t enough.

Carol bought the coffees. It was a privilege of rank. She thought about refusing to shell out for the chocolate biscuits on the basis that nobody needed three KitKats to get through a meeting with their DCI. But she knew it would be misinterpreted, so she grinned and bore the expense. She led the troops she’d chosen with care to a quiet corner cut off from the rest of the canteen by an array of plastic parlour palms. Detective Sergeant Tommy Taylor, Detective Constable Lee Whitbread and Detective Constable Di Earnshaw had all impressed her with their intelligence and determination. She might yet be proved wrong, but these three officers were her private bet for the pick of Seaford Central’s CID.

‘I’m not going to attempt to pretend this is a social chat so we can get to know each other better,’ she announced, sharing the biscuits out among the three of them. Di Earnshaw watched her, eyes like currants in a suet pudding, hating the way her new boss managed to look elegant in a linen suit with more creases than a dosser’s when she just looked lumpy in her perfectly pressed chain-store skirt and jacket.

‘Thank Christ for that,’ Tommy said, a grin slowly spreading. ‘I was beginning to worry in case we’d got a guv’nor who didn’t understand the importance of Tetley’s Bitter to a well-run CID.’

Carol’s answering smile was wry. ‘It’s Bradfield I came from, remember?’

‘That’s why we were worried, ma’am,’ Tommy replied.

Lee snorted with suppressed laughter, turned it into a cough and spluttered, ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

‘You will be,’ Carol said pleasantly. ‘I’ve got a task for you three. I’ve been taking a good look at the overnights since I got here, and I’m a bit concerned about the high incidence of unexplained fires and query arsons that we’ve got on our ground. I spotted five query arsons in the last month and when I made some checks with uniform, I found out there have been another half-dozen unexplained outbreaks of fire.’

‘You always get that kind of thing round the docks,’ Tommy said, casually shrugging big shoulders inside a baggy silk blouson that had gone out of fashion a couple of years previously.

‘I appreciate that, but I’m wondering if there’s a bit more to it than that. Agreed, a couple of the smaller blazes are obvious routine cock-ups, but I’m wondering if there’s something else going on here.’ Carol left it dangling to see who would pick it up.

‘A firebug, you mean, ma’am?’ It was Di Earnshaw, the voice pleasant but the expression bordering on the insolent.

‘A serial arsonist, yes.’

There was a momentary silence. Carol reckoned she knew what they were thinking. The East Yorkshire force might be a new entity, but these officers had worked this patch under the old regime. They were in with the bricks, whereas she was the new kid in town, desperate to shine at their expense. And they weren’t sure whether to roll with it or try to derail her. Somehow she had to persuade them that she was the star they should be hitching their wagons to. ‘There’s a pattern,’ she said. ‘Empty premises, early hours of the morning. Schools, light industrial units, warehouses. Nothing too big, nowhere there might be a night watchman to put the mockers on it. But serious nevertheless. Big fires, all of them. They’ve caused a lot of damage and the insurance companies must be hurting more than they like.’

‘Nobody’s said owt about an arsonist on the rampage,’ Tommy remarked calmly. ‘Usually, the firemen tip us the wink if they think there’s something a bit not right on the go.’

‘Either that or the local rag gives us a load of earache,’ Lee chipped in through a mouthful of his second KitKat. Lean as a whippet in spite of the biscuits and the three sugars in his coffee, Carol noted. One to watch for high-strung hyperactivity.

‘Call me picky, but I prefer it when we’re setting the agenda, not the local hacks or the fire service,’ Carol said coolly. ‘Arson isn’t a Mickey Mouse crime. Like murder, it has terrible consequences. And like murder, you’ve got a stack of potential motives. Fraud, the destruction of evidence, the elimination of competition, revenge and cover-up, at the “logical” end of the spectrum. And at the screwed-up end, we have the ones who do it for kicks and sexual gratification. Like serial killers, they nearly always have their own internal logic that they mistake for something that makes sense to the rest of us.

‘Fortunately for us, serial murder is a lot less common than serial arson. Insurers reckon a quarter of all the fires in the UK have been set deliberately. Imagine if a quarter of all deaths were murder.’

Taylor looked bored. Lee Whitbread stared blankly at her, his hand halfway to the cigarette packet in front of him. Di Earnshaw was the only one who appeared interested in making a contribution. ‘I’ve heard it said that the incidence of arson is an index of the economic prosperity of a country. The more arson there is, the worse the economy is doing. Well, there’s plenty unemployed round here,’ she said with the air of someone who expects to be ignored.

‘And that’s something we should bear in mind,’ Carol said, nodding with approval. ‘Now, this is what I want. A careful trawl through the overnights for CID and uniform for the last six months to see what we come up with. I want the victims re-interviewed to check if there are any obvious common factors, like the same insurance company. Sort it out among yourselves. I’ll be having a chat with the fire chief before the four of us reconvene in … shall we say three days? Fine. Any questions?’

‘I could do the fire chief, ma’am,’ Di Earnshaw said eagerly. ‘I’ve had dealings with him before.’

‘Thanks for the offer, Di, but the sooner I make his acquaintance, the happier I’ll feel.’

Di Earnshaw’s lips seemed to shrink inwards in disapproval, but she merely nodded.

‘You want us to drop our other cases?’ Tommy asked.

Carol’s smile was sharp as an ice pick. She’d never had a soft spot for chancers. ‘Oh, please, Sergeant,’ she sighed. ‘I know what your case-load is. Like I said at the start of this conversation, it’s Bradfield I came from. Seaford might not be the big city, but that’s no reason for us to operate at village bobby pace.’

She stood up, taking in the shock in their faces. ‘I didn’t come here to fall out with people. But I will if I have to. If you think I’m a hard bastard to work for, watch me. However hard you work, you’ll see me matching it. I’d like us to be a team. But we have to play by my rules.’

Then she was gone. Tommy Taylor scratched his jaw. ‘That’s us told, then. Still think she’s shaggable, Lee?’

Di Earnshaw’s thin mouth pursed. ‘Not unless you like singing falsetto.’

‘I don’t think you’d feel a lot like singing,’ Lee said. ‘Anybody want that last KitKat?’

Shaz rubbed her eyes and turned away from the computer screen. She’d come in early so she could squeeze in a quick revision of the previous day’s software familiarization. Finding Tony at work on one of the other terminals had been a bonus. He’d looked astonished to see her walk through the door just after seven. ‘I thought I was the only workaholic insomniac around here,’ he’d greeted her.

‘I’m crap on computers,’ she’d said gruffly, trying to cover her satisfaction at having him to herself. ‘I’ve always needed to work twice as hard to keep up.’

Tony’s eyebrows had jumped. Cops didn’t generally admit weaknesses to an outsider. Either Shaz Bowman was even more unusual than he’d initially appreciated or else he was finally losing his alien status. ‘I thought everybody under thirty was a wizard on these,’ he said mildly.

‘Sorry to disappoint you. I was behind the door when the anoraks were being handed out,’ Shaz replied. She settled in front of her screen and pushed up the sleeves of her cotton sweater. ‘First remember your password,’ she muttered, wondering what he thought of her.

Two forces seethed under Shaz Bowman’s calm surface, taking it in turns to drive her. On the one hand, fear of failure gnawed at her, undermining everything she was and all she achieved. When she looked in the mirror, she never saw her good points, only the thinness of her lips and the lack of definition in her nose. When she reviewed her accomplishments, she saw only the places where she had fallen short, the heights she had failed to scale. The countervailing force was her ambition. Somehow, ever since she’d first begun to formulate the ambitions that drove her, those goals had restored her damaged self-confidence and shored up her vulnerabilities before they could cripple her. When her ambition threatened to tip her over into arrogance, somehow the fear would kick in at the crucial point, keeping her human.

The setting up of the task force had coincided so perfectly with the direction of her dreams, she couldn’t help but feel the hand of fate in it. That didn’t mean that she could let up, however. Shaz’s long-term career plan meant she had to shine brighter than anyone else in this task force. One of her tactics for achieving that was to pick Tony Hill’s brains like a master locksmith, extracting every scrap of knowledge she could scavenge there while simultaneously worming her way inside his defences so that when she needed his help, he’d be willing to provide it. As part of her approach, and because she was terrified that otherwise she’d fall behind and make a fool of herself in a group that she was convinced were all better than her, she was covertly taping all the group sessions, listening to them over and over again whenever she could. And now, luck had dropped a bonus opportunity into her lap.

So Shaz frowned and stared at the screen, working her way through the lengthy process of filling out an offence report then setting in motion its comparison against the details of all the previous crimes held in the computer’s memory banks. When Tony had slipped out of his seat, she’d vaguely registered the movement, but forced herself to carry on working. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was trying to ingratiate herself.

The intensity of the concentration she imposed upon herself was sufficient for her not to notice when he came back in through the door behind her desk until her subconscious registered a faint masculine smell which it identified as his. It took all her willpower not to react. Instead, she carried on striking keys until his hand cleared the edge of her peripheral vision and placed a carton of coffee topped with a Danish on the desk beside her. ‘Time for a break?’

So she’d rubbed her eyes and abandoned the screen. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘You’re welcome. Anything you’re not clear about? I’ll take you through it, if you want.’

Still she held back. Don’t snatch at it, she cautioned herself. She didn’t want to use up her credit with Tony Hill until she absolutely had to, and preferably not before she’d been able to offer him something helpful in return. ‘It’s not that I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I don’t trust it.’

Tony smiled, enjoying her defensive stubbornness. ‘One of those kids who demanded empirical proof that two and two were always going to be four?’

A prick of delight that she’d entertained him, quickly stifled. Shaz moved the Danish and opened the coffee. ‘I’ve always been in love with proof. Why do you think I became a cop?’

Tony’s smile was lopsided and knowing. ‘I could speculate. It’s quite a proving ground you’ve chosen here.’

‘Not really. The ground’s already been broken. The Americans have been doing it for so long they’ve not only got manuals, they’ve got movies about it. It’s just taken us forever to catch on, as per usual. But you’re one of the ones who forced the issue, so there’s nothing left for us to prove.’ Shaz took a huge bite of her Danish, nodding in quiet approval as she tasted the apricot glaze on the flaky pastry.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Tony said wryly, moving back to his own terminal. ‘The backlash has only just started. It’s taken long enough to get the police to accept we can provide useful help, but already the media hacks who were treating us profilers like gods a couple of years ago are jumping all over our shortcomings. They oversold us, so now they have to blame us for not living up to a set of expectations they created in the first place.’

‘I don’t know,’ Shaz said. ‘The public only remember the big successes. That case you did in Bradfield last year. The profile was right on the button. The police knew exactly where to go looking when it came to the crunch.’ Oblivious to the permafrost that had settled over Tony’s face, Shaz continued enthusiastically. ‘Are you going to do a session on that? We’ve all heard the grapevine version, but there’s next to nothing in the literature, even though it’s obvious you did a textbook job on the profile.’

‘We won’t be covering that case,’ he said flatly.

Shaz looked up sharply and realized where her eagerness had beached her. She’d blown it this time, in spades. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I get carried away, and tact and diplomacy, they’re history. I wasn’t thinking.’ Thick git, she berated herself silently. If he’d had the therapy he would have needed after that particular nightmare, the last thing he’d want would be to expose the details to avid prurience, even if it was masquerading as legitimate scientific interest.

‘You don’t have to apologize, Shaz,’ Tony said wearily. ‘You’re right, it is a key case. The reason we won’t be covering it is that I can’t talk about it without feeling like a freak. You’ll all have to forgive me. Maybe one day you’ll catch a case that leaves you feeling the same way. For your sake, I sincerely hope not.’ He looked down at his Danish as if it were an alien artefact and pushed it to one side, appetite dead as the past was supposed to be.

Shaz wished she could rerun the tape, pick up the conversation at the point where he’d put the coffee down on her desk and there was still the possibility of using the moment to build a bridge. ‘I’m really sorry, Dr Hill,’ she said inadequately.

He looked up and forced a thin smile. ‘Truly, Shaz, there’s no need. And can we drop the “Dr Hill” bit? I meant to bring it up during yesterday’s session, but it slipped my mind. I don’t want you all feeling that I’m the teacher and you’re the class. At the moment, I’m the group leader simply because I’ve been doing this for a while. Before long, we’ll all be working side by side, and there’s no point in having barriers between us. So it’s Tony from now on in, OK?’

‘You got it, Tony.’ Shaz searched for the message in his eyes and his words and, satisfied it contained genuine forgiveness, wolfed the rest of her Danish and returned to her screen. She couldn’t do it while he was here, but next time she was in the computer room alone, she intended to use her Internet access to pull up the newspaper archives and check out all the reports of the Bradfield serial killer case. She’d read most of them at the time, but that had been before she’d met Tony Hill and everything had changed. Now, she had a special interest. By the time she was finished, she’d know enough about Tony Hill’s most public profile to write the book that, for reasons she still couldn’t understand, had never been written. After all, she was a detective, wasn’t she?

Carol Jordan fiddled with the complicated chrome coffee maker, a housewarming present from her brother Michael when she’d moved to Seaford. She’d been luckier than most people caught in the housing market slump. She hadn’t had far to look for a buyer for her half of the warehouse flat she and Michael owned; the barrister he’d recently been sharing his bedroom with had been so eager to buy her out that Carol had begun to wonder if she’d been even more of a gooseberry than she’d imagined.

Now she had this low stone cottage on the side of the hill that rose above the estuary almost directly opposite Seaford; a place of her own. Well, almost, she corrected herself, reminded by the hard skull head-butting her shin. ‘OK, Nelson,’ she said, stooping to scratch the black cat’s ears. ‘I hear what you’re saying.’ While the coffee brewed, she scooped out a bowl of cat food to a rapture of purring followed by the sloppy sound of Nelson inhaling his breakfast. She walked through to the living room to enjoy the panorama of the estuary and the improbably slender arc of the suspension bridge. Gazing out across the misty river where the bridge appeared to float without connection to the land, she planned her coming encounter with the fire chief. Nelson walked in, tail erect, and jumped without pause straight on to the window sill where he stretched out, arching his head back towards Carol and demanding affection. Carol stroked his dense fur and said, ‘I only get one chance to convince this guy that I know arse from elbow, Nelson. I need him on my side. God knows, I need somebody on my side.’

Nelson batted her hand with his paw, as if responding directly to her words. Carol swallowed the rest of her coffee and got to her feet in a movement as smooth as the cat’s. One of the advantages she’d soon found with a DCI’s office hours was that she actually managed to use her gym membership more than once a month, and she was already feeling the benefit in firmer muscle tone and better aerobic fitness. It would have been a bonus to have someone to share it with, but that wasn’t why she did it. She did it for herself, because it made her feel good. She took pride in her body, revelling in its strength and mobility.

An hour later, enduring the tour of the central fire station, she was glad of her fitness as she struggled to keep pace with the long legs of the local chief of operations, Jim Pendlebury. ‘You seem to be better organized here than CID ever manages,’ Carol said, as they finally made it to his office. ‘You’ll have to share the secret of your efficiency.’

‘We’ve had so much cost-cutting, we’ve really had to streamline everything we do,’ he told her. ‘We used to have all our stations staffed round the clock with a complement of full-time officers, but it really wasn’t cost effective. I know a lot of the lads grumbled about it, but a couple of years back we shifted to a mix of part-time and full-time officers. It took a few months to shake down, but it’s been a huge advantage to me in management terms.’

Carol pulled a face. ‘Not a solution that would work for us.’

Pendlebury shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You could have a core staff who dealt with the routine stuff and a hit squad that you used as and when you needed them.’

‘That’s sort of what we have already,’ Carol said drily. ‘The core staff is called the night shift and the hit squad are the day teams. Unfortunately, it never gets quiet enough to stand any of them down.’

With part of her mind, Carol added to her mental profile of the fire chief as they spoke. In conversation, his straight dark eyebrows crinkled and jutted above his blue-grey eyes. Considering how much time he must spend flying a desk, his skin looked surprisingly weathered, the creases round his eyes showing white when he wasn’t smiling or frowning. Probably a part-time sailor or estuary fisherman, she guessed. As he dipped his head to acknowledge something she’d said, she could see a few silver hairs straggling among his dark curls. So, probably a few years the far side of thirty, Carol thought, revising her initial estimate. She had a habit of analysing new acquaintances in terms of how their description would read on a police bulletin. She’d never actually had to produce a photofit of someone she’d encountered, but she was confident her practice would have made her the best possible witness for the police artist to work with.

‘Now you’ve seen the operation, I take it you’re a bit more willing to accept that when we say a fire’s a query arson, we’re not talking absolute rubbish?’ Pendlebury’s tone was light, but his eyes challenged hers.

‘I never doubted what you were telling us,’ she said calmly. ‘What I doubted was whether we were taking it as seriously as we should.’ She snapped open the locks on her briefcase and took out her file. ‘I’d like to go through the details on these incidents with you, if you can spare me the time.’