The Wire in the Blood (12 page)

Tony’s smile came nowhere near his eyes. ‘Chances are they’ll have half a dozen good excuses why they can’t come to the pub with you. Any other ideas?’

Shaz raised her pen. ‘Work your socks off. If they see you’re a grafter, they’ll give you some respect.’

‘Either that or think you’re brown-nosing the bosses,’ Leon sneered.

‘It’s not a bad idea,’ Tony said, ‘though Leon does have a point. If you’re going to go down that road, you also need to demonstrate a complete contempt for everyone over the rank of DCI, which can be wearing, not to say counterproductive.’ They laughed. ‘What does the trick for me is incredibly simple.’ He gave them a last questioning look. ‘No? How about flattery?’

A couple nodded sagely. Leon’s lip curled and he snorted. ‘More brown-nosing.’

‘I prefer to think of it as one technique among many in the arsenal of the profiler. I don’t use it for personal advancement; I use it for the benefit of the casework,’ Tony corrected him mildly. ‘I have a mantra that I trot out at every available opportunity.’ He shifted his position slightly, but that small change altered his body language from comfortable authority to subordinate. His smile was self-deprecating. ‘Of course,’ he said ingratiatingly, ‘I don’t solve murders. It’s bobbies that do that.’ Then, just as swiftly, he returned to his previous posture. ‘It works for me. It might not work for you. But it’s never going to do any harm to tell the investigating officers how much you respect their work and how you’re just a tiny cog that might make their machine work better.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You have to tell them this at least five times a day.’ They were all grinning now.

‘Once you’ve done that, there’s a reasonable chance they’ll give you the information you need to draw up your profile. If you can’t be bothered making the effort, they’re likely to hold as much back as they can get away with because they see you as a rival for the glory of solving a high-profile case. So. You’ve got the investigating officers on your side, and you’ve got your evidence. It’s time to work on the profile. First you assess probabilities.’

He stood up and began to prowl round the perimeter of the room, like a big cat checking the limits of its domain. ‘Probability is the only god of the profiler. To abandon probability for the alternative demands the strongest evidence. The downside of that is that there will be times when you end up with so much egg on your face you’ll look like an omelette on legs.’

Already, he could feel his heart rate increasing and still he hadn’t said a word about the case. ‘I had that experience myself on the last major case I worked. We were dealing with a serial killer of young men. I had all the information that was available to the police, thanks to a brilliant liaison officer. On the basis of the evidence, I drew up a profile. The liaison officer made a couple of suggestions based on her instincts. One of those suggestions was an interesting idea I hadn’t thought of because I didn’t know as much about information technology as she did. But equally, because it was something only a small proportion of the population would know about, I assigned it a moderately low probability. Normally, that would mean the investigation team would assign it low priority, but they were stuck for leads, so they pursued it. It turned out she’d been right, but in itself it didn’t move the investigation much further forward.’

His hands were clammy with perspiration, but now he was actually confronting the details that still shredded his nights, his stomach had stopped clenching. It was less effort than he’d expected to continue his analysis. ‘Her other suggestion I discounted out of hand because it was completely off the wall. It ran counter to everything I knew about serial killers.’ Tony met their curious stares. His tension had transmitted itself to the entire squad and they sat silent and motionless, waiting for what would come next.

‘My disregard for her suggestion nearly cost me my life,’ he said simply, reaching his seat and sitting down again. He looked around the room, surprised he could speak so levelly. ‘And you know something? I was right to ignore her. Because, on a scale of one to a hundred, her proposition was so unlikely it wouldn’t even register.’

As soon as the formal confirmation of the body in the blaze came through, Carol called a meeting of her team. This time, there were no chocolate biscuits. ‘I expect you’ve all heard this morning’s news,’ she said flatly as they arranged themselves around her office, Tommy Taylor straddling the only chair apart from Carol’s on the basis that he was the sergeant. He might have been brought up never to sit while women were standing, but he’d long since stopped thinking of Di Earnshaw as a woman.

‘Aye,’ he said.

‘Poor bugger,’ Lee Whitbread chimed in.

‘Poor bugger nothing,’ Tommy protested. ‘He shouldn’t have been there, should he?’

Repelled but not surprised, Carol said, ‘Whether he should or shouldn’t have been there, he’s dead, and we’re supposed to be looking for the person who killed him.’ Tommy looked mutinous, folding his arms across the chair back and planting his feet more firmly on the floor, but Carol refused to respond to the challenge. ‘Arson’s always a time bomb,’ she continued. ‘And this time it’s gone off right in our faces. Today has not been the proudest day of my career to date. So what have you got for me?’

Lee, leaning against the filing cabinet, shifted his shoulders. ‘I went through all the back files for the last six months. Leastways, all I could get my hands on,’ he corrected himself. ‘I found quite a few incidents like you told us to look for, some off night-shift CID reports, some off the uniform lads. I was planning on getting them collated on paper today.’

‘Di and me, we’ve been re-interviewing the victims, like you said. There doesn’t seem to be any linking factor that we’ve come across so far,’ Tommy said, his voice distant following Carol’s snub.

‘A variety of insurance companies, that kind of thing,’ Di amplified.

‘What about a racial motive?’ Carol asked.

‘Some Asian victims, but not what you’d call enough to make it look significant,’ Di said.

‘Have we spoken to the insurers themselves yet?’

Di looked at Tommy and Lee stared out of the window. Tommy cleared his throat. ‘It was on Di’s list for today. First chance she’s had.’

Unimpressed, Carol shook her head. ‘Right. Here’s what we do next. I’ve had some experience in offender profiling…’ She stopped when Tommy muttered something. ‘I’m sorry, Sergeant Taylor, did you have a contribution?’

Confidence restored, Tommy grinned insolently back at Carol. ‘I said, “We’d heard,” ma’am.’

For a moment, Carol said nothing, merely staring him down. It was situations like this that could make the job degenerate into a misery if they weren’t handled right. So far, it was only cheeky disrespect. But if she let it go, it would quickly slide into full-scale insubordination. When she spoke, her voice was quiet but chill. ‘Sergeant, I can’t think why you have this burning ambition to go back into uniform and play at community policing, but I’ll be more than happy to oblige you if CID work continues not to be to your taste.’

Lee’s mouth twitched in spite of himself; Di Earnshaw’s dark eyes narrowed, waiting for the explosion that never came. Tommy pushed his shirtsleeves above his elbows, looked Carol straight in the eye and said, ‘Reckon I’d better show you what I’m made of then, Guv.’

Carol nodded. ’You better had, Tommy. Now, I’m going to work on a profile, but to make that anything more than a bit of an academic exercise, I’m going to need a lot of raw data. Since we can’t find any evidence of linkage between the victims, I’m going to stick my neck out and say we’ve got a thrill seeker rather than a torch for hire. Which means we’re looking for a young adult male. He’s probably unemployed, likely to be single and still living with his parents. I’m not going to go into all the psychobabble about social inadequacy and all that right now. What we need to look for is someone with a record of police contact for petty nuisance offences, vandalism, substance abuse, that sort of thing. Maybe minor sex offences. Peeping Tom, exposing himself. He’s not going to be a mugger, a burglar, a thief, a fly boy. He’s going to be a sad bastard. In and out of minor bother since he was a pre-teen. He probably doesn’t have a car, so we need to look at the geography of the fires; chances are if you drew a line linking the outermost fires, he’ll live inside its boundaries. He’ll probably have watched all the fires from a vantage point, so have a think about where that might have been and who might have witnessed him there.

‘You know the ground. It’s your job to bring me suspects that we can match against my profile. Lee, I want you to talk to the collator and see who uniform know that fits those criteria. I’ll get going on a fuller profile and Tommy and Di will do the routine work-up on the crime itself, liaising with forensics and organizing a door-to-door in the area. Hell, I don’t have to tell you how to run a murder inquiry…’

A knock at the door interrupted Carol’s flow. ‘Come in,’ she called.

The door opened on John Brandon. It was, Carol realized, a measure of how far she had to go before she’d be accepted into the East Yorkshire force that no one had stuck a head round the door to warn her the chief was on his way. She jumped to her feet, Tommy nearly toppled in his hurry to get out of his chair and Lee cracked his elbow on the filing cabinet pushing himself upright. Only Di Earnshaw was already in place, standing against the back wall with her arms folded across her chest. ‘Sorry to interrupt, DCI Jordan,’ Brandon said pleasantly. ‘A word?’

‘Certainly, sir. We’re pretty much finished here. You three know what we’re after, I’ll leave you to it.’ Carol’s smile managed to dismiss as well as encourage and the three junior officers edged out of the office with barely a backward glance.

Brandon waved Carol to her seat as he folded his long body into the guest chair. ‘This fatal fire at Wardlaw’s,’ he began without formalities.

Carol nodded. ‘I was out there earlier.’

‘So I heard. One of your series then, I take it?’

‘I think so. It’s got all the hallmarks of it. I’m waiting to hear from the fire investigators, but Jim Pendlebury, the fire chief, reckons it’s got generic similarities to the earlier incidents we’d identified.’

Brandon chewed one side of his lower lip. It was the first time Carol had ever seen him look anything other than completely composed. He breathed heavily through his nose and said, ‘I know we talked about this before and you were convinced that you could handle it. I’m not saying that you can’t, because I think you’re a bloody good detective, Carol. But I want Tony Hill to take a look at this.’

‘There’s really no need,’ Carol said, feeling heat spreading up her chest and into her neck. ‘Certainly not at this stage.’

Brandon’s gloomy bloodhound face seemed to grow even longer. ‘It’s no slur on your competence,’ he said.

‘I’m bound to say that’s what it looks like from here,’ Carol said, trying not to sound as mutinous as she felt, forcing herself to remember how angry Tommy Taylor’s earlier impertinence had made her feel. ‘Sir, we’ve barely started our own inquiries. It may well be that we’ll have this whole thing wrapped up in a matter of days. There can’t be that many potential suspects in Seaford who fit the serial arsonist profile.’

Brandon shifted in his chair, as if struggling to find an appropriate arrangement for his long legs. ‘I find myself in a slightly awkward position here, Carol. I’ve never been happy with the “theirs not to reason why” approach to command. I’ve always thought things run better when my officers understand why I issue the orders I do rather than having to rely on blind obedience. On the other hand, for operational reasons, sometimes things have to be taken on trust. And when other units outside my command are involved, even when I think there’s no earthly reason for confidentiality, I have to respect what they ask for. If you follow me?’ He raised his eyebrows in an anxious question. If any of his officers could read between so oblique a set of lines, it would be Carol Jordan.

Carol frowned as she digested Brandon’s words. ‘So, hypothetically,’ she eventually said, taking her time to think through what she was saying, ‘if a new unit was being set up with a specialist area of responsibility, and they wanted a sympathetic force to let them use one of their cases as a sort of guinea pig, even if you thought the officer in charge had a right to know what the score was, you’d be obliged to go along with their demand for confidentiality as to the real reason why they were being handed the case? That sort of thing, sir?’

Brandon smiled gratefully. ‘Speaking purely hypothetically, yes.’

There was no answering smile. ‘This wouldn’t be an appropriate occasion for such an experiment, in my opinion.’ She paused. ‘Sir.’

Brandon looked surprised. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

Carol thought for a moment. Few fast-track graduates climbed the greasy pole as fast as she’d done, particularly women. John Brandon’s patronage had given her more than she could ever have expected. And she couldn’t even be certain if her real reasons for reluctance were the ones she was about to voice. Nevertheless, she’d stuck her neck out this far and she’d never been a quitter. ‘We’re a new force,’ she said carefully. ‘I’ve only just arrived to work with a group of people who have been a team for a long time. I’m trying to build up a working relationship that will allow us to protect and serve our community. I can’t do that if I’m stripped of the first major case that’s crossed my desk since I got here.’