The Wire in the Blood (13 page)

‘No one’s talking about taking the case away from you, Chief Inspector,’ Brandon said, reflecting Carol’s formality. ‘We’re talking about using the new task force on a consultancy basis.’

‘It’ll look like you’ve no confidence in me,’ Carol insisted.

‘That’s nonsense. If I had no confidence in your abilities, why on earth would I have appointed you to a promoted post?’

Carol shook her head in disbelief. He really didn’t get it. ‘I’m sure the canteen cowboys won’t have any trouble coming up with ideas on that score, sir,’ she said bitterly.

Brandon’s eyes widened as he grasped her meaning. ‘You think they…That can’t be…It’s ridiculous! I never heard anything so absurd!’

‘If you say so, sir.’ Carol managed a twisted smile and ran a hand through her shaggy blonde hair. ‘I didn’t think I looked that rough.’

Brandon shook his head in disbelief. ‘It never occurred to me that people would misinterpret your promotion. You’re self-evidently such a good copper.’ He sighed and chewed his lip again. ‘Now I’m in an even worse position than I was when I walked in.’ He looked up at her and made a decision.

‘I’m going to speak off the record. Paul Bishop has been having liaison problems with the local brass in Leeds. They’ve made it clear they don’t want his team on their ground and they won’t let him near any of their crimes. He needs a real case for his officers to learn their trade, and for obvious reasons, he doesn’t want some high-profile serial killer or rapist. He rang me because we’re next door to him and he asked me to keep an eye out for something that might do for his squad to cut their teeth on before they’re officially available to catch cases from every Tom, Dick and Harry. To be perfectly honest, I was going to offer them your serial arsonist even before it turned fatal.’

Carol tried to keep her anger out of her face. It was always the way. Just when you thought you’d got them house-trained, they reverted to Neanderthal. ‘It’s a murder now. You don’t get much more high profile than that,’ she said. ‘For my own self-respect, never mind the respect of my team, I need to head the investigation. I do not need to be seen to be hanging on the coat-tails of the National Offender Profiling Task Force,’ she continued coldly. ‘If I’d thought sending in visiting firemen was the best way to police serious crime, I’d have applied to join them. I can’t believe you’d undermine me like this. Sir.’ The last word came out like an expletive.

Brandon’s method of dealing with threatened insubordination was very different from Carol’s. A man in his position had little need of veiled threats; he could afford to be more creative. ‘I have no intention of undermining any of my officers, DCI Jordan. That’s why you will be the only officer who has direct dealings with the task force. You will go to them in Leeds, they will not come on our ground. I will make it clear to Commander Bishop that his officers will discuss the case with no other officer of the East Yorkshire force. I trust you will find that satisfactory?’

Carol couldn’t help feeling a grudging respect for the speed with which her chief had thought on his feet. ‘You’ve made your orders perfectly clear,’ she said, leaning back in resignation.

Relieved that the crisis had been resolved without anything that would have been embarrassing to report back to Maggie, Brandon got to his feet with a relaxed smile. ‘Thanks, Carol. I appreciate it. Funny, I could have sworn you’d have jumped at the chance to work with Tony Hill again. The two of you hit it off so well when you worked liaison on the Bradfield murders.’

She coaxed her muscles to conjure up a smile from memory and hoped it would pass for the real thing. ‘My reluctance was nothing to do with Dr Hill,’ she said, wondering whether Brandon would believe her when she couldn’t even convince herself.

‘I’ll let them know you’ll be in touch.’ Brandon closed the door on his way out, a courtesy Carol was profoundly grateful for.

‘I can hardly wait,’ she said grimly to the empty room.

Shaz bounced through the door of the police station where the task force was based and grinned at the uniformed officer behind the desk with cheerful expectation. ‘DC Bowman,’ she said. ‘NOP task force. There should be a package for me?’

The constable looked sceptical. ‘Here?’

‘That’s right.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It was supposed to be sent by overnight courier. For delivery by nine a.m. And since my watch says it’s ten past…’

‘Then you owe somebody a bollocking, because there’s nowt here for you, love,’ the constable said, incapable of keeping the satisfaction out of his voice. It wasn’t often he had the chance to score a point against a task force outsider
and
patronize a woman in a single go.

‘You sure?’ Shaz asked, trying not to show the consternation that she knew would only increase his smugness.

‘I’ve got my reading badge, love. Trust me, I’m a bobby. There’s no package here for you.’ Bored now, he ostentatiously turned away and pretended to be interested in a pile of paperwork.

Fizzing with frustration, her good mood history, Shaz bypassed the bank of lifts and jogged up the five flights of stairs to the task force operations room. ‘Never trust someone else, never trust someone else,’ pounded in her head in sync with her feet on the stairs and the blood in her ears. She marched straight into the room that held their computer terminals and threw herself into her chair, barely managing to grunt a greeting to Simon, the only other occupant of the room. Shaz grabbed her phone and punched in Chris’s home number. ‘Bugger!’ she muttered when the answering machine picked up. She yanked her personal organizer out of her bag and keyed in Chris’s name. Her index finger stabbed out the direct line at New Scotland Yard. The phone was answered on the second ring. ‘Devine.’

‘It’s Shaz.’

‘Whatever it is you’re after, the answer’s no, doll. I don’t think I’m ever going to get the dust and ink out from under my fingernails after yesterday’s little exercise. Definitely a non-starter on the “fun things to do with your day off” list.’

‘I really appreciate it, you know that. Only…’

Chris groaned. ‘What, Shaz?’

‘The stuff hasn’t arrived.’

Chris snorted. ‘That all? Listen, by the time I’d got finished—which I have to tell you I only managed by flashing the old warrant card and roping the staff in—it was too late to get an overnight delivery. Best they could do was by noon. So you should get it some time this morning. All right?’

‘It’ll have to be,’ Shaz said, aware she was being ungracious, but unable to care.

‘Relax, doll. It’s never the end of the world. You’re going to give yourself an ulcer,’ Chris told her.

‘I’ve got to present my case tomorrow afternoon,’ Shaz pointed out.

Chris laughed. ‘So what’s the problem? ’King hell, Shaz, that Yorkshire air’s slowing you up. Time was, you were greased lightning. You got a whole night to turn it around. Don’t tell me you’re getting soft.’

‘I do like the odd bit of sleep between dusk and dawn,’ Shaz said.

‘Just as well you and me never got it together, then, isn’t it? Gimme a call if you haven’t got the stuff by the middle of the afternoon, all right, doll? Just hang loose. Nobody’s going to die.’

‘I flaming hope not,’ Shaz said to a dead line.

‘Problems?’ Simon asked, plonking himself down next to her and pushing a mug of coffee towards her.

Shaz shrugged, reaching for the brew. ‘Just some stuff I wanted to check out before we report back on the exercise tomorrow.’

Simon’s interest suddenly expanded beyond the erotic possibilities of a fling with Shaz. ‘You on to something?’ he asked, trying for nonchalant and failing.

Shaz’s grin was evil. ‘You mean you haven’t spotted the cluster?’

‘Course I have. Saw it right away, no messing,’ he said, clearly blustering.

‘Right. So you also found the external link?’ Shaz enjoyed the momentary blankness that crossed Simon’s milk-pale face before he regained command. She snorted with laughter. ‘Good try, Simon.’

He shook his head. ‘All right, Shaz, you win. Will you tell me what you’ve got if I buy you dinner tonight?’

‘I’ll tell you what I’ve got tomorrow afternoon, same time as I tell everybody else. But if the offer’s genuine and not just a bribe, I’d say yes to a drink before we go for the curry on Saturday night.’

Simon thrust out his hand. ‘Deal, DC Bowman.’ Shaz took his hand and matched his grip.

The prospect of a pre-dinner drink with Simon, enticing though it was, couldn’t distract Shaz from the anticipation of her parcel. At coffee break, she was at the front counter before the others had even brewed up. For the rest of the morning, as Paul Bishop took them through the application of a profile to a suspect list, Shaz, normally the most attentive of students, fidgeted like a four-year-old at the opera. As soon as they broke for lunch, Shaz was off down the stairs like a greyhound out of a trap.

This time, her prayers were answered. A cardboard archive box sealed with what looked like an entire roll of packing tape sat on the front counter. ‘Any longer and I’d have phoned the bomb disposal squad to get rid of it,’ the desk officer said. ‘We’re a police station, not a post office.’

‘Just as well. You’d never stand the pace.’ Shaz swept the box off the counter and marched out to the car park with it. She opened the boot of her car and snatched a quick look at her watch. She reckoned she had about ten minutes to spare before her absence from the communal lunch table would excite comment. Hastily, she ripped at the packing tape with her fingernails, managing to unpick it enough to force the lid open.

Her heart sank. The box was almost brimful of photocopies. For a brief moment, she wondered if she couldn’t just ignore her hunch. Then she thought of the seven teenage girls, their faces smiling up at her with all the expectation that, however many disappointments life might hold, at least they’d have a life.

This wasn’t just an exercise. Somewhere out there was a cold-hearted killer. And the only person who seemed to be aware of it was Shaz Bowman. Even if it did take all night, she owed them that effort at the very least.

Seeing him again face to face, Carol was struck by the realization that it was pain that lurked behind Tony Hill’s face. All the time she’d known him, she’d never recognized what underpinned his intensity. She’d always assumed that he was like her, driven only by the desire to capture and understand, fired by a passion to elucidate, haunted by the things he’d seen, heard and done. Now, distance had allowed her to comprehend what she had failed to see before, and she found herself wondering how different her behaviour towards him would have been had she really grasped what was going on behind his dark and troubled eyes.

Of course, he’d arranged it so that they would not be alone when they first encountered each other after the intervening months. Paul Bishop had been despatched to greet her when she’d arrived at the task force base in Leeds, smothering her in the charm that had made him such a media darling. His gallantry didn’t extend to offering to carry her two briefcases heavy with case files, and Carol noticed with amusement that he couldn’t pass a reflective surface without checking his appearance for imperfection, now smoothing an eyebrow, now straightening broad shoulders in a uniform that had plainly been made to measure. ‘I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to meet you,’ he said. ‘John Brandon’s best and brightest. Some accolade in itself, never mind your track record. That speaks for itself, of course. Did John mention we’d been at staff college together? What a copper that man is, and what a talent spotter.’ His enthusiasm was infectious and Carol found herself responding to his flattery in spite of her best intentions.

‘I’ve always enjoyed working with Mr Brandon,’ she said. ‘How are things bedding down with the task force?’

‘Oh, you’ll see all that for yourself,’ he said dismissively, ushering her into the lift. ‘Of course, Tony’s been singing your praises to the heavens. What a joy you are to work with, what a delightful colleague, how bright, how easy to deal with.’ He grinned down at her. ‘And the rest.’

Now Carol knew he was a bullshitter. She had no doubt as to Tony’s professional respect for her, but she knew him well enough to be certain he would never have spoken about her in personal terms. His ingrained reticence would have taken far greater subtlety and skill to penetrate than Paul Bishop clearly possessed. Tony would never talk about Carol because to do so he’d have to talk about the case that had brought them together. And that would mean revealing far more about both of them than any stranger had a right to know. He’d have had to explain how she’d fallen for him and how his sexual inadequacies forced him to reject her, how any hope of them ever getting together had been the last victim of the murderous psychopath they’d tracked. She felt in her bones that he would never have told another living soul these things, and if there was one thing that raised her above her colleagues, it was her instinct. ‘Mmm,’ she said noncommittally. ‘I’ve always admired Dr Hill’s professionalism.’ Bishop brushed against her hip as he pushed the button for the fifth floor. If I’d been a man, Carol thought, he’d just have told me which floor to go for.

‘It’s a real bonus for us that you’ve worked with Tony before,’ Bishop continued, eyeing his hair in the brushed metal doors. ‘Our new trainees will be able to learn a lot from watching how you divide up the process, how you communicate, what you both need from each other.’