The Wire in the Blood (31 page)

She grinned and got to her feet. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Stay out of trouble, Chief Inspector,’ he said gruffly, dismissing her with a flutter of his fingers. As she opened the door to leave, he added, ‘If you need my help, you have my number.’

It was a promise Carol hoped she’d never have to collect on.

Sunderland was the furthest north, Exmouth the most southerly point. In between were Swindon, Grantham, Tamworth, Wigan and Halifax. In each place, a teenage girl’s disappearance had snagged Shaz Bowman’s attention. Kay Hallam knew that somehow she had to squeeze fresh juice from those investigations that would shore up the edifice of circumstantial evidence Tony was building against Jacko Vance. It wasn’t an easy assignment. Years had passed and with them the sharpness of memory. Doing it single-handed wasn’t the best option either. In an ideal world, there would be two of them, taking a couple of weeks to complete the task, conducting interviews with brains that weren’t exhausted from driving the length and breadth of the country.

No such luxury. Not that she wanted to hang around. Whoever had killed Shaz didn’t deserve a minute longer at liberty than they’d already had. It was tough enough sitting on her hands while she waited for the results of DCI Jordan hammering the phones. Now there was a role model, Kay thought as she prowled from room to room of her terraced Victorian artisan’s cottage. Whatever Carol Jordan had done, she’d obviously done it right. ‘If you want to be successful, hang around with successful people and copy what they do,’ Kay recited, a familiar mantra from one of her American self-improvement tapes.

The call came at lunchtime. Carol had spoken to all of the CID divisions who had dealt with the missing girls. In three cases, she’d even managed to contact the investigating officer, though investigation was probably too exalted a word for the cursory inquiries into missing teenage girls who didn’t appear to want to be found. She had arranged for Kay to survey the slender files, and she’d contrived to elicit addresses and phone numbers for the distraught parents.

Kay put the phone down and studied a road atlas. She reckoned she could do Halifax in the afternoon and Wigan that evening. Then down the motorway to the Midlands and an overnight motel. Breakfast at Tamworth then hammer down to Exmouth for late afternoon. Back up the motorway to overnight at Swindon, then cross-country to Grantham. A stop the following day in Leeds to report to Tony, then she could finish off in Sunderland. It sounded like the road movie from hell. Even Thelma and Louise got it more glamorous than this, she thought.

But then, unlike some of her colleagues, she’d never expected it to be glamorous. Hard graft, job security and a decent pay cheque were all Kay had ever supposed she’d get from the police. The gratification of detective work had come as a surprise. And she was good at it, thanks to an eye for detail that her less appreciative colleagues called anal. Profiling seemed like the ideal area for using her observational skills to the full. She hadn’t imagined her first case would be so close to home, or how personal it would feel. Nobody deserved what Shaz Bowman had endured, and nobody deserved to get away with it.

That was the thought Kay held on to as she hacked her way round the network of motorways that crisscrossed England. She noticed that all of her destinations were either close by one of those motorways or to one of the other major arterial roads peppered with fast-food joints tacked on to petrol stations. She wondered if there were any significance in that. Did Vance arrange to meet his victims at service areas they could easily scrounge a lift to? It was almost the only fresh thing to come out of two days’ work, she thought grimly. That and the faintest ghostly glimmering of a pattern. But the stories of the parents were depressingly similar, and distressingly short on significant detail, certainly where Vance was concerned. She’d managed to talk to a couple of friends of missing girls, and they’d been scarcely more helpful. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help; Kay was the sort of interviewer people always talked to. Her mousey insignificance belied her intelligence; she was no threat to women and made men feel protective. No, it wasn’t that they were holding back, it was simply that there wasn’t much to be said. Yes, the missing girls were daft on Jacko, yes, they’d been to events where he was present and yes, they were really excited about it. But nothing more than that flimsy gleaning.

By Grantham, she was operating on automatic pilot. Two nights in motels with the beds too soft and the constant high zip, zing and zoom of all-night traffic diluted but not deleted by double glazing was no recipe for a productive interview, but it was better than no sleep at all, she scolded herself as she yawned expansively before ringing the doorbell.

Kenny and Denise Burton didn’t seem to notice her exhaustion. It had been two years, seven months and three days since Stacey had walked out of the front door and never returned and the shadows under their eyes indicated neither had had a decent night’s sleep since. They were like twins; both short, burly with pale, indoor skin and puffy fingers. Looking at the wall of photographs of their slim, bright-eyed daughter, it was hard to believe in genetics as a science. They sat in a living room that was a monument to the expression ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. There were a lot of places in the cramped room; corner display cabinets, alcoves shelved to accommodate knickknacks without number, a feature fireplace with built-in niches. It was a claustrophobic, timidly conventional room. With the two bars of the electric fire throwing out dusty heat, Kay could hardly breathe. It was no wonder Stacey hadn’t been reluctant to leave.

‘She was a lovely girl,’ Denise said wistfully. It was a refrain Kay had come to hate, hiding as it did every useful element of an adolescent girl’s personality. It also reminded her discouragingly of her own mother, forever obliterating the reality of Kay’s identity behind the anodyne phrase.

‘Not like some,’ Kenny said darkly, smoothing his greying hair back over the bald patch threatening to burst through like a cartoon bump on the head. ‘She was told to be in by ten, by ten she’d be in.’

‘She’d never have gone off of her own free will,’ Denise said, the next line in the litany perfectly timed, perfectly placed. ‘She had no reason to. She must have been abducted. There’s no other explanation.’

Kay avoided the painfully obvious one. ‘I’d like to ask some questions about the days before Stacey disappeared,’ she said. ‘Apart from going to school, did she go out at all that week?’

Kenny and Denise didn’t pause for thought. In counterpoint, they said, ‘She went to the pictures.’

‘With Kerry.’

‘The weekend before she was taken.’

‘Tom Cruise.’

‘She loves Tom Cruise.’ The defiant present tense.

‘She went out on the Monday as well.’

‘We wouldn’t normally allow her out on a school night.’

‘But this was special.’

‘Jacko Vance.’

‘Her hero, he is.’

‘Opening a fun pub in town, he was.’

‘We wouldn’t normally have allowed her into a pub.’

‘What with her only being fourteen.’

‘But Kerry’s mum was taking them, so we thought it would be all right.’

‘And it was.’

‘She was home right on time, right when Kerry’s mum said they’d be.’

‘Full of it, our Stacey was. She got a signed photo.’

‘Personally signed. To her personally.’

‘She had that with her. When she went.’ There was a pause while Kenny and Denise swallowed their grief.

Kay took advantage. ‘How did she seem after their night out?’

‘She was very excited, wasn’t she, Kenny? It was like a dream come true to her, talking to Jacko Vance.’

‘She actually got to talk to him?’ Kay forced herself to sound nonchalant. The faint pattern she’d discerned was growing stronger with each interview.

‘Like a moonstruck calf she was, after,’ Stacey’s father confirmed.

‘She’d always wanted to go on the television.’ The counterpoint was back.

‘Your people reckoned she’d run off to London to try and break into showbiz,’ Kenny said contemptuously. ‘No way. Not Stacey. She was far too sensible. She agreed with us. Stay at school, get her A-levels, then we’d see.’

‘She could have been on the television,’ Denise wistful now.

‘She had the looks.’

Kay cut in before they could get off and running again. ‘Did she say what she’d talked about with Jacko Vance?’

‘Just that he was really friendly,’ Denise said. ‘I don’t think he said anything in particular to her, did he, Kenny?’

‘He hasn’t got time to take a personal interest. A busy man. Dozens of people, no, hundreds of people want him to sign an autograph, exchange a few words, pose for a picture.’

The words hung in the air like the after-image of sparklers. ‘Pose for a picture?’ Kay said faintly. ‘Did Stacey have her picture taken with him?’

They nodded in sync. ‘Kerry’s mum took it.’

‘Could I see it?’ Kay’s heart was suddenly thudding like a drum, her palms sweating in the stuffy room.

Kenny pulled an embossed album from under a coffee table stained a colour unknown in nature. With practised hand, he turned swiftly to the last page. There, blown up to ten by eight was a fuzzy snapshot of a cluster of people surrounding Jacko Vance. The angle was skewed, the faces blurred, as if seen through a heat haze. But the girl standing next to Jacko Vance, the one he was unquestionably talking to, his hand on her shoulder, his head inclined towards her, the girl looking up with the adoring look of a new puppy was without a shadow of a doubt Stacey Burton.

It had been harder than Wharton had expected to talk to Detective Sergeant Chris Devine. When he’d rung her office, he’d discovered she’d signed up for a couple of days’ compassionate leave following her initial telephone statement to the murder inquiry. It was the first time Wharton had encountered anyone who seemed to be genuinely grieving for Shaz Bowman; he’d not been the officer charged with breaking the news to her devastated parents.

By the time Chris had returned the message on her answering machine, Wharton was already in London interviewing Vance and his wife. It had been easy to arrange to meet at her flat afterwards.

The hard-nosed copper in him had warmed to Chris Devine immediately she’d opened her door and greeted them with, ‘I sincerely hope you’re going to nail the bastard who did this.’ He wasn’t bothered by the array of artistic photographs of beautiful women that covered the walls of her flat. He’d worked with dykes before and on balance he thought they were a damn sight less disruptive than most of the straight women on the force. His sidekick was less sanguine, carefully choosing to sit facing the wall of glass that looked out from the modern block of flats to the ancient church left incongruously standing at the heart of the Barbican complex.

‘I hope so, too,’ he’d said, perching on the lumpy futon sofa and wondering fleetingly how people ever slept on the things.

‘You’ve been to see Jacko Vance?’ Chris said almost before she was settled in the big wing chair opposite him.

‘We interviewed him and his wife yesterday. He confirmed what you’d already told us about the appointment DC Bowman kept with him on the day she died.’

She nodded, pushing her thick chestnut hair away from her face. ‘I had Vance down as the type that would keep a note of everything.’

‘So what was all that about?’ Wharton asked. ‘Why were you helping DC Bowman maintain the illusion that she was a Met officer?’

The frown line between her eyes deepened. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Your direct line in the CID office was left as a contact number for DC Bowman. The impression it gave was that she was still a Met officer.’

‘She
was
still a Met officer,’ Chris pointed out. ‘But there was nothing sinister in giving my number as a contact. During their training period, the profiling squad officers can’t take phone calls in working hours. Shaz asked if I’d sort it, that’s all.’

‘Why you, Sergeant? Why not the desk officer where she was stationed? Why not leave her home number and ask him to call in the evening?’ There was nothing hostile in Wharton’s manner; he was genuinely interested in the answer.

‘I suppose because we were already in contact over the case,’ Chris said, feeling irritation rise inside her but giving no outward sign. Her years in the police had left her with the tendency to see innuendo in everything and the ability not to show her reaction.

‘You were? In what respect?’

Chris turned her head and her dark eyes looked over Wharton’s shoulder to the sky beyond. ‘She’d already asked for my help. She needed some newspapers photocopied and I went out to Colindale to do it for her.’

‘You were responsible for that parcel?’

‘I was, yes.’

‘I’ve heard about that. Must have been hundreds of pages, box that size and weight. That’s a lot of work for an officer as busy as you must be,’ Wharton said, starting to lean a little now he suspected there might be more going on here than met the eye.

‘I did it in my own time. OK, Inspector?’

‘That’s a lot of time to give up for a junior officer,’ Wharton suggested.

Chris’s mouth tightened momentarily. With her snub nose, she had more than a passing resemblance to Grumpy from the Seven Dwarves. ‘Shaz and I were partners on the night shift for a long time. We were friends as well as colleagues. She was probably the most talented young officer I’ve ever worked with and frankly, Mr Wharton, I don’t see how questioning why I was happy to give up my day off to help her is going to help you put her killer away.’

Wharton shrugged. ‘Background. You never know.’

‘I know, believe me. You should be asking about Jacko Vance.’

In spite of himself, Wharton couldn’t help an ironic grin. ‘Don’t tell me you fell for that as well?’

‘If you mean, do I go along with Shaz’s theory that Jacko Vance was killing teenage girls, the answer is, I don’t know. I’ve not had the chance to review her evidence. But what I do know is that Vance arranged with me that she should come to his house early on Saturday and she was dead by the next morning. Now, the way we work things down here is we get very interested in the last known person to see a murder victim alive, and according to Shaz’s mum, you don’t seem to have any record of anyone seeing her after she left Vance’s house. That would make me very interested in Jacko Vance. What are the profiling squad saying about it?’