The Wire in the Blood (42 page)

A chilled silence fell over the group. Tony scratched the stubble on his chin. ‘I should have worked this out before now. He’s a control freak. The only killing ground he’d trust would be one he had total control over.’

‘So let’s go,’ Simon said, pushing his cup away and reaching for his jacket.

‘No,’ Tony said firmly. ‘Simon, this is not the time for Action Man tactics. We need to plan carefully here. We can’t just go charging in mob-handed and hope what we find justifies the action. His lawyers would make mincemeat of us. We need to have a strategy.’

‘That’s easy for you to say, man,’ Leon said. ‘You’re not the one the cops are looking to arrest. You can sleep in your own bed at night. Simon needs this to be sorted.’

‘All right, all right,’ Chris said mildly. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to do a trawl locally with pictures of Donna Doyle. Looking at his timetable, she must have got there under her own steam. I bet he sends them up on the train or the coach. We need to blitz the bus terminal and the train station, talk to the staff. And the locals. If there’s a small local station near to Jack the Lad’s hideaway, somebody might have seen her getting off the train.’

Simon stood up, dark eyes burning. ‘So what are we waiting for?’

‘No point in hitting it before morning,’ Chris said.

‘It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from here. We’re not doing anything better, are we? Let’s go now, find a cheap hotel and get cracking first thing in the morning. You up for it, Leon?’

Leon stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Long as I don’t have to go in your car. What’re you driving, Chris?’

‘You wouldn’t like my music. We’ll take all the cars. OK, Tony?’

‘OK. Provided you stay well away from his house. I have your word on that, Chris?’

‘You got my word, Tony.’

‘That go for you two? Bearing in mind Chris is technically your senior officer?’

Leon scowled but gave a grudging nod. Simon, too, conceded. ‘OK. I probably shouldn’t be making the decisions anyway.’

‘What’ve you got planned, Tony?’ Chris asked.

‘I’m going home to draw up a full profile based on all we know now. I can’t say I blame you for wanting to hare off up the A1, but if Carol and Kay come back with the goods, I’m proposing we go to West Yorkshire first thing in the morning and persuade them to make this official. So, nothing except local inquiries until we’ve spoken. OK?’

Chris nodded sombrely. ‘Trust me, Tony. Shaz meant too much to me to risk fucking this up.’

If she’d been trying to take the gung-ho madness out of the two male officers’ eyes, she succeeded. Even Leon stopped bouncing on the balls of his feet. ‘I hadn’t forgotten that,’ Tony said. ‘Or how much she wanted to catch Jack the Lad.’

‘I know,’ Chris said. ‘Fucking mad bitch, she’d have loved this.’

Once upon a time she’d understood most of what there was to know about computers, Carol thought wistfully. Back around 1989, she was almost as much of a whizz with CP/M and DOS as her brother. But she’d gone into the police force and it had eaten up her life. While she’d been getting to grips with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, Michael had been assimilating software and hardware that often moved forward on a daily basis. Now she was the one-eyed woman in the kingdom of 20?20 vision. She knew enough to crunch numbers and process words, to retrieve lost files from limbo and to rewrite boot files so that a reluctant machine could be persuaded to talk to its user. But ten minutes with her brother and his mate Donny and she knew that, these days, this was the culinary equivalent of being able to boil a kettle. From the look on Kay’s face, it wasn’t any better for her. It was just as well she’d come along, Carol thought. At least she had enough knowledge to know when the boys were spinning off into a world of their own and the authority to drag them back to the job in hand.

The two men sitting in front of a computer screen the size of a pub TV muttered to each other incomprehensibly about video drivers, local buses and smart caches. Carol knew what the words meant, but she couldn’t connect them to anything they were doing with keyboard and mouse. Donny, Michael had told her, was the best man in the north when it came to computer-enhancing photographs or video stills. And he just happened to work in the same building where Michael’s software company had its suite of offices. And, in spite of Chris’s convictions, he was so devoid of a life that he was thrilled to be dragged away from
The X Files
and a microwave dinner to show off his toys.

Carol and Kay looked over their shoulders at the screen. Donny had already done everything he could with the number plate, yielding confirmation of the last two letters and a strong probability of a match with the third. Now he was working on the driver. He’d already tweaked and twiddled with some full-length shots of the man, pronouncing himself finally satisfied with one and printing out a couple of colour copies for the two women to pore over. The more Carol looked, the more convinced she was that under the Nike baseball cap and behind the aviator glasses, Jacko Vance was peeking out at her. ‘What do you think?’ she asked Kay.

‘I don’t know if you’d pick him out of a line-up, but if you know who you’re looking for, I think you can tell it’s him.’

Now, without any prompting from them, Donny was working on a head and shoulders of the man who’d filled the Golf with petrol at lunchtime on the Saturday Shaz Bowman died. It was hard to find a good shot to work with because the peak of the cap shaded his face most of the time when he wasn’t actually bending over the fuel tank. Only by advancing one frame at a time did Donny finally come up with a single shot where the man in the cap glanced swiftly up at the pump to check how much petrol he’d taken.

Watching Donny painstakingly improve the quality of the picture was agonizing. Carol couldn’t keep her eyes off her watch, gripped with the knowledge that she should be elsewhere and if anything happened in Seaford she’d be in deep shit. The minutes crawled by while the powerful processor drove a search through the computer’s massive memory for the next best alternative to the pixels on the screen. Although it was making more calculations per second than the human brain could comfortably comprehend, the computer seemed to Carol to take forever. At last, Donny turned away from the screen and pushed his own baseball cap back on his head. ‘Best you’re going to get,’ he said. ‘Funny, he looks familiar. Is he supposed to?’

‘Can you print me off half a dozen copies?’ Carol said. She felt mean ignoring his good-natured question, but it wasn’t the time or place to tell Donny that, apart from cheeks that were undeniably too chubby, the face he’d recreated was that of the nation’s favourite TV personality.

Michael was either quicker on the uptake or more familiar with the medium. ‘He looks like Jacko Vance, that’s what’s got you confused, Donny,’ he said innocently.

‘Yeah, right, that dickhead,’ Donny said, swinging round in his chair and blinking at the women. ‘Fucking hell, shame it’s not him you’re going to arrest. You’d be doing the world a favour, getting that shit he does off the box. Sorry I couldn’t get a better head shot, but there wasn’t a lot to go on. Where did you say you got the tape from?’

‘M1 services. Watford Gap,’ Kay said.

‘Yeah, right. Pity you weren’t looking for your man in Leeds.’

‘Leeds?’ Carol leapt on the word. ‘Why Leeds?’

‘Cos that’s where the state-of-the-art CCTV development company is. Seesee Vision. They are the total business. They think civil liberties is that posh but polite department store in London.’ He laughed at his own bad joke. ‘Double wicked fuckers, they are. You can’t miss them. That sodding great smoked glass monolith just after the end of the motorway. You want somebody coming off the M1 at Leeds, they’ve got it taped.’

‘What do you mean, somebody coming off at Leeds?’ Carol’s fingers were twitching with the desire to grab Donny by the shirt and make him get to the point.

Donny cast his eyes upwards as if he were tired of dealing with mental defectives. ‘Right. History lesson. Nineteenth-century Britain. Little pockets of mains water supply, gas providers, railway companies. Gradually, they all linked up to make national utilities. With me so far?’

‘And there’s me thinking nerds knew nothing about the Victorian era apart from Charles Babbage,’ Carol snapped. ‘OK, Donny, we did the Industrial Revolution at school. Can we get to CCTV?’

‘OK, OK, be chill. CCTV is kind of like the baby utilities were then. But soon it won’t be. Soon we’re going to have all these inner-city systems linking up with private security systems and motorway cameras and we’re going to have a national network of CCTV. And these systems will be so finely tuned that they can recognize you or your wheels and if you’re not supposed to be some place, then the big fuck-off security guards are gonna remove you. Like if you’re a convicted shoplifter and Marks and Sparks don’t want you hanging out in their food hall, or you’re a known perv and your local launderette doesn’t want you in there ogling the knickers-’ He made a throat-cutting gesture.

‘So what exactly has all this got to do with the M1?’

‘Seesee Vision are the masters of the universe when it comes to leading-edge techno. And they test all their new gear on the traffic flow off the M1. Their stuff is so well developed they can give you a high-res picture of the drivers and the front-seat passengers, never mind baby stuff like number plates.’ Donny shook his head in wonder. ‘I went for a job there, but I didn’t like it. You could tell it was seagull city.’

‘Seagull city?’ Carol asked faintly.

‘The bosses fly in, do a lot of screaming, grab everything worth having, crap over everybody and fly out again. Not my scene.’

‘Do you think they’d co-operate with me?’

‘They’d wet their pants. They’re desperate to make a big impression on your lot. When this national network finally creaks into being, they want to be in the driving seat. The company of choice.’

Carol looked at her watch. It was after ten. She should be heading back to Seaford, on the spot if her team had to swing into action. Besides, no one in authority would be at Seesee Vision at this time of night.

Donny spotted her glance and read her mind. ‘There’ll be somebody there this time of night, if that’s what you’re wondering. Give them a bell. You got nothing to lose.’

But Donna Doyle might, Carol thought, catching Kay’s pleading look. And besides, Leeds was halfway between Manchester and Seaford. Her team were grown-ups. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d had to think for themselves.

First, the victims. It was always the place to start. The problem here was to convince anyone that there were victims. It was always possible that they were wrong, Tony realized. They so badly wanted Shaz to have been right, they so desperately needed to be instrumental in putting a stop to the person who had killed her that they might all be deluding themselves about the value of the material they had uncovered. It was almost conceivable that the circumstantial evidence piling up against Jacko Vance was just that and no more.

But that way madness lay. Madness and the prospect of poor Simon being arrested as soon as he crossed the threshold of his own home. ‘The victims,’ Tony said. He stared at the laptop screen and started to type.

THE CASE FOR A SERIAL OFFENDER

The first known victim in this putative cluster is Barbara Fenwick whose murder took place twelve years ago (see attached summary prepared by DC Leon Jackson for crime details). We can say with some degree of certainty that this was the first killing by this perpetrator since there is no previous record of this signature behaviour, namely the pulverizing of the lower right arm. This is clearly signature behaviour; there is no need to inflict such an injury in order to commit sexual assault and murder. It is extraneous, it is ritualistic and therefore it is safe to assume that it has particular significance for this offender. Given the ceremonial nature of this signature behaviour, it is likely that he has used the same implement to produce these injuries in all his killings; other victims could therefore be expected to display very similar disfigurement.