The Wire in the Blood (52 page)

He turned slowly to face Vance. ‘But it would if the vice matched Barbara Fenwick’s bone injuries, wouldn’t it? Serial killers often like to use the same weapon for all their murders. But it’s hard to imagine a stalker who’s followed you around on a killing spree for twelve years and never put a foot wrong, don’t you think?’

This time, he saw a flicker of uncertainty in Vance’s confident mask. ‘What utter rubbish. Just for the sake of argument, even if you got an exhumation order, no Crown Prosecutor is going to push a case that depends on a mark on a piece of bone that’s been in the ground for twelve years.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Tony said. ‘But you see, the pathologist who did the postmortem on Barbara Fenwick had never seen injuries quite like that. They intrigued her. And she is a university professor. Professor Elizabeth Stewart, actually. She applied to the Home Office to retain Barbara Fenwick’s arm so she could use it as a teaching aid. To illustrate the effect on bone and flesh of blunt trauma from compression. Funnily enough, she noticed that there was a slight imperfection on the bottom edge of the implement that inflicted the injuries. A tiny projection of metal that made a mark in bone as distinctive as a fingerprint.’ He let the words hang in the air. Vance’s eyes never left his face.

‘When Professor Stewart moved to London, she left the arm behind. For the last twelve years, Barbara Fenwick’s arm has been perfectly preserved in the anatomy department of Manchester University.’ Tony smiled gently. ‘One solid piece of irrefutable evidence tying you to a weapon used on a murder victim, and suddenly the circumstantial looks very different, don’t you think?’

He walked to the door and opened it. ‘And by the way—I don’t fancy your wife in the slightest.
I’ve
never been so inadequate that I had to hide behind a lesbian.’

In the corridor, Tony signalled to the uniformed officer by the door that he should go back into the interview room. Then, exhausted by the effort of confronting Vance, he leaned against the wall, sliding down into a squat, elbows on knees and hands over his face.

He was still there ten minutes later when Carol Jordan emerged from the viewing room where she and Marshall had watched the encounter between the hunter and the killer. She crouched in front of him and took his head between her hands. He looked into her face. ‘What do you think?’ he said anxiously.

‘You convinced Phil Marshall,’ she said. ‘He’s spoken to Professor Stewart. She wasn’t too thrilled at being woken in the middle of the night, but when Marshall explained what was what, she got really excited. There’s a train gets in from London around nine. She’ll be on it, with her famous slides of the injury. Marshall’s organized someone to go over and collect Barbara Fenwick’s arm from Manchester University first thing. If it looks like a match, they’ll charge him.’

Tony closed his eyes. ‘I just hope he’s still using the same vice.’

‘Oh, I think you’ll find he is,’ Carol said eagerly. ‘We were watching. You couldn’t see from where you were, but when you hit him with Professor Stewart and her preserved arm, his right leg started jittering up and down. He couldn’t control it. He’s still got the same vice. I’d stake my life on it.’

Tony felt a smile gather the corners of his mouth. ‘I think the fat lady just landed.’ He put his arms round Carol and stood up, bringing her with him. He held her at arm’s length and grinned down at her.

‘You did a great job in there. I’m really proud to be on your team.’ Her face was solemn, her eyes grave.

Tony dropped his arms and took a deep breath. ‘Carol, I’ve been running away from you for a long time,’ he said.

Carol nodded. ‘I think I understand why.’ She looked down, reluctant to meet his eyes now they were finally having this conversation.

‘Oh?’

The muscles along her jaw tightened, then she looked up at him. ‘I didn’t have blood on my hands. So I could never understand what it feels like to be you. Di Earnshaw’s death changed that. And the fact that neither of us could save Donna…’

Tony nodded bleakly. ‘It’s not a comfortable thing to have in common.’

Carol had often visualized a moment like this between them. She had thought she knew what she wanted to happen. Now, she was taken aback to find her responses so different from what she had imagined. She put a hand on his forearm and said, ‘It’s easier for friends to share than lovers, Tony.’

He gazed at her for a long moment, frowning. He thought of the bodies Jacko Vance had incinerated in the hospital where he gave his time to sit with the dying. He thought of the loss of what Shaz Bowman could have achieved. He thought of all the other deaths that still lay ahead of them both. And he thought of redemption, not through work, but through friendship. His face cleared and he smiled. ‘You know, I think you could be right.’

Epilogue

Murder was like magic, he thought. The quickness of his hand had always deceived the eye, and that was how it was going to stay. They thought they had him trapped, sewn into a bag and wrapped with chains of guilt. They thought they were lowering him into a tank of proof that would drown him. But he was Houdini. He would burst free when they least expected it.

Jacko Vance lay on the narrow police cell bed, the real arm tucked behind his head. He stared at the ceiling, remembering how he had felt in hospital, the only other place where he’d had no choice about staying put. There had been pockets of despair and impotent anger and he knew those would probably afflict him again before he was free of this place and others like it. But when he’d been in hospital, he’d known he would be free of it all one day and he’d focused all his powerful intelligence on shaping that moment.

True, he’d had Micky’s help then. He wondered if he could still rely on her. He thought that as long as he could cast credible doubt, she would stand by him. As soon as it looked like he was going under, she’d be gone. Since he had no intention of letting that happen, he thought he could probably be sure of her.

The evidence was flimsy. But he couldn’t deny that Tony Hill was impressive in his command of it. He would be hard to discredit in a courtroom, even if Vance succeeded in planting advance press stories accusing the psychologist of being obsessed with Micky. And there was a risk there. Hill had somehow discovered that Micky was a lesbian. If he leaked that in response to an accusation against him, it would do serious damage both to Micky’s credibility and his own image as a man who needed no other woman but his adorable wife.

No, if it came to a court battle, even with a jury of telly addicts, Vance would be at risk. He had to make certain it never went past a preliminary hearing. He had to destroy the evidence against him, to demonstrate there was no case to answer.

The greatest threat came from the pathologist and her reading of the toolmarks. If he could discredit that, there were only circumstantial details. Together, they weighed heavy, but individually, they could be undermined. The vice was too solid a piece of substantiation to submit to that.

The first step was to cast doubt on whether the arm from the university really belonged to Barbara Fenwick. In a university pathology department, it could not be held under the sort of security of a police evidence room. Anyone could have had access to it over the years. It could even have been replaced with another arm deliberately crushed in his vice by, say, a police officer determined to frame him. Or students could have swapped it in some macabre prank. Yes, a little work there could force a few cracks into the reliability of the preserved arm.

The second step was to prove the vice had not belonged to him when Barbara Fenwick had died. He lay on the hard mattress and racked his brains to find an answer. ‘Phyllis,’ he eventually murmured, a sly smile creeping across his face. ‘Phyllis Gates.’

She’d had terminal cancer. It had started in her left breast then worked its way through her lymphatic system and finally, agonizingly, into her spine. He’d spent several nights by her bedside, sometimes talking, sometimes simply holding her hand in silence. He loved the sense of power that working with the virtual dead gave him. They’d be gone, and he would still be here, on top of the world. Phyllis Gates was long gone, but her twin brother Terry was alive and well. Presumably he was still running his market stall.

Terry sold tools. New and second-hand. Terry credited Vance with the only happiness his sister had known in the last weeks of her life. Terry would walk on hot coals for Vance. Terry would think telling a jury he’d sold the vice to Vance only a couple of years previously was the least he could do to repay the debt.

Vance sat upright, stretching out his arms like a hero accepting the adulation of the crowd. He’d worked it out. He was as good as a free man. Murder was indeed like magic. And one day soon, Tony Hill would find that out for himself. Vance could hardly wait.

Acknowledgements

It’s hard to imagine how I could have written this book without a lot of help from several key people. For their specialist knowledge and willingness to give so freely of their expertise, I’d like to thank Sheila Radford, Dr Mike Berry, Jai Penna, Paula Tyler and Dr Sue Black. I owe an apology to Edwina and Lesley, who ran around like headless chickens researching something that was cut in the rewrites. Without Jim and Simon at Thornton Electronics, Mac and Manda, I would almost certainly have had a complete nervous breakdown when the hard disk crashed. But the perseverance and perspicacity of three women in particular got me through to the end. For that reason, this book is for:

Julia, Lisanne and Brigid
With love

About the Author

Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three years as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid. Now a full-time writer, she lives in Cheshire.

The Wire in the Blood
is Val McDermid’s second book featuring criminal profiler, Tony Hill. The first,
The Mermaids Singing
, won the 1995 Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year. The third,
The Last Temptation
, is now available in paperback.

A Place of Execution
, a complex and disturbing stand-alone thriller, was awarded the 2001 LA Times Book of the Year Award (Mystery/Thriller category). Her other stand-alone thriller,
Killing the Shadows
, received critical acclaim on its release in 2000.

She has also written six crime novels featuring Manchester PI Kate Brannigan, and the latest of these,
Star Struck
, won the Grand Prix des Romans d’Aventure in France.

A further five novels feature journalist-sleuth Lindsay Gordon.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Praise for
The Wire in the Blood

‘This is a shocking book, stunningly exciting, horrifyingly good. It is so convincing that one fears reality may be like this and these events the awful truth’

RUTH RENDELL

‘
The Wire in the Blood
is truly frightening. McDermid’s capacity to enter the warped mind of a deviant criminal is shiveringly convincing, and she is equally adept at portraying the interactions, allegiances and petty jealousies that exist among the investigators. Hill, driven and disturbed, is an appealing and original character. This is a writer who just gets better and better’

MARCEL BERLINS,
The Times

‘Terrific chiller from Manchester’s answer to Thomas Harris. Val McDermid can do what the Americans do so effortlessly—get inside the mind of a serial killer. Thank God for Dr Tony Hill and psychological profiling’

LUCRETIA STEWART,
Guardian

‘Tension-filled sequel to
The Mermaids Singing
…The story, handled with verve, wit and style, never flags’

FRANCES FYFIELD,
Mail on Sunday

‘This is a clever and exciting thriller’

SUSANNA YAGER,
Sunday Telegraph

‘The novel has the same compelling combination of sexual-political mischief and Jacobean psychological intensity that earned the author the crime novel of the year award…for
The Mermaids Singing
’

JOHN DUGDALE,
Sunday Times

‘The book [has] a sense of gravitas and intelligence utterly beyond lesser writers in the field…This is a wholly satisfying read which cleverly subverts tradition and expectation. Having already awarded her previous Tony Hill novel a Gold Dagger, someone better be smelting the platinum’

IAN RANKIN,
Scotland on Sunday

‘The plot is a cracker…You will shiver in your socks longer than usual after reaching the last page. And you will almost certainly rush to buy Val McDermid’s follow-up novel’

CARLA McKAY,
Daily Mail

‘McDermid is no novice at tense thriller writing and it shows. Her handling is sly and sophisticated, weaving the mundane with the stomach-churningly depraved’

JULIE CARPENTER,
Express on Sunday

‘Blood count exceptionally high; horripulation guaranteed’

PHILIP OAKES,
Literary Review

‘Intelligent, convincing and compelling,
The Wire in the Blood
takes risks with plot and character, undercutting all the normal devices of thriller structure in a highly readable and scary book’

New Woman

‘Her writing is never less than excellent, and she keeps the multiple ensemble cast together…Not one to give even a minor character short shrift, she has worked very hard to pack it all in’

Crime Time

‘As usual Val McDermid…orchestrates the macabre melange of TV stardom, murder and detective work like a master’

ERIC JACKSON,
Manchester Evening News