The Wire in the Blood. Val McDermid
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it came, Brandon’s question was hardly a surprise. ‘So how are you settling in on the ground?’ His voice was casual, but his eyes were watchful.
‘Obviously, they’re wary of me. Not only am I a woman, which on the evolutionary scale in East Yorkshire comes somewhere between a ferret and a whippet, but I’m also the Chief Constable’s nark. Brought in from the big city to crack the whip,’ she said ironically.
‘I was afraid you’d get lumbered with that,’ Brandon said. ‘But you must have known how it would be when you took the job on.’
Carol shrugged. ‘It’s not come as a surprise. But there’s been rather less of it than I anticipated. Maybe they’re all still on their best behaviour, but I think the Seaford Central Division CID are not a bad crew. Because they were stuck out in the boondocks before the reorganization and nobody was paying much attention, they’ve got a bit lazy, a bit sloppy. I suspect one or two might be spending a bit more than they’re earning, but I don’t think there’s any deep-rooted, systemic corruption.’
Brandon nodded, satisfied. Trusting Carol Jordan’s judgement had been a steep learning curve for him, and he’d known instinctively she was the one senior officer he wanted to tempt away from Bradfield. With her setting the tone in Seaford, word would spread through other divisions and the CID culture would adapt accordingly, given time. Time and a certain amount of stick which Brandon wasn’t afraid to apply. ‘Anything on the books that’s causing you a problem?’
Carol finished her coffee and poured herself another cup, offering the pot to Brandon, who refused with a shake of the head. She frowned in thought, gathering her arsenal of information. ‘There is something,’ she said. ‘Since we’re talking informally?’
Brandon nodded.
‘Well, I noticed going through the overnights that there seemed to be a positive spate of unexplained fires and query arsons. All at night, all in unoccupied premises like schools, factories, cafés, warehouses. None of them very big in itself, but taken together, you’re looking at a lot of damage. I put a team together to re-interview the previous victims, see if we could find any connection – financially or insurance-wise. Zilch. But I went myself to talk to the local fire chief, and he produced a series of incidents going back about four months. None of the fires could be absolutely, positively put down as arson, but circumstantially, he reckons there have been something between six and a dozen possible deliberate fires per month on his patch,’ Carol said.
‘A serial arsonist?’ Brandon said softly.
‘It’s hard to imagine another interpretation,’ Carol agreed.
‘And you want to do what, exactly?’
‘I want to catch him,’ she said with a grin.
‘Well, what else?’ Brandon smiled. ‘Did you have something specific in mind?’ he continued mildly.
‘I want to carry on working with the team I’ve already got on it, and I want to do a profile.’
Brandon frowned. ‘Bring someone in?’
‘No,’ Carol said sharply. ‘There’s not really enough evidence to justify the expense. I think I can take a pretty good stab at it myself.’
Brandon looked impassively at Carol. ‘You’re not a psychologist.’
‘No, but I learned a lot last year, working with Tony Hill. And since then, I’ve read everything about profiling I could find.’
‘You should have applied for the National Task Force,’ Brandon said, keeping his eyes fixed on her.
Carol felt her skin burn. She hoped the wine and the coffee would account for her heightened colour. ‘I don’t think they were looking for officers of my rank,’ she said. ‘Apart from Commander Bishop, there’s no one above the rank of sergeant. Besides, I prefer to work a patch, get to know the people and the ground.’
‘They’re due to be up and running a full case-load in a few weeks,’ Brandon continued implacably. ‘Maybe they’d welcome something like this to cut their teeth on before then.’
‘Maybe they would,’ Carol said. ‘But it’s my case. And I’m not ready to let it go.’
‘Fine,’ Brandon said, interested that Carol had already developed such fierce possessiveness about the work of the East Yorkshire force. ‘But keep me posted, yes?’
‘Of course,’ Carol said. Her sense of relief, she told herself, was entirely because she would now have the chance to cover herself and her team in glory when they cracked the case. Deep down, though, she knew she was lying.
Sleeping in what the estate agent had referred to as the guest bedroom of Shaz’s flat would have been beyond most people, particularly if they were the sort who needed to read a few pages before they could nod off. While the bookcase in the living room contained an innocuous mix of middlebrow middle-of-the-road modern fiction, the shelves in the room Shaz thought of as her study held only hard-core horror, most of it masquerading as textbooks. There were a few novels by pathologists of psychopathy and anatomists of agony like Barbara Vine and Thomas Harris, but most of Shaz’s working library was both stranger and more brutal than fiction ever dared to be. If there had been a vocational course for serial killers, her library would have comprised the set books.
The lowest shelves held those items which mildly embarrassed her – pulp true-crime biographies of notorious serial killers with lurid nicknames, sensational accounts of careers that had robbed hundreds of people of their trust and their lives. Arranged above these were the more respectable versions of those same lives, portentous renderings that provided thoughtful revelations and insights sociological, psychological and sometimes illogical.
Next, at eye-level for anyone sitting at the table that held Shaz’s notepads and laptop, were the battle stories of the veterans of the war against serial offenders. Since it was the best part of twenty years since the infancy of offender profiling, the pioneers had been trickling into retirement for a few years now, each determined to augment his pension with graphic accounts of his contribution to the latest soft science with the case histories of his notable successes and a passing gloss over his failures. They were, thus far, all men.
Above these autobiographies was the serious stuff; books with titles like The Psychopathology of Sexual Homicide, Crime Scene Analysis and Serial Rape: A Clinical Study. The top shelf gave the only indications that she aspired to be hunter rather than hunted, with its selection of legal texts, including a couple of guides to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. It was a comprehensive collection and Shaz hadn’t amassed it in the mere couple of months since she’d won her place on the task force; it had been years in the building, helping her prepare for the day she’d always been convinced would come, when she’d be called upon to bring her very own notorious killer to book. If textual familiarity alone caught criminals, Shaz would have had the best arrest record in the country.
She had begged off the nightclub run following the curry in spite of the blandishments of the other three. It wasn’t just that she had never been a great one for clubbing. Tonight, her spare room was infinitely more tempting than anything a DJ or a barman had to offer. The truth was, she’d been in a ferment all evening, eager to get back to her computer and to finish the comparisons she’d begun to run through her database that afternoon. In the three days since Tony had set their assignment, Shaz had spent every spare moment working her way through the thirty sketchy sets of case notes. At last, the opportunity had come to put into practice all the theories and tricks of the trade she’d picked up in her reading. She’d read the papers from start to finish, not once, but three times. Not until she was fairly sure she had them well differentiated in her head did she approach her computer.
The database Shaz used hadn’t represented the leading edge of software development way back when she’d copied it from a fellow student, and now it was practically a candidate for display in a computing museum. But while it might not have all the latest bells and whistles, it was more than capable of performing what she needed. It displayed the material clearly, it allowed her to create