The Wire in the Blood (24 page)

‘What about timing?’ Carol interrupted. ‘He’s doing it more often than he was when he started out. Isn’t that typical of a serial offender?’

‘Yeah, it’s in all the books about serial killers,’ Pendlebury added.

‘It’s less true of firebugs,’ Tony said. ‘Especially the ones who go in for the more serious arson attacks like this. The gaps are unpredictable. They can go weeks, months or even years without a big blaze. But within the series, you do get sprees, so yes, the timing of these fires might support the idea that you’re looking at a serial offender. But I’m not trying to suggest that these fires are the work of several individuals. I think it’s one person. I just don’t believe he’s a thrill seeker.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Carol said.

‘Whoever is setting these fires is not a psychopath. I believe he has a conventional criminal motive for what he’s doing.’

‘So what is this so-called motive?’ Pendlebury asked suspiciously.

‘That’s what we don’t know yet.’

Pendlebury snorted. ‘Minor detail.’

‘Actually, in a sense it is, Jim,’ Carol chipped in. ‘Because once we’ve established that it’s not a psychopath operating on unique and personal logic, we should be able to apply reasoning to uncover what’s behind the fires. And once we’ve done that…well, it’s just a matter of solid coppering.’

A look of disgruntled annoyance had settled over Jim Pendlebury’s face like an occluded cold front on the weather map. ‘Well, I can’t think of any reason for setting these fires unless you get a kick out of them.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Tony said casually, starting almost to enjoy himself.

‘Share it then, Sherlock,’ Carol urged him.

‘Could be a security firm coming round in the wake of the fires offering cut-rate night watchmen. Could be a fire-alarm or sprinkler-system company facing hard times. Or…’ his voice tailed off and he cast a look of speculation at the fire chief.

‘What?’

‘Jim, do you employ any part-time firemen?’

Pendlebury looked horrified. Then he took in the half-smile twitching the corner of Tony’s mouth and misread it completely. The fire chief visibly relaxed and grinned. ‘You’re at the wind-up,’ he said, wagging a finger at Tony.

‘If you say so,’ Tony said. ‘But do you? Just as a matter of curiosity?’

The fireman’s eyes showed uncertainty and suspicion. ‘We do, yes.’

‘Maybe tomorrow you could let me have their names?’ Carol asked.

Pendlebury’s head thrust forward and he stared intently into Carol’s closed face. His broad shoulders seemed to expand as he clenched his fists. ‘My God,’ he said wonderingly. ‘You really mean it, don’t you, Carol?’

‘We can’t afford to ignore any possibilities,’ she said calmly. ‘This is not personal, Jim. But Tony has opened up a valid line of inquiry. I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t follow it through.’

‘Derelict in your duty?’ Pendlebury got to his feet. ‘If my fire crews were derelict in their duty, there wouldn’t be a building in this city left standing. My people put their lives on the line every time this nutter has a night on the town. And you sit there and suggest one of them might be behind it?’

Carol stood up and faced him. ‘I’d feel just the same if it was a question of a bent copper. No one’s accusing anyone at this stage. I’ve worked with Tony before, and I’d stake my career that he doesn’t make mischievous or ill-considered suggestions. Why don’t you sit down and have another glass of wine?’ She put a hand on his arm and smiled. ‘Come on, there’s no need for us to fall out.’

Slowly Pendlebury relaxed and gingerly lowered himself back into his chair. He allowed Carol to top up his glass and even managed a half-smile at Tony. ‘I’m very protective of my officers,’ he said.

Tony, impressed at Carol’s smooth handling of a potentially explosive situation, had shrugged. ‘They’re lucky to have you,’ was all he said.

Somehow, the three of them managed to shift the conversation on to the more neutral territory of how Carol was settling in at East Yorkshire. The fire chief slipped into professional Yorkshireman mode, keeping everyone happy with a series of anecdotes. For Tony, it was a blessed rescue from thoughts of Shaz Bowman’s last hours.

Later, in the small hours and the loneliness of Carol’s spare room, there was no distraction to damp down the flames of imagination. As he pushed away the nightmare vision of her distorted and devastated face, he promised Shaz Bowman that he would expose the man who had done this to her. No matter what the price.

And Tony Hill was a man who knew all about paying the ferryman.

Jacko Vance sat in his soundproofed and electronically shielded projection room at the top of the house, behind locked doors. Obsessively, he replayed the tape he’d spliced together from his recordings of the late evening news bulletins on a variety of channels, terrestrial and satellite. What they all had in common was the news of Shaz Bowman’s death. Her blue eyes blazed at him again from the screen time after time, an exciting contrast to his last memory of her.

They wouldn’t be showing pictures of her like that. Not even after the watershed. Not even with an X-certificate.

He wondered how Donna Doyle was feeling. There had been nothing on TV about her. They all thought they had star quality, but the truth was none of them raised the faintest flicker of interest in anyone except him. For him, they were perfect, the ultimate representation of his ideal woman. He loved their pliancy, their willingness to believe exactly what he wanted them to believe. And the perfection of the moment when they realized this encounter was not about sex and fame but pain and death. He loved that look in their eyes.

When he saw that translation from adoration to alarm, their faces seemed to lose all individuality. They no longer merely resembled Jillie, they became her. It made the punishment so easy and so perfectly right.

What also made it appropriate was the unfairness. Almost all of his girls spoke about their families with affection. It might be shrouded behind a veil of adolescent frustration and exasperation, but it was obvious as he listened to them that their mothers or fathers or siblings cared about them even though their sluttish readiness to do whatever he wanted demonstrated they didn’t merit that concern. He’d deserved their lives, and what had he got?

Anger surged through him, but like a thermostat, self-control cut in and tamped the fires down. This was not an appropriate time or place for that energy, he reminded himself. His anger could be channelled in a variety of useful directions; ranting pointlessly about what he had been deprived of wasn’t one of them.

He took a series of deep breaths and forced his emotions into another mould. Satisfaction. That’s what he ought to be feeling. Satisfaction at a job well done, a danger neutralized.

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner
Eating his pudding and pie.
He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum
And said, ‘What a good boy am I!’

Vance giggled softly. He’d put in his thumbs and pulled out the glistening plum of Shaz Bowman’s eyes and felt the silent scream vibrating in his very core. It had been easier than he’d expected. It took surprisingly little force to pop an eye free from its roots.

The only pity of it was that you couldn’t then see her expression when you poured the acid in or sliced the ears off. He didn’t anticipate any need for there to be a next time, but if there were, he’d have to think carefully about the order of the ceremony.

Sighing with satisfaction, he rewound the tape.

If Micky hadn’t been such a purist about her morning routine, they might have heard about Shaz’s death on the radio news or seen it on satellite TV. But Micky insisted on no exposure to the day’s news until she was behind the closed door of her office at the studios. So they breakfasted to Mozart and drove in to Wagner. No one from the programme was ever foolish enough to thrust a tabloid at Micky as she strode from car parking slot to her desk. Not twice, anyway.

So, because their early morning start forced them to bed before the late bulletins that had alerted Jacko, it was Betsy who had the first shock of recognition at Shaz’s picture. Even dulled by newsprint, her blue eyes were still the first thing that demanded notice. ‘My God,’ Betsy breathed, moving round behind Micky’s desk the better to examine the front pages.

‘What is it?’ Micky said without pausing in the habitual process of removing her jacket, placing it on a hanger and checking it critically for creases.

‘Look, Micky.’ Betsy thrust the
Daily Mail
towards her. ‘Isn’t that the policewoman who came to the house on Saturday? Just as we were leaving?’

Micky registered the thick black type before she took in the photograph. SLAUGHTERED, it read. Her eyes moved to Shaz Bowman’s smiling face underneath the peak of a Metropolitan Police cap. ‘There can’t be two of them,’ she said. She sat down heavily on one of the visitors’ armchairs that faced her desk and read the melodramatic copy that provided Shaz’s epitaph. Words like ‘nightmare’, ‘gory’, ‘blood-soaked’, ‘agony’ and ‘gruesome’ leapt out to ambush her. She felt strangely queasy.

In a television career that had spanned war zones, massacres and individual tragedy, no one in Micky’s life had ever been touched personally by any of the catastrophes she had reported. Even a connection as tangential as hers to Shaz Bowman was all the more shocking because it had no precedent. ‘Jesus,’ she said, stretching the syllables. She looked up at Betsy, who read the shock in her face. ‘She was in our house on Saturday morning. According to this, they think she was murdered late Saturday or early Sunday. We spoke to her. And within hours, she was dead. What are we going to do, Bets?’

Betsy moved round the desk and crouched beside Micky, hands flat on her thighs, staring up into her face. ‘We’re going to do nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s not up to us to do anything. She came to see Jacko, not us. She’s nothing to do with us.’

Micky looked appalled. ‘We can’t do
nothing
,’ she protested. ‘Whoever killed her, they must have hooked up with her after she left our house. At the very least, it lets the police know she was alive and well and walking around of her own free will in London on Saturday morning. We can’t ignore it, Bets.’

‘Sweetheart, take a deep breath and think about what you’re saying. This isn’t any old murder victim. She was a police officer. That means her colleagues are not going to be satisfied with a one-page statement saying she came to the house and we left. They’re going to be stripping our lives down to the bone, on the off chance that there’s something there they should know about. You know and I know that we just won’t stand up to that kind of scrutiny. I say, leave it to Jacko. I’ll give him a call and tell him to say we’d gone before she arrived. It’s simplest that way.’

Micky pushed herself back violently. The chair slid along the carpet and Betsy almost toppled forward. Micky jumped to her feet and started pacing agitatedly. ‘And what happens if they start questioning the neighbours and there’s some nosy old biddy who remembers DC Bowman arriving and then us leaving? Anyway, I was the one who spoke to her in the first place. I made the appointment. What if she jotted that down in her notebook? What if she even taped the call, for God’s sake? I can’t believe you think we should just shut up about it.’

Betsy struggled to her feet, her chin tipped back to reveal a stubborn set to her firm jaw. ‘If you’d stop being such a bloody drama queen, you’d see I’m talking sense,’ she said in a low, angry voice. She’d spent too long providing the advice that Micky routinely acted upon to abandon the role now it had become so crucial. ‘No good will come of it,’ she added ominously.

Micky stopped by the desk and picked up the phone. ‘I’m ringing Jacko,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘He won’t be up yet. At least I can break the news more gently than the tabloids.’

‘Good. Maybe he’ll talk some sense into you,’ Betsy said caustically.

‘I’m not calling for permission, Betsy. I’m calling to tell him I’m about to phone the police.’ As she punched in her husband’s private number, Micky looked sadly at her lover. ‘God, I can’t believe you’re running so scared that you’d kid yourself you can walk away from doing the right thing.’

‘It’s called love,’ Betsy said bitterly, turning away to hide the tears of anger and humiliation that had sprung without warning.

‘No, Betsy. It’s called fear…Hello, Jacko? It’s me. Listen, I’ve got some terrible news for you…’

Betsy turned her head and watched Micky’s mobile face with its frame of silky blonde hair. It was a sight that had given her pleasure beyond dreams of avarice over the years. All she felt now was an unreasonable, unfathomable sense of impending disaster.

Jacko leaned back on his pillows and considered what he’d just heard. He’d been in two minds whether to call the police himself. On the one hand, it argued for his innocence, since, for all he knew, nobody outside his household knew DC Bowman had been anywhere near him. On the other hand, it made him look a little too eager to be involved in a high-profile murder inquiry. And one of the things everyone who had read a book on psychopathic killers knew was that the murderer often tried to insert himself into the investigation.

Leaving it to Micky was somehow much safer. It demonstrated his innocence at second hand; she was his devoted wife, crammed with public probity and therefore to be trusted in her account of events. He knew it was safe to assume she’d go straight to the police as soon as she saw Shaz’s picture, which would be well before his normal rising time, so there would be no question of him having known and said nothing. Because, of course, officer, he’d been too busy to watch the evening news the previous day. Why, sometimes he barely had time to watch his own show, never mind his wife’s!

What he had to do now was to work out his strategy. There would be no question of him having to schlepp up to Leeds to talk to the investigating plods; the police would come to him, he felt sure. If he was proved wrong, he wouldn’t call in any favours just yet. He’d play along, the magnanimous man with nothing to hide. Of course you can have an autograph for your wife, officer.