The Wire in the Blood (26 page)

Wharton opened a folder and placed a sheet of paper in front of Tony. ‘For the tape, I am showing Dr Hill a photostat of DC Bowman’s diary for the week of her death. There are two entries for the day she was murdered. JV, nine thirty. And the letter T. I put it to you, Dr Hill, that you had arranged to meet Shaz Bowman on Saturday. That you did in fact meet her on Saturday.’

Tony ran a hand through his hair. The confirmation of Carol’s idea that Shaz would have confronted Vance with what she knew gave him no satisfaction. ‘Inspector, I made no such arrangement. The last time I saw Shaz alive was at the end of the working day on Friday. What I was doing on Saturday could not be less relevant to this inquiry.’

McCormick leaned forward and spoke softly. ‘I’m not so sure about that. T for Tony. She could have been meeting you. She could have met you out of office hours away from the squad room, and the boyfriend could have found out about it and let it wind him up. Maybe he confronted her with it and she admitted she fancied you more than she fancied him?’

Tony’s lip twitched in contempt. ‘Is that the best you can come up with? That’s pathetic, McCormick. I’ve had patients who came up with more credible fantasies. Surely you must recognize that the crucial thing here is the diary entry that says JV, nine thirty? Shaz may have
intended
talking to me after that interview, but she never made it. If you’re interested in what the killer was doing on Saturday, you really should be checking out Jacko Vance and his entourage.’ As soon as the name was out of his mouth, Tony knew he’d blown it. McCormick shook his head pityingly and Wharton jumped to his feet, his chair shrieking on the cheap vinyl flooring.

‘Jacko Vance tries to
save
lives, not take them. You’re the one with the track record here,’ Wharton shouted. ‘You’ve already killed somebody, haven’t you, Dr Hill? And as you psychologists are always telling us, once the taboo’s breached, it’s gone for good. Once a killer…Fill in the blanks, Doctor. Fill in the fucking blanks.’

Tony closed his eyes. His chest hurt, as if a punch to the diaphragm had robbed him of air. All the progress he’d made over the past year was stripped away and again he smelled sweat and blood, felt them slick on his hands, heard the screams ripped from his own throat, tasted the Judas kiss. His eyes snapped open and he looked at Wharton and McCormick with a hatred he’d forgotten he was capable of. ‘That’s it,’ he said, standing up. ‘Next time you want to talk to me, you’ll have to arrest me. And you’d better make sure my lawyer’s on the premises when you do.’

Only his desire not to give them the satisfaction held him together as he marched out of the interview room, through the police station and out into the fresh air. No one made any move to stop him. He set off across the car park, desperate to make it to the street before his stomach lost its battle with breakfast. Just as he reached the kerb, a car pulled up beside him and the passenger window descended. Simon McNeill’s dark head loomed towards him. ‘Want a lift?’

Tony recoiled as if from a blow. ‘No…I…No thanks.’

‘Come on,’ Simon urged. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. They kept me in half the night. They’ll try and pin this on me given half a chance. We need to find out who killed Shaz before they decide it’s time to make an arrest.’

Tony leaned into the car. ‘Simon, listen very carefully to me. You’re right that they want it to be one of us. I’m not sure they’d go so far as to manufacture evidence against anybody. But I don’t intend to sit back and wait and see if that happens. I intend to find out who’s behind this, and I can’t have you along. It’s dangerous enough going up against a man who’s capable of what this guy did to Shaz. It’ll be hard enough for me to watch my own back without having to watch yours as well. You might be a great detective, but when it comes to going head to head with psychopaths like this, you’re an absolute beginner. So do us both a favour. Please. Go home. Deal with your loss. Don’t try to be a hero, Simon. I don’t want to bury another one of you.’

Simon looked as if he wanted to burst into tears and thump Tony. ‘I’m not a child. I’m a trained detective. I’ve worked on murder squads. I cared about her. You can’t shut me out. You can’t stop me nailing this bastard.’

A long sigh. ‘No, I can’t. But Shaz was a trained detective. She’d worked on murders. She knew she was rattling a killer’s cage. And she still got demolished. Not just killed, but annihilated. It’s not conventional police methods that are going to sort this out, Simon. I’ve done this once before. Believe me, I know what it’s like and I wouldn’t wish it on another living soul. Go home, Simon.’

With a screech of rubber on asphalt, Simon’s car streaked away from the kerb. Tony watched it take the next left far too fast, the rear spoiler fishtailing out of sight. He hoped it would be the biggest risk Simon had to take until Shaz’s killer was dealt with. He knew a traffic accident would be the least of his own worries.

Chapter 19

There was something to be said for delirium. When feverish sweat ran down her face and added another layer to the sour staleness that covered her sticky skin, it meant she could escape into hallucinations that were infinitely preferable to reality.

Donna Doyle lay huddled against the wall, holding on to the chimeras of childhood memory as if they could somehow save her. One year, her mum and dad had taken her to the Valentine Fair at Leeds. Candyfloss, hot dogs and onions, the blurry kaleidoscope of lights on the waltzer, the sparkling jeweller’s window of the city spread beneath her from the top of the Ferris wheel as they swung gently in the cold night air, the neon glow of the fair like a carpet at their feet.

Her dad had won her a big teddy bear, electric pink fun fur with a goofy grin stitched across its white face. It had been the last present he’d given her before he died. It was all his fault, Donna thought, snivelling. If he hadn’t gone and died, none of this would have happened. They wouldn’t have been poor and she wouldn’t have had to think about being a telly star, she could have listened to her mum and stuck in at school and gone to university.

Tears crept out of the corners of her eyes and she beat her left fist against the wall. ‘I hate you,’ she cried, screaming at the wavering image of a thin-faced man who had adored his daughter. ‘I hate you, you bastard!’

At least the incoherent sobs tired her out, letting her consciousness slide mercifully from her again.

Chapter 20

The brashness that characterized Leon’s performance among his peers was gone. Instead, he was locked behind the blank insolent face he’d seen on too many young blacks, both in custody and on the street. His street. He might have the warrant card that said he was one of them, but he had enough smarts to know that the two Yorkshiremen sitting across the interview room table were still The Man.

‘So, Leon,’ Wharton was saying in seemingly expansive mode, ‘what you’re telling us squares with what we’ve already heard from DC Hallam. The pair of you met at four o’clock and went tenpin bowling. Then you went for a drink in the Cardigan Arms, after which you met Simon McNeill for a curry.’ He smiled encouragingly.

‘So neither of you two killed Shaz Bowman,’ McCormick said. Leon had him figured for a racist, his pink slab of a face showing no rapport, his eyes hard and cold, his wet mouth permanently a mere twitch away from a sneer.

‘None of us killed Shaz, man,’ Leon said, deliberately drawing out the last word. ‘She was one of us. Maybe we’ve not been a team for long, but we know how to stick together. You’re wasting your time on us.’

‘We’ve got to go through the motions, lad, you know that,’ Wharton said. ‘You’re going to be a profiler, you know that over ninety per cent of murders are committed by families or lovers. Now, when Simon turned up, how did he seem?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘OK. Did he seem agitated, wound up, in a state?’

Leon shook his head. ‘None of that, no. He was a bit quiet, but I put that down to Shaz not being there. I reckoned he fancied her, and he was disappointed when she didn’t show.’

‘What made you think he fancied her?’

Leon spread his hands. ‘Stuff. You know? The way he tried to impress her. The way he was always checking her out. The way he’d always be bringing her into the conversation. The way a man does when he’s interested, know what I mean?’

‘Did you think she was interested in him?’

‘I don’t reckon Shaz was too interested in anybody. Not in the shagging sense. She was too obsessed with the Job to be bothered with it, if you ask me. I don’t think Simon was going to drop lucky and get his leg over. Not unless he had something she wanted bad, like the inside track on a serial killer.’

‘Did he say he’d been round her house?’ McCormick interjected.

‘He never mentioned it, no. But you wouldn’t, would you? I mean, if you thought a woman had just stood you up, you wouldn’t be telling people about it. Not saying anything isn’t strange behaviour. Saying something, setting yourself up for having the piss taken out of you all round the squad room, now that would be strange.’ Leon lit a cigarette and gave McCormick the blank-eyed stare again.

‘What was he wearing?’ Wharton asked.

Leon frowned with the effort of recollection. ‘Leather jacket, bottle green polo shirt, black jeans, black Docs.’

‘Not a flannel shirt?’

Leon shook his head. ‘Not when we met him. Why? You found some flannel fibres on her clothes?’

‘Not her clothes,’ Wharton said. ‘We think she was-’

‘I don’t think we’ll be going into details about the forensic evidence just now,’ McCormick interrupted firmly. ‘Weren’t you worried when DC Bowman didn’t show up for this big night out?’

Leon shrugged and blew out a stream of smoke. ‘Not worried, no. Kay figured she’d got a better offer. Me, I thought she probably had her head in her computer, doing her homework.’

‘Bit of a teacher’s pet, was she?’ Wharton asked, sympathy to the fore again.

‘Nah. She was just a grafter, that’s all. Look, shouldn’t you be out there catching the bastard who did this, instead of wasting your time with us? You’re not going to find her killer in the task force. We signed up to solve shit like this, not commit it, man.’

Wharton nodded. ‘So the sooner we get this over, the better. We need your help here, Leon. You’re a trained detective, but you’ve also got trained instincts, or else you wouldn’t be on this task force. Give us the benefit of your insights. What do you make of Tony Hill? I mean, you do know that he didn’t want you on the task force, don’t you?’

Tony stared at the dark blue screen. McCormick and Wharton might have barred him from the task squad offices, but either they didn’t know about the group’s networked computer system or they had no idea how to exclude him from it. The set-up was straightforward. It had to be; the people using it were less computer literate than the average seven-year-old. All the PCs in the office were linked via a central processing and storage unit. A modem connection made it possible for any of the team who was working off site to plug straight into their personal data store as well as any of the general material that was available to everyone. For security reasons, they each had personal logins as well as individual passwords. The trainees had all been instructed to change their passwords weekly to avoid possible leaks. Whether any of them bothered was a moot point.

What none of the squad knew was that Tony had a list of every individual login. In effect, he could dial up the office computer and pretend to be any of them, with the machine none the wiser. Of course, without the password, he wouldn’t get very far with the private material, but he’d be in the system.

As soon as he’d returned home from his interview, he’d switched on his home computer. First, he’d called up Shaz’s application form and test responses, all scanned in as soon as she’d been accepted for the squad. He printed them out, along with the progress reports that both he and Paul Bishop had compiled.

Then he signed off as himself and signed in as Shaz. Now, the best part of two hours and a pot of coffee later, he was no further forward. He’d tried everything he could think of.
SHAZ, SHARON, BOWMAN, ROBIN
,
HOOD, WILLIAM, TELL, ARCHER, AMBRIDGE
…He’d run through every character he could think of from the eponymous radio soap opera. He’d tried her parents’ names, every town, city, institution and street name mentioned in her CV. He’d even attempted the obvious
JACKO, VANCE
and the less obvious
MICKY, MORGAN
. And still he was staring at a screen that said, ‘Welcome to the National Offender Profiling Task Force. Please type in your password now:-’. The cursor had been flashing so long the only thing he could say with total certainty was that he had no epileptic tendencies.

He stood up and prowled round the room. He didn’t have an idea to bless himself with. ‘Enough,’ he muttered in exasperation. He lifted his jacket from the chair where he’d thrown it and shrugged it on. A walk down to the shop for the evening paper, that might clear his head. ‘Don’t fool yourself,’ he muttered as he opened his front door. ‘You just want to see what those pillocks have told the latest press conference.’

He walked down the path bisecting two flower beds where grimy rose bushes fought a rearguard action against urban enemies both human and industrial. As he turned into the street, he noticed a couple of men in a nondescript saloon car opposite. One was scrambling out of the passenger seat to the accompaniment of the engine being over-enthusiastically started. Shocked, Tony recognized all the hallmarks of an amateurish stakeout. Surely they couldn’t be wasting their human resources keeping tabs on him?

At the corner, he stopped to look in the window of Bric’n’Brac, a junk shop with sad pretensions. Its proud owner kept the glass clean, which allowed Tony to take a look over his shoulder and across the street. The man who’d jumped out of the car was over there, loitering by the bus stop, pretending to read the timetable. It was an activity that marked him out as a stranger more than almost anything else could have done; the locals knew the anarchic practices of the rival bus companies too well to regard the timetable as anything other than a bad joke.

Tony walked on to the corner. Under the cloak of crossing the road, he threw a look over his shoulder. The car had turned round and was creeping down his street about fifty yards behind him. There was no doubt about it. If these were the best the local force had to offer, Shaz Bowman’s killer didn’t have much to worry about.

Despairing of his supposed colleagues, Tony bought an evening paper from the local newsagent and walked slowly home, reading as he went. At least the police weren’t publicly saying anything to attract ridicule. In fact, they weren’t saying anything much at all. Either they were playing things very close to their chest, or they had nothing to play with. He knew which he believed was the case.

Once inside, under the guise of drawing a curtain across to protect his computer screen from the bright sun, he checked for his watchers. They were both back in the car, parked in the same spot as before. What were they waiting for? What did they expect him to do?

If it wasn’t so appalling in its potential consequences, it would be funny, he thought as he grabbed the phone and dialled Paul Bishop’s mobile. When Bishop answered, Tony dived straight in. ‘Paul? You’re not going to believe this. McCormick and Wharton have got it into their heads that someone connected to the task force killed Shaz, since we’re the only people up here she knew.’

‘I know,’ Bishop said, sounding depressed. ‘But what can I do? It’s their inquiry. If it makes you feel any better, I do know they’ve been in touch with her old division, asking them to check out if there were any villains down there who might have had enough of a grudge against her to follow her up here. So far, no joy. But her old CID sergeant has apparently been in touch to say she acted as intermediary to set up a meeting between Jacko Vance and Bowman on Saturday morning. It looks as if she was determined to pursue that wild idea of hers about the teenage girls.’

Tony let out a sigh of relief. ‘Well, thank God for that. Now maybe they’ll begin to take us seriously. I mean, they have to be asking at the very least why Vance hasn’t come forward and revealed this himself, given that Shaz’s picture has been all over the papers.’

‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Bishop said. ‘Vance’s wife actually rang in within minutes of the other call to say Bowman had come to the house on Saturday morning. She said her husband hadn’t seen the papers yet. So no one’s actually hiding anything.’

‘But they are at least going to talk to him?’

‘I’m sure they will.’

‘So they’ll have to treat him as a suspect.’

Tony heard Bishop exhale. ‘Who knows? The trouble is, Tony, I can make gentle suggestions, but I’ve no authority to stop them running this their own sweet way.’

‘I was told that you’d agreed with them that the squad should effectively be suspended,’ Tony pointed out. ‘You didn’t have to go along with that, surely.’

‘Come on, Tony, you know how difficult the politics of the task force are. The Home Office is adamant that we don’t cause problems on the ground. It was a small concession. The squad hasn’t been disbanded. Nobody’s being reassigned to their old units. We’re just out of the operational loop until this case is either resolved or out of the headlines. Try and treat it like a sabbatical.’

Exasperated, Tony got to the initial point of his call. ‘It’s a pretty strange sabbatical that includes a stakeout straight out of the Keystone Cops on my doorstep.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘I wish I was. I walked out of my interview with them this morning after they accused me of being their best bet because I’m already a killer. And now I’ve got Beavis and Butthead on my tail. This is intolerable, Paul.’

He could hear Bishop take a deep breath. ‘I agree, but we’re just going to have to roll with the punches until they get bored with us and start running a proper investigation.’

‘I don’t think so, Paul,’ Tony said, his voice clipped and authoritative. ‘One of my team is dead and they won’t let us help find out who killed her. They’re quick enough to remind me that I’m not one of them, I’m an outsider. Well, that cuts both ways. If you can’t persuade them to get out of my face, I will be holding a press conference of my own tomorrow. And I promise, you won’t like it any more than Wharton and McCormick will. It’s time to pull some strings, Paul.’

‘I hear you, Tony,’ Bishop sighed. ‘Leave it with me.’

Tony dropped the phone back into its cradle and pulled the curtain back. He switched on his desk lamp and stood in front of the window staring mutinously out at his watchers. He reviewed the information Paul Bishop had given him and related it to what he had learned at the crime scene. This killer was angry because Shaz had stuck her nose into his business. That indicated that she had been right in her supposition that there was at large a serial killer of teenage girls. Something she had done had panicked the murderer into making her his next target. The only thing she had apparently done that was connected to her theory was to visit Jacko Vance within hours of her death.

He knew now that Shaz Bowman’s killer could not be some crazed fan of Vance’s. There was no way for even the most dedicated stalker to find out in the short interval before her murder who Shaz was or the reason for her visit to Vance’s house.

He had to find out more about the encounter between Shaz and Vance. If the killer was one of his entourage, it was possible he’d been present. But if Vance had been alone when Shaz confronted him, the finger pointed only at him. Even if he’d picked up the phone the minute she’d left and reported her suspicions to someone else, there was no way such a third party could have picked up Shaz’s trail, discovered where she lived, or persuaded her to open her door to him in the time available.