by Val McDermid
Carol noticed Blake’s eyes followed Moira from the room with a look of fond appraisal that made her like him more. When the door closed behind her he gave a brittle cough and led the way over to a pair of sofas at right angles to each other. The coffee table between them was swamped with the Sunday papers. ‘We don’t often get a Sunday without the girls,’ he said, vaguely waving at the sea of newsprint. ‘Their grand-mother’s holding the fort this weekend.’
‘You can never call your time your own in this job. But I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t vitally important.’
Blake nodded. ‘Fire away, then.’
‘Dr Hill came to see us today,’ Carol began.
‘I thought I’d made myself clear on that subject?’ Blake interrupted her, his cheeks growing even pinker than usual.
‘Abundantly. But I didn’t ask him to come in. I’ve deliberately told him nothing about our cases that he couldn’t have read in the papers. He came in because he believes the two murders - three now - that we’re working on have been committed by the same killer he’s been profiling in another jurisdiction.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, that’s pitiful. Is he so desperate for work that he has to thrust himself upon us with flimsy excuses like that? What’s his problem? Is he jealous of young DS Parker?’
Carol waited till he’d subsided, then said, ‘Sir, I’ve known Tony Hill for a long time and I’ve worked closely with him on several key cases. He just doesn’t have that kind of ego. I admit I was sceptical about his analysis at first. But there’s substance to what he has to say.’ She worked her way through the list Tony had laid out for her, thanking her eidetic memory for the power to repeat them verbatim. ‘I know it sounds far-fetched, but there are too many elements in common for coincidence to be an acceptable explanation.’
Blake had looked increasingly gobsmacked as Carol’s recital had unfolded. ‘You’re sure he had no access to your team’s information?’
‘I believe him,’ she said. ‘He’s a lot more interested in closing down a killer than he is in his own self-image.’
‘What does Parker think of all this?’
Carol tried not to scream. ‘I’ve no idea. I haven’t discussed it with him.’
‘You don’t think he’s the person you should have consulted before you came to me? He is the profiler assigned to this case.’ Carol blinked hard. ‘He’s an idiot. His so-called profile is a joke. Any one of my team could have come up with something more useful than his first attempt. And the second version was only marginally better. I know you set great store by the training they’re doing at the faculty, but DS Parker is not going to make any converts. His work is callow and superficial. ‘ She shrugged. ‘There’s no other word for it. I can’t work with him. I’d rather do without a profiler than have one with so little insight.’ Carol stopped for breath. She could almost smell her boats burning. Blake looked thunderous.
‘You’re crossing a line here, Chief Inspector.’
‘I don’t think I am, sir. My job is to bring serious criminals to justice. Every member of my team has been hand-picked because of the unique contribution they make to that goal. I’d have thought you would have supported my drive towards excellence. I’d have thought you would be glad that I’m willing to nail my colours to the mast and say, “This is not good enough for Bradfield Metropolitan Police.”’ She shook her head. ‘If we’re not on the same page on that aspiration, I don’t know that I have a long-term future in this force.’ The words were out before she’d had time to consider whether she wanted to say them out loud.
‘This isn’t the time or the place for that conversation, Chief Inspector. You’ve got three murders to solve.’ He pushed himself to his feet, his struggle with the sofa revealing a man less fit than he looked. He walked over to the tall windows that overlooked the canal and stared out. ‘Dr Hill makes a strong case for this West Mercia murder being part of our series. He may be overstating the case, you understand?’ He turned and gave her a questioning look.
‘If you say so, sir.’
‘What I’d like you to do is to talk to the SIO in Worcester and see what he has to say. Once you’ve spoken to him, you’ll have to decide whether Dr Hill is right. And if, on balance, it seems that he is, you’re going to have to bring West Mercia on board with us. They may have the first in the series, but we’ve got more victims and he’s still active on our patch. I want you heading up the task force to deal with this. Is that clear? This will be our investigation.’
‘I understand.’ Now she understood. Blake thought Tony’s actions were about ego because that was his own guiding principle. ‘Does that mean I can bring Dr Hill fully on board with our cases?’
Blake rubbed his chin between fingers and thumb. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s West Mercia’s tab, though. They brought him in. They can pay for him.’ He gave the first genuine smile she’d seen all afternoon. ‘You can tell them that’s the price of admission to the party.’
CHAPTER 32
The team of officers on the knocker in the Brucehill flats didn’t take long to turn up the two Asian lads who’d stood at the bus stop with Niall the previous afternoon. It was clear from the get-go that this murder was not connected to the quotidian villainies of the estate, so for once there was no threat to anyone local in talking to the police. The normal rules of grassing did not apply. True, some refused to talk to the cops on principle, but there were plenty who still thought the murder of a fourteen-year-old who wasn’t connected to any of the estate’s gangs should not go unavenged. There had been enough people more than happy to give up the witnesses.
So within a couple of hours of the discovery of Niall’s body, Sadiq Ahmed and Ibrahim Mussawi had been huckled into Southern Divisional HQ for questioning. Sam, who had left Stacey and the FLO with Niall’s mother, had a brief discussion with Paula on how to play it. Neither wanted to work with an unfamiliar partner, but the alternative was for them to take one witness and to leave the other to a pair of detectives from Southern about whose abilities they knew nothing. ‘What do you think?’ Sam said.
‘Look at their sheets. Mussawi’s got half a dozen arrests for minor stuff, he’s been in court. He knows the system. He’s not going to be going out of his way to help us. But Ahmed, he’s a virgin. Never been arrested, never mind charged. He’s going to want to keep it that way, I think. We should take him, you and me. Leave Mussawi to the local boys and hope they get lucky,’ Paula said.
They found Ahmed in an interview room, lanky limbs in a hoodie and low-slung designer jeans, gold chain at his neck, feet in outsized designer trainers, laces undone. A couple of hundred quid’s worth of gear on a fifteen-year-old kid. Well, there’s a surprise, Paula thought. Dad works in a local restaurant, Mum’s at home with five other kids. She didn’t think Ahmed was getting his spending money from a paper round. She sat back while Sam did the introductions.
‘I want a lawyer, innit.’
Paula shook her head, doing the ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ look. ‘See, there you go. Making yourself look like you’re guilty of something before I’ve even asked your name and address.’
‘I haven’t done nothing, I want a lawyer. I know my rights. And I’m a minor, you need to get me an appropriate adult.’ His narrow face was aggressive, all sharp angles and twitchy little muscles round the mouth.
‘Sadiq, my man, you need to chill,’ Sam said. ‘Nobody thinks you did anything bad to Niall. But we know you were at the bus stop with him, and we need you to tell us what went down.’
Ahmed rolled his shoulders inside his hoodie, trying for nonchalant. ‘I don’t got to tell you nothing.’
Paula half-turned to Sam. ‘He’s right. He doesn’t have to tell us anything. How lovely do you think his life is going to be in these parts when we let it be known that he could have helped us catch a stone killer, only he didn’t want to?’
Sam smiled. ‘Exactly as lovely as he deserves.’
‘So there you have it, Sadiq. This is probab
ly the one and only time in your life that you’re going to have the chance to do yourself a favour with us without it coming back to bite you in the arse.’ Paula’s voice was at the opposite end of the kindness scale from her words. ‘We don’t have time to fuck around on this one, because this guy will kill again. And next time, it might be you or one of your cousins.’
Ahmed looked at her, calculation obvious in his face. ‘I do this, I get a free pass off you twats?’
Sam lunged forward and grabbed the front of his hoodie, almost yanking him off the chair. ‘You call me a twat one more time and the only free pass you’ll be getting is to Casualty. Capisce?’
Ahmed’s eyes opened wide and his feet scrabbled on the floor for purchase. Sam shoved him away and he teetered backwards before his chair settled on all four legs. ‘Fu-u-uck,’ he complained.
Paula shook her head slowly. ‘See, Sadiq? You’d have been better off paying attention to me. You need to start talking politely to us or the next thing you know you will need a lawyer because DC Evans here will be charging you with police obstruction. So, what time was it when you and Ibrahim arrived at the bus stop?’
Ahmed fidgeted for a moment, then caught her eye. ‘About half three, twenty to four,’ he said.
‘Where were you going?’
‘Into town. Just to hang about, right? Nothing special.’
A little light larceny. ‘And how long were you there before Niall showed up?’
‘We’d only just got there, like.’ He leaned back in the chair, feigning cockiness again.
‘Did you know Niall?’ Sam asked.
A shrug. ‘I knew who he was. We didn’t hang about, nothing like that.’
‘Did you speak to him at all?’ Paula said.
Another shrug. ‘Might have.’
‘Never mind “might have”. Did you?’
‘Ibrahim goes, “Where you going, brah?” And he goes, like, he’s going into town to hang with his crew. Only, we know he don’t have a crew so it’s bullshit, right? So Ibrahim calls him Billy No-Mates.’
‘The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie,’ Sam said wryly.
‘Do what?’
‘Nothing. So what did he say when you called him Billy No-Mates? ‘
Ahmed ran a finger round the inside curve of his ear then inspected it. ‘Fuck all he could say, was there? Cuz that’s when the car turned up, right?’
‘Tell me about the car,’ Paula said.
‘It was silver.’
Paula waited but nothing more was forthcoming. ‘And? You must have noticed more than that.’
‘Why the fuck would I? It was, like, a pile of crap. It was this silver hatchback thing. Medium sort of size. Total fucking nothing car. Something, like, of no interest.’
Of course it was. ‘So what happened then?’
‘The window comes down and the driver says something like, “You’re Niall, right?”’
‘He definitely used Niall’s name?’ If Ahmed was right, it proved this was a premeditated set-up.
He gave her the, ‘Well, duh,’ eye-roll. ‘I said so, innit?’ he drawled. ‘He definitely said the name Niall.’
‘What happened then?’ Sam was back in the act. Paula wished he’d shut up, almost wished she was with a Southern Division detective she could have intimidated into silence.
‘Niall stuck his head in the window, so I didn’t catch what was going on between them. Niall said something like, how did the geezer know he was going to be there. But I couldn’t make out what the driver was saying.’
Why was it always like this? Paula wondered. One step forward, one step sideways then one back. ‘What did he sound like, the driver?’
Ahmed pulled a face. ‘What you mean, what did he sound like?’
‘Accent? High voice, low voice? Educated, not?’
She could see Ahmed struggling to recall. Which meant what he said would probably be worthless. ‘It wasn’t, like, deep. It was kind of ordinary. Like everybody round here speak. But like old people like my parents speak, you know? Not like one of us.’
‘Did you get a look at him?’
‘Not really. He was wearing a ball cap. He had long hair, brown, like down to his collar.’
Probably a wig. ‘What did the cap look like? What colour? Any slogan?’
‘It was grey and blue. I didn’t pay attention, you know? Why would I be interested? Some geezer stops and talks to somebody I hardly know, why would I be paying them any of my attention?’ He leaned back again and sighed. ‘This is so bullshit, me being here like this.’
‘So what happened next?’ Paula said.
‘Niall gets in the car and they drive off. End of.’
And that was also the end of Sadiq Ahmed’s useful testimony. They hung on to him while they compared notes with the other interview team, who had even less to show for their chat. But they had no cause to hold either Ahmed or Mussawi any longer so they cut them loose. Paula watched them swagger down the street, jeans at half-mast, hoodies over their heads. ‘Sometimes I feel like counting the days to retirement,’ she said wearily.
‘Not a good move,’ Sam said. ‘It’s always going to be too many. Even when it gets down to one.’
For Tony, there were no longer enough hours in the day. Carol had called him as soon as she’d left Blake. Her next call would be to Stacey, to instruct her to open the case files to Tony. She told him about Blake’s parting shot, but he didn’t care. Who paid the piper had never been his issue. All that mattered was having access to the information he needed to build his portrait of the killer.
Information on this scale, however, could be a curse as much as a blessing. Stacey had emailed him the codes so that he could directly access all their files. But the amount of raw data generated by three missing-person inquiries that had turned to murders was vast. Just reading through it would take days. But thankfully, there were digests of the reports that had been prepared so that Carol’s team could have a more accessible overview of the cases. The downside of that was that important details could have been lost in the sifting. So every time Tony came across something that piqued his curiosity, he had to backtrack to the original report to see what had been said or done in the first instance.
The worst of it was that he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. His conclusion that these killings did not have their roots in a sexual motive meant he had to reconsider evidence from anyone close to the victims. Because he didn’t know what linked the victims, anything could be significant.
There was no way round it. He had to go back to square one and start looking in the dark corners of the victim’s lives. The victims were always the key to cracking a series. But in all his years of profiling serial offenders, Tony had never known a case where they were as crucial as they were here. He settled down to work, completely oblivious to the digital recorder that was now buried under a drift of paper.
To Carol’s surprise, DI Stuart Patterson couldn’t have been less territorial about his inquiry. In her experience, SIOs jealously hugged their murders close to their chests. You generally had to drag information out of them piecemeal. But it soon became clear that he genuinely believed two heads were better than one. Even if it was also obvious that he wasn’t at all sure that the addition of Tony Hill’s was an unmixed blessing.
‘He’s not your usual sort of expert witness,’ he said cagily when Carol commented on Tony’s brilliant linkage of the cases.
‘He’s one of a kind,’ she agreed.
‘Probably just as well. You do know he nearly got himself arrested down here? My bagman had to pull him out of the mire.’
Carol stifled a giggle. ‘He did mention there had been a spot of bother, yes. I’d just put it down to the price you have to pay for having him on the team.’
‘So what’s the easiest way for us to proceed?’
They ran through the rules of engagement, working out how they could link the two investigations in practical terms. Stacey featured large in the conversation,
and Carol couldn’t help noting a certain wistfulness in Patterson’s voice on the subject of resident geeks. ‘We don’t have anyone with that level of skill,’ he said. ‘I have to buy in that kind of expertise. You take what you can get, and it’s not always what you might hope for. Not to mention you’re always having to butter them up just to keep them on side.’
‘You’re welcome to use Stacey on this if there’s anything you’ve got that might benefit from a more thorough analysis.’
‘Thanks, Carol. I think we’re covered, but I will bear it in mind. We have actually got an intel-based joint op going on with GMP already on this case.’
‘Really? One of our bodies was dumped on the border between us and them. What’s the connection?’
‘It came from Tony Hill. We’d got a series of locations for public-access computers the killer used to communicate with Jennifer Maidment. He asked a colleague to run them through a geographic profiling program and it spat out a hot spot in South Manchester. So we took the product from our number-plate recognition system to DVLA and asked for details of all the Manchester-registered vehicles that came into town around the day Jennifer was abducted.’
Carol was impressed. It was the kind of lateral thinking she looked for from her own team. ‘Great idea. So what was the pay-off?’
‘Fifty-three possibles. I’ve sent my sergeant up there to work alongside the GMP officers. They’re going round the addresses, checking alibis and looking for people with connections to the ICT industry. That’s where Tony Hill reckons our perp works.’
‘Sounds like that might just break something open. I’ll be very interested to hear how it pans out.’
Patterson sighed. ‘Me too. Because, frankly, it’s the only lead we’ve got right now.’
Paula’s phone vibrated against her hip. She pulled it from her pocket and got a quick hit of pleasure when she saw her caller was Elinor Blessing. She walked away from the knot of Brucehill teenagers she and Sam were pointlessly engaging with, phone to her ear.