by Val McDermid
But Merrick was too wrapped up in his own miseries to register Paula’s regretful tone. ‘At least if we get things formalized, I’ll know where I am when it comes to seeing the lads,’ he said. ‘If I ever get any time off in this lifetime.’
‘If we get lucky tonight, we’ll be able to ease up a bit,’ Paula said, trying not to think what getting lucky would mean for her.
That got through. Merrick looked up, his mournful eyes showing a spark of interest. ‘You all right about tonight?’ he asked.
Paula twirled a short strand of hair round her finger. ‘I’m a bit nervous,’ she admitted.
‘Nothing bad’s going to happen to you,’ Merrick reassured her.
‘What? Like nothing bad happened to you when you were chasing the Queer Killer?’ Paula said sarcastically. She’d only been a CID aide on the fringes of the investigation, but she vividly remembered the turban of bandages that had swathed Merrick’s head after his own undercover operation had gone out of control.
Merrick looked embarrassed. ‘That was my own fault,’ he said. ‘I put myself in harm’s way. I thought I could handle the situation and I was wrong. So learn from my mistakes: don’t take risks, don’t leave anything to chance. If in doubt, abort. It’s better we lose a chance at the killer than anything happens to you.’
Slightly uncomfortable in the face of his earnest concern, Paula said, ‘I’m not really worried about something happening to me. I feel confident in the back-up. Face it, after what Jordan went through, she’s not going to leave my back uncovered. If anything, she’s going to go for overkill and scare him off.’
‘So what is it that’s eating you? Because I can see something’s bothering you.’
‘This is going to sound daft,’ Paula said. ‘But I don’t know if I can carry it off. I don’t know if I can play the part. I don’t think I’ve got the right kind of imagination.’
Merrick frowned. ‘I’m not sure I understand you.’
‘I’m a cop through and through, Don. I see the world in black and white. I don’t get that empathy shit that Tony Hill’s always banging on about. I don’t catch villains by thinking the way they do. I catch them because they’re stupid and I’m smart. Because I’m on the right side of the law and they’re not. So how does somebody like me stand on a street corner and make some fucking psychopath believe I’m a hooker?’ Paula said savagely.
Merrick struggled for an answer. ‘Well, you’ve got the gear, right?’
‘Yes, I’ve got the gear,’ she said wearily. ‘Shields knows all about picking the right trashy clothes. But I feel like a kid playing make-believe. You know how sometimes you dress up to go out, and you put something on that’s a bit out of the usual run of what you wear and you think, “Yeah, wow, that’s who I can be tonight”?’
Merrick looked at her as if she was talking Greek. ‘I can’t say I do.’
‘Trust me, it goes that way. But when I put that stuff on, all I think is, “I so don’t want to be this person.” I’m not scared you guys are going to let me down. I’m scared I’m going to let you down.’
Carol tracked down John Brandon to the press briefing room, deep in discussion with one of the liaison staff. He looked up when she entered, and gave her a nod of acknowledgement. ‘Carol, we’re just talking about Tim Golding and Guy Lefevre. Shaheed’s had one of the Sunday broadsheets on. They’re apparently planning to revisit the cases this weekend.’ He sighed. The way they go on, you’d think we’d been sitting on our hands for the past four months.’
Carol forced a smile. ‘I might just have some news for you on that score, sir.’ Briefly, she outlined the information Jonathan had given them.
Brandon’s lugubrious face lit up. ‘But that’s excellent news, Carol. Whose idea was it to bring this geologist on board?’
‘Mine, sir.’ She was damned if she was going to refuse credit for the one good thing she’d achieved in a while.
‘Good. Well done. Make sure you keep me posted on developments. And Shaheed too.’ He stood up.
‘If I might have a word, sir?’ Carol said, drawing him to one side.
Brandon raised an eyebrow. ‘Fire away.’
‘I understand DC Evans told you he was following an unauthorized line of inquiry relating to Dr Aidan Hart?’
Brandon squared his shoulders. ‘He did. And I’m bound to say I was most surprised that you had closed down that particular avenue. It’s not as if you’re awash with suspects on these prostitute murders. I know that Hart works with Tony, but…’
‘That had nothing to do with my decision, sir,’ Carol interrupted. ‘I eliminated Dr Hart on the basis that he has an alibi for the time when the medical evidence says Sandie Foster was killed.’
Brandon shook his head. ‘Not good enough, Carol. We all know time of death is far from an accurate measurement.’
‘Nevertheless, the timings don’t stack up. He picked her up at half past eight. It would have taken a few minutes to get to her room. Then he’s got to tie her up and brutalize her repeatedly. Then somehow he’s got to drive across town, find a parking space and get to the restaurant by nine without a trace of blood on him. It’s just not possible, sir, whatever bee Sam Evans has in his bonnet.’
Brandon scowled. ‘In that case, DCI Jordan, you need to keep a tighter rein on your officers. Now, I’m sure you have work to do in preparation for this evening.’ He walked past her and out the door, leaving Carol smarting at the injustice of his final remarks. Had she been wrong about Brandon? When the pressure for results was at its height, was he so very different from the others who had let her down before? One thing was certain: when all of this was over, there would be some adjustments in the Major Incident Team. But for now, she had to swallow her pride and get back to work.
Carol understood the disappointment she could read all over the faces of Kevin Matthews and Sam Evans. Tonight would be the first sniff of real frontline action they’d had since their supposedly elite squad had been inaugurated and she was pulling them off it for the sake of a good night’s sleep. But if Tony was right about what lurked in Swindale, she wanted officers in charge who were alert to every possibility. She didn’t want vital evidence slipping through their fingers either because the lead officers were dizzy and disorientated with tiredness or, conversely, high as kites because they’d got a result in another case.
She knew that when she’d called them in they’d been expecting some special assignment on the undercover duty. They’d both demonstrated all the eagerness and anticipation of lads let off the leash for a Saturday night on the town. She’d tried to let them down easy, but there was no way to sugar the pill. They wanted to be out there, standing shoulder to shoulder with their team mates, not tucked up in bed in preparation for the morrow’s work, no matter how crucial that might turn out to be. No matter that they were all desperate to find out what had happened to Tim Golding and Guy Lefevre; when push came to shove, cops always wanted to be where the action was. And tonight, the action would be in Temple Fields.
‘I thought we needed every body we could muster on the ground for this op,’ Evans had protested even before she’d had the chance to brief them thoroughly.
I’m not doubting your willingness, Sam,’ she said, trying not to let her personal animus colour her response to what was close to insubordination. ‘But I make the decisions about priorities round here. And as far as I’m concerned, finding out what happened to Tim Golding is every bit as high a priority as catching the person who killed Sandie Foster and Jackie Mayall before he can claim any more victims.’
‘Even if it means putting an officer at greater risk?’ Evans’ betrayal of her to Brandon seemed to have given him a taste for undermining her. She had to end it here and now before it caused problems with the others.
‘Believe me, Detective Constable, your absence will not be increasing the risk to DC McIntyre one jot. You are not so special that you can’t be replaced. Tonight’s team is at full strength. What I need is to have confidenc
e that tomorrow morning’s operation will be as thoroughly covered.’ Carol’s voice was sharp and cold as an icicle. Evans studied his shoes and mumbled something she was prepared to consider an apology.
‘What’s the drill tomorrow, guv?’ Kevin asked, feeling sorry for his colleague and keen to divert Carol’s annoyance.
‘Dr France, the forensic geologist, thinks he’s narrowed down where the photograph of Tim was taken. It’s an isolated though not especially remote dale in Derbyshire. Dr Hill believes that there’s a strong possibility Tim may have been murdered there and his body disposed of on site. So this isn’t just a stroll in the country I’m sending you on. This could be the most significant development in these cases so far. You’ll be going out with a full complement of SOCOs and you’re going to treat the area as a crime scene. I need officers of your calibre because it’s crucial that we don’t miss anything that’s down there that can take us nearer to what happened to Tim and who made it happen.’
‘Do the local boys know we’re going to be on their patch?’ Kevin asked.
‘I’ve spoken to them, yes. Stacey has the details of who you should liaise with if you come up with anything.’ She stood up. ‘I know you’re both disappointed about tonight, but I’ve chosen you two because I have confidence in your ability to find whatever there is to be found out there in Swindale. So get a good night’s sleep then go out tomorrow and prove me right.’
They filed out and Carol watched them glumly. You’re losing them, she thought, trying not to panic. You’re losing them and they know why.
The rules have changed. This time it’s going to be different because the Voice says so. He doesn’t make the rules, he just follows them. And if they change, there must be a reason. It doesn’t worry him that he doesn’t know what that reason is. He knows he probably wouldn’t understand it even if he did. But the Voice understands. So even though things are going to be different this time, he’ll still be OK.
Because it’s going to be different, because there are new things for him to learn, the Voice is giving him longer to prepare. He has a new script to learn, a new set of instructions to be sure of. He’s even got a new coat to make him look different.
He has a dim feeling that these changes mean danger. He’s going to be taking more chances, which would be scary if it wasn’t for the Voice giving him confidence. So tonight, he’s staying home, making sure he knows without having to think about it what he’ll have to do. He’s sitting in his room, listening to the seductive voice on the minidisk running through the routine one more time. He’s got a joint burning, good stuff he’s been holding back for a special occasion.
As the words sink into his brain, spreading their warmth and comfort, he knows he was right to roll it. Occasions don’t really come any more special than this.
Tony sat in the pool of light cast by the desk lamp in his office at Bradfield Moor. Like so many objects in the secure hospital, it had never been up to much in the first place, and now it was well past its best. The only two positions it would sustain for any length of time were either too high or too low for effective use. But at that particular moment, Tony was oblivious to his surroundings.
The killer was still eluding him. A disembodied voice he couldn’t hear but which still seemed capable of pulling his strings. He had no more real sense of who this killer was now than he’d had on the morning after Sandie Foster’s murder when he’d spoken to Carol about rape and murder and power.
He’d tried to speak to Derek Tyler again, but Tyler had refused to come out of his room. When Tony had attempted to see him there, Tyler had curled up in a ball on his bed and turned his face to the wall. There had been nothing equivocal in the gesture. So he’d gone back to his office and read through the case file that Carol had finally sent over. She’d been right. There was no wriggle room around Derek Tyler’s conviction. Not unless he’d had a twin brother who shared his DNA. And there was no record of Tyler having any siblings, never mind a twin.
‘What’s in it for you?’ he said, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. ‘Where’s the punchline in taking over someone else’s crime?’ He was at the point of beginning to doubt something he had always regarded as one of the few given truths in what he did: that no two people were subject to precisely the same reactions to stimulus in the area of sexual homicide. What if this case were to provide the exception that proved the rule?
He’d once been present at a forensic science conference where a prominent crime writer had been giving the after-dinner speech. He remembered the man leaning nonchalantly on the lectern, his soft Welsh accent making his words soothing and innocuous. Tony didn’t have Carol’s gift of total recall of speech, but he remembered the gist of it because it had chimed so perfectly with his own understanding. The writer was talking about a question that was frequently put to him by readers: did he worry about somebody stealing his imagined crimes and turning them into real ones? The writer said he didn’t lose sleep over this for two reasons. Firstly, the chances of any individual having the identical motive springs for his action as the characters in the books was negligible. And even in the unlikely event of that happening, it still wasn’t the writer’s responsibility. The person committing the crime had to be predisposed in that direction; to blame the writer for the murderer’s crime would be like blaming the breadknife for stabbing a spouse in the middle of a domestic.
But what if they’d both been wrong, the writer and Tony? What if a congruence of murderous fantasies wasn’t as unlikely as he and his colleagues had always believed? What if someone out there had been so moved by Derek Tyler’s crimes that he’d come to understand that the only way he could achieve his own dream of perfection was to act out what he’d realized was his fantasy too?
It was far-fetched. It would earn him ridicule from his colleagues. He could see the smirk on Aidan Hart’s face at the conviction that Tony Hill had finally lost it completely.
More than that, it just didn’t make sense. Because Tyler had confessed, because the forensic evidence had been believed to be impregnable, because he’d been deemed to be mad and not bad, the full story of Tyler’s crimes had never been heard in open court. There were elements of the crimes that were not in the public domain, known only to Tyler himself, the police and the lawyers on both sides of the divide and those, like Tony himself, charged with his psychiatric care. And while it wasn’t impossible that someone among that group could have gone to the bad, it wasn’t a suggestion that was likely to inspire confidence from Carol or from Brandon.
Come to that, he didn’t believe it himself. Trying it on for size only demonstrated what a bad fit it was.
He walked his chair back till he was out of the light and his head was touching the bookshelves behind him. Had he really lost his touch? Had he been out of the game for too long? Was he no better than those self-serving idiots who gave profiling a bad name?
It was a frightening thought. If he had lost the one thing he knew he was good at, what was left? He certainly couldn’t console himself that he’d been able to use his professional acuity to help Carol. It had taken a man who spent his days looking at rocks to see at least something of what she needed and to act on it.
He wallowed for a few minutes longer, then abruptly sat upright. ‘Mawkish self-pity,’ he said loudly. ‘Not a pretty sight.’ Nor did it lead to behaviour he could be proud of. He’d walked away from tonight’s undercover operation not because he genuinely believed there was nothing useful he could offer, but out of a combination of pique and a sense of acute failure. He’d let himself down. More importantly, he might have let Paula McIntyre down. And that was something Carol would find harder to forgive than his role in her own ruin.
‘Oh, bugger,’ Tony said, pushing himself out of the chair and grabbing his coat. It was time to stop the self-indulgence. It might not be too late to stop something very bad indeed happening to Paula McIntyre.
Carol watched the officers file out of the briefing room, their voices a low mutter
of background noise. She’d pulled together just over thirty men and women to cover Paula’s foray into the killer’s world. Most would be on the streets in plain clothes, trying to blend in with the usual patrons of Temple Fields. Some would be parked up in cars just off the main drag, out of sight of Paula but in radio contact with the surveillance van. Others would be strategically placed in the warren of back alleys, ready to cut off any escape attempt. Carol herself would be in the surveillance van with Don Merrick, Stacey Chen, Jan Shields and a couple of technicians, sweating it out, staring into the CCTV screens, straining to hear what came in over the wire Paula would be wearing.
Carol tried to convince herself she was confident of a good outcome. She thought they’d achieved saturation coverage; any more officers and they’d have started to have a significant impact on the ambience. She knew that murderers like this were often finely tuned to their killing ground, and it was important not to alter the environment so much that their target would sense a disturbance in the atmosphere. That much she’d learned from Tony over the years. She could have used his input this afternoon. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in her own ability to organize a major operation; it was more that she wanted another angle on what she had planned. She wanted Tony because he could look at it with the eyes of the hunted rather than the hunter. Paula would be offered up as prey; Carol didn’t want her to end up as a sacrificial lamb, but equally she didn’t want the wolf to sniff the air and take fright.
Tony was, she thought, behaving oddly. Given the level of concern he’d been showing for her since she’d come back to Bradfield, she’d expected him to be glued to her side tonight. It was hard not to see his absence as a reproach.