Val McDermid - The Wire in the Blood

As she absently shovelled breakfast into her mouth, she imagined Chris spending her day in the national newspaper archives at Colindale, copying page after page of local papers until she’d covered the period surrounding each of the seven disappearances that had captured Shaz’s imagination. Shaz ran her empty cereal bowl under the hot tap with happy anticipation swelling inside. She couldn’t say why she was so certain, but she was convinced that the first steps on her journey of proof would be waymarked in the local press.

She’d never been wrong so far. Except, of course, about Chris. But that, she told herself, had been different.

‘The kind of cases we’ll be working are the ones that leave most police officers feeling edgy. That’s because the perpetrators are dancing to a different beat from the rest of us.’ Tony looked around, double-checking that they were listening to him rather than shuffling through their papers. Leon looked as if he’d rather be somewhere else, but Tony had grown accustomed to his affectations and no longer took them at face value. Satisfied, he continued. ‘Knowing you’re dealing with someone who has manufactured their own set of rules is a very unsettling experience for anyone, even trained police officers. Because we come in from the outside to make sense of the bizarre, there’s a tendency to lump us as part of the problem rather than the solution, so it’s important that the first thing we concentrate on is building a rapport with the investigating officers. You’ve all come here from CID work – any ideas about the sort of thing that might work?’

Simon jumped straight in. ‘Take them out for a pint?’ he suggested. The others groaned and catcalled at his predictability.

Tony’s smile came nowhere near his eyes. ‘Chances are they’ll have half a dozen good excuses why they can’t come to the pub with you. Any other ideas?’

Shaz raised her pen. ‘Work your socks off. If they see you’re a grafter, they’ll give you some respect.’

‘Either that or think you’re brown-nosing the bosses,’ Leon sneered.

‘It’s not a bad idea,’ Tony said, ‘though Leon does have a point. If you’re going to go down that road, you also need to demonstrate a complete contempt for everyone over the rank of DCI, which can be wearing, not to say counterproductive.’ They laughed. ‘What does the trick for me is incredibly simple.’ He gave them a last questioning look. ‘No? How about flattery?’

A couple nodded sagely. Leon’s lip curled and he snorted. ‘More brown-nosing.’

‘I prefer to think of it as one technique among many in the arsenal of the profiler. I don’t use it for personal advancement; I use it for the benefit of the casework,’ Tony corrected him mildly. ‘I have a mantra that I trot out at every available opportunity.’ He shifted his position slightly, but that small change altered his body language from comfortable authority to subordinate. His smile was self-deprecating. ‘Of course,’ he said ingratiatingly, ‘I don’t solve murders. It’s bobbies that do that.’ Then, just as swiftly, he returned to his previous posture. ‘It works for me. It might not work for you. But it’s never going to do any harm to tell the investigating officers how much you respect their work and how you’re just a tiny cog that might make their machine work better.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You have to tell them this at least five times a day.’ They were all grinning now.

‘Once you’ve done that, there’s a reasonable chance they’ll give you the information you need to draw up your profile. If you can’t be bothered making the effort, they’re likely to hold as much back as they can get away with because they see you as a rival for the glory of solving a high-profile case. So. You’ve got the investigating officers on your side, and you’ve got your evidence. It’s time to work on the profile. First you assess probabilities.’

He stood up and began to prowl round the perimeter of the room, like a big cat checking the limits of its domain. ‘Probability is the only god of the profiler. To abandon probability for the alternative demands the strongest evidence. The downside of that is that there will be times when you end up with so much egg on your face you’ll look like an omelette on legs.’

Already, he could feel his heart rate increasing and still he hadn’t said a word about the case. ‘I had that experience myself on the last major case I worked. We were dealing with a serial killer of young men. I had all the information that was available to the police, thanks to a brilliant liaison officer. On the basis of the evidence, I drew up a profile. The liaison officer made a couple of suggestions based on her instincts. One of those suggestions was an interesting idea I hadn’t thought of because I didn’t know as much about information technology as she did. But equally, because it was something only a small proportion of the population would know about, I assigned it a moderately low probability. Normally, that would mean the investigation team would assign it low priority, but they were stuck for leads, so they pursued it. It turned out she’d been right, but in itself it didn’t move the investigation much further forward.’

His hands were clammy with perspiration, but now he was actually confronting the details that still shredded his nights, his stomach had stopped clenching. It was less effort than he’d expected to continue his analysis. ‘Her other suggestion I discounted out of hand because it was completely off the wall. It ran counter to everything I knew about serial killers.’ Tony met their curious stares. His tension had transmitted itself to the entire squad and they sat silent and motionless, waiting for what would come next.

‘My disregard for her suggestion nearly cost me my life,’ he said simply, reaching his seat and sitting down again. He looked around the room, surprised he could speak so levelly. ‘And you know something? I was right to ignore her. Because, on a scale of one to a hundred, her proposition was so unlikely it wouldn’t even register.’

As soon as the formal confirmation of the body in the blaze came through, Carol called a meeting of her team. This time, there were no chocolate biscuits. ‘I expect you’ve all heard this morning’s news,’ she said flatly as they arranged themselves around her office, Tommy Taylor straddling the only chair apart from Carol’s on the basis that he was the sergeant. He might have been brought up never to sit while women were standing, but he’d long since stopped thinking of Di Earnshaw as a woman.

‘Aye,’ he said.

‘Poor bugger,’ Lee Whitbread chimed in.

‘Poor bugger nothing,’ Tommy protested. ‘He shouldn’t have been there, should he?’

Repelled but not surprised, Carol said, ‘Whether he should or shouldn’t have been there, he’s dead, and we’re supposed to be looking for the person who killed him.’ Tommy looked mutinous, folding his arms across the chair back and planting his feet more firmly on the floor, but Carol refused to respond to the challenge. ‘Arson’s always a time bomb,’ she continued. ‘And this time it’s gone off right in our faces. Today has not been the proudest day of my career to date. So what have you got for me?’

Lee, leaning against the filing cabinet, shifted his shoulders. ‘I went through all the back files for the last six months. Leastways, all I could get my hands on,’ he corrected himself. ‘I found quite a few incidents like you told us to look for, some off night-shift CID reports, some off the uniform lads. I was planning on getting them collated on paper today.’

‘Di and me, we’ve been re-interviewing the victims, like you said. There doesn’t seem to be any linking factor that we’ve come across so far,’ Tommy said, his voice distant following Carol’s snub.