The Retribution (13 page)
Today, she was being as tenacious as ever. Once she got an idea into her head, she was like a serial killer with a victim in her power. She wouldn’t give up until she’d exhausted the possibilities of her prey then finished it off. It was an admirable trait,
Carol supposed. Provided you had the judgement to know when the idea was actually worth the pursuit. She’d been driven to the point of public rage by Penny herself; she knew exactly what Pete Reekie was experiencing now. It didn’t help that Penny was actually on to something Reekie wanted to keep under the radar. There was a dull flush across his prominent cheekbones and his brows were drawn down low. ‘As I said right at the start of this press call, the aim of this morning’s exercise is to identify an unknown murder victim. Somewhere out there is a family who are unaware of what has happened to their daughter, their sister, maybe even their mother. That’s the number one priority,’ he said, biting his words as if they were a stick of celery.
Penny Burgess didn’t wait for an invitation that surely wouldn’t have come. She was straight in there, coming back at the point she’d introduced some time earlier. ‘Surely the number one priority is to catch a killer? To stop the death toll rising any further?’
Flustered, Reekie looked around for help. But there was none. ‘That goes without saying,’ he said. ‘But our first step is to identify the victim. We need to know where she encountered her killer.’
‘She encountered him on the streets of Bradfield,’ Penny interrupted. ‘Just like his first two victims, Kylie Mitchell and Suzanne Black. Superintendent, do you have a warning to issue to the city’s street prostitutes while this serial killer is at large?’
‘Miss Burgess, I have already said there is no reason to believe these murders are the work of one man. The women were all killed in markedly different ways and locations—’
‘My source tells me there’s a link between all three crimes,’ Penny Burgess cut in. ‘The killer leaves a signature. Would you care to comment on that?’
Take it back to her
, Carol urged mentally.
She’s short on details, that’s why she hasn’t run the story.
There was a shocked silence in the room. Then a cacophony of voices began shouting questions.
You’ve gone too far
, Carol thought.
You’ve really pissed her off now
.
The police press officer managed to bring some calm to the half-dozen reporters in the room. Then Penny Burgess’s voice rang out again:
‘Will you be inviting DCI Jordan’s Major Incident Team to contribute to the inquiry?’
Reekie glowered at her. ‘I’ve no intention of discussing operational matters in this forum,’ he said. ‘I’m going to say this one more time, and then this press conference is over.’ He half-turned and gestured towards the cleaned-up image Grisha Shatalov had managed to produce. The woman still looked dead, but at least now she wouldn’t give most people nightmares. ‘We are concerned to identify the victim of a brutal murder that occurred in Bradfield some time between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. Someone must know this woman. We urge you to come forward in strictest confidence with any information about her identity or her movements prior to her death. Thank you for your cooperation.’ Reekie turned on his heel and marched out, ignoring the questions still coming from the reporters.
A few moments later, he burst into his office and threw his papers on a small table by the door. Carol swung round in the swivel chair and pasted a sympathetic look on her face. ‘Bit of a nightmare, Penny Burgess,’ she said.
Reekie glared at her as he subsided into the comfortable
chair behind his desk. ‘I still don’t see why I had to deal with her. What’s the point in trying to pretend we’ve not got a serial killer on the rampage? Why can’t we just front up about it? Reveal your team’s on the case?’ He picked up a pen and began tapping it end to end on his desk. She noticed a faint indentation on his finger where a wedding ring should have been. ‘That would reassure people.’
Carol swivelled to face him. Reekie needed his feathers smoothed down; yet another of the political games she hated having to play. ‘But as you pointed out in there, it would get a lot more media attention. Which is a problem on two counts. One: it’s always harder to run an investigation with the world’s press breathing down your neck, and these days the faintest whiff of a serial killer generates the kind of media shit-storm that makes life impossible for investigating officers. Greedy media on a twenty-four-hour cycle means a level of scrutiny that none of us wants to operate under. And two: this kind of killer revels in publicity. He wants to be a star. He wants to be the centre of attention. Take that away from him, and you put him under stress. And stress leads to mistakes. And mistakes are how we catch them.’
‘That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t have to stand up there and lie.’ He kept up the annoying thing with the pen. Carol wanted to snatch it from him, to play the martinet teacher to his sulky small boy. She resisted the urge with some difficulty.
‘You didn’t have to lie. Just not reveal the whole story. The one thing that was a relief to me from that display was that her source isn’t at the heart of the investigation.’
Reekie nodded. ‘I suppose so. If he was, she’d have known about the tattoo instead of having to go all coy about the “signature”.’
‘So we’re in the clear for now.’ Carol stood up. Reekie made no move to shake hands or get to his feet. Clearly he still felt bruised from his close encounter with Penny Burgess.
‘Let me know if your guys on the ground get anything on the ID.’
‘As soon as we hear anything, you’ll know. Let’s stay in close touch on this one, Carol. We don’t want it to get away from us.’
Carol turned and made for the door. They always had to have the last word, to remind her who was the ranking officer. At moments like this, she knew exactly why she appreciated Tony Hill.
So it came as a surprise to him when he sat down to write a risk assessment of Jacko Vance that he had no recollection of ever having formally profiled him. After Carol had left, he’d closed his eyes and tried to summon up a mental image of his report. When nothing materialised, his eyes had snapped open as he realised that his pursuit of Vance had been so out of the ordinary that he’d written nothing down at the time it was happening. Of course, the hunt for Vance had been unusual, in that it hadn’t originated with a police investigation. It had
been the result of a training exercise for the aspiring profilers Tony had been working with on a Home Office task force. And once things had started moving, there had been no time to sit back and analyse Vance’s crimes in those terms.
To buy himself some time while he considered what he knew about Vance, Tony found one of his previous profiles on Carol’s laptop and copied his standard introductory paragraphs.
The following offender profile is for guidance only and shouldn’t be regarded as an identikit portrait. The offender is unlikely to match the profile in every detail, though I would expect there to be a high degree of congruence between the characteristics outlined below and the reality. All of the statements in the profile express probabilities and possibilities, not hard facts.
A serial killer produces signals and indicators in the commission of his crimes. Everything he does is intended, consciously or not, as part of a pattern. Discovering the underlying pattern reveals the killer’s logic. It may not appear logical to us, but to him it is crucial. Because his logic is so idiosyncratic, straightforward traps will not capture him. As he is unique, so must be the means of catching him, interviewing him and reconstructing his acts.
It didn’t really fit the bill. That was because Lambert wanted a risk assessment, not a crime-based profile. He could keep the second paragraph, he supposed. But the first would have to change. He created a new file and began.
The following risk assessment is based on limited direct acquaintance with Jacko Vance. I saw Vance in public on several occasions and I interviewed him
twice: once in his home when he may have realised he was the object of investigation; and a second time after he had been arrested on suspicion of murder. However, I am familiar with the detail of his crimes and have sufficient knowledge of his background to feel confident in preparing an assessment of how he is likely to respond to being on the run, having successfully outwitted the system and escaped from prison.
‘What’s going through your head, Jacko?’ Tony said softly, leaning back in the chair and locking his fingers behind his head. ‘Why this? Why now?’
A sharp knock at the door interrupted his conversation with himself. Paula stuck her head in, a determined look on her face. ‘You got a minute?’ Before he could reply, she was through the door and shutting it behind her.
‘What if I said no?’
Paula gave him a tired smile. ‘I’d say, “tough shit”.’
‘I thought as much.’ Tony took off his reading glasses and studied Paula. There was history between them, a stained and complicated web of connections that had spread out over the years till it had become a sort of friendship. He’d led her through the labyrinth of grief after the death of a colleague who had also been a friend; she’d pushed him into doing the right things for the wrong reasons; he’d made her break the rules then stood in the firing line when Carol had turned her sights on her. Respect was the keystone of their relationship. Just as well, Tony thought, otherwise he might have found it hard to forgive Paula the happiness she’d found with Dr Elinor Blessing, a happiness he doubted he had the capacity for. ‘I don’t suppose this is a social visit?’
‘Can I ask what you’re working on?’ Paula clearly wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Carol must be expected back soon, then.
‘So you’re not working on our case?’
‘You know how it is, Paula. Blake won’t pay for me and DCI Jordan refuses to let me work without being paid. I thought I might be able to call in a favour via the Home Office, but they won’t agree, not now. They’ll want me totally focused on Jacko. No distractions.’
‘It’s just stupid, not making the most of your skills,’ Paula said. ‘You know what we’re working on?’
‘A string of murders that looks like a serial. I don’t know much more than that,’ he said. ‘She tries to keep me out of temptation’s way.’
‘Well, consider me the temptress. Tony, this is right up your street. He’s the kind of killer you understand, the sort of mind you can map like nobody else. And this is MIT’s last tango. We want to go out on a high note. I want to leave Blake with a sour taste in his mouth when the chief goes off to West Mercia. I want him to understand the class of the operation he’s flushing down the toilet. So we’ve got to come up with the right answer, and fast.’ Her eyes were pleading, a contrast with the fierceness of her words.
Tony wanted to resist the draw of Paula’s words. But in his heart, he agreed with everything she’d said. There was no rational explanation for what Blake was doing except that it would save some money to close the specialist unit. His conviction that spreading MIT’s skills more thinly would produce more effective outcomes was, in Tony’s opinion, a crackpot idea that would produce the opposite result. ‘Why are you
telling me this?’ he said, a last-ditch bid to still the interest quickening in him.
Paula rolled her eyes and tutted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the smart one? Because we need your help, Tony. We need you to profile the killer so we can make some progress instead of getting bogged down in the mountain of crap this kind of inquiry produces.’
‘She won’t have it. Like I said: there’s no budget to pay me and she won’t exploit me.’ He opened his hands as he shrugged, going for the deliberately cute smile. ‘I’ve begged her, but she won’t take advantage.’
Paula groaned. ‘Spare me the single entendres. Listen, it’s simple. It doesn’t matter what she wants. Because she’s not going to know. Because it’s going to be our little secret.’
Tony groaned. ‘Why am I getting that sinking feeling? Whenever you and I go off on our own initiative, it always ends in tears.’
Paula grinned, her eyes sparkling with mischief. ‘Yeah, but you can’t argue with our results. Every time we’ve gone behind her back, it’s moved the investigation forward.’
‘And she’s ripped us a new one,’ Tony said with feeling. ‘It’s all right for you, you get to go home to Elinor. But I’m supposed to be living with her in Worcester—’ The words were out before he could stop them.
Paula’s face couldn’t make its mind up between astonishment and delight. ‘What? You mean, like now? She’ll have her own flat, like she has now, in the basement?’
