Val McDermid 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Mermaids Singing, The Wire in the Blood, The Last Temptation

That wasn’t all; I soon discovered a second problem. The straps I’d fitted were fine for human ankles and wrists. But the dog didn’t have hands or feet to stop his limbs slipping free.

I didn’t puzzle for long. It was a far from elegant solution, but it served my purpose. I still had some six-inch nails left over from the repairs and modifications I’d made to the cellar. I carefully placed his left front paw so it straddled a gap in the timbers. I felt for the space between the bones and, with one blow of my club hammer, I drove the nail through at right angles to the paw, just above the last joint. I fixed the strap below the nail, and tugged at it. I reckoned it would hold for long enough.

I’d fixed the other legs within five minutes. Once he was securely strapped down, I was finally able to get started on the business of the day. Even with the bare prospect of a purely scientific experiment, I could feel the excitement rising in me till it was like a hard lump in my throat. Almost, it seemed, without conscious thought, my hand strayed to the handle of the rack. I watched it, detached, as if it were the hand of a stranger. It caressed the cogs, ran lightly over the wheel, and finally came to rest on the handle. The aroma of lubricating oil still hung lightly on the air, melding with the faint smell of paint and the stale, doggy smell of my assistant in the experiment. I took a deep breath, shivered in anticipation, and slowly began to turn the handle.

3 (#uf3797f56-55db-5bb6-a57d-cdcd500e1896)

I do not stick to assert, that any man who deals in murder must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles.

Don Merrick unzipped his flies. With a sigh of relief, he relaxed his muscles and let his bursting bladder empty. Behind him, the cubicle door opened. His pleasure was abruptly shattered when a heavy hand descended on his shoulder. ‘Sergeant Merrick. Just the man I wanted to see,’ Tom Cross boomed. Inexplicably, Merrick discovered he couldn’t finish what he’d started.

‘’Morning, sir,’ he said cautiously, shaking himself and quickly tucking his manhood out of Cross’s sight.

‘Told you about her new assignment, has she, your guv’nor?’ Cross asked, all lads-together bonhomie.

‘She mentioned it, yes, sir.’ Merrick looked longingly at the door. But there was no escape. Not with Cross’s hand still clamped on his shoulder.

‘I hear you’re planning on taking your inspector’s exams,’ Cross remarked.

Merrick’s stomach clenched. ‘That’s right, sir.’

‘So you’ll be needing all the friends in high places you can find, eh, lad?’

Merrick forced his lips apart in what he hoped was a smile to match Cross’s. ‘If you say so, sir.’

‘You’ve got the makings of a good officer, Merrick. As long as you remember where your loyalties lie. I know Inspector Jordan’s going to be a very busy lady over the next few weeks. She might not always have time to keep me fully abreast of things.’ Cross leered suggestively. ‘I’ll be relying on you to keep me informed of all developments. You understand, lad?’

Merrick nodded. ‘Aye, sir.’

Cross dropped his hand and made for the door. Opening it, he turned back to Merrick and said, ‘Especially if she starts shagging our doctor friend.’

The door sighed shut behind Cross. ‘Fuck and bollocks,’ Merrick said softly to himself as he moved to the washbasin and started scrubbing his hands vigorously under the hot tap.

Tony had been at his desk since eight. So far, all he’d done was make some photocopies of the Crime Analysis Report form he’d devised for the projected task force. Heavily based on the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program questionnaire, it aimed to produce a standard classification of every aspect of the crime, from the victim through to the forensic evidence. He shuffled the forms absently, then rearranged his newspaper cuttings into a neat pile. He justified his lack of activity by telling himself that until Carol arrived with the police files, there was little he could do. But that was merely an excuse.

The truth was, there was good reason why concentration was eluding him. She was in his head again. The mystery woman. At the start, he’d felt vulnerable, unwilling to take part in her games. Just like his patients, he thought ironically. How many times had he uttered the maxim that everybody was reluctant to cooperate with therapy at some level? He’d lost count of the number of times he’d slammed the phone down in the early days. But she had persisted, patiently continuing to administer her soothing persuasions till he had started to relax, even to join in.

She had completely thrown him off balance. She had seemed from the first to have an instinct for his Achilles heel, yet she never attacked it. She was everything anyone could desire in a fantasy lover, from gentle to raunchy. The key question for Tony was whether he was pathetic because he managed to relate to pornographic phone calls from a stranger, or whether he should congratulate himself on being so well adjusted that he understood what he needed and what worked for him. But he could not escape the fear that, if not yet dependent on the phone calls, he was at risk of succumbing to that danger. Already incapable of sustaining a normal sexual relationship, was he colluding in the worsening of his condition, or was he moving towards recovery? The only way to test which was correct was to attempt the shift from fantasy to reality. But he was still too wary of fresh humiliation for that. For now, it seemed he’d have to settle for the mysterious stranger who managed to make him feel like a man for long enough to drive the demons underground.

Tony sighed and picked up his mug. The coffee was cold, but he drank it anyway. In spite of himself, he began replaying past conversations in his mind. As if he hadn’t run through it enough during the early hours of the morning when sleep had been as elusive as the Bradfield serial killer. The woman’s voice buzzed in his ears, inescapable as someone else’s Walkman in a train carriage. He tried to close off his emotions and treat the calls with the intellectual objectivity he brought to his work. All he had to do was shut himself off, the way he did when he was examining the perverse fantasies of his patients. He’d certainly had enough experience of refusing to recognize echoes in himself.

Stop the voice. Analyse. Who was she? What drove her? Maybe, like him, she simply enjoyed digging around in messy heads. That at least would explain how she’d wormed her way through his barricades. She was certainly a different animal from the women who worked for the sleazy telephone sex chatlines. Before he’d started this study for the Home Office, he’d been engaged in a piece of research into those chatlines. A significant number of the recently convicted offenders he had dealt with had admitted they were regular callers to the premium-rate phone lines where they could pour their sexual fantasies, however bizarre, obscene or perverse, into the ears of dismally paid women who were encouraged by their bosses to indulge the callers for as long as they were prepared to pay. He’d actually phoned some of the lines himself, just to sample what was on offer, and to discover, using the transcripts of some of his interviews, just how far it was possible to go before disgust overcame the profit motive or the desperate need to earn a living.

Finally, he’d interviewed a selection of the women who worked the phones. The one thing they all held in common was a sense of being violated and degraded, however some of them dressed it up in the contempt they voiced for their clients. He’d come to several conclusions, but the paper he’d subsequently written hadn’t included all of them. Some he’d left out because they were too off the wall, others because he feared they might reveal too much about his own psyche. That included his conviction that the response of a man who had previously called a chatline to a dirty phone call from a member of the opposite sex would be radically different to that of a woman in the same situation. Instead of slamming down the receiver, or reporting it to Telecom, most of these men would be either amused or aroused. Either way, they’d want to hear more.

All he had to work out now was why, unlike the chatline workers, this woman found telephone sex with a stranger so appealing. What he needed was to satisfy the intellectual curiosity that was at least as strong as his urge to explore the sexual playground she had opened up for him. Maybe he should consider suggesting a meeting. Before he could go any further, the phone rang. Tony started, his hand stopping halfway in its automatic journey to the receiver. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he muttered impatiently, shaking his head like a high-diver surfacing. He picked up the phone and said, ‘Tony Hill.’

‘Dr Hill, it’s Carol Jordan here.’

Tony said nothing, relieved that his thoughts had failed to conjure up the mystery woman.

‘Inspector Jordan? Bradfield Police?’ Carol continued into the silence.

‘Hello, yes, sorry, I was just trying to … clear a space on my desk,’ Tony stumbled, his left leg starting to jitter like a cup of tea on a train.

‘I’m really sorry about this, but I’m not going to be able to make it for ten. Mr Brandon’s called all the squad together for a briefing, and I don’t think it would be politic to miss it.’

‘No, I can see that,’ Tony said, his free hand picking up a pen and unconsciously doodling a daffodil. ‘It’s going to be hard enough for you to act as go-between without making it look like you’re not part of the team. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Thanks. Look, I don’t think this briefing is going to last that long. I’ll be with you as soon as I can. Probably around eleven, if that doesn’t interfere with your schedule.’

‘That’s fine,’ he said, relieved he wouldn’t have too long to brood before they could get down to work. ‘I’ve no meetings in the diary for today, so take your time. You’re not putting me out.’

‘OK. See you then.’

Carol replaced the phone. So far, so good. At least Tony Hill didn’t seem a prisoner of his professional ego, unlike several of the experts she’d had dealings with. And, unlike most men, he’d perceived her potential difficulty, sympathized without patronizing her, and had happily gone along with a course of action that would minimize her problems. Impatiently, she pushed away the memory of the attraction she’d felt for him. These days, she had neither the time nor the inclination for emotional involvement. Sharing a flat with her brother and finding the time to sustain a few close friendships took as much of her energy as she could spare. Besides, the ending of her last relationship had dealt her self-esteem too serious a blow for her to enter on another one lightly.

The affair with a casualty surgeon in London hadn’t survived her move from the Met to Bradfield three years before. As far as Rob was concerned, it was Carol’s decision to move to the frozen north. So travelling up and down motorways to spend time together was down to her. He had no intention of wasting any of his valuable off-duty time putting unnecessary mileage on his BMW just to go to a city whose only redeeming feature was Carol. Besides, nurses were a lot less stroppy and critical, and they understood long hours and shift work just as well as a copper, if not better. His brutal self-interest had shaken Carol, who felt cheated of the emotion and energy she’d invested in loving Rob. Tony Hill might be attractive, charming, and, if his reputation was correct, intelligent and intuitive, but Carol wasn’t about to risk her heart again. Especially not with a professional colleague. If she was finding it hard to get him out of her mind, it was because she was fascinated by what she could learn from him about the case, not because she fancied him.

Carol ran a hand through her hair and yawned. She’d been home for precisely fifty-seven minutes in the previous twenty-four hours. Twenty of those had been spent in the shower in a futile attempt to inoculate herself against the effects of no sleep. She’d spent a large chunk of the evening out on the knocker with her CID team, pursuing fruitless enquiries among the nervous inhabitants, workers and regular customers of Temple Fields and its gay businesses. The men’s reactions had ranged from total noncooperation to abuse. Carol felt no surprise. The area was seething with a mass of contradictory feelings.

On the one hand, the gay businesses didn’t want the area swarming with police because it was bad for cash flow. On the other hand, the gay activists were angrily demanding proper protection now the police had belatedly decided that there was a gay serial killer on the loose. One group of customers were horrified to be questioned, since their gay life was a deep secret from wives, friends, colleagues and parents. Another group were happily playing macho men, boasting that they’d never get into a situation where they were slaughtered by some glassy-eyed maniac. Yet another group were eager for details, obscurely and, in Carol’s eyes, obscenely excited by what could happen when one man went out of control. And there was a handful of hardline lesbian separatists who made no secret of their glee that this time, men were the targets. ‘Maybe now they’ll understand why we were so outraged during the Yorkshire Ripper hunt when men suggested single women should have a curfew,’ one had sneered at Carol.

Exhausted by the turmoil, Carol had driven back to headquarters to begin her trawl of the files of the existing enquiries. The murder room was strangely quiet, since most of the detectives were out in Temple Fields, pursuing different lines of enquiry or taking advantage of a few hours off to catch up on their drinking, their sex lives or their sleep. She’d already had a quick word with her opposite numbers on the other two murder investigations, and they had reluctantly agreed to give her access to their files provided she had the material back on their desks first thing in the morning. It was exactly the response she’d expected: superficially cooperative, but, in real terms, calculated to cause her even more problems.

When she’d walked through her office door, she’d been appalled by the sheer volume of paper. Stacks of interview statements, forensic and pathology reports, files of photographs virtually buried her office. Why, in God’s name, hadn’t Tom Cross decided to use the HOLMES computer system for the earlier murders? At least then all the material would be accessible in the computer, indexed and cross-referenced. All she’d have had to do then was to persuade one of the HOLMES indexers to print out the relevant stuff for Tony. With a groan, she closed her door on the mess and walked through the empty corridors to the uniform sergeant’s office. The time had come to test the ACC’s instruction to all ranks to cooperate with her. Without another pair of hands, she’d never get through the night’s work.

Even with the grudgingly granted help of a PC, it had been a struggle to get through the material. Carol had skimmed the investigation reports, extracting everything that seemed to hold the possibility of significance and passing it on to the constable for copying. Even so, there was a daunting pile of material for Tony and her to work through. When her assistant knocked off at six, Carol wearily loaded the photocopies into a couple of cardboard cartons and staggered down to her car with them. She helped herself to full sets of photographs of all the victims and scenes of crime, filling in a form to requisition fresh copies for the investigating teams to replace the ones she’d taken.

Only then had she headed home. Even there, she had no respite. Nelson waited behind the door, miaowing crossly as he wove his sinuous body round her ankles, forcing her to head straight for the kitchen and the tin opener. When she dumped the bowl of food in front of him, he stared suspiciously at it, frowning. Then hunger overcame his desire to punish her and he wolfed down the whole bowl without pause. ‘Nice to see you missed me,’ Carol said drily as she made for the shower. By the time she emerged, Nelson had clearly decided to forgive her. He followed her around, purring like a dialling tone, sitting down on every garment she selected from the wardrobe and placed on the bed.

‘You really are the pits,’ Carol grumbled, pulling her black jeans out from under him. Nelson carried on adoring her, his purr not disrupted in the slightest. She pulled on the jeans, admiring the cut in her wardrobe mirror. They were Katharine Hammett, but she’d only paid £20 for them in a seconds shop in Kensington Church Street, where she went on a twice-annual trawl for the designer clothes she loved but couldn’t afford, even on an inspector’s wages. The cream linen shirt was French Connection, the ribbed grey cardigan from a chain store men’s department. Carol picked a few black cat hairs from the cardigan and caught Nelson’s reproachful stare. ‘You know I love you. I just don’t need to wear you,’ she said.

‘You’d get a shock if he answered you,’ a man’s voice said from the doorway.

Carol turned to face her brother, who leaned against the doorjamb in his boxer shorts, blond hair tousled, eyes bleary with sleep. His face had a strange congruence with Carol’s, as if someone had scanned her photograph into a computer and subtly altered the features away from the feminine and towards the masculine. ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Nope. I’ve got to go to London today. The money man cometh.’ He yawned.

‘The Americans?’ Carol asked, crouching down and scratching the cat behind the ears. Nelson promptly rolled over on to his back, displaying his full stomach to be stroked.

‘Correct. They want a full demo of what we’ve done so far. I’ve been telling Carl that nothing looks very impressive right now, but he says they want some reassurance that they’re not just pouring their development money into a black hole.’

‘The joys of software development,’ Carol said, rumpling Nelson’s fur.

‘Leading-edge software development, please,’ Michael said, self-mockingly. ‘How about you? What’s happening down the murder factory? I heard on the news last night that you’d copped for another one.’

‘Looks like it. At least the powers that be have finally admitted that we’ve got a serial killer on the loose. And they’ve brought in a psychological profiler to work with us.’