keys until his hand cleared the edge of her peripheral vision and placed a carton of coffee topped with a Danish on the desk beside her. ‘Time for a break?’
So she’d rubbed her eyes and abandoned the screen. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘You’re welcome. Anything you’re not clear about? I’ll take you through it, if you want.’
Still she held back. Don’t snatch at it, she cautioned herself. She didn’t want to use up her credit with Tony Hill until she absolutely had to, and preferably not before she’d been able to offer him something helpful in return. ‘It’s not that I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I don’t trust it.’
Tony smiled, enjoying her defensive stubbornness. ‘One of those kids who demanded empirical proof that two and two were always going to be four?’
A prick of delight that she’d entertained him, quickly stifled. Shaz moved the Danish and opened the coffee. ‘I’ve always been in love with proof. Why do you think I became a cop?’
Tony’s smile was lopsided and knowing. ‘I could speculate. It’s quite a proving ground you’ve chosen here.’
‘Not really. The ground’s already been broken. The Americans have been doing it for so long they’ve not only got manuals, they’ve got movies about it. It’s just taken us forever to catch on, as per usual. But you’re one of the ones who forced the issue, so there’s nothing left for us to prove.’ Shaz took a huge bite of her Danish, nodding in quiet approval as she tasted the apricot glaze on the flaky pastry.
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Tony said wryly, moving back to his own terminal. ‘The backlash has only just started. It’s taken long enough to get the police to accept we can provide useful help, but already the media hacks who were treating us profilers like gods a couple of years ago are jumping all over our shortcomings. They oversold us, so now they have to blame us for not living up to a set of expectations they created in the first place.’
‘I don’t know,’ Shaz said. ‘The public only remember the big successes. That case you did in Bradfield last year. The profile was right on the button. The police knew exactly where to go looking when it came to the crunch.’ Oblivious to the permafrost that had settled over Tony’s face, Shaz continued enthusiastically. ‘Are you going to do a session on that? We’ve all heard the grapevine version, but there’s next to nothing in the literature, even though it’s obvious you did a textbook job on the profile.’
‘We won’t be covering that case,’ he said flatly.
Shaz looked up sharply and realized where her eagerness had beached her. She’d blown it this time, in spades. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I get carried away, and tact and diplomacy, they’re history. I wasn’t thinking.’ Thick git, she berated herself silently. If he’d had the therapy he would have needed after that particular nightmare, the last thing he’d want would be to expose the details to avid prurience, even if it was masquerading as legitimate scientific interest.
‘You don’t have to apologize, Shaz,’ Tony said wearily. ‘You’re right, it is a key case. The reason we won’t be covering it is that I can’t talk about it without feeling like a freak. You’ll all have to forgive me. Maybe one day you’ll catch a case that leaves you feeling the same way. For your sake, I sincerely hope not.’ He looked down at his Danish as if it were an alien artefact and pushed it to one side, appetite dead as the past was supposed to be.
Shaz wished she could rerun the tape, pick up the conversation at the point where he’d put the coffee down on her desk and there was still the possibility of using the moment to build a bridge. ‘I’m really sorry, Dr Hill,’ she said inadequately.
He looked up and forced a thin smile. ‘Truly, Shaz, there’s no need. And can we drop the “Dr Hill” bit? I meant to bring it up during yesterday’s session, but it slipped my mind. I don’t want you all feeling that I’m the teacher and you’re the class. At the moment, I’m the group leader simply because I’ve been doing this for a while. Before long, we’ll all be working side by side, and there’s no point in having barriers between us. So it’s Tony from now on in, OK?’
‘You got it, Tony.’ Shaz searched for the message in his eyes and his words and, satisfied it contained genuine forgiveness, wolfed the rest of her Danish and returned to her screen. She couldn’t do it while he was here, but next time she was in the computer room alone, she intended to use her Internet access to pull up the newspaper archives and check out all the reports of the Bradfield serial killer case. She’d read most of them at the time, but that had been before she’d met Tony Hill and everything had changed. Now, she had a special interest. By the time she was finished, she’d know enough about Tony Hill’s most public profile to write the book that, for reasons she still couldn’t understand, had never been written. After all, she was a detective, wasn’t she?
Carol Jordan fiddled with the complicated chrome coffee maker, a housewarming present from her brother Michael when she’d moved to Seaford. She’d been luckier than most people caught in the housing market slump. She hadn’t had far to look for a buyer for her half of the warehouse flat she and Michael owned; the barrister he’d recently been sharing his bedroom with had been so eager to buy her out that Carol had begun to wonder if she’d been even more of a gooseberry than she’d imagined.
Now she had this low stone cottage on the side of the hill that rose above the estuary almost directly opposite Seaford; a place of her own. Well, almost, she corrected herself, reminded by the hard skull head-butting her shin. ‘OK, Nelson,’ she said, stooping to scratch the black cat’s ears. ‘I hear what you’re saying.’ While the coffee brewed, she scooped out a bowl of cat food to a rapture of purring followed by the sloppy sound of Nelson inhaling his breakfast. She walked through to the living room to enjoy the panorama of the estuary and the improbably slender arc of the suspension bridge. Gazing out across the misty river where the bridge appeared to float without connection to the land, she planned her coming encounter with the fire chief. Nelson walked in, tail erect, and jumped without pause straight on to the window sill where he stretched out, arching his head back towards Carol and demanding affection. Carol stroked his dense fur and said, ‘I only get one chance to convince this guy that I know arse from elbow, Nelson. I need him on my side. God knows, I need somebody on my side.’
Nelson batted her hand with his paw, as if responding directly to her words. Carol swallowed the rest of her coffee and got to her feet in a movement as smooth as the cat’s. One of the advantages she’d soon found with a DCI’s office hours was that she actually managed to use her gym membership more than once a month, and she was already feeling the benefit in firmer muscle tone and better aerobic fitness. It would have been a bonus to have someone to share it with, but that wasn’t why she did it. She did it for herself, because it made her feel good. She took pride in her body, revelling in its strength and mobility.
An hour later, enduring the tour of the central fire station, she was glad of her fitness as she struggled to keep pace with the long legs of the local chief of operations, Jim Pendlebury. ‘You seem to be better organized here than CID ever manages,’ Carol said, as they finally made it to his office. ‘You’ll have to share the secret of your efficiency.’
‘We’ve had so much cost-cutting, we’ve really had to streamline everything we do,’ he told her. ‘We used to have all our stations staffed round the clock with a complement of full-time officers, but it really wasn’t cost effective. I know a lot of the lads grumbled about it, but a couple of years back we shifted to a mix of part-time and full-time officers. It took a few months to shake down, but it’s been a huge advantage to me in management terms.’
Carol
