ART ONE

Tony Hill lay in bed and watched a long strip of cloud slide across a sky the colour of duck eggs. If anything had sold him on this narrow back-to-back terraced house, it was the attic bedroom with its strange angles and the pair of skylights that gave him something to look at when sleep was elusive. A new house, a new city, a new start, but still it was hard to lose consciousness for eight hours at a stretch.

It wasn't surprising that he hadn't slept well. Today was the first day of the rest of his life, he reminded himself with a wry smile that scrunched the skin round his deep-set blue eyes into a nest of wrinkles that not even his best friend could call laughter lines. He'd never laughed enough for that. And making murder his business had made sure he never would.

Work was always the perfect excuse, of course. For two years, he'd been toiling on behalf of the Home Office on a feasibility study to see whether it would be useful or possible to create a national task force of trained psychological profilers, a hit squad capable of moving in on complex cases and working with the investigative teams to improve the rate and speed of clean-up. It had been a job that had required all the clinical and diplomatic skills he'd developed over years of working as a psychologist in secure mental hospitals.

It had kept him off the wards, but it had exposed him to other dangers.

The danger of boredom, for example. Tired of being stuck behind a desk or in endless meetings, he'd allowed himself to be seduced away from the job in hand by the tantalizing offer of involvement in a case that even from a distance had appeared to be something very special. Not in his wildest nightmares could he have imagined just how exceptional it could be. Nor how destructive.

He clenched his eyes momentarily against the memories that. always stalked on the edge of his consciousness, waiting for him to drop his guard and let them in. That was another reason why he slept badly. The thought of what his dreams could do to him was no enticement to drift away and hand control over to his subconscious.

The cloud slipped out of sight like a slow-moving fish and Tony rolled out of bed, padding downstairs to the kitchen. He poured water into the bottom section of the coffee pot, filled the mid-section with a darkly fragrant roast from the freezer, screwed on the empty top section and set it on the gas. He thought of Carol Jordan, as he did probably one morning in three when he made the coffee. She'd given him the heavy aluminium Italian pot when he'd come home from hospital after the case was over. "You're not going to be walking to the cafe for a while," she'd said. "At least this way you can get a decent espresso at home."

It had been months now since he'd seen Carol. They'd not even taken the opportunity to celebrate her promotion to detective chief inspector, which showed just how far apart they'd grown. Initially, after his release from hospital, she'd come to visit whenever the hectic pace of her job would allow. Gradually, they'd both come to realize that every time they were together, the spectre of the investigation rose between them, obscuring and overshadowing whatever else might be possible for them. He understood that Carol was better equipped than most to interpret what she saw in him. He simply couldn't face the risk of opening up to someone who might reject him when she realized how he had been infected by his work.

If that happened, he doubted his capacity to function. And if he couldn't function, he couldn't do his job. And that was too important to let go. What he did saved people's lives. He was good at it, probably one of the best there had ever been because he truly understood the dark side. To risk the work would be the most irresponsible thing he could ever do, especially now when the whole future of the newly created National Offender Profiling Task Force lay in his hands.

What some people perceived as sacrifices were really dividends, he told himself firmly as he poured out his coffee. He was permitted to do the one thing he did supremely well, and they paid him money for it. A tired smile crossed his face. God, but he was lucky.

Shaz Bowman understood perfectly why people commit murder. The revelation had nothing to do with the move to a new city or the job that had brought her there, but everything to do with the cowboy plumbers who had installed the water supply when the former Victorian mill-owner's mansion had been converted into self-contained apartments. The builders had done a thoughtful job, preserving original features and avoiding partitions that wrecked the fine proportions of the spacious rooms. To the naked eye, Shaz's flat had been perfect, right down to the French windows leading to the back garden that was her exclusive domain.

Years of shared student dives with sticky carpets and scummy bathtubs, followed by a police section house and a preposterously expensive rented bed sit in West London had left Shaz desperate for the opportunity to check out whether house-proud was an adjective she could live with. The move north had provided her first affordable chance. But the idyll had shattered the first morning she had to rise early for work.

Bleary-eyed and semi-conscious, she'd run the shower long enough to get the temperature right. She stepped under the powerful stream of water, lifting her hands above her head in a strangely reverent gesture. Her groan of pleasure turned abruptly to a scream as the water switched from amniotic warmth to a scalding scatter of hypodermic stings. She hurled herself clear of the shower cubicle, twisting her knee as she slipped on the bathroom floor, cursing with a fluency she owed to her three years in the Met.

Speechless, she stared at the plume of steam in the corner of the bathroom where she had stood moments before. Then, as abruptly, the steam dissipated. Cautiously, she extended a hand under the water. The temperature was back where it should be. Inch by tentative inch, she moved under the stream of water. Letting out her unconsciously held breath, she reached for the shampoo. She'd got as far as the halo of white lather when the icy needles of winter rain cascaded on her bare shoulders. This time, her breath went inwards, taking enough shampoo with it to add a coughing retch to the morning's sound effects.

It didn't take much to work out that her ordeal was the result of someone else's synchronous ablutions. She was supposed to be ii a detective, after all. But understanding didn't make her any happier.

The first day of the new job and instead of feeling calm and grounded after a long, soothing shower, she was furious and frustrated, her nerves jangling, the muscles in the nape of her neck tightening with the promise of a headache. "Great," she growled, fighting back tears that had more to do with emotion than the shampoo in them.

Shaz advanced on the shower once again and turned it off with a vicious twist of the wrist. Mouth compressed into a thin line, she started running a bath. Tranquillity was no longer an option for the day, but she still had to get the suds out of her hair so she wouldn't arrive in the squad room of the brand new task force looking like something no self-respecting cat would have bothered to drag in. It was going to be unnerving enough without having to worry about what she looked like.

As she crouched in the bath, dunking her head forward into the water, Shaz tried to restore her earlier mood of exhilarated anticipation.

"You're lucky to be here, girl," she told herself. "All those dickheads who applied and you didn't even have to fill in the form, you got chosen. Hand-picked, elite. All that shit work paid off, all that taking the crap with a smile. The canteen cowboys going nowhere fast, they're the ones having to swallow the shit now. Not like you, Detective Constable Shaz Bowman. National Offender Profiling Task Force Officer Bowman." As if that wasn't enough, she'd be working alongside the acknowledged master of that arcane blend of instinct and experience.

Dr. Tony Hill, BSc (London), DPhil (Oxon), the profiler's profiler, author of the definitive British textbook on serial offenders. If Shaz had been a woman given to hero-worship, Tony Hill would have been right up there in the pantheon of her personal gods. As it was, the opportunity to pick his brains and learn his craft was one that she'd cheerfully have made sacrifices for. But she hadn't had to give up anything. It had been dropped right into her lap.

By the time she was to welling her cap of short dark hair, considering the chance of a lifetime that lay ahead of her had tamed her anger though not her nerves. Shaz forced herself to focus on the day ahead.

Dropping the towel carelessly over the side of the bath, she stared into the mirror, ignoring the blurt of freckles across her cheekbones and the bridge of her small soft nose, passing over the straight line of lips too slim to promise much sensuality and focusing on the feature that everyone else noticed first about her.

Her eyes were extraordinary. Dark blue irises were shot through with striations of an intense, paler shade that seemed to catch the light like the facets of a sapphire. In interrogation, they were irresistible. The eyes had it. That intense blue stare fixed people like super-glue. Shaz had a feeling that it had made her last boss so uncomfortable he'd been delighted at the prospect of shipping her out in spite of an arrest and conviction record that would have been remarkable in an experienced CID officer, never mind the rookie of the shift.

She'd only met her new boss once. Somehow, she didn't think Tony Hill was going to be quite so much of a pushover. And who knew what he'd see if he slid under those cold blue de fences With a shiver of anxiety, Shaz turned away from the remorseless stare of the mirror and chewed the skin on the side of her thumb.

Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan slipped the original out of the photocopier, picked up the copy from the tray and crossed the open-plan CID room to her office with nothing more revelatory than a genial, "Morning, lads," to the two early bird detectives already at their desks. She presumed they were only there at this hour because they were trying to make an impression on her. Sad boys.

She shut her door firmly behind her and crossed to her desk. The original crime report went back into the overnight file and onwards into her out tray. The photostat joined four similar previous overnight despatches in a folder that lived in her briefcase when it wasn't sitting on her desk. Five, she decided, was critical mass. Time for action. She glanced at her watch. But not quite yet.

The only other item that cluttered the desk now was a lengthy memo from the Home Office. In the dry civil service language that could render Tarantino dull, it announced the formal launch of the National Offender Profiling Task Force. "Under the supervision of Commander Paul Bishop, the task force will be led by Home Office clinical psychologist and Senior Profiler Dr. Tony Hill. Initially, the task force will consist of a further six experienced detectives seconded to work with Dr. Hill and Commander Bishop under Home Office guidelines."

Carol sighed. "It could have been me. Oh yeah, it could have been me," she sang softly. She hadn't been formally invited. But she knew all she'd have had to do was ask. Tony Hill had wanted her on the squad.

He'd seen her work at close quarters and he'd told her more than once that she had the right cast of mind to help him make the new task force effective. But it wasn't that simple. The one case they'd worked together had been personally devastating as well as difficult for both of them. And her feelings for Tony Hill were still too complicated for her to relish the prospect of becoming his right-hand woman in other cases that might become as emotionally draining and intellectually challenging as their first encounter.

Nevertheless, she'd been tempted. Then this had come along. Early promotion in a newly created force wasn't an opportunity she felt she could afford to miss. The irony was that this chance had emerged from the same serial killer hunt. John Brandon had been the Assistant Chief Constable at Bradfield who'd had the nerve to bring in Tony Hill and to appoint Carol liaison officer. And when he was promoted to Chief Constable of the new force, he wanted her on board. His timing couldn't have been better, she thought, a faint pang of regret surfacing in spite of herself. She stood up and took the three steps that were all she needed to cross her office and stare down at the docks below where people moved around purposefully doing she knew not what.

Carol had learned the Job first with the Met in London and then with Bradfield Metropolitan Police, both leviathans fuelled by the perpetual adrenaline high of inner city crime. But now she was out on the edge of England with East Yorkshire Police where, as her brother Michael had wryly pointed out, the force's acronym was almost identical to the traditional Yorkshire yokel greeting of

"Ey-up'. Here, the DCI's job didn't involve juggling murder inquiries, drive-by shootings, gang wars, armed robberies and high-profile drug deals.

In the towns and villages of East Yorkshire, there wasn't any shortage of crime. But it was all low-level stuff. Her inspectors and sergeants were more than capable of dealing with it, even in the small cities of Holm and Traskham and the North Sea port of Seaford where she was based.

Her junior officers didn't want her running around on their tails. After all, what did a city girl like her know about sheep rustling? Or counterfeit cargo lading bills? Besides which, they all knew perfectly well that when the new DCI turned up on the job, she wasn't so much interested in finding out what was going down as she was in sussing out who was up to scratch and who was bus king it, who might be on the sauce and who might be on the take. And they were right. It was taking longer than she'd anticipated, but she was gradually assembling a picture of what her team was like and who was capable of what.

Carol sighed again, rumpling her shaggy blonde hair with the fingers of one hand. It was an uphill struggle, not least because most of the blunt Yorkshiremen she was working with were fighting a lifetime's conditioning to take a woman guvnor seriously. Not for the first time, she wondered if ambition had shoved her into a drastic mistake and backed her flourishing career into a cul-de-sac.

She shrugged and turned away from the window, then pulled out the file from her briefcase again. She might have opted to turn her back on the profiling task force, but working with Tony Hill had already taught her a few tricks. She knew what a serial offender's signature looked like.

She just hoped she didn't need a team of specialists to track one down.

One half of the double doors swung open momentarily ahead of the other.

A woman with a face instantly recognizable in 78 per cent of UK homes (according to the latest audience survey) and high heels that shouted the praises of legs which could have modelled pantyhose strode into the make-up department, glancing over her shoulder and saying, '... which gives me nothing to work off, so tell Trevor to swap two and four on the running order, OK?"

Betsy Thorne followed her, nodding calmly. She looked far too wholesome to be anything in TV, dark hair with irregular strands of silver swept back in a blue velvet Alice band from a face that was somehow quintessentially English; the intelligent eyes of a sheepdog, the bones of a thoroughbred racehorse and the complexion of a Cox's Orange Pippin.

"No problem," she said, her voice every degree as warm and caressing as her companion's. She made a note on the clipboard she was carrying.

Micky Morgan, presenter and only permissible star of Midday with Morgan, the flagship two-hour lunchtime news magazine programme of the independent networks, carried straight ahead to what was clearly her usual chair. She settled in, pushed her honey blonde hair back and gave her face a quick critical scrutiny in the glass as the make-up artist swathed her in a protective gown. "Maria, you're back!" Micky exclaimed, delight in her voice and eyes in equal measure. "Thank God.

I'm praying you've been out of the country so you didn't have to look at what they do to me when you're not here. I absolutely forbid you to go on holiday again!"

Maria smiled. "Still full of shit, Micky."

"It's what they pay her for," Betsy said, perching on the counter by the mirror.

"Can't get the staff these days," Micky said through stiff lips as Maria started to smooth foundation over her skin. "Zit coming up on the right temple," she added.

"Premenstrual?" Maria asked.

"I thought I was the only one who could spot that a mile off," Betsy drawled.

"It's the skin. The elasticity changes," Maria said absently, completely absorbed in her task.

"Talking Point," Micky said. "Run it past me again, Bets." She closed her eyes to concentrate and Maria seized the chance to work on her eyelids.

Betsy consulted her clipboard. "In the wake of the latest revelations that yet another junior minister has been caught in the wrong bed by the tabloids, we ask, "What makes a woman want to be a mistress?" She ran through the guests for the item while Micky listened attentively. Betsy came to the final interviewee and smiled. "You'll enjoy this: Dorien Simmonds, your favourite novelist. The professional mistress, putting the case that actually being a mistress is not only marvelous fun but a positive social service to all those put-upon wives who have to endure marital sex long after he bores them senseless."

Micky chuckled. "Brilliant. Good old Dorien. Is there anything, do you suppose, that Dorien wouldn't do to sell a book?"

"She's just jealous," Maria said. "Lips, please, Micky."

"Jealous?" Betsy asked mildly.

"If Dorien Simmonds had a husband like Micky's, she wouldn't be flying the flag for mistresses," Maria said firmly. "She's just pig sick that she'll never land a catch like Jacko. Mind you, who isn't?"

"Mmmm," Micky purred.

"Mmmm," Betsy agreed.

It had taken years for the publicity machine to carve the pairing of Micky Morgan and Jacko Vance as firmly into the nation's consciousness as fish and chips or Lennon and Mccartney. The celebrity marriage made in ratings heaven, it could never be dissolved. Even the gossip columnists had given up trying.

The irony was that it had been fear of newspaper gossip that had brought them together in the first place. Meeting Betsy had turned Micky's life on its head at a time when her career had started curving towards the heights. To climb as far and as fast as Micky meant collecting an interesting selection of enemies ranging from the poisonously envious to the rivals who'd been edged out of the limelight they thought was theirs of right. Since there was little to fault Micky on professionally, they'd homed in on the personal. Back in the early eighties, lesbian chic hadn't been invented. For women even more than men, being gay was still one of the quickest routes to the P45. Within a few months of abandoning her formerly straight life by falling in love with Betsy, Micky understood what a hunted animal feels like.

Her solution had been radical and extremely successful. Micky had Jacko to thank for that. She had been and still was lucky to have him, she thought as she looked approvingly at her reflection in the make-up mirror.

Perfect.

Tony Hill looked around the room at the team he had hand-picked and felt a moment's pity. They thought they were walking into this grave new world with their eyes open. Coppers never thought of themselves as innocents abroad. They were too streetwise. They'd seen it all, done it all, got pissed and thrown up on the T-shirt. Tony was here to instruct half a dozen cops who already thought they knew it all that there were unimaginable horrors out there that would make them wake up screaming in the night and teach them to pray. Not for forgiveness, but for healing. He knew only too well that whatever they thought, none of them had made a genuinely informed choice when they'd opted for the National Offender Profiling Task Force.

None of them except, perhaps, Paul Bishop. When the Home Office had given the profiling project the green light, Tony had called in every favour he could claim and a few he couldn't to make sure the police figurehead was someone who knew the gravity of what he was taking on.

He'd dangled Paul Bishop's name in front of the politicians like a carrot in front of a reluctant mule, reminding them of how well Paul performed in front of the cameras. Even then it had been touch and go till he'd pointed out that even

London's cynical hacks showed a bit of respect for the man who'd headed the successful hunts for the predators they'd dubbed the Railcard Rapist and the Metroland Murderer. After those investigations, there was no question in Tony's mind that Paul knew exactly the kind of nightmares that lay ahead.

On the other hand, the rewards were extraordinary. When it worked, when their work actually put someone away, these police officers would know a high unlike any other they'd ever experienced. It was a powerful feeling, to know your endeavours had helped put a killer away. It was even more gratifying to realize how many lives you might have saved because you shone a light down the right path for your colleagues to go down. It was exhilarating, even though it was tempered with the knowledge of what the perpetrator had already done. Somehow, he had to convey that satisfaction to them as well.

Paul Bishop was talking now, welcoming them to the task force and outlining the training programme he and Tony had thrashed out between them. "We're going to take you through the process of profiling, giving you the background information you need to start developing the skill for yourself," he said. It was a crash course in psychology, inevitably superficial, but covering the basics. If they'd chosen wisely, their apprentices would go off in their own preferred directions, reading more widely, tracking down other specialists and building up their own expertise in particular areas of the profiling craft that interested them.

Tony looked around at his new colleagues. All CID-trained, all but one a graduate. A sergeant and five constables, two of them women. Eager eyes, notepads open, pens at the ready. They were smart, this lot. They knew that if they did well here and the unit prospered, they could go all the way to the top on the strength of it.

His steady gaze ranged over them. Part of him wished Carol Jordan was among them, sharing her sharp perceptions and shrewd analyses, tossing in the occasional grenade of humour to lighten the grimness. But his sensible head knew there would be more than enough problems ahead without that complication.

If he had to put money on any of them turning into the kind of star that would stop him missing Carol's abilities, he'd go for the one with the eyes that blazed cold fire. Sharon Bowman. Like all the best hunters, she'd kill if she had to.

Just like he'd done himself.

Tony pushed the thought away and concentrated on Paul's words, waiting for the signal. When Paul nodded, Tony took over smoothly. "The FBI take two years to train their operatives in offender profiling," he said, leaning back in his chair in a deliberate attitude of relaxed calm. "We do things differently over here." A note of acid in the voice. "We'll be accepting our first cases in six weeks. In three months' time, the Home Office expects us to be running a full case-load.

What you've got to do inside that time frame is assimilate a mountain of theory, learn a series of protocols as long as your arm, develop total familiarity with the computer software we've had specially written for the task force, and cultivate an instinctive understanding of those among us who are, as we clinicians put it, totally fucked up." He grinned unexpectedly at their serious faces. "Any questions?"

"Is it too late to resign?" Bowman's electric eyes sparkled humour that was missing from her deadpan tones.

"The only resignations they accept are the ones certified by the pathologist." The wry response came from Simon Mcneill. Psychology graduate from Glasgow, four years' service with Strath-clyde Police, Tony reminded himself, reassuring himself that he could recall names and backgrounds without too much effort.

"Correct," he said.

"What about insanity?" another voice from the group asked.

"Far too useful a tool for us to let you slip from our grasp," Tony told him. "I'm glad you brought that up, actually, Sharon. It gives me the perfect lead into what I want to talk about first today." His eyes moved from face to face, waiting until his seriousness was mirrored in each of their faces. A man accustomed to assuming whatever personality and demeanour would be acceptable, he shouldn't have been surprised at how easy it was to manipulate them, but he was. If he did his job properly, it would be far harder to achieve in a couple of months' time.

Once they were settled and concentrating, he tossed his folder of notes on to the table attached to the arm of his chair and ignored them.

"Isolation," he said. "Alienation. The hardest things to deal with.

Human beings are gregarious. We're herd animals. We hunt in packs, we celebrate in packs. Take away human contact from someone and their behaviour distorts. You're going to learn a lot about that over the coming months and years." He had their attention now. Time for the killer blow.

"I'm not talking about serial offenders. I'm talking about you. You're all police officers with CID experience. You're successful cops, you've fitted in, you've made the system work for you. That's why you're here.

You're used to the camaraderie of team work, you're accustomed to a support system that backs you up. When you get a result, you've always had a drinking squad to share the victory with. When it's all gone up in smoke, that same squad comes out and commiserates with you. It's a bit like a family, only it's a family without the big brother that picks on you and the auntie that asks when you're going to get married." He noted the nods and twinges of facial expression that indicated agreement. As he'd expected, there were fewer from the women than the men.

He paused for a moment and leaned forward. "You've just been collectively bereaved. Your families are dead and you can never, never go home any more. This is the only home you have, this is your only family." He had them now, gripped tighter than any thriller had ever held them. The Bowman woman's right eyebrow twitched up into an astonished arc, but other than that, they were motionless.

"The best profilers have probably got more in common with serial killers than with the rest of the human race. Because killers have to be good profilers, too. A killer profiles his victims. He has to learn how to look at a shopping precinct full of people and pick out the one person who will work as a victim for him. He picks the wrong person and it's good night, Vienna. So he can't afford to make mistakes any more than we can. Like us, he kicks off consciously sorting by set criteria, but gradually, if he's good, it gets to be an instinct. And that's how good I want you all to be."

For a moment, his perfect control slipped as images crowded unbidden to the front of his mind. He was the best, he knew that now. But he'd paid a high price to discover that. The idea that payment might come due again was something he managed to reject as long as he was sober. It was no accident that Tony had scarcely had a drink for the best part of a year.

Collecting himself, Tony cleared his throat and straightened in his seat. "Very soon, your lives are going to change. Your priorities will shift like Los Angeles in an earthquake. Believe me, when you spend your days and nights projecting yourself inside a mind that's programmed to kill until death or incarceration prevents it, you suddenly find a lot of things that used to seem important are completely irrelevant.

It's hard to get worked up about the unemployment figures when you've been contemplating the activities of somebody who's taken more people off the register in the last six months than the government has." His cynical smile gave them the cue to relax the muscles that had been taut for the past few minutes.

"People who have not done this kind of work have no notion of what it is like. Every day, you review the evidence, raking through it for that elusive clue you missed the last forty-seven times. You watch helplessly as your hot leads turn out colder than a junkie's heart. You want to shake the witnesses who saw the killer but don't remember anything about him because nobody told them in advance that one of the people who would fill up with petrol in their service station one night three months ago was a multiple murderer. Some detective who thinks what you're doing is a bag of crap sees no reason why your life shouldn't be as fucking miserable as his, so he gives out your phone number to husbands, wives, lovers, children, parents, siblings, all of them people who want a crumb of hope from you.

"And as if that isn't enough, the media gets on your back. And then the killer does it again."

Leon Jackson, who'd made it out of Liverpool's black ghetto to the Met via an Oxford scholarship, lit a cigarette. The snap of his lighter had the other two smokers reaching for their own. "Sounds cool," he said, dropping one arm over the back of his chair. Tony couldn't help the pang of pity. Harder they come, the bigger the fall.

"Arctic," Tony said. "So, that's how people outside the Job see you.

What about your former colleagues? When you come up against the ones you left behind, believe me, they're going to start noticing you've gone a bit weird. You're not one of the gang any more, and they'll start avoiding you because you smell wrong. Then when you're working a case, you're going to be transplanted into an alien environment and there will be people there who don't want you on the case. Inevitably." He leaned forward again, hunched against the chill wind of memory. "And they won't be afraid to let you know it."

Tony read superiority in Leon's sneer. Being black, he reasoned, Leon probably figured he'd had a taste of that already and rejection could therefore hold no fears for him. What he almost certainly

didn't realize was that his bosses had needed a black success story.

They'd have made that clear to the officers who controlled the culture, so the chances were that no one had really pushed Leon half as hard as he thought they had. "And don't think the brass will back you when the shit comes down," Tony continued. "They won't. They'll love you for about two days, then when you haven't solved their headaches, they'll start to hate you. The longer it takes to resolve the serial of fences the worse it becomes. And the other detectives avoid you because you've got a contagious disease called failure. The truth might be out there, but you haven't got it, and until you do, you're a leper.

"Oh, and by the way," he added, almost as an afterthought, ' they do nail the bastard thanks to your hard work, they won't even invite you to the party."

The silence was so intense he could hear the hiss of burning tobacco as Leon inhaled. Tony got to his feet and shoved his springy black hair back from his forehead. "You probably think I'm exaggerating. Believe me, I'm barely scratching the surface of how bad this job will make you feel. If you don't think it's for you, if you're having doubts about your decision, now's the time to walk away. Nobody will reproach you.

No blame, no shame. Just have a word with Commander Bishop." He looked at his watch. "Coffee break. Ten minutes."

He picked up his folder and carefully didn't look at them as they pushed back chairs and made a ragged progress to the door and the coffee station in the largest of the three rooms they'd been grudgingly granted by a police service already strapped for accommodation for their own officers. When at last he looked up, Shaz Bowman stood leaning against the wall by the door, waiting.

"Second thoughts, Sharon?" he asked.

"I hate being called Sharon," she said. "People who want a response go for Shaz. I just wanted to say it's not only profilers that get treated like shit. There's nothing you said just now that sounds any worse than what women deal with all the time in this job."

"So I've been told," Tony said, thinking inevitably of Carol Jordan. "If it's true, you lot should have a head start in this game."

Shaz grinned and pushed off from the wall, satisfied. "Just watch," she said, swivelling on the balls of her feet and moving through the door on feet as silent and springy as a jungle cat.

Jacko Vance leaned forward across the flimsy table and frowned. He pointed to the open desk diary. "You see, Bill? I'm already committed to running the half-marathon on the Sunday. And then after that, we're filming Monday and Tuesday, I'm doing a club opening in Lincoln on Tuesday night you're coming to that, by the way, aren't you?" Bill nodded, and Jacko continued. "I've got meetings lined up Wednesday back to back and I've got to drive back up to Northumberland for my volunteer shift. I just don't see how we can accommodate them." He threw himself back against the striped tweed of the production caravan's comfortless sofa bench with a sigh.

"That's the whole point, Jacko," his producer said calmly, stirring the skimmed milk into the two coffees he was making in the kitchen area.

Bill Ritchie had been producing Vance's Visits for long enough to know there was little point in trying to change his star's mind once it was made up. But this time, he was under sufficient pressure from his bosses to try. "This documentary short's supposed to make you look busy, to say, "Here's this amazing guy, busy professional life, yet he finds time to work for charity, so why aren't you?" He brought the coffees to the table.

"I'm sorry, Bill, but it's not on." Jacko picked up his coffee and winced at its scalding heat. Hastily, he put it down again. "When are we going to get a proper coffee maker in here?"

"If it's anything to do with me, never," Bill said with a mock-severe scowl. "The lousy coffee's the one thing guaranteed to divert you from whatever you're going on about."

Jacko shook his head ruefully, acknowledging he'd been caught out. "OK.

But I'm still not doing it. For one, I don't want a camera crew dogging my heels any more than I already have to put up with. For two, I don't do charity work so I can show off about it on prime-time telethons. For three, the poor sick bastards I spend my nights with are terminally ill people who do not need a handheld camera shoved down their emaciated throats. I'll happily do something else for the telethon, maybe something with Micky, but I'm not having the people I work with exploited just so we can guilt-trip a few more grand out of the viewers."

Bill spread his hands in defeat. "Fine by me. Do you want to tell them or will I?"

"Would you, Bill? Save me the aggravation?" Jacko's smile was bright as a shaft of sunlight from a thundercloud, promising as the

hour before a first date. It was imprinted on his audience like a race memory. Women made love to their husbands with more gusto because Jacko's sexually inviting eyes and kissable mouth were flickering across the inside of their eyelids. Adolescent girls found their vague erotic longings suddenly focused. Old ladies doted on him, without connecting the subsequent feelings of unfulfilled sadness.

Men liked him too, but not because they found him sexy. Men liked Jacko Vance because he was, in spite of everything, one of the lads. A British, Commonwealth, and European gold medallist and holder of the world javelin record, Olympic gold had seemed like an inevitability for the darling of the back pages. Then one night, driving back from an athletics meeting in Gateshead, Jacko drove into a dense bank of fog on the A1. He wasn't the only one.

The morning news bulletins put the figures at between twenty-seven and thirty-five vehicles in the multiple pile-up. The big story wasn't the six dead, however. The big story was the tragic heroism of Jacko Vance, British athletics' golden boy. In spite of suffering multiple lacerations and three broken ribs in the initial impact, Jacko had crawled out of his mangled motor and rescued two children from the back of a car seconds before it burst into flames. Depositing them on the hard shoulder, he'd gone back into the tangled metal and attempted to free a lorry driver pinioned between his steering wheel and the buckled door of his cab.

The creaking of stressed metal turned to a shriek as accumulated pressures built up on the lorry and the roof caved in. The driver didn't stand a chance. Neither did Jacko Vance's throwing arm. It took the firemen three agonizing hours to cut him free from the crushing weight of metal that had smashed his flesh to raw meat and his bones to splinters. Worse, he was conscious for most of it. Trained athletes knew all about pushing through the pain barrier.

The news of his George Cross came the day after the medics fitted his first prosthesis. It was small consolation for the loss of the dream that had been the core of his life for a dozen years. But bitterness didn't cloud his natural shrewdness. He knew how fickle the media could be. He still smarted at the memory of the headlines when he'd blown his first attempt at the European title. JACK SPLAT! had been the kindest stab at the heart of the man who only the day before had been JACK OF HEARTS.

He knew he had to capitalize on his glory quickly or he'd soon be another yesterday's hero, early fodder for the

"Where Are They Now?"

column. So he called in a few favours, renewed his acquaintance with Bill Ritchie and ended up commentating on the very Olympics where he should have mounted the rostrum. It had been a start. Simultaneously, he'd worked to establish his reputation as a tireless worker for charity, a man who would never allow his fame to stand in the way of helping people less fortunate than himself.

Now, he was bigger than all the fools who'd been so ready to write him off. He'd charmed and chatted his way to the front of the sports presenters' ranks in a slash and burn operation of such devious ruthlessness that some of his victims still didn't realize they'd been calculatedly chopped off at the knees. Once he'd consolidated that role, he'd presented a chat show that had topped the light entertainment ratings for three years. When the fourth year saw it drop to third place, he dumped the format and launched Vance's Visits.

The show claimed to be spontaneous. In fact, Jacko's arrival in the midst of what his publicity called ' people living ordinary lives' was invariably orchestrated with all the advance planning of a royal visit but none of the attendant publicity. Otherwise he'd have attracted bigger crowds than any of the discredited House of Windsor.

Especially if he'd turned up with the wife.

And still it wasn't enough.

Carol bought the coffees. It was a privilege of rank. She thought about refusing to shell out for the chocolate biscuits on the basis that nobody needed three Kitkats to get through a meeting with their DCI. But she knew it would be misinterpreted, so she grinned and bore the expense. She led the troops she'd chosen with care to a quiet corner cut off from the rest of the canteen by an array of plastic parlour palms. Detective Sergeant Tommy Taylor, Detective Constable Lee Whitbread and Detective Constable DI Earnshaw had all impressed her with their intelligence and determination. She might yet be proved wrong, but these three officers were her private bet for the pick of Seaford Central's CID.

"I'm not going to attempt to pretend this is a social chat so we can get to know each other better," she announced, sharing the biscuits out among the three of them. Di Earnshaw watched her, eyes like currants in a suet pudding, hating the way her new boss managed to look elegant in a linen suit with more creases than a dosser's when she just looked lumpy in her perfectly pressed chain-store skirt and jacket.

"Thank Christ for that," Tommy said, a grin slowly spreading. "I was beginning to worry in case we'd got a guvnor who didn't understand the importance of Tetley's Bitter to a well-run CID."

Carol's answering smile was wry. "It's Bradfield I came from, remember?"

"That's why we were worried, ma'am," Tommy replied.

Lee snorted with suppressed laughter, turned it into a cough and spluttered, "Sorry, ma'am."

"You will be," Carol said pleasantly. "I've got a task for you three.

I've been taking a good look at the over nights since I got here, and I'm a bit concerned about the high incidence of unexplained fires and query arsons that we've got on our ground. I spotted five query arsons in the last month and when I made some checks with uniform, I found out there have been another half-dozen unexplained outbreaks of fire."

"You always get that kind of thing round the docks," Tommy said, casually shrugging big shoulders inside a baggy silk blouson that had gone out of fashion a couple of years previously.

"I appreciate that, but I'm wondering if there's a bit more to it than that. Agreed, a couple of the smaller blazes are obvious routine cock-ups, but I'm wondering if there's something else going on here."

Carol left it dangling to see who would pick it up.

"A firebug, you mean, ma'am?" It was Di Earnshaw, the voice pleasant but the expression bordering on the insolent.

"A serial arsonist, yes."

There was a momentary silence. Carol reckoned she knew what they were thinking. The East Yorkshire force might be a new entity, but these officers had worked this patch under the old regime. They were in with the bricks, whereas she was the new kid in town, desperate to shine at their expense. And they weren't sure whether to roll with it or try to derail her. Somehow she had to persuade them that she was the star they should be hitching their wagons to. "There's a pattern," she said.

"Empty premises, early hours of the morning. Schools, light industrial units, warehouses. Nothing too big, nowhere there might be a night watchman to put the mockers on it. But serious nevertheless. Big fires, all of them.

They've caused a lot of damage and the insurance companies must be hurting more than they like."

"Nobody's said owl about an arsonist on the rampage," Tommy remarked calmly. "Usually, the firemen tip us the wink if they think there's something a bit not right on the go."

"Either that or the local rag gives us a load of earache," Lee chipped in through a mouthful of his second Kitkat. Lean as a whippet in spite of the biscuits and the three sugars in his coffee, Carol noted. One to watch for high-strung hyperactivity.

"Call me picky, but I prefer it when we're setting the agenda, not the local hacks or the fire service," Carol said coolly. "Arson isn't a Mickey Mouse crime. Like murder, it has terrible consequences. And like murder, you've got a stack of potential motives. Fraud, the destruction of evidence, the elimination of competition, revenge and cover-up, at the "logical" end of the spectrum. And at the. screwed-up end, we have the ones who do it for kicks and sexual gratification. Like serial killers, they nearly always have their own internal logic that they mistake for something that makes sense to the rest of us.

"Fortunately for us, serial murder is a lot less common than serial arson. Insurers reckon a quarter of all the fires in the UK have been set deliberately. Imagine if a quarter of all deaths were murder."