he car stopped. Shaz slid irresistibly forward into the bulwark separating the narrow confines of the boot from the back seat, crushing her wrists and shoulders again. She tried to strain upwards to bang her head on the lid in a desperate bid to attract someone's attention, but all she achieved was a fresh wave of pain. She tried not to sob, afraid that if mucus blocked her nose, she'd suffocate, unable to breathe through the gag that Vance had tied over the hood before he'd rolled her agonizingly across hard floors, over a carpeted area and down a short flight of steps, then hoisted her into the boot of the car. She had been horribly amazed at the strength and dexterity of this one-armed man.

Shaz breathed as deeply as she could; too far and her chest expansion made her stiff shoulder muscles protest. Only sheer willpower kept her from gagging at the stench of her own urine. Let's see you get rid of that from your boot carpet, she thought triumphantly; she couldn't do anything to save her life, but she was still determined to seize every opportunity to prevent Jacko Vance from walking away from his crimes. If SOCO ever got this far, a piss-stained carpet would make their day.

Abruptly the muffled music stopped. Ever since they'd set off, he'd listened to hits of the sixties. Shaz had forced herself to pay attention and had counted the tracks. At an average of three minutes a song, she reckoned they'd been driving for somewhere around three hours of what had felt like motorway after the first twenty minutes or so.

That probably meant the north; heading west would have taken them on to the motorway more quickly. Of course, it was possible that he could have confused her by driving a circuit round the M25, orbiting London until he'd laid a completely false trail. Shaz didn't think so; she doubted whether he felt any need to mislead her. She wasn't going to be alive to tell anyone, after all.

It was probably dark by now; she'd lain bound in the house for what felt like several hours before Vance had returned to deal with her. If they were in the depths of the country, there would be no one to see or hear her. Somehow, she thought that was probably Vance's plan. He must have taken his victims somewhere isolated to escape detection. She could think of no reason why he'd treat her differently.

A car door closed with a soft thud and a faint click. Then a metallic sound closer to hand and the soft hydraulic sigh of a boot opening.

"God, you stink," Vance said contemptuously, dragging her carelessly forward.

"Listen," he continued, sounding closer. "I'm going to free your feet.

I'm going to cut them free. The knife is very, very sharp. Mostly I use it to joint meat. If you take my meaning." His voice was almost a whisper, his hot breath penetrating the hood next to her ear. Shaz felt another ripple of nausea. "If you try to run, I'll gut you like a pig on a butcher's hook. There's nowhere to run to, see? We're in the middle of nowhere."

Shaz's ears told her different. To her surprise, there was the rumble of traffic not far off, the underlying mutter of city life. If she had half a chance, she'd take it.

She felt the cold blade of the knife briefly against the skin of her ankle, then her feet were miraculously free. For a second, she thought she could kick out then make a run for it. Then her circulation reasserted itself and spasms of excruciating pins and needles squeezed a moan from the dry mouth behind the unyielding gag. Before the cramp could pass, Shaz felt herself hauled over the edge of the boot. She collapsed in an uncoordinated heap before he slammed the boot shut and yanked her to her feet. He half-dragged, half-carried her through a gap or a gateway where she bashed her shoulder on the wall, then down a path and up a couple of steps. Then he pushed her sharply and she crashed to a carpeted floor, her legs still useless rubbery handicaps.

Even through the haze of disorientation and pain, the closing of the door and the rattle of curtains being drawn sounded strangely familiar to Shaz. A fresh dread seized her and she began to shiver uncontrollably, losing control of her bladder for the second time in the past hour.

"God, you're a disgusting bitch," Vance sneered. Again she felt herself irresistibly hauled upwards. This time she was dumped unceremoniously in a hard, upright chair. Before she could adjust to the fresh pain in her shoulders and arms, she felt a new restraint being fastened to her leg, attaching it to the chair like a broken limb to a splint. In a desperate bid for freedom, she forced her other leg to kick out, rejoicing in the jarring connection with Vance's body, exulting in his cry of surprised pain.

The blow to her jaw snapped her head back with a crack that sent waves of sick pain down her spine. "You fucking stupid cow," was all he said before he grabbed her other leg and forced it against the chair while he bound them tightly together.

She felt his legs between her knees. The warmth of his body was almost the worst suffering she'd had to endure so far. He raised her arms agonizingly and forced them back down over the back of the chair to hold her irresistibly upright. Then the hood was pulled away from her flesh and she heard the whisper of a razor-sharp blade through cloth. Blinking at the sudden appalling brightness, Shaz's stomach was gripped with a cold cramp as she discovered her worst fear was a reality. She was sitting in her own living room, strapped to one of the four dining chairs she'd bought only ten days before in Ikea.

Vance pressed his body against hers as he cut the hood away just above the gag, leaving her able to see and hear properly, but incapable of any noise other than a muffled grunt. He stepped back, giving her breast a cruel tweak with his artificial hand as he went.

He stood staring at her, flicking the blade of the butcher's filleting knife against the table edge. Shaz thought she had never seen a more arrogant human being. His pose, his expression, everything reeked of self-important righteousness. "You really fucked up my weekend," he said witheringly. "Believe me, this is not how I planned to spend Saturday night. Dressing up in fucking surgical greens and latex in some shitty flat in Leeds is not my idea of a good time, bitch." He shook his head pityingly. "You're going to pay, Detective Bowman.

You're going to pay for being a stupid little fuck."

He put the knife down and fumbled under his top. Shaz glimpsed a bum bag as he unzipped it and took out a CD-ROM. Without another word he walked out of the room. Shaz heard the familiar hum then clatter as first her computer then her printer were switched on. Straining her ears, she fancied she heard the clicking of the mouse and the sound of keys being struck. Then, unmistakably, the vibrating thrum of paper loading and printing.

When he returned, he carried a single sheet of paper which he held in front of her face. She recognized the print-out of an illustrated encyclopedia article. She didn't have to read the words to understand the symbolism of the line drawing at the top of the page. "You know what this is?" he demanded.

Shaz just stared at him, her eyes bloodshot but still arresting. She was determined not to give in to him on any level.

"It's a teaching aid, student detective Bowman. It's the three wise monkeys. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. You should have taken that as your class motto. You should have stayed away from me.

You should have kept your nose out of my business. You won't be doing that again."

He let the paper flutter to the floor. Suddenly he lunged forward, hands pushing her head back. Then his prosthetic thumb was over her eyeball, pushing down and out, rending muscles, ripping the hollow globe free from its moorings. The scream was only inside Shaz's head. But it was loud enough to carry her over into blessed unconsciousness.

Jacko Vance studied his handiwork and saw that it was good. Because his usual killings were fuelled by a completely different set of needs, he'd never contemplated them in a purely aesthetic light before. But this was a work of art, laden with symbolism. He wondered if anyone would be smart enough to read the message he'd left and, having read it, to heed it. Somehow, he doubted it.

He leaned forward and made a slight adjustment to the angle of the sheet of paper in her lap. Then, satisfied, he allowed himself the luxury of a smile. All he had to do now was to make sure she'd left no messages behind. He began to search the flat methodically, inch by inch, including the waste bins. He was used to the company of corpses, so the presence of Shaz's remains caused him no stress. He was so relaxed as he meticulously searched her kitchen that he actually caught himself singing softly as he worked.

In the room she'd made her office, he found more than he'd bargained for. A box of photocopies of newspapers, a pad of rough notes, files on the hard disk of her laptop and back-ups on floppy disk, print-outs of various drafts of the analysis he'd found earlier in the file she'd brought to his house. What was even worse was that much of the print-out didn't seem to have any matching files on the computer. There were copies on floppy disk, but not on the hard disk. It was a nightmare. When he spotted the modem, he almost panicked. The reason the files weren't on her hard disk was that they were somewhere else, presumably on some National Profiling Task Force computer. And there was no way he could access that. His only hope was that Shaz Bowman had been as paranoid with her computer files as she seemed to have been about sharing her showdown with a colleague. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it now. He'd get rid of every trace there was here and just have to hope that nobody would go looking in her computer files at work. If the Luddite cops he knew were anything to judge by, it would never occur to them that she might have techie tendencies.

Besides, she wasn't supposed to be working cases, was she? Not according to the contacts he'd so cautiously and entirely naturally exploited to find out what he had about her before their meeting. There was no reason why anyone should connect so bizarre a death to her profiling training.

But how was he going to deal with all this stuff? He couldn't take the material with him in case a chance encounter with a traffic cop led to a search of his car. Equally, he couldn't leave it behind, pointing a giant finger of blame in his direction. He wasn't singing now.

He crouched in one corner of the office, thinking furiously. He couldn't burn it. It would take too long and the smell would be bound to attract the attention of her neighbours. The last thing he needed was the fire brigade. He couldn't flush it down the toilet; it would block the drains in no time at all unless he tore it into tiny fragments, and that would take till dawn and beyond. He couldn't even dig a hole in the garden and bury it, since the discovery of the bitch's body would only be the starting point for a massively thorough investigation, beginning with the immediate environs of the body.

In the end, the only solution he could come up with left no choice but to take all the incriminating evidence with him. It was a scary thought, but he kept telling himself that luck and the gods were with him, that he'd been untouchable up to now because he took every precaution humanly possible and left only a fraction of the risk to a benevolent fate.

Vance loaded a couple of bin liners with the material and staggered out to the car with them, every step an effort. He had been working on ditching Detective Constable Shaz Bowman for something like fifteen or sixteen hours, and he was running out of mental and physical energy. He never used drugs when he was working; the false sense of power and capability they induced were certain steps to fallibility and stupid mistakes. But just this once, he wished he had a neatly folded paper packet of cocaine in his pocket. A couple of lines of charlie and he'd be flying through the tasks that remained instead of dragging his weary body down this bloody gravel path through the arse end of Leeds.

With a small groan of relief, he dropped the second bin liner in the boot. He paused momentarily, wrinkling his nose in disgust. Leaning forward and sniffing, he confirmed his suspicion. The bitch had pissed in his car, soaking the carpet. One more item to dispose of, he thought, glad he had a ready solution to the problem. He stripped off his surgical greens and gloves and pushed them into the spare-tyre well then gently closed the lid with a soft snap of metal. "Goodbye, DC Bowman," he muttered as he lowered himself wearily into the driving seat. The clock on the dashboard told him it was nearly half past two.

Provided he wasn't stopped by the cops for being in possession of a smart motor in the small hours of the morning, he'd be at his destination by half past four. The only difficulty would be fighting his instinct to hammer the pedal to the metal so he could put as much distance between him and his achievement as possible. With one hand sweating and the other as cool as the night air, he drove out of the city and headed north.

He made it ten minutes ahead of schedule. The maintenance area of the Royal Newcastle Infirmary was deserted, as he knew it would be until the Sunday morning skeleton shift arrived at six. Vance backed his car into a space in the service bay right next to the double doors that led through to the incinerators that dealt with the hospital's surgical waste. Often when he'd finished his voluntary work with the patients, he'd come down here to have a brew and a gossip with the service staff.

They were proud to count a celebrity like Jacko Vance as a friend, and they'd been more than honoured to provide him with his own smart card to admit him to the maintenance sectors so he could come and go at will.

They'd even known him to come down on his own in the middle of the night when there was no one else around and help them out by getting stuck in to the incineration work himself, stoking the furnace with the sealed bags of waste that came down from clinics, wards and operating theatres.

It never occurred to them that he added his own fuel to the flames.

That was one of the many reasons why Jacko Vance never feared discovery.

He was no Fred West with bodies underpinning the foundations of his home. When he'd finished taking his pleasure, with his victims, they disappeared forever in the fierce disintegrating heat of the RNI's incinerator. For an appliance that routinely swallowed the waste of an entire city hospital, two bin bags full of Shaz Bowman's research would be a mere amuse bouche. He'd be in and out in twenty minutes. Then the end would be in sight. He could fall into his favourite bed, the one at the heart of his killing floor, ignore all the other distractions and sleep the sleep of the just.

PART TWO

"Anybody know where Bowman is?" Paul Bishop asked impatiently, looking at his watch for the fifth time in two minutes. Five blank faces stared back at him.

"Gotta be dead, hasn't she?" Leon grinned. "Never late, not Shazza baby."

"Ha ha, Jackson," Bishop said sarcastically. "Be a good boy and call down to the front desk, see if they've taken a message from her."

Leon tipped his chair forward on to all four feet and slouched out of the door, the wide shoulders of his sharply tapering jacket managing to make his six feet of skinniness look challenging. Bishop started drumming his fingers on the edge of the video remote control. If he didn't get this session kicked off soon, he'd be running late. He had a series of scene-of-crime videos to get through then a meeting with a Home Office minister scheduled for lunch. Bloody Bowman. Why did she have to be late today of all days? He'd give her till Jackson got back and then he was forging ahead with the session. Too bad if she missed something crucial.

Simon spoke softly to Kay. "Have you spoken to Shaz since Friday?"

Kay shook her head, her light brown hair falling like a curtain across one cheek to create the image of a fieldmouse peering through winter grasses. "I left a message when she didn't turn up for the curry, but she didn't get back to me. I was half-expecting to see her at the women's swim last night, but she wasn't there either. Mind, it wasn't a firm arrangement or anything."

Before Simon could say anything more, Leon returned. "Not a dicky bird from her," he announced. "She's not rung in sick or anything."

Bishop tutted. "Well, we'll just have to manage without her." He briefed them on the morning's programme, then pressed '' on the video.

The aftermath of uncontrolled violence and viciousness that unfolded before them made little impact on Simon. Nor did he have much to contribute to the discussion afterwards. He couldn't get Shaz's absence out of his head. He'd gone round to her flat to pick her up on Saturday night for their pre-curry drink, as they'd agreed. But when he'd rung the bell, there had been no reply. He'd been early, admittedly, so, thinking she might have been deafened by the shower or the hair dryer, he'd walked back to the main road and found a phone box. He'd let her number ring out until the call was automatically disconnected, then he'd tried twice more. Unable to believe she'd stood him up without a word, he'd walked back up the hill to the flat and tried the doorbell again.

He knew which ground-floor flat was Shaz's he'd given her a lift home after they'd all been out for a drink one evening and, already wistfully hoping he might pluck up the courage to ask her out, he'd lingered long enough to see which set of lights came on. So, just by looking, he could see that the curtains were closed across the deep bay of the master bedroom at the front of the house although it wasn't long dark.

As far as he was concerned, that meant she'd been getting ready to go out. Though not, it appeared, with him. He was about to give up and go to the pub alone to drown his humiliation in Tetley's when he noticed the narrow passage running down the side of the house. Not giving himself time to wonder whether he was either justified or wise, he slipped down the ginnel, through the wrought-iron gate and into the gloomy darkness of the back garden.

He rounded the corner of the house and almost tripped over a short flight of steps leading up from the garden to a pair of French windows.

"For fuck's sake," he muttered angrily, catching himself before he pitched headlong. He peered through the glass, cupping his hand round his eyes against the stray beams of light from the next-door house. He could see dim shapes of furniture against a faint glow that appeared to be coming from another room opening off the hall. But there was no sign of life. Suddenly a light snapped on from the floor above, casting an irregular rectangle of light right next to Simon.

Instantly aware that he must appear more like burglar than policeman to any casual observer, he'd slid back into the darkness against the wall and returned to the street, hoping he'd managed to avoid anyone's attention. The last thing he needed were jibes from the local uniforms about the Peeping Toms of the profiling squad. Baffled by Shaz's apparent rebuff, he'd walked miserably down to the Sheesh Mahal to meet Leon and Kay for the agreed meal. He wasn't in the mood to join in their speculation that Shaz had had a better offer, concentrating instead on getting as much Kingfisher lager down his throat as he could.

Now, on Monday morning, he was seriously worried. It was one thing standing him up. Let's face it, she could probably do a lot better than him without trying too hard. But to miss a training session was completely out of character. Oblivious to Paul Bishop's words of wisdom, Simon sat and fretted, a pair of frown lines dividing his dark brows. As soon as the screech of chairs on floor announced the end of the session, he went in search of Tony Hill.

He found the psychologist in the canteen, sitting at the table the profiling squad had made their own. "Can you spare a minute, Tony?" he asked, his dark intense expression almost a mirror image of his tutor's.

"Sure. Pull up a coffee and join me."

Simon looked uncertainly over his shoulder. "It's just that the others'll be down any minute, and ... well, it's a bit ... you know, sort of private."

Tony picked up his own coffee and the file he'd been reading. "We'll grab one of the interview rooms for a minute."

Simon followed him down the corridor to the first witness interview room without a red light showing. The air smelled of sweat, stale cigarettes and, obscurely, burnt sugar. Tony straddled one of the chairs and watched Simon pace for a moment before he leaned into one corner of the room. "It's Shaz," Simon said. "I'm worried about her. She didn't turn up this morning and she didn't phone in or anything."

Tony knew without being told there was more to it than that. It was his job to find out what. "I agree, it's not like her. She's very conscientious. But something could have come up unexpectedly. A family problem, perhaps?"

One corner of Simon's mouth twitched downwards. "I suppose so," he conceded reluctantly. "But she would have phoned somebody if that's what it was. She's not just conscientious, she's obsessive. You know that."

"Maybe she's had an accident."

Simon pounced. "Exactly. My point exactly. We should be worried about her, shouldn't we?"

Tony shrugged. "If she has had an accident, we'll hear about it soon enough. Either she'll call us or else someone else will."

Simon clenched his teeth. He was going to have to explain why it was more urgent than that. "If she's had an accident, I don't think it was this morning. We had a sort of date on Saturday night. Leon and Kay and me and Shaz, we've taken to going out on a Saturday night for a curry and a few bevvies. But I'd arranged to have a drink with Shaz first, just the two of us. I was supposed to meet her at her flat."

Once he'd started, the words poured out of him. "When I turned up, there was no sign of her. I thought she'd had second thoughts. Bottled out, whatever. But now it's Monday, and she's not turned up. I think something's happened to her, and whatever it is, it's not trivial. She could have had an accident at home. She could have slipped in the shower and hit her head. Or outside. She could be lying in hospital somewhere and nobody knows who she is. Don't you think we should do something about it? We're supposed to be a team, are we not?"

A dreadful premonition shimmered at the edge of Tony's mind. Simon was right. Two days was too long for a woman like Shaz Bowman to drop out of sight when that meant letting down a colleague and missing work. He got to his feet. "Have you tried ringing her?" he asked.

"Loads of times. Her answering machine's not on, either. That's why I thought maybe she'd had an accident in the house. You know? I thought, she might've switched the machine off when she came in, and then something happened and ... I don't know," he added impatiently. "This is really embarrassing, you know? I feel like a teenager. Making a fuss about nothing." He shrugged away from the wall and crossed to the door.

Tony put a hand on Simon's arm. "I think you're right. You've got a policeman's instinct for when something doesn't smell right. It's one of the reasons you're on this squad. Come on, let's go round to Shaz's flat and see what we can see."

In the car, Simon leaned forward in his seat as if willing them forward.

Realizing any attempt at conversation would be futile, Tony concentrated on following the young officer's terse directions.

They pulled up outside Shaz's flat and Simon was oh the pavement before Tony could even turn off the engine. "The curtains are still drawn," Simon said urgently as soon as Tony joined him on the doorstep. "That's her bedroom on the left. The curtains were drawn on Saturday night when I was here." He pushed the bell marked

"Flat i: Bowman'. They could both hear the irritating buzz from within.

"At least we know the bell's working," Tony said. He stepped back and looked up at the imposing villa, its York stone blackened by a century of the internal combustion engine.

"You can get round the back," Simon said, finally releasing the bell push. Without waiting for a response, he was off down the ginnel. Tony followed him, but not quickly enough. As he reached the corner, he heard a wail like an agonized cat in the night. He emerged in time to see Simon reel back from a pair of French windows like a man struck in the face. The young policeman sank to his knees and emptied his guts on the grass, groaning incoherently.

Shocked, Tony took a few hesitant steps forward. As he came level with the steps leading up to the windows, the sight that had stripped Simon Mcneill of his manhood turned his stomach to ice. Beyond thought, beyond emotion, Tony stared through the glass at something that looked more like a pastiche of a Bacon painting executed by a psychopath than it did a human being. At first, it was more than he could grasp.

When realization came a moment later, he'd have sold his soul for that previous incomprehension.

It was not the first mutilated corpse Tony had ever faced. But it was the first time he'd had any personal connection to a victim.

Momentarily, he put a hand over his eyes, massaging his eyebrows with thumb and forefinger. This wasn't the time to mourn. There were things he could do for Shaz Bowman that no one else was capable of, and crawling round on the grass like a wounded puppy wasn't one of them.

Taking a deep breath, he turned to Simon and said, "Call this in. Then go round the front and secure the scene there."

Simon looked up at him beseechingly, his baffled pain impossible to ignore. "That's Shaz?"

Tony nodded. "That's Shaz. Simon, do as I say. Call this in. Go round the front. It's important. We need to get other officers here, now. Do it." He waited until Simon stumbled to his feet and reeled towards the ginnel like a drunk. Then he turned back and stared through the glass at the ruination of Shaz Bowman. He longed to be closer, to move round her body and take in the horrific details of what had been done to her. But he knew too much about crime scene contamination even to consider it.

He made do with what he could see. It would have been more than enough for most people, but for Tony it was a tantalizing partial picture. The first thing he had to do was to stop thinking of this shell as Shaz Bowman. He must be detached, analytical and clear-headed if he was to be any use at all to the investigating officers. Looking again at the body in the chair, he found it wasn't so hard to distance himself from memories of Shaz. The deformed freakish head that faced him bore so little resemblance to anything human.

He could see dark holes where her startling eyes had last looked out at him. Gouged out, he guessed, judging by what looked like threads and strings trailing from the wounds. Blood had flowed and dried round the black orifices, making the hideous mask of her face even more grotesque.

Her mouth looked like a mass of plastic in a dozen hues of purple and pink.

There were no ears. Her hair stuck out in spikes above and behind where the ears should have been, held in place by the dried blood that had sprayed and flowed over them.

His eyes moved down to her lap. A sheet of paper was propped up against her chest. Tony was too far away to make out the words, but he could distinguish the line drawing easily. The three wise monkeys. A shiver shook him from head to foot. It was too early to tell, but from what he could see, there was no sign of any sexual assault. Coupled with the deadly calculation of the three wise monkeys, Tony read the scene. This was no sex killing. Shaz hadn't caught the chance attention of some psychopathic stranger. This was an execution.

"You didn't do this for pleasure," he said softly to himself. "You wanted to teach her a lesson. You wanted to teach all of us a lesson.

You're telling us you're better than us. You're showing off, thumbing your nose at us because you're convinced we'll never find anything to incriminate you. And you're telling us to keep our noses out of your business. You're an arrogant bastard, aren't you?"

The scene before him told Tony things it would never reveal to a police officer trained to look only for the physical clues. To the psychologist, it revealed a mind that was incisive and decisive. This was a cold-blooded killing, not a frenzied, sexually motivated attack.

To Tony, that suggested that the killer had identified Shaz Bowman as a threat. Then he'd acted on it. Brutally, coldly and methodically. Even before the SO COs arrived, Tony could have told them they would find no significant material clues to the identity of this perpetrator. The solution to this crime lay in the mind, not the forensic lab. "You're good," Tony murmured. "But I'm going to be better."

When the sirens tore the silence into shreds and uniformed feet pounded down the ginnel, Tony was still standing at the windows, memorizing the scene, drinking in every detail so it would be there later when he needed it. Then and only then he walked round to the front of the house to offer what consolation he could to Simon.

"Hardly bloody urgent," the police surgeon grumbled, opening his bag and pulling out a pair of latex gloves. "State she's in, an hour's neither here nor there. Not like doctoring the living, is it? Bloody pager, bane of my bloody life."

Tony resisted the impulse to hit the chubby doctor. "She was a police officer," he said sharply.

The doctor flashed him a shrewd look. "We've not met, have we? You new here?"

"Dr. Hill works for the Home Office," the local DI said. Tony had already forgotten the man's name. "He runs this new profiling task force you'll have heard about. The lass was one of his trainees."

"Aye, well, she'll get the same treatment from me as a Yorkshire lass would," the doctor said drily, turning back to his grim task.

Tony was standing outside the now open French windows, looking in on the crime scene where a photographer and a team of SO COs worked their way round the room. He could not take his eyes off the wreckage of Shaz Bowman. No matter how hard he tried, he could not avoid the occasional flashback image of what she had been. It heightened his resolve, but it was a provocation he could well have done without.

Worse for Simon, he thought bitterly. He'd been taken, putty-skinned and trembling, back to police HQ to give a statement about Saturday night. Tony knew enough about the workings of the official mind to realize that the murder squad were probably treating him as their current prime suspect. He was going to have to do something about that sooner rather than later.

The DI whose name he couldn't remember walked down the steps and stood behind him. "Helluva mess," he said.

"She was a good officer," Tony told him.

"We'll get the bastard," the DI said confidently. "Don't you worry about that."

"I want to help."

The DI raised one eyebrow. "Not my decision," he said. "It's not a serial killer, you know. We've never seen owl like this on our patch."

Tony fought to suppress his frustration. "Inspector, this is not a first-time killing. Whoever did this is an expert. He might not have killed on your patch or used this precise method before, but this is not the product of amateur night out."

Before the inspector could respond, they were interrupted. The police surgeon had finished his grisly work. "Well, Colin," he said, walking over to them, "She's definitely dead."

With a quick sidelong glance, the policeman said, "Spare us the gallows humour for once, Doc. Any idea when?"

"Ask your pathologist, Inspector Wharton," the doctor said huffily.

"I will. But in the meantime, can you give me a ballpark figure?"

The doctor peeled off his gloves with a snap of latex. "Monday lunchtime ... let me see ... Some time between seven o'clock Saturday night and four o'clock Sunday morning, depending on whether the heating was on and how long for."

DI Colin Wharton sighed. "That's a bloody big window of opportunity.

Can't you get it tighter than that?"

"I'm a doctor, not bloody Mystic Meg," he said caustically. "And I'm going back to my game of golf, if you don't mind. You'll have my report in the morning."

Tony impulsively put a hand on his arm. "Doctor, I could use some help here. I know it's not really your place to say, but you've obviously developed a lot of expertise in this kind of thing." When in doubt, flatter. "The injuries ... Do you know if she was still alive, or are they postmortem?"

The doctor pursed full red lips and stared back consideringly at Shaz's body. He looked like a small boy puckering up for his maiden aunt, calculating how much of a tip it was going to earn him. "A

mixture of both," he said finally. "I reckon the eyes both went while she was still alive. I think she must have been gagged or she'd have screamed the place down. She probably passed out then, a combination of shock and pain. Whatever was poured down her throat was very caustic and that's what killed her. The total disintegration of her respiratory tract, that's what they'll find when they open her up. I'd stake my pension on it. Looking at the amount of blood, I'd reckon the ears came off more or less as she was dying. They're neatly cut off, though. No trial attempts like you usually get with any kind of mutilation. He must have one hell of a sharp knife and a lot of nerve. If he was trying to make sure she'd end up like them three wise monkeys, he went the right way about it." He nodded to the two men. "I'll be off, then.

Leave you to it. Good luck finding him. You've got a right nutter here." He waddled off round the side of the house.

"That bastard's got the worst bedside manner in the whole West Riding," Colin Wharton said in disgust. "Sorry about that."

Tony shook his head. "What's the point in dressing up something as brutal as that in fancy words? Nothing alters the fact that somebody took Shaz Bowman apart and made sure we knew why."

"What?" Wharton demanded. "Have I missed something here? What d'you mean, we know why? I don't bloody know why."

"You saw the drawing, didn't you? The three wise monkeys. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The killer destroyed her eyes, her ears, her mouth. Doesn't that say something to you?"

Wharton shrugged. "Either the boyfriend's the killer, in which case he's a certifiable nutter and it doesn't matter what screwed-up shite was going round his head. Or else it was some other nutter who's got it in for coppers because he thinks we stick our noses into things that we'd be better off leaving alone."

"You don't think it could be a killer who specifically had it in for Shaz because she was sticking her nose in somewhere it didn't belong?"

Tony suggested.

"I don't see how it could be," Wharton said dismissively. "She's never worked any cases up here, has she? You lot aren't catching live ones yet, so she's not had the chance to get up some local nutter's nose."

"Even though we're not catching new cases, we've been working on some genuine old ones. Shaz came up with a theory the other day about a previously unidentified serial killer ... "

"The Jacko Vance story?" Wharton couldn't stop the snigger. "We've all had a good laugh about that one."

Tony's face tightened. "You shouldn't have heard anything about it. Who let that out of the bag?"

"Nay, Doc, I'm not for dropping anybody else in it. Besides, you know there are no secrets in a nick. That were too good a joke to keep a secret. Jacko Vance, serial killer. It'll be the Queen Mum next!" He spluttered with laughter and clapped Tony indulgently on the shoulder.

"Face it, Doc, chances are you picked a wrong ' when you co-opted the boyfriend. You don't need me to tell you that nine times out of ten we never end up looking beyond whoever the stiff's been shagging." He raised a speculative eyebrow. "Not to mention the person who finds the body."

Tony snorted derisively. "You'll be wasting your time if you try pinning it on Simon Mcneill. He hasn't done this."

Wharton turned to face Tony, pulling a Marlboro out of its pack with his teeth. He caught it in his lips and lit it with a throwaway lighter. "I heard you lecture once, Doc," he said. "Over in Manchester. You said the best hunters were the ones who were most like the prey. Two sides of the same coin, you said. I reckon you were right. Only, one of your hunters has gone native on you."

Jacko flapped a dismissive hand at his PA and hit a button on the remote control. His wife's face filled the king-size TV screen as she handed her audience over to the newsroom for the midday headlines. Still nothing. The longer the better, he couldn't help thinking. The less accurate the pathologist could be about the time of death, the further it could be distanced from the stupid cow's visit to his home. As he killed the TV picture and turned to the script in front of him, he wondered momentarily what it must be like to have the sort of life where no one would notice you'd been lying dead for a couple of days. It was never likely to happen to him, he thought, self-satisfied as ever. It had been a very long time since he'd been that insignificant in anyone's life.

Even his mother would have noticed if he'd disappeared. She might well have been delighted at the prospect, but she'd have at least noticed. He wondered how Donna Doyle's mother was reacting to the disappearance of her daughter. He'd seen nothing on the news, but there was no reason why she should cause more of a stir than any of the others.

He'd made them pay, all of them, for what had been done to him. He knew he couldn't take it out on the one who deserved it; it would be too obvious, the finger pointing straight at him. But he could find surrogate Jillies all over the place, looking just as ripe and delicious as she'd been when he'd first pinned her to the ground and felt her virginity surrender to his power. He could make them understand what he'd been through, feel what he'd felt in ways that the treacherous bitch had never comprehended. His girls could never abandon him; he was the one with power over life and death. And he could make them discharge her debt over and over again.

Once, he had believed that there would come an occasion when these surrogate deaths would have purged him for good. But the catharsis never lasted. Always, the need came creeping back.

Lucky he'd got it off to such a fine art, really. All those years, all those deaths, and only one off-the-wall maverick cop had ever suspected.

Jacko smiled a very private smile, one his fans never saw. The means of payment had had to be different for Shaz Bowman. But they'd been satisfying, nonetheless. It made him wonder if it might not be the time to ring a few changes.

It never did to become a slave to routine.

Frustration drove Tony up the stairs two at a time. No one would let him near Simon. Colin Wharton was stonewalling, claiming he didn't have the authority to allow Tony to collaborate on the investigation. Paul Bishop was out of the building at one of his interminable and ever-convenient meetings, and the Divisional Chief Superintendent was allegedly too busy to see Tony.

He threw open the door of the seminar room, expecting to see the four remaining members of his task force engaged in some meaningful activity.

Instead, Carol Jordan looked up from the file of papers in front of her.

"I was beginning to think I'd got the day wrong," she said.

"Ah, Carol," Tony sighed, subsiding into the nearest chair. "I completely forgot you were coming back this afternoon."

"Looks like you weren't the only one," she said drily, gesturing at the remaining empty seats. "Where's the rest of the team? Playing truant?"