hris nodded sombrely. "Trust me, Tony. Shaz meant too much to me to risk fucking this up."

If she'd been trying to take the gung-ho madness out of the two male officers' eyes, she succeeded. Even Leon stopped bouncing on the balls of his feet. "I hadn't forgotten that," Tony said. "Or how much she wanted to catch Jack the Lad."

"I know," Chris said. "Fucking mad bitch, she'd have loved this."

Once upon a time she'd understood most of what there was to know about computers, Carol thought wistfully. Back around 1989, she was almost as much of a whizz with CP/M and DOS as her brother. But she'd gone into the police force and it had eaten up her life. While she'd been getting to grips with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, Michael had been assimilating software and hardware that often moved forward on a daily basis. Now she was the one-eyed woman in the kingdom of 20/20 vision.

She knew enough to crunch numbers and process words, to retrieve lost files from limbo and to rewrite boot files so that a reluctant machine could be persuaded to talk to its user. But ten minutes with her brother and his mate Donny and she knew that, these days, this was the culinary equivalent of being able to boil a kettle. From the look on Kay's face, it wasn't any better for her. It was just as well she'd come along, Carol thought. At least she had enough knowledge to know when the boys were spinning off into a world of their own and the authority to drag them back to the job in hand.

The two men sitting in front of a computer screen the size of a pub TV muttered to each other incomprehensibly about video drivers, local buses and smart caches. Carol knew what the words meant, but she couldn't connect them to anything they were doing with keyboard and mouse. Donny, Michael had told her, was the best man in the north when it came to computer-enhancing photographs or video stills. And he just happened to work in the same building where Michael's software company had its suite of offices. And, in spite of Chris's convictions, he was so devoid of a life that he was thrilled to be dragged away from The X Files and a microwave dinner to show off his toys.

Carol and Kay looked over their shoulders at the screen. Donny had already done everything he could with the number plate, yielding confirmation of the last two letters and a strong probability of a match with the third. Now he was working on the driver. He'd already tweaked and twiddled with some full-length shots of the man, pronouncing himself finally satisfied with one and printing out a couple of colour copies for the two women to pore over. The more Carol looked, the more convinced she was that under the Nike baseball cap and behind the aviator glasses, Jacko Vance was peeking out at her. "What do you think?" she asked Kay.

"I don't know if you'd pick him out of a line-up, but if you know who you're looking for, I think you can tell it's him."

Now, without any prompting from them, Donny was working on a head and shoulders of the man who'd filled the Golf with petrol at lunchtime on the Saturday Shaz Bowman died. It was hard to find a good shot to work with because the peak of the cap shaded his face most of the time when he wasn't actually bending over the fuel tank. Only by advancing one frame at a time did Donny finally come up with a single shot where the man in the cap glanced swiftly up at the pump to check how much petrol he'd taken.

Watching Donny painstakingly improve the quality of the picture was agonizing. Carol couldn't keep her eyes off her watch, gripped with the knowledge that she should be elsewhere and if anything happened in Seaford she'd be in deep shit. The minutes crawled by while the powerful processor drove a search through the computer's massive memory for the next best alternative to the pixels on the screen. Although it was making more calculations per second than the human brain could comfortably comprehend, the computer seemed to Carol to take forever. At last, Donny turned away from the screen and pushed his own baseball cap back on his head. "Best you're going to get," he said. "Funny, he looks familiar. Is he supposed to?"

"Can you print me off half a dozen copies?" Carol said. She felt mean ignoring his good-natured question, but it wasn't the time or place to tell Donny that, apart from cheeks that were undeniably too chubby, the face he'd recreated was that of the nation's favourite TV personality.

Michael was either quicker on the uptake or more familiar with the medium. "He looks like Jacko Vance, that's what's got you confused, Donny," he said innocently.

"Yeah, right, that dickhead," Donny said, swinging round in his chair and blinking at the women. "Fucking hell, shame it's not him you're going to arrest. You'd be doing the world a favour, getting that shit he does off the box. Sorry I couldn't get a better head shot, but there wasn't a lot to go on. Where did you say you got the tape from?"

"M1 services. Watford Gap," Kay said.

"Yeah, right. Pity you weren't looking for your man in Leeds.

"Leeds?" Carol leapt on the word. "Why Leeds?"

"Cos that's where the state-of-the-art CCTV development company is.

Seesee Visions. They are the total business. They think civil liberties is that posh but polite department store in London." He laughed at his own bad joke. "Double wicked fuckers, they are. You can't miss them. That sodding great smoked glass monolith just after the end of the motorway. You want somebody coming off the M1 at Leeds, they've got it taped."

"What do you mean, somebody coming off at Leeds?" Carol's fingers were twitching with the desire to grab Donny by the shirt and make him get to the point.

Donny cast his eyes upwards as if he were tired of dealing with mental defectives. "Right. History lesson. Nineteenth-century Britain.

Little pockets of mains water supply, gas providers, railway companies.

Gradually, they all linked up to make national utilities. With me so far?"

"And there's me thinking nerds knew nothing about the Victorian era apart from Charles Babbage," Carol snapped. "OK, Donny, we did the Industrial Revolution at school. Can we get to CCTV?"

"OK, OK, be chill. CCTV is kind of like the baby utilities were then.

But soon it won't be. Soon we're going to have all these inner-city systems linking up with private security systems and motorway cameras and we're going to have a national network of CCTV. And these systems will be so finely tuned that they can recognize you or your wheels and if you're not supposed to be some place, then the big fuck-off security guards are gonna remove you. Like if you're a convicted shoplifter and Marks and Sparks don't want you hanging out in their food hall, or you're a known perv and your local launderette doesn't want you in there ogling the knickers' He made a throat-cutting gesture.

"So what exactly has all this got to do with the M1?"

"Seesee Vision are the masters of the universe when it comes to leading-edge techno. And they test all their new gear on the traffic flow off the M1. Their stuff is so well developed they can give you a high-res picture of the drivers and the front-seat passengers, never mind baby stuff like number plates." Donny shook his head in wonder. "I went for a job there, but I didn't like it. You could tell it was seagull city."

"Seagull city?" Carol asked faintly.

"The bosses fly in, do a lot of screaming, grab everything worth having, crap over everybody and fly out again. Not my scene."

"Do you think they'd co-operate with me?"

"They'd wet their pants. They're desperate to make a big impression on your lot. When this national network finally creaks into being, they want to be in the driving seat. The company of choice."

Carol looked at her watch. It was after ten. She should be heading back to Seaford, on the spot if her team had to swing into action.

Besides, no one in authority would be at Seesee Vision at this time of night.

Donny spotted her glance and read her mind. "There'll be somebody there this time of night, if that's what you're wondering. Give them a bell.

You got nothing to lose."

But Donna Doyle might, Carol thought, catching Kay's pleading look. And besides, Leeds was halfway between Manchester and Seaford. Her team were grown-ups. It wouldn't be the first time they'd had to think for themselves.

First, the victims. It was always the place to start. The problem here was to convince anyone that there were victims. It was always possible that they were wrong, Tony realized. They so badly wanted Shaz to have been right, they so desperately needed to be instrumental in putting a stop to the person who had killed her that they might all be deluding themselves about the value of the material they had uncovered. It was almost conceivable that the circumstantial evidence piling up against Jacko Vance was just that and no more. But that way madness lay.

Madness and the prospect of poor Simon being arrested as soon as he crossed the threshold of his own home. "The victims," Tony said. He stared at the laptop screen and started to type.

THE CASE FOR A SERIAL OFFENDER

The first known victim in this putative cluster is Barbara Fenwick whose murder took place twelve years ago (see attached summary prepared by DC Leon Jackson for crime details). We can say with some degree of certainty that this was the first killing by this perpetrator since there is no previous record of this signature behaviour, namely the pulverizing of the lower right arm. This is clearly signature behaviour; there is no need to inflict such an injury in order to commit sexual assault and murder. It is extraneous, it is ritualistic and therefore it is safe to assume that it has particular significance for this offender. Given the ceremonial nature of this signature behaviour, it is likely that he has used the same implement to produce these injuries in all his killings; other victims could therefore be expected to display very similar disfigurement.

There is at least one other indication that this was a first murder. The killer had chosen what he thought was a sufficiently isolated and safe place to carry out his crime undisturbed, but he was in fact almost caught in the act. This will have frightened him considerably and he will have taken immediate steps to secure his future killing grounds.

That he was successful in this is shown by the fact that no bodies have been recovered from his subsequent victims.

In the absence of bodies, what possible grounds can there be for assuming a serial offender?

He paused and referred back to the list of common features that Shaz had presented to the profiling team what felt like an age ago. The least he could do was make sure the work she'd left wasn't wasted. With a few changes and additions, he typed in the list then continued.

While two or three common features are to be expected with any such grouping, the number and congruence we can identify here is of far too high a level to be coincidental. Of particular importance is the degree of physical similarity between the victims. They could be sisters.

Perhaps more significantly, they could also be sisters of a woman called Jillie Woodrow as she looked fifteen or sixteen years ago, when she first became the earliest known lover of Jacko Vance, our prime suspect.

It is not coincidence, in my opinion, that Vance was robbed of a brilliant athletic career when he lost his lower right arm in an accident that crushed it beyond hope of restoration.

Further, the date of the killing of Barbara Fenwick was a mere fourteen weeks after Jacko Vance's accident. For much of that time, he was in hospital recovering from his injuries and subsequently undergoing extensive physiotherapy. It was during this hospitalization that Jillie Wood-row took the opportunity to terminate what had become an increasingly oppressive and unwelcome relationship (see appended notes of interview with JW, conducted by DC Simon Mcneill). The combined stress of these two events would be sufficient to trigger a sexual homicide in one who was predisposed to realize his sociopathic responses in violent behaviour.

He has never released his sexual impulses in a normal fashion since. His extremely high-profile marriage is a sham, his wife being a lesbian whose ' assistant' is in fact her lover and has been since before the wedding took place. Vance and his wife have never had sexual intercourse and his wife assumes he uses '-class call girls' to provide him with a sexual outlet. There is no suggestion that she has any suspicion of his homicidal activities.

When Vance's early life is set against the criteria that experience has demonstrated are common features among homicidally active sociopaths, a remarkable degree of commonality is obvious. We have witness interviews that attest to a difficult relationship with a rejecting mother, an often absent father whom the subject was desperate to impress, bullying of younger children, cruelty to animals and sadistic, controlling sexual behaviour, and evidence of powerful and perverse sexual fantasies. His sporting prowess can be identified as a massive overcompensation for the worthlessness he felt in every other area of his life, and the loss of that prowess as a devastating blow to his extremely fragile self-esteem.

In those circumstances, women would be the obvious victim gender. He would perceive his mother and subsequently his fiancee as having emasculated him. But he is far too intelligent to vent his rage on the obvious targets, and so he has assumed a series of surrogates. These are girls who bear a strong resemblance to Jillie Woodrow at the age when he first seduced her.

It should be borne in mind that captured serial killers have in the main been above average intelligence, in some cases well above. We should not therefore be surprised that uncaught and unsuspected serial offenders exist who are using their greater intelligence more effectively. Jacko Vance is, in my opinion, an example of this principle in action.

He leaned back in his chair. So much for the psychology. He'd have to draw up a more detailed table of corresponding preconditions, but that wouldn't take long. Added to the hard evidence he hoped Carol and Kay would produce that night, he felt sure that there was enough material to make certain that within twelve hours, West Yorkshire would have started to take Jacko Vance seriously.

Detective Sergeant Tommy Taylor knew a pile of crap when he saw it. And surveilling part-time firemen was the biggest pile of crap he'd seen in a very long time. He'd spent the night before watching Raymond Watson, which in effect meant watching Raymond Watson's house. It wasn't as if it was packed with architectural detail to keep the mind active. A bog-standard terraced house with a pocket handkerchief front garden that boasted a tired rose bush contorted by the north-east winds into a shape some modern sculptors would have given their eye teeth to achieve.

Flaked paintwork, scabby varnish on the front door.

Watson had come home at eleven the night before, after the last race at the dog track. There was no meeting tonight, so he'd arrived home just after seven, according to the seconded uniforms who'd been keeping an eye out in their mufti. Since then, nothing. Unless you counted putting out the milk bottles as a major event.

The lights had gone off about ten minutes after that. An hour later, there was no sign of life anywhere. The back streets of Seaford weren't noted for their liveliness after midnight. The only thing that was going to get Raymond Watson out of his kip now was a major fire, Taylor reckoned. He grunted and shifted in the car seat, scratching his balls and sniffing his fingers afterwards. Bored shitless, he flicked the switch on his personal radio and called Di Earn-shaw. "Owt happening your end?" he asked.

"Negative," came the reply.

"If Control come through to you with news of a fire that our lads are getting called out on, give me a shout on the PR, OK?"

"Why? Are you leaving the car on foot pursuit?" She sounded eager.

Probably as bored as him, excited by the thought of some action even at second hand.

"Negative," Taylor said. "I need to stretch my legs. These fucking sardine tins weren't built for the likes of me. Like I said, anything doing, give me a shout. Over and out."

He turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed to life, sounding freakishly noisy in the quiet side street. Bollocks to Carol Jordan's daft ideas. Less than a mile away there was a club that kept late doors, catering mainly for the sailors off the foreign ships. There was a pint there with Tommy Taylor's name on it, unless he was very much mistaken. It was time he checked out the possibility.

Carol and Kay followed the security guard down blindingly white corridors. He opened a door and stood back, waving them into a large, dimly lit room. Computer monitors occupied almost every horizontal surface. A young woman in jeans and a polo shirt, hair dyed platinum blonde and cut flat to her head, glanced over her shoulder, registered the new arrivals and turned back to the screen she'd been engrossed in.

Fingers tapped keys and the display changed. Carol caught movement in her peripheral vision and turned her head. A tall man in a suit that screamed money was perched on the edge of a computer desk over to one side. What she'd caught was him unfolding his arms and dropping his hands in preparation for rising to greet them.

He took a step towards them, pushing a persistent cowlick of mid-brown hair out of his eyes. If he was going for boyish, Carol thought, he'd missed it by about a generation. "Detective Chief Inspector Jordan," he said, clearly relishing the bass resonance of his voice. "And Detective Constable Hallam. Welcome to the future."

God help me, Carol thought. "You must be Philip Jarvis," she said, forcing a smile. "I'm impressed and grateful that you were prepared to help me out at this time of night."

"Time waits for no man," he said, as proudly as if he'd coined the phrase. "Or woman, come to that. We recognize the importance of your work and, like you, we operate twenty-four hours a day. We are, after all, in the same business, the business of crime prevention and, when that fails us, catching those responsible."

"Mmm," Carol murmured noncommittally. It was clearly a prepared speech that placed no reliance on a response.

Jarvis smiled benevolently, revealing the sort of brilliant white dental work more common in New York than Yorkshire. "This is the viewing room," he said with a sweep of his arm, undaunted by the obviousness of his statement. "It's fed either from our fully automated library or by live feeds from the many cameras we have being road-tested on the site.

The operator chooses the source and summons the images he or she wants to look at."

He ushered Carol and Kay forward until they were standing behind the woman. Close up, Carol could see her skin was older than her face, faded to unhealthy by the lack of natural light and the radiation from the monitors. "This is Gina," Jarvis announced. He made her sound like royalty. "When you told me the date and time period you were interested in and the vehicle index numbers that you wanted to know about, I got Gina on to it right away."

"As I said, I really appreciate this. Have you had any luck?"

"Luck doesn't enter into it, Chief Inspector," Jarvis said with throwaway arrogance. "Not with a leading-edge system like ours. Gina?"

Gina tore her eyes from the screen and pushed off with her feet, spinning round to face them, grabbing a sheet of paper from the desk.

"Seventeen minutes past two on the afternoon in question." Her voice was clipped and efficient. "The black Volkswagen Golf left the M1 heading for the city centre. Then, at eleven thirty-two p. m." the silver Mercedes convertible did exactly the same thing. We can supply timed and dated tapes and still photographs of both events."

"Is it possible to identify the drivers of either vehicle?" Kay asked, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice and failing. Gina flicked an interested eyebrow upwards and stared.

"Obviously, the daytime shots pose fewer problems in that respect," Jarvis butted in. "But we're using very high-end experimental media with the night filming at present, and with our computer enhancement technology, it would be possible to come up with surprisingly good images."

"If you knew who it was you were looking at, you would be able to recognize them. If you were planning on doing a "does anyone know this man" on Crimewatch UK, you might have one or two problems," Gina qualified.

"You say this system's experimental. How well do you think this evidence would stand up in court?" Carol asked.

"One hundred per cent on the vehicles. More like a seventy-five per cent chance on the drivers," Gina said.

"Come on now, Gina, let's not be so pessimistic. It depends, like so much evidence, on how it's presented to the jury," Jarvis protested.

"I'd happily testify that I'd stake my reputation on the reliability of the system."

"And you're a qualified expert witness, are you, sir?" Carol asked. She wasn't trying to put him on the spot, but time was short and she needed to know how firm was her ground.

"I'm not, no, but some of my colleagues are."

"Like me," Gina said. "Look, Ms. Jordan, why don't you look at what we've got and see if that isn't enough to help you get the corroborative evidence so it won't depend on what a jury thinks about our technology?"

When she left half an hour later, Kay was clutching a bundle of video tape and laser-printed stills that both women knew in their bones would corner Jacko Vance. If Donna Doyle remained alive, they were her last best hope. Carol could hardly wait to tell Tony. She looked at her watch when she got back to the car. Half past midnight. She knew he'd want to see what she had, but she needed to get back to Seaford. And Kay could always take the material over to him now. Carol stood by her car, undecided.

To hell with it, she thought. She really wanted to talk over the evidence with Tony. He'd only get one shot at Mccormick and Wharton and she needed to make sure he'd prepared a case that would speak directly to a copper's idea of evidence.

She had her mobile if they really needed her, after all.

Detective Constable Di Earnshaw pushed her shoulders hard back against the car seat, thrusting her pelvis forward in a vain attempt to loosen her stiff spine and find a comfortable position in the unmarked CID car.

She wished she'd been able to bring her own little Citroen whose seat seemed moulded to her contours. Whoever had designed the police Vauxhall had obviously been a hell of a lot narrower in the hips and longer in the leg than she had any hope of ever achieving.

At least the discomfort kept her awake. There was a kind of spiteful pride in Di's determination to stay on the job. She was as convinced as Tommy Taylor that these stakeouts were a total waste of time and money, but she reckoned there were more subtle and effective ways of demonstrating that to the powers that be than skiving off. She knew her sergeant well enough by now to have a pretty shrewd idea of how he was passing the weary hours as night crawled relentlessly toward dawn. If Carol Jordan found out, he'd be back in uniform so fast he wouldn't know what had hit him. CID was such a gossip factory, she was bound to find out sooner or later. If not on this job, then on another, perhaps one that actually counted.

Di wouldn't dream of doing anything so obvious to undermine Jordan's authority. More in sorrow than in anger, that would be her line. The pitying smiles behind Jordan's back, the back-stabbing, "I shouldn't really say this, but ... " at every opportunity. Make it look like every cock-up emanated from Jordan's orders, every success from the troops' initiatives. There was almost nothing as destructive as constant undermining. She should know. She'd experienced plenty of it in her years with the East Yorkshire Police.

She yawned. Nothing was going to happen. Alan Brinkley was tucked up in bed with his wife inside their pretentious modern box on a so-called executive development with ideas above its station. Never mind that it would be easier to keep clean and maintained, Di preferred her little trawler man terraced cottage down by the old docks, even though they were now a tourist trap heritage centre. She loved the cobbled streets and the salt on the air, the sense that generations of Yorkshirewomen had stood on those doorsteps and scanned the horizon for their men. She should be so lucky, she thought with a moment's self-hatred.

She checked her watch against the clock on the dashboard. In the ten minutes that had passed since she'd last done it, the two had managed to remain precisely five seconds out of sync. Yawning, she switched on her small portable radio. Hopefully the phone-in she personally called prole-speak would be over and the DJ would be playing some decent sounds. Just as Gloria Gaynor stridently revealed that as long as she knew how to love, she knew she'd stay alive, soft light abruptly appeared behind the four frosted glass panels of the mock-Georgian fanlight in the Brinkleys' front door. Di grabbed the steering wheel tightly and sat up hurriedly. Was this it? Or was it insomnia pushing someone towards a cup of tea?

Just as suddenly as it had appeared, the light vanished. Di slumped back with a sigh, then from under the garage door, a thin rope of brightness stretched across the driveway. Startled, she punched the off button on the radio and wound down the car window, letting the raw night air flood her airways and sharpen her senses. Yes, there it was. The unmistakable cough of a car engine.

Within moments, the garage door shuddered upwards and the car rolled forward on to the drive. It was Brinkley's car, no mistake. Or rather, it was the car on which Brinkley had only ever paid three hire-purchase instalments and which would be snatched back just as soon as the repo men figured out how to grab it without actually breaking into Brinkley's garage. As she watched, Brinkley himself got out of the car and walked back to the garage, reaching inside presumably to hit the button that closed the door behind him.

"Oh boy," Di Earnshaw said, winding up her window. She pressed the record button on her personal microcassette recorder and said excitedly, "Alan Brinkley is now leaving his home by car at one twenty-seven a. m."

Dropping the tape machine on the seat beside her, she grabbed the personal radio that was meant to keep her in close touch with Tommy Taylor. "This is Tango Charlie. Tango Alpha, do you read me? Over."

She started her engine, careful to avoid the reflex of turning on her lights. Brinkley had pulled off the drive now and was driving out of the cul-de-sac, signalling a right turn. She eased her foot off the clutch, still driving without lights, and picked him up on the winding avenue that ran through the housing development and out to the main road.

She clicked the radio as she drove, repeating her message to her sergeant. "Tango Charlie to Tango Alpha. Subject on the move, do you read me? Tango Alpha, do you read me? Over." At the main road, Brinkley turned left. She counted to five, then switched on her lights and turned after him. He was heading for the city centre three miles away, keeping his speed steady, just above the limit. Not so careful he'd be pulled on suspicion of over-cautious drunk driving, not so fast he'd attract a tug for speeding. "Tango Charlie to Tango Alpha." She swore silently at her errant boss. She needed back-up and he wasn't there. She thought about calling in to control, but they'd only send a troop of patrol cars that would scare off any arsonist for three counties.

"Oh, shit," she complained as Brinkley turned off the main road into the dimly lit streets of a small industrial estate. It looked very much as if this was it. Turning off her lights again, she followed cautiously.

As the high walls of the units closed around her, she decided she had to call for uniformed back-up. She turned up the '

volume on her police radio and picked up the mike. "Delta Three to control, over?"

There was a crackle of static, then nothing. Her heart sank as she realized she was in one of a handful of radio shadows that peppered the city centre. She might as well have been in a black hole for all the chance she had of raising back-up. There was nothing else for it. She was on her own.

Donna Doyle no longer felt any pain. She was swimming through a warm soup of delirium, revisiting memories through a distorting lens. Her dad was still alive, alive and throwing her up into the air in the park where the trees waved at her. Their branches turned into arms and Donna was in the centre of a ring of friends playing party games. Everything was bigger than usual, because she was only six and things always loomed larger when you were little. The colours bled into each other and it was Well Dressing week, the carnival floats melting over the streets like jellies left out in the sun.

And there she was at the heart of the parade, on a dais in a pick-up truck covered in crepe-paper flowers that swelled big as cabbage roses in her fevered derangement. She was the Rose Princess, radiant in layers of stiff petticoat, the glory of the occasion cancelling out the discomfort of the itchy fabric on the warm summer afternoon and the plastic tiara cutting into the soft flesh behind her ears. Through the misty dislocation between dream and reality Donna wondered why the sun was burning with such tropical fervour that it made her sweat and then shiver.

Outside her consciousness, the swollen, discoloured meat that hung uselessly down by her side continued to decay, sending more poisons into her body, continually shifting the balance between toxicity and survival. The rotting stink and the corrupt flesh were only the outward signs of a deeper putrefaction.

Her eager body couldn't wait for death to begin the business of decomposition.

Getting out of the car to close the garage door, Alan Brinkley had noticed his breath puff white on the night air. It was a bitter one, all right. Winter was gripping tight. Just as well he'd got one earmarked that didn't involve a long walk. The last thing he needed was fingers numbed with cold fumbling about their work. But there was nothing like a good fire to warm a man to the bone, he'd thought with an ironic smile as he revved the car engine to encourage the heater to deliver its scarlet promise of warmth.

His target was a specialist paint factory at the far end of a small industrial estate on the edge of town. For once, he could avoid the walk from his chosen parking spot because the unit next to his goal was a body shop. There were always half a dozen cars parked outside in varying stages of being re sprayed or restored after an accident. One more wouldn't be noticeable. Not that there was anyone to notice. He happened to know for a fact that the guard employed to patrol the estate was never there between two and three thirty. Brinkley had watched him often enough to know that the guy was a victim of greedy bosses. He had too many premises to protect and not enough time to keep an eye on them properly.

He turned into the narrow canyon between tall warehouses that led into the estate and nosed slowly down the access road that led to the body shop. He killed the engine and lights then double-checked that none of the items in his kit had slipped out of his pocket. They were all there: the string, the brass cigarette lighter smelling of petrol, the packet of seventeen cigarettes, the dog-eared book of matches, last night's evening paper, his seven-bladed Swiss Army knife and a crumpled oil-stained handkerchief. He leaned across and took the small but powerful torch out of the glove box Three deep breaths with eyes closed and he was ready.

He got out of the car and glanced quickly around. His gaze swept over the cars surrounding the body shop. He saw without seeing the nose of a Vauxhall sitting in the shadow of a warehouse just on the curve of the access road. He failed to register that he hadn't passed it moments before since there was no thrum of an engine or blur of lights to alert him. Certain there was nothing else moving in the landscape, he cut across the Tarmac apron to the paint factory. God, this was going to be one hell of a display, he thought with satisfaction. He wouldn't mind betting that when this went, it would take one or two other buildings with it. Another couple of conflagrations like this and Jim Pendlebury was going to have to say, "Bugger the budget," and take him on full-time. It wouldn't be enough even to pay off the interest on the debts he and Maureen seemed to have accumulated like fleas on a cat, but it would keep the creditors at bay while he could work out a way to get their heads above water once and for all.

Brinkley shook his head to clear away the clutter of worry and dread that engulfed him whenever he allowed their mountain of debt to cast its shadow over him. He couldn't do this unless his mind was focused, and whenever he thought about the amount he owed, his head swam and he couldn't imagine ever making it out the other side in one piece. He kept telling himself that what he was doing was the only way he had to survive. The dosser who had died had already given up on that struggle long before Brinkley had come on the scene. He would be different. He would survive. So now he had to stifle distractions and concentrate on achieving the right result without getting caught.

Getting caught would defeat the whole purpose. He'd never get the debts paid off then. Maureen would never forgive him getting caught.

Brinkley thrust his hand between the industrial-sized rubbish skip and the wall of the factory, his fingers closing on the bag he'd stowed there earlier. This time, the office window was his best bet for entry.

The fact that it was wide open to the eyes of anyone who happened to walk or drive down the access road didn't worry him. None of the units worked a night shift, the security guard wasn't due for another hour and the paint factory was the last building before the dead end of a seven-foot security fence. Nobody would be taking a short cut down here.

It took less than five minutes to get inside, and only another seven for his practised hands to set his standard fuse. The cigarette smoke billowed upwards, to his nostrils the most fragrant aroma around, its sweetness mingling with the chemical smells of the paint that permeated the air of the factory. The paint would go up like a pillar of flame in the desert, Brinkley thought with satisfaction as he backed down the dark corridor, his eyes never leaving the smouldering fuse.

He felt behind him for the open doorway of the office where he'd come in. Instead of empty space, his fingers brushed against warm fabric.

Startled, he whirled in his tracks and the glare of a torch hit his eyes like a thrown glass of wine. Blinded, he tried to blink the light away.

He struggled to back through the doorway, but, disorientated, stumbled sideways into the wall. The light moved and he heard the door snick shut.

"You're fucking nicked," a woman's voice said. "Alan Brinkley, I am arresting you on suspicion of arson ... "

"No!" he roared like a cornered animal, throwing himself forward at the light. They collided and crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and a crash of office furniture. The woman beneath him struggled and wriggled like a furious kitten, but he was heavier and stronger, his upper body developed through years of fire officer's training.

She tried to hit him with the torch, but he easily fended off the blow with his shoulder, sending the light rolling across the floor where it came to rest against a filing cabinet, rocking slightly and throwing a seasick light on the struggle. He could see her face now, her mouth screwed open in a rictus of determination as she tried to break free. If he could see her, she could see him, his panicking mind screamed.

Getting caught would defeat the whole purpose. He'd never get the debts paid off then. Maureen would never forgive him getting caught.

He brought one knee up over her abdomen and leaned on it to crush the air from her lungs. He pushed his forearm against her throat, pinning her to the floor. As her tongue thrust out in a desperate fight for air, he grabbed her hair with his free hand and yanked her head forward against the brace of his forearm. He felt rather than heard something snap. Suddenly she was limp. The fight was over.

He fell away from her, curling on the floor in a foetal crouch. A

sob rose in his throat. What had he done? He knew the answer well enough, but he had to repeat the question continually inside his head.

He rolled on to his knees, head hanging like a disgraced dog. He couldn't leave her there. They'd find her too soon. She needed to be somewhere else.

A groan dragged from his lips. He forced himself to touch flesh that already felt dead and cold in his imagination. Somehow he hauled the woman's body over his shoulders in the traditional fireman's lift.

Staggering to his feet, he lurched through the doorway and back towards the seat of the fire. He carried on beyond the fuse that now smelled harsh, on to where cases of paint tins stood on pallets waiting to be loaded on lorries. The fire would burn hot here, leaving the forensic people little to go on. There would certainly be nothing left to connect him to her. He let the body fall loose-limbed to the floor.

Wiping tears from his eyes, Brinkley turned and ran into the welcoming cold of the night. How had it come to this? How had a few good times, a taste for the good life, brought him to this place? He wanted to fall to the ground and howl like a wolf. But he had to get to his feet, get to the car, answer his pager when it summoned him to the fire station.

He had to get through this. Not for his sake but for Maureen's.

Because getting caught would defeat the whole purpose. He'd never get the debts paid off then. Maureen would never forgive him getting caught.

"Shouldn't you be in Seaford?" he'd asked.

"I've got my phone with me. It'll only take me half an hour longer on the motorway than it does from the cottage. And we need to sort out what we've got and what comes next."

"You'd better come in, then."

It took Carol longer to read Tony's report than he needed to scan the photographs and watch the videos she'd brought, but he didn't mind that.

He kept replaying the tape and shuffling the date-stamped photographs, a tight smile on his lips, fire in his eyes. Eventually, Carol reached the end. The look of complicity they shared told them both that they had been right, and now they could demonstrate a case that could no longer be ignored. "Good work, Doctor," Carol said.

"Good work, Detective Chief Inspector," he echoed.

"Vengeance is mine, saith the profiler."

He bowed his head in acknowledgement. "I wish I'd paid more attention when Shaz first raised it. Maybe we could have achieved this without such a high price then."

Carol reached out impulsively and covered his hand with hers. "That's ridiculous, Tony. No one would have mounted an investigation on the basis of what she came up with at that classroom session."

"I didn't mean that, exactly." He ran his fingers through his hair. "I meant that I'm supposed to be a psychologist. I should have seen that she wasn't going to let it go. I should have discussed it with her, made her feel that she wasn't being discounted, explored ways we could have taken the matter further without putting her at risk."

"You might as well say it's Chris Devine's fault," Carol said briskly.

"She knew Shaz was going to interview him and she let her go alone."

"And why do you think Chris is spending her valuable time off tearing round Northumberland with Leon and Simon? It's not out of a sense of duty. It's out of a sense of guilt."

"You can't take responsibility for them all. Shaz was a copper. She should have considered the risk. There was no need for her to go in like she did, so even if you had tried to stop her, she probably wouldn't have paid any attention. Let it go, Tony."

He lifted his head and read the compassion in her eyes. He gave a rueful nod. "We need to go official on this now, if we're going to avoid accusations that we're as out of control as Shaz was."