'm not blaming myself, though maybe we could have put a bit more effort into the case. I'm saying that somewhere along the line the police on this patch have let down the people they're supposed to serve.

And maybe you should have been a bit more forceful about making the point to my predecessor that you thought you had a firebug."

Pendlebury looked shocked. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been criticized to his face by a member of another emergency service. "I think you're a bit out of order, Chief Inspector," he said, made pompous by his outrage.

"I'm sorry you feel like that," Carol said stiffly, standing up and straightening her shoulders. "But if we're going to have a productive working relationship, there's no room for cosiness at the expense of honesty. I expect you to tell me if we're not keeping our end of the deal. And when I see things I don't like, I'll call them. I don't want to fall out with you about this. I want to catch this guy. But we're not going to make any progress if we all stand around saying it can't be helped that some poor bastard is lying there dead."

For a moment, they glared at each other, Pendlebury uncertain how to deal with her fiery determination. Then he spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "I'm sorry. You're right. I shouldn't have taken no for an answer."

Carol smiled and thrust out her hand. "Let's both try and get it right from now in, OK?"

They shook on it. "Deal," he said. "I'll talk to you later, when the forensics team have been all over it."

As she drove off, Carol had room for only one thought. She had a serial arsonist who had now become a killer on her patch. Catching him was the only show in town. By the time the forensics team had something positive to tell her, she intended to have a draft profile. By the time the inquest opened, she meant to have a suspect in custody. If John Brandon had thought she was driven when they'd worked together in Bradfield, he was in for a surprise. Carol Jordan was out to prove a lot of points to a lot of people. And if she felt discouraged along the way, the stink that clung to her nostrils would be impetus enough to get her moving again.

Shaz turned over and looked at the clock. Twenty minutes to seven. Only ten minutes since she'd looked at it last. She wasn't going to fall asleep again, not now. If she was honest, she thought as she got out of bed and made for the bathroom, she probably wasn't going to sleep properly until Chris had delivered on her promise.

Asking the favour had been less awkward than she'd expected, Shaz reflected as she sat on the loo and leaned over to turn on the bath taps. Time seemed to have smoothed the rough edges of her relationship with Detective Sergeant Devine until it was back where it had been before misunderstandings and false moves had abraded it to a series of painful snags.

From the start of Shaz's career in the Met, Chris Devine had represented everything Shaz aspired to. There had been only two women in CID at the station where Shaz was based in West London, and Chris was the higher ranking. It was obvious why. She was a good cop with one of the best arrest records in the division. Rock solid in a crisis, hard working, imaginative and incorruptible, she also demonstrably possessed a brain and a sense of humour. Even more importantly, she could be one of the lads without ever letting anyone forget she was a woman.

Shaz had studied her like a specimen under a microscope. Where Chris was, she wanted to be, and she wanted that same respect. Already she'd seen too many women officers dismissed as plonks or slits, and she was determined that would never happen to her. Shaz knew that as a brand new uniformed constable, she was an insignificant dot somewhere in Chris's peripheral vision, but somehow she insinuated herself into the older woman's consciousness until, whenever they were in the station taking refs at the same time, they could invariably be found in a corner of the canteen drinking brutally strong tea and talking shop.

The very day Shaz became eligible for acid aide posting, she'd submitted her name. Chris's recommendation was enough to swing it and, a few weeks later, Shaz found herself on her first night-shift stakeout with Chris. It took her rather longer to realize that Chris was gay, and had been working on the assumption that Shaz's hot pursuit was sexual rather than professional. The night her sergeant kissed her had been the worst moment of her police career.

For an instant, she'd almost gone along with it, so deep-rooted was her ambition. Then reality had clicked in. Shaz might not have been much good at forming relationships, but she knew enough about herself to be clear that it was very definitely men rather than women that she wasn't connecting with. She'd recoiled from Chris's embrace more vigorously than from a sawn-off shotgun. The aftermath was something neither Shaz nor Chris could recall without an uncomfortable mixture of emotions; humiliation, embarrassment, anger and betrayal. The sensible option would probably have been for one of them to seek a transfer, but Chris wasn't prepared to abandon a patch she knew like her own back garden, and Shaz was too stubborn to give up her first best chance at making it on to a permanent CID appointment.

So they'd established an awkward armistice that allowed them to stay on the same team, though whenever they could avoid working shift together, they did. Six months before Shaz's move to Leeds, Chris had been promoted and transferred to New Scotland Yard. They hadn't spoken from that day until Shaz had fetched up on Chris's doorstep looking for a favour.

Shaz chopped fresh fruit into her muesli and reflected that it had been easier than she'd expected to swallow her pride and ask Chris for help, possibly because Chris had been wrong-footed by the presence in her flat and, clearly, her bed of a fingerprint technician Shaz remembered from Notting Hill Gate. When Shaz had explained what she wanted, Chris had agreed immediately, understanding exactly why Shaz was so eager to push far beyond what her course leader expected from his officers. And, again as if fate had taken a hand in Shaz's life, it happened that Chris was off duty the following day, so garnering Shaz's information in the minimal time available would be simple.

As she absently shovelled breakfast into her mouth, she imagined Chris spending her day in the national newspaper archives at Colin-dale, copying page after page of local papers until she'd covered the period surrounding each of the seven disappearances that had captured Shaz's imagination. Shaz ran her empty cereal bowl under the hot tap with happy anticipation swejling inside. She couldn't say why she was so certain, but she was convinced that the first

steps on her journey of proof would be way marked in the local press.

She'd never been wrong so far. Except, of course, about Chris. But that, she told herself, had been different.

"The kind of cases we'll be working are the ones that leave most police officers feeling edgy. That's because the perpetrators are dancing to a different beat from the rest of us," Tony looked around, double-checking that they were listening to him rather than shuffling through their papers. Leon looked as if he'd rather be somewhere else, but Tony had grown accustomed to his affectations and no longer took them at face value. Satisfied, he continued. "Knowing you're dealing with someone who has manufactured their own set of rules is a very unsettling experience for anyone, even trained police officers. Because we come in from the outside to make sense of the bizarre, there's a tendency to lump us as part of the problem rather than the solution, so it's important that the first thing we concentrate on is building a rapport with the investigating officers. You've all come here from CID work any ideas about the sort of thing that might work?"

Simon jumped straight in. "Take them out for a pint?" he suggested.

The others groaned and catcalled at his predictability.

Tony's smile came nowhere near his eyes. "Chances are they'll have half a dozen good excuses why they can't come to the pub with you. Any other ideas?"

Shaz raised her pen. "Work your socks off. If they see you're a grafter, they'll give you some respect."

"Either that or think you're brown-nosing the bosses," Leon sneered.

"It's not a bad idea," Tony said, ' Leon does have a point. If you're going to go down that road, you also need to demonstrate a complete contempt for everyone over the rank of DCI, which can be wearing, not to say counterproductive." They laughed. "What does the trick for me is incredibly simple." He gave them a last questioning look. "No? How about flattery?"

A couple nodded sagely. Leon's lip curled and he snorted. "More brown-nosing."

"I prefer to think of it as one technique among many in the arsenal of the profiler. I don't use it for personal advancement; I use it for the benefit of the casework," Tony corrected him mildly. "I have a mantra that I trot out at every available opportunity." He shifted his position slightly, but that small change altered his body language from comfortable authority to subordinate. His smile was self-deprecating.

"Of course," he said ingratiatingly, "I don't solve murders. It's bobbies that do that." Then, just as swiftly, he returned to his previous posture. "It works for me. It might not work for you. But it's never going to do any harm to tell the investigating officers how much you respect their work and how you're just a tiny cog that might make their machine work better." He paused for a moment. "You have to tell them this at least five times a day." They were all grinning now.

"Once you've done that, there's a reasonable chance they'll give you the information you need to draw up your profile. If you can't be bothered making the effort, they're likely to hold as much back as they can get away with because they see you as a rival for the glory of solving a high-profile case. So. You've got the investigating officers on your side, and you've got your evidence. It's time to work on the profile.

First you assess probabilities."

He stood up and began to prowl round the perimeter of the room, like a big cat checking the limits of its domain. "Probability is the only god of the profiler. To abandon probability for the alternative demands the strongest evidence. The downside of that is that there will be times when you end up with so much egg on your face you'll look like an omelette on legs."

Already, he could feel his heart rate increasing and still he hadn't said a word about the case. "I had that experience myself on the last major case I worked. We were dealing with a serial killer of young men.

I had all the information that was available to the police, thanks to a brilliant liaison officer. On the basis of the evidence, I drew up a profile. The liaison officer made a couple of suggestions based on her instincts. One of those suggestions was an interesting idea I hadn't thought of because I didn't know as much about information technology as she did. But equally, because it was something only a small proportion of the population would know about, I assigned it a moderately low probability. Normally, that would mean the investigation team would assign it low priority, but they were stuck for leads, so they pursued it. It turned out she'd been right, but in itself it didn't move the investigation much further forward."

His hands were clammy with perspiration, but now he was actu ally confronting the details that still shredded his nights, his stomach had stopped clenching. It was less effort than he'd expected to continue his analysis. "Her other suggestion I discounted out of hand because it was completely off the wall. It ran counter to everything I knew about serial killers." Tony met their curious stares. His tension had transmitted itself to the entire squad and they sat silent and motionless, waiting for what would come next.

"My disregard for her suggestion nearly cost me my life," he said simply, reaching his seat and sitting down again. He looked around the room, surprised he could speak so levelly. "And you know something? I was right to ignore her. Because, on a scale of one to a hundred, her proposition was so unlikely it wouldn't even register."

As soon as the formal confirmation of the body in the blaze came through, Carol called a meeting of her team. This time, there were no chocolate biscuits. "I expect you've all heard this morning's news," she said flatly as they arranged themselves around her office, Tommy Taylor straddling the only chair apart from Carol's on the basis that he was the sergeant. He might have been brought up never to sit while women were standing, but he'd long since stopped thinking of Di Earnshaw as a woman.

"Aye," he said.

"Poor bugger," Lee Whitbread chimed in.

"Poor bugger nothing," Tommy protested. "He shouldn't have been there, should he?"

Repelled but not surprised, Carol said, "Whether he should or shouldn't have been there, he's dead, and we're supposed to be looking for the person who killed him." Tommy looked mutinous, folding his arms across the chair back and planting his feet more firmly on the floor, but Carol refused to respond to the challenge. "Arson's always a time bomb," she continued. "And this time it's gone off right in our faces. Today has not been the proudest day of my career to date. So what have you got for me?"

Lee, leaning against the filing cabinet, shifted his shoulders. "I went through all the back files for the last six months. Leastways, all I could get my hands on," he corrected himself. "I found quite a few incidents like you told us to look for, some off night-shift CID reports, some off the uniform lads. I was planning on getting them collated on paper today."

"Di and me, we've been re-interviewing the victims, like you said. There doesn't seem to be any linking factor that we've come across so far," Tommy said, his voice distant following Carol's snub.

"A variety of insurance companies, that kind of thing," Di amplified.

"What about a racial motive?" Carol asked.

"Some Asian victims, but not what you'd call enough to make it look significant," Di said.

"Have we spoken to the insurers themselves yet?"

Di looked at Tommy and Lee stared out of the window. Tommy cleared his throat. "It was on Di's list for today. First chance she's had."

Unimpressed, Carol shook her head. "Right. Here's what we do next.

I've had some experience in offender profiling ... " She stopped when Tommy muttered something. ''m sorry, Sergeant Taylor, did you have a contribution?"

Confidence restored, Tommy grinned insolently back at Carol. "I said, "We'd heard," ma'am."

For a moment, Carol said nothing, merely staring him down. It was situations like this that could make the job degenerate into a misery if they weren't handled right. So far, it was only cheeky disrespect. But if she let it go, it would quickly slide into full-scale insubordination. When she spoke, her voice was quiet but chill.

"Sergeant, I can't think why you have this burning ambition to go back into uniform and play at community policing, but I'll be more than happy to oblige you if CID work continues not to be to your taste."

Lee's mouth twitched in spite of himself; Di Earnshaw's dark eyes narrowed, waiting for the explosion that never came. Tommy pushed his shirtsleeves above his elbows, looked Carol straight in the eye and said, "Reckon I'd better show you what I'm made of then, Guv."

Carol nodded. "You better had, Tommy. Now, I'm going to work on a profile, but to make that anything more than a bit of an academic exercise, I'm going to need a lot of raw data. Since we can't find any evidence of linkage between the victims, I'm going to stick my neck out and say we've got a thrill seeker rather than a torch for hire. Which means we're looking for a young adult male. He's probably unemployed, likely to be single and still living with his parents. I'm not going to go into all the psychobabble about social inadequacy and all that right now. What we need to look for is someone with a record of police contact for petty nuisance of fences vandalism, substance abuse, that sort of thing. Maybe minor sex of fences Peeping Tom, exposing himself. He's not going to be a mugger, a burglar, a thief, a fly boy.

He's going to be a sad bastard. In and out of minor bother since he was a pre-teen. He probably doesn't have a car, so we need to look at the geography of the fires; chances are if you drew a line linking the outermost fires, he'll live inside its boundaries. He'll probably have watched all the fires from a vantage point, so have a think about where that might have been and who might have witnessed him there.

"You know the ground. It's your job to bring me suspects that we can match against my profile. Lee, I want you to talk to the collator and see who uniform know that fits those criteria. I'll get going on a fuller profile and Tommy and Di will do the routine work-up on the crime itself, liaising with forensics and organizing a door-to-door in the area. Hell, I don't have to tell you how to run a murder inquiry ... "

A knock at the door interrupted Carol's flow. "Come in," she called.

The door opened on John Brandon. It was, Carol realized, a measure of how far she had to go before she'd be accepted into the East Yorkshire force that no one had stuck a head round the door to warn her the chief was on his way. She jumped to her feet, Tommy nearly toppled in his hurry to get out of his chair and Lee cracked his elbow on the filing cabinet pushing himself upright. Only Di Earnshaw was already in place, standing against the back wall with her arms folded across her chest.

"Sorry to interrupt, DCI Jordan," Brandon said pleasantly. "A word?"

"Certainly, sir. We're pretty much finished here. You three know what we're after, I'll leave you to it." Carol's smile managed to dismiss as well as encourage and the three junior officers edged out of the office with barely a backward glance.

Brandon waved Carol to her seat as he folded his long body into the guest chair. "This fatal fire at Wardlaw's," he began without formalities.

Carol nodded. "I was out there earlier."

"So I heard. One of your series then, I take it?"

"I think so. It's got all the hallmarks of it. I'm waiting to hear from the fire investigators, but Jim Pendlebury, the fire chief, reckons it's got generic similarities to the earlier incidents we'd identified."

Brandon chewed one side of his lower lip. It was the first time Carol had ever seen him look anything other than completely composed. He breathed heavily through his nose and said, "I know we talked about this before and you were convinced that you could handle it. I'm not saying that you can't, because I think you're a bloody good detective, Carol.

But I want Tony Hill to take a look at this."

"There's really no need," Carol said, feeling heat spreading up her chest and into her neck. "Certainly not at this stage."

Brandon's gloomy bloodhound face seemed to grow even longer. "It's no slur on your competence," he said.

"I'm bound to say that's what it looks like from here," Carol said, trying not to sound as mutinous as she felt, forcing herself to remember how angry Tommy Taylor's earlier impertinence had made her feel. "Sir, we've barely started our own inquiries. It may well be that we'll have this whole thing wrapped up in a matter of days. There can't be that many potential suspects in Seaford who fit the serial arsonist profile."

Brandon shifted in his chair, as if struggling to find an appropriate arrangement for his long legs. "I find myself in a slightly awkward position here, Carol. I've never been happy with the "theirs not to reason why" approach to command. I've always thought things run better when my officers understand why I issue the orders I do rather than having to rely on blind obedience. On the other hand, for operational reasons, sometimes things have to be taken on trust. And when other units outside my command are involved, even when I think there's no earthly reason for confidentiality, I have to respect what they ask for.

If you follow me?" He raised his eyebrows in an anxious question. If any of his officers could read between so oblique a set of lines, it would be Carol Jordan.

Carol frowned as she digested Brandon's words. "So, hypothetically," she eventually said, taking her time to think through what she was saying, ' a new unit was being set up with a specialist area of responsibility, and they wanted a sympathetic force to let them use one of their cases as a sort of guinea pig, even if you thought the officer in charge had a right to know what the score was, you'd be obliged to go along with their demand for confidentiality as to the real reason why they were being handed the case? That sort of thing, sir?"

Brandon smiled gratefully. "Speaking purely hypothetically, yes."

There was no answering smile. "This wouldn't be an appropriate occasion for such an experiment, in my opinion." She paused. "Sir."

Brandon looked surprised. "Why not?" he asked.

Carol thought for a moment. Few fast-track graduates climbed the greasy pole as fast as she'd done, particularly women. John Brandon's patronage had given her more than she could ever have expected. And she couldn't even be certain if her real reasons for reluctance were the ones she was about to voice. Nevertheless, she'd stuck her neck out this far and she'd never been a quitter. "We're a new force," she said carefully. "I've only just arrived to work with a group of people who have been a team for a long time. I'm trying to build up a working relationship that will allow us to protect and serve our community. I can't do that if I'm stripped of the first major case that's crossed my desk since I got here."

"No one's talking about taking the case away from you, Chief Inspector," Brandon said, reflecting Carol's formality. "We're talking about using the new task force on a consultancy basis."

"It'll look like you've no confidence in me," Carol insisted.

"That's nonsense. If I had no confidence in your abilities, why on earth would I have appointed you to a promoted post?"

Carol shook her head in disbelief. He really didn't get it. "I'm sure the canteen cowboys won't have any trouble coming up with ideas on that score, sir," she said bitterly.

Brandon's eyes widened as he grasped her meaning. "You think they ... That can't be ... It's ridiculous! I never heard anything so absurd!"

"If you say so, sir." Carol managed a twisted smile and ran a hand through her shaggy blonde hair. "I didn't think I looked that rough."

Brandon shook his head in disbelief. "It never occurred to me that people would misinterpret your promotion. You're self-evidently such a good copper." He sighed and chewed his lip again. "Now I'm in an even worse position than I was when I walked in." He looked up at her and made a decision.

"I'm going to speak off the record. Paul Bishop has been having liaison problems with the local brass in Leeds. They've made it clear they don't want his team on their ground and they won't let him near any of their crimes. He needs a real case for his officers to learn their trade, and for obvious reasons, he doesn't want some high-profile serial killer or rapist. He rang me because we're next door to him and he asked me to keep an eye out for something that might do for his squad to cut their teeth on before they're officially available to catch cases from every Tom, Dick and Harry. To be perfectly honest, I was going to offer them your serial arsonist even before it turned fatal."

Carol tried to keep her anger out of her face. It was always the way.

Just when you thought you'd got them house-trained, they reverted to Neanderthal. "It's a murder now. You don't get much more high profile than that," she said. "For my own self-respect, never mind the respect of my team, I need to head the investigation. I do not need to be seen to be hanging on the coat-tails of the National Offender Profiling Task Force," she continued coldly. "If I'd thought sending in visiting firemen was the best way to police serious crime, I'd have applied to join them. I can't believe you'd undermine me like this. Sir." The last word came out like a expletive.

Brandon's method of dealing with threatened insubordination was very different from Carol's. A man in his position had little need of veiled threats; he could afford to be more creative. "I have no intention of undermining any of my officers, DCI Jordan. That's why you will be the only officer who has direct dealings with the task force. You will go to them in Leeds, they will not come on our ground. I will make it clear to Commander Bishop that his officers will discuss the case with no other officer of the East Yorkshire force. I trust you will find that satisfactory?"

Carol couldn't help feeling a grudging respect for the speed with which her chief had thought on his feet. "You've made your orders perfectly clear," she said, leaning back in resignation.

Relieved that the crisis had been resolved without anything that would have been embarrassing to report back to Maggie, Brandon got to his feet with a relaxed smile. "Thanks, Carol. I appreciate it. Funny, I could have sworn you'd have jumped at the chance to work with Tony Hill again.

The two of you hit it off so well when you worked liaison on the Bradfield murders."

She coaxed her muscles to conjure up a smile from memory and hoped it would pass for the real thing. "My reluctance was nothing to do with Dr. Hill," she said, wondering whether Brandon would believe her when she couldn't even convince herself.

"I'll let them know you'll be in touch." Brandon closed the door on his way out, a courtesy Carol was profoundly grateful for.

"I can hardly wait," she said grimly to the empty room.

Shaz bounced through the door of the police station where the task force was based and grinned at the uniformed officer behind the desk with cheerful expectation. "DC Bowman," she said. "NOP task force. There should be a package for me?"

The constable looked sceptical. "Here?"

"That's right." She glanced at her watch. "It was supposed to be sent by overnight courier. For delivery by nine a.m. And since my watch says it's ten past ... "

"Then you owe somebody a bollocking, because there's nowt here for you, love," the constable said, incapable of keeping the satisfaction out of his voice. It wasn't often he had the chance to score a point against a task force outsider and patronize a woman in a single go.

"You sure?" Shaz asked, trying not to show the consternation that she knew would only increase his smugness.

"I've got my reading badge, love. Trust me, I'm a bobby. There's no package here for you." Bored now, he ostentatiously turned away and pretended to be interested in a pile of paperwork.

Fizzing with frustration, her good mood history, Shaz bypassed the bank of lifts and jogged up the five flights of stairs to the task force operations room. "Never trust someone else, never trust someone else," pounded in her head in sync with her feet on the stairs and the blood in her ears. She marched straight into the room that held their computer terminals and threw herself into her chair, barely managing to grunt a greeting to Simon, the only other occupant of the room. Shaz grabbed her phone and punched in Chris's home number. "Bugger!" she muttered when the answering machine picked up. She yanked her personal organizer out of her bag and keyed in Chris's name. Her index finger stabbed out the direct line at New Scotland Yard. The phone was answered on the second ring. "Devine."

"It's Shaz."

"Whatever it is you're after, the answer's no, doll. I don't think I'm ever going to get the dust and ink out from under my fingernails after yesterday's little exercise. Definitely a non-starter on the "fun things to do with your day off" list."

"I really appreciate it, you know that. Only ... "

Chris groaned. "What, Shaz?"

"The stuff hasn't arrived."

Chris snorted. "That all? Listen, by the time I'd got finished which I have to tell you I only managed by flashing the old warrant card and roping the staff in it was too late to get an overnight delivery. Best they could do was by noon. So you should get it some time this morning.

All right?"

"It'll have to be," Shaz said, aware she was being ungracious, but unable to care.

"Relax, doll. It's never the end of the world. You're going to give yourself an ulcer," Chris told her.

"I've got to present my case tomorrow afternoon," Shaz pointed out.

Chris laughed. "So what's the problem? "King hell, Shaz, that Yorkshire air's slowing you up. Time was, you were greased lightning.

You got a whole night to turn it around. Don't tell me you're getting soft."

"I do like the odd bit of sleep between dusk and dawn," Shaz said.

"Just as well you and me never got it together, then, isn't it? Gimme a call if you haven't got the stuff by the middle of the afternoon, all right, doll? Just hang loose. Nobody's going to die."

"I flaming hope not," Shaz said to a dead line.

"Problems?" Simon asked, plonking himself down next to her and pushing a mug of coffee towards her.

Shaz shrugged, reaching for the brew. "Just some stuff I wanted to check out before we report back on the exercise tomorrow."

Simon's interest suddenly expanded beyond the erotic possibilities of a fling with Shaz. "You on to something?" he asked, trying for nonchalant and failing.

Shaz's grin was evil. "You mean you haven't spotted the cluster?"

"Course I have. Saw it right away, no messing," he said, clearly blustering.

"Right. So you also found the external link?" Shaz enjoyed the momentary blankness that crossed Simon's milk-pale face before he regained command. She snorted with laughter. "Good try, Simon."

He shook his head. "All right, Shaz, you win. Will you tell me what you've got if I buy you dinner tonight?"

"I'll tell you what I've got tomorrow afternoon, same time as I tell everybody else. But if the offer's genuine and not just a bribe, I'd say yes to a drink before we go for the curry on Saturday night."

Simon thrust out his hand. "Deal, DC Bowman." Shaz took his hand and matched his grip.

The prospect of a pre-dinner drink with Simon, enticing though it was, couldn't distract Shaz from the anticipation of her parcel. At coffee break, she was at the front counter before the others had even brewed up. For the rest of the morning, as Paul Bishop took them through the application of a profile to a suspect list, Shaz, normally the most attentive of students, fidgeted like a four-year-old at the opera. As soon as they broke for lunch, Shaz was off down the stairs like a greyhound out of a trap.

This time, her prayers were answered. A cardboard archive box sealed with what looked like an entire roll of packing tape sat on the front counter. "Any longer and I'd have phoned the bomb disposal squad to get rid of it," the desk officer said. "We're a police station, not a post office."

"Just as well. You'd never stand the pace." Shaz swept the box off the counter and marched out to the car park with it. She opened the boot of her car and snatched a quick look at her watch. She reckoned she had about ten minutes to spare before her absence from the communal lunch table would excite comment. Hastily, she ripped at the packing tape with her fingernails, managing to unpick it enough to force the lid open.

Her heart sank. The box was almost brimful of photocopies. For a brief moment, she wondered if she couldn't just ignore her hunch. Then she thought of the seven teenage girls, their faces smiling up at her with all the expectation that, however many disappointments life might hold, at least they'd have a life. This wasn't just an exercise. Somewhere out there was a cold-hearted killer. And the only person who seemed to be aware of it was Shaz Bowman. Even if it did take all night, she owed them that effort at the very least.

Seeing him again face to face, Carol was stuck by the realization that it was pain that lurked behind Tony Hill's face. All the time she'd known him, she'd never recognized what underpinned his intensity. She'd always assumed that he was like her, driven only by the desire to capture and understand, fired by a passion to elucidate, haunted by the things he'd seen, heard and done. Now, distance had allowed her to comprehend what she had failed to see before, and she found herself wondering how different her behaviour towards him would have been had she really grasped what was going on behind his dark and troubled eyes.

Of course, he'd arranged it so that they would not be alone when they first encountered each other after the intervening months. Paul Bishop had been despatched to greet her when she'd arrived at the task force base in Leeds, smothering her in the charm that had made him such a media darling. His gallantry didn't extend to offering to carry her two briefcases heavy with case files, and Carol noticed with amusement that he couldn't pass a reflective surface without checking his appearance for imperfection, now smoothing an eyebrow, now straightening broad shoulders in a uniform that had plainly been made to measure. "I can't tell you how thrilled I am to meet you," he said. "John Brandon's best and brightest. Some accolade in itself, never mind your track record.

That speaks for itself, of course. Did John mention we'd been at staff college together? What a copper that man is, and what a talent spotter." His enthusiasm was infectious and Carol found herself responding to his flattery in spite of her best intentions.

"I've always enjoyed working with Mr. Brandon," she said. "How are things bedding down with the task force?"

"Oh, you'll see all that for yourself," he said dismissively, ushering her into the lift. "Of course, Tony's been singing your praises to the heavens. What a joy you are to work with, what a delightful colleague, how bright, how easy to deal with." He grinned down at her. "And the rest."

Now Carol knew he was a bullshitter. She had no doubt as to Tony's professional respect for her, but she knew him well enough to be certain he would never have spoken about her in personal terms. His ingrained reticence would have taken far greater subtlety and skill to penetrate than Paul Bishop clearly possessed. Tony would never talk about Carol because to do so, he'd have to talk about the case that had brought them together. And that would mean revealing far more about both of them than any stranger had a right to know. He'd have had to explain how she'd fallen for him and how his sexual inadequacies forced him to reject her, how any hope of them ever getting together had been the last victim of the murderous psychopath they'd tracked. She felt in her bones that he would never have told another living soul these things, and if there was one thing that raised her above her colleagues, it was her instinct. "Mmm," she said noncommittally. "I've always admired Dr. Hill's professionalism." Bishop brushed against her hip as he pushed the button for the fifth floor. If I'd been a man, Carol thought, he'd just have told me which floor to go for.

"It's a real bonus for us that you've worked with Tony before," Bishop continued, eyeing his hair in the brushed metal doors. "Our new trainees will be able to learn a lot from watching how you divide up the process, how you communicate, what you both need from each other."

"You know my methods, Watson," Carol parodied wryly.

Bishop looked momentarily puzzled, then his face cleared. "Ah, yes."

The lift opened. "This way. We're going to have coffee together, just the three of us, then you and Tony can work through the initial contact interview with the students looking on." He strode down the corridor and held a door open for her, standing back while she entered what looked like a scaled-down scruffy school staff-room.

Across the room, Tony Hill swung round, coffee filter in one hand, spoon in the other. His eyes widened at the sight of Carol and she felt a slow smile spread irresistibly across her face. "Tony," she said, managing to keep her voice formal. "How nice to see you."

"Carol," he greeted her, dropping the teaspoon on the table with a clatter. "You look ... well. You look well."

She'd have been lying if she'd said the same to him. He was still pale, though she'd seen him paler. The dark smudges under his eyes were less like bruises than they'd been the last time the two of them had stared at each other, but they were still the badges of someone to whom eight hours' sleep was the impossible dream. His eyes had lost some of the strain she'd grown accustomed to seeing there after their one memorable case had finally been resolved, but he still looked tense. Regardless, she wanted to kiss him.

Instead, she placed her briefcases on the long coffee table and said, "Any chance of a brew, then?"

"Strong, black, no sugar?" Tony checked with the hint of a smile.

"You must have made an impression," Bishop said, striding past Carol and dropping into one of the sagging chairs, carefully lifting the knees of his trousers to avoid bagging them. "He can't remember from one day to the next how I like mine."

"When we worked together before, it was the kind of situation where every detail is engraved on your brain forever," Carol said repressively.

Tony flashed her a quick look of gratitude then turned away to brew up.

"Thanks for sending the case files over," he said against the wheezing of the elderly electric kettle. "I've had them copied and the team have had them to study overnight."

"Fine. How do you want to play this?" Carol asked.