here was a moment's silence. To Wharton it felt as long as Remembrance Sunday. He searched around for a meaningful question. "How did DC Bowman respond, sir? To your lack of recognition, I mean."

"She seemed disappointed," Vance said. "But she admitted it had always been a long shot. I said I was sorry not to have been more

help, and she left. That must have been around ... oh, half past ten, thereabouts?"

"So she was here for about an hour? That seems quite a long time for a few questions," Wharton said, punctilious rather than suspicious.

"It does, doesn't it?" Vance agreed. "But I did keep her waiting a few minutes, then I made us both some coffee, we did the usual small talk.

People always want to know behind-the-scenes gossip about Vance's Visits. Then I had to go through all the photographs. I took my time.

Missing girls is too serious a subject to take lightly. I mean, no contact with their families after all this time years, in some cases, according to DC Bowman chances are they could have been murdered. It merited my attention."

"Quite so, sir," Wharton said heavily, wishing he hadn't bothered asking. "I don't suppose she mentioned any plans she might have for the rest of the day?"

Vance shook his head. "Sorry, Inspector. I had the impression she had another appointment, but she didn't say where or with whom."

"What gave you that impression, sir?" Wharton looked up, for the first time feeling he might be doing more than going through the motions.

Vance frowned for a moment, as if thinking. "After I'd finished with the photographs, I offered to make fresh coffee. But she looked at her watch and seemed startled. As if she hadn't realized the time. She said she had to be going, she'd no idea we'd been talking for so long.

She was out the door within minutes."

Wharton closed his notebook. "As I think I should be too, sir. I very much appreciate both of you taking the time to talk to me. If there's anything else, which I very much doubt, I'll be in touch." He rose and gave his junior officer a ''s go' jerk of the head.

"You don't need to speak to Betsy?" Micky asked. "She shouldn't be long."

"I don't think that'll be necessary," Wharton said. "Frankly, I think DC Bowman's visit here was almost certainly nothing to do with her death. We just have to tie up the loose ends."

Vance crossed to the door and opened it to usher them out. "A shame you have to be dragged down here when the real work's waiting for you in Yorkshire," he said, his sympathetic smile adding weight to the commiseration in his voice.

Micky said goodbye and watched from the window as Vance saw the police officers off the premises. She wasn't sure what her husband was hiding.

But she knew him well enough to know that what she had just heard was only a distant relative of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

When he walked back into the room, she was leaning against the fireplace. "Are you going to tell me what you didn't tell them?" she asked, her eyes giving him the shrewd appraisal that could always penetrate his glossy surface.

Vance grinned. "You're a witch, Micky. Yes, I'll tell you what I didn't tell them. I did recognize one of the girls whose picture Bowman showed me."

Micky's eyes widened. "You did? How come? Where from?"

"No need to panic," he said scornfully. "It's perfectly innocent. When she went missing, her parents contacted us. Said she was my biggest fan, blah, blah, blah, never missed a show, blah, blah, blah. Wanted us to put out an appeal for her to contact them."

"And did you?"

"Course not. It wouldn't fit the format of the programme at all.

Somebody from the office sent them a sympathetic letter and we got one of the tabloids to run a story saying, "Jacko begs runaway to phone home"."

"So why didn't you tell Wharton? If you did something for the press, there'll be cuttings somewhere! They could dig them out and then you'll be in deep shit."

"How? They don't even know what Bowman was doing, which doesn't sound like they've got her files, does it? Look, Mick, I never met the girl.

I never spoke to her. But if I tell DI Plod I recognized her ... shit, Mick, you know the police are the leakiest sieve in town. Next thing you know, it'll be

"Jacko in murder quiz" splashed all over the front pages. No thanks. I can do without it. They can't connect me to a single one of Bowman's runaways. The king of deniability, remember?"

Micky shook her head, admiring his chutzpah in spite of herself. "More like Teflon Man," she said. "I've got to hand it to you, Jacko. When it comes to playing the audience like a fiddle, even I can't hold a candle to you."

He crossed to her and kissed her cheek. "Never try to bullshit a bullshitter."

Carol walked next morning into her office to find her crew had wrong-footed her by being there ahead of her. Tommy Taylor sprawled in the chair opposite hers, legs wide apart to emphasize his masculinity.

Lee had the window cracked open, blowing his smoke out to join the traffic fumes. Di was in her usual position leaning against the wall, arms folded over her badly fitting suit. Carol itched to drag her kicking and screaming to the January sales to kit the woman out in clothes that would both fit and flatter her instead of the expensive and nasty stuff she chose now.

Carol made straight for her bastion behind the desk, flipping open her briefcase as she sat. "Right," she said. "Our serial arsonist."

"Crunchy nut corn flake Lee said.

"Actually, not," Carol said. "Apparently, our firebug is as sane as you or me. Well, me, anyway, since I can't speak for you three. According to a psychologist whose judgement I trust implicitly, we're not dealing with a psychopath. The man who's setting these fires has a straightforward criminal motive. And that points to Jim Pendlebury's part-timers." The three stared at her as if she'd suddenly slipped into Swedish.

"You what?" Lee managed to speak first.

Carol distributed copies of the list the fire chief had given her. "I want deep background checks into these men. Particular attention to financial details. And I don't want them to get so much as a sniff that we're interested."

Tommy Taylor found his voice. "You're accusing firemen?"

"I think you'll find we're supposed to call them firefighters these days," Carol said mildly. "I'm not accusing anybody yet, Sergeant. I'm trying to gather enough information on which we can base a decision."

"Firemen die in fires," Di Earnshaw sniped mutinously. "They get injured, they inhale smoke. Why would a fireman set fires? He'd have to be a real sicko, and you just said this bloke isn't. Surely that's a contradiction in terms?"

"He's not sick," Carol said firmly. "Desperate, maybe, but he's not suffering from a mental illness. We're looking for someone who's so deep in debt he's lost sight of anything except how to get out of it.

It's not that he wants to put his mates at risk; he's just not allowing himself to include them in the equation."

Taylor shook his head sceptic ally

"It's a helluva slur on the fire service," he protested.

"No more so than outside inquiries into allegations of police corruption. And we all know that happens." Carol's voice was dry. She shuffled the case papers back into her briefcase then looked up at them.

"You lot still here?"

Lee tossed his cigarette into the street below in an eloquent gesture and pushed himself into a slouching walk to the door. "I'm on it," he said.

Taylor stood up and ostentatiously rearranged the outward evidence of his gender. "Aye," he said, following Lee and indicating to Di Earnshaw that she should follow.

"Softly, softly," Carol said to the retreating backs.

If spines could speak, Di Earnshaw's would have uttered a fluent

"Fuck off." The door closed behind them and Carol leaned back in her chair, one hand massaging the tight knots at the base of her skull. It was going to be a very long day.

Tony reached for the phone automatically, mumbling, "Tony Hill here, can you hang on a minute," before finishing the sentence he was typing into his computer. He looked at the receiver in his hand as if not quite certain how it had arrived there. "Yes, sorry, Tony Hill speaking."

"This is DI Wharton." His voice was neutral.

"Why?" Tony asked.

"What?" Wharton stumbled, wrong-footed.

"I asked why you were calling. What's so strange about that?"

"Aye, right. Well, I'm calling out of courtesy," Wharton said with a brusqueness that contradicted his words.

"That's novel."

"There's no need to get clever. My boss would have no problem with bringing you in for another visit."

"He'd have to take that up with my lawyer. You've had your one free shot. So what was this courtesy you wanted to extend me?"

"We had a telephone call from Micky Morgan, the TV presenter who, as you may or may not know, is Mrs. Jacko Vance. She volunteered the information that Bowman visited their house in London on Saturday morning to interview her husband. So we took a trip down there and spoke to Mr. Vance ourselves. And he's in the clear. Bowman might have made a fool of herself in front of your little clique, but she wasn't daft enough to repeat her nonsense to the man himself. Turns out all she wanted to ask was if he'd seen

anybody at his events stalking these missing girls. And he hadn't. Not surprising, when you consider how many faces pass his in a week. So you see, Dr. Hill, he's clean. They came to us, we didn't go to them."

"And that's it? Jacko Vance told you he'd waved goodbye to Shaz Bowman on the doorstep and that's good enough for you?"

"We've no reason to think otherwise," Wharton said stiffly.

"The last person to see her alive? Aren't they usually worth a look?"

"Not when they have no known connection to the victim, a reputation for probity that's never been challenged and they said goodbye twelve hours before the crime was committed," Wharton said, his voice laced with acid. "Especially when they're a registered disabled, one-armed person who's supposed to have overwhelmed a highly trained, able-bodied police officer."

"Can I ask one question?"

"You can ask."

"Was there a witness to this interview or did Vance see Shaz alone?"

"His wife let her into the house, but she left them to it. Bowman saw him alone. But that doesn't automatically mean he's lying, you know.

I've been in this game a long time. I can tell when folk are telling me lies. Face it, Doctor, you're well off target. I can't say I blame you for trying to divert us, but we're sticking with the people that she knew."

"Thanks for letting me know." Not trusting himself to say more, Tony dropped the phone back into its cradle. The blindness of the human animal never ceased to amaze him. It wasn't that Wharton was a stupid man; he was simply, in spite of years in the police service, conditioned to the belief that men like Jacko Vance could not be violent criminals.

In a way, Wharton's call was what he had been waiting for. The police could not avenge Shaz Bowman and vindicate his own work. It was up to him now, and there was a mordant satisfaction in that. Besides, Wharton's answer to his question had confirmed Vance as prime suspect in Tony's eyes. It had to be him. Tony had already eliminated a psychotic fan; now he could eliminate the members of Vance's entourage. If no one else had witnessed the interview, no one else could have picked up Shaz's trail after she left the house.

Picking up the phone again, Tony called the number he'd

obtained earlier from Directory Enquiries, anticipating this moment.

When the switchboard answered, he said, "Can you put me through to the Midday with Morgan production office?" Then he leaned back to wait, a grim little smile curving his lips.

John Brandon fiddled with the handle of his coffee cup. "I don't like it, Carol," he admitted. She opened her mouth to respond and he lifted a finger to silence her. "Oh, I know you're no more fond of the idea than I am. It's still a big step, pointing the finger at the fire service. I only hope we're not making a terrible mistake here."

Tony Hill's been right before," she reminded him. "And when you look at his analysis, it makes sense the way nothing else does."

Brandon shook his head despairingly, looking more like a world-weary undertaker than ever. "I know. It's such a depressing thought, though.

To put so many lives at risk for so little. At least when coppers go bent, people don't usually end up dead." He sipped his coffee. The aroma wafted across the desk to Carol, making her mouth water. Normally he offered her a cup; it was a measure of how shocked he was by her report that she wasn't sharing the fragrant brew. "Ah well," he said.

"Keep me informed of what your team comes up with. I'd appreciate advance notice of an arrest."

"No problem. There was one other thing, sir?"

"Was that the bad news or the good news?"

"I think it was the bad news. Depending on what you think of the other matter, sir." Carol's smile held no cheer.

The Chief Constable sighed and half-turned in his swivel chair to stare out across the estuary. As usual, the boss had the best view, Carol thought irrelevantly as an ocean-going trawler slid from one window to the next. "Let's hear it, then," he said.

"It also concerns Tony Hill," she said. "You know about the murder on his squad?"

"Hellish business," Brandon said accurately. "The worst thing that can happen in this job is losing an officer. But losing one like that ... It's your biggest nightmare."

"Especially if you've got memories like Tony Hill's to draw on."

"You're not wrong." He looked shrewdly across at her. "Apart from our natural compassion, how does this engage us?"

"Officially, not at all."

"But unofficially?"

"Tony's having some problems with West Yorkshire. They appear

to be treating him and his profiling trainees as their principal suspects instead of an effective resource. Tony feels they've dismissed other avenues for arbitrary reasons, and he's determined that Shaz Bowman's killer shouldn't escape simply because the investigating officers are taking a blinkered approach."

A smile escaped and spread across Brandon's face. "Those his words?"

Carol's answering smile was comp licit

"Not verbatim, sir. I didn't take a contemporaneous note."

"I can see why he feels the need to take action," Brandon said cautiously. "Any investigator would have the same reaction. But we have rules in the police service that prevent officers investigating crimes where they have a personal interest. Those rules exist for the very good reason that crimes close to home distort an officer's judgement. Are you sure it wouldn't be best to let West Yorkshire get on with this in their own way?"

"Not if it means leaving a psychopath on the streets," Carol said firmly. "There's nothing wrong that I can see with the way Tony's mind's working."

"You still haven't explained what this has to do with us."

"He needs help. He's working with some of his task force officers, but they're all currently on suspension, so they don't have access to any official channels. Plus he needs input from an experienced police officer to counterbalance his viewpoint. He can't get that from West Yorkshire. All they want to do is find a reason to stick him or one of his team behind bars."

"They never wanted to host that unit in the first place," Brandon said.

"It's not surprising they see this as an excuse to shoot it down in flames. Nevertheless, it is their case and they're not looking to us for assistance."

"No, but Tony is. And I feel I owe him, sir. All I'd be doing is a little background digging to provide his team with raw materials like names and addresses. I intend to give him what help I can. I'd prefer to do it with your blessing."

"When you say help ... ?"

"I won't be treading on West Yorkshire's heels. The angle Tony's interested in is miles away from their inquiries. They won't know I'm there. I'm not going to drop you in a jurisdictional wrangle."

Brandon swallowed the last of his coffee and pushed the cup away from him. "Damn right, you're not. Carol, do what you've got to do. But you're doing it off the books. This conversation never happened, and if it all comes on top, I never met you before." She grinned and got to her feet. "Thank you, sir."

"Stay out of trouble, Chief Inspector," he said gruffly, dismissing her with a flutter of his fingers. As she opened the door to leave, he added, "If you need my help, you have my number."

It was a promise Carol hoped she'd never have to collect on.

Sunderland was the furthest north, Exmouth the most southerly point. In between were Swindon, Grantham, Tamworth, Wigan and Halifax. In each place, a teenage girl's disappearance had snagged Shaz Bowman's attention. Kay Hallam knew that somehow she had to squeeze fresh juice from those investigations that would shore up the edifice of circumstantial evidence Tony was building against Jacko Vance. It wasn't an easy assignment. Years had passed and with them the sharpness of memory. Doing it single-handed wasn't the best option either. In an ideal world, there would be two of them, taking a couple of weeks to complete the task, conducting interviews with brains that weren't exhausted from driving the length and breadth of the country.

No such luxury. Not that she wanted to hang around. Whoever had killed Shaz didn't deserve a minute longer at liberty than they'd already had.

It was tough enough sitting on her hands while she waited for the results of DCI Jordan hammering the phones. Now there was a role model, Kay thought as she prowled from room to room of her terraced Victorian artisan's cottage. Whatever Carol Jordan had done, she'd obviously done it right. "If you want to be successful, hang around with successful people and copy what they do," Kay recited, a familiar mantra from one of her American self-improvement tapes.

The call came at lunchtime. Carol had spoken to all of the CID divisions who had dealt with the missing girls. In three cases, she'd even managed to contact the investigating officer, though investigation was probably too exalted a word for the cursory inquiries into missing teenage girls who didn't appear to want to be found. She had arranged for Kay to survey the slender files, and she'd contrived to elicit addresses and phone numbers for the distraught parents.

Kay put the phone down and studied a road atlas. She reckoned she could do Halifax in the afternoon and Wigan that evening.

Then down the motorway to the Midlands and an overnight motel. Breakfast at Tamworth then hammer down to Exmouth for late afternoon. Back up the motorway to overnight at Swindon, then cross-country to Grantham. A stop the following day in Leeds to report to Tony, then she could finish off in Sunderland. It sounded like the road movie from hell. Even Thelma and Louise got it more glamorous than this, she thought.

But then, unlike some of her colleagues, she'd never expected it to be glamorous. Hard graft, job security and a decent pay cheque were all Kay had ever supposed she'd get from the police. The gratification of detective work had come as a surprise. And she was good at it, thanks to an eye for detail that her less appreciative colleagues called anal.

Profiling seemed like the ideal area for using her observational skills to the full. She hadn't imagined her first case would be so close to home, or how personal it would feel. Nobody deserved what Shaz Bowman had endured, and nobody deserved to get away with it.

That was the thought Kay held on to as she hacked her way round the network of motor ways that crisscrossed England. She noticed that all of her destinations were either close by one of those motor ways or to one of the other major arterial roads peppered with fast-food joints tacked on to petrol stations. She wondered if there were any significance in that. Did Vance arrange to meet his victims at service areas they could easily scrounge a lift to? It was almost the only fresh thing to come out of two days' work, she thought grimly. That and the faintest ghostly glimmering of a pattern. But the stories of the parents were depressingly similar, and distressingly short on significant detail, certainly where Vance was concerned. She'd managed to talk to a couple of friends of missing girls, and they'd been scarcely more helpful. It wasn't that they didn't want to help; Kay was the sort of interviewer people always talked to. Her mousey insignificance belied her intelligence; she was no threat to women and made men feel protective. No, it wasn't that they were holding back, it was simply that there wasn't much to be said. Yes, the missing girls were daft on Jacko, yes, they'd been to events where he was present and yes, they were really excited about it. But nothing more than that flimsy gleaning.

By Grantham, she was operating on automatic pilot. Two nights in motels with the beds too soft and the constant high zip, zing and zoom of all-night traffic diluted but not deleted by double glazing

was no recipe for a productive interview, but it was better than no sleep at all, she scolded herself as she yawned expansively before ringing the doorbell.

Kenny and Denise Burton didn't seem to notice her exhaustion. It had been two years, seven months and three days since Stacey had walked out of the front door and never returned and the shadows under their eyes indicated neither had had a decent night's sleep since. They were like twins; both short, burly with pale, indoor skin and puffy fingers.

Looking at the wall of photographs of their slim, bright-eyed daughter, it was hard to believe in genetics as a science. They sat in a living room that was a monument to the expression ' place for everything and everything in its place'. There were a lot of places in the cramped room; corner display cabinets, alcoves shelved to accommodate knickknacks without number, a feature fireplace with built-in niches. It was a claustrophobic, timidly conventional room. With the two bars of the electric fire throwing out dusty heat, Kay could hardly breathe. It was no wonder Stacey hadn't been reluctant to leave.

"She was a lovely girl," Denise said wistfully. It was a refrain Kay had come to hate, hiding as it did every useful element of an adolescent girl's personality. It also reminded her discouragingly of her own mother, forever obliterating the reality of Kay's identity behind the anodyne phrase.

"Not like some," Kenny said darkly, smoothing his greying hair back over the bald patch threatening to burst through like a cartoon bump on the head. "She was told to be in by ten, by ten she'd be in."

"She'd never have gone off of her own free will," Denise said, the next line in the litany perfectly timed, perfectly placed. "She had no reason to. She must have been abducted. There's no other explanation."

Kay avoided the painfully obvious one. "I'd like to ask some questions about the days before Stacey disappeared," she said. "Apart from going to school, did she go out at all that week?"

Kenny and Denise didn't pause for thought. In counterpoint, they said, "She went to the pictures."

"With Kerry."

"The weekend before she was taken."

"Tom Cruise."

"She loves Tom Cruise." The defiant present tense.

"She went out on the Monday as well."

"We wouldn't normally allow her out on a school night."

"But this was special."

"Jacko Vance."

"Her hero, he is."

"Opening a fun pub in town, he was."

"We wouldn't normally have allowed her into a pub."

"What with her only being fourteen."

"But Kerry's mum was taking them, so we thought it would be all right."

"And it was."

"She was home right on time, right when Kerry's mum said they'd be."

"Full of it, our Stacey was. She got a signed photo."

"Personally signed. To her personally."

"She had that with her. When she went." There was a pause while Kenny and Denise swallowed their grief.

Kay took advantage. "How did she seem after their night out?"

"She was very excited, wasn't she, Kenny? It was like a dream come true to her, talking to Jacko Vance."

"She actually got to talk to him?" Kay forced herself to sound nonchalant. The faint pattern she'd discerned was growing stronger with each interview.

"Like a moonstruck calf she was, after," Stacey's father confirmed.