The Wire in the Blood. Val McDermid

there would be no reason for any forensic expert to reconstruct the window and reveal a missing circle of glass at the heart of the shards. That done, he was inside within a few minutes. There was, he knew, no burglar alarm.

      He took out the torch and flipped it quickly on and off to check his position, then emerged into the corridor that led along the back of the main work space. At the end, he recalled, were a couple of large cardboard boxes of scrap material that local handicraft hobbyists bought for coppers. No reason for fire investigators to doubt it was a place where workers might hang out for a sly fag.

      It was a matter of moments to construct his incendiary device. First he opened up the cigarette lighter and rubbed the string with the wadding which he’d previously saturated with lighter fluid. Then he put the string at the centre of a bundle of half a dozen cigarettes held loosely together with an elastic band. He placed his incendiary so that the string fuse lay along the edge of the nearest cardboard box, then laid the oily handkerchief beside it with some crumpled newspaper. Finally, he lit the cigarettes. They would burn halfway down before the string ignited. That in its turn would take a little while to get the boxes of fabric smouldering. But by the time they’d caught hold, there wouldn’t be any stopping his fire. It was going to be some blaze.

      He’d been saving this one up, knowing it would be a beauty. Rewarding, in more ways than one.

      Betsy checked her watch. Ten minutes more, then she would break up Suzy Joseph’s junket with a fictitious appointment for Micky. If Jacko wanted to carry on charming, that was up to him. She suspected he’d rather seize the opportunity to escape. He’d have finished filming the latest Vance’s Visits the night before, so he’d be off on one of his charity stints at one of the specialist hospitals where he worked as a volunteer counsellor and support worker. He’d be gone by mid-afternoon, leaving her and Micky to a peaceful house and a weekend alone.

      ‘Between Jacko and the Princess of Wales, you get no peace these days when you’ve got a terminal illness,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m the lucky one,’ she went on, moving from bureau to filing cabinet as she cleared her desk in preparation for a guilt-free weekend. ‘I don’t have to listen to the Authorized Version for the millionth time.’ She imitated Jacko’s upbeat, dramatic intonation. ‘“I was lying there, contemplating the wreck of my dreams, convinced I had nothing left to live for. Then, out of the depths of my depression, I saw a vision.”’ Betsy made the sweeping gesture she’d seen Jacko deploy so often with his living arm. ‘“This very vision of loveliness, in fact. There, by my hospital bed, stood the one thing I’d seen since the accident that made me realize life might be worth living.”’

      It was a tale that bore almost no relationship to the reality Betsy had lived through. She remembered Micky’s first encounter with Jacko, but not because it had been the earth-shaking collision of two stars recognizing their counterparts. Betsy’s memories were very different and far less romantic.

      It was the first time Micky had been the lead outside broadcast reporter on the main evening news bulletin. She’d been bringing millions of eager viewers the first exclusive interview with Jacko Vance, hero of the hottest human story on the networks. Betsy had watched the broadcast at home alone, thrilled to see her lover the cynosure of ten million pairs of eyes, hugging herself in delight.

      The exhilaration hadn’t lasted long. They’d been celebrating together in the flickering glow of the video replay when the phone had interrupted their pleasure. Betsy had answered, her voice exuberant with happiness. The journalist who greeted her as Micky’s girlfriend drained all the joy from her. In spite of Betsy’s frostily vehement denials and Micky’s scornful ridicule, both women knew their relationship was poised on the edge of the worst kind of tabloid exposure.

      The patient campaign Micky had gone on to wage against the sneak tactics of the hacks was as carefully planned and as ruthlessly executed as any career move she’d ever made. Every night, two separate pairs of bedroom curtains would be closed and lights turned on behind them. The lamps would go off at staggered intervals, the one in the spare room controlled by a timer that Betsy adjusted to a different hour each night. Every morning, the curtains would be drawn back at diverse times, each pair by the same hands that had closed them. The only places the two women embraced were behind closed curtains out of the line of sight of the window, or in the hallway, which was invisible from outside. If both left the house at the same time, they parted at the bottom of the steps with a cheerful wave and no bodily contact.

      Giving the presumed watchers nothing to chew on would have been enough to make most people feel secure. But Micky preferred a more proactive approach. If the tabloids wanted a story, she’d make sure they had one. It would simply have to be a more exciting, more credible and more sexy story than the one they thought they had. She cared far too much for Betsy to take chances with her lover’s peace of mind or their relationship.

      The morning after the ominous phone call, Micky had a spare hour. She drove to the hospital where Jacko was a patient and charmed her way past the nurses. Jacko seemed pleased to see her, and not only because she came armed with the gift of a miniature AM/FM radio complete with earphones. Although he was still taking strong medication for his pain, he was alert and receptive to any distraction from the tedium of life in his side ward. She spent half an hour chatting lightly about everything except the accident and the amputation, then left, leaning over to give him a friendly peck on the forehead. It had been no hardship; to her surprise, she’d found herself warming to Jacko. He wasn’t the arrogant macho man she’d expected, based on her past experience with male sporting heroes. Nor, even more surprisingly, was he wallowing in self-pity. Micky’s visits might have started out as cynical self-interest, but within a very short space of time she was sucked in, first by her respect for his stoicism, then by an unexpected pleasure in his company. He might be more interested in himself than in her, but at least he managed to be entertaining and witty with it.

      Five days and four visits later, Jacko asked the question she’d been waiting for. ‘Why do you keep visiting me?’

      Micky shrugged. ‘I like you?’

      Jacko’s eyebrows rose and fell, as if to say, ‘That’s not enough.’

      She sighed and made a conscious effort to hold his speculative gaze. ‘I have always been cursed with an imagination. And I understand the drive to be successful. I’ve worked my socks off to get where I am. I’ve made sacrifices and I’ve sometimes had to treat people in a way that, in other circumstances, I’d be ashamed of. But getting to where I want to be is the most important thing in my life. I can imagine how I would feel if a chain of circumstances outside my control cost me my goal. I guess what I feel for you is empathy.’

      ‘Meaning what?’ he asked, his face giving nothing away.

      ‘Sympathy without pity?’

      He nodded, as if satisfied. ‘The nurse reckoned it was because you fancied me. I knew she was wrong.’

      Micky shrugged. It was all going so much better than she’d anticipated. ‘Don’t disillusion her. People distrust motives they can’t understand.’

      ‘You’re so right,’ he said, an edge of bitterness in his voice that she hadn’t heard there before, in spite of the ample reason. ‘But understanding doesn’t always make it possible to accept something.’

      There was more, much more behind his words. But Micky knew when to leave well alone. There would be plenty of opportunity to broach that subject again. When she left that day, she was careful to make sure the nurse saw her kiss him goodbye. If this story was to be credible, it needed to leak out, not be broadcast. And from her own journalistic experience, gossip spread through a hospital faster than legionnaire’s disease. From there to the wider community only took one carrier.

      When she arrived a week later, Jacko seemed remote. Micky sensed violent emotions barely held in check, but couldn’t be sure what those feelings were. Eventually, tired of conducting a monologue rather than a conversation, she said, ‘Are you going to tell me or are you just going to let your blood pressure rise till you have a stroke?’

      For the first time that afternoon, he looked directly into her face.