The Wire in the Blood. Val McDermid

to change. Your priorities will shift like Los Angeles in an earthquake. Believe me, when you spend your days and nights projecting yourself inside a mind that’s programmed to kill until death or incarceration prevents it, you suddenly find a lot of things that used to seem important are completely irrelevant. It’s hard to get worked up about the unemployment figures when you’ve been contemplating the activities of somebody who’s taken more people off the register in the last six months than the government has.’ His cynical smile gave them the cue to relax the muscles that had been taut for the past few minutes.

      ‘People who have not done this kind of work have no notion of what it is like. Every day, you review the evidence, raking through it for that elusive clue you missed the last forty-seven times. You watch helplessly as your hot leads turn out colder than a junkie’s heart. You want to shake the witnesses who saw the killer but don’t remember anything about him because nobody told them in advance that one of the people who would fill up with petrol in their service station one night three months ago was a multiple murderer. Some detective who thinks what you’re doing is a bag of crap sees no reason why your life shouldn’t be as fucking miserable as his, so he gives out your phone number to husbands, wives, lovers, children, parents, siblings, all of them people who want a crumb of hope from you.

      ‘And as if that isn’t enough, the media gets on your back. And then the killer does it again.’

      Leon Jackson, who’d made it out of Liverpool’s black ghetto to the Met via an Oxford scholarship, lit a cigarette. The snap of his lighter had the other two smokers reaching for their own. ‘Sounds cool,’ he said, dropping one arm over the back of his chair. Tony couldn’t help the pang of pity. Harder they come, the bigger the fall.

      ‘Arctic,’ Tony said. ‘So, that’s how people outside the Job see you. What about your former colleagues? When you come up against the ones you left behind, believe me, they’re going to start noticing you’ve gone a bit weird. You’re not one of the gang any more, and they’ll start avoiding you because you smell wrong. Then when you’re working a case, you’re going to be transplanted into an alien environment and there will be people there who don’t want you on the case. Inevitably.’ He leaned forward again, hunched against the chill wind of memory. ‘And they won’t be afraid to let you know it.’

      Tony read superiority in Leon’s sneer. Being black, he reasoned, Leon probably figured he’d had a taste of that already and rejection could therefore hold no fears for him. What he almost certainly didn’t realize was that his bosses had needed a black success story. They’d have made that clear to the officers who controlled the culture, so the chances were that no one had really pushed Leon half as hard as he thought they had. ‘And don’t think the brass will back you when the shit comes down,’ Tony continued. ‘They won’t. They’ll love you for about two days, then when you haven’t solved their headaches, they’ll start to hate you. The longer it takes to resolve the serial offences, the worse it becomes. And the other detectives avoid you because you’ve got a contagious disease called failure. The truth might be out there, but you haven’t got it, and until you do, you’re a leper.

      ‘Oh, and by the way,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘when they do nail the bastard thanks to your hard work, they won’t even invite you to the party.’

      The silence was so intense he could hear the hiss of burning tobacco as Leon inhaled. Tony got to his feet and shoved his springy black hair back from his forehead. ‘You probably think I’m exaggerating. Believe me, I’m barely scratching the surface of how bad this job will make you feel. If you don’t think it’s for you, if you’re having doubts about your decision, now’s the time to walk away. Nobody will reproach you. No blame, no shame. Just have a word with Commander Bishop.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Coffee break. Ten minutes.’

      He picked up his folder and carefully didn’t look at them as they pushed back chairs and made a ragged progress to the door and the coffee station in the largest of the three rooms they’d been grudgingly granted by a police service already strapped for accommodation for their own officers. When at last he looked up, Shaz Bowman stood leaning against the wall by the door, waiting.

      ‘Second thoughts, Sharon?’ he asked.

      ‘I hate being called Sharon,’ she said. ‘People who want a response go for Shaz. I just wanted to say it’s not only profilers that get treated like shit. There’s nothing you said just now that sounds any worse than what women deal with all the time in this job.’

      ‘So I’ve been told,’ Tony said, thinking inevitably of Carol Jordan. ‘If it’s true, you lot should have a head start in this game.’

      Shaz grinned and pushed off from the wall, satisfied. ‘Just watch,’ she said, swivelling on the balls of her feet and moving through the door on feet as silent and springy as a jungle cat.

      Jacko Vance leaned forward across the flimsy table and frowned. He pointed to the open desk diary. ‘You see, Bill? I’m already committed to running the half-marathon on the Sunday. And then after that, we’re filming Monday and Tuesday, I’m doing a club opening in Lincoln on Tuesday night – you’re coming to that, by the way, aren’t you?’ Bill nodded, and Jacko continued. ‘I’ve got meetings lined up Wednesday back to back and I’ve got to drive back up to Northumberland for my volunteer shift. I just don’t see how we can accommodate them.’ He threw himself back against the striped tweed of the production caravan’s comfortless sofa bench with a sigh.

      ‘That’s the whole point, Jacko,’ his producer said calmly, stirring the skimmed milk into the two coffees he was making in the kitchen area. Bill Ritchie had been producing Vance’s Visits for long enough to know there was little point in trying to change his star’s mind once it was made up. But this time, he was under sufficient pressure from his bosses to try. ‘This documentary short’s supposed to make you look busy, to say, “Here’s this amazing guy, busy professional life, yet he finds time to work for charity, so why aren’t you?”’ He brought the coffees to the table.

      ‘I’m sorry, Bill, but it’s not on.’ Jacko picked up his coffee and winced at its scalding heat. Hastily, he put it down again. ‘When are we going to get a proper coffee maker in here?’

      ‘If it’s anything to do with me, never,’ Bill said with a mock-severe scowl. ‘The lousy coffee’s the one thing guaranteed to divert you from whatever you’re going on about.’

      Jacko shook his head ruefully, acknowledging he’d been caught out. ‘OK. But I’m still not doing it. For one, I don’t want a camera crew dogging my heels any more than I already have to put up with. For two, I don’t do charity work so I can show off about it on prime-time telethons. For three, the poor sick bastards I spend my nights with are terminally ill people who do not need a hand-held camera shoved down their emaciated throats. I’ll happily do something else for the telethon, maybe something with Micky, but I’m not having the people I work with exploited just so we can guilt-trip a few more grand out of the viewers.’

      Bill spread his hands in defeat. ‘Fine by me. Do you want to tell them or will I?’

      ‘Would you, Bill? Save me the aggravation?’ Jacko’s smile was bright as a shaft of sunlight from a thundercloud, promising as the hour before a first date. It was imprinted on his audience like a race memory. Women made love to their husbands with more gusto because Jacko’s sexually inviting eyes and kissable mouth were flickering across the inside of their eyelids. Adolescent girls found their vague erotic longings suddenly focused. Old ladies doted on him, without connecting the subsequent feelings of unfulfilled sadness.

      Men liked him too, but not because they found him sexy. Men liked Jacko Vance because he was, in spite of everything, one of the lads. A British, Commonwealth, and European gold medallist and holder of the world javelin record, Olympic gold had seemed like an inevitability for the darling of the back pages. Then one night, driving back from an athletics meeting in Gateshead, Jacko drove into a dense bank of fog on the A1. He wasn’t the only one.

      The morning news bulletins put the figures at between twenty-seven and thirty-five vehicles in the multiple pile-up. The