The Wire in the Blood by Val McDermid Page B

got together,’ Suzy was saying, her hand covering Jacko’s real one. She wouldn’t have been so quick to pat the other, Micky reflected grimly. ‘But I need to hear it from your own lips.’
    Here we go, Micky thought. The first part of the recital was always hers. ‘We met in hospital,’ she began.
    By the middle of the second week, the task force office felt like home to the entire team. It was no accident that all six of the junior officers chosen for the squad were single and unattached, according both to their records and the unofficial background checks that Commander Paul Bishop had pursued in canteens and police clubs up and down the country. Tony had deliberately wanted a group of people who, uprooted from their former lives, would be thrown together and forced to develop team spirit. That at least was something he seemed to have got right, he thought, looking around the seminar room where six heads were bowed over a set of photocopied police files he’d prepared for them.
    Already, they had started to form alliances, and so far they’d done well to avoid the personality clashes that could split a group beyond salvaging. Interestingly, the associations were flexible, not fixed in rigid pairs. Although some affinities were stronger than others, there was no attempt to make any of them exclusive.
    Shaz was the one exception, as far as Tony could tell. It wasn’t that there was a problem between her and the others. It was more that she held herself apart from the easy intimacy that was growing between the rest. She joined in the jokes, took part in the communal brainstorming, but somehow there was always distance between her and her fellows. He sensed in her a passion for success that the rest of the squad lacked. They were ambitious, no denying that, but with Shaz it went deeper. She was driven, her need burning inside her and consuming any trace of frivolity. She was always first there in the mornings and last out at night, eagerly snatching any opportunity to get Tony to expand on whatever he’d been talking about last. But her very need for success made her correspondingly more vulnerable to failure. What he recognized as a desperate desire for approval was a blade that could be used against her with devastating effect. If she didn’t learn to drop her defences so she could use her empathy, she’d never achieve her potential as a profiler. It was his job to find a way of making her feel she could relax her vigilance without risking too much damage.
    At that moment, Shaz looked up, her eyes direct on his. There was no embarrassment, no awkwardness. She simply stared for a moment then returned to what she was reading. It was as if she had raided his memory banks for a missing piece of information and, having found it, had logged off again. Slightly unnerved, Tony cleared his throat. ‘Four separate incidents of sexual assault and rape. Any comments?’
    The group had moved beyond awkward silences and polite hanging back to give others a chance. In what was becoming an established pattern, Leon Jackson dived straight in. ‘I think the strongest link is in the victims. I read somewhere that serial rapists tend to rape within their own age group, and all these women were in their mid-twenties. Plus they all have short blonde hair and they all took time and trouble to stay fit. You got two joggers, one hockey player, one rower. They all did sports where it wouldn’t be hard for a weirdo stalker to watch them without attracting any attention.’
    ‘Thanks, Leon. Any other comments?’
    Simon, already the devil’s advocate designate of the group, weighed in, his Glasgow accent and habit of staring out from under his heavy dark eyebrows multiplying the aggression factor. ‘You could argue that that’s because the kind of woman who indulges in these kind of sports is exactly the sort that’s confident enough to be out in risky places on her own, convinced it’s never going to happen to her. It could