Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

Val McDermid’s latest novel, The Fever of the Bone, will be released in the U.K. on September 3. The book is the sixth to feature clinical psychologist Dr. Tony Hill and Chief Inspector Carol Jordan, who also star in this new story. Val McDermid’s last novel to appear in the U.S. also belongs to the Tony Hill series. Entitled Beneath the Bleeding, it was published by Harper Paperbacks in summer 2009.Many TV viewers will recognize the characters in this story as the protagonists of the series Wire in the Blood.

Previously published in the U.K., in the Mail on Sunday, December 2008. ©2008 by Val McDermid

1.

A chrysanthemum burst of colour flooded the sky. “Oooh,” said the man, his blue eyes sparking with reflected light.

“Aaah,” said the woman, managing to invest the single syllable with irony and good humour. Her shaggy blond hair picked up colour from the fireworks, giving her a fibre-optic punk look at odds with the conservative cut of her coat and trousers.

“I’ve always loved fireworks.”

“Must be the repressed arsonist in you.”

Dr. Tony Hill, clinical psychologist and criminal profiler, pulled a rueful face. “You’ve got me bang to rights, guv.” He checked out the smile on her face. “Admit it, though. You love Bonfire Night, too.” A scatter of green-and-red tracer raced across the sky, burning afterimages inside his eyelids.

DCI Carol Jordan snorted. “Nothing like it. Kids shoving bangers through people’s letter boxes, drunks sticking lit fireworks up their backsides, nutters throwing bricks when the fire engines turn up to deal with bonfires that’ve gone out of control? Best night of the year for us.”

Tony shook his head, refusing to give in to her sarcasm. “It’s been a long time since you had to deal with rubbish like that. It’s only the quality villains you have to bother with these days.”

As if summoned by his words, Carol’s phone burst into life. “Terrific,” she groaned, turning away and jamming a finger into her free ear. “Sergeant Devine. What have you got?”

Tony tuned out the phone call, giving the fireworks his full attention. Moments later, he felt her touch on his arm. “I have to go.”

“You need me?”

“I’m not sure. It wouldn’t hurt.”

If it didn’t hurt, it would be the first time. Tony followed Carol back to her car, the sky hissing and fizzing behind him.

The smell of cooked human flesh was unforgettable and unambiguous. Sweet and cloying, it always seemed to coat the inside of Carol’s nostrils for days, apparently lingering long after it should have been nothing more than a memory. She wrinkled her nose in disgust and surveyed the grisly scene.

It wasn’t a big bonfire, but it had gone up like a torch. Whoever had built it had set it in the corner of a fallow field, close to a gate but out of sight of the road. The evening’s light breeze had been enough to send a drift of sparks into the hedgerow and the resulting blaze had brought a fire crew to the scene. Job done, they’d checked the wet, smoking heap of debris and discovered the source of the smell overwhelming even the fuel that had been used as an accelerant.

As Tony prowled round the fringes of what was clearly the scene of a worse crime than arson, Carol consulted the lead fire officer. “It wouldn’t have taken long to get hold,” he said. “From the smell, I think he used a mixture of accelerants — petrol, acetone, whatever. The sort of stuff you’d have lying around your garage.”

Tony stared at the remains, frowning. He turned and called to the fire officer. “The body — did it start off in the middle like that?”

“You mean, was the bonfire built round it?”

Tony nodded. “Exactly.”

“No. You can see from the way the wood’s collapsed around it. It started off on top of the fire.”

“Like a guy.” It wasn’t a question; the fireman’s answer had clearly confirmed what Tony already thought. He looked at Carol. “You do need me.”

Tony smashed the ball back over the net, narrowly missing the return when his doorbell rang. He tossed the Wii control onto the sofa and went to the door. Carol walked in, not waiting for an invitation. “We’ve got the postmortem and some preliminary forensics. I thought you’d want to take a look.” She passed him a file.

“There’s an open bottle of wine in the fridge,” Tony said, already scanning the papers and feeling his way into an armchair. As he read, Carol disappeared into the kitchen, returning with two glasses. She placed one on the table by Tony’s chair and settled opposite him on the sofa, watching the muscles in his face tighten as he read.

It didn’t make for comfortable reading. A male between twenty-five and forty, the victim had been alive when he’d been put on the bonfire. Smoke inhalation had killed him, but he’d have suffered tremendous pain before the release of death. He’d been bound hand and foot with wire and his mouth had been sealed by some sort of adhesive tape. For a moment, Tony allowed himself to imagine how terrifying an ordeal it must have been and how much pleasure it had given the killer. But only for a moment. “No ID?” he said.

“We think he’s Jonathan Meadows. His girlfriend reported him missing the morning after. We’re waiting for confirmation from dental records.”

“And what do we know about Jonathan Meadows?”

“He’s twenty-six, he’s a garage mechanic. He lives with his girlfriend in a flat in Moorside—”

“Moorside? That’s a long way from where he died.”

Carol nodded. “Right across town. He left work at the usual time. He told his girlfriend and his mates at work that he was going to the gym. He usually went three or four times a week, but he never showed up that night.”

“So somewhere between — what, six and eight o’clock? — he met someone who overpowered him, bound and gagged him, stuck him on top of a bonfire, and set fire to him?”

“That’s about the size of it. Anything strike you?”

“That’s not easy, carrying out something like that.” Tony flicked through the few sheets of paper again. His mind raced through the possibilities, exploring the message of the crime, trying to make a narrative from the bare bones in front of him. “He’s a very low-risk victim,” he said. “When young men like him die violently, it’s not usually like this. A pub brawl, a fight over a woman, a turf war over drugs or prostitution, yes. But not this kind of premeditated thing. If he were just a random victim, if anyone would do, it’s more likely to be a homeless person, a drunk staggering home last thing, someone vulnerable. Not someone with a job, a partner, a life.”

“You think it’s personal?”

“Hard to say until we know a lot more about Jonathan Meadows.” He tapped the scene-of-crime report. “There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of forensics at the scene.”

“There’s a pull-in by the gate to the field. It’s tarmacked, so no convenient tire tracks. There’s a few footprints, but they’re pretty indistinct. The SOCOs think he was wearing some sort of covering over his shoes. Just like the ones we use to preserve the crime scene.” Carol pulled a face to emphasise the irony. “No convenient cigarette ends, Coke cans, or used condoms.”

Tony put down the file and drank some wine. “I don’t think he’s a beginner. It’s too well executed. I think he’s done this before. At least once.”

Carol shook her head. “I checked the database. Nothing like this anywhere in the U.K. in the last five years.”

That, he thought, was why she needed him. She thought in straight lines, which was a useful attribute in a cop, since, however much they might like to believe otherwise, that was how most criminals thought. But years of training and experience had honed his own corkscrew mind till he could see nothing but hidden agendas stretching backwards like the images in an infinity mirror. “That’s because you were looking for a burning,” he said.

Carol looked at him as if he’d lost it. “Well, duh,” she said. “That’s because the victim was burned.”

He jumped to his feet and began pacing. “Forget the fire. That’s irrelevant. Look for low-risk victims who were restrained with wire and gagged with adhesive tape. The fire is not what this is about. That’s just window dressing, Carol.”

Carol tapped the pile of paper on her desk with the end of her pen. Sometimes it was hard not to credit Tony with psychic powers. He’d said there would be at least one other victim, and it looked as if he’d been right. Trawling the databases with a different set of parameters had taken Carol’s IT specialist a few days. But she’d finally come up with a second case that fit the bill.

The body of Tina Chapman, a thirty-seven-year-old teacher from Leeds, had been found in the Leeds-Liverpool canal a few days before Jonathan Meadows’ murder. A routine dredging had snagged something unexpected, and further examination had produced a grisly finding. She’d been gagged with duct tape, bound hand and foot with wire, tethered to a wooden chair weighted with a cement block, and thrown in. She’d been alive when she went into the water. Cause of death: drowning.

A single parent, she’d been reported missing by her thirteen-year-old son. She’d left work at the usual time, according to colleagues. Her son thought she’d said she was going to the supermarket on her way home, but neither her credit card nor her store-loyalty card had been used.

Carol had spoken to the senior investigating officer in charge of the case. He’d admitted they were struggling. “We only found her car a couple of days ago in the car park of a hotel about half a mile from the supermarket her son said she used. It was parked down the end, in a dark corner out of range of their CCTV cameras. No bloody idea what she was doing down there. And no joy from forensics so far.”

“Anybody in the frame?”

His weary sigh reminded her of cases she’d struggled with over the years. “It’s not looking good, to be honest. There was a boyfriend, but they split up about six months ago. Nobody else involved, it just ran out of road. Quite amicable, apparently. The boyfriend still takes the lad to the rugby. Not a scrap of motive.”

“And that’s it?” Carol was beginning to share his frustration. “What about the boy’s real father?”

“Well, he wasn’t what you’d call any kind of father. He walked out on them when the lad was a matter of months old.”

Carol wasn’t quite ready to let go the straw she’d grasped. “He might have come round to the idea of having some contact with the boy.”

“I doubt it. He died in the Boxing Day tsunami back in oh-four. So we’re back to square one and not a bloody thing to go at.”

Carol still couldn’t accept she’d reached the end of the road. “What about her colleagues? Any problems there?”

She could practically hear the shrug. “Not that they’re letting on about. Nobody’s got a bad word to say about Tina, and I don’t think they’re just speaking well of the dead. She’s been working there for four years and doesn’t seem to have caused a ripple with other staff or parents. I can’t say I share your notion that this has got anything to do with your body, but I tell you, if you come up with anything that makes sense of this, I’ll buy you a very large drink.”

Making sense of things was what Bradfield Police paid Tony for. But sometimes it was easier than others. This was not one of those occasions. Carol had dropped off the case files on Jonathan Meadows and Tina Chapman at Bradfield Moor, the secure hospital where he spent his days among the criminally insane, a clientele whose personal idiosyncrasies he did not always find easy to distinguish from the population at large.

Two victims, linked by their unlikelihood. There was no evidence that their paths had ever crossed. They lived thirty miles apart. Carol’s team had already established that Tina Chapman did not have her car serviced at the garage where Jonathan Meadows worked. He’d never attended a school where she’d taught. They had no apparent common interests. Anyone other than Tony might have been reluctant to forge any link between the two cases. Carol had pointed that out earlier, acknowledging that her counterpart in Leeds was far from convinced there was a connection. Tony’s instincts said otherwise.

As he read, he made notes. Water. Fire. Four elements? It was a possibility, but admitting it took him no further forward. If the killer was opting for murder methods that mirrored fire, water, earth, and air, what did it mean? And why did it apply to those particular victims? Tina Chapman was a French teacher. What had that to do with water? And how was a garage mechanic connected to fire? No, unless he could find more convincing connective tissue, the four elements wasn’t going anywhere.

He studied the file again, spreading the papers across the living-room floor so he could see all the information simultaneously. And this time, something much more interesting caught his attention.

Carol stared at the two pieces of paper, wondering what she was supposed to see. “What am I looking for?” she said.

“The dates,” Tony said. “October thirty-first. November fifth.”

Light dawned. “Halloween. Bonfire Night.”

“Exactly.” As he always did when he was in the grip of an idea, he paced, pausing by the dining table to scribble down the odd note. “What’s special about them, Carol?”

“Well, people celebrate them. They do particular things. They’re traditional.”

Tony grinned, his hands waving in the air as he spoke. “Traditional. Exactly. That’s it. You’ve hit the nail on the head. They’re great British traditions.”

“Halloween’s American,” Carol objected. “Trick or treat. That’s not British.”

“It is originally. It came from the Celtic Samhain festival. Trick or treat is a variation of the Scottish guising tradition. Trust me, Carol, it only got to be American when the Irish took it over there. We started it.”

Carol groaned. “Sometimes I feel the Internet is a terrible curse.”

“Not to those of us with enquiring minds. So, we’ve got two very British festivals. I can’t help wondering if that’s the root of what’s going on here. Tina died like a witch on the ducking stool. Jonathan burned like a bonfire guy. The murder methods fit the dates.” He spun on his heel and headed back towards Carol.

“So I’m asking myself, is our killer somebody who’s raging against Britain and our traditions? Someone who feels slighted by this country? Someone who feels racially oppressed, maybe? Because the victims are white, Carol. And the killer’s paid no attention to Diwali. Okay, we’ve not had Eid yet, but I’m betting he won’t take a victim then. I’m telling you, Carol, I think I’m on to something here.”

Carol frowned. “Even if you’re right — and frankly, it sounds even more crazy than most of your theories — why these two? Why pick on them?”

Tony trailed to a halt and stared down at what he’d written. “I don’t know yet.” He turned to meet her eyes. “But there is one thing I’m pretty sure about.”

He could see the dread in her eyes. “What’s that?”

“If we don’t find the killer, the next victim’s going to be a dead Santa. Stuffed in a chimney would be my best guess.”

Later, Tony’s words would echo in Carol’s head. When she least expected it, they reverberated inside her. As she sat in the canteen, half her attention on her lasagne and half on the screen of the TV, she was jolted by a news flash that chilled her more than the November snow: SANTA SNATCHED OFF STREET.

2.

It had been a long time since Tony had been a student, but he’d never lost his taste for research. What made his investigations different from those of Carol and her team was his conviction that the truth lay in the tangents. An exhaustive police investigation would turn up all sorts of unexpectedness, but there would always be stuff that slipped between the cracks. People were superstitious about telling secrets. Even when they gave up information, they held something back. Partly because they could and partly because they liked the illusion of power it dealt them. Tony, a man whose gift for empathy was his finest tool and his greatest weakness, had a remarkable talent for convincing people that their hearts would never be at peace till they had shared every last morsel of information.

And so he devoted his attentions to identifying the unswept corners of the lives of Tina Chapman and Jonathan Meadows.

The first thing that attracted his attention about Tina Chapman was that she had only been in her current job for four years. In his world, history cast a long shadow, with present crimes often having their roots deep in the past. He wondered where Tina Chapman had been before she came to teach French in Leeds.

He knew he could probably short-circuit his curiosity with a call to Carol, but her gibe about the Internet was still fresh in his mind so he decided to see what he could uncover without her help.

Googling Tina Chapman brought nothing relevant except for a Facebook entry describing her as “everybody’s favourite language teacher,” an online review of the sixth-form performance of Le Malade Imaginaire that she’d directed, and a slew of news stories about the murder. None of the articles mentioned where she’d taught previously. But there was an interesting clue in one of them. Tina’s son wasn’t called Ben Chapman but Ben Wallace. “Lovely,” Tony said aloud. If Wallace had been Ben’s father’s name, there was at least a fighting chance that his mother had used it at some point.

He tried “Tina Wallace” in the search engine, which threw out a couple of academics and a real-estate agent in Wyoming. Then he tried “Martina Chapman,” “Christina Chapman,” “Martina Wallace,” and finally, “Christina Wallace.” He stared at the screen, hardly able to credit what he saw there.

There was no doubt about it. If ever there was a motive for murder, this was it.

Detective Inspector Mike Cassidy knew Carol Jordan only by reputation. Her major-case squad was despised and desired in pretty much equal measure by Bradfield’s detectives, depending on whether they knew they would never be good enough or they aspired to join. Cassidy avoided either camp; at forty-two, he knew he was too old to find a niche working alongside the chief constable’s blue-eyed girl. But he didn’t resent her success as so many others did. That didn’t stop him showing his surprise when she walked into his incident room with an air of confident ownership.

He stood up and rounded his desk, determined not to be put at a disadvantage. “DCI Jordan,” he said with a formal little nod. He waited; let her come to him.

Carol returned the nod. “DI Cassidy. I hear you’re dealing with the abduction in Market Street?”

Cassidy’s lips twisted in an awkward cross between a smile and a sneer. “The case of the stolen Santa? Isn’t that what they’re calling it in the canteen?”

“I don’t care what they’re calling it in the canteen. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing funny about a man being kidnapped in broad daylight on a Bradfield street.”

Cassidy took the rebuke on the chin. “As it happens, I’m with you on that one, ma’am. It’s no joke for Tommy Garrity or his family. And apart from anything else, it makes us look like monkeys.”

“So where are you up to?”

“Tommy Garrity was dressed in a Santa suit, collecting money for Christmas for Children when two men in balaclavas and blue overalls drove up the pedestrian precinct in a white Transit. They stopped in front of Tommy, bundled him into the Transit, and took off. We got the van on CCTV, turns out it was stolen off a building site this morning.” Cassidy turned to his desk and excavated a map from the stack of paper by the keyboard. He handed it to Carol. “The red line’s the route they took out of the city centre. We lost them round the back of Temple Fields. Once you come off Campion Way, the coverage is patchy.”

Carol sighed. “Typical. What about the number-plate-recognition cameras?”

“Nothing. At least we know they’ve not left the city on any of the main drags.”

“So, Tommy Garrity. Is he known?”

Cassidy shook his head. “Nothing on file. He works behind the bar at the Irish Club in Harriestown, does a lot of charity work in his spare time. He’s fifty-five, three kids, two grandkids. Wife’s a school-dinner lady. I’ve got a team out on the knocker, but so far Garrity’s white as the driven.”

Carol traced the line on the map. “That’s what worries me.”

Cassidy couldn’t keep his curiosity at bay any longer. “If you don’t mind me asking, ma’am, what’s your interest? I mean, not to play down the importance of daylight abduction, but it’s not major in the sense of being up your street.”

Carol dropped the map on Cassidy’s desk. “Just something somebody said to me a couple of weeks ago. Can you keep me posted, please?”

Cassidy watched her walk out. She was more than easy on the eye, and normally that would have been all that registered with him. But Carol Jordan’s interest had left him perturbed and anxious. What the hell was he missing here?

News generally passed Tony by. He had enough variety in his life to occupy his interest without having to seek out further examples of human shortcomings. But because he’d floated the suggestion of Santa as potential victim, he was more susceptible than normal to the scream of newspaper billboards that announced: SANTA SNATCH IN CITY CENTRE.

The story in the paper was short on fact and long on frenzy, queasily uncertain whether it should be outraged or amused. Tony, already on his way to Carol’s office, quickened his step.

He found her at her desk, reading witness statements from the Santa kidnap. She looked up and squeezed out a tired smile. “Looks like you were right.”

“No, I wasn’t. I mean, I think I was, but this isn’t him.” Tony threw his hands in the air, exasperated at his inability to express himself clearly. “This isn’t the next victim in a series,” he said.

“What do you mean? Why not? You were the one who told me I should be looking out for Santa. And not in the sense of hanging up my stocking.”

“There were two of them. I never said anything about two of them.”

“I know you didn’t. But it would have made the first two murders a lot easier if they’d been two-handed. And we both know that racially motivated fanatics tend to work in cells or teams. After what you said, I’ve had my crew looking at all our intel and we’re not getting many hits on lone activists.” She shrugged. “It may not have been in the profile, but two makes sense.”

Tony threw himself in the chair. “That’s because I was ignoring my own cardinal rule. First you look at the victim. That’s what it’s all about, and I got distracted because of the eccentricity of the crimes. But I’ve looked at the victims now and I know why they were killed.” He fished some printouts from his carrier bag. “Tina Chapman used to be known by her married name. She was Christina Wallace.” He passed the top sheet to Carol. “She taught French at a school in Devon. She took a bunch of kids on a school trip and two of them drowned in a canoeing accident. The inquest cleared her, but the bereaved parents spoke to the press, blaming her for what happened. And it does look like they had pretty strong reasons for that. So, she moved away. Reverted to her maiden name and started afresh.”

“You think one of the parents did this?”

“No, no, that’s not it. But once I knew that about Tina, I knew what I was looking for with Jonathan.” He handed over the second sheet. “Seven years ago, a five-year-old girl was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The car was a Porsche that had allegedly been stolen from a garage where it was in for a service. The garage where Jonathan Meadows worked. I went over there and spoke to the local traffic officers. They told me that there was a strong feeling at the time that the Porsche hadn’t been stolen at all, that Jonathan had taken it for a ride and had lost control. His DNA was all over the car, but his excuse was that he’d been working on it. His girlfriend gave him an alibi, and nothing ever came of it.”

Carol stared at the two sheets of paper. “You’re saying this is some kind of vigilante justice?”

Tony dipped his head. “Kind of. Both victims were implicated in the death of a child but went unpunished because of loopholes in law or lack of evidence. The killer feels they stole children away from their families. I think we should be looking for someone who has lost a child and believes nobody paid the price. Probably in the past year. He’s choosing these victims because he believes they’re culpable, and he’s choosing these murder methods because they mark the points in the year where parents celebrate with children.”

Within the hour, Tony and Carol were studying a list of seven children who had died in circumstances where blame might possibly be assigned. “How can we narrow it down?” she demanded, frustration in her voice. “We can’t put surveillance on all these parents and their immediate families.”

“There’s no obvious way,” Tony said slowly.

“Santa Garrity could still be a potential victim,” Carol said. “We don’t know enough about his history, and there’s nothing in your theory to say it couldn’t be two killers working together.”

Tony shook his head. “It’s emotionally wrong. This is about punishment and pain, not justice. It’s too personal to be a team effort.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Couldn’t we at least go and talk to the parents? Shake the tree?”

“It’s a waste of time. Even you can’t pick out a killer just by looking at them.”

They sat in glum silence for a few minutes, then Carol spoke again. “Victims. You’re right. It all comes back to victims. How’s he choosing his victims? You had to do some digging to come up with what you found. There was nothing in the public domain to identify Jonathan, and Tina had changed her name. That’s why the motive didn’t jump out at my team.”

Tony nodded. “You’re right. So who knows this kind of information? It’s not the police, there’s at least two forces involved here. Not the Crown Prosecution Service either, neither of them ever got that far.”

Light dawned behind Carol’s eyes. “A journalist would know. They get access to all kinds of stuff. He could have recognised Tina Chapman from the press photographs at the time. If he has local police contacts, he could have heard that Jonathan Meadows was under suspicion over the hit-and-run.”

Tony scanned the list. “Are any of these journalists?”

DI Cassidy entered the Children for Christmas offices almost at a run, his team at his heels. A trim little woman got to her feet and pointed to her computer screen. “There. Just as it came in.”

The e-mail was short but not sweet. “We’ve got Santa. You’ve got money. We want 20,000 pounds in cash. You’ll hear from us in an hour. No police.”

“I thought I would ignore the bit about no police,” the woman said. “It’s not as if we’re going to be paying the ransom.”

Cassidy admired her forthrightness but had to check she was taking all the possibilities into consideration. “You’re not frightened they might kill Mr. Garrity? Or seriously harm him?”

She gave him a scornful look. “They’re not going to hurt Santa. How do you think that would go down in prison? You of all people should know how sentimental criminals are.”

Carol’s conviction that David Sanders was a serial killer took her no closer to making an arrest. There was a small matter of a complete lack of evidence against Sanders, a feature writer on the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times. Even the apparent miracles of twenty-first century forensic science couldn’t nail this. Water and fire were notorious destroyers of trace evidence. She’d hoped that close analysis might fit together the cut marks on the tape and wire from the previous killings, but the fire had done too much damage. That meant there was no chance of definitively linking them to any materials still in Sanders’s possession.

There were no reliable witnesses or meaningful CCTV footage. A couple of homeless men had turned up claiming to have seen Tina Chapman go into the canal. But the person pushing her had been wearing a Halloween mask and the sighting had gone nowhere.

The only option left was to cling to Tony’s conviction that the killer would strike again before Christmas. It was always hard to persuade her bosses to mount surveillance operations because they were so costly and because they took so many officers off other cases, but at least this one had a fixed end point.

And so they watched. They watched David Sanders go to work. They watched him drink in the pub with his workmates. They watched him work out at the gym. They watched him do his Christmas shopping. What they didn’t watch him do was abduct and murder anyone.

Then it was Christmas Eve, the last day of authorised surveillance. In spite of the privileges of rank, Carol put herself down for a shift. It was already dark when she slid into the passenger seat of the anonymous car alongside DC Paula McIntyre. “Nothing moving, Chief. He got home about an hour ago, nobody in or out since.”

“The house doesn’t look very festive, does it? No sign of a tree or any lights.”

Paula, who had known her own share of grief, shrugged. “You lose your only child? I don’t expect Christmas is much to celebrate.”

The Sanderses’ four-year-old daughter had drowned during a swimming lesson back in September. The instructor had been dealing with another kid who was having a come-apart when Sanders’s daughter had hit her head on the poolside. By the time anyone noticed, it had been too late. According to a colleague discreetly questioned by Sergeant Devine, it had ripped Sanders apart, though he’d refused to consider any kind of medical intervention.

Before Carol could respond, the garage door opened and Sanders’s SUV crawled down the drive. They let him make it to the end of the street before they pulled out of their parking place and slipped in behind him. It wasn’t hard to stay on the tail of the tall vehicle, and fifteen minutes’ driving brought them to a street of run-down terraced houses on the downtrodden edge of Moorside. On the corner was a brightly lit shop, its windows plastered with ads for cheap alcohol. Sanders pulled up and walked into the shop carrying a sports holdall.

“I think this is it,” Carol breathed. “Let’s go, Paula.”

They sprinted down the street and tried the door of the shop. But something was jamming it. Carol took a couple of steps back, then charged the door, slamming her shoulder into the wooden surround. Something popped and the door crashed open.

Sanders was standing behind the counter, a cricket bat in his hand, dismay on his face. “Police, drop your weapon!” Carol roared as Paula scrambled to the far end of the counter.

“There’s someone here, Chief. Looks like he’s unconscious,” Paula said.

The cricket bat fell to the ground with a clatter. Sanders sank to the floor, head in hands. “This is all your fault,” he said. “You never make the right people pay the price, do you?”

Carol collapsed into Tony’s armchair and demanded a drink. “He didn’t even bother with a denial,” she said. “Being arrested seemed almost to come as a relief.” She closed her eyes for a moment, memory summoning up Sanders’s haggard face.

“It generally does when you’re not dealing with a psychopath,” Tony said.

Carol sighed. “And a very merry bloody Christmas to you, too.”

“You stopped him killing again,” Tony said, handing her a glass of wine. “That’s not an insignificant achievement.”

“I suppose. Jahinder Singh’s family can celebrate the festive season knowing their father’s safe from any further consequences from selling solvents to kids.” Before Carol could say more, her phone rang. “What now?” she muttered. She listened attentively, a slow smile spreading from mouth to eyes. “Thanks for letting me know,” she said, ending the call. “That was Cassidy. Santa’s home free. Two extremely inept kidnappers are banged up, and nobody got hurt.”

Tony raised his glass, his smile matching hers. In their line of work, making the best of a bad job was second nature. This wasn’t exactly a happy ending, but it was closer than they usually managed. He’d settle for that any day.

Copyright © 2010 Val McDermid

My lawyer had the jury in tears — when he got to the part about never having won a case.