Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

was a case that was going to make far greater demands on her than that.
    And then her phone rang.

54

    S leep was a distant stranger for Tony. Simply being in the same room as Carol had sparked his engines back to life. He had imagined so many scenarios where the weight of grief and loss had driven Carol to destruction, and now he’d seen her apparently intact the relief made him feel buoyant in spite of being locked in a smelly cell with no prospect of walking free just yet.
    He ran an inventory of what he’d clocked. She’d always cheated time, looking younger than her years, but now her history had caught up with her. In his eyes, she was as attractive as ever, but the bloom had started to fade into something that told a darker story. She did look as if she was sleeping well though. The dark bruises under her eyes that had been a regular feature when she’d been up half the night trying to find a resolution to serious crimes had faded out, but her blue-grey eyes still had a weariness to them.
    Carol had never been vain, but the one aspect of her appearance she’d always taken trouble with was her hair. Naturally thick and blonde, it was always styled to look informally shaggy, but she’d once explained to Tony that it took a lot of skill to make it appear so casual. Now, whoever was cutting it lacked the necessary proficiency and it looked untidy. And the silver she’d kept at bay with clever colouring had asserted itself, changing the shade from honey to ash. The alteration he saw in her spoke volumes to Tony. Carol had lost her pride in herself. She no longer saw value in who she was and what she did.
    And what exactly was she doing? Her body shape had undergone some subtle changes too. Her shoulders were broader and she wasn’t carrying any spare weight round her midriff. She’d abandoned the silver twelve-piece Turkish puzzle ring she used to wear and her hands carried the marks of physical labour, yet she’d always been the first to insist on getting someone in when there were any problems with the house. As far as he was aware, she barely knew what a screwdriver was for. Whatever displacement activity she had chosen as her form of therapy, she had moved well outside her previous comfort zone.
    And here he was, well outside his own comfort zone, completely reassured by the arrival of a woman who was adamant in her desire not to give a damn about him. Her very presence gave him hope. And now that he had genuine hope, it was possible to examine honestly the hopeless position he’d been in previously. He wondered what he represented to Alex Fielding to make her so swift and sure in her condemnation of him. Was it simply that she sensed a sensational scalp? A headline-grabbing arrest and conviction? It seemed a giant leap to believe him capable of such crimes. After all, BMP had consulted him for years. He’d been trusted to maintain confidentiality and to produce profiles that could be relied on by its officers. He was aware that a significant number of powerful officers thought he was odd, to say the least, but as far as he knew, they didn’t consider him potentially lethal. But for Fielding to have gone on the attack like this, she must have been confident of support from the top brass.
    And, realistically, that meant no matter what Paula believed, she couldn’t rescue him from behind the barrier of her official position. If she hadn’t already broken the rules for him, he’d have been lost. Fielding would almost certainly have charged him in the morning and the magistrates almost never granted bail on a murder charge. Definitely not on a double murder charge, regardless of who the accused was. Oscar Pistorius would have had no chance of making bail in a British magistrates’ court.
    Without Carol, he had been lost. With Carol, he stood a chance. And the best thing he could do to help her set him free was to focus not on her and how she’d changed and what was going on inside her head, but on the man who was killing a subset of women that she fitted into.
    He got to his feet and started pacing. Profiling, that’s what he was supposed to be good at. He needed to think about this killer in those terms. He’d written the introduction to his profiles so many times he knew it by heart. As he paced, he recited it aloud like a mantra to put his head in the right place. ‘The following offender profile is for guidance only and shouldn’t be regarded as an identikit portrait. The offender is