example. Even though he’d been drinking coffee with Carol Jordan for more years than he cared to consider, he still found himself standing at the counter in coffee shops or in his kitchen, having to pause while he sorted through the database in his head to recall whether she drank espresso or cappuccino. But he was no absentminded professor. He could remember the signature behaviour of every serial offender he’d ever encountered, both as a profiler and a clinician. All memory was selective, he knew that. It was just that the principles that governed his memory were unusual.
So it came as a surprise to him when he sat down to write a risk assessment of Jacko Vance that he had no recollection of ever having formally profiled him. After Carol had left, he’d closed his eyes and tried to summon up a mental image of his report. When nothing materialised, his eyes had snapped open as he realised that his pursuit of Vance had been so out of the ordinary that he’d written nothing down at the time it was happening. Of course, the hunt for Vance had been unusual, in that it hadn’t originated with a police investigation. It had been the result of a training exercise for the aspiring profilers Tony had been working with on a Home Office task force. And once things had started moving, there had been no time to sit back and analyse Vance’s crimes in those terms.
To buy himself some time while he considered what he knew about Vance, Tony found one of his previous profiles on Carol’s laptop and copied his standard introductory paragraphs.
The following offender profile is for guidance only and shouldn’t be regarded as an identikit portrait. The offender is unlikely to match the profile in every detail, though I would expect there to be a high degree of congruence between the characteristics outlined below and the reality. All of the statements in the profile express probabilities and possibilities, not hard facts.
A serial killer produces signals and indicators in the commission of his crimes. Everything he does is intended, consciously or not, as part of a pattern. Discovering the underlying pattern reveals the killer’s logic. It may not appear logical to us, but to him it is crucial. Because his logic is so idiosyncratic, straightforward traps will not capture him. As he is unique, so must be the means of catching him, interviewing him and reconstructing his acts.
It didn’t really fit the bill. That was because Lambert wanted a risk assessment, not a crime-based profile. He could keep the second paragraph, he supposed. But the first would have to change. He created a new file and began.
The following risk assessment is based on limited direct acquaintance with Jacko Vance. I saw Vance in public on several occasions and I interviewed him twice: once in his home when he may have realised he was the object of investigation; and a second time after he had been arrested on suspicion of murder. However, I am familiar with the detail of his crimes and have sufficient knowledge of his background to feel confident in preparing an assessment of how he is likely to respond to being on the run, having successfully outwitted the system and escaped from prison.
‘What’s going through your head, Jacko?’ Tony said softly, leaning back in the chair and locking his fingers behind his head. ‘Why this? Why now?’
A sharp knock at the door interrupted his conversation with himself. Paula stuck her head in, a determined look on her face. ‘You got a minute?’ Before he could reply, she was through the door and shutting it behind her.
‘What if I said no?’
Paula gave him a tired smile. ‘I’d say, “tough shit”.’
‘I thought as much.’ Tony took off his reading glasses and studied Paula. There was history between them, a stained and complicated web of connections that had spread out over the years till it had become a sort of friendship. He’d led her through the labyrinth of grief after the death of a colleague who had also been a friend; she’d pushed him into doing the right things for the wrong reasons; he’d made her break the rules then stood in the firing line when Carol had turned her sights on her. Respect was the keystone of their relationship. Just as well, Tony thought, otherwise he might have found it hard to forgive Paula the happiness she’d found with Dr Elinor Blessing, a happiness he doubted he had the capacity for. ‘I don’t suppose this is a social visit?’
‘Can I ask what you’re working on?’ Paula clearly wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Carol must be expected back soon, then.
‘I’m doing a risk assessment for the Home Office. I don’t know if Carol said anything to you guys, but it’ll be public knowledge before too long. Some things you can’t keep quiet. Jacko Vance escaped from Oakworth this morning. Because I was involved in putting him away, they want me to stare into my crystal ball and tell them where he’s going to go and what he’s going to do.’ Tony’s sardonic stare matched his tone.
‘So you’re not working on our case?’
‘You know how it is, Paula. Blake won’t pay for me and DCI Jordan refuses to let me work without being paid. I thought I might be able to call in a favour via the Home Office, but they won’t agree, not now. They’ll want me totally focused on Jacko. No distractions.’
‘It’s just stupid, not making the most of your skills,’ Paula said. ‘You know what we’re working on?’
‘A string of murders that looks like a serial. I don’t know much more than that,’ he said. ‘She tries to keep me out of temptation’s way.’
‘Well, consider me the temptress. Tony, this is right up your street. He’s the kind of killer you understand, the sort of mind you can map like nobody else. And this is MIT’s last tango. We want to go out on a high note. I want to leave Blake with a sour taste in his mouth when the chief goes off to West Mercia. I want him to understand the class of the operation he’s flushing down the toilet. So we’ve got to come up with the right answer, and fast.’ Her eyes were pleading, a contrast with the fierceness of her words.
Tony wanted to resist the draw of Paula’s words. But in his heart, he agreed with everything she’d said. There was no rational explanation for what Blake was doing except that it would save some money to close the specialist unit. His conviction that spreading MIT’s skills more thinly would produce more effective outcomes was, in Tony’s opinion, a crackpot idea that would produce the opposite result. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he said, a last-ditch bid to still the interest quickening in him.
Paula rolled her eyes and tutted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the smart one? Because we need your help, Tony. We need you to profile the killer so we can make some progress instead of getting bogged down in the mountain of crap this kind of inquiry produces.’
‘She won’t have it. Like I said: there’s no budget to pay me and she won’t exploit me.’ He opened his hands as he shrugged, going for the deliberately cute smile. ‘I’ve begged her, but she won’t take advantage.’
Paula groaned. ‘Spare me the single entendres. Listen, it’s simple. It doesn’t matter what she wants. Because she’s not going to know. Because it’s going to be our little secret.’
