That slight show of humanity saved Sid’s life, although of course the CSI wouldn’t realise that. The Man in Black had considered Sid a worthy target, but on reflection maybe that would be just too much of a clue – two CSIs involved with the ritual killer investigation might raise a few eyebrows and although he is smarter than McGuire and co, they aren’t complete imbeciles. No, maybe this time he’ll opt for someone on the fringes of the investigation and next time swoop in for someone a little more obvious. He has plenty of time after all. Nobody is going to catch him – not till he is ready anyway.
He wishes McGuire would hurry up; he’s had a really low profile after that initial press conference last week. Now, it seems that someone else has taken over as SIO. Understandable – he thinks it might be that sweet little dark-haired officer that had been at the scene last week, DS Alice Cooper. She is delectable – smart and funny. The two of them share a house – her and McGuire. His observations told him that Alice was shagging that journalist Hopkins, but she has been keeping it quiet from everybody. Hmm, maybe he’d be a suitable target? It would do McGuire a favour – take out the journalist who made such a hype about Gus being the target of his boss’s psycho daughter last year. The one who had a crush on him. Then there were the sex tapes of him and his ex-girlfriend. The Man in Black had spent hours enjoying McGuire’s undoubted agility in the bedroom – quite the stud was our DI McGuire.
It was that publicity that had made his plan fall into place. It had started with him voraciously reading every article he could find on DI Gus McGuire and his family and developed into trawling the entire family and the lives of Gus’s team. He knows everything about them. From John Compton, the computer nerd’s dark lapses into suicidal thoughts and the therapist he sees weekly albeit unbeknownst to anyone else. He knows about Talvinder Bhandir’s desire to over-compensate for his family’s dual disappointment that he is a copper and going out with a white girl, by putting them before the girlfriend – wonder how long she’ll last being marginalised in favour of Taffy’s family? Not bloody long he thinks.
Then there is the delightful, happy-go-lucky Alice Cooper. She too has a dark side. She too has secrets. Has anyone ever considered how her friend Lulu had died in prison, after Alice’s tormentors met an untimely accident? He bets not, but it would live inside Alice, festering like a slop of rotting meat. Guilt is not an uplifting companion to share your head space with. Sebastian Carlton too has his secrets, though he hides them well. The FBI would have kept him on, but it was he who made the choice to return to the UK. A broken man who isolated himself on a Scottish Island for months dealing with his grief at losing the woman he loved to a serial killer in Atlanta, before re-inventing himself as the slightly ridiculous loopy professor with intuitive insights into the killer mind. The fact that he and the DCI Nancy Chalmers are drawn to each other is no surprise, really. She’d shared her bed with a vile paedophile, and it had nearly broken her.
He smiles. It is fascinating to realise that Gus’s entire team is damaged goods. Even McGuire himself – a man who made the choice to kill his own best friend in a failed attempt to save his godson. A man who finds it hard to trust, who holds doubts about everyone around him – his parents, his colleagues, his friends. The only person McGuire appears to fully open up to is his psychiatrist. Gaining access to her files on McGuire has been revealing. Little did McGuire know that by opening up to Dr Mahmood, he’d put her right in the Man in Black’s firing line.
Of course, the Man in Black knows exactly who is to blame for the darkness that envelopes McGuire’s heart. It is his mother. Convivial, educated, strong – everyone looks up to her, but just like her son, Corrine McGuire keeps her darkness hidden. Well, no longer would she be allowed to ignore it. No longer would she to be allowed to cover-up her darkness – he wants to see it released into the wild, visible for everyone she knows to see; a dark cloud over Bradford that would leave her suffering for the rest of her miserable life – just like he had.
He’d toyed with the idea of making her a target, but his trawling over the past months had revealed a better plan – one, to make them all suffer; two, to make them realise that actions have consequences. That not taking responsibility for those actions would make the payment all the harsher when the debt was due.
The sound of the familiar voice beneath him draws him out of his reverie. McGuire is here with Cooper, talking in low voices, analysing, assessing, trying to join the dots – but so far they’re only connecting the clues to the one puzzle. Maybe it’s time to jazz things up a bit.
Gus’s voice rises a little. ‘Bloody parasites, the lot of them, you know, Al?’
‘Hmm.’ Alice’s non-committal reply is fainter.
‘He’s a toad … a bloody cockroach and a toad. I’ve a good mind to kick his slimy arse into the sewers so he can look for his morals among the
