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her new boss managed to look elegant in a linen suit with more creases than a dosser’s when she just looked lumpy in her perfectly pressed chain-store skirt and jacket.
    ‘Thank Christ for that,’ Tommy said, a grin slowly spreading. ‘I was beginning to worry in case we’d got a guv’nor who didn’t understand the importance of Tetley’s Bitter to a well-run CID.’
    Carol’s answering smile was wry. ‘It’s Bradfield I came from, remember?’
    ‘That’s why we were worried, ma’am,’ Tommy replied.
    Lee snorted with suppressed laughter, turned it into a cough and spluttered, ‘Sorry, ma’am.’
    ‘You will be,’ Carol said pleasantly. ‘I’ve got a task for you three. I’ve been taking a good look at the overnights since I got here, and I’m a bit concerned about the high incidence of unexplained fires and query arsons that we’ve got on our ground. I spotted five query arsons in the last month and when I made some checks with uniform, I found out there have been another half-dozen unexplained outbreaks of fire.’
    ‘You always get that kind of thing round the docks,’ Tommy said, casually shrugging big shoulders inside a baggy silk blouson that had gone out of fashion a couple of years previously.
    ‘I appreciate that, but I’m wondering if there’s a bit more to it than that. Agreed, a couple of the smaller blazes are obvious routine cock-ups, but I’m wondering if there’s something else going on here.’ Carol left it dangling to see who would pick it up.
    ‘A firebug, you mean, ma’am?’ It was Di Earnshaw, the voice pleasant but the expression bordering on the insolent.
    ‘A serial arsonist, yes.’
    There was a momentary silence. Carol reckoned she knew what they were thinking. The East Yorkshire force might be a new entity, but these officers had worked this patch under the old regime. They were in with the bricks, whereas she was the new kid in town, desperate to shine at their expense. And they weren’t sure whether to roll with it or try to derail her. Somehow she had to persuade them that she was the star they should be hitching their wagons to. ‘There’s a pattern,’ she said. ‘Empty premises, early hours of the morning. Schools, light industrial units, warehouses. Nothing too big, nowhere there might be a night watchman to put the mockers on it. But serious nevertheless. Big fires, all of them. They’ve caused a lot of damage and the insurance companies must be hurting more than they like.’
    ‘Nobody’s said owt about an arsonist on the rampage,’ Tommy remarked calmly. ‘Usually, the firemen tip us the wink if they think there’s something a bit not right on the go.’
    ‘Either that or the local rag gives us a load of earache,’ Lee chipped in through a mouthful of his second KitKat. Lean as a whippet in spite of the biscuits and the three sugars in his coffee, Carol noted. One to watch for high-strung hyperactivity.
    ‘Call me picky, but I prefer it when we’re setting the agenda, not the local hacks or the fire service,’ Carol said coolly. ’Arson isn’t a Mickey Mouse crime. Like murder, it has terrible consequences. And like murder, you’ve got a stack of potential motives. Fraud, the destruction of evidence, the elimination of competition, revenge and cover-up, at the “logical” end of the spectrum. And at the screwed-up end, we have the ones who do it for kicks and sexual gratification. Like serial killers, they nearly always have their own internal logic that they mistake for something that makes sense to the rest of us.
    ‘Fortunately for us, serial murder is a lot less common than serial arson. Insurers reckon a quarter of all the fires in the UK have been set deliberately. Imagine if a quarter of all deaths were murder.’
    Taylor looked bored. Lee Whitbread stared blankly at her, his hand halfway to the cigarette packet in front of him. Di Earnshaw was the only one who appeared interested in making a contribution. ‘I’ve heard it