Cross and Burn by Val McDermid

would happily stop dead in her tracks if it meant Michael and Lucy could have their lives back. After all, they had been making a better job of living well than she was. They’d put something back into the world, restoring the barn. And the work they did. Well, the work that Michael did. Lucy’s commitment to criminal defence work had always baffled Carol. She’d spent too many days sitting in court, disgusted at the barristers who exploited legal technicalities and twisted the words of witnesses, all in the service of getting nasty little shits off the hook of their own criminality. She’d tried not to argue with Lucy over the dinner table, but sometimes she couldn’t restrain herself. ‘How can you defend people you know are guilty? How can you feel satisfaction when they walk free from court, leaving their victims without any sense of justice?’
    The answer was always the same. ‘I don’t know that they’re guilty. Even when the evidence seems overwhelming, it may be misleading. Everyone’s entitled to a defence. If you people did your job thoroughly, they wouldn’t be walking free from court, would they?’
    It was an argument whose speciousness left Carol almost speechless with rage. A desire for justice was what drove her, what made it possible for her to tolerate the horrors of her job at the sharpest of sharp ends. To see it constantly thwarted by hair-splitting lawyers who generated doubt where none should exist was the ultimate insult to the broken lives and broken bodies that occupied her memory. She’d always been with Dick the Butcher on that one. ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’
    Except, of course, she hadn’t been. Not really. Not when it came to the woman her brother loved. The woman who had transformed him from a single-minded geek to a relatively civilised human being. A transformation Carol had never managed for herself. Would never have to manage now.
    It would have been bad enough if it had been some chance event that had cut their lives so brutally short. But there had been nothing chance about it. They’d been deliberately slaughtered with one aim in mind. To make Carol suffer. The man who had come to the barn with murder on his agenda didn’t care about Michael and Lucy. The corrosive hatred in his heart was directed at Carol and he understood only too well that the best way to destroy her was to kill them in her stead. They were murdered because they were connected so intimately to her. No other reason.
    And it should never have happened. They should have figured out – no, Tony Hill, forensic psychologist and offender profiler, he should have figured out what might happen. She had the resources at her command to have protected them. But she never had the chance to put those resources in place. It had never occurred to her that anyone could be so twisted. It should have occurred to Tony, though. Most of his professional career had been intertwined with people who were seriously twisted. She hoped he felt as gutted by their deaths as she did.
    Two deaths on her hands would have been grounds enough for crippling guilt. But for Carol, there was more. One of her team had been maimed and blinded in a hideous booby trap that had been set for Carol and sprung by Chris Devine. Chris, a former sergeant in the Met, who had moved to Bradfield because she believed in what Carol was trying to do with her Major Incident Team, a raggle-taggle band of specialists who didn’t quite fit in for one reason or another but who had learned to work together and grown into a formidable outfit. And Chris at the heart of it, the most unlikely of mother figures holding them all together. Chris, whose career was now at an end and whose life had been wrecked beyond mending because of a simple act of helpfulness.
    When Carol thought about Chris, she felt ashamed. She’d been so wrapped up in her own pain, she hadn’t paid the debt to friendship. Others had sat with Chris through her