by Val McDermid
It was below the belt, but that didn’t make it any less true. He’d never spoken to her like this before. Her pride wanted to tell him to fuck off. But her fear wouldn’t let her. ‘Sit the fuck down and stop grandstanding,’ she growled. ‘I’ll make the coffee.’ She turned her back on him and went through the ritual of grinding and tamping and expressing coffee. Surely he wouldn’t walk? And when she turned round, he was still there, hands clutching the chair back so tightly his knuckles were white. Wordlessly, she put the espresso cup on the table near him before processing a second cup for herself.
She took a deep breath. ‘I usually have beans on toast with scrambled eggs. I’ll make some for you too if you want.’ It was the nearest she could come to an apology.
‘That’s fine. You’ve branched out a bit from an orange juice and a granola bar.’
She gave a grim little smile. ‘I learned the hard way. You can’t do a day’s physical work on that.’
Tony sat down and sipped his coffee while she assembled the breakfast with the efficient economy of movement she’d developed since she’d started working on the barn. Everything to hand, a system clearly worked out. No fuss, no mess, no hesitation. In the kitchen as it was in the barn. She’d learned that the hard way too.
She plonked the plates down and sat opposite him, her face stiff with anger. Annoyingly, Tony seemed unmoved by her reaction. He thanked her then said, ‘What’s the plan for today?’
‘I don’t know about you, but now I’ve finished the first fix for the electrics, I’m going to start plasterboarding the end wall.’ The fresh air had sorted Carol out; she attacked her breakfast as if George Nicholas’s lavish dinner party had been a week ago rather than the night before.
‘Good eggs.’ He swallowed another forkful. ‘I’ve got a couple of pre-sentence reports to write up, and I’ve got my laptop with me, so that’s me sorted. And if I finish them … well, I’ve made a start on writing a book.’
‘A book?’ Carol was startled. A book was a major project. And she’d known nothing about it. That was a measure of the distance they’d allowed to grow between them. ‘What kind of book?’
‘What kind of book would you expect me to write?’
She smiled, in spite of herself. ‘I suppose you could do a mash-up of your interests and do a cartoon guide to profiling for beginners.’
He made a self-deprecating face. ‘With a caped crusader showing up to save the day.’
‘You’d look silly in tights. So what’s this book, then?’
‘It is about profiling. My supervisor – you know, the psychologist I go and talk to so I stay on the relatively straight and narrow – he thinks that if the police are going to try to save money by doing their own profiling instead of paying people like me, we shouldn’t be dogs in the manger and wash our hands of them. He thinks I should write a book that gets away from technical language and theory and lays out in the most practical way possible what it is that I do. Jam-packed with examples of profiling in action from my casebook.’
Carol frowned. ‘Isn’t that like collaborating with your executioners?’
Tony shrugged. ‘One of two things will happen. Either they’ll get it and they’ll learn how to do it properly, which is a good thing because, even when they were paying me, I could only be in one place at a time. Or they won’t get it and they’ll realise there’s actually some expertise involved and they’ll come back to us professionals with a renewed respect.’
She spluttered with laughter. ‘You can’t renew something that was never there in the first place, Tony. You’ve never had the respect your work deserves.’
‘Some people have valued what I do. John Brandon. You. A couple of mandarins at the Home Office.’
‘Just not enough to make ignorant arseholes like James Blake do the right thing.’ She shovelled the last of her breakfast into her mouth and stood up, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. She caught him watching her and felt the blood rising in a blush. Working like a labourer, she’d somehow acquired the same habits. The old Carol Jordan would have used a napkin or even a sheet of kitchen towel. The new Carol Jordan didn’t care.
Left to his own devices, Tony set himself up with laptop and notebook. He could focus on his own work without having to keep watch over her. Unless she had a secret stash in the main part of the barn. But there was no reason for that. Besides, he reckoned she would be fired up with determination to prove him wrong. That righteous resolve would be enough to keep her going for a while. The problems would come on Monday or Tuesday, faced with the impending disaster of the court case and the loss of face and driving licence. That would be when he had to watch over her like a mother hen.
What she needed was something proper to focus on. Manual labour was all very well, and it had clearly fulfilled a need in her. But it was repetitious; for great tracts of time, it made no intellectual demands. And Carol was a woman who needed to occupy her mind. He had to figure out something that would engage her intelligence. If she couldn’t be a cop any more, there had to be something else she could do that would stretch her and challenge her in the same way. But maybe with slightly lower stakes. Stakes that didn’t push her back towards the bottle.
With a sigh, he turned to his notes and started to compose the pre-sentence report on a serial rapist who had tried to convince the court that he was driven to attack women by the voices in his head. Tony thought not. He reckoned he was dealing with a high-functioning psychopath who was aiming for a secure mental hospital as a preferable alternative to the sex offenders’ wing of a prison.
By the time he’d finished, it was past noon. He stood up and stretched, then went through to the barn where Carol was nailing battens to the rough stone walls with six-inch nails. ‘Do you want me to throw something together for lunch?’ he asked.
She stopped hammering and turned round, pushing her damp hair back from her forehead with her bent wrist. Her plaid shirt clung to the contours of her body and her jeans were tight, revealing sculpted muscle. She was grimy and sweaty, and he knew it was a cliché, but he couldn’t help but feel his blood stirring at the sight. ‘There’s bread and cheese and pâté and tomatoes,’ she said. ‘I usually have that with some fruit.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll make some sandwiches.’
‘OK.’ She turned back to the work. ‘I won’t be long, but I want to finish this section before I break for lunch.’
Back in the kitchen, he assembled clumsy sandwiches with cheap supermarket cheddar and tomatoes that would taste of cotton wool and water. Carol might drink for the taste, but he suspected she was only eating for the fuel. There was a bowl of apples and pears on the side and he moved them to the table beside the plate of sandwiches. It wasn’t exactly a feast, but it would do. He poured two glasses of water and set two places opposite each other. There was nothing more he could do to make it look appealing so he went back to his laptop to pass the time till she joined him.
Tony didn’t want to start work on the second report only to have to pause. Instead, he navigated to a news site and checked out Jasmine Burton to see if there was any more information on her death. He sifted through several reports but nothing fresh seemed to have emerged. ‘Stones in your coat,’ he muttered under his breath. The detail bothered him but he couldn’t pin down the echo that was resonating in the back of his mind.
‘What did you say?’
He’d been so absorbed in what he was reading that he hadn’t heard her come in.
‘Nothing important. Just something that’s niggling in the corner of my brain.’
She leaned over him to check out what he was looking at. He could smell clean sweat. It would have been erotic, he thought, if not for the slightly rancid edge to her breath. The drink working its way out of her system, he guessed. Even if they’d been at a point in their relationship where they might have kissed – and there had been moments of that intensity – her breath would have given him pause.
‘Why are you so interested in a suici
de in Devon?’ Carol asked.
‘I’m not sure. I was round at Paula and Elinor’s last night and Torin brought it up. We got talking about cyber-bullying and trolls and how it looks like that’s what drove Jasmine Burton to kill herself. But there was something about it …’ His voice tailed off.
Carol scanned the story in the top window. ‘The media does love a good stick to beat the internet with,’ she sighed. ‘I know why this has caught your attention and got you puzzling.’
‘You do? That’s a relief.’ He looked up at her expectantly. There was a familiar teasing half-smile on her lips. ‘So are you going to tell me?’
‘You can’t help yourself, can you? Your subconscious is always building patterns.’
‘So what’s the pattern? What are you seeing that I’m not?’
The smile broadened. ‘She’s not the first one, Tony. At some level, your brain has clocked that she’s not the first one.’
14
Detective Constable Sam Evans stretched luxuriously, loving that he was in a bed so big his limbs didn’t make it to the outer limits. He admired the contrast of his latte-coloured skin against the white sheets, enjoying the sculpted contours of his muscles. The light fabric blinds on the high skylights cast a flattering light, and Sam smiled, knowing Stacey would gasp with grateful delight at the sight of him when she returned with his coffee.
At the far end of the loft, Stacey Chen poured beans in the hopper of her coffee grinder with one hand, while she tapped on the screen of a mini tablet with the other. She couldn’t help herself. Even with the overwhelming and very tangible distraction of the man she’d never believed she’d tempt to her bed, the intangible world of cyberspace exerted its fascination.
Stacey knew she was a geek. Probably an uber-geek, if she was honest. Her immigrant parents had wanted the traditional route for her – the law, medicine, accountancy. But the first time she’d sat in front of a computer screen, she knew she’d found her natural home. She wanted to know how it worked so she could make it do her bidding and she’d plunged into the silicon world as if she was the bastard love child of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
While she was an undergraduate, she’d written a piece of game code that she’d sold to a major developer for an eye-watering sum. It was earning her royalties all these years later. Her fellow students had expected her to join a games company or a software giant. Nobody expected her to join the police. Now she was the leading digital forensics expert with Bradfield Metropolitan Police. And every other force that managed to snag some of her wizardry. In her spare time, she still wrote code; in the past year, she’d developed two mobile apps that had each earned more than her annual salary.
Very few people knew the extent of her success. Stacey didn’t want too much speculation about her reasons for staying with the police when she could have a much more lucrative life elsewhere. When pressed, she would talk about giving something back to the society that had welcomed her parents. The truth was too shaming to admit.
Stacey loved sticking her nose into other people’s data. And being a police officer gave her access and licence. Nobody knew enough about her world to have the faintest idea how extensively she crawled and trawled her way through people’s secrets. She’d wormed her way into almost every significant official data collection in the country and she had the back-door keys to all sorts of places whose users thought they were secret. It was helpful professionally. But nothing fired her up more than breaking through some high-level firewall into other people’s privacy. Not even Sam.
Stacey dumped the ground coffee into a cafetiere and poured the boiled water over it. As she waited for it to brew, she allowed herself a dreamy moment. They’d had a brilliant night. They’d ordered dinner from a local gourmet restaurant that delivered three-course meals, they’d opened a bottle of champagne, they’d streamed a movie that Sam had been eager to see, then they’d ended up in bed for twelve hours, alternating sex and sleep in a deeply satisfying combination. This was the first time Stacey had been in a serious relationship and she loved Sam so hard it made her stomach clench. After a night like this, the conclusion was irresistible. He loved her too.
It had been a few months now since she’d screwed up her courage and made her feelings known. He’d been a little wary at first. But they’d gone out to dinner and when she invited him back for a nightcap to her loft, he’d finally relaxed. They’d stood by the big windows, looking across the scatter of light that was Bradfield by night, and his arm had crept round her shoulders.
It had been a moment of pure magic. Stacey shivered at the memory, then plunged the coffee, glancing back at the screen of her tablet. As she read the alert she’d set up when she’d first joined the Major Incident Team, her mouth opened in a silent O.
Sam would be gobsmacked.
When Carol went back to work, Tony tried to be dutiful and prepare his second pre-sentencing report. But what she had said intrigued him too much. Carol hadn’t been able to remember much detail but she was convinced she’d read recently about a case where a woman had killed herself after being trolled for speaking out about something vaguely feminist. Carol couldn’t remember that either. ‘I’m getting old,’ she’d said with bleak humour. ‘Things don’t stick like they used to.’
That was quite an admission from a woman who was known for her eidetic memory for speech. Carol could repeat any conversation or interview verbatim, from memory. It was an occasionally inconvenient gift. Thoughtlessly, he’d said, ‘Old age and alcohol. They both kill off brain cells at an alarming rate.’ And that had been the end of any chance of Carol trying to be helpful. They’d eaten lunch in glum silence and she’d escaped back to work as soon as she could.
He tried various combinations of keywords in a series of fruitless searches. He wished he was still working with Carol’s old team. Stacey Chen would have tracked the answer down in a matter of minutes. His years of gaming had left him adept at hunting down zombies but they hadn’t trained him to scour the internet as successfully.
He was about to give up when he tried ‘suicide trolling rape’ and finally got what looked like the answer. Kate Rawlins had been a commercial radio presenter, responsible for an upbeat, anodyne drive-time show in London. She’d spoken up in support of the anonymity of rape victims after a controversial case involving a soap star who wanted his old job back after serving a sentence for rape. His fans had named his victim and persecuted her in spite of the guilty verdict and Kate had started a campaign to have the violators of the victim’s privacy prosecuted.
She’d been buried under an avalanche of abuse. Her social media accounts had been deluged with a disgusting torrent of insults, threats and rage. They’d even tracked down her teenage daughter, an art student, and demanded she disown her mother for her shameful hostility to men.
Kate, a woman who’d always relied on warmth and charm to woo her audience, had discovered depths of defiance and determination. She’d stood up to the bullies, using her access to the airwaves to call them out. All that did was to provoke more baying for her blood. On the face of it, she’d taken it all on the chin, winning a broad swathe of support from broadcasters, journalists and her followers on social media.
And then one morning, her PA had turned up at her North London house and found her in the garage with the engine running. In case of second thoughts, Kate had handcuffed herself to the passenger armrest so she couldn’t reach the ignition button.
There was a storm of shock and outrage. Fingers pointed at the soap star, who threw his hands up and denied that he’d ever encouraged the beasts who’d tormented her. The story commanded inside-page headlines for a few days and then it died.
Similar circumstances, very different deaths. It was interesting, but finding out about Kate Rawlins hadn’t stilled the niggle in his head. Something was bothering him about Jasmine Burton’s death.
But worrying at it was getting him nowhere. Experience had taught him that the best way to access what was swimming under the
surface was to focus on something else. So he forced himself back to work.
When he emerged from the other end of the tunnel of concentration, it was late afternoon. He strained to listen but he couldn’t hear the distant muffled banging that had kept him company just below the level of consciousness earlier in the day. He wondered whether Carol had taken the dog out. He hoped not; he’d been planning to suggest accompanying them on their next walk. He needed the fresh air and walking was always where he got his best ideas, whether for his book or about Jasmine Burton.
He opened the door and Flash was at his side in an instant, weaving round his legs. Not dog-walking, then.
She wasn’t working either. At the far end of the barn, Carol was sitting on a sawhorse, her arms wrapped around her body, her shoulders hunched. Even from that distance, he could see that she was shivering even though a couple of big space heaters made the barn a tolerable temperature. Tony took his time walking towards her, trying not to show the level of his concern. The last thing she needed right now was the emotional complication of his feelings for her spilling out all over the place.
As he drew nearer, he could see a sheen of greasy sweat on her face. She tried visibly to get hold of herself and stop shaking. But her body betrayed her, trembling like a beaten dog. He sat down beside her and put his arm around her. They’d avoided any physical contact for a long time, both nervous of where it might take them. The intimacy that had once been second nature to them had been shattered by Michael and Lucy’s death and since then they’d been like a country riven by a civil war whose opposing sides don’t know how to rebuild diplomatic relations. Feeling her warmth against him after all this time filled him with a nostalgic sadness. He wished the embrace came from wanting, not needing that physical contact.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
