by Val McDermid
Tonight, though, was different. There was no MIT invisibility cloak to protect her if things went wrong. She was on her own. And being a white-hatted version of the darkside hacker wouldn’t help her if she was caught with her hand in the biscuit tin of another police force. For Stacey, that was like a gauntlet thrown down in front of her skills. Paula had offered her a chance to do the kind of thing she did best, and these days, such opportunities were hard to come by. The work that was officially being thrown her way could have been completed by an A-level student. She’d have taken that as an insult were it not for the fact that she realised the officers handing out the orders knew so little themselves that they had no clue how far beneath her capabilities their requests were.
Normally she’d have said no to a drink after work on a Monday evening. She was always eager to get back to her own devices after the first brain-numbing day of the week. But Paula had sweetened the invitation with the teaser that Carol and Tony were looking at something they wanted her help with. Stacey didn’t care that Carol was outside the official tent. What tempted her was the promise of something different and probably difficult. So she’d said yes.
They’d met in a dingy bar on the edge of Temple Fields, where the gay village blurred into the domain of the sex trade. So early in the evening, it was more or less deserted, apart from a pair of wan young men leaning despondently on the bar. ‘You know all the best places,’ Stacey said, sipping her vodka tonic with an air of deep suspicion.
‘I know how to hide in plain sight.’ Paula took a swig of overpriced Eurolager. They worked their way through the catch-up but Stacey’s heart wasn’t in it. She thought of Paula as a friend – probably her closest female friend – but she didn’t think that meant she had to be interested in her girlfriend or their weird domestic set-up with a murder victim’s teenage kid. But that was the way the world worked. You had to pretend you cared.
‘I presume you heard Carol got nicked for drink driving?’
Stacey nodded. ‘It showed up on my radar.’
‘If you were paranoid, you might think Franklin had set his lads up for it. She was a mile from home, not driving like a maniac, the usual Carol Jordan buzz on. And where she lives, it’s a back road that goes from Bumfuck, West Yorkshire, to Bumfuck, Lancashire. You’d have to sit around all night waiting for a car to collide with.’ Paula sounded angry. Stacey recognised the signs. She’d been brooding all day and now she was ready for a little rant.
But Stacey was going to lance the boil. ‘I thought of that too. So I took a look. There’s no trail of breadcrumbs in the system that says anything other than this was righteous. Franklin actually emailed the arresting officer yesterday, wanting to know what they were doing on that road. The yellow jacket said they use it regularly as a cut-through from Todmorden. Which it sort of is, if you’re trying to avoid making too many inconvenient Saturday-night traffic stops.’
Paula sighed. ‘I know. I’m just raging against the machine. Anyway, the bottom line is Tony’s trying to get her off the sauce—’
‘What? Dry her out?’ Stacey couldn’t help showing her scepticism.
‘Well, there’s nobody else with a snowball’s chance of getting her to even try. He seems to think if he keeps her occupied every waking moment she’ll get through the worst of it and out the other side.’
‘Good luck with that,’ Stacey said. ‘But I thought she was gutting her brother’s place?’
‘She’s at the rebuilding stage now, Tony says. But because it’s hard physical labour, there’s only so much she can do in a day. And then she’s got all evening to sit around and get tanked up. So he thought he’d find some other things take her mind off the next drink.’ Paula gave Stacey an up-and-under look over the rim of her glass. ‘He’s going to get her gaming.’
Generally Stacey aimed to conform to the stereotype of the inscrutable Chinese. Give people what they expect and they won’t look twice. But now her eyes widened and her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Carol Jordan? Gaming? But she despises gaming.’
Paula nodded. ‘But he’s managed to get her to agree to give it a go.’
‘It’s the invasion of the body snatchers. Are you sure this is Carol Jordan we’re talking about?’
‘Looked like her this morning. And I think I have some evidence to back it up. The other thing he’s come up with to keep her occupied is a classic Tony and Carol ploy. They think they’ve found a case to investigate. A case that’s so far below the radar it doesn’t even exist yet.’
Stacey straightened her face. ‘Now that I can believe. And since it’s supposed to be keeping Carol occupied, of course he’s gone down the far end of the obscure spectrum. And that’ll be where I come in, I take it?’
Paula grinned. ‘You know you want to.’
‘You only want me for my baud rate.’
‘I don’t even know what that means, Stace. Anyway, here’s what it is. Two women, each with a bit of a profile, express separate opinions online that set the trolls off. There’s bile, there’s vile, there’s threats and there’s all sorts of unpleasantness. But neither of them backs down. They’re taking it on the chin and fighting back. And then they kill themselves. When you say it like that, it sounds like one of Tony’s famous patterns. But there’s a lot speaks against that. There’s about three months between the two suicides. One did the car exhaust thing, the other drowned herself. We don’t know if they’d ever even met, never mind knew each other.’
Stacey automatically took out her tablet and started typing. ‘Names? Addresses?’ She went through her list of basics and Paula answered where she could. ‘Any question marks over their suicides?’
‘Nothing more than the usual disbelief from friends and family. Tony thinks there may have been some kind of intervention. Something that tipped them over the edge. But that’s total speculation at this stage.’
‘I presume they want everything?’
‘Yesterday. I’m going to have a look at our caseload tomorrow, see what we’ve got in terms of troll complaints so I can use that as a springboard for an official request for a background briefing. But you know what’ll happen. I’ll get some overworked DC reading from someone else’s notes because it’s not in any sense a priority. So we need you to get all of the stuff that counts.’
‘You’ll be wanting their digital data, I suppose? Phones, hard drives, tablets?’
Paula shrugged one shoulder, affecting nonchalance. ‘Only if you can manage it.’
That was the challenge. And now it was time to roll her sleeves up. Literally. Stacey folded back the cuffs of her perfectly tailored Egyptian cotton shirt and set her fingers flying over the keyboard. Only if you can manage it? Who did Paula think she was talking to?
Before Carol Jordan walked into court on Wednesday, there would be some answers.
20
The past few months had taught Carol that there was a good reason why builders always had the radio blaring. The work was repetitive and boring; without distraction, her thoughts ran like a dog biting its tail. Having the radio as a constant companion forced her out of the rut she’d worn in her brain and allowed her to move tentatively to other thoughts. She’d tried talk stations, but they intruded too much. She had to keep stopping what she was doing to shout at the ignorant and the bigoted and the mad. Classical music was useless because there were too many quiet bits. And too many ladies singing, fat or otherwise. She’d worked her way through various commercial stations but the ads drove her to distraction. And then she discovered music streaming. Now she paid what seemed to her to be a ridiculously small amount to have an apparently infinite amount of music at her fingertips. She’d compiled playlists, rotating them and adding to them regularly. And it had worked.
But the morning after Tony had set about distracting her with gaming and investigating, nothing was as it had been. For once, she needed to concentrate on what she was doing. Plumbing in a bathroom was not a dull, repetitive task. It required focus and attention, otherwise she’
d be condemned to a lifetime of cold showers and recalcitrant flushes. With or without music, she seemed incapable of fixing her mind to the task in hand for any length of time. Her thoughts kept drifting off, exploring possible reasons why a strong-minded woman might suddenly kill herself. And if she managed to drag herself away from that, strategies for getting round the world inside eighty days crept in like something glimpsed out of the corner of her mind.
When Tony emerged from what Carol still thought of as Michael’s office towards the end of the morning, waving a shopping list and announcing that he was going down the valley to the supermarket, she took that as a signal to take off her tool belt and reclaim her desk. It never occurred to her to sneak off in her Land Rover to do some shopping of her own. If Tony was expecting her to fail, he was in for a surprise. Although her body was reminding her of withdrawal with aches and pains, trembling and unsteadiness, in her head she’d already made a choice.
Whether she’d manage to keep to that decision was the big question she wasn’t even going to ask herself.
As she waited for her laptop to boot up, Carol found herself paying attention to her hands in a way she hadn’t for a long time. Her skin was dry and rough, her nails chipped and uneven where they’d broken and she’d bitten them straight rather than file them as she once would have. She turned them over and felt a mixture of pride and surprise to see calluses and scars, all of whose origins she could point to in the barn. She wasn’t who she used to be, not in any sense. But could she access those old skills again? That was the pressing question.
Stacey was unquestionably the queen of the data search. But Carol had picked up a few tricks over the years. There was an understanding that went beyond algorithms and when it came to mining the internet for the trace elements that made the kind of connections detectives loved, she reckoned she did pretty well.
She started with the basic subject of internet trolling examples. An unnerving half-million search results showed up in a matter of seconds. That so much had been written, that so many had been moved to put finger to keyboard to protest was as worrying as it was depressing. Carol browsed a series of newspaper articles, blogs and academic research, her anger growing as she went. The majority of the victims were women and teenage girls. Although there were vulnerable boys and young men in the mix, overwhelmingly this looked like a misogynistic phenomenon.
Intriguingly often, when a culprit was identified, their response seemed to be consternation followed by a desperate claim not to have meant anything by it. They called it ‘banter’. They blamed drink or drugs or depression. Their mothers, their sisters, their girlfriends (when they had them) sprang to their defence, saying they weren’t really like that, that their victims shouldn’t be so thin-skinned, that it was just a laugh. ‘Is this for real?’ Carol said out loud. ‘Telling someone you hope their baby gets raped by a black man is a laugh?’
And when women spoke out against what was happening, they simply attracted more insults, threats and contempt. In such a morass of unpleasantness, it was hard to see what might have distinguished Kate Rawlins and Jasmine Burton from the crowd. Carol ploughed on, feeling tainted simply by reading the stuff that was out there.
After a while, she realised she was attacking it from the wrong end. She was looking at the cause when she should be looking at the effect. What made Kate and Jasmine stand out was not that they had been trolled but that they had ended up dead.
So she refined her search and came at it from another angle. Whose experience of being bullied online had ended on the mortuary slab? Even here, there were more instances than anyone should be comfortable with. But most of the cases Carol uncovered didn’t come anywhere near the template of the two women who had piqued Tony’s curiosity. Teenage suicides of girls who had been beaten down by abuse were tragic but not characterised by vocal defiance of their attackers. Nor were the deaths of women who had been plagued by mental health problems before they were picked on by faceless bullies.
After what felt like a long journey, Carol finally found something that sounded like it might squeeze under the wire into their territory of interest. Daisy Morton had been a part-time teacher and a city councillor in Bradfield. ‘Right on our doorstep,’ Carol muttered. She’d delivered a blistering attack on dead-beat dads who didn’t contribute to raising their children.
‘I’m not only talking about the disappearing divorced dads who do everything in their power to avoid their responsibilities,’ Daisy had said. ‘I’m talking about the nice middle-class men who are never the ones who leave work early so they can spend time with their children. Who cheerfully spend forty grand on a new car but won’t spend forty minutes with their kids. Who think it’s a woman’s job to do the parenting so they’re free to go to the pub. Those are the dead-beat dads who are responsible for the dead-beat teenage lads who have no respect for women because they’ve never seen a woman being respected.’
Carol could see that Daisy Morton had gone out of her way to cause a shitstorm. And that was exactly what she’d got. It had started with online abuse but it had escalated to more direct attacks when Daisy had refused to apologise or retract what she’d said. A brick had been thrown through her living room window; dog shit had been smeared on the windows of the office where she heard out her constituents; and the tyres on her car had been slashed. And still Daisy berated the men she believed were letting their children down.
And then, dramatically, Daisy Morton had died. She’d been in the kitchen of her house when it had exploded and caught fire. The intensity of the blaze had made it impossible for firefighters to rescue her. The inquest report revealed a few anomalies; Daisy had been found with her head inside the oven, which was electric rather than gas. And the pathologist said that death was due not to smoke inhalation but asphyxiation from natural gas. The explosion had been laid at the door of the burners on the stove. However, there was nothing to suggest foul play and the coroner had recorded an open verdict. That did nothing to prevent speculation by a handful of bloggers and a couple of newspaper columnists that Daisy had been driven to kill herself by the pressure of the bullying she’d experienced.
It was far from satisfactory, but Carol knew from experience that when pieces didn’t fit the jigsaw, there was no point in hitting them with a hammer till they appeared to slot in. The coroner had taken the easy way out. The one that would spare the family the grief of a suicide verdict on top of the loss of a wife and mother. The one that let everyone off the hook.
She printed out a few of the relevant pages and left them sitting on Tony’s laptop. Then she picked up her phone and called Paula.
The CID room at Skenfrith Street police station was empty save for a couple of officers hammering light-touch keyboards with heavy fingers. Neither looked up when Paula walked in. ‘Where is everybody?’ she asked, taking off her jacket and draping it over her chair.
‘A shout came in while you were at court,’ one said without looking up from his screen. ‘Armed robbery at the coffee stall on Station Approach.’
‘Armed robbery at a coffee stall? You’re kidding.’
He looked up and shrugged. ‘Cash business, mostly. A few hundred punters on their way to work, call it a fiver a time, soon adds up. Two lads with a shotgun and a motorbike. Sounds like the same pair that knocked over the hot dog van on Campion Boulevard at the weekend. Fielding grabbed every available body and took off.’
The other officer stood up and stretched. ‘She said if you got back from court, you were catching any calls that came in.’
‘And has anything come in?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing that needs immediate action.’
Exactly what she’d hoped. As usual, Paula had a hefty caseload, but there was nothing so urgent that Fielding would notice she’d parked it on the back burner. She turned on her computer and called up the list of pending cases. This was her division’s home for lost causes: hard-to-solve minor incidents whose victims were so resigned to not seeing justice done that t
hey never picked up the phone to complain; complicated stories that nobody had been able to make sense of or even decide whether a crime had been committed; and the occasional internet scam that seemed impossible to get a handle on. Somewhere among the orphans of the storm she thought she’d find what she needed – a complaint about online stalking or bullying that would give her a legitimate reason to gain access to the official record on the two cases Tony and Carol were interested in.
It was a wearisome and depressing trawl. So many stories with no ending, so much pain and anger with no consolation, so many problems with no obvious solution. Paula soon lost count of the incidents that might have been resolved if only the person concerned had simply had someone to confide in, someone to turn to who could have taken the sting out of a problem before it escalated to the point where the police seemed to be the only available answer.
About halfway through the case listings, she found what she was looking for. A young Asian fashion designer called Shakila Bain had been interviewed on the local TV news, saying that although she didn’t support Islamic fundamentalism or terrorist violence, it was obvious that the demonising of young Muslim men in the UK was creating a battalion of willing young jihadists eager to fight for a cause. For a couple of weeks, Shakila had been showered with hate messages and assorted threats of violence. She’d reported the harassment to the police but before an investigation could grind into gear, the trolls had lost interest and moved on to someone else. So the case had been filed under ‘let’s forget about this’ because nobody ever wanted to get into something with so much potential for aggravation.
