by Val McDermid
Again, she copied the list then turned to one of her other screens, where she set up a comparison between the names on the Plath and Woolf list and those who’d bought the Sexton. Three names were highlighted by the computer. All women.
‘Damn,’ Stacey muttered. Because she couldn’t help herself, she looked them up in Valhalla’s customer database. One had an address at the English department in a Scottish university; the second apparently lived in France and the third had bought dozens of books of poetry, some of it by men. A further search revealed that the third was herself a published poet. Even if they hadn’t agreed with Tony and Alvin that the killer they sought was a man, none of these seemed a viable suspect. It looked as if Tony’s inspired suggestion had been a dead end.
Unless … perhaps there was a way of widening out the comparison? She’d asked only for exact matches. What if there were variations? Sometimes people set up new accounts when they changed their email address or the credit card they wanted their purchases billed to. She had some time left on the clock. Surely it was worth having another crack at it?
This time, she downloaded and printed the buyers of each of the three titles separately. Let her systems make the comparisons rather than Valhalla’s. There were pages of names now. It would be an almost impossible task for a human brain to sort them out. But for a programmer like Stacey, it was a minor challenge to set up a routine to weed out close variations.
She ran the comparison again, this time factoring in variations and using all three full lists. And this time, another match showed up. This time, one was definitely a man. Matthew Martin had bought both Woolf and Sexton. And MJ Martin had purchased Plath. How sweet it was when the machines delivered what no human could possibly manage.
Finding the personal accounts of both Martins was the work of moments. A few keystrokes, a few deft movements of fingers over trackpad and there it was. The credit card details were different. But the billing addresses were identical, and conveniently the same as the delivery address. The same instruction that if he wasn’t home, his parcels could be left safely in the garden shed round the back. And a list of all the other purchases from both accounts.
He’d bought all sorts from Valhalla. Computer accessories. Pay-as-you-go phones. Vitamin supplements. Jeans. SIM cards. A hacksaw. MP3 downloads. And books. The three Stacey had gone looking for plus four others. Books of poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva, May Ayim and Alejandra Pizarnik. And a novel by Penelope Delta. Stacey had heard of none of them, but five minutes’ googling revealed that all four were writers who had killed themselves. Hanging, jumping from a high building, poison and an overdose. It looked as if Matthew Martin was planning a major campaign.
For most people that would have been enough to take into the next morning’s briefing. But Stacey considered that a mere baseline which she was obliged to rise above. With a name and an address she had the raw materials for a biography. First there was LinkUp, the site where people could post their beefed-up CVs and connect with everyone they’d ever wanted to impress. And there was Matthew Martin, civil engineer. A specialist in bridges. If you wanted to build a bridge or renovate or repair one, he was apparently your man. He’d worked on a wide range of projects overseas and in the UK. His most recent job seemed to have been in the Scottish highlands. Stacey followed the links for the project and discovered that the lead engineer on the project had been a woman. She captured the information and highlighted it. Not that she was particularly interested; but she knew it was the sort of thing Tony would latch on to.
His Facebook page wasn’t very helpful. He had less than two dozen friends, almost all of them engineers. He owned up to no interests or relationships, even resisting listing his favourite albums, movies or TV shows. The last posting on the page was just over three months old and was a moody photograph of the Humber Bridge at dawn.
According to DVLA, he had a clean driving licence and owned a five-year-old 4WD Toyota Navarra pickup as well as a two-year-old Volkswagen Passat. Both were registered to the same address as his credit card.
Stacey wondered if she could get inside the ANPR system, the network of cameras that recorded in real time the number plates of the majority of vehicles on the road as they moved around the country. The last time she’d tried, she’d timed out before she got where she wanted to be. Since then she’d refined her security-busting software, tailoring it more precisely to the idiosyncrasies of the site, but she hadn’t had a chance to try it out yet.
Tentatively she launched herself at the site. To her delight, she slipped inside as cleanly as if she had a set of master keys. If she could get what she needed, she wouldn’t waste time trying to analyse it, just print it out and look at it offline. First she tried the Toyota pickup, typing in the registration. If he’d been moving his victims around, it would be a lot easier to get them in and out of the cab or the bed of the truck. She didn’t know how much data was going to come up, so she set the search window for two days before Jasmine Burton had walked into the Exe. But nothing came up at all. Either she wasn’t doing it right or he hadn’t driven his Toyota anywhere the ANPR cameras were operating, which seemed unlikely, given they covered all the key trunk routes in the country these days. The other possibility was that he’d obscured part of his number plate with mud or reflective spray. Sometimes it was possible to hoodwink the cameras like that. And Tony had emphasised that they were dealing with a careful planner.
She tried again, this time using the registration number of the Passat. And this time, up came a string of results. The car had dozens of hits over the past ten days. Stacey printed out the results, then stretched the time window back to the week before Kate Rawlins had died. The screen scrolled down and down and down as the results flowed in. He’d been all over the place, she thought as the paper spilled out of the printer. With all this information at their fingertips, they could go to the mobile phone companies and pinpoint the areas they wanted them to check for the phones and SIM cards they now knew Matthew Martin owned. There would be others too, no doubt. But they could make a start there. And for all her darkside skills, it was a search too far for Stacey to make. For now, she’d done all she could and she was willing to bet she had more to bring to the morning meeting than anyone else.
She stood up and did some stretches against the wall. It had been a long day and she didn’t want to wake up stiff and sore. For the briefest of moments, she wondered where Sam was and what he was doing. Maybe she should text him one more time? Let him know she hadn’t stopped thinking about him? But she pushed the thought away. She’d chased him enough. He knew how she felt. It was up to him to stop behaving like a child. If he didn’t know her well enough by now to understand that she wasn’t expecting him to grovel, he hadn’t been paying attention. She’d let him sweat for another day or two, then she’d drop him a casual message suggesting dinner.
Then it would be up to him.
The decision nearly killed her. She wanted him back so badly. There was a physical ache in her chest; it felt as if her heart was actually bruised. And the effort of hanging on to the last shreds of her dignity was like clinging on to a high wire by her fingertips. Who was she kidding? If anyone was going to grovel, it would be her. She’d shame herself, no two ways about it.
The only red line was her job. This was the most excitement she’d had since the old MIT had been split up. She’d give up her dignity, her self-respect, her pride for Sam. But not her job.
49
Tony prodded the pan of chilli suspiciously with a wooden spoon. He could never remember the spice mix he’d used from one batch to the next. Sometimes the chilli heat was overwhelming, sometimes it was barely discernible. The cumin level was unpredictable and on occasions he forgot the oregano and cilantro altogether. It gave a whole new meaning to pot luck. He tasted the mixture and yelped as he burned his tongue. ‘Ow, that hurts!’ Alerted by his tone, Flash wriggled out from under the table and cocked her head to one side, ears pricked. She checked him out, decided he was fi
ne and headed back for her mistress’s feet.
‘Now you’ll have no idea what it tastes like,’ Carol sighed. ‘I should have picked up a pizza.’
‘You’re over-excited because you’re in the city and pizzas are a possibility. There’s nothing wrong with my cooking. Well, nothing much.’ Tony left the pot on the stove and sat down opposite her. ‘You’re going to have to come clean about what you’re up to.’
Carol rolled her eyes. ‘Since when have you been all about playing by the rules? Everything’s fine. We’re flying under the radar, everybody thinks we’re quietly getting ourselves organised, ready to roll when the first big case rolls in.’
‘And when’s that going to be? It could be tomorrow morning. It could be happening right now. And then what are we going to do? We’re already at full stretch and we’ve not even started on a proper caseload.’ He rolled up his sleeves as he spoke. It was always the same when he started cooking on the boat. The temperature soon climbed out of the comfort zone.
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ she said firmly. ‘A few breaks from Stacey and we could have this wrapped up in no time at all.’
‘You’re going to have to set up an incident room if we don’t.’
Carol laughed. ‘What? You’re missing writing on the whiteboards?’
‘It’s nothing to do with whiteboards, it’s about having enough bodies to do all the routine actions that come out of what the team are doing. You know perfectly well that if you had a roomful of detectives bashing the phones we’d be further forward.’
Her jaw set in a familiar line of stubbornness. ‘I don’t know that, actually. This isn’t a conventional case. There’s so little to get hold of. No forensics, no loose ends to pull … ’
‘If you had a bigger team, you’d be taking apart those crime scenes. Looking at endless streams of CCTV, talking to potential witnesses, digging down into the victims’ lives and their movements on the days they died.’ He got up and stirred the chilli again. ‘We wouldn’t have to rely on Stacey’s law-breaking abilities.’
‘But I don’t have the bodies and honestly, Tony, I don’t have the justification. We’re still woefully thin on evidence.’
He opened the oven and took out the pile of tortillas he’d had warming through. He put them in a basket and dumped them on the table alongside a tub of sour cream and a bag of grated cheddar. ‘I know. Believe me, there have been moments when I’ve wished I’d kept my mouth shut.’
‘You don’t mean that. You would never turn your back on a victim.’
He dished up the chilli into bowls. ‘I know. But this is clutching at straws. I’m making a profile without anything solid.’
‘Apart from years of experience and a unique degree of empathy,’ Carol said softly, accepting the bowl. She dug her fork in and waved it around to cool down. Tasted it. ‘Mmm, this is definitely one of your better efforts.’ She stirred in cheese and sour cream. ‘Thanks for feeding me.’
‘It’s more fun than eating alone.’ He spooned chilli on to a tortilla and bit into it. ‘Carol, we’ve got to cover our backs here. That story in the paper at the weekend proves what we already knew: we’ve got enemies out there waiting – no, longing – to bring us down. We don’t want to give them a gift-wrapped opportunity to do that, to point to us and say, “See, we told you they’re a bunch of dangerous mavericks”. What are we going to do?’
‘We’re going to make the best of it. We’re going to go in tomorrow morning and see what bones the dogs have brought us. And then, Tony, we are going to nail us a killer.’
He’d never got over her drive for justice. However bleak the prospect, it pushed her forward. He remembered a Scottish friend once defining his nation as ‘the ones who run towards gunfire’. By that reckoning, Carol must have tartan in her veins. He hoped she also had a bulletproof vest.
50
You could tell by looking that this was a new squad, Carol thought. Familiar faces but with a new purpose. In spite of their years in the job, they all had an alertness and eagerness about them, a sense of being wound up ready to be let go. They looked well slept, showered and dressed in fresh clothes, a state she knew wouldn’t last long once the hard cases started piling up. With the exception of Karim Hussain, she knew their strengths and weaknesses; she knew how to make the most of what they brought to the team. Tony was right that there were people on the outside who wanted to see them fail. But she thought there was enough talent here to keep them at bay.
Paula was last to leave the shiny new coffee machine. ‘If this all goes to shit, we could set up as a coffee shop,’ she said, plonking herself down at the table.
‘Good to know we have an alternative,’ Carol said. ‘So who wants to kick off?’
Kevin started, reporting briefly on his trip to Sunderland. ‘Complete write-off,’ he concluded. It was the same story with minor variations from Alvin, and Carol asked Karim to to run through their interview in Rochdale. Time the lad learned how to stand on his own two feet in the room. Everyone looked a little deflated, but Carol forced herself to sound upbeat as she turned to Paula.
‘How did you get on?’
‘The good news is that none of the women I spoke to sounded suicidal,’ she said. ‘But then, the ones who are already dead probably wouldn’t have either, since they didn’t actually commit suicide. However. When I talked to them in more detail about what they’d initially said that brought the shitstorm down around their ears, it seemed to me that only two of them fit the pattern in the terms that Tony was talking about. I mean in terms of the kind of things they’ve been vilified for saying. The three women we’re looking at were expressing overtly feminist positions and directly attacking men for their behaviour. With some of the women I spoke to, like Shakila and Maxine, the nature of their attack was much less focused on those aspects. So they didn’t interest our guy.’
She flicked open her notebook. ‘On the other hand, Zoe Brewster is a novelist who lives in Norwich and had the temerity to suggest that computer games were misogynist and taught boys to despise women. Ursula Foreman is a blogger and journo and website designer who has written lately about everyday sexism in soaps and the damage it does to the self-image of young women and the attitudes of young men. She went on to complain about men trying to shut women up. They’ve both had the style and volume of trolling that our victims experienced. If he’s sticking to the same sort of search criteria as, frankly, we are, they’d be the most likely current targets, I think. But what we can do about it – that’s another matter. Since we don’t know how he approaches his victims, I don’t see how we can protect them.’
‘We can’t,’ Tony said. ‘Not even if we tell them they’re at risk. Because, as you say, we don’t have any clue how he’s getting alongside them. And the questions I keep coming back to are: why this, why now, why here? And I’ve got no answers. Not a one.’
Glum faces all round. Except, Carol realised, for Stacey. Her face was unreadable as it often was but she definitely wasn’t looking despondent. ‘Stacey, have you got anything for us?’
She flipped open her laptop and looked round the table. There was an air of something suppressed about her that drew all their attention. ‘His name is Matthew Martin.’ She did something complicated on her trackpad and the interactive whiteboard on the wall behind her came to life. It showed a driving licence with a picture of a man with light brown hair and a full beard. ‘He was born in 1975 in Bradfield. He’s a civil engineer specialising in bridges and he lives here –’ a click of the fingers and the image changed to a small brick house standing alone at the edge of a stubble field – ‘in Leicestershire. He’s very close to the motorway network, so he can move around the country readily.’
‘Bloody hell, Stacey,’ Kevin exclaimed. ‘Where did you get all this?’
‘It was Tony’s idea. Follow the books. So I did.’
‘In a way we can admit to?’ Carol asked.
Stacey gave her a long hard look. ‘Not as
such.’
‘OK. We’ll find a way round it. Leave that to me. That’s very impressive, Stacey.’
Karim was staring at her as if he’d never seen a woman before, mouth open, eyes wide. ‘How did you do that?’ he stammered.
‘Don’t ask,’ Paula said. ‘Just accept it. You’ll get used to it.’
Tony was smiling. ‘That’s beautiful, Stacey.’
She inclined her head graciously. ‘I’m not finished.’
‘Course you’re not,’ Paula said.
‘He has two vehicles registered to him. A Toyota Navarra four-wheel-drive pickup truck with a double cab, and a VW Passat. The Passat is the one I’ve been able to connect to the dead women. Martin drove into London the day before Kate Rawlins died and he left the night she supposedly killed herself. I can put him on the A1 less than a kilometre from her house that afternoon.’ A map appeared on the whiteboard, with the relative positions of the car and the house marked with red crosses.
It felt as if everyone was holding their breath, eyes on the whiteboard to see what was coming next. ‘There’s a similar pattern around Morton. He shows up four times in Bradfield in the two weeks before she died. Every time, he drove down the trunk road that runs within five hundred metres of Daisy’s street. He shows up on the morning she died and goes in the opposite direction half an hour after the explosion.’ A satellite image flashed up with a couple of roads outlined in red. ‘I think there might be CCTV cameras here – there’s a petrol station and a convenience store, they usually have cameras and they often pick up street traffic. But they’re private, so I can’t get into them remotely.’
