Common Murder

by Val McDermid

  “I found it in a collection of papers belonging to Rupert Crabtree, the man who was murdered.

  His son owns a small software house in Fordham. It was in such a strange place, I figured it might be significant. And now, from what you tell me, it could be more than just a clue in a murder mystery. Have you made a copy of the tape?”

  Annie nodded. “I always do, as a precaution.”

  “Then I’d suggest you disguise it as Beethoven string quartets or something and hide it in your tape collection. I’d like there to be a spare in case anything happens to my copy. Or to me.”

  Annie’s eyebrows rose. “A little over the top, surely?”

  Lindsay smiled. “I hope so.”

  “You can make a copy yourself on a decent tape-to-tape hi-fi, you know,” Annie remarked in an offhand way. “And you will be going home tonight, won’t you?”

  Lindsay grinned. “Yes, Annie. I’ll be going home. But I’ve got a couple of things to do first.” She stood up. “Thanks for all your work. Soon as all of this is over, we’ll have a night out on me, I promise.”

  “Let’s hope those aren’t famous last words. Be careful, Lindsay, if this is what I think it might be, it’s not kid’s stuff you’re into.” Suddenly she stood up and embraced Lindsay. “Watch your back,” she cautioned, as the journalist detached herself and made for the door.

  Lindsay turned and winked solemnly at Annie. “Just you watch me,” she said.

  As she wrestled with the twin horrors of the one-way system and the pay phones of Oxford, Lindsay decided that she was going to invest in a mobile phone whatever the cost. In frustration, she headed out toward the motorway and finally found a working box in Headington. Once installed, she flipped through her contacts book until she found the number of Socialism Today, a small radical monthly magazine where Dick McAndrew worked.

  She dialed the number and waited to be connected. Dick was a crony from the Glasgow Labour Party who had made his name as a radical journalist a few years earlier with an exposé of the genetic damage sustained by the descendants of British Army veterans of the 1950s atom bomb tests. He was a tenacious Glaswegian whose image as a bewildered ex-boxer hid a sharp brain and a dogged appetite for the truth. Lindsay knew he’d recently become deeply interested in the intelligence community and GCHQ at Cheltenham. If this was a record of signals traffic, he’d know.

  Her luck was still with her. Dick was at his desk, and she arranged to meet him for lunch in a little pub in Clerkenwell. That gave her just enough time to go home and swap her bag of dirty washing for a selection of clean clothes. She made good time on the motorway, which compensated for the time she lost in the heavy West London traffic. Being behind the wheel of her MG relaxed her, and in spite of the congested streets she was almost sorry when she turned off by Highbury Fields and parked outside the house.

  She checked her watch as she walked through the front door and decided to make time for herself for a change. She stripped off and dived into a blessedly hot shower. Emerging, she carefully chose a crisp cotton shirt and a pair of lined woolen trousers still in the dry cleaners’ bag. She dressed quickly, finishing the outfit off with an elderly Harris Tweed jacket she’d liberated from her father’s wardrobe. In the kitchen, Lindsay scrawled a note on the memo board: “12:45. Thurs. I intend to be back by eight tonight. If emergency crops up, I’ll leave a message on the machine. Love you.”

  She pulled on a pair of soft gray moccasins, light relief after her boots, and ran downstairs to the street. There she picked up a passing cab which deposited her outside the pub. She shouldered her way through the lunchtime crowds till she found Dick sitting in a corner staring morosely at a pint of Guinness. “You’re late,” he accused her.

  “Only ten minutes, for Chrissake,” she protested.

  “It’s the job,” he replied testily. “You get paranoid. What you drinking?” In spite of Lindsay’s attempts to buy the drinks, he was adamant that he should pay, and equally adamant that she had to have a pint. “I’m no’ buying bloody half pints for an operator as sharp as you,” he explained. “If I’m on pints, so are you. That way I’m less likely to get conned.”

  He returned with the drinks and immediately scrounged a cigarette from Lindsay. “So,” he said, “how’s tricks? You look dog rough.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere, McAndrew. If you must know, I’m in the middle of a murder investigation, my ex-girlfriend is recovering from a homicidal attack, Cordelia’s in a huff, and Duncan Morris expects the moon yesterday. Apart from that, life’s the berries. Howsabout you?” she snarled.

  “Oh well, you know?” He sighed expansively.

  “That good, eh?”

  “So what have you got for me, Lindsay? What’s behind this meet? Must be good or you’d have given me some clue on the phone and chanced the phone-tap guy not being sharp enough to pick it up. Hell mend them.”

  “It’s not so much what I’ve got for you as what you can do for me.”

  “I’ve told you before, Lindsay, I’m not that kind of boy.”

  “You should be so lucky, McAndrew. Listen, this is serious. Forget the Simon Dupree of the gay repartee routine. I’ve got a computer printout that I’m told might be coded signals traffic. Could you identify it if it was?”

  Dick looked alert and intent. “Where d’you get this from, Lindsay?”

  “I can’t tell you yet, Dick, but I promise you that as soon as it’s all sorted, I’ll give you chapter and verse.”

  He shook his head. “You’re asking a lot, Lindsay.”

  “That’s why I came to you,” she said. “Want to see it?” He nodded and she handed him the printout. He helped himself to another cigarette and studied the paper. Ten minutes later, he carefully folded it up and stuffed it back in her handbag. “Well?” she asked cautiously.

  “I’m not an expert,” he said warily, “but I’ve been looking at intelligence communication leaks for a wee while now. As you well know. And that looks to me like a typical pattern for a US military base. Somewhere like Upper Heyford, Mildenhall.”

  “Or Brownlow Common?”

  “Or Brownlow Common.”

  “And what does it mean?”

  “Oh Christ, Lindsay. I don’t know. I’m not a bloody expert in codes. I’ve got a source who might be able to unscramble it if you want to know that badly. But I’d have thought it was enough for you to know that you’re walking around with a printout of top secret intelligence material in your handbag. Just possessing that would be enough for them to put you away for a long time.”

  “It’s that sensitive?”

  “Lindsay, the eastern bloc spend hundreds of thousands of roubles trying to get their hands on material like that. Quite honestly, I don’t even want to know where you got that stuff. I want to forget I’ve ever seen it.”

  “But if you know what it is, you must have seen other stuff like it.”

  Dick nodded and took a long draught of his pint. “I’ve seen similar stuff, yes. But nothing approaching that level of security. There’s a system of security codes at the top of each set of groups. And I’ve never encountered anything with a code rated that high before. It’s the difference between Hansard and what the PM tells herself in the mirror in the morning. You are playing with the big boys, Lindsay.” He rose abruptly and went to the bar, returning with two large whiskies.

  “I don’t drink spirits at lunchtime,” she protested.

  “You do today,” he said. “You want my advice? Go home, burn that printout, go to bed with Cordelia, forget you ever saw it. That’s trouble, Lindsay.”

  “I thought you were a tough-shit investigative journo, the sort that isn’t happy unless you’re taking the lid off the Establishment and kicking the Official Secrets Act into touch?”

  “It’s not like pulling the wings off flies, Lindsay. You don’t just do it for the hell of it. You do it when you think there’s something nasty in the woodpile. I’m not one of those knee-jerk lefties who publishes every bit o
f secret material that comes my way, like Little Jack Horner saying ‘See what a good boy am I.’ Some things should stay secret; it’s when that’s abused to protect crime and pettiness and sloppiness and injustice and self-seeking that people like me get stuck in,” he replied passionately.

  “Okay,” she said mildly. “Cut the lecture. But take it from me, Dick, something very nasty has been going on, and I’ve got to get to the bottom of it before it costs any more lives. If I have to use my terrifying bit of paper to get there, I’ll do it. There’s nothing wrong with my bottle.”

  “I never said there was. That’s the trouble with you, Lindsay—you don’t know when it’s sensible to get scared.”

  By silent consent they changed the subject and spent half an hour gossiping about mutual friends in the business. Then Lindsay felt she could reasonably make her excuses and leave. She got back to the three-story house in Highbury at half past two, with no recollection of the journey through the North London streets. The answering machine was flashing, but she ignored it and went through to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. She had the frustrating feeling that she had all the pieces of the jigsaw but couldn’t quite arrange them in a way that made sense. While the coffee dripped through the filter, she decided to call Rigano.

  For once, she was put straight through. As soon as she identified herself, he demanded, “Where are you? And what have you been up to?”

  Puzzled, she said, “Nothing. I’m at home in London. I visited Deborah this morning and since then I’ve seen a couple of friends. Why?”

  “I want to know what you make of your friend’s remark when you saw her in the hospital. My constable thought it might be significant.”

  “I told him then that I didn’t understand it,” she replied cautiously.

  “I know what you told him. I don’t believe you,” he retorted.

  “That’s not my problem,” she replied huffily.

  “It could be,” he threatened. “I thought we were cooperating, Lindsay?”

  “If I had any proof of who attacked Deborah, do you think I’d be stupid enough to sit on it? I don’t want to be the next one with a remodeled skull, Jack.”

  There was a heavy silence. Then he said in a tired voice, “Got anything for me at all?”

  “These bikers who have been terrorizing the camp—I think Warminster and Mallard are paying them.”

  “Have you any evidence of that?”

  Briefly, Lindsay outlined what she had learned the day before. “It’s worth taking a look at, don’t you think? I mean, Warminster and Mallard both wanted Crabtree out of the way. Maybe they used the yobs they’d already primed for the vandalism.”

  “It’s a bit far-fetched, Lindsay,” he complained. “But I’ll get one of my lads to take a look at it.”

  Having got that off her chest, Lindsay got to the point of the call. “Has it occurred to you that there might be a political dimension to this situation?”

  His voice became cautious in its turn. “You mean that RABD is only a front for something else? That’s nonsense.”

  “I mean real politics, Jack. Superpowers and spies. The person you’re looking for didn’t really kill for personal reasons; I think we’re looking at a wider motive altogether. Somebody doesn’t want us to do that. And that’s why I think this investigation has got bogged down in trivial details about peace women’s alibis.”

  “That’s an interesting point of view, but that sort of thing is all out of my hands. I’m just a simple policeman, Lindsay. Conspiracy theories don’t do much for me. I leave all that to the experts. And you’d be well advised to do the same.”

  Simple policeman, my foot, thought Lindsay. “Is that a warning, Jack?” she asked innocently.

  “Not at all, Lindsay. I’m just telling you as simply as I know how that this case isn’t about James Bond, it’s about savage responses to petty situations. It’s about people carrying offensive weapons for mistaken notions of self-defense. Anything else is out of my hands. Do I make myself clear?”

  “So who is that blond man who keeps following me? Special branch? MI5?”

  “If you mean Mr. Stone, he’s not Special Branch. There’s no SB man around here, Lindsay. And no one is following you. I’d know about it if they were. If anyone’s being followed, it’s not you. You should stop being so paranoid.”

  Lindsay almost smiled. “Haven’t you heard, Jack? Just because you stop being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

  15

  Lindsay raked around in her desk drawer until she found a blank cassette. Going through to the large L-shaped living room where the stereo system with the twin tape decks occupied a corner she set it up to make a copy of the computer tape and sprawled on one of the elegant gray leather chesterfields while she waited for the recording to finish. It was wonderful to lie back on the comfortable sofa surrounded by the restful atmosphere created by Cordelia’s unerring talent for interior design, though she felt a pang of guilt when she remembered the squalid conditions back at Brownlow. Lindsay ruefully recalled her feelings when she had first entered Cordelia’s domain two years before. She had been overwhelmed with the luxurious interior of the tall house by the park, and it had been months before she got out of the habit of pricing everything around her with a sense of puritanical outrage. Now, it was her home, far more than her Glasgow flat which she rented out to students at a rent that covered her overheads.

  She turned over again what Rigano had said. As far as the blond man was concerned, it seemed plain to Lindsay that he was something to do with intelligence, since Rigano had denied so vehemently that he was SB while pointedly ignoring her MI5 allegation. And if Stone wasn’t following her, that didn’t leave many options for the focus of his interests. And that in turn meant she wasn’t barking up the wrong tree as far as the existence of wider political implications was concerned. What she couldn’t understand was why Rigano was just sitting back and letting it happen without pursuing the same person that she was interested in.

  Unless, of course, she was completely wrong and the two strands were unrelated, leaving the murder as a purely personal matter. That would leave the ball firmly in the court of Warminster, Mallard, and the putative biker or Alexandra/Carlton. The interest of the security forces could then be explained away as concern about police action jeopardizing some operation of theirs. Since Lindsay was still far from clear about the point of killing Rupert Crabtree, either option seemed possible. However, the attempt on Deborah’s life seemed logical only if one assumed that it had been made to silence her. And if that was the case, Lindsay argued to herself, how did the murderer know that Debs hadn’t already spilled whatever beans she possessed; and if she hadn’t, then was she likely to do so now, especially since her silence must have come not from fear but from a failure to recognize what she knew or its importance? Lindsay shook her head vigorously. She was going round in circles.

  She mentally replayed her conversation with Rigano again. Something he had said as a throwaway line came back into sharp focus. “It’s about people carrying offensive weapons for mistaken notions of self-defense,” he had remarked bitterly. Suddenly the jigsaw fell into place. Lindsay jumped to her feet and went to the phone. If Cordelia had been accessible, she would have outlined her theory then and there and waited for the holes to be picked in it. Failing that, she punched in the number of Fordham police station and drummed her fingers impatiently till the connection was made.

  “Hello . . . Can I speak to Superintendent Rigano,” she demanded. The usual sequence of clicks and hollow silences followed. Then the switchboard operator came back to her and reported that Rigano was out of the building. But Lindsay was not to be deflected.

  “Can you get a message to him, please? Will you tell him that Lindsay Gordon rang and needs to talk to him urgently? I’m just setting off to drive to Fordham now, and I’ll be at the police station in about an hour and a half; say five o’clock. If he’s not back by then, I’ll hang on. Got that?�
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  The woman on the switchboard seemed slightly bemused by Lindsay’s bulldozer tactics, but she dutifully repeated the message and promised it would be passed on over the radio. Taking the original cassette tape out of the machine and stuffing it in her pocket, Lindsay left the house, completely forgetting the flashing answering machine and her promise to Cordelia.

  She walked round to the mews garage where she kept the car and was soon weaving through the traffic, seeing every gap in the cars ahead as a potential opportunity for queue jumping. Excited as she was by the new shape her thoughts had taken, she forced herself not to think about murder and its motives while she negotiated the busy roads leading to the M4.

  She arrived at Fordham police station ten minutes ahead of schedule. The elderly constable on reception desk duty told her Rigano was due back within the next half hour and that he was expecting her. She was taken through to a small anteroom near his office and a matronly policewoman brought her a cup of tea, freshly brewed but strong. Lindsay found it hard to sit still and chain-smoked through the twenty minutes she was kept waiting. She looked at one cigarette ruefully as she blew smoke at the ceiling. No matter how hard she tried to give up or cut down, at the first crisis she leapt for the nicotine with the desperate fixation of the alcoholic for the bottle.

  Rigano himself came to escort her to his room. More cheerful now, there was no sign that he resented her demand to see him. But he seemed determined to keep a distance between them. In his office, there was no sign of his sergeant or any of the other officers to take notes of the interview. Lindsay was disconcerted by that, but nevertheless relieved. What she had to say didn’t need a big audience. And if some hard things were going to be said on both sides, it was probably just as well that they should go unrecorded.

  “Well,” he said, indicating a chair to her as he walked round his desk to sit down. “You seem in a big rush to talk to me now, when you could barely spare me a sentence earlier on. What’s caused the big thaw? Surely not my overwhelming charm.”