Beneath the Bleeding

by Val McDermid

  Carol weighed up her choices. Should she make the little she had sound more or less than it was? More would put pressure on her to deliver on it; less would put pressure on her to find something to chase. She settled for laying it out exactly as it was. At the end of her short recital, John Brandon looked even more miserable. ‘I don’t envy you,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t want a result. Anything you need in terms of bodies and resources, let me know.’ He got up.

  ‘It’s not a matter of resources now, sir. It’s a matter of information.’

  ‘I know.’ He turned to go. His hand was on the door handle when he looked back. ‘Do you need me to sort out another profiler? With Tony out of action?’

  Carol felt a flash of panic. She didn’t want to have to forge a working relationship with somebody whose judgements would be based on a scant knowledge of her and her team. She didn’t want to have to worry about how to mitigate another psychologist’s conclusions. ‘It’s his leg that’s busted, not his brain,’ she said hastily. ‘It’ll be fine. When there’s something for a profiler to get his teeth into, Dr Hill will be there for us.’

  Brandon raised his eyebrows. ‘Don’t let me down, Carol.’ Then he was gone, walking across the office with a word of encouragement.

  Carol stared at his back, fizzing with anger. The implied criticism in his words was out of order. No other officer under John Brandon’s command had done more to demonstrate commitment to the job, or to the abstract principles of justice that drove her. No other officer had a better track record when it came to dealing with the kind of destructive high-profile cases that fucked up lives and made Bradfield’s citizens look over their shoulders in fear. And he knew that. Somebody somewhere must have given him one hell of a kicking to make him act as if he didn’t.

  DC Sam Evans was supposed to be canvassing residents of the converted warehouse where Robbie Bishop had lived. The boss had had this idea that Robbie might have said something to a fellow resident in the sauna or the steam room after his night out at Amatis, something that might lead them to the poisoner. Sam thought the idea was crap. If there was one thing that people like Robbie Bishop learned, it was to keep your mouth shut in front of anybody who might be tempted to grass you up to Heat or the Bradfield Evening Sentinel diary. He knew that Carol Jordan thought he needed to mend his maverick ways, especially after Don Merrick’s decision to follow a hot lead without waiting for back-up had ended so disastrously. She had indicated there was no room now for anything other than team spirit, but he knew she hadn’t got where she was today by putting her own interests second. She couldn’t blame him for doing his own thing as long as he got results.

  So instead of pointless door-knocking, he was holed up in his own living room, laptop on his knees, Robbie Bishop’s emails on his screen. Stacey had said there was nothing there, but he didn’t think she’d had time to go through them one by one. Not when she’d been doing all the techie stuff with his hard drive as well. She might have skimmed the emails, but he’d bet this month’s salary that she hadn’t scrutinized them in detail.

  After an hour, he couldn’t find it in his heart to find fault with Stacey for her presumed dereliction. It was bad enough that Robbie cleaved to the text message style of prose, making it less than straightforward to read. Even worse was the banality of his messages. If there was a duller correspondent than Robbie Bishop, Sam hoped earnestly he’d never have to wade through his mail. He supposed the ones about music might contain something worth reading if you had a consuming passion for the minutiae of obscure trip-hop tracks. Maybe Robbie’s fascination for bpm made Bindie’s heart race. All it did for Sam was provoke a strong desire for sleep.

  The love stuff was almost as boring as the music. And since Bindie was his principal correspondent, love and music was most of what there was. But Sam wasn’t about to give up. He understood that the most interesting information was often the stuff that was most deeply buried. And so he persevered.

  The clue came halfway through the third hour of excruciating assertions of love and analyses of music. He almost missed it, so casually was it buried among the other stuff. Robbie had written, ‘Maybe u shd report this fuckwit. U say he means u no harm, bt wot abt me? Peple like him do al kinds of shit with guns & stuff. Let’s talk about it l8r.’

  It didn’t make much sense on its own. Sam went back to the email filing cabinet and called up the saved incoming mail folder. When he clicked to open it, the message read, ‘You have 9743 messages in this folder. It may take some time to sort these messages. Do you want to go ahead?’ He clicked and while he waited, checked the date on Robbie’s outgoing message.

  It took only a few seconds to find the message from Bindie that had prompted Robbie’s reply. ‘I’m starting to get a bit weirded out by this geezer who keeps turning up at gigs,’ Sam read.

  ‘He’s been sending me letters for a while now-beautiful fancy handwriting, looks like it’s written with a fountain pen–all telling me how we’re meant to be together and how the BBC are conspiring to keep us apart. None of it very sensible, but whatever, he seemed harmless enough. Anyway, he’s finally figured out that I do live club gigs too and he’s started showing up there. Thankfully most of them won’t let him in becoz he fails the dress code, but then he just hangs around outside. He’s taken to parading up and down with a placard saying there’s a plot to keep him from me. So one of the doormen took it on himself the other week to show him that spread we did for the Sunday Mirror for Valentine’s Day. And apparently he was very put out. Ever since, he’s been telling all the door crews that you’ve hypnotized me and made me your sex slave. And that he’s going to put it to rights. I don’t imagine for a moment that he will do anything except crawl back in his burrow eventually, but it is a BIT freaky.’

  Sam drew his breath in slowly. He’d been sure there was something to be found on Robbie’s computer. Something that would finally give them a solid lead. And here it was. Twenty-four carat freak. Just the sort who would come up with some complicated plot involving a rare poison and a slow, horrible death.

  He smiled at the screen. A couple of phone calls to nail it down, then he’d show Carol Jordan how wrong she was to sideline Sam Evans.

  Tony refined the search parameters again and set his metacrawler to work once more. Google was fine for broad-brush searches, but when it came to fine-tooth comb work, it was hard to beat the search engine an FBI profiler colleague had given him with a nod and a wink. ‘It takes a little longer, but you can see the hair in their ears and nostrils,’ he’d said. Tony suspected a lot of what it did was in breach of European data protection laws, but he didn’t think the cops would be coming after him any time soon.

  The big advantage he had over his American counterparts was that the sample he was looking at was much smaller than theirs. If an FBI profiler wanted to look at suspicious deaths of white males between the ages of twenty and thirty over the previous two years, he’d have something like 11,000 cases to consider. But in the UK, the total number of murders committed over two years scarcely reached 1600. When suspicious deaths were added, the numbers rose a little, but not by much. The difficulty Tony faced was actually to identify the target group he was interested in. With relatively few murders committed, there was less impetus to break them down into neat categories of age, gender and race. He’d wasted much of the day acquiring information that had turned out to be completely irrelevant. The process was slowed even further because his concentration span had been temporarily shrunk by drugs and anaesthesia. Tony was embarrassed at the number of times he’d started into consciousness, laptop in hibernation and drool running down his chin.

  He had, however, narrowed his search to nine cases by the time Carol arrived in the early evening. He’d wanted to do better, to have something to show her, to prove he was still in the game. But clearly he wasn’t, not yet. So he decided to say nothing about his trawl.

  She looked frayed round the edges, he thought, watching her slip out
of her coat and pull the chair up to the bedside. Eyes heavy-lidded, recent lines showing the strain at the corners. Mouth a despondent line. He knew her well enough to read the process as she pulled herself together and smiled for him. ‘So, how did it go today?’ she asked. ‘Looks pretty different from here.’ She nodded at the shape under the covers.

  ‘It’s been quite a day. I got my drains out, which was frankly the most painful experience of my life to date. After that, getting the splint off was a piece of piss.’ He gave a wry little smile. ‘Actually, I’m exaggerating. The splint coming off was no picnic either. But it’s all relative. And now I have a leg brace that holds the joint in place.’ He gestured at the lump under the covers. ‘Apparently the wound is healing well. They took me down for an X-ray, and the bone is also looking in pretty good shape. So tomorrow the sadists from physiotherapy are let loose on me to see if I can get out of bed.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Carol said. ‘Who knew you’d be back on your feet so soon?’

  ‘Hey, let’s not get carried away here. Out of bed means a short stagger on a walking frame, not the Great North Run. It’s going to be a long road back to anything like I was before.’

  Carol snorted. ‘You make it sound like you were Paula Radcliffe. Come on, Tony, you were hardly the Rambling Boy of Bradfield.’

  ‘Maybe not. But I had a great action,’ he said, his upper body miming an athletic movement.

  ‘And you will have again,’ Carol said indulgently. ‘Pretty good day, then.’

  ‘More or less. My mother stopped by, which does take the shine off any given twenty-four hour period. Apparently, I own half of my grandmother’s house.’

  ‘You’ve got a granny as well as a mother that I don’t know about?’

  ‘No, no. My grandmother died twenty-three years ago. When I was still at university. Half a house would have come in quite handy then. I was always skint,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m following this,’ Carol said.

  ‘I’m not sure I did either, not entirely. I think I’m still a little less than morphine-free. But what I understood my mother to say is that her mother left me half of her house when she died. It seems to have slipped my mother’s mind. It’s been rented out for the last twenty-three years, but my mother thinks it’s time to sell it and she needs my signature on the documents. Of course, whether I’ll ever see a penny of the proceeds is another matter.’

  Carol stared at him in disbelief. ‘That’s theft, you know. Technically speaking.’

  ‘Oh, I know. But she is my mother.’ Tony wriggled himself more comfortable. ‘And she’s right. What do I need money for? I have everything I need.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’ She dumped a carrier bag on the bed-table. ‘All the same, I can’t say I approve.’

  ‘My mother is a force of nature. Approval’s irrelevant, really.’

  ‘I thought your mother was dead. You’ve never spoken about her, you know.’

  Tony looked away. ‘We never had what you’d call a close relationship. My gran did most of the hands-on child rearing.’

  That must have been strange. How was it for you?’

  He squeezed out a dry little laugh. The Yorkshire translation of The Gulag Archipelago. Without the snow.’ Please God, let the flippancy divert her.

  Carol harrumphed. ‘You men are such wimps. I bet you never went to bed cold or hungry.’ Tony said nothing, unwilling to invite either anger or pity. Carol pulled a wooden box from the bag, opening it up to reveal a chess set. Tony frowned, bemused. ‘Why are you setting up a chess board?’ he said.

  ‘It’s what intelligent people are supposed to do when one of them is in hospital.’ Carol’s tone was firm.

  ‘Have you been secretly watching Ingmar Bergman films, or what?’

  ‘How hard can it be? I know the moves, I’m sure you do too. We’re both smart. It’s a way of exercising our brains without working.’ Carol continued to lay out the pieces without pause.

  ‘How long have we known each other?’ Tony was laughing now.

  ‘Six, seven years?’

  ‘And how often have we played any kind of game, never mind chess?’

  Now Carol paused. ‘Didn’t we once…No, that was John and Maggie Brandon.’ She shrugged. ‘Never, I guess. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Carol. There are very good reasons why we shouldn’t.’

  She leaned back. ‘You’re afraid I’ll beat you.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘We both like winning too much. That’s just one of the reasons.’ He pulled his notepad and pen towards him and started scribbling.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to humour you,’ he said absently as he wrote. ‘I’m going to play a game of chess with you. But first, I’m going to write down why it will be a disaster.’ He carried on writing for a couple of minutes, tore off the page and folded it in half. ‘Let’s do it, then.’

  Now it was Carol’s turn to laugh. ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘Never more serious.’ He picked up a white and a black pawn, muddled them in his hands and offered her his fists. Carol chose white, and they were off.

  Twenty minutes later, they were down to three pieces each and a long tedium of strategy beckoned. Carol let out a huge breath. ‘I can’t take it. I resign.’ Tony smiled and handed her the piece of paper. She opened it and read aloud. ‘I take far too long to make a move because I’m exploring all the possibilities four moves ahead. Carol plays kamikaze, trying to get as many pieces off the board as possible. When there are hardly any pieces left and it’s clear it’s going to take for ever, Carol gets bored and cross and resigns.’ She dropped the paper and gently punched his arm. ‘You bastard.’

  ‘Chess is a very clear mirror of how individuals think,’ Tony said.

  ‘But I’m not a quitter,’ Carol protested.

  ‘Not in real life, no. Not when there’s something meaningful at stake. But when it’s just a game, you can’t see the point of expending all that energy with no guarantee of a result.’

  Ruefully, Carol scrambled the pieces together and closed the box on them. ‘You know me too well.’

  ‘It’s mutual. So, given you’ve studiously avoided it so far tonight, dare I ask how the Robbie Bishop investigation’s going?’

  Carol snapped the chess set open again. ‘How about another game?’

  Tony gave her a sympathetic look. ‘That bad, eh?’

  Five minutes later, having listened to Carol’s thorough resumé of what had happened since last they’d met, he was forced to agree. It was indeed that bad. Later, when she tiptoed out as his eyes were closing, the faintest of smiles lifted one corner of his mouth. Maybe tomorrow he would have something better than a game of bad chess for her.

  Thursday

  The sequence of events that had practically buried Paula McIntyre had also reintroduced her to the balm of nicotine. She hated the smell of stale smoke in the house; it reminded her too much of when Don Merrick had been camping out in her spare room. He’d been her mentor, teaching her so many of the skills she now took for granted. And then he’d become her friend. She’d been the one he turned to when his marriage had imploded and, after his death, she’d been the one who’d had to pack up his personal possessions and return them to the wife who’d pushed him into feeling he had something to prove. Now Paula missed his friendship enough without creating occasions for memory. So she’d spent time, money and energy building a deck on the back of her house with a covered area where she could huddle in the morning with her coffee and cigarettes, trying to pull enough of herself together to make it into the shower and then the office. She was under no illusions about her relationship with the job. She still loved it enough almost to forgive it for what it had done to her. And the time she had spent talking to Tony Hill had helped her to understand that only by staying with Bradfield Police would she ever come anywhere near healing the scars. Some people recovered from trau
ma by putting as much distance between themselves and their past as was humanly possible. She wasn’t one of those.

  She dragged on her Marlboro Red, loving the feeling but hating the need. Every morning she berated herself for starting again. And every morning, she reached for the packet before her first mouthful of coffee had made it as far as her stomach. To begin with, she’d told herself it was only a temporary crutch. First case she helped to crack, she’d be able to walk away from it. She’d never been more wrong. Cases had come and gone, but the fags were still with her.

  Today was a typically brutal Bradfield morning; low sky, air bitter with pollution, a swirl of damp wind that cheated its way through clothes to the very bones. Paula shivered and smoked and started out of her seat when her phone rang. She grabbed it from her pocket and frowned. Nobody but work would dare call at this time of the morning. But she didn’t recognize the number. She froze for a moment, swore out loud at herself and pressed a key. ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.

  ‘Is that DC McIntyre?’ Ulster accent, dark growl of a voice.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Martin Flanagan. From Bradfield Victoria.’

  Recognition dawned a split second ahead of the name. ‘Mr Flanagan, of course. I’m sorry, there’s no…’

  ‘No, no, it’s me that’s got something for you. With all the worry about Robbie, like, it completely slipped my mind. Until I came in this morning and there it was.’

  Paula sucked smoke and tried to stay calm. She hadn’t got to be the queen of the interrogation suite by letting her impatience show. ‘Totally understandable,’ she said. ‘Just take your time, Martin.’

  An audible breath. ‘Sorry, I’m getting way ahead of myself. Sorry. One of the things we do at the Vics, we do random drug testing on the lads. It’s in our interests to keep them clean. Any road, I totally forgot that we tested on Friday morning. And of course, that meant Robbie.’