Beneath the Bleeding

by Val McDermid

  ‘Only thing I feel bad about is missing the match on Saturday, innit? It’s gonna be a big deal, saying goodbye to Robbie. Is Raj going?’

  Yousef nodded. ‘Wild horses, man. You’d think it was me or Sanjar had died, not some football player.’

  Imran reared back in his seat. ‘Whoa, that’s heresy, cuz. Robbie wasn’t just “some football player”.’ He signed the inverted commas in the air with his fingers. ‘He was the football player. Home-town boy turned hero. We loved Robbie, I tell you. Loved him. So you tell Raj, say goodbye to Robbie from me.’

  Yousef rolled his eyes. Had the world gone mad? Hysterical grief over Robbie Bishop, and not a hair turned over the daily death tolls in Iraq and Palestine and Afghanistan. Something had gone badly wrong with their values. He couldn’t pretend that he’d been the world’s most perfect Muslim, but at least his thinking had never been as twisted as Imran’s.

  Imran fell silent, his fingers beating time on his denim-clad thighs, his Nikes tapping on the rubber floor mat. It kept him occupied the rest of the way to Manchester Airport. Yousef pulled up in the drop-off zone outside Terminal One, keeping the engine running while Imran grabbed his bag and got out. He stuck his head in the door. ‘Be cool, Yousef. See you Monday.’

  Yousef smiled. He wouldn’t be seeing Imran on Monday. But there was no need to tell his cousin that.

  Tony drifted up from a delicious sleep. Delicious because it came from genuine exhaustion, not a drug-induced escape. Who knew it could take so much energy to get out of bed, move three metres into a bathroom clutching a walking frame, pee and then get back to bed? When he’d slumped back on the pillows, he felt as if he’d climbed a small mountain. The physio had been happy with his progress; he’d been delirious. She’d promised him elbow crutches tomorrow. The excitement was almost too much for him.

  He sat up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and woke the laptop from its hibernation. Before sliding into sleep, he’d set up a final array of searches but he’d been out for the count before it finished. He hadn’t been optimistic; he’d even begun to accept that he might not find what he was looking for. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there, just that it was too well hidden.

  The screen cleared and to his surprise, a little box in the middle of the display read, ‘(1) match found’. The brackets meant that the match wasn’t perfect but that it was over 90 per cent congruent with the terms of his search. Wide awake now, Tony summoned the search results.

  It was a story from a free newspaper covering the west side of Sheffield. There wasn’t much detail, but there was enough to give Tony pause for thought as well as material for further detailed searches.

  Eagerly, he typed in a new set of parameters. This was going to be interesting. It looked as if he might just have something to show Carol after all.

  Sam Evans left his jacket hanging on his chair and strolled out of the office as if he had nothing more pressing on his mind than a trip to the toilet. Once the door closed behind him, however, he picked up speed and headed for the lifts. He descended to the car park and got into his car. Out came the mobile and he dialled Bindie Blyth’s number.

  She answered on the second ring. When he identified himself, she groaned. ‘Not more questions. I’ve already had your DCI on this morning.’

  Sweat popped out on Sam’s forehead. What if he’d called earlier, before Carol Jordan? How would he have explained himself to the woman who already had him marked down as too much of a maverick? Shit, he had to be careful with this stuff. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been bothered twice. We each have our own lines of inquiry,’ he said, hoping to Christ he wasn’t about to cover the same ground as his boss.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. I didn’t fancy a second excursion into the wilder reaches of my sex life. So, how can I help you, Detective?’

  ‘Back in February, you wrote an email to Robbie about some guy that was bothering you. Turning up to gigs. Minor stalker stuff. Do you remember?’

  Bindie groaned. ‘Do I remember? It would be hard to forget.’

  ‘Can you tell me a bit more about what happened?’

  ‘You can’t think this has anything to do with Robbie’s death? This was a pathetic little no-mark, not some criminal mastermind.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t check out every possibility,’ Sam said. ‘So tell me all about this guy.’

  ‘It started off with letters, cards, flowers, that sort of thing. And then he began to turn up when I was DJ’ing at clubs. Mostly, they wouldn’t let him in because he looked too geeky or freaky or whatever. But sometimes he would get in and he’d hang around the stage or the booth, trying to talk to me, or have his picture taken with me. It was irritating, but it felt pretty harmless. Then Robbie and I had a bit of a bust-up in public one night. You know how it is. A few drinks, things get a little out of hand? We ended up having a screaming match outside a club. The paparazzi picked it up, it was all over the papers and the mags. I mean, we’d made up by the time the pictures hit the streets, but it’s breaking up, not making up that gets the headlines.’ He heard her light a cigarette and waited for her to continue. Waiting. A trick he’d learned from Paula.

  ‘So this geezer takes it upon himself to defend my honour against this evil boyfriend who is not treating me as he should. He confronts Robbie as he’s leaving the team hotel in Birmingham. Starts reading the riot act. Nothing violent, just loud and a bit embarrassing, according to Robbie. Though of course, Robbie was the last man alive to admit to being scared. Anyway, the police were called, the geezer got carted off to the cells. Turns out that was just the wake-up call he needed. According to the cop I spoke to, once the potential consequences of his behaviour were explained to him, he saw the light. Desperately sorry, realized he’d got things out of proportion. And of course he would leave me and Robbie alone in future. So they let him off with a caution. And in fairness, I haven’t heard anything from him since. And that’s all I can tell you.’

  Somehow, it all sounded too pat to Sam. From what he knew about stalkers, they didn’t just pack up and go home when somebody rattled their cage. If they were stupid, they kept on doing the same kind of thing only more so till they eventually got locked up for it. And by that stage, there was often blood and teeth on the carpet. If they were smart, they either found another object for their warped affections or they became more subtle. And the smart ones often ended up causing even more blood and teeth on the carpet. Ask Yoko Ono about that. ‘You’ve really not heard from him since?’

  ‘Nope. Not even a sympathy card about Robbie.’

  ‘Have you had many of those?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Forty-seven delivered by hand yesterday at the BBC. I expect there’ll be more in the post today.’

  ‘We might want to have a look at those.’

  Bindie made an exasperated noise. ‘She was right, your boss. Nothing’s private in a murder investigation. What do you want me to do? Bag them up and post them to you?’

  ‘If you could bag them up, I’ll have somebody collect them. At your convenience, obviously. If we could just backtrack…’

  ‘His name was Rhys Butler. He lived in Birmingham. That’s all I can tell you. I gave all the letters and cards to the Brummie cops. Just in case he went off on one again.’

  ‘Thank you. You read my mind.’

  Bindie snorted. ‘Hardly a Booker prize-winner, Detective.’

  Sam hated witnesses who thought they were cleverer than the cops. ‘The name of the officer who dealt with you would also be helpful,’ he said, working at keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.

  ‘Hang on a minute, I’ve got his details somewhere…’ The sound of movement, a drawer being opened, another cigarette lit. At last, she came up with the information. ‘DC Jonty Singh. God, it’s so beautiful, what’s happened to names in this country. Jonty Singh. What a fab name. I love that cricket, the most English thing in the world, has Ramprakash and Panesar alongside Trescothick and Strauss. I adore the way we went from empi
re to multi-culti in the space of fifty years. Doesn’t that bring a smile to your face, Sam?’

  He didn’t much care, All that mattered was that Jonty Singh was the sort of name it wouldn’t be hard to track down in a big force like the West Midlands Police. He also noticed she had gone from ‘detective’ to ‘Sam’ and wondered if she was flirting. It was hard to tell, given her on-air personality. And even if she was, it wasn’t something he wanted to pursue. Didn’t want to be her next bit of rough. ‘Thanks for your time,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said, suddenly serious again. ‘It’s all I can do for him now. I really cared about him, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ Sam said, desperate now to get off the phone and get cracking on his lead. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ He ended the call abruptly. Now, if only he had a computer in his car like the uniformed patrol guys. He’d be well away, fingers flying, carrying him on the next step of his journey. Instead, he’d have to go back to his desk and hope that Stacey wasn’t watching his every keystroke. He was on to something and he was damned if he was going to give anyone else a look in.

  He was on tenterhooks waiting for her arrival, but still Tony didn’t announce his discovery the moment Carol walked in. He wanted to savour the anticipation. Besides, he had to admit there was something gratifying about her concern for his welfare. All the ebb and flow of pain and danger that had infiltrated their relationship had left little room for something as simple as sitting around being kind to each other. He knew she’d experienced that-still experienced it, for all he knew–with her family, but it had never been something he’d known. Kindness had always been viewed as weakness in his family. So even though he didn’t entirely know what to do with it, he wasn’t about to sacrifice a moment of their closeness to the demands of work. They’d get to that soon enough.

  It was, he recognized, a reordering of his priorities. The part of himself that viewed his own reactions as a perpetual experiment was intrigued to see whether it would last and what it would mean. But to his surprise, there was another part that was happy just to go with the flow.

  So Carol asked about his day and he told her. They had a conversation that he thought must be what ordinary friends and even lovers might weave together routinely. But of course, it couldn’t last. There had to come a point where equilibrium demanded that he ask about her day. And she told him.

  At the end of the recital, she leaned an elbow on the arm of the chair and ran her fingers through her thick hair. ‘This is unlike any other case I’ve ever worked on. When murder happens, two or more people come face to face. An act takes place and somebody dies. You can connect the dots. You’ve got forensics, witnesses, evidence. A precise point in time. But there’s nothing like that here. There’s a huge gap between the act that killed Robbie Bishop and the death itself. And we don’t know when or where or with whom that fatal act took place.’ She scuffed the carpet with the toe of her shoe. ‘The more we find out, the more obscure it gets. Kevin was right, this killer is Caspar the fucking friendly ghost.’

  Tony waited for a second, to make sure she’d got her frustration out. ‘It’s not quite as bad as you make out. We do know some things about him. I mean, apart from the Harriestown High connection and that he knows Temple Fields as well as a hooker.’

  Carol gave him a sceptical look. ‘Like what?’

  ‘We know he’s a planner. He’s thought this through and decided what level of risk he can safely assume, so we know he’s not reckless. He doesn’t feel the need to see his victim’s pain. He’s happy for it to happen offstage. So whoever he was at school, he wasn’t the class bully. Do we know if Robbie was a bully at school?’

  Carol shook her head. ‘Apparently not. He was a charmer, by all accounts. Though we’ve still got to plough through everybody on the Best Days website who knew him.’

  ‘Right. So this is not about revenge for adolescent humiliation. Unless the revenge element is about success…’ Tony’s voice tailed off and he frowned. ‘I need to think about that some more. But we do know he must know something about chemistry or pharmacology. I mean, he’s not just making ricin, he’s making ricin suppositories. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  Carol leaned into the carrier bag she’d brought with her and produced a screw-top bottle of Australian shiraz. ‘I’d start with the internet. That’s where we learn everything new these days, isn’t it? Are you allowed some of this?’

  ‘Probably not, but don’t let that stop you. There’s a couple of plastic tumblers in the bathroom.’

  When Carol returned with two substantial doses of red wine, he said, ‘And speaking of the internet…’

  ‘Mmm?’ Carol savoured her drink. She’d sneaked a couple of glasses after the post mortem, but apart from that, this was her first of the day, a small achievement in itself.

  ‘I don’t think this is the first time he’s done this. There’s too much assurance here for a beginner.’

  He could see the scepticism on her face. ‘You see serial killers everywhere, Tony. What possible evidence do you have for saying that? Apart from not liking the fact that this killer is either very good or very lucky.’

  ‘I don’t believe in lucky. Lucky is what we call it when our intuition leads us in the right direction. And intuition is a product of observation and experience. Did you know there’s been some recent research that suggests we make better decisions when we trust our gut reactions than when we weigh up the pros and cons of a situation?’

  Carol grinned. ‘I see Captain Tangent is reasserting himself. You didn’t answer the question, Tony. What evidence do you have for saying he’s done this before?’

  ‘Like I said, Carol: the internet. Source of all bollocks and a bit of wisdom too. Since we spoke last night, I’ve been on the prowl. And I found something very interesting.’ He reached for his laptop, tapped the mouse pad and turned the machine to face Carol. As she skimmed the short local paper story on screen, he said, ‘Danny Wade. Twenty-seven years old. He died two weeks ago at his luxury home on the outskirts of Sheffield. He was poisoned by deadly nightshade. Belladonna, the beautiful lady. Supposedly in a fruit pie prepared by his Polish housekeeper. The fruit pie works, you see, because belladonna berries are notoriously sweet. And there’s a belladonna bush by the patio. You need to find out if that was container-grown, by the way. It’s possible the killer brought it with him. The housekeeper denies making any fruit pie even though the remains of a pie containing deadly nightshade berries was found in the fridge. And the night he died was her night off. She was staying with her boyfriend in Rotherham, like she did every Wednesday and Saturday. They opened the inquest then adjourned it pending further inquiries.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you think this–’ pointing at the screen ‘–is anything to do with Robbie Bishop,’ Carol said. ‘It seems to be straightforward. The housekeeper made a mistake with the berries, and now she’s lying about it. Tragic accident. That’s what the story says.’

  ‘But what if she’s not lying? If she’s telling the truth, it’s the second instance of a man in his twenties being the victim of a very bizarre poisoning.’ Tony tried to turn so he could face Carol more directly, but it wasn’t possible. ‘Move that chair so I can see you properly,’ he said impatiently. ‘Please.’

  Slightly surprised, Carol did as he asked. ‘OK, now you can see me. This is just supposition, Tony.’

  ‘It’s always supposition till the evidence is nailed down. Supposition is what I do. We call it profiling. People other than me speak of it as if it’s a science, but it’s supposition based on experience and probability and instinct. More art than science a lot of the time, if we’re honest. Even the algorithms that the geographic profilers use, they’re based around probabilities, not certainties.’

  ‘So show me something that outweighs the probability of an immigrant housekeeper lying about accidentally killing her boss,’ Carol said. He could see she was humouring him, that she thought his sharp edge blunted by pain and dru
gs and strange sleep patterns.

  ‘Danny Wade wasn’t local to where he was killed. He moved to Dore on the western edge of Sheffield a couple of years ago because he was sick and tired of being pestered where he was living. In Bradfield. The reason he couldn’t get any peace and quiet there was that three years ago, he won the lottery. Big time. He got just over five million. He’d worked for Virgin Trains as a conductor. He was unmarried. The two things he cared about were model railways and his dogs, a pair of Lakeland terriers. He was a bit of a loner. Until he won the money. Then suddenly they all came out of the woodwork. Old school friends after a handout. Former workmates acting like he owed them. Distant relatives suddenly remembering that blood’s supposed to be thicker than water. And it all got a bit too much for Danny.’

  ‘Still, at least he had the money,’ Carol said. ‘It can buy you a lot of peace and quiet, five million.’

  ‘So Danny found out. He upped sticks and bought himself a lovely house on the edge of the moors. High walls, electric gates. Lots of space for model railway layouts. Didn’t tell anyone where he’d gone, not even his mum and dad. Nobody to bother him except for Jana Jankowicz who is by all accounts a very nice young woman with a fiancé who is working as an electrician on a building site in Rotherham.’

  Carol shook her head in disbelief. ‘Where did you dig all this up? This is tons more background than there is in the local paper.’

  Tony looked pleased with himself. ‘I spoke to the reporter. Stories like this, they’ve always got more in their notebook than they get on the page. She gave me Jana’s mobile number. So I called her. And, according to the lovely Jana, Danny was happy as a pig with his dogs and his railways and his three meals a day. But here’s the thing. I already found out Danny was a pupil at Harriestown High. Two years ahead of Robbie Bishop. And although Jana’s English wasn’t up to deep and meaningful conversations, she did understand enough to tell me that Danny had come back from the local pub a few nights before his death, saying he’d met somebody he was at school with.’ He grinned, a dog with two tails. ‘What do you think of that?’