by Val McDermid
‘Good point.’ Chris smiled. ‘I’ll buy you a couple of hours. I can tell her you were exhausted and I told you to take your time coming in. But you need to do your bit. You need to make sure you catch up with the housekeeper bright and early. You think they do breakfast meetings in Rotherham?’
Paula grinned. ‘She’s Polish. They work all the hours God sends. She’ll totally get an early meeting.’
Chris shoved the pile of photos towards her. ‘You better take these. If it’s the same killer, he might be among this lot.’
‘What about you and Kevin?’
‘I’ll go back and print out another set. It won’t take long, not now Stacey’s got the file set up. If I call her now, she’ll have them done by the time I finish my drink and get back.’ She reached for her glass. ‘And you need to get your arse in gear, Constable.’
Paula didn’t need telling a second time. She scooped up the pictures and headed for the door, a bounce in her step. She didn’t want to think about how awkward it would be to prove Carol Jordan wrong. What she was focused on was proving Tony Hill right.
Paula had never done the lottery. A mug’s game, she’d thought. But as she walked into the Blacksmith’s Arms on the outskirts of Dore, she wondered if maybe she’d been wrong. Danny Wade’s house was only quarter of a mile away from the pub, and she’d swung past it on her way there. What she’d been able to see through the gates had made her whistle. She could think of lots of ways to fill a mansion like that without once having to resort to 00 gauge. She made a mental note to check out who was going to inherit. It never hurt to eliminate the obvious. Or not, as it often turned out.
The pub matched its environment. Paula reckoned it was a lot more modern than it looked. The ceilings were too high, for a start. She guessed the beams might be polystyrene, but it didn’t matter. They looked authentic. The bar was decked out with wood panelling and chintz, tables and chairs grouped so that it imitated a drawing room rather than a saloon bar. At one end of the room, old church pews flanked an inglenook fireplace where logs blazed on substantial iron fire dogs.
Paula guessed they had a lively lunchtime and weekend trade. But at quarter past nine on a Friday evening, it was much quieter than a city-centre bar would be. Half a dozen tables were occupied by couples and foursomes. They all looked like accountants and building society managers to her. Smartly dressed, nicely turned out, scarily interchangeable. Stepford couples. In her leather jacket, black jeans and solitude, she stuck out like a hoodie at a Tory fête. As she walked to the bar, she was aware of conversations pausing and heads turning. A middle-class version of Straw Dogs.
There were a couple of blokes sitting on high stools at the bar. Pringle sweaters and dark slacks. They could have wandered straight off the nearby golf course. As she drew nearer, she realized they were probably a couple of years younger than her. Barely in their mid-twenties, she guessed. She thought her dad probably had more sense of adventure. Probably right up Danny Wade’s street.
Paula smiled at the barman, who looked as if he’d be more at home in a Spanish karaoke bar than here. ‘What can I get you?’ he said in an accent that matched her preconception.
God, how weary she got of soft drinks when she was working. ‘Orange juice and lemonade, please, she said. As he prepared her drink, Paula pulled out the bundle of photos. There was no point beating about the bush in here. Nobody was going to become her friend. Not the Spanish barman, not the Nick Faldo clones, not the cosy couples. She had her ID ready when the drink was placed in front of her, precisely centred on the beermat. ‘Thanks. I’m a police officer.’
The barman looked bored. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said.
‘Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll pay for it.’
‘Up to you.’ He took the money and brought her change back. The Pringle twins were openly staring at her.
‘I’m investigating the death of Danny Wade. He lived up the road?’
‘He the one who got poisoned?’ The barman’s interest was barely awakened.
‘That’s what happens when you use cheap foreign labour,’ the Pringle nearest her said. He was either incredibly stupid, incredibly insensitive or incredibly offensive. Paula couldn’t be sure which. She’d have to wait for his next utterance to be sure.
‘Mr Wade was poisoned, yes,’ she said coolly.
‘I thought that was all sorted out,’ the other Pringle said. The housekeeper made a tragic mistake, isn’t that what happened?’
‘We just need to clear up one or two details,’ Paula said.
‘Bloody hell, are you saying she did it on purpose?’ Pringle One said, turning round properly and giving her an avid look.
‘Did you know Mr Wade, sir?’ she said.
‘Knew him to speak to.’ He turned to his friend. ‘We knew him to say hello, didn’t we, Geoff?’
Geoff nodded. ‘Just to chat at the bar, you know. He had a lovely pair of Lakeland Terriers, very well-behaved dogs. In the summer, he’d bring them down with him and sit out in the beer garden. What happened to the dogs? Carlos, do you know what happened to the dogs?’ He looked at the barman expectantly.
‘I have no idea.’ Carlos carried on polishing glasses.
‘Was he always on his own?’ Paula asked. ‘Or did he come in with friends.’
Pringle One snorted. ‘Friends? Do me a favour.’
‘I was told that he ran into an old school friend in here recently. You don’t remember that?’
‘I remember,’ said Carlos. ‘You two know the guy. He came in a few times on his own, then one night Danny came in and he recognized him, this other guy. They had a couple of drinks together over by the fire.’ He pointed across the room. ‘Vodka and Coke, that’s what he drank.’
‘Do you remember anything else about him?’ Paula asked, deliberately casual. Never make them think it’s important; then they want to please you, so their imagination fills in the blanks.
The Pringles shook their heads. ‘He always had a book with him,’ Carlos said. ‘A big book, not like usual.’ With his hands, he described something about eight inches by ten. ‘With pictures. Flowers, gardens I think.’
‘Not enough to do with your time, that’s your trouble,’ Pringle One pronounced.
Paula spread the pictures across the bar. ‘Do you see him here?’
All three crowded round. Geoff shook his head dubiously. ‘Could be any one of these,’ he said, pointing to three dark-haired, blue-eyed men with thin faces.
The barman frowned, picking up a couple of the pictures to study them more closely. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Is not them. Is this one.’ He put his index finger on a fourth shot and pushed it towards Paula. This image had dark hair and blue eyes. His face was long, like the other three, but much broader across the eyes, narrowing to a blunt chin. ‘His hair is shorter now, combed to the side. But it’s him.’
Geoff stared at the chosen photo. ‘I wouldn’t have picked that one, but now I look at it…you could be right.’
‘I spend all my time looking at faces, matching them to drinks,’ Carlos said. ‘I’m pretty sure this is him.’
‘Thank you. That’s very helpful. Did you happen to hear any of their conversation?’ Paula asked, gathering the photos together with the identified shot on top.
‘No,’ Carlos said. ‘My English is not good enough for this kind of talk.’ He spread his hands in so foreign a gesture that Paula instinctively knew he was lying. All I do is take orders for drinks and food.’
Yeah, right. She’d be talking to him again, she suspected. ‘Never mind,’ she said, her smile reassuring. ‘You’ve been very helpful. I might have to come back and talk to you again, Carlos.’ She produced her notebook. ‘Maybe you could write down your full name and contact details?’
While he wrote, she turned her attention back to the Pringles. ‘Have you seen that bloke in here again, after the night he met up with Danny?’
They exchanged glances. Geoff shook his head. ‘Haven’t seen hide nor ha
ir of him, have we?’
As if he’d accomplished his mission and didn’t have to come back. Paula gathered up her notebook and made her escape. Back at the car, she stared at the photo Carlos had identified. Number 14. According to Stacey’s key, this was Jack Anderson. He hadn’t sent in his own photo. He’d been one of a group of three in someone else’s picture. But he’d been to Harriestown High, and he’d overlapped with Robbie Bishop.
Paula looked at the clock on the dashboard. Only quarter to ten. She was due to meet Jana Jankowicz at eight. She could either find a cheap motel in Sheffield and sleep badly or head back to Bradfield for a few comfortable hours in her own bed. And that way she’d be able to show her face at Amatis. Maybe they’d get lucky and pick up a second ID on the photo. For sure, she would pay back some of the favour Chris Devine had granted her. For Paula, who always preferred debtors to debts, it was no contest.
Midnight
Would he know she’d been spending so much time here? Would her presence leave a stain? Would he turn to her, like one of the three bears, saying, ‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’ She might be blonde, but Carol was no Goldilocks. She swallowed the last mouthful of wine in her glass and reached for the bottle, conveniently placed within reach on the floor. There was something comforting about being here. Even though she’d just arrested a suspect who ran counter to Tony’s convictions about Robbie Bishop’s murder, Carol felt confident in her professional judgement.
It was her private emotions that gave her more trouble. It was easy to be sure of her feelings when he wasn’t here-she missed him, she could create a conversation between them on any subject under the sun, she could picture the shifting expressions on his face. She could almost dare to think the l-word. But when they were in the same space, all her certainties shifted. She needed him too much and her anxiety over doing or saying something that would drive a wedge between them became her overriding consideration. And so the things unsaid and undone loomed large in everything they said and did. She had no idea how to resolve it. And for all his professional expertise, she suspected Tony was no wiser than her in this crucial respect.
In his hospital room, Tony lay with the lights off and the curtains open. The thick clouds reflected the city’s glow, taking the edge off the darkness. He’d dropped off to sleep earlier, but it hadn’t lasted long. He wanted to be home in his own bed. Or at least on his own sofa, given how impossible the thought of stairs seemed right now. Nobody waking him at six with a cup of tea he didn’t want. Nobody making judgements about him based on his choice of boxer shorts. Nobody treating him like he was five years old and incapable of making his own decisions. Above all, nobody to let his mother in.
He sighed, a long, deep exhalation that left him hollow. Who was he kidding? He’d be just as restless and miserable at home as he was here. What he needed was work. That was what made him tick, what made his mind inhabitable. Without work, without direction, his thoughts were like a hamster on a wheel, circling and dancing with no destination and no possibility of arrival. With work, he could avoid anything but the most superficial consideration of Carol Jordan and his feelings for her. Once, there might have been a faint hope of them building a future. But circumstances and his reactions to them had blown that. If there had ever been a real possibility of her loving him, that was history.
And probably best that it was, for all concerned. Especially now his mother was back on the scene.
The insistent bass seemed to have taken up residence in Chris’s thighs. With every beat, her muscles contracted a fraction and her bones seemed to vibrate. She was sweating in places she didn’t know could sweat and her heart rate seemed to have shifted up a gear. Funny, when she was out clubbing for fun, she never noticed these reactions. She was too absorbed in the beats, too fixated on having fun with Sinead or whoever, too alive to the possibility of the night to feel the anxiety the music was creating in her tonight.
She was moving through the dancers, working round the fringe of the dance floor, leading with her ID, then fanning out the photos, making them stop and look. A few times, she’d had to grab T-shirts and go nose to nose with those either too recalcitrant or too high to want to co-operate. Every now and again, she would catch a glimpse of Kevin or Paula going through the same routine.
Kudos to Paula for coming back. Chris had been surprised when she’d seen the young detective moving through the crowd at the bar, but she’d been bloody delighted to learn about her success in Dore. Earlier, she’d heard about Carol and Sam picking up Rhys Butler. So now they had two avenues to pursue. One way or another, the search for Robbie Bishop’s killer was picking up the momentum it needed.
Sinead might as well have stayed on with her friends in Edinburgh for the weekend, Chris thought. The way things were going, it didn’t look like she was going to have a whole lot of free time in the immediate future. But hey, that was the way this job went. And the flexibility Carol Jordan had built into MIT meant she had more down time than she’d ever had since she joined the police.
Only one regret in all of this. She didn’t know a senior detective she respected who didn’t carry a similar weight. Talking to Paula earlier had brought it all back. Chris had once worked with a young detective who would have been stellar if she’d lived long enough to make it as far as MIT. A cop who was just beginning to fly when some bastard clipped her wings for good. A woman that Chris had failed to avoid loving more than she should have. A death that she couldn’t help shouldering some of the responsibility for. A gap that would always be there. A gap she tried to fill by doing the job as well as she possibly could.
‘You sentimental cow,’ Chris muttered under her breath. She pulled her shoulders back and moved into the eye line of the next dancer. It didn’t matter who you did it for. What mattered was doing it.
Garbled chunks of code scrolled down the screen. Algorithms were constantly battering them, unravelling the clues and making the strings of numbers carry meaning again. Stacey leaned back, yawning. She had done as much as was humanly possible with Robbie Bishop’s hard drive. Now it was up to the machines.
She got up from her ergonomically designed chair and stretched her arms over her head, feeling the creaks and crackles in her neck and shoulders. She crab-walked over to the window, moving muscles and joints cramped in one position for too long, then gazed down on the city below. So many people on the streets so late at night. Out there, trying to meet their needs. Hoping, searching, desperate.
Stacey turned away. That’s what you got for being needy. Friday night in Temple Fields, sad bastards craving something that would get them through the night. If they got unlucky, they might even get sucked into one of those greedy relationships that used up so much energy and resources.
She’d seen too many swallowed up that way. Good people with something out of the ordinary to give. But those needy emotional co-dependencies had fucked them up every time. If she did get it together with Sam Evans, it would never be that sort of cannibalistic, draining thing. Because the one thing she knew was that she was not going that way. Nobody was going to come between her and the mysteries she wanted to unpick, the solutions she was going to find.
Her parents wanted her to marry and have children. They had this strange notion that first Stacey, then her husband and their children were going to take over the family chain of Chinese supermarkets and food wholesalers. They’d never understood how different her destiny was from that. No marriage to come between her and her machines. If her biological clock demanded children, well, there were ways to deal with that and enough money to make it as convenient as she wanted.
Meet your own needs, that was what it was about. Sam would be nice to play with, but she could manage perfectly well without him. Barefoot, she padded across the loft, stripping off her clothes as she went. On to the big bed, hand reaching automatically for the remotes. The home cinema screen sprang to life, the DVD player kicked in. On the screen, a woman thrust a dildo into a man who in turn was fucking another
woman’s mouth. Their grunts and moans spilled out into the antiseptic air of Stacey’s flat. She rummaged among the covers till she found her vibrator. She spread her legs.
She was ready to roll.
The strobe lights pulsed and the music thundered. It was like being in the middle of a storm, Sam thought, his feet skittering to keep the beat. He moved well, dance the only language that allowed him to express everything he normally held in close check. And tonight was one of those times when he truly wanted to get the previous day out of his system. The shitty drive, the unfairness of the bollocking from Jordan, the mortification of being taken prisoner by their suspect, the drudgery of hanging around while Butler had emergency dental treatment-today had not been one to cut out and keep.
Driving back from Newcastle with Jordan and Butler, he’d been praying that she wouldn’t want to go straight into interrogation. Thankfully, Butler had known his rights and demanded a duty solicitor. And the first thing his brief had insisted on was an eight-hour sleep break. Jordan had liberated him and within an hour, he’d been on the dance floor, dressed for action and ready to strut like a peacock.
For the longest time while he’d been growing up, the dance was enough. He couldn’t remember when music hadn’t made him want to move. Toe tap, knee bounce, hip swivel, shoulder sway, finger click. It had bemused his parents, neither of whom were anything other than special occasion dancers. His primary teacher had suggested dance classes, but his dad had vetoed it on the grounds of cissiness. Sam didn’t care either way he danced regardless, whenever he had the chance.
In his teens, he’d discovered the big deal. Girls loved a boy who loved to dance. Any lad who rescued them from the handbag circle was halfway to paradise after any given ballroom blitz. It had been his teenage one-way ticket to the moon.
These days, it still worked the old magic and it had the added advantage of keeping him fit. He couldn’t get on the floor as often as he would like, but that just meant he had even more energy pent up. It was his only relaxation and he loved it.
