by Val McDermid
‘I’m so sorry,’ Carol said.
The look Dorothy flashed her was sharp as a shard of glass. ‘Are you? Are you really? I thought the two of you never got on.’
Fuck. What happened to British reticence? ‘It’s true we didn’t see eye to eye sometimes. But you don’t have to be friends with someone to appreciate their worth.’ Carol could feel herself slithering around on a shiny surface of hypocrisy. ‘He was very popular with his junior officers. I’m sure you know that. And his actions yesterday…Mrs Cross, he was heroic. I hope you’ve been told that already.’
‘It doesn’t make any odds to me, DCI Jordan. What matters to me is that I’ve lost him.’ It took both hands for her to raise her cup to her lips. It was strange to see such a big, solid woman reduced to fragility. But Carol could see the signs of her unravelling. Her shampoo-and-set hair was strangely asymmetrical, her lipstick line a little smudged. ‘He filled this house with his personality, and he filled my life the same way. We met when we were only seventeen, you know. I don’t think either of us has seriously looked at anybody else since. I feel like I’ve lost half of myself. What it’s like is that whenever one of you forgets some detail from the past, the other remembers it. What am I going to do without him?’ Her eyes were bright with tears, her breath catching in her throat.
‘I can’t imagine,’ Carol said.
‘It makes no sense, you know.’ She kept touching her wedding ring with the tip of her right index finger. Again, she flashed Carol that incisive look. ‘I’m not stupid. I know there must have been plenty wanted him dead at one time or another. People he’d arrested, people he’d got across. But why now? Why seven years after he left the force? I’m sorry, I just don’t believe anybody stays angry for that long. And the sort of people he put away? They’re not poisoners. If one of them was going to come after them, it would have been a shotgun on the doorstep.’
‘I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ll be honest with you, Mrs Cross. We think this might be part of a wider investigation, but I can’t tell you what that is right now.’ Carol took a sip of the excellent coffee. ‘I know you’ll appreciate how it is.’
Dorothy looked pained, as if she didn’t like the idea of her husband’s death not being a unique event. ‘I want whoever did this to be caught and punished, DCI Jordan. I’m not bothered about any other investigation you’re dealing with.’
‘I understand that. And Tom’s death is our number one priority.’
Dorothy reared up in her seat, considerable bosom heaving, and looked down her nose at Carol. ‘You expect me to believe that? With thirty-five dead at Victoria Park?’
Carol put her cup down and looked Dorothy straight in the eye. ‘They’ve taken that away from us. That’s up to Counter Terrorism Command. We’re concentrating on Tom’s death and I have to tell you that, when it comes to investigating murder, my team has no equal.’
Dorothy subsided slightly. But being Tom Cross’s wife for the best part of forty years had left its mark. ‘They’d never have dared take the Bradfield bombing off my Tom. He’d have given John Brandon what for,’ she said, making it plain what she thought of Carol and Brandon both.
Carol told herself she was dealing with a grief-stricken widow. It wasn’t the time to debate Tom Cross’s views on policing. ‘I was hoping you could help me with Tom’s movements yesterday,’ she said.
Dorothy stood up. ‘I knew you’d want to know about it, so I looked it out for you. I’ll be right back.’ She bustled out of the room. Carol couldn’t help thinking that if there were to be a biopic of Tom Cross’s life, you’d have to cast Patricia Routledge as his wife.
Dorothy came back with a sheet of paper and handed it to Carol. While she poured more coffee, Carol read a letter from the head teacher of Harriestown High, asking Tom Cross to act as security consultant for a fundraiser. At the bottom of the letter, Cross had jotted the name Jake Andrews next to a phone number and the name of a restaurant. Beneath that, in a different pen but in the same hand, he’d written Saturday’s date, the name of a pub in Temple Fields, and ‘1 p.m.’.
‘Do you know who Jake Andrews is?’ Carol said.
‘He was organizing the fundraiser. Tom said it was going to be at Pannal Castle. Him and Jake had lunch a couple of weeks back in that fancy French place round the back of The Maltings. They were meeting in the Campion Locks pub yesterday then going on to Jake’s flat for lunch. Do you think that’s when it happened?’ Dorothy said. ‘Is Jake dead as well? Were you investigating him?’
This is the first time I’ve heard his name. Do you know his address?’
Dorothy shook her head. ‘According to Tom, they were meeting in the Campion Locks because Jake’s flat is hard to find. He told Tom it would be easier if they met in the pub then walked round to his place.’
Carol tried not to let her disappointment show. This case was full of frustrations. Every time they had something approaching a lead, it frittered out. ‘Is there anything else Tom said about Jake Andrews?’
Dorothy thought for a moment, stroking her chin in a peculiar gesture that reminded Carol of a man caressing a beard. Finally, she shook her head. ‘He said he seemed to know what he was about. That’s all. Is that when it happened?’
‘We don’t know yet. Before he met Jake-was there anyone else Tom was seeing?’
Dorothy shook her head. ‘He didn’t have time. His taxi came at half past twelve. Just right to get to the far side of Temple Fields.’
Carol couldn’t argue with that. ‘Had he had any threats? Did he ever speak of having enemies?’
‘Not specifically.’ She stroked her non-existent beard again. ‘Like I said, the people who had it in for Tom wouldn’t do anything subtle. He knew there were places he shouldn’t go in Bradfield. Places where he’d put too many of the locals away. But he didn’t live in fear of his life, DCI Jordan.’ There was a catch in her voice. ‘He lived his life to the full. His boat, his golf, his garden…’ She had to stop for a moment, hand on her bosom, eyes shut. When she gathered herself together again, she leaned forward, close enough for Carol to see every line on her face. ‘You catch whoever did this. You catch them and you put them away.’
It felt strange being back inside his house. No wonder people spoke of becoming institutionalized. A week away and Tony felt as if his capabilities had been compromised. He led Sanjar into the living room and collapsed into his armchair with a surge of relief. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘As you can see, I’m not in a position to be very hospitable. This is the first time I’ve been home in a week. There won’t be any milk, but if you want some black tea or coffee, you’re very welcome to help yourself. There might even be some fizzy mineral water in the fridge.’
‘What happened to you?’ It was the first thing Sanjar had said to him since they’d left Vale Avenue. He hadn’t spoken in the cab, which Tony had been grateful for. He hadn’t anticipated how much energy the physical activity would take. But the twenty-minute cab ride had allowed him to recoup some of his resources.
‘I think the technical term is a mad axeman,’ Tony said. ‘One of our patients at Bradfield Moor had an episode. He managed to get out of his room and get his hands on a fire axe.’
Sanjar pointed at him. ‘You’re the bloke who saved them nurses. You were on the news.’
‘I was?’
‘Just on the local news. And they didn’t have no pictures of you. Just pictures of the mental case that went for you guys. You did good.’
Tony fiddled with the arm of his chair, embarrassed. ‘I didn’t do good enough. Somebody died.’
‘Yeah, well. I know what that feels like.’
‘There’s not really been any space for you to grieve, has there?’
Sanjar stared at the fireplace and sighed. ‘My parents are really fucked up,’ he said. ‘They can’t take it in. Their son. Not just that he’s dead, but that he took all those people with him. How can that be? I mean, I’m his brother. Same genes. Same upbringing. And I can’t get my h
ead round it. How can they? Their lives are destroyed, and they’ve lost a son.’ He swallowed hard.
‘I’m sorry.’
Sanjar looked suspiciously at him. ‘What are you sorry for? My brother was a killer, right? We deserve all the shit we get. We deserve to spend the night in police cells. We deserve to have our home ripped to bits.’
The pain and anger were obvious. Tony had carved a career out of his capacity for empathy and imagination. He would have done almost anything to avoid being in the terrible place where Sanjar was. ‘No, you don’t. I’m sorry that you’re hurting. I’m sorry that your parents are suffering,’ he said.
Sanjar looked away. ‘Thanks. OK, I’m here. What did you want to know about my brother?’
‘What do you want to tell me?’
‘What he was really like. Nobody wants to hear what my brother Yousef was really like. And the first thing you need to know is that I loved him. Now me, I couldn’t love a terrorist. I hate those people and so did Yousef. He wasn’t a fundamentalist. He was barely a Muslim. My dad, he’s really devout. And he gets so pissed off with me and Yousef because we’re, like, not. Both of us, we’d find excuses not to go to the mosque. When we were kids, as soon as we were old enough, we quit going to the madrassa. But here’s the thing,’ he carried on, taking over the question Tony was trying to ask. ‘Even if we had been devout, even if we had been down the mosque every day, we wouldn’t have heard no radical shit. The Imam in the Kenton Mosque? He’s totally not into that shit. He’s the kind that talks about how we’re all sons of Abraham and we have to learn to live together. There’s no secret gangs meeting behind closed doors plotting how to blow people up.’ He ran out of steam as suddenly as he’d found it.
‘I believe you,’ Tony said, almost relishing the expression of bemused surprise on Sanjar’s face.
‘You do?’
‘Like I said earlier, I don’t think your brother was a terrorist. Which raises a question that interests me very much. Why would Yousef take a bomb into Victoria Park and blow a hole in the Vestey Stand?’ Tony deliberately didn’t mention the dead. Not that either of them was going to be forgetting the dead any time soon. But there was no need to drag them into the foreground. The last thing Tony wanted was to put Sanjar even more on the defensive.
Sanjar’s mouth twitched then set in a straight line. Time stretched out before he eventually said, TI don’t know. It makes no sense to me.’
‘I know this is going to sound kind of crazy,’ Tony said. ‘But is there any way he might have been paid to do it?’
Sanjar jumped to his feet and took a step towards Tony, hands bunched into fists. ‘What the fuck? You saying my brother was a hit man or something? Fuck. You’re as fucked in the head as those bastards saying he was some kind of fanatic.’
‘Sanjar, you don’t have to act like you’re defending the honour of the family. There’s only you and me here. I have to ask because there’s some evidence that suggests that maybe Yousef thought he was going to survive yesterday afternoon. That he was going to be able to leave the country afterwards. Now, that’s not the mindset of a suicide bomber. So I have to try and think of another explanation. OK? That’s all I’m doing.’
Sanjar paced, agitated. ‘You’ve got it wrong, man. Yousef, he was a gentle guy. He was the last man on the planet to be a hit man.’ He smacked his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘He’d never been to no training camp. He’d never been to Pakistan or Afghanistan. Fuck, we’ve never even been to the bloody Lake District or the Dales.’ He clapped his hands to his chest. ‘We’re peaceful, me and Yousef.’
‘He killed those people, Sanjar. There’s no getting away from that.’
‘And it doesn’t make any sense,’ Sanjar moaned. ‘I don’t know how to get you to understand.’ He suddenly stopped, staring at the console table where Tony’s former laptop had been retired. ‘You got wireless? Can I turn your computer on? There’s something I want to show you.’
‘Go ahead.’
Sanjar waited for the machine to boot then navigated his way to a blog called DoorMAT-the portal for Muslims Against Terrorism. Meanwhile, Tony managed to get to his feet and cross the room. He leaned against the arm of the sofa and looked at the screen. At the login screen, Sanjar typed in an email address. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Yousef’s address. Not mine.’ At the password prompt, he typed ‘Transit350’. He looked back at Tony. ‘We always use our vehicles for our passwords. That way you don’t forget.’ Once accepted on to the site, Sanjay clicked the mouse a few times and up popped a listing of Yousef’s posts to the blog. Sanjay clicked at random.
OK, Salman31, I haven’t lived in a city where the BNP have seats on the council. But I know if I did, I would be making protests that got better headlines than the rabble on the streets in Burnley. The BNP thugs act like savages, it’s what people expect from chavs with shaved heads. Nobody thinks any worse of them, but we do the same, and suddenly we got no reputation, we should know better, ect, ect. We have to be better than them, we have to be.
‘You go through his posts, that’s what they’re like. That doesn’t sound much like a hit man, does it?’
‘No,’ Tony said, thinking how much he wanted to spend some time with Yousef’s posts when his brother wasn’t looking over his shoulder. ‘You make your point very well. So has anything changed recently? Has Yousef changed? Has there been anything different about him lately? New friends? New routines? New girlfriend?’
Sanjar’s brow furrowed in concentration. ‘He’s been a bit up and down the last six months or so,’ he said slowly. ‘Off his food, not sleeping. Up, like a geezer with a new lady, then down like she’d dumped him. Then up again. I didn’t see him with anybody, though. We’d go out together, clubbing or just for a meal with friends, and he wasn’t hanging with any of the girls in particular. I never saw him with a girl, not lately. He’d been working pretty hard too, nailing down some new contracts. A lot of meetings and shit. So he didn’t really have time for a new girl, innit?’
‘And he never said anything?’
Sanjar shook his head. ‘No. Not a thing.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Look, I gotta go. I promised my dad I would be back.’ He stood up and stretched a hand out to Tony. ‘I appreciate you listening. But I don’t think this is ever going to make sense.’
Tony searched his pockets till he finally unearthed a business card. ‘This is who I am. Call me if you want to talk.’
Sanjar pocketed it with the nearest Tony had seen to a proper smile. ‘No disrespect, like, but I don’t think I’m gonna need a shrink.’
‘I’m not a shrink. Not the way you’re thinking of it. I don’t have people lying on couches telling me about their miserable childhoods. I get too bored too easily. What I do is find practical uses for psychology. Often, I don’t know what they are till I get there. I like trying to fix what’s broken, Sanjar.’
The younger man smiled and reached for the pen and notepad beside the computer. He scribbled something and dropped it back on the table. ‘My mobile, innit? Call me if you want to talk. I’ll see myself out.’
Tony watched him go, feeling quite deeply disturbed. As Sanjar had said, same genes, same upbringing. If Yousef Aziz had been anything like his brother, Tony couldn’t imagine how he’d ended up blowing thirty-five people to kingdom come. He desperately wanted to read those blog contributions. But first, he’d better get back to hospital before they called the cops. Carol would really love that.
Kevin reckoned that Nigel Foster would never have made head teacher of the Double Aitch in his day. The man who had ruled the roost back then had the build of a prop forward and a voice like a foghorn. Foster was tall, already slightly stooped at forty-something. His polo shirt and jeans hung baggy on his thin frame. His head and neck had the defleshed look of a wasted old man. But his expression was lively, his eyes bright and watchful. He’d suggested meeting at his home, but Kevin had wanted to see the Double Aitch up close and personal. Foster had protested that it was too much
hassle to disarm the building security, so they’d compromised. They’d settled on the rickety wooden stand that overlooked the football pitch. A swell of nostalgia surged through Kevin. He’d had some of his finest hours on that turf. He could still remember some of the plays. ‘I loved playing here,’ he said. ‘Not many schools had a proper spectator stand like this. You could almost believe you were doing it for real.’
‘It’s due for demolition, I’m afraid,’ Foster said in a pleasant tenor voice with traces of a Welsh accent. ‘Health and Safety. It would cost too much to fireproof it the way they want it.’
Kevin’s face twisted into a cynical sneer. ‘We mollycoddle them these days.’
‘We’ve developed a culture of blame and litigation,’ Foster said. ‘But I mustn’t waste your time. How can I help you with your investigation, Sergeant?’
It was, Kevin thought, a subtle rebuke for taking up the headmaster’s valuable Sunday. ‘Three men have died recently from a variety of poisons. We think the cases may be connected, and one of the links between them is that they are all former pupils.’
A quick flash of surprise crossed Foster’s face. ‘I knew about Robbie Bishop, of course. But there have been others?’
‘You might have missed the story, with all the news coverage of the bomb. But another man died yesterday, nothing to do with the explosion. Ex-Detective Superintendent Tom Cross.’
Foster frowned. ‘He died? I read something about him being one of the heroes of the hour.’
‘His death didn’t make the early editions. But he died from poisoning too, similar to Robbie. And a third man, Danny Wade. Also a former pupil. Also poisoned.’
