Beneath the Bleeding

by Val McDermid

  ‘I’m going to call you Jack,’ Tony said. ‘I know that whatever happened three years ago makes you feel Jack is dead, but he’s the one I know most about, so Jack it’s going to be. I think of that boy Jack, and my heart goes out to him. Lots of kids grow up without dads. I’m one of them, so I understand a bit about what that means. But my dad wasn’t killed. I always had the possibility of him coming back into my life, no matter how remote a chance that was. But you didn’t, did you? Your dad was gone for ever. No hope to hang on to for you. And worse than that, he died a hero. A soldier’s death, dying for queen and country. That’s far too much for a teenager to live up to.

  ‘And then there’s all the things he lost, dying when he did. All the things he never saw, never did. The internet. iPods. Digital cameras. Cheap air fares. Google. You growing up. I suppose that’s why you got so greedy for experience. Women. Drink. Drugs. Men. Snorting, shooting up, shagging, getting shit-faced. All of it, there to be grabbed-’

  ‘What do you mean, men? I’m not a poof.’ His arms had unfolded, his hands gripping the side of his chair.

  Bingo. The anti-retrovirals had been the clue, but even so, Tony hadn’t expected a crack in the armour so early. ‘I never said you were.’ Tony’s voice remained calm and relaxed. Hypnotic, almost. ‘I was talking about the desire for experience. I thought you wanted to experience everything? To feel it for yourself. Fearless and receptive to everything, every sensation. To take everything the world had to offer and grab it, to miss out on nothing. Am I wrong, then?’

  ‘Your words, not mine, Doctor.’ Anderson was doing his best to be the tough guy, but Tony could sense the anger and anguish underneath. All that pain, and nowhere to put it.

  ‘But I’m right. We both know that,’ he said. ‘I’m not a poof either, if that helps. It doesn’t mean I’ve not thought about what it would be like. I mean, when you’ve gone through every other experience, you do have to wonder. Would it be more of the same or would it be different?’ Time for a shift of tempo. ‘Then when your mum died-that was one experience you didn’t want to have. Didn’t want her to kill herself, didn’t want to know about that kind of despair. Didn’t want her to die, did you? How hard it must have been for her, hanging on till she thought you were sorted, and then going for it. For that one experience that nobody gets to share. She did what she could and then she clocked off. Left you to it. I’d guess if there was anything you’d missed out on before that, you went for it after she took herself off.’

  Anderson shifted in his seat. ‘Have I got to listen to this amateur psychology all day?’ he burst out.

  ‘Nothing amateur about it, Jack. I get paid for this. So, what else was on the list? Play premiership football. Buy a house on Dunelm Drive. Make a million by the time you hit thirty. Drive a Ferrari.’ Tony could see it working. Every sentence provoked a tiny flutter of reaction. Time to step up the pressure. ‘How am I doing, Jack? How many more on the list? How many more were you planning to poison? Poison their lives like he poisoned yours?’

  He drew in a ragged breath. ‘You’re talking bollocks. What does that mean? Poisoned lives? You think whoever killed these guys was using murder as a metaphor? How can you trivialize death like that? You’re sicker than the killers you’re supposed to be hunting.’

  Tony shrugged. ‘You’re not the first to suggest that. But the bottom line is that I’m not a killer. You are. And the only reason you interest me or anybody else right now is because we want to know why. I think I know why, but it would be good to hear I’m right.’

  ‘You’re so full of shit,’ Anderson said. ‘People like you, thinking you know what drives people-you don’t have a clue.’

  ‘Smokescreen, Jack. It might put some people off, but not me. I’m not interested in your attempts to set up a diversion. Let’s get back to what this is really about. Your attempts to extract revenge for having your dreams stolen from you by the man who poisoned your life.’

  ‘I am not a poof,’ Anderson said, more loudly this time.

  ‘Who said anything about a poof?’ Tony said, all innocence, hands spread. ‘I was asking about your little list. About what else was on it. Three down. How many more to go? I know there’s at least one. Kevin, the Ferrari guy. Did you really think they’d sit back and let you take another one of theirs? You got Tom Cross, because we weren’t looking in the right place.’ Tony leaned forward, getting in his face, still calm but inescapable. ‘But no way were you getting Kevin Matthews.’

  For the first time, Anderson looked shaken, his face startled and alert. ‘I do a bit of freelance journalism. I was interviewing him.’

  ‘How long did it take you to find a journalist with the right initials? Or was it seeing the real Justin Adams’s by-line that gave you the idea of how to get to Kevin?’ Tony cocked his head and appraised Anderson. ‘I’m curious, you know. Are you relieved that we’ve stopped you? Or are you pissed off because you didn’t get to finish what you started? Just out of curiosity, what was your endgame? Were you going to do the list and then stop? Live out whatever life you’ve got left? Or were you going to bottle it like your mother did?’

  A muscle bunched in Anderson’s jaw. ‘I told you. It was an interview. I do some freelance journalism, OK? Then he started to freak out. I have no idea why. You should be asking where he was before he arrived at my place. Whatever he took, he must have taken it there. I don’t know what you’re on about. Poison, gay sex? That’s not my world.’

  Tony was about to speak, but Carol’s voice in his ear made him pause. ‘Tony, I’ve just had a message from the CSIs. They’ve found his list, taped underneath the keyboard of his computer. The two you don’t have are, “Make a chart CD” and “Date a top model”. You got that?’

  He nodded. ‘Oh yes it is, Jack. Kevin and his Ferrari. Also on your little list. So who was going to be next? Which of Bradfield’s charting artistes were you going to take down? Or were you going for the guy with the model girlfriend? Let me think, who do we have from Bradfield who’s got a top catwalk chick? That would have to be Deepak, wouldn’t it? Our homegrown fashion designer. Was he on the list too?’

  Anderson’s eyebrows had drawn closer, creating a shallow vertical crease between them. Anxiety, that’s what Tony was going for now. Make him anxious. Make him uneasy. Shift the ground beneath his feet. And then offer him comfort.

  ‘They’re very upset about Kevin, you know? He’s popular around here. What was it going to be this time? Monksbane? Foxglove? Strychnine? I tell you, you hit on an elegant idea there. Poison. Poison their lives the way he poisoned yours.’ And suddenly, he knew. The repetition, designed to unsettle Anderson, had opened the door for Tony. It was a leap, he knew. But it was a leap that made perfect sense.

  He folded his hands together on the table and let the pity he felt flow out. ‘Just one time. That’s all it took. You wanted to taste everything, wanted to know everything. But it wasn’t like all the other times when you pushed the boundaries and had fun, was it? You hated it. Because you’re right. You’re not a poof. You thought it would be OK, but you hated it. Hated it so much it made you hate yourself. That’s when you stopped being Jack, wasn’t it? Jack was ruined, fucked up. So you left Jack behind. You knew that being dead meant saying goodbye to the past, so you did. Jack became John and sometimes Jake. You still had your dreams, though. Still had the list. Still believed you could make the climb.’

  Anderson gripped his chair more tightly, his shoulder muscles bunched and taut. He shook his head violently, as if he were trying to shake off something sticky and disgusting.

  Tony spoke softly now. ‘And then you found out. Just one time, that’s all it took. That infection in the blood, poisoning you. Killing you. It doesn’t matter that these days you can take the drugs and live longer. Who wants to live longer without their dreams? What’s the point in existing? You had the world at your feet, you were going to be somebody. And one bad night took it all away.’

  The silence between them stretched o
ut, tight and dramatic. Anderson looked as if something was going to snap inside him. Tony decided to try and make it.

  His tone was silky, sweet. ‘So you decided if you couldn’t have your dreams, then the men who had walked the same path as you weren’t going to have them either. You could have been them, but you weren’t, so they weren’t going to be allowed to be them either.’ Then his voice changed abruptly. Harsh and loud, Tony said, ‘Well, here’s the news, Jack. You don’t get to take away anybody else’s dreams. You’re going to jail, where they’ll take good care of you and make sure every day you have left is filled with misery. You’re going to live long and prosper behind bars. Where everybody else inside with you will know all the juicy details from your trial.’

  Anderson jumped up and lunged for Tony, who swung one of his crutches hard through the air, smacking it into Anderson’s ribs and catching him off balance enough to make him fall to the floor. ‘You see? They’re not rushing in to help me, are they?’ Tony said. ‘That’s because they know you’re not up to giving me a proper beating. You don’t like violence. Chris Devine just got unlucky in the heat of the moment. If you’d had to think about it, you’d never have hit her. That’s another reason why you chose the poison. So you could kill at arm’s length.’ He shook his head. ‘I started out feeling sympathy for you, Jack. Now, I just feel pity.’

  Anderson scrambled to his feet and slunk back to his chair. ‘I don’t want your pity.’

  ‘So earn my respect. Tell me how it was. If I’m wrong, tell me now. I’ll take it back.’

  Anderson slumped in the chair, defeated. ‘I’m not going to talk about it. Whatever evidence they find, I’m not going to talk about it. I’ll plead guilty. But I’m not going to talk about the stuff you were saying. There won’t be any trial to taint me. It’ll always be a mystery, why I did it.’ His eyes blazed anger. ‘I killed them. That’s what you need me to say, right? I did what I had to do. I killed them.’

  After they took Anderson away, Tony found he really didn’t want to move. Drained and in pain, he was unwilling to do anything that might make either of those states worse. So he sat there. The custody sergeant brought him a cup of coffee that must have come from his private stash because it tasted of something. Other than that, they left him in peace. He drank most of the coffee, then let the last inch cool so he could use it to swallow some codeine. What kind of a job was it where the high point of success meant feeling so shit?

  He wasn’t certain how much time had passed when Carol came back. She sat down opposite him and reached across the table to put her hand over his. ‘Kevin’s doing fine. He’s going to be all right. And we’ve charged Anderson,’ she said. ‘If the CSIs come through, we’ll be home and dry. We can tie him to Tom Cross for sure, and there’s circumstantial evidence with Danny Wade. And the attempt on Kevin. And if he sticks to the guilty plea, we’ll get Robbie as well.’

  ‘He’ll change his mind as soon as a brief gets to work on him,’ Tony said. It was the way of the world. Whoever ended up representing him would see the potential for headlines as well as the need for justice to be seen to be done. ‘Let’s just pray it’s not Bronwen Scott.’

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk to me about?’ Carol said, taking her hand back.

  His eyelids flickered with tiredness. ‘Oh,’ he said slowly. ‘Now you come to mention it…’

  ‘Tony,’ John Brandon’s voice boomed from the doorway. ‘Congratulations. Fresh out of hospital and you’re doing our job for us. Well done.’ He shook Tony’s hand and pulled up a chair. ‘Now, Carol tells me we have something of a delicate situation on our hands. It might be helpful to have your input here. Carol?’

  ‘It seems we have an alternative scenario for Saturday’s bombing,’ she said. ‘Tony and DC McIntyre went to see Rachel Diamond yesterday. The widow of Benjamin Diamond, one of the stadium bomb victims. It had emerged that Mr Diamond’s company had links to Yousef Aziz’s family business. Tony had already raised doubts with me about whether this might be something other than a straightforward terrorist outrage, so when he asked if he could talk to Mrs Diamond about any possible connection between her husband and Yousef Aziz, I thought it would be worth pursuing. Tony?’

  ‘Rachel Diamond claimed she hadn’t been following the media coverage, and it occurred to me afterwards she might not have seen a photo of Aziz, and so she might not have realized something she’d seen and written off as completely innocent was in fact something quite different. So I went back to her house today with a photo of Aziz. She wasn’t there, but her son Lev was. He caught sight of the photo of Aziz and said, “Why have you got a photo of Mummy’s friend?” I didn’t press him in any way, I know the rules about juvenile witnesses. And he said that they’d met Aziz in the park and he’d bought him an ice cream. It dawned on me that there was a different explanation from either of the ones we’d been considering.’

  Brandon looked worried. ‘CTC are not going to like this.’ he said.

  ‘Tough,’ Carol said. She hadn’t forgiven Brandon for what she still saw as spinelessness in the face of the enemy. ‘Tony?’

  ‘Yousef Aziz wasn’t a terrorist. He wasn’t a hit man either. He was a lover. He was snarled up in…forgive me for sounding like a bad tabloid headline, but there’s no other way to describe it than forbidden love. The son of a devout Muslim falls in love with a married Jewish woman. It’s not going to play well at home, is it? They’re both going to be cast out of their families and the businesses they’ve worked so hard to build.

  ‘I think Rachel was the brains behind it.’ He shook his head. ‘Actually, having spent some time with Rachel, I have a creepy suspicion that she went after Aziz with the sole intention of setting up what finally happened-killing two birds with one stone. But I’m getting ahead of myself.’ Brandon looked as if he wanted to be anywhere but with them. Undaunted, Tony carried on.

  ‘They’re having an affair. Aziz is head over heels in love, he’d do anything for her. And Rachel hits on a great idea. They fake a terrorist bombing. They’ll get rid of Benjamin without anyone suspecting the motive. Aziz also gets to strike a blow against the system that oppresses his people, because the people they’re blowing up are the rich bastards who despise the likes of him and his family.

  ‘What Aziz thinks is going to happen is this. He’s going to set the manual timer, get out of there before it blows, drive to the airport and be gone before anybody even starts to look for him. He’s going to go to Canada, which is a clever choice, because there are quite a lot of Asians there. Rachel is supposedly going to join him there-’

  ‘I hate to interrupt,’ Carol said, ‘but I have some information on that front. Stacey has traced a booking on a flight to Toronto next Friday for Rachel Diamond and her son Lev. And we’ve found a holiday rental company who leased a cottage for a month, starting on Saturday, to Rachel Diamond. Yousef Aziz had previously viewed the cottage on his computer. Both flight and cottage were paid for on her personal credit card. So Tony’s right. Whether she was planning to join Aziz or not, she had the bookings to demonstrate her intent.’

  ‘It’s very thin,’ Brandon said.

  ‘There’s more to be found,’ Carol said. ‘We’ll be able to trace the call to the remote-control timer. If she used her landline, it’ll be on her phone records. If she used a mobile, we’ll be able to find what mast it went through. I’m betting Stacey will be able to find some evidence on one of the Diamonds’ several computers. We’ll be talking to all the Diamonds’ friends. There must be someone who knew the marriage was in trouble. There always is. And now we know what we’re looking for, we’ll find witnesses who saw them together. And Tony will give evidence of what Lev said.’

  ‘Hearsay,’ Brandon said.

  ‘Actually, sir, I think this comes under one of the exceptions to the hearsay rule,’ Carol said politely.

  Brandon shook his head. ‘I don’t like it, Carol. You think a jury’s going to buy the idea of a Jewish woman setting up
her Muslim lover to kill himself and thirty-five other people, just to get rid of her husband? Why didn’t she just divorce him, like the rest of us do?’

  ‘Because she’s greedy,’ Tony said. And I know all about greedy women.

  ‘I want to arrest her, sir,’ Carol said. ‘On thirty-six counts of murder. Because if we don’t, as soon as her mother tells her what Lev said to Tony, she’ll be on the next plane out of here. And if you think what we’ve got is thin for an arrest, it won’t even get to first base on an extradition warrant.’

  Brandon groaned, ‘I don’t like this, Carol. It feels like a fishing expedition.’ There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Brandon shouted.

  Stacey walked in looking very pleased with herself. ‘I thought you’d want to see this,’ she said, laying the folder she carried on the table.

  ‘What’s this?’ Brandon asked.

  The CSIs who turned over Aziz’s flat found a receipt for a Coke and a cake at the City Art Gallery on Friday morning. So we took the initiative and seized the CCTV footage from the café and the gallery. We’ve got the whole thing upstairs, but I thought you’d like to see the edited highlights now.’

  Brandon flipped the file open and they all stared at the contents. The first photo showed Yousef Aziz sitting at a table reading the paper, Coke and cake in front of him. In the next shot, Rachel Diamond was approaching from behind carrying a newspaper. The next shot showed her putting the paper on the table in front of Yousef. In the final shot, she was beyond him, no longer carrying the paper. ‘Three points of contact between them,’ Carol said. ‘I say it’s definitely time to go fishing.’ Brandon still looked dubious, but he nodded his assent.

  ‘Look on the bright side, John,’ said Tony. This way you get to tell CTC to piss off.’

  Three months later

  A bright Sunday afternoon, a classic Northern England landscape of high moors and long valleys. A scarlet Ferrari convertible, top down, drifted along a single-track road that wound uphill to a high plateau. ‘Where are we going?’ Tony asked Carol. ‘And why are we going there in Kevin’s car?’