Cross and Burn

by Val McDermid

  ‘I believe not. They’re talking about lining her up with a guide dog. But that’ll be a bit down the road.’

  Carol thanked her and ended the call, wondering whether she had the strength for this. But building a bridge between her and Chris was the first step to regaining her humanity. She’d called ahead to ask about visiting times and been told that visitors were expected to leave by nine o’clock. So she’d finished work in the late afternoon, showered the sweat and dirt away and put on one of her business suits for the first time in months. She stretched the process out as long as she could, taking time out for a large glass of cold pinot grigio. Then another. But finally there was nothing for it but to set off across the rolling green landscape to the tiny cathedral city.

  The convalescent home was on the edge of town, not far from the ruined grandeur of Fountains Abbey. It was hidden at the end of a twisting drive, obscured from sight by a shrubbery that looked mature enough to have been planted by the original owners of the sprawling Victorian villa that formed its heart. There were modern two-storey wings on either side of the main house and small chalets dotted the fringes of the wide lawns, all linked by well-groomed paths. Lights burned in several windows, but the curtains were already drawn in the downstairs rooms. If she hadn’t known what she was coming to, Carol would have been hard pressed to identify its purpose from outside.

  A heavy Gothic door stood open into a substantial porch. The doors leading inside were modern, however, and slid open as they detected her presence. Inside was more like a hotel foyer than a hospital facility. A way, Carol thought, of communicating to people that this was a step on the road to something approaching normal life. It even smelled like a hotel rather than a hospital, a vague floral scent like supermarket pot pourri hanging in the air.

  In keeping with this image, the young woman behind the curved reception desk wore a cheap business suit that was slightly too tight across the bust. She smiled in greeting. ‘Good evening. How can I help you?’

  For a moment, Carol was nonplussed. She’d been introducing herself by rank for so long she’d almost forgotten the art of plain announcement. ‘I’m here to see Chris Devine,’ she said. ‘Sergeant Devine.’

  ‘Is Sergeant Devine expecting you?’

  Carol shook her head. ‘I’m her commanding officer,’ she said, slipping uneasily into the persona she’d abandoned months ago. ‘DCI Jordan.’ She took a slim leather wallet from her pocket. She wasn’t sure whether BMP had forgotten to tell her to return her ID or nobody had had the nerve to ask for it. Either way, she’d hung on to it. She wasn’t a sentimental woman. She could only suppose that at some level, she’d kept it because it might come in handy. She didn’t want to think about what that might mean. Right now, she was happy just to milk it. She flipped the wallet open and let the receptionist take it in.

  The woman tugged her jacket down, as if attempting a parade-ground attention. ‘Have you visited us before?’

  ‘This is my first time. Can you direct me to Chris’s room?’

  The directions were straightforward. Carol smiled her gratitude and set off towards one of the modern wings. Her normal brisk pace slowed as she neared her destination. By the end she was dawdling, pausing to look at the vibrant abstract paintings that hung on the corridor walls. Outside Chris’s door, she ran a hand through her hair and wished she’d had a large vodka. She clenched the fist of her left hand so tight she could feel her short fingernails digging into her palm. And gently rapped on the door.

  A voice that didn’t sound like Chris said, ‘Come in.’

  Carol opened the door and stepped across the threshold. She’d barely registered that the figure in one chair was Chris when the woman in the other chair jumped to her feet, a look of welcoming enquiry switching in an instant to one of hostility. ‘I’m sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong room,’ Sinead Burton said, her voice warm and polite, her face the diametric opposite. She held a finger to her lips. ‘Can I show you the way?’ She crossed the room, practically pushing Carol out through the door. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, love,’ she called over her shoulder to Chris, who had turned her head towards them, her face a twisted pink and purple mask. Carol had tried to prepare for it, but still it shook her.

  Sinead closed the door firmly behind her and shooed Carol down the hall with her hands. As soon as they were far enough from the door not to be overheard, she started on Carol, her voice tight with suppressed anger. ‘What the hell are you doing here? I thought you had the good sense to stay away. What the hell are you playing at?’

  Carol backed away. Her previous encounters with Chris’s partner hadn’t prepared her for this. ‘I wanted to say sorry,’ she stuttered.

  ‘You wanted to say sorry?’ Sinead’s Irish accent grew more pronounced as her anger rose. ‘You don’t think it might be a wee bit late for that? My wife nearly dies instead of you and it takes you all these weeks and months to get round to saying sorry? Talk about a day late and a dollar short. Jesus.’

  Carol felt tears closing her throat. But she knew she had to hold it together. It was obvious that tears would cut no ice with Sinead. ‘I know. Believe me, I know. But I couldn’t handle it.’

  Sinead cut straight across her. ‘You couldn’t handle it? What the hell do you think it’s been like for her? The excruciating pain. The loss of her sight. The loss of her face, for God’s sake. Couldn’t handle it? You should have crawled on your hands and knees the day after and begged for her to forgive you.’

  ‘I’d just lost my brother and sister-in-law,’ Carol said.

  ‘It’s not a bloody fucking competition.’ Sinead’s voice was cold and hard as stone. ‘You should have been here right from the start.’

  Carol swallowed. ‘I know that, Sinead. Nobody could feel more guilty and ashamed than I do.’

  ‘As you should. Well, you’re not welcome here. You haven’t earned the right to be here. I don’t care how hard it’s been on you, it’s been a hundred times harder on her. Other people have been here for her, you know. Paula and Kevin, they come a lot. Sam stops in, and even Stacey the geek. And you know who comes regular as clockwork? Tony. He’s been coming right from the start. And believe me, he’s a man who wears his guilt on his sleeve. But the one person she wanted to hear from, the woman she respected more than any other officer she ever worked under, the person she ended up sacrificing herself for – you couldn’t be bothered to show your face. Well, fuck you, Carol Jordan. You don’t get to stroll in now Tony’s done the hard stuff for you. So are you going to walk right out of here or am I going to get security on to you?’

  Carol wanted to slump to the floor and sob till her throat was raw. Instead, she simply nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’ She turned and walked back the way she’d come, desperate to make it to her car before she fell apart.

  Sinead’s last words hit like a handful of hail in her face. ‘And don’t fucking come again.’

  18

  Tony paused in the cramped hallway that smelled faintly of smoked paprika. ‘Are we going to get in trouble?’

  ‘Only if you grass me up. I did log the keys out officially. I told Fielding I wanted another look. I’m not mad – I’m not going totally off the reservation.’

  ‘Fair enough. You said you had a set of the crime-scene photos,’ he reminded Paula. ‘Can I see them before we go in?’

  ‘This isn’t where she was killed,’ Paula said, opening her bag to get the folder of photos she’d printed off before leaving the CID office. ‘There’s nothing to suggest the killer was ever here.’

  ‘I realise that. But until we know how and where he acquired Nadia, I don’t want to rule out any possible connections.’

  ‘I hate that word.’ Paula pulled out the folder.

  ‘Connections?’ Tony sounded confused.

  ‘“Acquired” – it’s so cold. So clinical.’

  ‘I am a clinician. This is supposed to be scientific, not emotional.’ He shrugged, doing his ‘helpless’ face. ‘But you’re right,
it is cold. Would you prefer me to talk about “intersections”? That always sounds like a traffic report to me.’ He took the proffered photographs and slipped them out of the folder. In the dim light of the hallway, he flipped through them quickly, taking a first impression of the body and its surroundings. Then he tugged a pair of owlish black-rimmed specs from his inside pocket and put them on. ‘I’m getting old,’ he said. ‘I can’t see detail without my glasses.’ Taking his time, he studied each photograph from different angles. ‘I once had a tutor, quite a young bloke, who thought wearing glasses made people take him more seriously. One day, I was sitting behind him when he took them off to polish them and I realised they were plain glass. Whether it was vanity or insecurity that drove him to it, it cost him my respect. And because I was young and smart-arsed, I told my fellow students what I’d spotted. So the trick he’d used to earn gravitas ended up making him look a fool.’

  ‘And there endeth the sermon for today,’ Paula said. ‘What about my crime scene?’

  Tony sighed. ‘I’m wasted here. All that hard-won wisdom, and where does it get me?’ He selected a full-length shot of Nadia’s body. ‘What did Grisha say about the damage to her body?’

  ‘He said he’d given her a good kicking. Probably with steel-toecapped boots.’

  ‘What about stamp marks? Did he say anything about that?’

  ‘He made a point of saying the killer got lucky because he couldn’t see any stamp marks.’

  ‘And that’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night,’ Tony said. ‘He didn’t stamp on her, which is the natural thing to do when you’re frenziedly attacking someone and they fall on the ground. You kick and you stamp. So right there, you’ve got a contradiction. Battering her face to a bloody pulp, to the point where she’s unrecognisable, that looks like frenzy. As if the killer is out of control. But the fact that he very carefully doesn’t stamp on her suggests his actions are deliberate. He’s thought this through. He doesn’t want to leave forensic traces. He doesn’t want to get caught.’

  ‘So why the overkill on the face?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. The textbook answer is, to depersonalise her. To objectify her. To make her less than human so what he’s doing isn’t really murder, because she’s a thing not a person. But that doesn’t feel right here somehow. Because the other business, the sealing up of the labia, that’s very personal. That’s making a statement of possession. “I’m done with you but nobody else can have you.” That’s what that says to me. It’s not a generalised statement of misogyny, it’s specific, it’s aimed directly at her. And that runs directly counter to the notion of smashing her face to depersonalise her.’ He frowned at the photograph, turning it this way and that. ‘I don’t know, I’m going to have to think about this.’

  ‘Good. I like what happens when you think about things. Now, are you done with the pics? Because I’m getting claustrophobia here. Any chance we could move into a room-sized space?’ She handed him a pair of nitrile gloves.

  Three doors led off the lobby. Tony opened the nearest one and revealed a poky, windowless bathroom with a shower cubicle, a toilet and a tiny sink. The lingering smell of toiletries couldn’t quite hide the fetor of damp. ‘Later,’ he muttered and hastily pulled the door to.

  The next door led to a room that comprised living room, dining corner and kitchen. The separate components could have made for a comfortable, welcoming space if they hadn’t been crammed into half the area they actually required. Instead, it felt crowded and confined. ‘Deceptively poky. Isn’t that what the estate agents never say?’ Tony looked around, taking in the pockets of clutter that had infiltrated the few available spaces. Piles of magazines, stacks of DVDs, cardboard boxes half-full of drug samples and promotional giveaways – pens, mouse mats, coasters. He squatted beside the DVDs and scanned the titles. ‘No sign of anybody else’s taste here. Bridesmaids, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Wedding Singer, Eight Women, Juno, Notting Hill, There’s Something about Mary, Amelie, My Best Friend’s Wedding. The fairytale reimagined for the twenty-first century.’

  ‘Fairytales for straight girls. Nothing in Polish?’

  Tony stood up and grunted as his knees cracked. ‘No. She was probably trying to improve her English. Given her job.’ He crossed to the dining table, where there was a laptop-shaped space between a stack of papers, an all-in-one printer, scanner and copier, and an A4 pad with a few lines of scribbled notes. ‘Did forensics take the laptop?’

  Paula nodded. ‘They did. I’ll ask them for a copy of the hard drive in the morning. If I’m going to talk Stacey into looking at Bev’s hard drive, I might as well get her to see what she can find on Nadia’s computer as well.’

  But Tony wasn’t listening. Now he had advanced into the kitchen area, he’d spotted a corkboard on a short section of wall that jutted into the room. The board had been obscured from sight when he’d been in the main part of the room. He made straight for it and stared at it, frowning as if he was cataloguing the contents for the crime-scene equivalent of Kim’s Game. ‘This is more like it,’ he said.

  Three takeaway menus – Indian, Chinese and catch-all pizza, kebab and burger. He turned and glanced round the kitchen area. ‘She cooked. You can smell it, you can see it from the pans and the knives and stuff. And there’s vegetables in the rack. Onions, potatoes, carrots, garlic. OK, the onions and potatoes are sprouting and the carrots are as wrinkled as a Shar Pei’s scrotum…’

  ‘That’s probably because, one way or another, she left here three weeks ago,’ Paula interrupted.

  He nodded. ‘She worked hard, she worked late. She didn’t always have time to cook.’

  ‘Maybe she couldn’t be bothered.’

  ‘Take a look in the cupboards,’ he said, anticipating open packets of ingredients, jars of herbs and spices, tins he’d have no idea what to do with.

  Paula revealed exactly what he’d expected. ‘You win. She cooked.’ She picked an open cardboard box off the shelf and peered inside. ‘Now I know the Polish word for lentils.’ While she was on this theme, she opened the fridge. It smelled of over-ripe cheese and bad fruit and the plastic bottle in the door shelf was solid with spoiled milk. ‘Well, that’s one question answered. I don’t believe she ever went to Poland. She’d never have left all this food to go off in the fridge. She certainly didn’t come home at the weekend just in time to be abducted. At the very least she’d have binned this rotten stuff.’

  Tony turned his attention back to the corkboard. A postcard from Ibiza. He unpinned it. ‘Sun shining, booze cheap, plenty guys!!! You should have come. Ashley xxx’ He replaced it. Business cards from a computer repair shop, a Polish deli in Harriestown, a dressmaker specialising in alterations and a taxi firm. The police would check them all, he knew. Chances were high that they would lead nowhere. Although Ashley might be able to colour in some of the background to Nadia’s life.

  There were a couple of flyers for upcoming pub gigs by local bands, a bus timetable for the 183 from Harriestown to Bellwether Square and a cartoon about Polish builders. Finally, he turned his attention to the photographs. A dog-eared and faded colour snap of a wedding party – bride and groom and two presumed sets of parents. ‘Her mum and dad?’

  ‘No reason to think otherwise.’

  Next, three women, arms around each other, in a nightclub or a fun pub, all mugging drunkenly at the camera. The kind of photograph half the women in Britain under thirty had on display, commemorating some celebratory night out with the girls. Tony was about to pass on, but something nagged at him. He took the photo off the board and studied it more closely. ‘The one in the middle,’ he said. ‘She looks familiar. I can’t place her. She’s not someone I know. But I’ve met her somewhere.’ He looked up at Paula, whose expression was unreadable. ‘Do we know who she is?’

  ‘Oh yeah, Tony. We know exactly who she is. She’s the victim.’

  His confusion was obvious. ‘That’s Nadia Wilkowa?’

  19

  Bev had no
way of measuring how long she’d been conscious inside the freezer. She’d started trying to count the minutes, going from one elephant to sixty then back again, but she couldn’t keep track. Her mind was too busy skittering from one awful possibility to another. And beneath them all, the constant thrum of anxiety about Torin. How would he be coping without her? How would he cope if she never got back to him? Would he go to the police? Would they find her in time? She tried to push the worst of her imaginings away from her, but there was no escaping it. This wasn’t the kind of predicament that generally had a positive ending.

  As well as losing all sense of time, Bev had also given up on dignity. She’d grown uncomfortably conscious of her full bladder but she’d held it in for as long as she could. Then she’d asked herself why she was bothering. She was locked in a chest freezer wearing nothing but a pair of pants that didn’t belong to her. There was nothing dignified in any of that. How could it be worse to be sitting in a puddle of her own piss? If it – literally – pissed off the person who’d put her in here, then score one to her.

  When the light came it was a physical shock. Without warning, the lid of the freezer suddenly lifted and a blaze of brilliant white light stunned her optic nerve. All she had time for was to cross her forearms across her face in a timeless gesture of self-defence and supplication before excruciating pain shot through her body and reduced her muscles to jelly. Completely disorientated, Bev felt herself lifted through the air then dumped face down on the floor. As her senses gradually returned, she was aware of rough cement against her skin. There was some kind of cold cuff round her left ankle and she felt her hands being secured behind her. She opened her mouth to scream but before she could make a sound, a terrible blow to the ribs knocked the air out of her. Strong hands turned her on her back and punched her in the side of the head. Colours flashed behind her eyes and thick pain throbbed through her head. ‘Shut the fuck up, bitch,’ a man’s voice said. It was all the more terrifying for being matter-of-fact.