Cross and Burn

by Val McDermid

  ‘Have you lost your way?’ He stood up, wary but not unfriendly. ‘We’ve not met, have we?’

  ‘DS Paula McIntyre. I’m the new face on DCI Fielding’s firm. I was looking for the duty inspector, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody about upstairs.’

  He gave a snort of laughter. ‘Are you not from round here?’

  ‘I’ve lived in Bradfield all my adult life. Why? What’s so special about Skenfrith Street? Don’t you do crime outside school hours?’ Paula kept her tone light, but she wished Sergeant Banter would cut to the chase.

  ‘Bradfield Victoria are playing Manchester United at home. Every warm body is at the game, in case of any crowd trouble. Including the duty inspector.’

  ‘Are they expecting crowd trouble?’

  This time, he laughed properly. ‘Nay, lass. But they’re expecting a bloody good game of football. Now, is there owt I can help you with?’

  Paula shook her head. Whatever the uniform branch were doing about Bev Andrews’ disappearance, they clearly weren’t doing it tonight. ‘I’ll speak to them in the morning. I hope you have a quiet night,’ she added on her way out.

  ‘Fat chance. There’ll be drunks galore later, whatever the scoreline is.’

  There was nothing for it but to go home empty-handed and see how Elinor was getting on with Torin. Maybe the boy would have thought of something that might open up a more promising line of inquiry. Something that would command attention more than a bloody good game of football.

  21

  There must be an algorithm that described the twist in the space-time continuum that occurred when a teenage boy was in the room, Paula thought, pausing on the threshold of her living room. Adolescent lads seemed to occupy a space out of all proportion to their actual size. The room usually seemed spacious when it was only occupied by herself and Elinor. It didn’t even feel crowded when they had friends round. But with Torin sprawled on the sofa, legs stretched across the rug, shirt untucked and tie at half mast, it seemed to have shrunk. She’d have to find a Doctor Who geek and ask.

  Elinor was in her favourite armchair, legs curled under her, knitting in her lap. The pair of them were watching Shaun of the Dead. Paula wasn’t sure it was the best viewing for a boy whose mother was missing, but presumably Torin and Elinor had chosen it between them.

  As she entered, Torin straightened up, his face stripped of teen anomie, naked anxiety exposed for anyone to see. ‘Has my mum turned up?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got no more news.’ Seeing the crestfallen look on his face, Paula wished she had something else to offer. She perched on the arm of the sofa. ‘I know you’re going to want to shout at me for even asking, but are you totally sure she didn’t say anything to you about any plans to meet someone?’

  He glared at her. ‘I told you. No. And even if she had and I missed it, she’d still have texted me to remind me. She always does. She says I never listen, so she always does a back-up.’ His lower lip trembled and he looked away, covering his mouth with his hand. ‘But she’s wrong anyway. I do listen.’

  ‘I’m sure you do, Torin,’ Elinor said. She paused the DVD.

  ‘So what are your lot doing to find her?’ Torin demanded, belligerence a cover for his fear. His shoulders hunched defensively inside his thin shirt.

  ‘The information I took from you this morning will have been put on the computer and circulated nationally. Tomorrow, they’ll get started on the painstaking stuff of tracking down friends, checking out any activity on her bank accounts and credit cards.’

  ‘Why are they waiting so long? Why aren’t they doing it right now?’ His voice was a howl of outrage.

  Because it’s not a priority. Because they’d rather be at the football. Because nobody else is worried about her the way you are. ‘Because these things are all easier to do during normal working hours,’ Paula said. Elinor’s raised eyebrows told her what her partner thought of that pale excuse. Guilt-tripped, Paula said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you like. I’ll go round to your house tonight and put together all the stuff they’ll need so they can get started right away in the morning. How does that sound?’

  He chewed the skin on the side of his thumb. ‘OK, I suppose.’

  ‘Where does she keep stuff like bank statements and her passport? Do you know?’

  ‘There’s, like, a boxroom between her bedroom and the bathroom. It’s a cupboard really, but my dad fitted it out like an office. Built a desk in and everything. All our official stuff’s in the bottom drawer.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll need to pick up some clothes for you too, if you’re going to stay with us. Is it OK for me to go into your room?’

  He looked mutinous but he nodded. ‘OK, I suppose.’

  ‘Do you want to stay here with us, Torin? It’s up to you. If you’ve got a mate you’d rather stay with, or another friend of your mum’s? You can say what you want, you know.’

  ‘Do you not want me here, then?’

  Paula could have wept for him. ‘You can stay as long as you need to. As long as it’s what you want.’

  ‘It’s OK here.’ He jerked his head towards Elinor. ‘She doesn’t make a fuss. And if I’m under your feet, you’ll crack on, get some answers so you get your space back, right?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ She tried to hide her surprise at his insight. ‘Can I have your keys?’

  ‘Not so fast,’ Elinor said. ‘You haven’t eaten, have you? We saved some pizza for you. So before you go over to Bev and Torin’s, you’re going to sit down and have some dinner.’

  Paula didn’t even bother trying to protest. And if she was honest, as she headed back out into the night, she was glad she’d taken the time to eat. Not just because it recharged her physical batteries but because it gave a face to the task ahead. That was something she’d learned from Carol Jordan. Until then, she’d listened to the colleagues who said you couldn’t afford emotional involvement with cases because it would burn you out. Working with Carol, she’d come to understand that you deliver a better quality of justice when you care. Yes, the price was high. But why do the job if you didn’t care about the outcome?

  It felt strange, letting herself into a house where she’d been a guest. Usually when she was searching premises or interrogating in someone’s space, as she had been with Tony earlier, she was coming to it fresh. Here, she’d have to put aside the embarrassment of raking through the life of someone she knew and liked. For Bev’s sake, she couldn’t put personal squeamishness ahead of scouring the house for anything useful.

  Of course, the house should have been searched already by whoever had been given her original notes. Paula suspected that Bev had been identified as low risk, the lowest rung on the ladder of missing persons. A by-the-book classification – ‘no apparent threat of danger to either the subject or the public’ – that would allow the officer concerned to put Bev on the bottom of the pile for someone else to pick up on the morning shift. They might not search the house at all at this stage. If Paula had been in charge, she’d have opted for an assessment of medium risk and not simply because Bev was a mate. The manual said, ‘The risk posed is likely to place the subject in danger,’ and she thought Bev slotted right into that category. Women like Bev did not go missing voluntarily. She tried not to dwell on the single sentence capitalised and highlighted in its own box near the start of the missing person protocol – ‘If in doubt, think murder.’

  There was a corner of her professional mind that had already been thinking precisely that.

  She made a note of the time in her pocket book and stepped inside. The first phase was the Open Door search. Her former colleague Kevin Matthews used to call it the ‘Don’t-discount-the-bleeding-obvious search’. They all remembered unnerving cases where missing kids had turned up hidden in obscure corners of houses and flats, sometimes off their own bat. But more often at the hands of others. So Paula made her way through the house, checking every room and cupboard, every cubbyhole and boxed-in space big enough to accommo
date a woman of Bev’s dimensions. And as anticipated, she drew a blank.

  She expected the next phase to be more productive. Now she would sweep the house in a quest for anything that would give her the inside track on Bev’s life. Notes, diaries, phones, photos, computers. Torin had his own tablet with him; he’d said Bev never used it and he never touched her laptop, not now they’d got a wireless printer he could command from his own machine. She’d already spotted the laptop on the desk in the cubbyhole office Torin had described, but she didn’t want to fuck that up for the techies. Time to call in a favour.

  Paula took out her phone and checked the time before she keyed in the call. Half past nine wasn’t too late to call a woman who spent her spare time communing with the digital world. To her surprise, it took four rings before Stacey answered. ‘Paula, hello, what’s going on?’

  If Paula hadn’t known her better, she would have said Stacey sounded flustered. But that wasn’t her style. She’d never seen the former MIT’s computer analyst anything less than cool under pressure. And Paula didn’t think a call from her qualified as pressure. ‘This and that. Started today in my new firm at Skenfrith Street. And you?’

  ‘Don’t ask. I’m doing stuff that a GCSE student could manage. It’s not a productive use of my skills.’

  ‘I thought as much. That’s why I was wondering if you might be interested in doing a favour for me?’

  Stacey gave a prim little laugh. ‘It did cross my mind that might be why you’re calling. What do you need?’

  ‘I’ve got a misper. It’s a bit complicated. I know the woman concerned so I’m doing the prelims myself. I’ll have to hand the laptop over to the CSIs. And they’ll take for ever and they won’t fillet it the way you will.’ Paula let her voice tail off.

  ‘And you want me to come over and make a shadow hard drive and analyse it, all without leaving a trace for the CSIs to find?’ Stacey was back to her usual calm deadpan.

  ‘Pretty much, yeah.’ And then Paula heard what sounded like a male voice in the background. ‘Have you got company? Is this a bad time?’ Then it hit her. ‘Oh my God, it’s not Sam, is it?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Stacey said briskly. ‘I’ll pick up an external hard drive and meet you there. Text me the address. I’ll see you soon.’ And she ended the call. With anyone else, it would have been rude. But with her, it was just Stacey.

  While she was waiting, Paula scouted out the kitchen and living room. A calendar fixed to the side of the fridge revealed the routines of normal life. Football practice, chess club, a school in-service day, a couple of sleepovers for Torin. A dental appointment for Bev. A trip to the movies, a gig for Torin, some friends for dinner. She flicked back a couple of months; it was much the same. A wood-framed blackboard fixed to the wall acted as a memo board. ‘Spaghetti, bacon, milk, nutmeg’ to one side, ‘School trip deposit, tickets for Leeds fest, dry cleaning’ on the other. Drawers and cupboards revealed nothing she wouldn’t expect to find in a kitchen. The living room was no more productive. There wasn’t even a notepad beside the phone. Nobody wrote down messages any more. They texted each other instead.

  Paula was on the point of heading back upstairs when Stacey arrived. The daughter of Hong Kong Chinese parents, Stacey had proved to be a computer prodigy, seeming to grasp the finer elements of programming as readily as if they were a child’s building blocks. She’d set up her own software company while she was still at university, coming up with a couple of boilerplate programs that had made her enough money never to have to work again. Then she confounded everyone by joining the police. She’d never explained her motives but over the years Paula had learned enough about her colleague to suspect that what Stacey loved was the licence to poke around in other people’s data without fear of being arrested for it. She was also convinced that Stacey was firmly ensconced somewhere on the autism spectrum, so socially awkward was she. But towards the end of the MIT, it had dawned on Paula that Stacey was carrying a torch for another colleague, Sam Evans.

  Sam’s naked ambition and lack of team spirit had been obstacles to friendship as far as Paula was concerned. She didn’t trust him to have her back when the shit came down, and that was a problem in a close team. Nevertheless, she’d nudged Stacey in the direction of making her feelings known. Life was too short not to go for the things that mattered. Of course, Stacey had said nothing since. They’d gone out for a meal a couple of times since the MIT disbanded, but Stacey had stolidly avoided talking about Sam. However, she had changed her hairstyle to something much more flattering and her clothes had definitely become more interesting than her standard uniform of beautifully tailored business suits. She was wearing more make-up too, emphasising the dark brown of her almond-shaped eyes and giving a palette of colour to unlined skin that looked surprisingly healthy considering how little daylight it ever absorbed. For the first time since Paula had known her, Stacey looked like a woman who thought she deserved to be loved.

  Now, as they climbed the stairs, Paula said again, ‘Did I interrupt something? Was that Sam’s voice I heard in the background?’

  Behind her, Stacey sighed. ‘He was at my place for dinner. OK? That’s all. Same way you’d come to my place for dinner.’

  Paula smiled triumphantly, knowing Stacey couldn’t see her face. ‘Stacey, I’ve known you, how many years? And how many times have I been to your place for dinner? That would be a big fat zero. We always eat out, remember?’

  ‘You could have come if you’d wanted to.’

  At the top of the stairs Paula turned and pulled a face at Stacey. ‘You are such a liar. Look, I’m actually glad you’re seeing him.’

  ‘Dinner. I didn’t even cook,’ Stacey said firmly. ‘I had it catered.’

  ‘It’s a start.’

  Stacey looked around the landing, her lips pursed, hands on her hips. ‘So where is this computer? And who is this woman?’

  Paula pointed to the cubbyhole door and gave Stacey the key points. She was done by the time Stacey was settled in front of the laptop. Stacey swung round in the chair and stared at Paula, frowning. ‘You’ve taken in a teenage boy? You?’

  ‘What? You mean, as in “the lesbians”?’

  ‘No,’ she said impatiently. ‘You know I’m not like that. I mean you, as in, never shown any interest in parenting.’

  Paula rubbed her tired eyes. Just what she needed. A discussion on her maternal instincts, or lack thereof. ‘I’m not parenting, for fuck’s sake. I’m taking in a stray. For the time being. Besides, Elinor’s the one doing the hands-on. Look at me. Here I am. Not on a sofa with Torin. OK?’

  Stacey turned back to the screen and pressed the power button. ‘Fine. So long as you remember the prime directive of mispers. If in doubt…’

  ‘Think murder. I know. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Now, can you shove over enough to let me at that bottom drawer? Apparently that’s where all the paperwork is.’

  Stacey obliged but there was still barely room for Paula to crouch beside her. She opened the drawer and found it almost filled to the brim with folders, envelopes and loose papers. ‘You’d be better taking the whole thing out and sitting down on the landing with it,’ Stacey muttered, her head already in what she was doing. ‘It never ceases to amaze me – how can you not password your computer? Especially when you share your home with a teenage boy? Are you listening, Paula?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Paula finally wrestled the drawer free of its runners and backed out of the room. She took it through to Bev’s bedroom and sat on the edge of the rumpled duvet. Unlike Nadia Wilkowa, Bev wasn’t a neat freak, which made Paula feel a little better about her own untidiness. She’d seen enough of the mess left by lives cut unexpectedly short to have learned the lesson of what’s left behind but it still hadn’t been enough to make her change her ways.

  But at least Bev was careful with the paperwork. The top folder contained birth certificates for her and Torin, plus her marriage certificate and the divorce decree. The next envel
ope held National Insurance numbers, National Health Service numbers, a note of blood groups and Torin’s red record book from babyhood. A folder of bank statements and another of credit card bills. Bev was one of those people who paid off her balance dutifully every month.

  Then came the passports. Wherever Bev was, it wasn’t abroad. At least, not by conventional means. There was a will leaving everything to Torin and granting guardianship to her ex-husband; an exchange of lawyers’ letters arranging the terms of Tom’s contact with his son; a bundle of Christmas and birthday cards to Bev from Torin; a folder of Torin’s school reports; and finally, right at the bottom, a battered old address book.

  Stacey appeared in the doorway, waving a small silvery box in the air. ‘A copy of Bev’s hard drive. And nobody will ever know I was in there. I’ll take a quick look tonight and forward her emails on to you. The rest I’ll let you have as soon as I can.’ She glanced at a slim gold watch that Paula reckoned must have cost a few months’ salary. ‘If I shoot off now, I’ll still have time for dessert.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’ Paula shovelled everything back into the drawer except the address book. ‘Thanks for this, Stacey. It’s looking darker and darker.’

  ‘I’m sorry, for your friend’s sake. I’ll be in touch.’ She half-turned to go then paused. ‘Have you heard from the DCI, by the way?’

  Paula shook her head. ‘Not a word. I don’t even know where she is or what she’s doing.’

  ‘I expected her to come home to BMP once the dust had settled.’

  ‘Ha. You have to be joking. The brass don’t want her. She makes the bureaucrats look like a bunch of useless wankers. No, they were thrilled when she handed in her notice so she could move to West Mercia. But she never turned up. She resigned before she even started.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I thought she’d come back. For the sake of familiarity. And Tony, of course. He’s still at Bradfield Moor, isn’t he?’