Cross and Burn

by Val McDermid

  What would he have done then, this Marco Mather, this man whose annoyingly handsome face smiled out of the photo in her purse? He’d have tried to phone her, of course. But by then, her phone was not only turned off, it had its battery and SIM card removed. He’d put them back later, when it didn’t matter if she was traced or not. But for now, he was taking every available precaution.

  So, Marco would get a dead phone. What would his next step be? He’d probably call her friends to see whether she was with them or if she’d confided any plans to them. He’d draw a blank, of course. He wouldn’t be able to phone anyone from work because she’d only just started her new job and she wouldn’t have built up a social network yet. He wouldn’t even know the names of her colleagues, never mind their phone numbers.

  So he’d have to go to the Tellit Communications building, where the night security guard would explain there was nobody left in the office. If Marco Mather kicked off, the guard might even show him the computer record from when she’d swiped herself off the grid and into the lift.

  He might think about the police then. But that would get him nowhere at all. Five hours late wouldn’t earn a mention in the incident log. Not even in the light of two female murder victims in the same week. Because there was nothing to connect Marco Mather’s wife to a Polish pharmaceutical sales rep or Bradfield Cross’s chief pharmacist. There couldn’t be because apart from the fact that they looked right, they were random selections. People said you couldn’t judge a book by its cover, and unfortunately that was true. But he’d had to go by the cover. They were replacements, not substitutes. So they had to look right. They had to fit the fantasy in his head, the dream that had grown from those images of Lauren Hutton up on the screen. It was an exhausting process, but eventually he would find the right one. The one to replace the one who had cheated him out of serving up her just deserts.

  But he was wandering off the point. Which was, what would Marco Mather do? He was so tempted to go and see for himself. There would be a delicious pleasure in glimpsing him through a window, wringing his hands or crying on the phone.

  Why not give in to temptation? There was no virtue in denying himself that pleasure, was there? So he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and picked up her keys. Just in case Marco had gone out to drown his sorrows and he got the chance to pick over their pitiful married life.

  Less than quarter of an hour later, he’d found a parking space in the next street and, sticking to the shadows, he walked briskly round the corner. In spite of the limp one of his father’s beatings had left him with, he could still move faster than most. At this time of night, the majority of the houses were in darkness, occasional slivers of light creeping through bedroom curtains, a few hall lights dimly seen through glass panels in front doors. This wasn’t the sort of area where people stayed up late and had fun, he thought. Solid suburbia to the core; either they had to get up for work in the morning or else they’d retired and acquired the old persons’ habit of early to bed and early to rise. Like they had something to get up for, he thought, imagining those unsatisfied lives where they’d settled for less than perfection. Not like him.

  He wasn’t entirely surprised to see plenty of lights on at the Mather house. The front room curtains weren’t closed, and light leaked in from the bright hallway. He checked to make sure he was unobserved, then cut into their tiny front garden, slinking past the front door and peering in through the window. No sign of life. A couple of deserted sofas, a TV, shelves that seemed to contain DVDs and a few books. No clutter whatsoever. There were paintings, or prints, he supposed, all over the walls. He couldn’t make them out in the dim light, but they looked colourful.

  He slipped past the front door and down the side of the garage. A small window cast a parallelogram of light on the ground, and he ducked low to avoid being seen. Then he turned and edged his head forward so he could look inside. The usual crap-filled garage, he thought. Lawnmower, gardening tools. A tall freezer. Shelves crammed with tins of paint, household chemicals, assorted car products. He inched forward to improve his field of vision and saw something completely unexpected.

  The top of a man’s head, motionless on the floor.

  Startled, he jerked back. When his heart stopped racing, he crept forward again, this time bolder than before. He could see the rest of the man’s head from behind. Unsurprisingly, it was attached to a body. A body that was sprawled on the floor beside an exercise bike, one leg still trailing over the frame.

  Marco Mather wasn’t pacing the floor, panicking over his wife’s absence. Marco Mather was dead.

  Either that or he was going to be dead very soon.

  51

  Bronwen Scott enjoyed the moment then pushed her chair back. ‘I need a quick word with the custody sergeant,’ she said. ‘Five minutes, Carol, any more and he’ll start to get antsy.’

  Tony and Carol stared at each other, stony-faced, waiting for her to leave. The door closed and they were alone for the first time in months. A scenario both had imagined but neither had expected. Tony cleared his throat. ‘How have you been?’

  ‘That’s really none of your business.’ The severity of her expression didn’t diminish. He’d seen her look at colleagues she despaired of and criminals she despised in the same way.

  ‘I think it is. You blamed me for what happened to Michael and Lucy.’ Most people would have missed the infinitesimal flinch in her eyes at the mention of their names, but he didn’t. Undeterred, he carried on. ‘You probably still do. That gives me a burden of responsibility and I think our history runs so deep that you owe me the chance to discharge it.’

  She shook her head. ‘Even if I could translate that out of Tony-speak into something a normal person would understand, I suspect it would still be bollocks. I owe you nothing. No amount of twisted logic can change that.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘I told you. Paula feels the need to save you and she can’t do it the straight way.’

  He let himself consider whether she might be speaking the truth. He wanted not to believe her, but he had to concede it made more sense to accept what she was saying. ‘But you agree with her, that I’m innocent?’

  ‘I can imagine situations where you might kill. But I don’t believe you’re this kind of killer. And I think if you were pissed off enough with me to want to kill me, you’d get on with it. Not fuck about with surrogates.’ There was a grim twist to her mouth that might almost have been a smile.

  ‘You think somebody’s really killing women who look like you?’ Tony was genuinely curious. He thought he knew her well enough to predict the answer but he wanted to hear what she had to say.

  She shrugged one shoulder. ‘Other people seem to. Senior detectives with years of experience, some of them.’

  ‘But you,’ he persisted. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think they look that much like me.’

  ‘There’s a generic similarity. Same blonde hair, blue eyes. Same haircut. Similar build. Professional women who go to work suited up. Has it occurred to you that it’s not them that look like you – it’s you that looks like them?’

  Carol frowned. This was how it had always played out between them. He said something impenetrable that she couldn’t resist and she was hooked. It had been like that since the very first case they’d worked together, all those years ago. And here he was, doing it to her again. She wanted to get to her feet and walk out, but more than that she needed to understand what he was driving at. ‘What do you mean – it’s me that looks like them?’

  ‘That’s not quite right.’ He spoke absently, as if thinking aloud. ‘It’s more that you all look like her.’

  ‘Like who?’ She almost howled in frustration.

  ‘The one he wanted to kill.’

  ‘Don’t you mean “wants” to kill?’

  Tony ran a hand through his hair. ‘No. He’s clever, he’s organised and he’s resourceful. If she was avail
able to be killed, he’d have killed her and that would be an end to it.’ He spread his arms wide as if trying to draw her in to embrace the idea. ‘I think she’s already dead. I think he was planning to kill her, working up to it. But somehow she thwarted him.’

  ‘She killed herself?’ Carol was intrigued now in spite of herself. She leaned forward, forearms on the table. He noticed the changes in her hands – scars, bruises, broken nails. What on earth had she been doing, this woman who he remembered barely being able to manage flat-pack furniture?

  ‘Either that or she just died,’ he said, distracted by his more private speculation.

  ‘And this helps us how?’

  ‘Find her, and you find him.’ He shrugged. ‘Obviously you’re going to have to find her.’

  Before Carol could respond, the door opened and Scott stuck her head into the room. ‘Time to go, Carol. We’ll see you in the morning, Tony. Chin up. She’s never going to charge you.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ Carol asked Scott as soon as they were clear of Skenfrith Street police station.

  ‘I’m going home to catch some zeds before I have to get up and go head to head with DCI Fielding,’ the lawyer said. ‘I recommend that you not show up for that conversation. It’ll only get messy. Besides, you have plenty of other things to be getting on with. It’ll be bloody ages before Fielding gives us disclosure on Nadia Wilkowa’s work diaries. You’re going to need to pull your strings and find out when this alleged incident happened at Bradfield Moor and whether Nadia was in the building that day to bump into Captain Clumsy.’

  ‘You want me to go back to Paula?’

  Scott broke her stride to give Carol an incredulous look. ‘Well, duh. I want you to do whatever it takes to get the information that will clear my client. You always had the knack of coming up with the goods when you were working the other side of the fence.’

  Carol gave a snort of bitter laughter. ‘I did have one or two resources at my disposal.’

  ‘You still do. Human resources. You’ve got friends. So has he. Use them.’

  Carol suppressed a sigh. After the reaction she’d had from Sinead, she wasn’t so sure how much reliance she could place on her old networks. How bitter would it be to have to rely on Tony’s name to open doors? Tony, who was even more crap at intimacy than she was. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said wearily.

  ‘And I’ll line up someone to demolish her thumbprint evidence. We’re going to leave her without a leg to stand on.’

  They entered the dank car park and headed for their cars. Before they separated, Scott put a hand on Carol’s arm. ‘Did he say anything useful after I left you alone with him?’

  Carol didn’t know where to begin to explain the way Tony’s mind worked to an outsider. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was private.’ The words were out before she had time to think. She walked to her car, thinking how hard it was to break the habit of mistrust.

  She climbed into the Land Rover and took out her phone, keeping one eye on Scott, whose engine purred into life as soon as she’d settled herself into her seat. Carol waited till the solicitor had driven out of the car park, considering her options. It was late and she was tired, but the clock was ticking for Tony. There were strict limits on how long the police could hold him after arrest. If the defence couldn’t blow apart the evidence against him, Fielding would charge Tony when the time ran out – or before that, if she could build a stronger case – and everything would become much harder. The police would stop looking for an alternative suspect. Mud would stick, even if Tony was subsequently cleared.

  It dawned on Carol that she minded the idea of his name being blackened. She tried to convince herself that it was simply because it offended her sense of justice. She wasn’t ready to accept that her history with Tony might mean there was a possible future for them. She was merely reacting as she would to the idea of any innocent person being unjustly imprisoned ahead of a trial for a crime they could never have committed. That was all it was. But that was enough to sanction any amount of unreasonable behaviour. Wasn’t it?

  52

  The journey back in the car from the Mather house to his place wasn’t long enough. He needed to savour what had happened, to replay it in his head and set it in stone so it would be the bedrock for what came next. This was so beautiful, you couldn’t make it up. It was the perfect scene-setter for turning Marie Mather into the perfect wife. And the joy of it was that he hadn’t had to do a thing himself.

  He’d forced himself to stand at the garage window for a full five minutes, to be certain that Marco Mather wasn’t moving. Five motionless minutes meant death or, at the very least, a deep unconsciousness he could take advantage of.

  He’d debated whether to try the back door or to brazen it out at the front. There were a pair of mortise keys on her ring, but only one Yale. He guessed that, like most people, there would be a Yale and a mortise on the front door and a mortise on the rear. So, only one unfamiliar lock to fumble with at the back, and out of sight at that. On the downside, his limp made him less than stealthy, and gardens were notoriously cluttered with plant containers and hoses and bags of compost. Better to risk the front door than clatter around the pitch-black patio and rouse the neighbours.

  Treading carefully, he returned to the front of the house and slipped the Yale into the keyhole, gambling that it would be the only lock engaged while Marco Mather was at home expecting his wife to return from work. It turned and the door swung silently open. He stepped inside confidently, for the benefit of anyone glancing out of their window on the way to bed. And he breathed in the smell of her home, nosing it like a wine connoisseur, relishing the faint scents of cooking herbs and the heady notes from the vase of lilies on a recessed windowsill. Yes, she had the basics of good taste, even if the lilies were a little florid for his liking.

  Down the hall and into the generous dining kitchen. It was clearly the heart of the house, the sort of kitchen where cooking was observed like a religious ritual. A well-used batterie de cuisine was on parade and ready for use, a small array of battered cookbooks on the windowsill alongside pots of thyme, basil and oregano. His heart lifted. She was going to be the one. She’d cook like an angel and fuck like a whore.

  The door to the garage was closed. He moseyed across the kitchen, helping himself to a baby tomato from a bowl sitting on a butcher’s block. He popped it into his mouth and burst it with his teeth, enjoying the sudden explosion of flavour, sharp and sweet. Oh yes, this was going to be special.

  There were no surprises on the other side of the door. Marco Mather was lying in exactly the same position. Only now he could see Marco’s face. There was no doubt about it. The guy was definitely dead. And from the looks of him, there had been nothing peaceful about it. Heart attack, at a guess. Fat bastard on an exercise bike, what did he expect? Greedy twat couldn’t resist her excellent cooking and look where it had got him.

  The beauty of it was that there would be no worried husband reporting his woman missing. No chance of some smart-arsed copper eager to make a name for himself connecting this to any other crime. Nobody would be looking for a woman who wasn’t missing. He could phone her office in the morning. Pretend to be Marco. Claim she was sick. That would buy him plenty of time.

  And he could use this to help bring her to heel. Once she saw Marco was dead, she’d know there was nothing to go back to. She’d have to make the most of what she had. It was bound to make her even more eager to please, to offer him the perfection he deserved. He was her future. He was her only future. She was a smart woman. She would understand.

  To ram home the point to her, he took out his phone and took half a dozen photos from various angles. He thumbed through them, making sure they left no room for doubt. Then he left, turning off all the lights behind him. Nothing suspicious to alert friends or neighbours.

  When he arrived home, he poured himself a Jack Daniel’s and Coke and sat down at the breakfast bar, scrolling through the pictures of Marco Mather. He s
lowly savoured both his drink and the photographs, deciding how best to play the upcoming scene. He uploaded the photographs to his tablet. ‘All the better to see you with,’ he said.

  At last, he rinsed his glass, dried it and put it away. Then he went through to the garage, snapping on the harsh white fluorescent tubes that bled life and colour from the scene. He unlocked the lid of the chest freezer and threw it open with a flourish.

  The woman’s face was a caricature of surprise and terror. Her hands jerked up to cover her eyes from the shock of the light. He could see her eyelids fluttering through the lattice of her fingers. Normally he liked to go on the attack right away, to catch them on the back foot. But for once, he was happy to wait, to enjoy the anticipation of her reaction.

  Gradually, she grew accustomed to the light. One hand slipped down from her face to conceal her breasts. She peeked fearfully at him through the fingers of her other hand. ‘You?’ Incredulity made her voice tiny and tremulous.

  ‘Here’s the deal. If you scream, I hurt you. And I tape your mouth up so you can never scream again. Is that clear?’

  Eyes wide, she bit her lip and nodded.

  ‘I am the husband. And you are the wife.’

  Tears brimmed and spilled from her eyes. ‘I have a husband.’ It was barely a whisper.

  He shook his head, smiling indulgently. ‘You used to have a different husband. Now you have me. There’s no going back.’

  53

  Talking to Carol had left Paula too jazzed to go home. She hated to inflict her edginess on Elinor, especially when she was carrying particularly heavy burdens of her own. Like a bereaved teenage boy in the living room. So she’d headed into Temple Fields, where the gay village rubbed shoulders with the hookers and the lap-dancing bars. A lot of her colleagues thought of Temple Fields as Bradfield’s badlands, but Paula had always felt at home here. She was old enough to remember when being gay meant you were an outlaw, not the darlings of a coalition government desperately trying to make itself relevant to anyone under forty. In those olden days, Temple Fields had been one of the few places it was possible to be openly gay, and she still relished the bustle and buzz of its streets in spite of some of the more recent memories her job had overlaid on those streets.