Cross and Burn

by Val McDermid

  ‘Unfortunately, not everyone knows him like we do. And he doesn’t come across like most blokes.’

  Maggie gave a little snort of laughter. ‘No kidding. All the same. Working in here, you think you’ve heard everything. And then you walk in and tell me Tony Hill’s suspected of murder. Incredible. Poor Tony.’ She picked up the letter and pushed her glasses up her nose. She read it carefully then put it down on the desk. ‘All right. We have some data protection issues here. I can’t let you have access to our incident log because of our duty of confidentiality to staff and patients. But because I have Tony’s permission, I believe I can give you copies of entries in that log that relate to him, provided that I redact the names of the patients involved. Will that give you what you need?’

  Carol nodded. ‘I don’t need much in the way of detail. All I’m interested in are the dates and the nature of the incidents.’

  Maggie nodded. She pulled her keyboard towards her and started hammering the keys with the energy of someone who had learned her skills on an old manual typewriter. Every now and again she paused and massaged her forehead with her fingertips. ‘Luckily everything’s online these days,’ she muttered. ‘And searchable.’

  After a few minutes, she said, ‘I’m going to cut and paste all the incidents involving Tony into a separate document then I can redact any identifying features relating to patients and I can print it out for you. That fine?’

  Carol nodded. ‘Perfect.’

  The tip of Maggie’s tongue slipped out between her lips as she concentrated on what she was doing. Finally, she looked across at Carol and smiled. ‘That’s it. Four incidents. I expect you already knew about the knee?’

  A swirl of recalled emotion caught Carol unawares. She had a vivid recollection of the axe attack that had left Tony lying in a hospital bed and its aftermath. No need for redaction there. Lloyd Allen’s name was carved on her memory. ‘I was around at the time,’ she said calmly, hiding what was going on beneath the surface.

  Just then the door swung open behind her. Carol turned in time to catch the arrival of Aidan Hart, Clinical Director of Bradfield Moor. It had been at least a year since she’d seen him last and time was definitely not on his side. He didn’t look as if he’d gained weight, but somehow, his face had grown pasty and jowly. Although he’d barely turned forty, there were deep lines between his eyebrows, and the whites of his eyes looked liverish. She’d never considered him attractive – particularly given what she knew about him – but now he was becoming positively repulsive. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ he demanded. For a psychologist, his interrogatory techniques seemed somewhat lacking.

  Maggie was clearly inured to his belligerence. ‘I’m just sorting out something Dr Hill asked for,’ she said calmly.

  ‘On whose authority?’ Hart moved further into the room, using his height and bulk to dominate the women.

  Maggie was undominated. She picked up Tony’s letter and waved it at him. ‘On Dr Hill’s authority. He has the right to access his own records.’

  Hart looked around him theatrically. ‘I don’t see Dr Hill here.’

  ‘His letter authorises Ms Jordan here to access the information on his behalf.’

  ‘He can’t do that. It’s a data protection issue.’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘I’ve redacted everything that could identify patients or other staff.’

  ‘I’m not prepared to release any of our records to a third party, however redacted they are. She’s not a police officer any more, you know. She’s here under false pretences.’

  ‘No, she’s not, she told me that.’

  Hart’s crocodile smile crept across his face. ‘She didn’t tell the gatehouse staff or reception. She used police ID to bypass our security.’

  Carol shrugged. ‘I needed photo ID. That was all I had. I never said I was a serving police officer.’

  Two stripes of scarlet appeared on his cheeks, as if a child had drawn on his face with lipstick. ‘Don’t split hairs with me, Miss Jordan. I’d like you to leave now.’ He was wholly focused on her, but beyond him, Carol could see Maggie’s fingers move stealthily on the keyboard.

  ‘Not without what I came for. It’s completely uncontroversial. We could easily get a court order.’ Carol wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

  ‘Get one, then.’ He threw the door open. ‘Maggie, show Miss Jordan out, would you?’

  ‘No point in making a fuss,’ Maggie said, taking Carol’s elbow and steering her to the door. Hart watched them leave, then, as Maggie opened the first locked door, he turned and marched off in the opposite direction. Maggie looked after him and smirked. ‘I figured something as menial as seeing you off the premises would be beneath him. He is the absolute antithesis of a class act. I don’t know how Tony puts up with him. I don’t know how I do, come to that.’

  As she talked, she led the way towards reception. But just before they emerged into the foyer, she turned abruptly into another office. A young man in a nurse’s tunic sat at a desk, working on a spreadsheet. He looked up when they walked in and grinned. ‘You owe me a drink.’ He leaned across the desk and picked up a few sheets of paper from the printer tray.

  ‘Thanks, Stephen.’ Maggie accepted the papers and handed them to Carol. ‘There you are. Tuck them away so the snitches on reception can’t see them. Now it really is time to go, Carol.’

  ‘Thanks. Nice move,’ Carol said as she followed Maggie into the corridor. ‘I have the impression you’ve done that before.’

  ‘We look after each other here,’ Maggie said. ‘Aidan only looks after number one. Tell Tony, chin up.’

  On her way out, Carol made a point of glaring at the receptionists. Anything else would have looked suspicious. She didn’t so much as glance at the papers until she was out of sight of the security guards on the front gate. Then she pulled in to the first woodland track she came to for a read. It wasn’t easy to make sense of the redacted reports, but when she compared them with the dates Nadia Wilkowa had been in Bradfield Moor, one thing rapidly became clear.

  Tony had been treated for a nosebleed following an incident with a patient on a day when Nadia Wilkowa had been there. ‘You fucking beauty,’ Carol said, kissing the sheet of paper. The first piece of evidence against Tony had been perfectly undermined.

  60

  The absence of their bosses didn’t let the workers at Tellit Communications off the hook. They knew their computers recorded every detail of their working lives. Their keystrokes were counted, their phone calls timed, their absences from either form of communication logged and monitored. The workers were so wrapped up in what they were paid to do that they barely looked around them. So Rob Morrison had been in his office for a good twenty minutes before Gareth Taylor appeared in his doorway.

  ‘Marie Mather’s husband phoned earlier,’ he said. ‘I was the only one in, so I picked up the call. Apparently she’s been taken to hospital with a suspected burst appendix.’

  Rob winced. ‘That sounds painful. Did he say how long she’d be off?’

  Gareth shook his head. ‘He said he’d phone again when he had a better idea of the prognosis, but not to expect her in for the rest of the week. He sounded fucking terrified,’ he added with a sneer.

  ‘That’s not a great start to a new job,’ Rob said.

  ‘I don’t suppose she planned it.’ Gareth pushed off from the door jamb and turned back to the busy room. Unobserved, Rob gave a sly smile. Marie Mather’s big ideas had definitely been put on ice and he wasn’t in the least sorry about that.

  Paula had felt her phone vibrate against her thigh while they’d been conducting their miserable ‘no comment’ interview with Tony Hill but she’d known better than to take it out in front of Fielding. The DCI was obviously right on the edge of losing her temper and Paula definitely didn’t want to be her target.

  The interview had run into the sand when Fielding had started repeating questions. Bronwen Scott had leaned back in her chair and smiled with
the weary charm of one who has seen it all before. ‘Charge my client or release him,’ she’d said.

  Fielding had thrown her pen on the table. ‘We’re continuing our inquiries. We have search warrants for Dr Hill’s home and his office, and officers are conducting those searches right now. So we won’t be releasing your client just yet.’ She’d pushed her chair back and stabbed a finger at the recording equipment. ‘This interview terminated at 11.17 a.m.’ Then she’d stalked out of the room, leaving Paula to make an apologetic face and follow. She took the chance to glance at her phone and see a message from Carol Jordan. ‘Think the metal case might be portable anaesthetic unit? Check any missing? Check paramedics?’

  Chiding herself for not having thought of that, Paula hurried to catch Fielding. ‘Bloody woman,’ Fielding snarled, climbing the stairs with the energy of fury. ‘And bloody Carol Jordan.’ She stopped in her tracks and turned on Paula and lowered her voice to a growl. ‘Don’t even think about leaking to Jordan.’

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ Paula said. ‘But I did have a thought while you were asking Dr Hill about hospitals. That metal case the killer is carrying in the CCTV footage? What if it’s portable anaesthetic apparatus? When he tips them into the car boots, he puts the box in and leans over them. We can’t see what he’s doing. What if he’s putting them under so they can’t escape or give the alarm?’

  Fielding’s face lit up. ‘That’s a bloody great idea, McIntyre.’ She clapped her on the shoulder. ‘Hill could easily have figured out how to get his hands on one of them. Head upstairs to the incident room and get that actioned right away. I want a check on hospitals that Nadia Wilkowa visited, see if they’ve had any portable anaesthesia units stolen. Paying particular attention to Bradfield Moor and Bradfield Cross. Although Tony Hill’s credentials could get him in anywhere.’ She looked almost gleeful. ‘Bloody brilliant! Well done, McIntyre.’ She bounded off up the stairs leaving Paula in her wake, feeling stricken. The suggestion was meant to shake Fielding’s certainties. Instead, it seemed merely to have reinforced them.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Paula muttered, heading up to the incident room. If they uncovered any stolen anaesthetic sets, that would give fresh life to the investigation. At least she could set the guys on to checking out paramedics rather than solely focusing on Tony. She wondered whether the search teams were suitably baffled by Tony’s life – psychology textbooks, computer games, superhero comic books, case notes and cryptic memos to himself. She couldn’t imagine they’d find anything to link him to the victims or the crimes. Wasting police time, that’s what this was.

  Somehow, she didn’t think anybody would be charging Fielding.

  61

  Buoyed up by her success at Bradfield Moor, Carol was eager to get to the Central Library so she could pursue the next stage in her investigation. But her life wasn’t quite as simple as it had been a few days before. She couldn’t just drive straight to the library and immerse herself in bound copies of the newspaper for as long as it took; she had Flash to consider.

  She texted Bronwen to fill her in on the outcome of her inquiries at the hospital then let Flash run free again while she walked several hundred yards up the track and back again. As before, the dog ranged far and wide but always returned at intervals to make sure Carol was still there and, presumably, in one piece. After this second run, Carol considered the dog could be left in the Landie for a while. Later, she could take the dog down to the canal and let her have a walk along the towpath, safe from the city traffic.

  Carol left the Land Rover in a multi-storey near the library, cracking the window open to give the dog air. She’d always been a little intimidated by the massive Victorian building. Its highly polished marble columns, staircase and wall panels came in colours she associated with the sort of old-fashioned butcher’s shop where the meat had lost its first bloom. There were no books in the grand entrance hall to absorb sound, and every noise seemed magnified by the hard surfaces, echoing in a swirl of footsteps and snatches of speech.

  She hurried up the stairs to the octagonal gallery where the local collections were kept. Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, starting with ancient leather spines at one end and travelling through a chronological catalogue of book bindings to privately published memoirs bound with adhesive cloth tape.

  At the far end stood a line of angled wooden tables, designed so that a person could sit and browse the large bound volumes of the newspaper collection. Here, this year’s copies of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times were fastened together week by week, clamped in place between long thin wooden batons. Carol found an empty chair and logged in with her tablet to the library’s wifi. Then she settled down with the previous week’s papers, working backwards from the day before Nadia Wilkowa’s disappearance.

  She pored over the news pages, checking even the shortest snippet of news. Then she moved on to Births, Marriages and Deaths. She’d settled on fifty as a sensible upper-age limit for her target. Whenever she found a woman in the right age group, she turned to her tablet and went to the online edition for the day in question. A few months before, the BEST had started offering those who placed notices in the BMD section of the paper the opportunity to post a digital photograph in the online edition. It was a clever marketing ploy – it cost the paper nothing, but it generated a huge amount of goodwill. Now, when people died, their families and friends chose their favourite photo and uploaded it to the BMD pages online. So Carol was able to ascertain quickly whether the dead women were blondes.

  It was a slow, painstaking process. By lunchtime, she only had two potential candidates. One had died, aged forty-four, ‘after a long battle with cancer. Beloved wife of Trevor, mum to Greta, Gwyneth and Gordon, gran to Adele. Much missed by her dear friends from the Fleece darts team.’ Her blonde looked as if it had come from a bottle. Somehow Carol didn’t think a killer with the control-freak tendencies Tony had outlined would allow his wife to join a pub darts team.

  The other was, on the face of it, more promising. The woman was thirty-five and she’d died with her two small children in a motorway pile-up on the M62. Carol reckoned from her colouring that she was a natural blonde. There was no BMD announcement, just a news story about the accident. A lorry driver had been critically injured and two other motorists hurt in the late-night collision. An eye-witness said the lorry had appeared to swerve without warning across the outside lane before smashing into the crash barrier. The photograph of the woman showed her holding a baby on her lap with a toddler cuddled into her side. To Carol’s eye, she didn’t look very relaxed. But people often didn’t in posed photos.

  According to a short follow-up in the following day’s paper, the woman had been taking the children to visit their grandparents in York. Ironically, she’d set off late in the evening to avoid the traffic. So said a police spokesman who gave the standard spiel about the dangers of driving while overtired.

  Carol couldn’t find the news stories in the online edition, so she took photocopies. She decided to walk the dog then return and do another month. That would make three in total. She reckoned that was far enough back.

  It was a relief to be out in the fresh air and Flash showed her pleasure at Carol’s return with extravagant tail wagging and a long pink tongue aimed at her owner’s face. Carol avoided it with an exclamation of disgust and let the dog jump free. Ten minutes’ brisk walking brought them to the Minster Basin. Carol tied Flash to a table outside one of the pubs and went inside to get a glass of wine, a bowl of water and a bag of crisps. She gave the dog some water and shared her crisps. She let her gaze wander idly across the boats in the marina, stopping short when she spotted a stern she recognised. There couldn’t be two boats with that name, not painted in the same design. How in the name of God had Tony managed to get the narrowboat from Worcester to Bradfield? A man who could barely navigate from his own front door to work?

  Even as she stared, a stocky man with a shaved head and a tight suit made from an unfortunate shiny gr
ey material backed out of the main hatchway. He was carrying a laptop, its connection cable trailing behind him. He stumbled ashore and put the computer in the boot of a Toyota saloon. Then he returned to the boat. Either Tony was being burgled or this was Fielding’s search team. She didn’t mind which, but it might be fun to freak them out.

  She untied the dog and the pair of them crossed the cobbles to the boat. The dog was reluctant at first, but with Carol’s encouragement she jumped aboard, followed by her owner. ‘Hello?’ Carol called.

  Almost immediately, the bald head reappeared, a frown on his pink face. ‘Who the —’ And then recognition dawned. He looked over his shoulder. ‘Harry?’

  ‘What are you doing on my friend’s boat?’ Carol demanded. Flash obligingly gave a couple of brusque barks.

  ‘We’re —’ This time his shout was more frantic. ‘Harry?’

  ‘What?’ The voice came from below.

  Baldy’s face creased with the effort of working out what to say. ‘It’s DCI Jordan,’ he finally settled on.

  ‘Ex-DCI Jordan,’ Carol gently reminded him. ‘You still haven’t explained who you are and what you’re doing on Dr Hill’s boat.’

  ‘We’ve got a warrant,’ a nasal Scouse voice said.

  ‘Might I see it?’ Carol said sweetly. ‘And your ID?’

  Baldy turned away from her and held a brief muttered exchange with his colleague. He swung back to face her and presented two sets of ID and a search warrant. Carol gave them a quick once-over and handed them back. ‘Thanks. You can’t be too careful these days. Shame you’ve had a wasted journey,’ she added.

  ‘What do you mean, a wasted journey?’ Baldy was wary.

  Carol smiled. ‘She’ll have to release him. Her case is falling to bits around her ears.’ She shook her head. ‘They should never have disbanded the MIT.’ Then she turned away and leapt ashore, dog at her heels. Pathetic, really, but she’d enjoyed herself. A pleasant interlude before heading back to the library.