by Val McDermid
‘He’s only known you a matter of months but he’s already got you sussed, Tony,’ Paula said.
Tony smiled. ‘Apparently.’ He shook his head. ‘That is a deeply strange sensation.’ Cautiously he took another spoonful of the chocolate tart Elinor had served for dessert. This time, he was expecting the popping candy, but he remained unconvinced that the sensation was pleasurable. However, he had to admit it was more interesting than anything he would have prepared for his own dinner. And interesting was always a plus point in his world.
‘Elinor’s been dying to try it out ever since she saw it on Masterchef,’ Torin said.
‘I can’t deny it,’ Elinor said. ‘I don’t often get the chance to cook a three-course dinner, so when I do I like to make the most of it.’
‘I suppose A&E shifts get in the way of culinary experimentation,’ Tony said. ‘Which is a pity, given what a great meal we’ve just had. Weirdness and all.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Elinor sighed. ‘Why do you think it’s taken so long for us to have you round for a meal?’
Tony could think of plenty of reasons why most people would give the body swerve to the idea of inviting him to dinner. He‘d always lacked the gift of building friendships. It was as if he’d missed out on the gene for social skills. In his professional life he was known and respected for his empathy with patients. Inside the walls of a secure mental hospital or a consulting room, he always knew the direction of travel. What to say, how to be. But on the outside, he was awkward, blunt, clumsy. Working with the police over the years, he’d been surrounded by the easy camaraderie that bound men together as mates. But somehow it never extended to him.
Paula, though. She was different. She’d become a friend, he thought. They’d started out as allies committed to the defence and protection of Carol Jordan. Paula, he suspected, was a little bit in love with her boss. Which probably made two of them. But their alliance had broadened and deepened, each answering some need in each other. And then she’d met Elinor, which had released her from her pointless hankering for Carol. What had been left was a mutual affection between Tony and Paula that had only been enriched by the unexpected arrival of Torin in their midst.
The boy had been stranded by the murder of his mother, his only relatives miles away, strangers among strangers. He’d clung to Elinor, his mother’s friend, like a drowning man to a spar. In spite of the scant time left from their demanding jobs, Elinor and Paula had made room in their lives for Torin. The boy’s emotional damage had drawn Tony like a magnet; to his surprise, he’d found himself pulled into something approaching family life.
Paula interrupted his thoughts: ‘You sure I can’t tempt you to some pudding wine? It hardly counts as alcohol.’
Tony waved his hand at her, the thumb bandaged to twice its normal size. He tipped his head to Elinor. ‘Your lot in A&E put the fear of death in me. Literally.’ He assumed a grave expression and dropped his voice. ‘“Septicaemia’s a very dangerous infection, Dr Hill. Take the full course of antibiotics and avoid alcohol.”’ He grinned and reverted to normal. ‘So for once I’m doing what I’m told.’
‘Quite right too,’ Elinor said.
Paula shook her head. ‘I’ve never known anyone like you for unlikely injuries. Ripping the base of your thumb unscrewing a bottle of wine. Who knew a glass of Pinot Grigio could be so high risk?’
Tony looked down at the table. ‘It wasn’t Pinot Grigio.’
A moment’s silence. They all knew who drank Pinot Grigio. Paula looked momentarily furious with herself. ‘No. Sorry.’
‘It was a cheeky little primitivo,’ Tony said, surprised at himself for finding a way to lighten the moment.
‘Very bloody cheeky,’ Elinor said. ‘How’s it doing?’
‘It throbs a bit when I’ve been using my hand.’
‘It will do. Nasty business, infected cuts. So, who wants more tart?’
The diversion of dessert over, Torin reverted to teenage boy mode, pulling his mobile out of his pocket and succumbing to the seduction of its screen. While the adults rehashed the week’s news, his thumbs danced over the phone, an occasional beep punctuating his silence. Then he stopped short, staring at the screen. ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Never saw that coming.’
‘What’s that?’ Elinor glanced across at him.
‘Don’t tell me some teen icon has cut his quiff off,’ Paula said, flicking her fingers at Torin’s carefully confected hairstyle.
‘Ha! No, it’s way worse than that,’ he said. ‘You remember that woman we were watching on The Big Ask a few weeks ago? Jasmine Burton?’
‘The name doesn’t ring a bell,’ Elinor said.
Paula frowned. ‘Yes, you remember. The one who was arguing that convicted rapists had no right to work in jobs where they came into contact with women or children after they’d served their sentences.’
‘It’s a point of view,’ Tony said. ‘I’d have to say, given my experience of dealing with serial rapists, it has its attractions. Though it’d be pretty much impossible to accommodate without driving a coach and horses through the human rights legislation.’
‘I remember now. She argued her case with real conviction. What about her?’ Elinor asked.
‘She’s killed herself,’ Torin said. ‘She got totally trolled after The Big Ask. You know the kind of thing: “You’re too ugly to be raped”, “I hope you get cancer and die slowly and painfully”, “Lesbo feminist castrating bitch, what you need is a real man”. That sort of thing.’ He gave an embarrassed apology of a smile. ‘And worse.’
‘But that’s terrible,’ Elinor said.
‘Happens all the time,’ Tony said. ‘These days it’s the first resort of men who don’t perceive their privilege. They feel frustrated, they have a mostly unrealistic sense of powerlessness because they’ve not been taught how to value what they have and what they can aspire to. So they expend their energy creating victims wherever they get the chance. Online anonymity is their natural home.’
‘Scumbags,’ Paula said. ‘But I’ve been following her on Twitter ever since The Big Ask. And she wasn’t taking it lying down. People say you should ignore those arseholes. Don’t feed the trolls. Report them, block them and move on. But she wasn’t like that. She went at them head on.’
Torin nodded. ‘That’s right. She’s been guest-blogging about it all over the place. It’s like she moved on from what she was originally talking about and now she’s been all over freedom of speech and Je Suis Charlie and standing up to the cyber-bullies. She was totally, “Bring it on, I’m big enough and you are tiny little saddos”.’
‘But now they’ve succeeded. They’ve driven her to kill herself,’ Elinor said flatly, her disgust obvious.
Torin frowned. ‘It makes no sense to me. I mean, that’s a big journey, right? From having the nerve to take on whatever people throw at you to throwing yourself into the river.’
‘I suppose it’s similar to what we see in seriously ill patients.’ Elinor pushed her long dark hair back from her face. Her eyes seemed to have lost their shine. ‘They convince themselves there’s hope. They talk in terms of a battle they can win. But that’s not what’s going on there. The disease is relentless. It doesn’t let go. There’s no respite. And one day the patient wakes up and believes a different narrative, one where fighting makes no odds because there is no light at the end of the tunnel. And very often, they die within hours or days of reaching that point of acceptance. Maybe that’s how it felt for poor Jasmine Burton.’
‘Or by sheer bad luck, somebody hit on the one thing she couldn’t fight. Something that found a gap in her armour and pierced her to the heart,’ Paula said. ‘We’ve all got those secret places.’
‘Have we?’ Torin said. ‘I don’t think I have.’
Tony wasn’t so sure about that. His mother’s murder would always be the crack in Torin’s psyche. Within hours of Bev McAndrew’s death, Paula had taken responsibility for his protection, shutting down his social media accounts and making sure o
nly a trusted handful of friends had initial access to him. By the time a wider circle found him, the focus of their unpleasantness had moved from his mother to the fact that he was living with lesbians. And that was something Torin felt pretty armour-plated against. ‘Maybe not yet,’ Tony said, trying to sound confident. ‘But sooner or later you’re going to do something you don’t want anybody to find out about.’
Taking her cue from him, Paula chuckled. ‘That’s what being a teenager is for.’
‘Do you see much online bullying among your schoolmates?’ Elinor, always the concerned quasi-parent, hadn’t noticed the others were trying to move the subject along.
The boy shifted awkwardly and looked to Tony as if for a cue. Tony lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug and gave him an encouraging smile. ‘I don’t think I know the kind of people who do that kind of thing,’ Torin said.
‘I don’t imagine you do,’ Elinor said. ‘I only wondered whether any of your friends had been picked on like that.’
Torin grimaced. ‘Nobody’s ever said anything.’ He gave a frustrated sigh. ‘We don’t really talk about stuff like that, Elinor. If one of my mates was upset about something, he might say. But, you know? He might not. Plus, we’d see it for ourselves on Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook or whatever.’
Elinor smiled. ‘OK. You have to remember, your online world is a foreign country to us. When we were growing up, communication happened face to face almost all of the time.’
‘Yeah, if I talked to one of my friends on the phone for more than five minutes, my dad would be standing in the hall, tapping his watch, muttering about the phone bill,’ Paula said. ‘If you wanted to bully somebody, you had to get up close and personal. None of this anonymous trolling.’
Tony fiddled with his knife. ‘So we don’t even know the right questions to ask half the time.’ He looked up and met Torin’s bland gaze. ‘We have to rely on you to keep us straight.’
Torin rubbed the fingers of his right hand over the fine short hair above his ear. ‘Right. Well, I don’t know anything about what was going on inside Jasmine Burton’s head. But you hear about people my age going over the edge because there’s no more than a handful of people in their school giving them all kinds of grief. So I guess what she was getting was grief multiplied by loads. And she didn’t know if they were people she’d never even seen in the street or people who sat next to her at work. That’d be the horrible bit, you’d think. The not knowing who hates you that much. At least with school bullying, you kind of know who’s doing it, so you can maybe go, “I know you’re a numbskull, why should I care what you think about me?” But not knowing whether it’s your so-called best mate or some total deranged stranger? That’d be a killer.’
5
The evening had turned into a steep learning curve. Among the things she knew now was that a police cell looked very different when you were locked in, as opposed to being the one doing the locking. Carol had always been satisfied with their inbuilt discomfort; the people she had banged up were there because they were criminals being kept in a holding pattern till she could nail them down unequivocally. They didn’t deserve comfort.
Apparently, that was the judgement that applied to her now. A criminal who deserved nothing better than this. Cement-grey walls that seemed to sweat a faint sheen of condensation. A concrete platform with a plastic-covered mattress the thickness of a yoga mat. A thin blanket that would shame economy class on a long-haul flight. A stainless steel toilet with no seat, half a roll of paper on the floor next to it. The stink of stale sweat and piss. This was what she’d come to. This was what she deserved.
Now that she was on the inside, she was beginning to understand the insidious power of the cell. It was oppressive, no two ways about it. Nobody ended up here by accident. That was the message, and it was an environment designed to fuel the feeling of self-disgust that came with that realisation.
Carol had whirled through a series of emotions when she realised the flashing blue lights were for her, not some urgent and distant emergency. This was not lightning striking someone else’s house; this was the tornado ripping her up by the roots. First came indignation – what were the traffic cops doing on an empty back road when there were plenty of major roads in the county with dozens of potential offenders who posed a risk to others? Then came fear – she knew she was over the limit, knew if she was breathalysed that what lay ahead was not only shame but horrendous inconvenience. Next, a shot of defiance – until recently she’d thoroughly outranked these bobbies and she knew exactly how to put them in their place. But finally, as she sat with the Land Rover in neutral, waiting for them to arrive at her driver’s door, she had to accept that she was comprehensively screwed.
There was no old pals’ act to be pulled here. This wasn’t Bradfield Metropolitan Police’s patch. Here, she was on someone else’s turf. Over the years, she’d had a few run-ins with West Yorkshire and nobody had walked away from those encounters feeling good about their opposite numbers. More than once, Carol had rubbed their noses in their own failures, and that was never going to make friends and influence outcomes.
So when the traffic cop tapped on the window and indicated that she should step out of the vehicle, she had nothing left but weary resignation. ‘Can I ask why you stopped me?’ she said as she got out, clinging to the faint hope that he might say something insufficient, something that might get her off the hook. She’d had a drink, for God’s sake. She wasn’t pissed. She knew where the slim chances lurked.
‘We’ve been following you since you came out of the driveway back there,’ he said with the offhand manner of a man who could sleepwalk through the next half-hour and still have everything perfectly in place. ‘Your driving was erratic. You took the corner too wide and then over-corrected. You were weaving in a manner that suggested to me you might have been drinking.’
Carol straightened up, shivering at the night air, and cocked her head to get a better look at him. He must have struggled to make the height requirement but he’d compensated down at the gym. He filled his hi-vis jacket and his neck was a thick column of muscle. The hair that was visible under his cap was a dark bristle along the sides of his head. He didn’t look like someone about to give an inch. ‘I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine,’ she said. ‘I’m not drunk.’
He stretched his lips into a thin line, nodding. Heard it all before. ‘We’ll let the machine be the judge of that,’ he said, raising his arm to show the breathalyser kit.
There was, she knew, no way to beat the machine. Her only hope was that when they came to retest her in two hours or so, she’d have metabolised enough alcohol to slip under the bar. How much had she had, after all? Not that much, not by cop standards, for God’s sake. And so Carol steeled herself and submitted to the indignity of a roadside breath test.
He held the small yellow-and-black box up towards her face and she put her lips round the slim white plastic tube. She took a deep breath then exhaled. He’d tilted the machine so she could see the screen, watch with sinking heart as the figures climbed up past thirty-five, the magic number. For fuck’s sake, is it ever going to stop? Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one. And that was it. Fifty fucking one. Anything between a year and eighteen months off the road. She couldn’t even begin to think how that was going to be possible.
Carol realised the cop was talking to her. His colleague was standing by the patrol car, the back door open. ‘We’re going to put you in the car and I’m going to move your Land Rover up the lane a ways to where I can get it safely off the road. There’s a house about half a mile away, the road widens by their drive.’
‘I know,’ she said bitterly. ‘It’s my house. It’s where I was going. A couple of minutes and I’d have been there. No harm done.’
‘With all due respect, you don’t know that when you get behind the wheel of a car after you’ve had a drink. You might well not have been the only person on this stretch of road. Now, you need to get in the car.’
‘Are you a
rresting me?’
‘We will be, as soon as we get your details. We’ll be arresting you and taking you to the police station at Halifax where you’ll be locked up pending a second breathalyser. You’ll be entitled to a phone call when you get there.’ As he spoke, he put a hand on her arm to steer her towards the car. She wanted to shake free and shout that this was ridiculous, she was Carol Jordan, scourge of murderers and rapists, queen of the crime scene. But she forced herself to stay calm.
It felt so strange to be the one directed into the back of a patrol car, the hand on her head to protect the officers from any accusation of carelessness or deliberate violence. While the arresting officer moved her Land Rover, his colleague ran her number plate through the national computer. ‘Are you the registered keeper of the vehicle?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, you would be Carol Jordan?’
‘Yes.’
And so it continued. Date of birth. Address. Yes, really. Just down the road. All the time biting her lip to keep a smart-arsed retort inside. All the checks done with, they set off in the Land Rover’s wake. Less than three minutes and they were pulling into her own gateway. ‘My dog,’ she said, remembering her excuse for getting out of George Nicholas’s dinner party. ‘She’s been indoors all evening. Can I let her out for a quick pee before you take me in?’
The driver turned in his seat and scrutinised her, trying to figure out if she was up to something. ‘You’re about to be arrested. You don’t get luxuries like dog-walking.’
As he spoke, his colleague opened the door and looked in. ‘Dog-walking? I heard barking coming from inside.’
‘My dog. She needs to be let out. Only for a few minutes.’
‘I’ve told her, you don’t get off the leash when you’re about to be arrested,’ his colleague said, laughing at his own limp joke.
The first cop ignored him, leaning in to look directly at Carol. ‘Is the dog all right with strangers? Friendly, like?’
