Splinter the Silence (Tony Hill)

by Val McDermid

  ‘The grunt work,’ Carol said. ‘That’d make a team like this popular with the locals.’

  Brandon shrugged. ‘Something you’ve never had to finesse before.’ The sarcasm was only thinly veiled.

  Carol finally cracked a smile. ‘How to keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. My motto.’

  ‘Where’s the catch?’ Tony said.

  ‘I don’t think there is one,’ Brandon said. ‘We get a first-class detective back doing what she does best, we have the chance to try out a new style of policing, and Carol avoids her life crashing and burning. Do you think there’s a downside in there, Tony?’

  ‘Where would we be based?’ Carol asked.

  Brandon laughed. ‘My God, Carol, you haven’t lost your knack. Straight to the only unattractive part of the whole equation. You’ll be working out of an office in Bradfield. That’s not negotiable. It’s logistically the best choice and they have space. However, you won’t be at force HQ.’

  ‘Where will we be?’

  ‘Skenfrith Street. The third floor’s been empty ever since they took the station out of mothballs. It’s all cabled up and ready to roll, but it’s never been used.’ Brandon’s smile was encouraging.

  ‘Skenfrith Street,’ Carol said flatly. ‘Home of DCI Alex Fielding, who hates me even more than Blake. Fabulous. The last time I was in Skenfrith Street –’ she gestured with her thumb at Tony – ‘he was under arrest for murder. She’s going to love having us under the same roof, reminding us of her finest hour.’

  Startled, Tony yelped, ‘Us?’

  ‘Well, duh.’ Carol rolled her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t even consider this if I wasn’t allowed a proper team.’

  Brandon gave a satisfied nod. ‘I take it that’s a yes, then?’

  ‘I’d like some time to think about it.’

  Brandon shook his head. ‘That’s not going to be possible. The court is gearing up downstairs. If we’re going to get you off the hook, it has to be now.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Tony said. ‘If you’ve got enough weight behind you to make a drink-driving charge go up in smoke, you’ve got more than enough juice to get the CPS to ask for an adjournment. Long enough to give Carol a chance to consider this properly.’

  ‘As I said earlier, there are three other people who are also being let off the hook to make Carol’s case dismissal look kosher. So it’s all got to happen this morning. There’s no leeway.’ Brandon’s voice was steely, his face implacable. It was a stern reminder to them both that, behind his geniality, Brandon was capable of unyielding obduracy. They’d seen it employed on their behalf in the past; it was uncomfortable to be on the receiving end now.

  Carol knew when she was beaten. ‘One more question,’ she said, defeat conceded. ‘And it might be the deal-breaker. Obviously there’s a chain of command. Who am I answerable to?’

  ‘The Home Office in the final analysis. For now, while we’re putting the pieces together and seeing how things pan out in practice, I have oversight on their behalf. The chief constables of the various forces will have to come through me.’

  This time, everyone smiled. The relief was palpable. Carol took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. ‘Given the alternative… when do I start?’

  He stood up and extended a hand across the table. ‘Tomorrow morning suit you?’

  Carol accepted the handshake. ‘What time?’

  ‘I’ll see you there at nine,’ Brandon said. ‘Don’t let me down, Carol. There’s a lot riding on this.’

  A flush coloured her cheeks. ‘I’m done with letting people down, John.’ She tipped her head to Tony. ‘He’s always on about redemption and rehabilitation. I’ll try and prove both of you right.’

  23

  After Kate Rawlins, he’d felt an odd mixture of triumph and jitteriness. He hugged his knowledge to himself, pleased he’d taken the first step on this evangelical undertaking. But when he closed his eyes at night, anxiety kicked in. He’d exercised power over life and death. His had been the last face Kate Rawlins had seen. And yet, a current of apprehension ran through him like the tremor you got in your arms from using a hammer drill. Would he, could he get away with it? But as the days had passed and it became clear that everybody was convinced she’d killed herself, he began to relax.

  What helped to soothe him was the preparation for the next one. He’d shortlisted another three women and started watching each of them whenever he could. This time, Sylvia Plath would be his template. He knew from the start it would be a challenge. Plath had gassed herself, but that was back before the days of natural gas. Then, stoves and household fires were fuelled by poisonous coal gas. People put their heads in the oven and turned on the gas and they died. Painlessly, by all accounts. But it was the gas that killed them.

  That wasn’t going to work so well for him. But he’d been thinking about this for a long time and after testing out a raft of different ideas and rejecting them, he finally had a plan. Daisy Morton had a public profile. And so he’d pretended to be a journalist from a women’s magazine. ‘At home with Daisy Morton’ was the pitch. Appealing to their vanity always worked.

  And then it had been laughably easy. He’d turned up at the agreed time, and of course she’d offered tea. He’d slipped the GHB into her tea. While he waited for it to take effect, he’d had to listen to the rubbish she spouted. If he’d had any doubts about what he was doing, that would have crushed them. Once she’d started slurring her stupid words, he’d given her a couple of valium to make sure she stayed calm and controllable; if they did a post-mortem toxicology screen and it showed up, they’d assume she’d taken it to calm herself down and make sure she went through with her plan.

  Once the drugs kicked in, it was easy. Plastic bag over the head, gas from the hob via a piece of vacuum cleaner hose, and patience. She’d barely twitched as the gas filled her lungs, displacing the air and slowly suffocating her. He’d watched the plastic membrane move in and out with her breathing until it finally stopped. There was a thrill in knowing, as with Kate, that he could stop it any time he wanted. It was almost sexual. But he was stronger than that. He had a goal and he wasn’t going to be deflected by pity or shame.

  He checked her pulse, then checked it again a few minutes later. When he was satisfied she was really gone, he removed the bag and the hose and turned on all the burners on the hob. He fetched towels from the bathroom, wet them and stuffed them along the bottom of the back door. He put more behind the kitchen door as he closed it on the way out. They wouldn’t stop the gas escaping but if there was the sort of explosion he was hoping for, the remnants of them would be in the right area. And if there was no detonation, the assumption would be that they’d been pushed back when the kitchen door was opened.

  He found Daisy’s mobile in the pocket of her jeans and rigged it up to the old-fashioned answering machine he’d brought with him, setting them both down close to the stove.

  His last act before he left the house was to pull the pages loose from the Sylvia Plath book and leave them in the hallway. He was no expert, but he thought an explosion would blow them out into the garden. Some of them would survive.

  Then he settled in for the long wait. If things went according to the routine he’d observed four times now, nobody would return to the house before four in the afternoon. By then the house would be filled with gas. When her kids came home, as soon as they approached the front door, he would call Daisy’s mobile phone. That in turn would set off the answering machine, creating a sustained electrical arc that would be enough to ignite the room full of gas.

  That day, waiting had been almost unbearable. He could have left it at Daisy lying with her head in the oven but he wanted something more spectacular, something that couldn’t be ignored. These deaths needed to make a mark. They needed to make women sit up and take notice.

  To understand that being like Daisy and Kate wasn’t going to end well.

  24

  Working in Carol Jordan’s MIT had pla
ced Paula firmly at the leading edge of modern policing. But when it came to teasing information out of other cops, she was perfectly capable of stepping back in time. And so she had arranged to meet Detective Sergeant Franny Riley in a gloomy pub a couple of streets away from Bradfield Police’s Northern Division HQ. The pub consisted of a series of small rooms furnished with dark wooden tables and heavy chairs. Although it had been years since smoking had been banned in pubs, Paula could have sworn the penetrating stink of stale smoke hung in the air. It wasn’t coming from her either – it had been six weeks since she’d replaced her heavy-duty habit with an e-cigarette, much to Elinor’s relief and delight.

  She bought herself a pint and settled down to wait at a corner table, her back to the wall. Five minutes drifted by, then a man shouldered his way into the room, looking more like the stereotype of a villain than a cop. Bull-necked, his nose badly repaired after an old break, his ears misshapen and unmatching, he walked on the balls of his feet as if expecting fight or flight to hit the agenda at any moment. His dark eyes glittered as they swept the room, then, seeing Paula, crinkled and twinkled in a smile that turned his piratical face benevolent. ‘Mine’s a Guinness,’ he said, parking himself opposite her.

  ‘Good to see you too, Franny,’ she said, getting to her feet and heading for the bar. By the time she returned, he was surreptitiously sucking on a discreet e-cigarette of his own. ‘Is that strictly legal?’ she asked, setting his drink down.

  ‘Landlord doesn’t give a shit. Draws the line at full-on fagging it, but vaping’s OK with him. Half his customers and most of his profits come from us anyway, he’s not going to make a fuss.’ He took a long pull of his pint then wiped the foam from his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. ‘Good pint. So. You’ll be wanting me to do your job for you, as usual?’

  Franny Riley was defiantly old school. But she knew that he knew she was a good cop in spite of her gender, as he would have put it. She’d proven herself when their paths had crossed before, and in spite of his abrasive approach, Paula trusted his acumen and his information. ‘More like satisfying my curiosity, Franny,’ she said, raising her glass in a silent toast.

  ‘Daisy Morton, you said on the phone?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What’s your interest? You’re Skenfrith Street now, right? No more mighty MIT? What’s Skenfrith Street got to do with Daisy Morton? Are you doing some kind of a foreigner?’

  He was, she remembered, a lot shrewder than you might expect. ‘You remember Tony Hill?’

  Franny’s lip curled in a sardonic grimace. ‘Funny little bugger with a blue plastic bag and a conversational style that goes all round the houses? That Tony Hill?’

  ‘That Tony Hill. Not just a funny bugger, Franny, a clever bugger too. Anyway, he’s got a bee in his bonnet about a couple of cases of suicide. I said I’d have a look around as a favour to a friend.’

  Franny took another deep swallow. Half the pint had gone in two gulps. ‘He got nicked a while back, didn’t he? Ended up making DCI Fielding look like a right arse?’

  Paula gave a wry smile. ‘And that didn’t exactly help my career. The DCI is not my friend these days.’

  ‘Not like DCI Jordan, eh?’

  ‘Oh, Franny, if you only knew the ways… Anyway, I’m interested because Tony’s interested in Daisy Morton’s death.’

  ‘Suicide. Whatever the coroner said, we were satisfied there was nothing going on beyond that. I can see why he gave an open verdict to spare the family, because it was an odd one. But I don’t think there’s any room for doubt. She was getting seven shades of shit from every corner of the internet, and it all got too much for her.’

  ‘Fair enough. But you have to admit it wasn’t a bog-standard, straight-down-the-middle-of-the-fairway suicide.’

  He gave her a speculative look. ‘Is there any such thing?’

  ‘You know there is. Overdose, chucking yourself in in front of a train, hanging yourself from the bannisters. Sticking your head in the gas oven used to be all the rage, but not since we changed to natural gas forty years ago. It’s really hard to do yourself in with natural gas because it’s not toxic. It only works when you manage to displace the oxygen with carbon monoxide. Or am I teaching you to suck eggs?’

  The word ‘suck’ reminded Franny of his e-cig and he took a deep drag. ‘It worked, though. She was obviously determined to go for it. The post-mortem says carbon monoxide poisoning. No smoke in the lungs. So she was dead before the explosion and the fire.’ He raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘You’re right, though, it’s not the obvious route. But who knows what goes through a woman’s head when she’s had enough? Come to that, who knows what goes through a woman’s head at any time?’

  ‘Did you check out the harassment she got online?’

  Franny nodded. ‘Bloody awful. Those twats need a good kicking. Relentless, it was. But there was dozens of them. It wasn’t like it was only one person giving her the needle. So if your Tony’s looking for a single arsehole driving her to it, he’s barking up the wrong tree.’

  Smarter than the average bear, as she’d always known. ‘I don’t know what he’s thinking, to be honest. Was there anything else about it that was out of the ordinary?’

  Franny drained his pint. ‘Hard to say.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘There was one thing. But we both know fire and explosion do funny things.’

  ‘Like blowing people’s clothes off?’

  ‘That kind of thing. So this might be something Daisy did herself or it might have been caused by the explosion.’

  Paula waited while Franny exhaled a cloud of vapour and considered.

  ‘All over the front garden there were pages from a book of poetry. Scattered everywhere.’

  ‘A book of poetry?’

  He nodded. ‘Something called Ariel. By that lass Sylvia Plath who’s buried up by Heptonstall. Married to Ted Hughes. Him that was Poet Laureate.’

  Paula hoped she was hiding her astonishment at the extent of Franny’s literary knowledge. ‘She gassed herself,’ she said. ‘Sylvia Plath.’

  Franny nodded. ‘That she did. So maybe that was Daisy’s last message to the rest of us. Like Sylvia Plath, she couldn’t take any more.’

  ‘She didn’t leave a note, then?’

  Pointedly, he sucked the last drops of stout from his glass. ‘Not a word. Now, are you for another pint or are you off like a scalded cat now you’ve sucked me dry?’

  Paula laughed. ‘Just a half. Because I’m not really supposed to be here at all.’

  Franny guffawed. ‘You and me both, pet. You and me both.’

  When they’d been kids, Carol and her brother Michael had had their own cure for hiccups – thumbs in the ears, index fingers jamming the nostrils closed, eyes shut to avoid distraction, the deepest breath you could squeeze into your lungs, then hold it for as long as possible. Till you could feel the hot tide of blood in your cheeks and you thought your eyeballs might explode. Then, an eruption of breath like an explosion. The hiccups would be gone, but the sufferer would stagger around for a few moments, light-headed and disorientated. That was how she felt all the way back to the barn. She’d screwed herself up so tight to face the consequences of her stupidity and then suddenly, all that tension had been released.

  She said next to nothing on the journey home. Tony kept starting sentences without finishing them, fading to a halt a few words in. She was accustomed to him talking to himself when he was working out a problem. What she wasn’t used to was being the problem.

  It wasn’t even lunchtime when they walked into the barn. Carol closed the door behind them and crouched down to accept the adoring welcome from Flash. As the dog licked her hands, she buried her face in the black-and-white fur of her ruff and tried to calm herself. Tony stood a few feet away, watching them with an expression of curiosity. She looked up. ‘What? You’ve never seen a dog welcome its owner before?’

  ‘It’s an aspect of you I’m not e
ntirely familiar with yet. Obviously it’s some sort of displacement, but I’m not sure for what.’

  Carol glared at him but her heart wasn’t in it. Just because he managed to come out with so many unsettling lines didn’t mean he wasn’t trying to help. She stood up and leaned against the wall. Christ, she needed a drink. She was determined not to have one, but the desire burned through her like electricity in the vein. A vodka and tonic, so cold the glass would sweat condensation over her fingers. Or the smooth glide of a Pinot Grigio slipping down her throat, taking all the tension with it. A few of those and she would feel no fear.

  Because fear was exactly what she was feeling right now. Coursing through her, making her heart race and her hands damp. She could feel a drop of cold sweat trickling into the small of her back. What in the name of God had she agreed to? Her eyelids fluttered and she drew in a ragged breath. ‘You can go home now,’ she said, pushing off from the wall and heading for what had been her private domain until Tony had decided to move in. ‘I don’t need a chauffeur any more.’

  She could hear his footsteps on the concrete floor as he slowly followed her. ‘I want to help,’ he said.

  ‘And you have.’ Carol kept her back to him, walking through to the kitchen and filling the kettle, shielding it with her body to hide the tremor in her hands. ‘And now it’s time for me to stand on my own two feet. I’m not drinking and I’m not going to.’

  ‘I thought it might be useful for you to use me as a sounding board. This is a huge challenge you’re taking on. And Brandon clearly expects you to hit the ground running even though you’ve spent the last six months being a builder, not a copper.’ He sat down at the table, reaching for a satsuma and starting to peel it. The bitter-sweet tang of the orange peel filled the air between them.

  ‘You can’t follow me round holding my hand.’ She blocked any response by activating the coffee grinder. When it stopped, she spooned grounds into the cafetiere and poured on the water.