Splinter the Silence (Tony Hill)

by Val McDermid

  The following offender profile is for guidance only and shouldn’t be regarded as an identikit portrait. The offender is unlikely to match the profile in every detail, though I would expect there to be a high degree of congruence between the characteristics outlined below and the reality. All of the statements in the profile express probabilities and possibilities, not hard facts.

  A serial killer produces signals and indicators in the commission of his crimes. Everything he does is intended, consciously or not, as part of a pattern. Discovering the underlying pattern reveals the killer’s logic. It may not appear logical to us, but to him it is crucial. Because his logic is so idiosyncratic, straightforward traps will not capture him. As he is unique, so must be the means of catching him, interviewing him and reconstructing his acts.

  It was almost comforting to see those words on the screen. They anchored him to the discipline he’d been following for so many years. Now, he started making notes on screen that he could shape into a profile.

  What are his goals? The silencing of outspoken women who criticise men, generally in overtly feminist terms.

  What does that achieve? It sends a message to other women that feminism is a counsel of despair. It’s the f-word, the forbidden fruit. He’s telling them that pursuing such an agenda will lead to so much misery that suicide is the only answer.

  Where are the roots of his hostility? Almost certainly in childhood or early adolescence. Men who are driven wild as adults by what they see as the damage done to them by individual instances of feminism tend to focus their anger very directly and personally in the form of domestic violence.

  So what happened in his childhood to cause this warping of his outlook? A mother who disappeared from his life and a distorted version of the reason for her disappearance? Possibly a mother who became a lesbian and was forced out of the family circle? If so, this must have happened at a time when the courts still leaned towards giving custody to the father over a lesbian mother, so that would mean the killer was a small child before, say, the early 1990s. But the women he’s killing are not all lesbian, so that may not be the reason. Whatever explanation he was given for his mother’s departure from his life has provoked an extremely hostile reaction to feminism and women he perceives as feminist.

  It’s interesting that he doesn’t see rape as a weapon in this context. His idea of exerting power and control is to erase these women, not simply to punish or humiliate them. He wants them gone for good.

  Judging by the degree of self-control and planning we’re seeing here, he’s not young and/or impulsive. I’d estimate his age between 30 and 45.

  Typically serial killers’ behaviour links into the sexual homicide matrix, which generally has a clearly demarcated route that culminates in murder – poor school record, petty crime including acts of torture against animals, minor sexual offences and flashpoint acts of violence against weaker opponents. And so usually I recommend searching criminal records for traces of those who come into the frame as suspects; or checking out any persistent escalating offenders known to be on the patch.

  But this perpetrator is different. There appears not to be an obviously sexual component to these murders. So I’m inclined to think he hasn’t graduated to murder after a series of intensifying lesser offences. He’s had the hurt that has provoked these crimes in his heart from the beginning and nothing less than this kind of annihilation would begin to quiet the nagging voice in his head. It won’t have even occurred to him that torturing a cat or sexually assaulting a minor might be a satisfactory act. So he’s not going to have the kind of criminal record that we’d recognise as indicative of serial homicide. Chances are he has no criminal record at all.

  The leaving of literary texts at the crime scenes tells us something about his level of education and sophistication. He hasn’t just googled ‘famous suicides’ and gone with that. He’s specifically chosen women writers who would fit broadly in the category of feminist. That suggests to me that he probably has degree-level education and a professional status in his working life. His degree is not necessarily in English or American literature, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it was.

  He has a high level of intelligence. To convincingly fake a suicide is far from easy. To do it three times without generating suspicion is hard. It needs planning, patience and a cool head under pressure. Once he has identified and targeted his victims, he has clearly watched them and studied their lives without generating suspicion. So we know he’s smart, patient and analytical in his approach. He’s either self-employed or has a job that allows him a degree of freedom and mobility, given we’re looking at victims in London, Birmingham and Bradfield. It’s hard to see where he is vulnerable in the early stages of his crimes.

  Except that he has to acquire his targets somehow. These are almost certainly women he doesn’t know. Does he come across them by randomly trawling social media for somebody whose loudly expressed opinions piss him off? Does he go for women he’s heard on the radio or seen in the papers? Does he pick them up from what’s trending on Twitter? However he’s doing it, I think he’s doing it as a spectator. He may be joining in the general vilification, but if he is, it’s only occasionally. He won’t be a hardcore troll. He’ll enjoy what others say and do but he won’t get stuck in. He’s too smart, too self-controlled for that. He knows how easy it is to be tracked down once you stick your head above the parapet.

  This man is dangerous. He’s going to keep on killing because he wants to create a climate of fear. I think his goal is to make women withdraw from public discourse, and that’s not a realistic prospect. So there will continue to be plenty of prospective victims and he won’t shy away from dispatching them. We need to catch him so we can stop him. And right this minute, I’ve got no idea how to do that.

  Tony stared at his bleak conclusion and tried to think of a way to express it that offered some fragment of hope. But nothing was surfacing. ‘You’ve lost your touch,’ he told himself, closing the lid of his laptop and laying it on the side table. There were few things more frustrating than not being able to complete a piece of work because his imagination had let him down.

  When all else failed there was one avenue he often found productive. Occupying his brain with something else seemed to liberate his subconscious mind. Left to its own devices, it would grind away like a hamster on a wheel until, more often than not, a solution would wriggle out into the daylight and make him smile with delight. Usually, his distraction of choice was some form of video game that required complete engagement of hands and mind. Creating a world or saving mankind, defeating a threat or building a railroad. They’d all played a part in making unpredictable leaps forward.

  But he deliberately kept no games on his laptop, and there was nothing on his phone sufficiently immersive. The only distraction here was books. And there were no shortage of those. Reading wasn’t the answer, though. It was the wrong kind of distraction, using the same part of his brain as the puzzle he was trying to resolve. What he could do was unpack and shelve some of the remaining boxes. Figuring out what needed to go where and how he could best arrange the collection was exactly the kind of challenge that would work.

  He jumped to his feet, pulled off his jacket and made for the nearest box. Foucault’s History of Sexuality was rapidly followed by Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test and Fiona Cameron’s Mapping Murder. Oh yes, this would do perfectly. Tony started pulling out books and making decisions about where they should be placed. It was repetitive, slightly challenging and offered moments of distraction when something neglected for too long caught his attention.

  More than an hour had passed. Three boxes had been emptied and he was contemplating a fourth when he stopped in his tracks. He slapped his forehead with the flat of his hand and rolled his eyes. ‘Books!’ he exclaimed. ‘Bloody books, you numbskull.’

  40

  Stacey had set a series of routines in motion and was writing code to create more searches. This was the kind of thing that normally
filled her with a Zen-like calm. Not today, though. Today she felt knocked out of kilter like an unbalanced wheel. The morning session with the team had been reassuring and interesting, reminding her of all the reasons why she’d been thrilled to be back on a team led by Carol Jordan. But then they’d dispersed, each with their own tasks, and she’d been left with nowhere to hide from the anxiety that had been fizzing away beneath the surface since the morning after she’d broken the news of the new MIT to Sam.

  He’d been subdued all evening and later, when they’d gone to bed, she’d practically had to force him to snuggle with her. ‘I know she doesn’t trust me, but I deserve the chance to prove she’s wrong about me,’ he’d said. Like a child picking a scab, he couldn’t seem to leave it alone. Stacey wished she could say something to make him feel better about himself. She knew he was a good cop; she wished she could make Carol Jordan see that.

  She hadn’t seen him since the morning after. He’d gone off, saying he was meeting up with some mates and they’d probably head over to Leeds to see some band. She’d texted him a couple of times and left a voicemail but he hadn’t got back to her. She hadn’t had much experience with men, but she did know that when their pride was hurt, they needed space and time to lick their wounds, so she was trying not to crowd him.

  Stacey decided to go round to Sam’s flat on her way home from the briefing. He didn’t answer the intercom and she didn’t have a key. When she’d given him a key to her place, he’d said, ‘There’s no point in me giving you a key to my flat. Why would we ever go there when we’ve got this place at our disposal?’ She’d been charmed by his obvious appreciation of her home but now she wished she’d insisted. She didn’t want to think of him sitting home alone, brooding about what he’d see as his failure. She wanted to comfort him, to reassure him that his career still had huge potential. But now there was nothing for it but to go home and get back to the endless routines that might take the squad closer to a callous killer.

  Stacey understood the importance of her work but for once that underpinning wasn’t enough to keep her focused. She checked her messages and emails every five minutes, irritated with herself for it. She felt out of place in her own skin and kept walking away from her array of screens to prowl round the flat, refill her water bottle or stare out moodily over the city roofs. Why wouldn’t he let her help him? Wasn’t that what lovers were supposed to do?

  When her phone rang, she almost tripped over her feet in her haste to get back to her desk. Seeing Tony’s name on the screen, she came close to not answering. But her sense of duty trumped her discontent and she fed the call through her speakers.

  ‘Books,’ he said without preamble. ‘That’s the way to find him.’

  ‘What about books?’ Stacey had worked with Tony for long enough not to dismiss him as a crazy man when he produced such gnomic utterances.

  ‘I’ve been working up a profile and I couldn’t come up with any useful suggestions that might help you guys track him down. It was frustrating because usually there’s something I can offer that’s like applied maths – it takes the theory and produces a practical application. And then it came to me. Books.’

  ‘I’m not entirely clear what you’re saying here, Tony.’

  ‘He’s been planning this for a while. He’s not lurching from killing to killing. He’s choosing the victims as they present themselves to him, but not the methods. He’s got the books lined up. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise how would he know there are enough to go around? Do you see? If he randomly started it, he couldn’t know he’d find enough famous women writers who’d killed themselves to fuel a campaign. It’s like the fatal flaw in Se7en, where the killer had obviously been planning the sequence more than a year ahead, but how could he have known he was going to end up with a cop whose sin was anger? He might have turned out to be despairing, or cowardly, or uncaring. That was bad planning. Our man is a planner too, and he looks to me like a good planner. I bet he has a nice little stack of books so he can mark each death and so the world will eventually notice there’s a rash of these deaths that have a common feature. That women are killing themselves because they are ashamed of what they’ve said and they’re copycatting each other by leaving books as suicide notes.’

  Stacey felt a glimmer of comprehension. ‘And you think he bought all the books at once?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Tony said triumphantly. ‘I knew you’d get it. Now, I’ve done a bit of quick and dirty research here and you’re not going to find all three of these books in your average high street bookshop. Your best bet would be an online retailer. And when it comes to books, we all know who the number one e-tailer is, right?’

  ‘Valhalla.co.uk,’ Stacey said. ‘The evil empire.’

  ‘Do you think they’d search their records and tell us if anybody in the last twelve months bought all three of those books?’

  Stacey couldn’t stop herself snorting in derision. ‘Are you kidding? It’d be easier to get a Swiss bank to reveal who owns its numbered accounts.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Tony said. ‘And everybody knows that, right? Everybody knows Valhalla are so paranoid about commercial confidentiality that they won’t tell anybody anything about anything.’

  ‘Exactly. So there’s no point asking. Even if you got a warrant, it would somehow take months or even years to execute it.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘What do you mean, perfect? I thought you wanted this information?’

  ‘Of course I want it. But it wouldn’t be there to be found if our perpetrator thought it would be retrievable.’

  ‘Either I’m being very stupid or you’re not making sense.’

  ‘Sorry. This guy is smart, Stacey. He knows how to cover his traces. All I’m getting at is that the killer could safely order from Valhalla because he knows, as everybody knows, that it’s an article of faith with Valhalla not to release any information. So he wasn’t taking a risk by ordering all the books from Valhalla. He knew we’d never get our hands on that information legitimately. But what he couldn’t know is that we have you.’ Tony ended on an exultant note.

  ‘So, let me be clear about this. You want me to make an illegal hack, break through the legendary security of Valhalla.co.uk and find out whether any single purchaser bought all three of the books associated with our victims?’ She didn’t even try to keep the incredulity from her voice.

  ‘That’s it. You’ve got it. You can do that, right?’

  Stacey sighed. The trouble with being as good as she was was that everyone expected miracles as routine. Because none of them knew anything about what went on behind the front end of the systems they took for granted, they assumed that what she did was a level playing field of complexity. They thought it was as easy to hack a security-obsessed multinational corporation as it was to open a teenager’s social media account. ‘It’s a big job, Tony,’ she said. ‘And I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right? I never cease to be amazed at the back-door stuff you come up with. You’ve got a real feel for how systems work.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I’m talking physical kit. I’m not sure what I’ve got can do the job. I might have to build something and I’ll certainly have to write some code. Or adapt some I’ve done before, depending on what I find in there. It might be easier and quicker to get somebody else to do it.’ Stacey wasn’t sure why she was making such an admission to Tony. Her standard operating procedure with her colleagues was to say nothing and get on with what they’d asked for. Maintaining her mystique as a hacker in a white hat. She never talked in any detail about how hard or how easy a particular task might be. She just presented results like a magician displaying high-level prestidigitation as if it was an everyday skill. If she was honest, she wanted them to think she was amazing. But her relationship with Sam had changed her in so many ways. Perhaps it was possible to admit to fallibility and still have people think she was amazing. If there was a safe place to
do that, it was with Tony.

  ‘Is that secure? Have you done that before?’

  Stacey paused and took a deep breath. ‘Yes. There are two people I trust implicitly. One of them I’ve asked for help before and he gave it, no questions asked. And all it cost us was a return favour, which is all paid off now. The other I’ve known since I first started writing programs. We’ve done stuff together for years, but nothing work-related. But – you know I have a private business, right?’

  Tony laughed. ‘Well, I figured out a long time ago that you either had some kind of business on the side or else you were siphoning money off from the Bank of England. You don’t get a lifestyle like yours on a detective’s salary.’

  Stacey felt a momentary twinge of anxiety. ‘Does Carol know?’

  A moment’s pause for thought. ‘I’d say she chooses not to know. As long as it doesn’t have any impact on what you do for the MIT, she’s not going to pick a fight with you about what you get up to on your own time. What were you going to say about your own company?’

  ‘Only that my friend has done quite a bit of work for me over the years and he’s never let me down. A lot of what we do is commercially confidential. He could have destroyed my income stream pretty much any time in the last ten years and he’s never given me any cause for concern. So if I do need help, there are people I can turn to.’

  ‘And it has the added advantage of keeping your hands clean if it all comes on top,’ Tony added, his tone wry.

  ‘That doesn’t hurt,’ Stacey said. ‘I don’t want to go to jail. But neither do they. So the chances of it all going horribly wrong are vanishingly small. These are clever boys, Tony. They’ve been doing this a long time and they have a very clear-eyed understanding of what they can and can’t do. So if I do have to outsource what you’re asking me…’ She paused, considering. ‘I think we’ll come out of it in one piece. There’s only one problem.’