by Claire Askew
Look, she forced herself to think, at your bloody notes.
It was unorthodox, this meeting she was organising, but this was a case – and a crime – like no other, and the gathering would help her tick a lot of boxes. First, she had a lot of information that needed to be imparted to the families: as soon as they’d been allocated FLOs, they’d started asking questions, and Birch’s bewildered team were struggling to keep up. They were mostly hard questions – parents wanting to know when their child’s remains would be released to them; siblings asking if they could meet with FLOs alone because their parents were struggling too much with their grief. Everyone was in need of a level of victim support that Birch had never before orchestrated. As well as the FLOs, she’d invited as many Victim Support Scotland workers as she could rope in.
Secondly, McLeod was worried. When school and college shootings happened in America, families of victims routinely tried to sue the police. The emergency response to Three Rivers had been not-great – as one of the first officers on the scene, Birch would readily attest to that. McLeod wanted to get as many of the families in one place as he possibly could, essentially to try and butter them up. ‘Damage control,’ he’d said to Birch. She’d made a face at him as soon as he turned his back, but had to admit: it wasn’t the worst idea he’d ever had.
Thirdly, Birch hoped that the families might get some comfort from coming together in the same room. It would be a meagre comfort, she imagined, but she also knew from experience the quietly restorative power of community. Her mother had only begun to recover, after Charlie, when she began talking to people – and trusting them – again.
Lastly, and secretly, Birch hoped that she might get the chance to warn the families away from Grant Lockley and his ilk. She knew the tabloids would soon start doorstepping them, offering dizzying sums of money for tell-all stories. It would be better for everyone involved if the personal stories of Three Rivers families were kept out of the papers: her own bitter personal experience with Grant Lockley had convinced her of that much.
Birch opened her laptop. Her head felt fizzy, like she’d been picked up and shaken. She couldn’t settle to anything. As the screen lit up she clicked open the folder she’d made in order to keep track of the death threats being sent to Moira Summers. There were a lot: she’d told Amy not to let on to Moira quite how many. Analysis had started to come back on them, and most, it seemed, were one-offs – sent online, some within half an hour of the press conference at which a police spokesperson had confirmed that Ryan Summers was indeed the Three Rivers gunman. But a few people were proving more persistent, and there were a couple of individuals, still unidentified, who analysis felt were credible. There were people out there who might really want to kill Moira Summers.
It wasn’t a stretch to see why. In her first couple of years on the force, Birch had routinely chided herself for privately understanding why a perp might have wanted to commit the crimes that they did. Jealousy, grief, desperation: more than once, she’d thought, Yeah, I’d have done the same in your shoes, and then punished herself for even entertaining the thought. These days, she gave herself more of a break. After all, if Moira Summers really had known what her son was planning – really had stayed silent and let him do it – then some measure of justice would have to be meted out. Birch could understand the men and women who were volunteering themselves as vigilantes, willing to do just that. She planned to stop them by any means necessary, but she understood them nevertheless. Birch had sat in the interview room with Moira: had held her gaze as the woman dissolved into tears over and over again. Surely, she thought – surely, that distraught and ashen woman cannot have been the silent accessory to thirteen murders? No: she shook the thought away. The idea was too unpleasant to hold on to for long.
Birch clicked into her emails and opened the most recent one from Marcello, a criminal intelligence analyst she had a soft spot for. Marcello was Italian, and the least subtle person Birch had ever met: he spoke loudly and laughed often, with his whole body. It was an excellent cover for someone who worked in intelligence, she thought. Each time his name popped up in her inbox, she smiled. He had a gap between his front teeth, and the most startling blue eyes. If she thought she’d be able to find the time, she might have tried to get the courage up to ask him out for a drink. But it wouldn’t end well. Birch’s relationships never did: not since she married this job, what – twelve years ago? She sighed. Come on, she thought. You have to do this work. Concentrate.
Marcello’s expert eye had picked up on a thread in the general noise of death and rape threats – Birch grimaced at the number of those there were, too – that he thought she should pay particular attention to.
I’m calling this man, and I’m certain it is a man, correspondent C, he wrote. In the attached spreadsheet, I’ve highlighted the various threats I believe have been sent by him.
Birch clicked open a preview of the document, let it hover alongside the text of Marcello’s email. A few lines of cells in the white spreadsheet were coloured in green.
There aren’t many, he wrote, not as many as some of our other correspondents. But I believe his threats are the most credible, and by far the most worrisome. Correspondent C is careful with his wording, and he repeats the same sort of phrases and imagery. It’s my belief that he has clear ideas about how he would like to hurt his target.
There was more text, but Birch was still struggling to focus. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, the laptop display informed her it was 17:21. Maybe . . . she thought, and reached for her mobile. Marcello answered after two rings.
‘Detective Inspector Birch!’
Birch flinched, and moved the phone away from her ear just slightly.
‘Marcello,’ she said, ‘I’m so pleased you’re still there.’
‘Waiting for your call, my darling,’ he said, and then his trademark laugh. ‘And if you think I’m getting to go home by five these days, you’re dreaming.’
‘Sorry,’ Birch said, ‘that’s largely my fault, isn’t it?’
He laughed again.
‘Let us say it’s Ryan Summers’ fault.’
Birch pushed aside the desire to make small talk. You have to do this work, she told herself again. Plus, she wasn’t sure she had the energy for anything other than what was right in front of her.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m reading your notes about Correspondent C. I share your concerns.’
Fibs, she thought. What you mean is, I don’t know what I’m doing, Marcello, and I need you to tell me what’s up.
‘Yes, he’s credible for sure. A very interesting man, I think.’
Birch rolled her eyes. She’d always been amazed at the knack that certain cadres of police personnel had for totally distancing themselves from the human realities of a case: perps and victims were all just numbers to be crunched, patterns and quirks to geek out over.
‘What can you tell me about him?’
She felt something quicken on the line between them. Marcello was preparing to give her a theory.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have a hunch, one that I cannot prove yet. What I know, almost for certain, is that Correspondent C is a man. He’s an older man – a lot of the one-off threats came from individuals under twenty-five, as I mentioned. But the length, vocabulary and general style of these messages suggest an educated, professional person.’
Birch was nodding again: nodding at a person who couldn’t see her. It was a bad habit she’d long been aware of, but had yet to do anything about.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘What else?’
Marcello was making a clicking sound between his teeth. In the background, she could hear him typing.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Here we are. Okay, so he’s gone to some lengths to hide his identity, and to make it look like these threats came from different people.’
‘Like what?’
There was a pause.
‘You got my email?’ Marcello was laughing at her.
&n
bsp; ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But lack of sleep is messing with my reading comprehension right now.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well, he tries on linguistic disguises . . . attempting to write in a way that he thinks is distinct each time. It’s not very sophisticated, but he’s trying. And he’s used different computers, with different IP addresses, but it looks like they’re all in Edinburgh. These are the things that make Correspondent C worrisome. He’s persistent – not content with just sending one threat. And he lives locally. He will have local knowledge. He could easily find his target.’
‘So you’re about to ask me if you can go to the ISP and get more specific information,’ Birch said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ll need a warrant for that. And I don’t think he’ll have been stupid enough to send anything from his home address. But I suspect at least one of the computers being used is at his workplace . . . simply because that’s a strangely common thing these people do.’
Birch scribbled a note on top of her file. ‘Okay, I’ll get onto it. Now . . . what’s your hunch?’
‘Aha. You are keen to . . . “cut to the chase”, as they say in the movies.’
Birch rolled her eyes again.
‘So,’ Marcello was saying, ‘I can’t prove it yet, but as you know, DI Birch, I am always right . . .’
‘Of course.’
‘. . . so I will be extremely surprised if it doesn’t turn out that this man is personally connected – closely connected, I think – to one of the shooting victims.’
Birch sat up straight.
‘You mean . . . a family member?’
‘Could be,’ Marcello said. ‘He could be a friend, or a teacher, but . . . yes, I think this is a close relative of someone who died. An uncle, maybe. Maybe even a father. There are just little things in the wording. Little quirks. You know?’
Birch nodded.
‘Marcello,’ she said, in her best give it to me straight tone, ‘just how confident are you about this?’
‘Confident.’ Again, that loud laugh. ‘Confidence, my darling, is my middle name.’
Birch hung up and looked around her. The canteen had emptied out. At the far end, a couple of guys whose names she didn’t know were sipping terrible coffee from corrugated paper cups. About three tables away, a uniformed female officer was typing something on her phone, her thumbs going so quickly they were almost a blur.
She made a pfft sound, the shoved-out breath lifting her fringe off her face.
‘Focus, woman,’ she hissed to herself, apparently loudly enough for the uniform to flick her face up and look over.
Sorry, she mouthed. The woman shrugged.
Birch’s cup of tea had gone lukewarm at her elbow. An oily film had begun to form on its surface. She stared down at it, watching the quivering reflection of the ceiling tiles, and chewing over what Marcello had told her. Maybe this evening’s hastily arranged meeting would serve another purpose: she could watch the male family members for signs of criminal intent.
Someone’s uncle, she thought. Someone’s father. Would a bereaved father really turn his thoughts to revenge before his child’s body was even shelved in the morgue? Birch thought about men, what she’d seen of them as perps, as victims. Yes, she thought. Some fathers are like that. I could believe it.
Birch’s phone rang: Marcello’s department landline.
‘DI Birch?’ she answered, as though asking herself a question.
‘Marm.’
She sighed. The voice was not Marcello’s.
‘Jim?’ she tried.
‘John,’ said the voice on the other end. ‘But close enough.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s okay. I’ll answer to anything, as long as it’s not rude.’
‘It’s because I usually deal with Marcello,’ Birch said.
‘I know,’ John replied. ‘He just left. You’ll have to deal with me this time, I’m afraid.’
‘If this is about Correspondent C, I just—’
‘Yeah, I know,’ John said. ‘But no, it’s something else. I’ve been looking at those forum posts for you.’
Birch blinked.
‘Forum posts?’
‘Oh. Yeah – I sent you an email?’
Birch pressed one palm to her forehead.
‘Sorry, John. I’m . . . struggling to prioritise over here.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll start from the beginning. We got a tip-off – I’d assumed it had been passed up through you, but if not, no worries – about some posts on an online forum. Posts written over a period of several weeks earlier this year, which seemed to make reference to a Three Rivers-style event. We had reason to believe they might have been written by Ryan Summers.’
Birch scrabbled for a pen, and some white space to write on.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You have my full attention now.’
‘Don’t get too excited,’ John said. ‘I was mainly phoning to say that we’ve looked over them, but come to the conclusion that it’s going to be tricky to prove for certain that they were written by Summers. There are a lot of nutters on these forums, and they say all sorts of outlandish things – usually, they’re fantasists who can’t function in the world beyond their keyboards.’
‘This is an MRA forum?’
John paused.
‘You did read my email.’
‘No.’ Birch felt her mouth harden into a line. ‘Lucky guess, based on the all-female body count. God, but I hate it when I’m right.’
‘So our problem,’ John said, ‘is that usually, these anti-feminist and Men’s Rights types frequent lots of different fora, all over the internet. They tend to always use the same screen name, or a variation of the same, so they can keep tabs on each other. They have lots of little in-jokes and hashtags and creepy little codes that they speak in. But . . . this one profile, the one that made these posts? I can’t find him elsewhere in the wider MRA community. His screen name only appears in one other place, and then only once, making a fairly benign comment about something.’
‘What other place?’
She listened to nothing: the sound of John checking his notes.
‘Truth Unifies,’ he said. ‘It’s a conspiracy theorist website. No real MRA connection, though there is some crossover between MRA and conspiracy theorist circles. But the screen name could well be a coincidence. Could be someone totally different.’
‘What’s the screen name?’
‘theobviouschild,’ John said. ‘It’s a weird one.’
‘Isn’t that a Paul Simon song?’
‘I dunno, marm, is it?’
‘Yeah . . .’ Birch hummed a little of the tune, almost to herself, and then blushed. The uniform a few tables away seemed to be focused on not looking at her. ‘Ring a bell? It’s on the Rhythm of the Saints LP.’
John laughed.
‘I’ll take your word for it.’
‘That album came out when I was . . . twelve or so?’ Birch allowed herself a fleeting memory of the early nineties, sitting in the back of her dad’s car, listening to the song’s battering drum solo playing on cassette, a hot wind coming in through the hand-wound windows. ‘You must be too young to remember. It’s certainly a weird reference for a twenty-year-old to make, if it is Ryan Summers we’re looking at.’
‘Sure,’ John said. ‘So it may well not be him at all. But the things this guy’s threatening to do certainly match up with the events at Three Rivers . . . so if it’s not him, it’s spooky.’
Birch scribbled.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Keep at it for me, would you, John? It’s awful, but I think that if we could point to MRA-type tendencies in Summers for sure – if we could pinpoint something that might reasonably be called motive – that might bring a degree of closure for people.’
John ‘mm-hm’d into the receiver.
‘I can’t promise anything,’ he said, ‘but we’ll do what we can. Look at my email, when you get a minute; there’s some more detailed analysis ther
e. But for now, the only certain thing we can say about this obviouschild guy is . . . well, he’s got some really weird ideas about women.’
I knew it, Birch thought, as she swiped to end the call. I hate it when I’m right.
The room she’d booked for that evening’s gathering – the gathering, she’d called it in her head, a daft-feeling term that she now couldn’t shake – was woefully inadequate. In one bank of ceiling lights a fluorescent bulb flickered on-off, on-off, whispering link, link, link to itself. Birch had ordered teas and coffees for eighty – families, police personnel, Victim Support and college staff were all invited – and now a line of giant stainless-steel urns hissed and laboured on a side table, rattling the teaspoons in their saucers as they boiled, cooled, boiled again. The room had been set up with a wide circle of chairs, padded ones, at Birch’s request, scrounged from offices and waiting areas, so few of them matched. The room looked like something out of a horror movie, or like the set-up for an AA meeting straight out of the seventies. In a half-hour or so, people would start arriving. Birch paced inside the ring of chairs, as though trapped by its grim fairy circle. Any minute now, McLeod would make his entrance, and she’d have to bow and scrape.
The FLOs had already begun to file in – good, she thought. She wanted to pass on Marcello’s findings to them before the families arrived. Rehan Ibrahiim was first: this was his FLO debut and he was keen to show his commitment. Some of the more experienced FLOs arrived shortly after Rehan in a gaggle – a clique, even, Birch guessed. Among them was Rema Mohamed, an officer whose rep in the city was legendary. Standing at five feet tall, Rema was tiny but mighty. She’d been a vocal campaigner for the hijab to become an official part of the Police Scotland uniform, then when it did, she’d spoken to the press about the fact that the uniform rule was only the tip of the iceberg: there needed to be a concerted effort to recruit more Muslim women into the force. Birch admired Rema, and disliked the fact that her male colleagues had a tendency to speak of her as a fly in the workplace ointment. Some even referred to her as ‘the headscarf wifey’ – Al, the Gayfield custody sergeant, included. They’re just scared, Birch thought, watching Rema cross the room towards her. She’ll be their chief superintendent in no time, and they know it.
