Snap_‘The best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time’ Val McDermid

by Belinda Bauer

  He opened the drawers of the chest one by one and picked out random items of clothing. A vest. Some knickers. Socks. A child’s T-shirt … He put them in a backpack and closed the drawers.

  There was a framed photo on top of the cluttered chest. Jack picked it up. A boy and a girl at a zoo, laughing into the sun. Ice creams in cones melting down chubby fingers, while a resigned lemur stared mournfully from the cage behind them.

  Jack remembered days like that. At least, he thought he did. Sometimes his memories felt like stories he’d once been told of a parallel boy with another life.

  He dropped the photograph on to the carpet, and stamped on it.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Then he ground his heel into it until nothing could be seen of the shattered children.

  He reached up and tore the dinosaur lampshade off the swaying flex, then picked up a hammer from the bedside table and set about the toys – rampaging through the room, knocking heads off dolls and crushing pink plastic underfoot.

  He took a kitchen knife and plunged it into the mattress, slashing and tearing the bed and the bedding until the room was a snow globe of feathery, foamy white.

  Then he pulled his hoodie tight around his cheeks and over his mouth, and jogged loosely down the stairs, hammer in hand.

  The lounge had been tastefully decorated in creams and pale blues, and the TV was still on from the night before.

  Everybody Loves Raymond.

  Jack hit the screen so hard that the hammer got stuck and he had to jerk it out of the hole in Raymond’s face. The television swayed violently on its stand as the image flickered into a neon rainbow and then failed with an electrical fizz.

  Jack jumped up and down on the coffee table until it snapped and folded drunkenly in half. He beat the family’s pictures off the walls, then hunted down their ornaments – smashing heirlooms and childish pottery to powder and shards.

  He stood for a moment, his chest heaving from the rush of destruction, then stabbed at the cushions of the sofa and chairs – jerking the blade through the fabric, so that foam and kapok bulged obscenely from the tears and nothing could be saved, nothing repaired, nothing recovered.

  A lesson in loss.

  He moved on to the kitchen, where a discoloured puddle had spread across the floor from the open door of the fridge freezer. At one end of the table were the remains of a meal. Pasta with salad. The pan sat unwashed on the hob. He put it in the washing machine, then tossed in the plate and the cutlery and the leftovers, and set the machine to spin.

  Jack picked up his stuff. A video camera, a jewellery box, and a PlayStation and games. He slid them all into his backpack, along with the hammer, a packet of spaghetti, and six shiny red apples from a bowl.

  Then he left through the back door, vaulted over the garden fence, and walked quickly away from the ruined house.

  Nobody saw him.

  Nobody cared.

  Nobody wanted to get involved.

  IT WAS A spectacular day for murder.

  The wide West Country sky was blue and gorgeous. It hummed with bees and smelled of hay.

  Detective Chief Inspector John Marvel scowled and pulled down the blind.

  The sky stung his eyes. Of course, it was the same sky as in London, but at least there you couldn’t see so much of the bloody stuff. Marvel didn’t know what was worse: too much sky above or too much green beneath. He’d been born and bred in the city, and was suspicious of both.

  But he was here now. Exiled by pen-pushers who didn’t understand that when it came to murder, sometimes you had to bend the rules to get your man.

  Sometimes to breaking point.

  And sometimes you still didn’t get your man.

  That was the harsh reality. But nobody seemed to understand reality any more – not even the police.

  Policing was changing. Now it was all about stats and paperwork and degrees and equality, and good old-fashioned coppers like him, who worked on contacts and hunches and sheer hard-won experience, were on the endangered list with targets on their arses.

  Marvel had finally been forced out by a single unfortunate incident that had resulted in the death of a suspect fleeing custody. Not his fault, really, but he’d been picked off anyway. He wasn’t mortally wounded, but he’d been winged hard enough to knock him off course, from heading a murder team in Lewisham to heading nowhere in darkest Somerset.

  Fuck it, Marvel thought for the hundredth time. It’s not for ever.

  He’d be out in the cold for a bit. Have to prove himself to a bunch of bloody yokels as penance for his supposed transgression. And as soon as something came up in another metropolitan force, he’d be off.

  In the meantime, he had rented a two-bedroom house in Taunton. It was tiny in the way that only modern houses could be – with space for all mod cons but no room for character. You could have a dishwasher or an alcove, but not both. The Lego-trained architect had tried to inject some personality into the neighbourhood by aligning each carbon-copy house at a different angle on its handkerchief plot, but that only made the place look untidy, rather than interesting.

  Marvel didn’t care. It was a place to shower and to sleep. He’d only brought three pieces of furniture with him – a brand-new bed, a sagging blue corduroy sofa, and a big TV with six surround-sound Acoustic Energy speakers. He’d taken hours to set up the speakers just the way he liked them, so that a ripple of applause at Lord’s seemed to go all the way around the room.

  It was almost like being there.

  Debbie had kept the furniture, but Marvel didn’t miss it. Or her. What was there to miss? There was a microwave in the kitchen and a Burger King at the bottom of the road.

  He missed the dog a bit, which did surprise him.

  His shirts and suits and shoes filled a fifth of the built-in wardrobe, and his socks rolled about in a single drawer.

  Marvel wasn’t one for knick-knacks but he did have an ashtray shaped like lungs. He was planning to quit, but, until then, he kept it within easy reach on the arm of the sofa.

  At one point he’d thought he might buy a table, but then realized that the laminate floor was flat, and even better for laying out files and crime-scene photos, when you didn’t have a dog or children to mess them up.

  There was a knock at the front door and Marvel picked up his jacket. It was his first day on the job and they were sending a man to drive him until he learned the lie of the land.

  He paused with his hand on the doorknob.

  Stuck to the wall next to the door with a single tab of tape was a photograph. A little girl on a BMX bike. Goofy teeth and a sprinkling of summer freckles; bobbed brown hair caught behind one sticky-out ear …

  John Marvel took a deep breath.

  Then he opened the door and went to work.

  Marvel resolved to learn the lie of the land asap, because DC Parrott was a terrible driver – light on the accelerator and heavy on the brakes, which made for a slow and jerky ride. Toby Parrott was extremely thin – or wore a uniform that was extremely big. Marvel couldn’t quite make up his mind which it was, but he reckoned he could stick a milk bottle down the back of the man’s collar without chilling his neck. He also had a very large, beaky nose, but hadn’t even smiled when Marvel had called him Polly.

  Bollocks to him, thought Marvel. He’d made the joke and wasn’t going to unmake it just because Parrott was a humourless prick. Back in London, Parrott would have liked it or lumped it.

  They left Taunton and headed down the M5, flanked by rolling hills dotted with cows, then turned on to a dual carriageway that rose and fell and twisted and turned through seven more miles of green, before descending steeply into Tiverton.

  Taunton was a hick town, but at least it was a town, with gum-stuck pavements and recognizable shops, and the homely reek of diesel fumes. Tiverton was at the bottom of a crater made of countryside, and it seemed to Marvel that there was not a single place from where you couldn’t see a hedge and at least a couple of
sheep.

  He had been there once before.

  Well, not there, but somewhere just as bad. A childhood holiday in Cornwall? He wasn’t sure. He just remembered being sick in the back of the car all the live-long way, and then having little to do for two long weeks other than bicker with his brother.

  It was hot, and Parrott said the air-con was broken, so Marvel put the window down and grimaced.

  ‘Smells like cowshit,’ he said.

  ‘That’s because it is cowshit,’ said Parrott stiffly.

  Marvel put the window up and they drove the rest of the way in hot silence.

  Detective Sergeant Reynolds was a very clever man.

  And that was official.

  His IQ score was 138 on the Stanford-Binet scale. And he’d been under the weather on the day he’d taken the test – as he never tired of telling his mother. Bit of a sniffle, he would say, and then let a modest shrug indicate: Otherwise, who knows …?

  Reynolds loved being a police officer. He’d always had a finely honed sense of right and wrong, and felt it his duty not to waste it. It wasn’t a complicated thing: he was right and everybody else was wrong. Luckily, he was clever enough to know that his always being right was unlikely to find favour with all those who were correspondingly always wrong. He was usually able to overcome any Dunning-Kruger types with his people skills, his sense of humour and his humility.

  Everybody liked him.

  If they were smart enough …

  Now Reynolds ducked down and squinted into the wing mirror of the unmarked Ford Focus. It was a scorching day, and Reynolds knew that most officers would be in shirtsleeves, but his mother always said that shirtsleeves were for factory workers at the seaside, so he was wearing a lightweight pale grey suit, a red silk tie with sharp white stripes, and black shoes that were so shiny they were almost patent.

  He examined his face in the mirror, and touched his thick brown hair with two tentative fingers. The new DCI was arriving today, and Reynolds wanted to look his best.

  Then he walked across the street and knocked on the door of a mid-terrace house. While he waited for an answer, he touched his hair again, with the very tips of his fingers, just to make sure that all was well with the world.

  A sinewy, red-faced man in shorts and sandals opened the door.

  ‘Mr Passmore? Detective Sergeant Reynolds.’

  The house was a mess. A gigantic TV lay face-down on the carpet, while three sunburnt children stared at it from the sofa, as if it might right itself at any moment and resume normal service.

  Mr Passmore pointed at it. ‘Nearly new, that was. Only had it a couple of months. I’ve got the receipts for everything. If it helps to identify them.’

  ‘I’m sure it will,’ said Reynolds, although he seriously doubted they would ever achieve the luxury of recovering any of the items in order to make a match. He didn’t tell Mr Passmore that most burglaries were only investigated in the most perfunctory way. It wasn’t that nobody cared – only that nobody cared to pay for the time it took, and the lousy return on investment in terms of convictions. Of course, they would do their best with what they had, but it was more to show willing to the taxpayers than in any real hope of tracing the perpetrator or recovering stolen goods.

  Every now and then somebody would come home to find a junkie swaying in the middle of their living room with a microwave oven in his arms, and call the police. The junkie would cough to twenty or thirty other burglaries that could be taken into consideration for sentencing purposes. And then those burglaries would be marked ‘solved’ and they would all feel better about themselves.

  Everybody else just got a crime reference number to give the insurance company, and bought new stuff. Reynolds didn’t like it, but it was a fact of life. When it came to burglary, he considered it his realistic role to provide the two ‘Rs’ – Recording and Reassurance. The third ‘R’ – Recovery – was something that only happened on TV.

  And yet Reynolds had driven all the way from Taunton to Tiverton this morning for this burglary …

  ‘Did they go upstairs?’ he ventured.

  Before Mr Passmore could answer, a voice behind him said, ‘Perverts.’

  Reynolds turned. The kitchen doorway was filled with a woman he assumed was Mrs Passmore. She was a hefty blonde and the sunburn on her face was interrupted by white circles around both eyes where she’d apparently worn very good sunglasses all holiday long, like a reverse panda.

  ‘Perverts,’ she said again. ‘In our bed. Disgusting. We’ll have to get rid of the bedding, the mattress, the lot.’

  Reynolds nodded and wrote carefully in his book.

  GOLDILOCKS?

  ‘Could I see?’

  Mr Passmore led him back through the front room to the hallway. As he did, he waved an angry arm at the suitcases still standing at the bottom of the stairs. ‘You don’t expect to come home from holiday to this.’

  ‘Indeed you don’t,’ said Reynolds sympathetically. ‘Are you insured?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the man scowled. ‘But you know what those bastards are like. Always looking for ways not to pay you.’

  ‘Well, you’ve done the right thing leaving everything as it was for us to see, Mr Passmore. I’ll be giving you a crime reference number for the insurance claim.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Passmore nodded, slightly less maroon.

  The second ‘R’ ticked off, Reynolds went upstairs.

  In the master bedroom, he hit paydirt. The bed had obviously been slept in. The duvet had been pushed aside, all the pillows were on the floor. Reynolds took out his notebook again and, with a triumphant flourish, crossed out the question mark after GOLDILOCKS.

  A wedding photo of Mrs Passmore – forty pounds and three shades lighter – was smashed on the bedside table.

  ‘Fucking hell!’

  Reynolds winced at the expletive. He stepped quickly on to the landing and leaned over the bannister in time to see a stocky, middle-aged man kick a child’s pink suitcase across the hallway.

  ‘Excuse me!’ said Reynolds sternly. ‘This is a crime scene!’

  The man glared up at him. ‘You Reynolds?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You ever hear of clear passage? I nearly broke my bloody neck!’

  Reynolds paused, and then said warily, ‘DCI Marvel?’

  By way of an answer, the man scowled. ‘Where’s the body?’

  Reynolds hurried down the stairs. ‘Sir,’ he hissed in soft warning, ‘there are children in the front room.’

  Marvel lowered his voice. ‘Dead children?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then why are you telling me about them?’ boomed Marvel. ‘Where’s the bloody body?’

  ‘There is no body, sir. It’s a burglary.’

  ‘A what?’ Marvel blinked at him.

  He was shorter than Reynolds, and fatter. And infinitely scruffier. But there was something in his eyes – a piggy cunning – that put Reynolds on the back foot.

  Mr Passmore opened the door to the front room and Reynolds spoke quickly, before Marvel could.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Marvel, this is Mr Passmore. He and his family got home from Portugal today. They found their house broken into and several items of value missing, and other things damaged.’

  Mr Passmore stepped out of the way so Marvel could see the big TV. He straddled the set and lifted it up so they could get a good look at the victim.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘Smashed.’

  He let it drop to the rug once more.

  ‘But that TV’s broken,’ complained the smallest of the children – a blonde girl with blistered lips.

  ‘That’s right,’ snapped her father. ‘Some b— bad man’s come in and broke it. Smashed. Only got it two months ago.’

  Marvel ignored him and his TV and addressed Reynolds. ‘I’m a homicide detective,’ he said. ‘When I’m rushed to the scene of a crime, I expect a murder victim, not a broken TV and a shit on the rug.’

  He stormed
out.

  Mr Passmore turned to Reynolds with a look of confused disgust on his face.

  Reynolds cleared his throat weakly. ‘Some burglars do … that,’ he said, then hurried after Marvel, who was already halfway across the road, striding towards the car, against which DC Parrott was leaning with his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Devon and Cornwall asked for our help, sir,’ he told Marvel’s back. Then he glanced at Parrott and lowered his voice diplomatically. ‘This perpetrator’s been running rings around them for a year and they don’t want to look … inefficient.’

  ‘Why?’ said Marvel. ‘Because they are inefficient? You don’t waste a homicide detective on a fucking B&E!’

  Marvel waved Parrott towards the driver’s seat, opened the passenger door and lit up a cigarette.

  ‘Very true, sir,’ said Reynolds. ‘But everyone mucks in when we don’t have enough murders to go round.’

  Marvel turned and squinted at him. ‘What do you mean, not enough murders?’

  Reynolds gave a little shrug. ‘Well, we get our fair share, of course, but sometimes there’s … you know … a lull …’

  ‘A lull?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Reynolds. ‘A lull.’

  Marvel looked completely stumped by the idea of a lull in the murder rate and, while he was adjusting, Reynolds pressed home his advantage.

  ‘And this is not just any old burglary, sir. You must have seen it in the papers. They call him Goldilocks.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said Marvel. ‘What papers?’

  ‘Tiverton Gazette,’ Parrott piped up. ‘Front page.’

  ‘God’s sake!’ said Marvel, and looked up and down the road, as if searching for someone with whom to share the disdain, but there was nobody.

  He sighed and pinched his nose and said ‘Shit’ under his breath, then gave Reynolds a glare that was furious and yet so resigned that Reynolds felt it was incumbent upon him to recognize the concession.

  ‘I understand it’s beneath you, sir,’ he said soothingly. ‘But we’d all be very grateful.’

  DCI Marvel stripped off his suit jacket, balled it up and tossed it into the car.