The Torment of Others

by Val McDermid

  She’d barely made it back to the security of her own office, blinds drawn against the world, when there was a knock at her door. If it’s bloody Brandon, I’ll scream. ‘Come in,’ she said resignedly.

  The door opened a few inches and Jonathan France’s head appeared. ‘Have you a minute?’

  Flustered and surprised, Carol stammered, ‘Yes, come in.’ He slid round the door and closed it behind him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you so soon,’ Carol gabbled. ‘Have you got something for us already?’

  ‘Not professionally,’ he said. ‘That’ll take a little longer.’ He pulled a plastic bag from his jacket pocket. Carol recognized the logo of a local independent bookshop. He held the bag out to her. ‘I thought this might interest you,’ he said.

  Curious, Carol took it. She slipped the book from the bag. Lucky by Alice Sebold. She looked up, puzzled.

  ‘It’s a memoir of her own experience of rape,’ Jonathan said. ‘I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but it struck me you might find it helpful.’ He looked awkward, as if unsure of his ground. ‘It’s not schlocky or sensationalist or sentimental. And it’s very well written.’

  ‘You’ve read it?’ Carol asked. It wasn’t really the question she wanted to ask, but it filled the silence.

  He looked faintly sheepish. ‘Don’t tell my rocky colleagues.’ He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. ‘My sister is an arts bureaucrat. She’s always punting stuff my way. I like things that make me think.’

  Carol turned the book over and read the jacket blurb. She looked up. ‘Thank you. I appreciate it.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ He backed towards the door. ‘Look, I’ll get off. We’ve both got work to do. Give me a call, yeah?’

  More touched than she could express, Carol nodded. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch about the other thing–the photograph.’ He gave her one last smile, then he was gone.

  Carol stared at the door for a long time, trying to work out how she felt. His kindness was remarkable, not least because he delivered it with a grace that removed any sense of patronage. She’d enjoyed his company, found him attractive. But somehow, her heart remained untouched. Maybe she wasn’t ready. Maybe it was still too soon.

  Or maybe it was simply that he wasn’t the one she wanted.

  Before she could consider the matter further, another knock disturbed her. ‘Come in,’ she sighed.

  Sam Evans stood in the doorway, his face giving nothing away. ‘Can I have a word?’ he said.

  She gestured to the chair. ‘Take a seat.’

  He arranged himself in an attitude of confident relaxation. ‘I thought I’d better come clean before Mr Brandon spoke to you,’ he said without preamble.

  Carol frowned. ‘What are you talking about, Sam?’

  ‘Aidan Hart.’

  ‘Have I missed something? Only you’re not making much sense.’

  ‘I know you concluded that Aidan Hart was off the suspect list because of his alibi, but I wasn’t convinced. So I’ve been following him.’ Evans met her eyes, his mouth twisting in what might have been an apology. ‘On my own time.’

  ‘What?’ Carol sounded incredulous.

  ‘When I interviewed him, I got the feeling that there was something not quite on the square about Hart. And I was right,’ he added. ‘He’s addicted to whores. Two or three times a week, he’s buying sex from street girls.’

  Carol stared at him in astonishment. She didn’t know where to begin. She was furious that he’d taken matters into his own hands. But the gnawing bite of doubt had taken hold too. Had she been rash in discounting Hart? Was she losing her touch? Impatiently, she put such considerations to one side. ‘And where does Mr Brandon come into this?’

  Evans shrugged. ‘He caught me entering the details on my computer. He wondered why I was following Dr Hart. So I had to explain.’

  Carol felt a cold pit open inside her. ‘You told the Chief Constable that you were pursuing a line of inquiry I had dismissed?’ she said, her words clipped and tense.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t put it like that. Not exactly.’

  You bastard. She could barely trust herself to speak. The echo of betrayal rang in her head. ‘I want a full report on your activities,’ she said. ‘I want it on my desk within the hour. And I don’t ever want to hear anything like this from you again. This is not the OK Corral. We’re a team or we’re nothing. You expressed no hint of your doubts about Hart to me. If you had, I might have been more reluctant to let him off the hook. I won’t have this sort of underhand behaviour on my team. It undermines all of us. Consider this a warning, DC Evans. Now get out of my sight.’

  He stood up and walked out, back straight, head erect. Carol saw nothing of the smile that lifted the corners of his mouth.

  A watery sun had broken through the grey haze, giving a pale gleam to the streets of Temple Fields. The rest of the city was bustling, but at ten on a weekday morning, there was an air of deserted sleepiness about the district. Those who lived there had already left for work; those who worked there were mostly still trying to recover from the night before. A man in a business suit, his raincoat flapping with the speed of his passage, briskly walked a bull terrier along the canal towpath. A couple of women in jeans and leather jackets swung along the street arm in arm, cocooned in a bubble of smug self-satisfaction. And Tony Hill stood on a street corner, fumbling with the index of a Bradfield A-Z and a sheet of paper.

  Should have done this before I came out, he thought as he tried to work out a logical order in which to visit the six addresses he’d jotted down when the spectre of a copycat killer had first reared its head. He flicked through the pages of the gazetteer, trying to find the locations of the crime scenes and fix them on his own mental map of the area. That way, he could start to get a feel for the killer’s own view of his world. He hadn’t chosen his victims at random so the chances were good that the area he’d culled from was one he knew well, one he held in his mind as a shape. Everyone had their own topography of the patch they called their own, traced by their personal routes, limited by their own needs. They could be blissfully unaware of whole chunks of territory entirely bounded by their own activities. The killer’s Temple Fields would be uniquely his, and discovering what that consisted of might help Tony to understand more of who he was. Or at least who he wasn’t.

  He’d needed activity that morning. Although he knew Carol would be briefing her officers about the proposed undercover operation, he wasn’t ready to see her yet. All night, he’d kept drifting up from sleep, the images of her and the motorbike man morphing in his mind’s eye into new shapes and patterns. He despised himself for the violence of his reaction, and he didn’t want that to taint his next encounter with Carol.

  Eventually, he had his route clear in his mind. He set off, heading into the warren of ginnels and lanes that threaded through the hinterland of Temple Fields. He turned into an alleyway and stopped outside a doorway. He looked up at the grimy redbrick building, wondering which window had opened on to the bed where Derek Tyler’s first victim had bled to death. According to the notes, Lauren McCafferty had often taken punters back to the bedsit where she lived. She’d thought it was safer than their cars; she’d thought it meant she was in control, surrounded as she was by other bedsits whose occupants might hear if things got out of hand and she had to call for help. She hadn’t bargained on an encounter with a killer who had forgotten more about control than she had ever known.

  Tony stood for a few moments, letting his mind freewheel, then set off for the next place on his list. Half an hour and another four locations later, he was outside the Woolpack Hotel. ‘What do they have in common, these places of yours?’ he said softly. ‘They’re part of a network that’s invisible to most of the people who visit Temple Fields to drink or find a sexual partner. But you’re comfortable with them. So maybe you live or work there? Maybe you make deliveries? A courier? A postman? All the sites are near the busy streets but no
t on them. You like to be private, but you want your victims to be discovered before too much time has gone by. You stay with them till they’re dead and then you leave, knowing they won’t be alone for long. Can you not bear them to be lonely?’

  He walked slowly down the alley towards Bellwether Street, thronged at this time of day with shoppers and those members of the underclass for whom the prospect of covered shopping areas was an improvement on the alternative. ‘No, that’s not it,’ he mumbled. ‘You don’t care enough about them. They’re not women to you, they’re disposables. You want us to see your kills when they’re fresh so we can admire your art. It was just bad luck that Dee had a night off and it took us so long to find Sandie.’ He looked up, a radiant smile on his face. ‘You’re showing off, that’s what it is. You can’t bear to hide your light under a bushel. You’re rubbing our noses in your power. You want the credit, the gratification, and you don’t want to wait for it.’

  Tony made his way down Bellwether Street to the Woolmarket, where he sat down on one of the benches that looked across the busy square. Unpacking the underlying message of the killer’s actions was only the first step, but it was a necessary one. He had to move backwards into the unravelling before he could extrapolate how those deep motivations might shape the public behaviour of the man who was perpetrating these vicious actions. Until he could do that, he wouldn’t be much use to Carol. Or to the killer’s future victims. ‘You’ve always looked for praise.’ He spoke quietly, his lips hardly moving. ‘But they never gave you enough of it, did they? They never valued you for what you wanted to be valued for. You wanted the power that people’s admiration would bring you, and it never happened. So what do you do for a living? You’ll have chosen something that offered you the prospect of lording it over the rest of us. You’d have liked the armed forces or the police or the prison service, but I’d guess you’re not disciplined enough to handle that. So maybe a security guard? A nightclub bouncer? Temple Fields has plenty of those. Something where you can throw your weight around anyway.’ He raised his eyes and let his gaze drift over the assortment of humanity going about its business. On the far side of the square, a woman in a dark blue uniform was tapping a stylus against a handheld computer. ‘Or a traffic warden,’ Tony muttered. They know the streets.’

  He got to his feet impatiently. He didn’t feel as if he was getting anywhere. For some reason, this killer’s mind felt as slippery as saturated autumn leaves that would fall apart in his hands before he could examine them. He couldn’t grasp those central threads that would lead him through the labyrinth. He’d never had this experience before, and he couldn’t understand why it was happening now, with this case. Was it that he was too focused on his own guilt and his need to keep Carol safe? Or was there something about this killer that set him apart from the other twisted minds Tony had encountered?

  He’d spent too many years working with serial offenders–rapists, killers, arsonists and paedophiles–to see them as one homogeneous group. Some were highly intelligent. Others, like Derek Tyler, seemed scarcely bright enough to have pulled off their crimes. Some had superficial social skills. Others would trip any normal person’s weirdo detector at a hundred paces. Some were almost grateful to be caught, to be relieved of the burden of their compulsion. Others gloried in the celebrity a perverse media culture persisted in granting them. One thing was certain: their actions carried the unique stamp of their particular mindset, and that had always been the route Tony had been able to travel with them.

  But this time, it was different. This time, it felt impossible.

  Peccadilloes was tucked away on a side street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, a revamped part of the city centre where the rag trade had slowly been squeezed out by the economics of labour and replaced by craft workshops, inner city housing and boutique shopping for the hip. An uneasy mixture of redbrick streets, remodelled Victorian monoliths and modern vernacular architecture struggling to look as if it fitted in hugged the narrow pavements. Jan Shields navigated the one-way system like a native, pointing out their destination as they drove past.

  ‘You know your way around,’ Paula commented as she negotiated a tricky junction in line with Jan’s instructions.

  ‘I’ve been doing my Christmas shopping in the Craft Village for years,’ Jan said. ‘It’s nice to get people something a bit individual, something they won’t have seen in Bradfield. And there are a couple of decent restaurants where you can relax afterwards.’ She directed Paula into a small pay-and-display car park where they found a slot.

  It had been a quiet drive over the Pennines. Jan had spent most of the journey engaged in a text message conversation that seemed to afford her considerable amusement. She hadn’t shared the joke with Paula. Almost the only conversation they’d had centred round whether or not Carol Jordan was up to the job. Paula had defended her boss, in spite of her own doubts. It was one thing to question Carol’s judgement with Don, but Jan Shields wasn’t really one of their team, so loyalty demanded that Paula support Carol to the hilt. Seeing she was getting nowhere, Jan had given up and turned to her mobile.

  As they approached Peccadilloes, Jan became more animated. This is going to be fun,’ she announced. ‘Nothing like a bit of game-playing to put a spring in the step.’

  That’s easy for you to say,’ Paula muttered. ‘You’re not the one who’s going to have to stand on a street corner freezing her arse off and dealing with grubby little fucked-up punters.’

  Jan chuckled. ‘No, I get to appreciate the view.’ She pushed open the door. The interior of Peccadilloes was less glossy than its counterpart in Bradfield. The lighting was dimmer, the wares less exuberantly displayed. Behind the counter, a woman glanced up at them. She looked to be in her late thirties, multi-coloured hair gelled and twisted into curlicues and spikes. Bizarrely, she was wearing a fawn cardigan that would have looked more at home on the proprietress of a wool shop. Paula suspected the outré hairdo was an attempt to draw attention from the strawberry birthmark that slid down one side of her face, looking as if someone had drawn a paintbrush loaded with blackberry sorbet down her cheek.

  Jan glanced around, then led Paula to a rack of clothes at the rear of the shop. Jan flicked through the garments hanging on a rail and pulled out a skimpy black latex dress. ‘Hey, girl, you’d knock them dead at Rainbow Flesh in this.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Paula lied, trying to cling to her privacy in the teeth of Jan Shields’ certainty. ‘Anyway, it’s not practical for tonight. I couldn’t wear a wire under that.’

  Jan grinned, her cherub’s face looking incongruously wicked. ‘Constable, you couldn’t wear anything under that.’

  She replaced the dress and raked along the rack. Her next pick was a scarlet PVC miniskirt. ‘Now that is the business. Perfect for Temple Fields. You’ll have Don Merrick slobbering into his tea in this.’

  Paula giggled. ‘That’s meant to be a selling point?’ But nevertheless, she took the skirt, setting it against her hips to gauge the fit.

  Jan pointed to the skirt. ‘You’ll need to try it on,’ she said. ‘And you’ll need a second opinion.’

  Paula turned a frigid stare on the sergeant. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ she said, reacting to what felt like knee-jerk innuendo. She reached past Jan and pulled out a tight silver lurex top cut low in the neck. ‘This should fit the bill.’

  Jan raised her eyebrows. ‘I swear you’re starting to enjoy this altogether too much, DC McIntyre.’

  This time, Jan’s flirtatious tone made Paula feel flustered. There seemed to be a note of genuine appreciation in her voice that made Paula wonder fleetingly what it would be like to spend time with Jan outside work. ‘I like to do my job properly,’ she said, smacking down the idea. Relationships with colleagues were always a seriously bad idea. And besides, Jan Shields wasn’t her type. Now, if Carol Jordan were to make a pass at her…Paula turned away, mentally rebuking herself for losing sight of why they were here.

&nbs
p; ‘Of course you do. But maybe when all of this is over, you could give me a little fashion show all for myself?’ Jan’s voice was soft, her breath warm against Paula’s neck.

  ‘I swear, Jan, you’re as bad as the guys,’ she said wearily.

  ‘Trust me, Paula, I’m better than any of them.’ Jan put a hand on her shoulder, smiling when Paula flinched. The changing rooms are over there,’ she said, pointing to a curtained-off cubicle behind the clothes rails. She stepped back, allowing Paula to pass without crowding her.

  Five minutes later, Paula surveyed herself in the changing cubicle mirror. Even without make-up and the right shoes, she knew her best friends would be hard pressed to recognize her. She barely knew herself. It was disconcerting how so superficial an alteration rendered her undeniably other. A shiver of apprehension gave her gooseflesh and she hastily stripped off and gratefully assumed her own personality along with her black jeans and white shirt. She yanked back the curtain, holding the clothes at arms’ length. These’ll do,’ she said.

  Jan held out a PVC bomber jacket that almost matched the skirt. ‘What about this to finish it off?’ she said. ‘It’ll be fucking freezing out there tonight.’

  Paula shook her head. ‘Jackie and Sandie weren’t wearing jackets. I’m supposed to look as much like them as possible. But I do need some fuck-me shoes.’

  ‘You need the jacket,’ Jan insisted. ‘You’ve got to have something to hide the wire going down your back and the bulge of the transmitter.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right.’ Paula took her purchases to the counter and handed over her credit card. Thank goodness nobody she cared about would see the monthly statement.

  ‘God, there’s some weird stuff here,’ Jan said, peering curiously into a cabinet containing bondage equipment.

  ‘Takes all sorts,’ the woman behind the counter said huffily.

  Jan gave her a cool look. ‘So it would seem.’ She turned away. ‘See you outside, Paula.’