How the Dead Speak

by Val McDermid

  The coercion came as no surprise to Carol, given what she’d made it her business to find out about Vanessa’s past. What kind of a woman tried to kill her fiancé for the insurance money? What kind of mother tried to cheat her son out of his father’s legacy? What was frustrating was that what she knew didn’t give her enough leverage for a comeback. ‘For Tony’s sake, I’ll listen,’ she said. ‘But that’s all I’m promising.’

  Vanessa made short work of repeating what she’d told Tony. ‘You can see why I want you on this and not the police,’ she concluded. ‘I want what’s mine. And although you really don’t want to help me there’s a bit of you that relishes the thought of giving that dirty crook the comeuppance he deserves. Be honest, Carol. You love nailing predators. And it’s not like you’ve got anything else to do right now.’ She glanced across the room to where Carol had been working on her carpentry and her lip twisted in a sneer.

  Carol hated that Vanessa read her so well. Maybe Tony’s gift of empathy had an element of heredity, she thought wryly. ‘If the police haven’t found him, it can’t be that straightforward,’ she said, hedging on a commitment.

  ‘They don’t know what I know,’ Vanessa said. ‘I didn’t tell them everything. Because I knew you’d be doing my legwork. Harrison Gardner has a ready-made bolthole. And it’s not in some distant tax haven without an extradition treaty. It’s right here in the UK.’

  ‘Why would he stay in the UK when the police are looking for him? That makes no sense.’

  ‘Because they won’t find any tracks when they investigate flight manifests or passport controls. He’s not the sort of criminal who knows people who can fit him up with a fake ID. He’ll have to bide his time before he can make his exit . . . ’

  In spite of herself, Carol was intrigued. ‘So how has he done it? And how do you know so much about it?’

  ‘We were having a little drink one evening and he was talking about tax shelters. He told me he’d set up a trust in the name of his son when the boy was just a baby. He deliberately failed to mention its existence to the boy or his mother, just salted money away whenever he had any to spare. He used some of it to buy a cottage in Northumberland in the name of the trust, he told me. One of those picture postcard coastal villages that’s been hollowed out by holiday homes, where there aren’t enough locals left to pay much attention to who comes and goes. He told me he’d go there on his own every few weeks for a night or two. Shouldn’t be too hard to find for someone with your talents. A holiday cottage that never has any holiday lets.’

  It wasn’t much to go on. ‘And that’s it? That’s the crucial information you held back from the Serious Fraud Office? It’s a lot of maybes.’ Carol repaid Vanessa’s sneer with one of her own.

  ‘Are you going to do it?’

  The one thing Carol wanted in her life right now was a bridge back to Tony. He’d said he wasn’t asking her to help Vanessa, but if that was going to protect him from the dark side of the media and the internet trolls who loved to hate, surely he’d have to accept she’d done the right thing? That she’d made the first down-payment on the debt she owed him? ‘There’s not much chance of success, based on what you’ve given me. But I’ll take a look.’

  ‘Good girl. There’s more. I just didn’t want to give you enough for you to go after the cash on your own account.’

  Carol shook her head scornfully ‘You are a piece of work. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything you have to sell.’

  Vanessa raised one shoulder in a tiny shrug. ‘Everybody wants more than they have. Why should you be any different? The son is seventeen now. So you know roughly when the trust bought the property. He told me it had a view of Holy Island, so that narrows it down.’ She stood up and pulled a file of papers from her bag. ‘I made copies of all the statements and correspondence. I don’t see anything of any use there. But you might. Call me when you’ve got some news.’ She dropped the folder on a side table as she passed. ‘Make it soon, though. I’m not a patient woman. But you probably worked that out for yourself.’

  9

  Most murders are spontaneous. They usually involve drink or drugs and they’re solved by the first police officer on the scene. The most challenging homicides are the ones that have been planned in advance. It’s not the killing itself that is the hard part, at least not in practical terms. There are many relatively easy ways to kill another human being. The hard part is disposing successfully of the body so that it doesn’t turn up like Banquo’s ghost, pointing an accusing finger at the killer.

  From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

  For once, Paula and her partner had sat down to breakfast with Torin, their teenage ward. Between the irregular demands of Elinor’s job as an A&E consultant, Paula’s unpredictable hours and Torin’s weekend lie-ins, they seldom managed a communal breakfast more than once a week. Paula celebrated by making scrambled eggs and mushrooms for everyone. Torin manned the toaster, producing a pile of perfectly browned granary slices dripping in butter. In the background, the radio muttered and Elinor quizzed Torin about the progress of his A level studies in Politics, History and Philosophy.

  ‘We’re doing free will just now,’ Torin said, dumping a plate of toast on the table. ‘It doesn’t actually exist, really.’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course it exists,’ Elinor protested.

  ‘Well, does it? Why do you make the choices you do?’

  ‘Because they seem best to me in the circumstances.’

  ‘Exactly. So you’ve not got free will, because you make your choices according to the situation and according to who you—’

  ‘Ssh, quiet a minute, please,’ Paula cut in. ‘Let me listen to this.’

  ‘ . . . at a former girls’ home in Bradesden, on the outskirts of Bradfield,’ the slightly breathless radio reporter announced. ‘According to police sources, there could be as many as thirty sets of human remains in unmarked graves. The home, run by a Catholic order of nuns, was closed down just over five years ago. The convent and the grounds were sold to a property development company whose workers made the gruesome discovery yesterday when they began to clear the grounds. More on our main bulletin in half an hour.’

  ‘Crikey,’ Elinor said.

  ‘Wow. Killer nuns,’ Torin mumbled through a mouthful of toast. ‘I thought that only happened in crap horror movies. Will you get sent out on that, Paula?’

  She shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t think so.’ She poured a cup of tea. ‘It’s not really the kind of thing ReMIT is supposed to do.’

  ‘Sounds like a major incident to me,’ Elinor said.

  ‘Yes, but it’s more of a cold case thing. Endless picking through bones and running tests. It’ll keep the forensic anthropologists going for weeks.’

  ‘But eventually they’ll have to figure out who did it,’ Torin said. ‘Somebody’ll have to be charged, surely? They don’t just get a free pass for being nuns.’

  Elinor poked him in the arm. ‘But if there’s no such thing as free will, then they had no choice. So what right do we have to punish them?’

  Paula groaned. ‘You two make my head hurt. It’s too early for this.’

  Torin grinned. ‘Can I take a packet of biscuits with me? For the boat?’ He had become the default caretaker of Tony’s narrowboat on its permanent mooring in Minster Basin. He went there after school two or three times a week to turn over the engine and check everything was secure. Lately he’d taken to staying for an hour or two, reading where there were no distractions.

  ‘As long as you don’t stuff yourself with the whole packet before you come home for dinner,’ Elinor said. ‘Exercise your free will and resist.’

  ‘Resistance is futile, El.’ He shovelled the last of his eggs and toast into his mouth and, still chewing, headed for the hall, grabbing his backpack of school books on the way. ‘Laters, ladies.’

  ‘He’s very sparky just now,’ Paula said.

  ‘Moving to sixth-form college has made all the difference. Nobody k
nows that his mother was murdered three years ago and nobody knows about that stupid nonsense last year. He’s got the break he deserved.’ Elinor gathered dirty plates, mugs and cutlery and loaded the dishwasher.

  ‘Next lesson, clearing up after himself,’ Paula sighed.

  ‘I’ll put you both down for that course.’

  Paula leaned across the open dishwasher and kissed Elinor’s forehead. ‘I need to run, sorry. See you tonight.’

  ‘Good luck with Rutherford.’

  Paula groaned. ‘Oh, how I miss Carol Jordan.’

  Although the ReMIT team occupied the same offices as they had under Carol’s command, there were several key differences. Most important, in Paula’s opinion, was the disappearance of the state-of-the-art bean-to-cup coffee machine. Its replacement by a kettle and a jar of instant felt like a studied insult to the past. Another difference was that Stacey had been turfed out of her cloistered enclosure and shifted to a corner of the main office. She was still more or less walled off by her array of half a dozen monitors, but Paula knew her friend interpreted the move as an indication of mistrust, and that stung.

  ‘I always delivered,’ Stacey had complained. ‘I don’t need people looking over my shoulder while I’m doing it.’ She had a point. It wasn’t always helpful to know how she got her results. And she always had a beautifully constructed explanation, so everything looked kosher. Paula thought in these days of fake news and data manipulation on an industrial scale, they needed Stacey’s black arts more than ever. What they didn’t need was to make her feel like she was under suspicious scrutiny.

  The main office now sported whiteboards and crime scene boards all round the walls. No chance now of staring into the middle distance once a major investigation got under way, Paula thought.

  Rutherford had safeguarded his own personal space, moving into Carol Jordan’s old domain, adding a whole new row of filing cabinets. That morning, however, the office was empty, the monitor on the desk grey and dead. Everyone else was at their desk, doing whatever they thought made them look busy. In Carol’s day, when ReMIT didn’t have a live case, they’d sometimes taken a look at unsolved cases, often ones that Tony had reckoned might yield fresh results. It kept them occupied and it felt worthwhile even though the cases didn’t always make much progress. But Rutherford hadn’t yet laid down any guidelines for how they should occupy themselves when there was no major incident on their desks.

  Karim was hunched over his desk, checking out the overnight reports, obviously looking for something that might have the potential to fall their way. He’d joined Carol Jordan’s ReMIT full of enthusiasm for the job, amazed at what he saw as his luck. Twenty-six, three years out of university with the law degree his family had pushed him into, he’d admitted to Paula that joining the crack unit had more than made up for the disappointment his parents gave regular voice to. ‘I always wanted to be a cop,’ he’d said. ‘It’s not like it was ever a secret. “You’re too little,” my mum used to say. “You’re too skinny,” my brother still tells me. It’s tough, taking all the crap whenever the aunties and uncles come round. But it’s my life.’

  He’d been shy at first, but his keenness had been obvious from the beginning. He was good with women witnesses; big brown eyes and lovely skin, they all wanted to snog him or mother him. Now he’d grown in confidence and Paula reckoned it wouldn’t be long before he got his sergeant’s stripes. He moved his chair to the side so he could see Paula across their back-to-back desks. His voice was soft, pitched so only she would hear. ‘What do you think the point of yesterday was?’

  Paula raised her eyebrows. ‘Team building, DC Hussain.’ Heavy on the irony. ‘Which bits of you still hurt?’

  ‘Mostly my ribs. The guy that brought me down fell on me like a tree. I wasn’t feeling a lot of solidarity with my partner right then.’

  ‘Not enough weeks on the street. Be interesting to see how Rutherford plays that one in the debrief.’

  Before Karim could reply, DCI Rutherford strode in. ‘Morning briefing, everyone,’ he announced cheerily, striding across to take up position in front of one of the whiteboards. Everyone turned to face him. ‘Useful though yesterday was, it’s time for us to get down to some proper police work.’ From his hearty tone, he made police work sound on a par with a box of assorted doughnuts. ‘One of the things I expect all my officers to do is to keep an ear on the local radio news. It’s a great way to take the temperature of your patch. That being so, I’m sure some of you at least heard the interesting news this morning.’ He looked round expectantly.

  Paula exchanged glances with Alvin Ambrose. It felt like being back at primary school. Who was going to make a bid for teacher’s pet? Predictably, Sophie Valente bent her arm at the elbow in a half-raise.

  Rutherford smiled. ‘Sophie? Care to share?’

  ‘The human remains in the convent grounds,’ she said confidently.

  Uneasy now, Paula deliberately stared at the floor, not risking meeting anyone else’s dubious eyes. As she’d explained to Torin, this didn’t feel like the sort of case ReMIT had been created for.

  Rutherford beamed at his favourite pupil, her failures of the previous day clearly filed under ‘not wanted on voyage’. ‘Exactly. You might be a newcomer to Bradfield like me, Sophie, but it’s good to see you’re paying attention. For those of you who missed it, a property company sent the bulldozers in to a former convent and girls’ home that they acquired after it closed down five years ago. The convent of the Order of the Blessed Pearl at Bradesden. The home was called the St Margaret Clitherow Refuge and School.’ He paused and looked around. ‘Feel free to make notes.’ Karim and Steve fumbled with pens and pads. The others didn’t even fidget. ‘When the diggers started work, they turned up human remains. Bones, to be precise. Not a bonny sight. It’s hard to be sure at this stage how many bodies we’re looking at but it’s likely to be more than thirty. Maybe a lot more. And our job is to find out who those skeletons belonged to and who put them there. And whether we’re looking at suspicious deaths. Which, if you ask me, is a no-brainer, given the scale of the thing.’ He paused for dramatic effect.

  ‘Do we have any indications of how long they’ve been in the ground?’ Paula asked.

  Rutherford’s smile tightened at the corners. ‘Well, I think it’s safe to assume they’ve been there at least five years, given when the nuns departed and the school closed down. But how recent they are? Well, we’ll have to wait for the forensics on that one. Carbon dating, and all that. Alvin, I want you to liaise with the lab on that one. They won’t want to spend their budget on it, but push them. Play the emotional blackmail card if you have to. “All those wee lassies belonged to somebody.”’

  ‘Do we know they’re all female?’

  ‘It’s a reasonable assumption, given that it was a convent and a home for girls. Alvin, lean on the labs for that too.’ Alvin looked glum. He’d never been drawn to the scientific end of investigations.

  Rutherford’s paternal condescension was clearly going to be an issue, Paula thought. ‘But don’t be jealous of Alvin having all the fun. There’s plenty of work to go round on this one. DC Chen, I want you to go through all the records pertaining to the home. The Catholic Church must have details, even if they’re not on the census or anything official. I want to know who lived there and when and for how long.’

  Stacey visibly perked up. Paula knew there was nothing she liked better than mission impossible. ‘I’m on it,’ she said, turning her attention back to her screens, her fingers whispering over the keyboard.

  ‘DI McIntyre, I want you to liaise with DC Chen on tracking down these nuns and any former residents of the home. We need to interview as many of them as quickly as we can. Karim can give you a hand with that. So get those leads coming, Chen, and get those interviews ticked off, Inspector. Sophie, I want you down at the crime scene to talk to DCI Fielding and see what’s what, and when you’ve got a handle on what it’s like down there, you can set yourself up back
here as the clearing house for all the information as it comes through.’

  It was, Paula thought, a big job for someone who didn’t have much experience of major incident rooms. Sure, Sophie seemed to have the organisational skills. Hell, you had to be organised to be so well-groomed this early in the day. The kind of make-up that looked effortless but actually took more time than slapping it on with a trowel; glossy chestnut hair in an immaculate French pleat; clothes that matched, barely a crease in sight. And that was how she looked every morning. She wasn’t easily flustered either. It would be interesting to see how she negotiated the complicated no man’s land between Rutherford and Fielding. Not a job Paula envied her.

  Rutherford noticed Steve fidgeting. ‘Steve. There must have been men who worked there. A priest. Maybe a handyman. Or a driver. The local education authority must have been involved too. Even if the kids were schooled in the convent, there would have had to be inspections and such. A GP. They must have had a GP practice registration. Check all that out. Alvin can double up with you once he’s rattled the cages down at the labs.’

  It wasn’t the most coherent allocation of tasks Paula had ever heard. She wasn’t unhappy with her lot; she knew her skills lay in interviewing witnesses and teasing out key information from suspects. But the rest of it seemed a bit hit and miss. She’d also noticed the way he addressed them. She and Stacey were always rank and surname. Stacey didn’t even get rank always. Everybody else was on first-name terms. The guys, obviously, because policing was all about man-to-man bonding. And Sophie presumably because she was one of the DCI’s chosen few. She wondered if Rutherford even knew he was doing it. She’d try not to let it bug her too much. And in the meantime, she’d show Rutherford she wasn’t there to make up the numbers. ‘There’ll be a Mother House for the Order of the Blessed Pearl,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can find out online while I’m waiting for Stacey to come up with something I can chase down.’