by Val McDermid
When she walked into the hipster coffee bar on the fringes of the university campus where Tony had told her to meet, she wondered momentarily if he’d misjudged the rendezvous. But of course it made perfect sense. None of the patrons here would have the faintest idea who any of the trio was; they’d just be three old saddos who had walked in by mistake.
Paula spotted Carol and Tony right away, sitting hunched over a corner table at the back of the room. Even from this distance, Tony looked tired, dark smudges under weary eyes, his cheeks hollow.
Paula picked up an Americano at the counter and joined them. Carol was pale, her skin blotchy and dry. Her hair needed a good cut from a proper stylist, not whatever local snipper she’d entrusted herself to. In the weeks since Paula had seen her last, she appeared to have withdrawn even further into herself. But Paula was determined not to show her worry for her former boss. ‘Good to see you,’ she said cheerily as she settled into the third chair, wondering what the etiquette was when it came to mentioning drink-driving charges.
‘You too,’ Tony said.
‘Thanks for sneaking out to meet us,’ Carol said.
Paula grinned. ‘How did you know there was sneaking involved?’
Carol shrugged. ‘I don’t imagine DCI Fielding would have let you out of the building if she’d known where you were going. Especially in the light of the latest gossip.’
Paula stared at her coffee, as if there was some fascinating message there. ‘I heard,’ she said. Then she felt ashamed of herself for her lack of support. She raised her eyes and put some spirit in her voice. ‘That sucks.’
Carol fiddled with her coffee spoon. ‘I was over the limit.’
‘Even so. Is there no way of sorting it? I could talk to DCI Franklin, I always got on with him better than you did … ’
Carol held up a hand. ‘No point. John Franklin is no friend of mine, but even if he were, I think he’d struggle to make it go away. It was a fair cop, Paula.’ She shook her head, resigned. ‘I was on a back road, a mile from home, in control of my vehicle and myself, which makes it sound unlucky and unfair, but in all honesty, I’ve got no grounds for complaint.’
Paula couldn’t help admiring Carol’s honesty. In her shoes, she doubted she’d be quite so accepting of her fate. ‘Makes it sound like a conspiracy,’ she grumbled. ‘But I hear you. If there’s anything I can do to help. I mean, practically. When you … ’
‘Lose my licence? Thanks, I might take you up on that. It’s not exactly straightforward, living where I do.’
‘You could move back into town for the duration,’ Tony said. ‘There’s always houseboats for rent down at the Minster Basin. We could be neighbours again.’
Paula had the feeling this was news to Carol. He’d probably waited till there was someone else around so she couldn’t explode at the suggestion.
‘Yeah, right,’ Carol said. ‘The dog would love that. Cramped and confined and constrained by the inner city. No thanks. I’d rather put up with the inconvenience. Besides, I’m not doing all this work on the barn so somebody else can have the benefit of it.’
‘Well, if you ever need a bed for the night when you’re in the city, we can always squeeze you in, there’s a sofa bed in the living room.’
Carol gave an involuntary shudder. A less understanding woman than Paula would have been offended. ‘That’s kind of you, Paula, but I wouldn’t want to intrude. I think I remind Torin too much of what happened to his mother.’
‘Speaking of death?’ Tony said with his usual flair for derailing the small talk.
‘Which we weren’t,’ Carol said.
‘We sort of were.’ Paula made an apologetic gesture with her hands. ‘Let’s face it, that’s what generally draws us together. I should have known there would be something more than a decent cup of coffee on the agenda. Fire away.’ She raised her coffee cup in a toast.
Carol and Tony exchanged a look. ‘You do it,’ he said. ‘You’re better at briefing detectives than me.’
Carol shook her head. ‘Oh no, you don’t get out of it that easily. This is your bloody mad idea.’
Tony shifted in his plain wooden chair, hooking one arm over the back of it. ‘It’s probably a chimera. Remember we were talking about Jasmine Burton on Saturday night?’
Paula nodded. ‘Yes, Torin was outraged about the trolling. He was talking about it again yesterday.’
‘There’s something about it that’s niggling at the back of my mind and I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t have any idea what it relates to, but there’s something there that’s bothering me. We were talking about it, me and Carol—’ He gestured for her to take over.
‘And I remembered Kate Rawlins. Does that ring a bell?’
Paula shook her head. ‘Sorry. Should it?’
‘The radio presenter who stuck up for the anonymity of rape victims after that twat from Northerners kicked off about being an innocent man found guilty because of a lying accuser. You remember?’
Light dawned on Paula, bringing a blast of self-disgust with it. ‘Yes, of course, sorry. I’d forgotten her name. How crap is that? A woman gets driven to suicide because of a bunch of bullying bastards, and I can’t even remember her name.’ She flushed, feeling a wash of shame. ‘But what’s that got to do with Jasmine Burton? They didn’t even choose the same method. Didn’t Kate Rawlins do the car exhaust thing?’
‘That’s right,’ Tony said. ‘And I know this is incredibly tenuous, and my cause is not helped by me not being able to summon up what it is that’s bothering me, but it’s my job to see patterns where other people see white noise. And in my head, there’s a pattern here. Two women. Strong, competent, professionally respected women who stuck their heads over the parapet all the time, except that one time it was picked up on by the internet trolls.’
‘I prefer to think of them as inadequate wankers,’ Carol said. ‘The trolls in Terry Pratchett’s books are quite lovable. Not even their mothers could find anything remotely lovable about these twats.’
Tony scrunched his face up, as if her words pained him. ‘Well, strictly speaking, most of the people who do this have been revealed as quite pathetic and even vulnerable young men whose mothers probably do love them.’ He held his hands up to ward off the protest Carol started to voice. ‘But some of them are much more dangerous and insidious than that, you’re right.’
‘All of this is very interesting, but …?’ Paula gently interjected.
‘The pattern. Yes. Strong women with a mind of their own who didn’t back down. They stood up to the trolls – sorry, bastards. They didn’t run away and hide, they didn’t backtrack, they stuck to their guns. They acted as though they felt brave. They behaved with conviction. And then out of the blue they killed themselves. Pattern.’
‘Are you suggesting they were murdered?’ Paula had heard some wild theories from Tony over the years, but seldom anything that had strained her credulity quite this far.
‘Not as such,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Not in the conventional sense of someone killing them directly. But something happened. Something intervened between their determination to see off the bastards and their deaths. Once would be an oddity. Twice makes me wonder.’
‘And he thinks I need something to keep my detective skills from atrophying,’ Carol said drily. ‘Though what I’m going to use them for in future is anybody’s guess. So we’re all going to play at running a case.’
There was a long silence while everyone suddenly became very interested in the contents of their cups and the beardie weirdie indie track playing in the background. It was Paula who spoke first. ‘So what exactly is it you want me to do?’
‘You might want to get Stacey on board,’ Carol said. ‘We want everything you can get your hands on. Investigating officer reports, interview product, pathology, the works.’
‘We’re looking for something we don’t know exists and we won’t know what it is till we find it,’ Tony said. ‘But if it does exist, you know you can rely
on us to spot it.’ He flashed her his sweetest smile, the one that made men and women alike eager to do whatever it took to provoke it again.
‘And meanwhile I’ll be backtracking through the news sites online to see whether I can find any more that fit the pattern,’ Carol said cheerfully.
‘Great,’ Paula said.
Tony twinkled at her. ‘Go on, admit it. You’ve missed us, haven’t you?’
18
The books were talismans that linked him to his past. They were the physical representation of the journey his mother had made away from him and into the embrace of the peace camp that had taken her life. Those were the texts she’d relied on to justify her absence. Any time his resolve wavered, he could go back to those books and remind himself of the lesson they carried. They were written by women who preached about feminism and women’s rights and demanded change to the way things had always been. Even to this day, stupid feminists held them up as texts that showed the way, that illuminated a path other women should follow.
But what their followers never talked about was the fact that it was a path to the grave. Those women his mother had read and admired – Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf – and those others he’d discovered since, they realised that what they’d been shouting about wasn’t a blueprint for life, it was a set of directions to hell. They’d invented a life of misery for themselves. They’d created a recipe for disaster. Their feminist revolution had led them straight down a one-way street to self-destruction.
And so they’d done the logical thing and killed themselves. And since the message he wanted to send was that these loud-mouthed women were setting themselves and their so-called sisters on the road to perdition, the books would serve to hammer home the message. They would act as a kind of suicide note, there to reinforce the act itself, to still any doubts on the part of the authorities. They would be an easily solved code that indicated these women had brought about their own deaths.
This was the message he wanted to go viral: failing to fulfil yourself as a wife and mother would make you want to kill yourself. He wanted there to be no misapprehension in the eyes of the audience. He didn’t want to cloud the issue with the notion that there might be something else going on. He didn’t want them martyred as murder victims so he had to strengthen that image of suicide. Trying to forge suicide notes would have been asking for trouble; the books served the same purpose and couldn’t be exposed as forgeries.
And besides, after the first two or three went public and people began to sit up and take notice, they’d become a fashion statement in themselves. Silly women driven to death and despair would pick their own texts to say goodbye with, so they’d become part of the movement he was creating. The ones who got it would join his very own sisterhood of their own free will.
The books had been a late addition to his plans. But a brilliant one. He had to scrabble to get them all together in time. But the more he thought about it, the larger their significance loomed. The little stack on the shelf in his garage had turned into one of the most powerful elements of his campaign. Women who had killed themselves raising their voices in support of women who were killing themselves. It had an almost poetic symmetry.
And of course, they led him directly to the next death.
19
They had started with a post-apocalyptic world recovering from a deadly fungal infection. To Carol, who hadn’t looked properly at a video game since the blocky polyhedrons of the nineties, The Last of Us looked as slick as an animated movie. ‘It’s a quest, like all the best books and films,’ Tony said. ‘I guarantee, you’ll care as much about Joel and Ellie as you did about Scout and Atticus Finch. Well, maybe not quite that much. But they will get under your skin and into your emotions.’
At first there had been a lot of swearing and walking into walls. Carol’s aim was appalling, her co-ordination little better. But Tony was encouraging, occasionally taking over the controls to show her how to negotiate a particular difficulty. And gradually, she got the hang of it. Watching her immerse herself in the world of pixels, Tony cursed that he hadn’t managed to persuade her to do this years ago. With the game as their focus, they slipped back into an easy intimacy that he thought they’d lost forever. They teased each other, made jokes, groaned at her failures and cheered her victories. They jostled each other’s shoulders like a pair of teenage gamers, both lost in what she was trying to achieve.
When he’d suggested they pause for a cup of tea, Carol had been astounded to realise they’d been playing for more than three hours. ‘I’d no idea. I thought it was about ten o’clock. Not midnight. I have to be up in the morning,’ she said in tones of wonder.
‘Take the dog out now, she’ll cut you some slack in the morning, won’t she?’ He yawned and reached for his tablet.
Carol gave him a derisive look. ‘It’s clear you’ve never had a dog. I’ll be lucky if I get an hour’s grace with this one.’
‘At least you’ve got a proper bed to sleep in tonight.’
They’d spent an hour earlier in the evening assembling a king-size bed at the far end of the barn. Carol had insisted on the widest option in the shop. ‘If I’ve got to share my bed with a bloody dog, I need as much space as possible,’ she’d pointed out.
‘It doesn’t matter what size bed you buy, she’ll snuggle up to you anyway. You’re the leader of her pack, she wants to be close to you.’
Carol had grunted but opted for the big bed regardless. And now she’d surfaced from the game, she intended to crawl into it as soon as possible. But by the time she came back from a short jog along the shoulder of the hill, Tony was deep into 80 Days. ‘That looks a bit dull,’ she said, looking over his shoulder.
‘Try it.’ He offered her the tablet and sat back. ‘It’s got narrative, which might appeal to you. And it looks good.’
An hour later, she surfaced, dazed. ‘Christ, this is addictive,’ she groaned.
‘But you haven’t craved a drink all night, have you?’
She glared at him. ‘So that’s how it goes, is it? Replace one addiction with another?’
‘Whatever works. And it’s not like you’ve had a shit time, is it? If you stick with it, it won’t take over your life. At least, I don’t think it will. I love gaming. It helps me work things out. And yes, there have been times when a new game has kept me up pretty much all night. But mostly, I just play for an hour or two, when there’s nothing urgent needs dealing with. And then I put it to one side. It’s a less demanding mistress than drink or drugs, I promise you.’
She looked mutinous for a moment, then she yawned. ‘I’ll take your word for it. But right now, I need to sleep. If you’re going to be around for a while, I need to install a second bathroom.’
‘I don’t mind sharing.’ He sounded almost wistful.
‘Maybe not, but I do. I’ve lived alone for a long time, and I don’t like my ablutions dictated by someone else’s timetable. Besides, it was the next job on my list after plaster-boarding the end wall. You can help me with the plumbing.’ She stood up and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Thank you.’ And then she was gone. It wasn’t much, but it was more than enough for him.
For once, Stacey was almost relieved to have her penthouse to herself. Sam and his team were out celebrating a double arrest in a violent armed robbery, and they’d both agreed that him staggering in pissed in the small hours would be a satisfying experience for no one. So he was spending the night in his own flat, a modern box in Kenton Vale overlooking the scabby park that the developers had claimed was about to be given a makeover. They hadn’t made it clear that the makeover would be in a downward direction. Sam didn’t care. ‘Do I look like a man who takes a walk in the park?’ he’d said. What he liked best about his building was the basement gym where he could hone his muscles in relative peace and quiet. Stacey would have killed herself before she’d be seen in a gym. She liked having an apartment that was big enough to accommodate a pilates ball and a yoga mat so she could follow her own, private fi
tness regime. But if the price of Sam moving in was one of those big multi-function gym machines in her space, she’d learn to live with it.
Not that living together was on the agenda. Well, not yet anyway. And although Stacey often fantasised about how wonderful it would be to share their lives even more completely, she had to admit there would be a downside. When would she find the time to invade other people’s systems, never mind write her own code? How would she keep secret from Sam the extent to which she was privy to all sorts of data that was supposed to be held safe behind firewalls and real walls? It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him. She did, of course. But his desire to do the right thing – like telling Blake about Carol’s drink habit – could be dangerous, given some of the information Stacey came by in the course of her compulsion to creep around other people’s confidentiality.
Take tonight. How would she explain that to Sam? He liked concrete lines of investigation, not this vague trawling around in the dark on a whim. He’d think she was wasting her time. Worse, he’d think she was pandering to her old boss, unable to let go and move forward as he had done.
He wasn’t a big fan of Paula’s either. He thought she’d been Carol Jordan’s teacher’s pet, that she got preferential treatment when assignments were being handed out. Stacey wondered if he was a little bit jealous of Paula’s success rate. She was, after all, the queen of the interview room and that was so often where the case was wrapped up. They’d all contributed to take the case to the point where the crucial interrogation could happen, but because it was always Paula asking the questions and making the final nail-down, she looked like the star baker every time.
Stacey didn’t mind that. In fact, she quite liked being lost in the background, pixelated out till she was ‘the Chinese one’ in the minds of outsiders to the team. That meant they didn’t look too closely at what she was actually doing so she could keep on getting away with it. That was one of the reasons she’d liked working for Carol Jordan. The boss cared about her results, not the minutiae of how she got them, provided that nothing Stacey did was going to come back and bite them in the arse at a later stage. Sometimes they had to find alternative explanations of how they’d made what looked like an extraordinary leap in the dark. But that was part of the fun.