by Val McDermid
“I don’t want anyone else, Cliff. Maybe you should get some more cover down here, though. I’m through for tonight. Now give me Tony.” A series of clicks followed, and Lindsay found herself talking to Tony Martin, one of her reporting colleagues. Cliff had obviously warned him what to expect, for his voice was quiet and coaxing. Lindsay forced the lid on her emotions and stumbled through the events of the evening. At the end of her recital, he asked for the number of the police station and the hospital. Her mind was a blank.
“Never mind,” he said. “Listen, I’ll make sure they put your by-line on this. It’s a helluva story. I hope your mate pulls through. But you go and get yourself a stiff drink. You sound as if you need one. Okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” she sighed, and put the phone down. Through the door of the booth, she could see other reporters arriving. She knew she couldn’t cope with them now, so she turned back to the call box and dialed home. Cordelia picked up the phone on the third ring. Lindsay’s voice shook as she said, “It’s me. Can you come down?”
“What?” Cordelia demanded. “Now? Whatever’s the matter? You sound terrible. What’s going on?”
“It’s Debs. She’s . . . she’s been attacked. Someone tried to kill her. I’m at the hospital now. I found her. I really could do with you being here.”
There was incredulity in Cordelia’s voice. “Someone tried to kill Deborah? How? What happened?”
“There was a candle-lit vigil. We were by the fence, about fifty yards from each other. Someone hit her on the head and left her drowning in a ditch,” Lindsay said, on the verge of tears.
“That’s awful! Are you okay?”
“Physically, yes. But I’m absolutely drained. I thought she was dead, Cordelia,” Lindsay wailed, tears finally coursing down her face. She sobbed helplessly, oblivious to Cordelia’s words.
When she managed to control herself again, she could hear her lover’s voice soothing her, saying, “Calm down, it’ll be okay. Why don’t you come home now? There’s nothing more you can do there tonight. I’d come down and get you, but I’ve had too much wine.”
“I can’t,” Lindsay said numbly.
“Why ever not?” Cordelia asked. “Look, you’d be better off here. You can have a nice hot bath and a drink and try to get a decent night’s sleep. Come home, Lindsay. I’ll only worry about you otherwise.”
“I just can’t,” Lindsay replied. “There’s too much going on here for me to walk away from it all. I’m sorry. I’ll ring you in the morning, okay. Thanks for listening. Goodnight, love.”
“I’ll come down first thing, how’s that?”
“No, it’s okay, leave it. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing or where I’ll be. I’ll speak to you soon.”
“Be careful, Lindsay, please. Ring me in the morning.”
Bleakness descended on Lindsay. She stared across the busy casualty department in time to see Rigano shoulder his way through the flapping celluloid doors and head for the desk. He was immediately surrounded by reporters. She became aware that the phone was squawking.
“Lindsay? Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here. Bye.”
She put the phone down, feeling utterly defeated. She left the phone booth but could not face the mêlée round the information desk. She leaned against the wall, shivering slightly in spite of the airless warmth of the hospital. Rigano, whose eyes had been sweeping the room for her, picked her up almost immediately.
“That’s it for now,” he said brusquely to the crowd of reporters and strode over to her, followed at a few paces by her colleagues. He took her by the elbow and piloted her into a corridor. He stopped briefly and said firmly to their followers. “Go away. Now. Or I’ll have the lot of you removed from the hospital altogether.” Reluctantly, they backed off and he steered Lindsay into an alcove with a couple of chairs. They sat down.
“She’s going to be all right,” he said. “There’s a hairline fracture of the skull and a big superficial wound. She’s lost quite a bit of blood and had stitches, but they say there’s no brain damage.”
The relief was like a physical glow that spread through Lindsay. “When can I see her?” she asked.
“Tomorrow morning. Come round about nine and they’ll let you in. She’ll still be heavily sedated, so they tell me, but she should be awake. It’ll be a while before we can get any sense out of her, though, so I need to know anything you can tell me about the attack.”
Lindsay shrugged. “I don’t know anything. I don’t even know what she was hit with. What was it?”
“A brick,” he replied. “There’s any number of them lying around. You use them to pin down the corners of your benders.”
“That’s ironic,” said Lindsay, stifling the hysterical giggle she felt bubbling inside her. “I really can’t tell you anything. I heard a short scream—not a long-drawn-out one, quite brief—and a squelch that must have been Debs falling into the ditch. Then I heard what sounded like someone trying to run off through the woodland.”
“Can you say in what direction?”
“Not really. It seemed to be more or less dead ahead of me as I ran toward the ditch, but that’s the vaguest of impressions and I wouldn’t swear to it. I wish I could tell you that I’d seen someone, but even if he’d still been there, I doubt if I would have seen him. There was really no light to speak of.”
“Him?”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been one of us, would it?”
It was Jane who woke Lindsay at eight the next morning with a pot of hot coffee. Settling herself down on the end of the bunk, she waited patiently for Lindsay to surface. Brought back to the camp by one of Rigano’s men, Lindsay had needed several large whiskies before sleep had even seemed a possibility. Now she was reaping the whirlwind.
Jane smiled at her efforts to shake off the stupor and said, “I thought I’d better make sure you were up in time to get to the hospital. I’ve already rung them—Deborah is out of danger and responding well, they said. Translation—she’s been sedated to sleep but her vital signs are looking good. They say it’s okay for you to go in, but they don’t think Cara should visit yet.”
“How is Cara?” asked Lindsay, who felt as if her limbs were wooden and her head filled with cotton wool.
“A bit edgy, but she’s with Josy and the other kids so she’ll be more or less all right,” Jane replied. “She wants her mummy, but at least she’s old enough to understand when you say that Deborah’s in the hospital but she’s going to be all right.”
“Do you think we can keep her here and look after her okay, or are we going to have to get something else sorted out?” Lindsay asked anxiously.
Jane smiled. “Don’t worry about Cara. She’s used to the routine here now. It’s better that she’s somewhere she can see Deborah as much as possible.”
“I’m just worried in case social services find out about her and take her into care,” Lindsay said.
“If anyone comes looking for her from the council, we’ll deny all knowledge of her and say she’s with her father. By the time they sort that little one out, Deborah will be convalescent,” Jane reassured her. “Now, drink this coffee and get yourself over to the hospital.”
“Five minutes,” warned the nurse as she showed Lindsay into a small side room.
Deborah lay still, her head swathed in bandages. There was a tube in her nose and another in her arm. Her face was chalky white and dark bruises surrounded her closed eyelids. Lindsay was choked with a mixture of pity, love, and anger. As she moved toward the bed, she sensed another presence in the room and half turned. Behind the door, a uniformed constable sat, notebook poised. He smiled tentatively at her and said, “Morning, miss.”
Lindsay nodded at him and sat down by the bed. Reaching out cautiously she took hold of Deborah’s hand. Her eyelids flickered momentarily then opened. The pupils were so dilated that her eyes no longer appeared blue. Frowning slightly, as she tried to focus, she registered Lindsay’s presence and her face cleare
d.
“Lin,” she said in a voice that lacked all resonance. “It’s really you?”
“Yes, love, it’s me.”
“Cara?”
“She’s okay. Josy’s in charge, everything’s under control.”
“Good. I’m so tired, Lin. I can’t think. What happened?”
“Somebody hit you. Did you see anyone, Debs?”
“I’m so glad it’s really you, Lin. I think I’m seeing ghosts. I think Rupert Crabtree’s haunting me.”
“I’m no ghost, Debs. And he can’t hurt you. He’s out of your life for good.”
“I know, but listen, Lin. It’s crazy, I know, but I have this weird impression that it was Rupert Crabtree who attacked me. I must be going mad.”
“You’re not mad, you’re just concussed and sedated up to the eyeballs. It’ll all be clear soon, I promise.”
“Yes, but I’m sure it was him that I saw. But it couldn’t be, could it? Just like it couldn’t have been him I saw walking his dog on Sunday night. Because he was already dead by then, wasn’t he?”
“What?” Lindsay suddenly stiffened. “You saw him after he was dead?”
“I told you before that I saw him. But he was walking toward his house. And he’d already been killed up by the fence. It’s his ghost, Lin, it’s haunting me.” Her voice was becoming agitated.
Lindsay stroked her arm. “It’s okay, Debs. There’s no ghost, I promise you. You’ve got to go to sleep now, and when you wake up, I swear you’ll be much clearer. Now close your eyes, go back to sleep. I’ll be back tonight, I promise. No ghosts, just good old Lindsay.”
Her soothing voice lulled the panic from Deborah’s face and soon she was sleeping again. Lindsay rose to go and the policeman followed her. Outside he said, “Could you make head or tail of that, miss? All that stuff about being attacked by a ghost?”
Lindsay shook her head. “She’s delirious, at a guess. It made no sense to me, officer,” she said.
But she knew as she walked away from the ward that she had lied. The echo of her words seemed to pursue her. Deborah’s words had triggered off a chain of thought in Lindsay, making a strange kind of sense. At last, vague suspicions were crystallizing into certainties. Lindsay felt a growing conviction that Oxford was where the answers lay.
14
Lindsay cursed the one-way system that had turned a city she knew like the back of her hand into a convoluted maze. Wryly she remembered the April Fool’s Day joke that had been played by a bunch of math students when she’d been an undergraduate. They’d worked out that if they reversed just one sign in the traffic system, vehicles would be able to enter but not to leave it. The city had ground to an infuriated, hooting halt by eight in the morning, a problem it had taken the traffic experts till noon to solve. The memory kept Lindsay mildly amused until she finally pulled into the car park at the Computer Sciences Laboratory at eleven. She had stopped only to plead with Duncan for a day off, a request he reluctantly granted after she had delivered a short, first-person piece about her visit to the hospital. Since the Clarion had changed the front page to accommodate her story from the night before, the pugnacious news editor was determined to milk their exclusive line for all it was worth. Lindsay had deliberately left out all references to ghosts and stressed Deborah’s ignorance of her attacker’s identity. Then, with great satisfaction, she switched off her radiopager for the day.
“Lindsay!” exclaimed Annie as she emerged into the reception area looking more like an earth mother than a computer scientist, dressed as she was in a Laura Ashley print. “I thought you were going to phone.” She escorted Lindsay through the security doors and down an air-conditioned corridor.
“Sorry,” said Lindsay. “It’s just that . . . well, I needed to be doing something and I can’t get any farther till I know what’s on that tape.
Annie stopped in her tracks and studied her friend carefully. “What’s happened, Lindsay? You look completely out of it. Getting involved with murders doesn’t seem to agree with you.”
Lindsay sighed. “Can we sit down somewhere? I don’t even know where to begin.” Annie ushered Lindsay into her office, a tiny cubby-hole with a remote terminal dominating it. Lindsay slumped into a low easy chair while Annie sat at her desk. Lindsay lit a cigarette then stubbed it out almost immediately, remembering that it was forbidden in the computer areas.
“Last night, somebody tried to kill her and nearly succeeded. It was me who found her. I thought . . . I thought she was going to die. It was terrible, Annie. Made me realize . . . I don’t know . . . how dangerous all of this is. Unless someone equally screwy is out to avenge Crabtree’s death it’s got to be Crabtree’s murderer. But it’s too much of a coincidence to believe there are two different killers on the loose. And that means as far as I’m concerned that it’s a race against time to prove who really did it before he has another go and succeeds.” Annie nodded encouragingly.
“I thought I could rely on the police to get their fingers out,” Lindsay went on. “But I don’t know, it all seems very strange to me. For some reason it’s a uniformed copper who’s running the show, not the CID, and there’s some guy who’s always around who’s either Special Branch or something odd. And somehow there doesn’t seem to be any urgency about what’s going on. This cop, Rigano, seems dead straight but even he’s not getting the action going. To begin with, he was keen enough to enlist my help and stay abreast of what I was up to. But now it’s almost as if he doesn’t want me to get any closer to the truth.
“I think I’m beginning to have just an inkling of an idea about who did it but I haven’t a clue why and I think the answer, or part of it, is that tape.”
Annie grimaced. “Well, add that to the murderer’s assumption that Debs will have told you all she knows and you could be the next target. And knowing you, I suppose all this is upfront in the Daily Clarion?”
“Sort of. I mean, I’ve done a couple of exclusives.”
Annie thought for a moment. “And?” she prompted.
“And what? Isn’t that enough? That I could be next on a killer’s hit list?”
“I know you. There’s something else. Something personal.”
Lindsay gave a tired smile. “I’d forgotten how sharp you can be,” she said. “Yes, there is something more. But it seems hellish trivial beside the real problems of people getting hurt and killed. I’m having a difficult time with Cordelia just now. She seems jealous of the time I spend at the camp, especially now Debs is there.”
“Hmm,” Annie murmured. “She does have a point, though, doesn’t she?”
Lindsay looked astonished. “I didn’t—”
“You didn’t have to, lovey. It’s not what you say, Lindsay, it’s how you say it. ’Twas ever thus with you. And if it’s that obvious to me who hasn’t seen you for months, then it must stick out like a sore thumb to Cordelia. She must be feeling very threatened. If I were you, I’d make a point of going home tonight, no matter what other calls you think there are on your time.”
Lindsay smiled. “I’d love to do just that. But a lot depends on what you’ve got to tell me about that tape. I’m convinced that that’s where the answers lie.”
Annie frowned. “I hope not,” she said. She unlocked her desk and took out a pile of printout paper and the tape. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said. “I don’t think you’ll find many answers here.”
“You mean you haven’t been able to crack it?” Lindsay asked, her voice full of disappointment.
“Oh no, it’s not that,” said Annie cheerfully. “I won’t bore you with the details, but I must thank you for a really challenging task. It took me a lot longer than I thought. I didn’t get to bed till three, you know, I was so caught up in this. Whoever constructed that program knew exactly what he was doing. But it was one of those thorny problems that I can’t bear to give up till I’ve solved it.
“So I stuck with it. And this is what I came up with.” She handed Lindsay a sheaf of printout. I
t consisted of pages of letters and numbers in groups.
“Is this it?” asked Lindsay. “I’m sorry, it’s completely meaningless to me. What does it represent?”
“That’s what I don’t know for sure,” Annie admitted. “It may be some encoded information, or that in itself could be the information. But unless you know what it is you’re looking for it doesn’t take you any farther forward in itself. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, if that’s any help.”
Lindsay shook her head. “I hoped that this would solve everything. I think I was looking for a motive for murder. But I seem to have ended up with yet another complication. Annie, do you know anybody who might be able to explain this printout?”
Annie picked up her own copy of the printed message and studied it again. “It’s not my field and I’m not sure whose it is until I know what it is, if you see what I mean.” She sighed. “The only thing that occurs to me, and it’s the vaguest echo from a seminar I went to months ago, is that it might possibly be some kind of signals traffic. I don’t know for sure, and I can’t even put my finger on why I believe that. But that’s all I can go on. And I can’t put you in touch with anyone who might help because if it is signals intelligence, then the ninety-nine per cent probability is that it’s Official Secrets Act stuff. I’m bound by that and so is anyone else who might help. And if I put you in touch, they’ll have to report the contact in both directions. Just what have you got yourself into this time, Lindsay?”
Lindsay sighed again. “Deep waters, Annie.”
“You should be talking to the police about this.”
“I can’t, not yet. I don’t trust what’s going on, I told you.”
“Where did this come from, Lindsay? For my own protection, I think you need to tell me a bit more about the provenance of this tape. It all looks extremely dodgy to me.”