by Val McDermid
And part of that reason was that another of her gifts had turned into a curse. Carol had perfect recall of speech. It made her masterly in the interview room, enabling her to trap her victims in the toils of their own words. But these days, the tape that kept looping through her brain more often than not had nothing to do with what she was working on. She was working so hard not to hear the fragments of dialogue that crept under her guard that she had no space in her mind for those promptings of her subconscious that might just take her further forward.
Carol leaned her forehead against the cool mirror and closed her eyes. What she wouldn’t give for a glass of wine right now.
The door to the ladies’ toilets banged open and Paula rushed in. Carol jerked erect, taking in the startled reflection of her junior in the mirror. ‘Hi, Paula,’ she said wearily. Paula had been even more distant than usual at that morning’s briefing. Carol tried not to take it personally, working on convincing herself that Paula had been scratchy with everyone. But she hadn’t managed it.
‘Chief,’ Paula said, hesitating on her way to the cubicle. ‘How did the review go?’
Carol pulled herself together, assuming the appearance of calm authority she knew she needed with a detective she feared was already on the road to writing her off. ‘As you’d expect. Nobody’s very happy with such conspicuous lack of progress in two very expensive inquiries. But at least they’re not scaling us back just yet.’ Carol made to pass Paula and head for the door. But Paula wasn’t finished with her.
I’ve been looking at the Tim Golding file again,’ she said, her body language already on the defensive.
‘Something strike you?’ Carol tried to keep her voice as neutral as possible.
That photo, chief. I don’t know much about rocks and stuff, but the background looks pretty distinctive to me. I was wondering if there was any mileage in blacking out the image of the boy and asking climbing and rambling magazines to print it, see if anybody recognizes where it was taken?’
Carol nodded. Once that would have occurred to her. Now her thought processes were blurred with too many bad memories. And too much wine, a small voice in the back of her head muttered. ‘Good idea, Paula. Ask Stacey to work something up and we’ll get the press office to send it out asap.’ Carol had taken a couple of steps towards the door when something in Paula’s words triggered a faint memory. She half-turned just as Paula pushed open the cubicle door. ‘Paula? What do you know about forensic geology?’
Paula looked puzzled. ‘Forensic geology? Never heard of it, chief.’
‘I heard something on the radio a few months ago. I wasn’t really paying attention, but they were definitely talking about forensic geology. I wonder if someone like that might be able to help us narrow the location down?’ Carol was thinking out loud rather than talking to Paula, but she was suddenly taken aback to see the DCs face light up in appreciation. It was as if this was the moment she’d been anticipating for weeks. It should have pleased Carol that she seemed finally to be dispelling the doubt she’d felt emanating from Paula. Instead, it saddened her to think that she’d been so far removed from her former self.
‘That’s a brilliant idea, chief,’ Paula said, giving the thumbs-up sign.
‘Maybe,’ Carol said. ‘For all I know, these guys just do the Sherlock Holmes thing of looking at the mud on your trousers and revealing which field you got splashed in. But it’s worth a try.’
She walked back to the squadroom, telling the small condemnatory voice inside her that the white wine hadn’t completely done for her brain cells. ‘Sam,’ she called as she crossed the floor. ‘Get on to the BBC website and see what you can find under forensic geology.’
Sam looked up from his desk, startled by the unfamiliar vigour in Carol’s voice. ‘Sorry?’
‘BBC website, forensic geology. Print out what you can find then get me somebody local to talk to,’ Carol said over her shoulder. There’s probably someone at the university earth sciences department who can point you in the right direction.’ She closed her door behind her, shutting out the main room behind the recently installed blinds. She dropped into her chair and put her head in her hands, feeling a slither of sweat under her fingers. Christ, but it had been a long time coming, this small and blessed inspiration. It wasn’t enough to solve anything. But at least it was a start. And she had some breathing space to explore it.
He looks at the tools of what has become his trade laid out before him. The handcuffs, the ankle restraints. The leather gag. The pliable rubber dildo. The razor blades. The latex gloves. The cameras. The laptop. The mobile. All he has to do now is slip the blades into the dildo then swaddle it in kitchen roll so it doesn’t take his fingers off.
He presses
The Voice tells him who to pick, makes it easy for him. There’s nothing left to chance. Tonight he’ll find her round the corner from the shitty hotel just off Bellwether Street where they rent rooms by the hour to women like her. She’ll be leaning against the big cast-iron litter bin, like as not. She’ll be amused when he tells her what he wants from her, like as not. The women don’t expect anything from him except always having good gear. He’s just there. Part of the landscape. Not worth paying attention to.
But she’ll pay attention tonight. It’ll be the last bit of attention she pays to anybody. But it will be paid to him, and that means something.
The streetlights hung like luminous boiled sweets in the thin fog of the early evening. Bradfield’s rush hour had spread like a middle-aged stomach even in the few years Tony had been away. But that evening, he was oblivious to his surroundings, working his way across town from Bradfield Moor to his new home on automatic pilot. Music spilled out of the tape player; he’d no idea what it was. Something soothing, minimalist and repetitive. One of his students back at St Andrews had given him the tape. He couldn’t remember why now–something about brainwave function. He liked it because it covered up the background interference, shutting out road noise, other people’s engines, the low subdued roar of the city’s life.
He wondered about the task he’d set Tom Storey. Was he asking too much of a profoundly damaged man? Would Storey feel so pressurized that he’d blow up again? Tony didn’t think so, but he couldn’t know for sure. He’d gone way outside the limits this time, and he knew how bad he’d feel if it had any adverse effect on Storey.
It dawned on him that feeling bad might be the least of his worries. Aidan Hart would go ballistic if he found out what Tony had done. It flew in the face of every therapeutic regime in the book, but in Tony’s view, the book had been written by people with at least as many problems as those they professed to treat. He knew this because he was one of them. His own difficulties with personal relationships of any kind, the impotence that had dogged him for most of his adult life, his failure to turn his feelings for Carol into any functional shape; these were all measures of his closeness to the ruined personalities he tended in his clinical role.
At least he knew he could do that with some semblance of competence. His empathy with their dysfunctionality made it possible for him to tease out useful treatment programmes. If it sometimes left him feeling uncomfortably complicit, that was a bearable trade-off.
What he couldn’t reconcile himself to was the guilt he felt towards Carol. Right now, the best way to help her heal seemed to be helping her to do her job. And the key to that was Derek Tyler. Which went some way to providing him with self-justification for the process he’d set in motion.
‘Oh, Derek, Derek, Derek. You crave the silence because that way you can still hear the voice,’ he said out loud, continuing a conversation he’d been having with himself since he’d left the hospital. ‘The voice does what?’ H
e paused, thinking and feeling, before he answered himself. ‘It reassures you. It tells you that what you did was good. If you couldn’t hear the voice, you might have to consider that what you did was bad. So you need to hear the voice. So you don’t talk, because that way nobody talks to you. So who’s the voice?’
He turned off the main drag into a side street. It was only when he couldn’t find a parking space that he realized he had come home to the wrong house. He was in the street where he’d lived the last time he’d worked in Bradfield. His automatic pilot had taken him to quite the wrong part of town.
Jackie Mayall walked into the hotel lobby. It wasn’t much of a reception area; it wasn’t much more than a large room with an alcove cut off by a chest-high counter. It had the kind of carpet visitors knew their feet would stick to. She leaned behind the counter, stretching to reach for a key. ‘It’s Jackie,’ she shouted over the muffled hectic sound of Sky Sport coming from a room to the left of the grimy Formica counter. ‘I’ve taken twenty-four.’
‘Right. That’s ten past six,’ a voice called back. ‘I’m writing it down, so don’t you take the piss.’
‘As if,’ she muttered, heading for the threadbare narrow stairs that led up to the room on the second floor that she knew too miserably well. She let herself in and tried not to notice her surroundings. It was about as unappetizing a place for sex as it was possible to imagine. It could have served as a dictionary definition of scruffy, grimy or down-at-heel. A worn blue candlewick spread covered the sagging bed. The dressing table’s cheap veneer was chipped and peeling. One upright chair sat by a dirty sink.
Jackie looked at herself in the mottled mirror. About time she dyed her hair again. She didn’t care about the half-inch of black showing at the roots, but she understood the virtue of window dressing. Her skimpy skirt, halter-neck top, knee-length boots were all smarter than most of the girls on the street. She reckoned that was why she could afford to charge enough to bring most of her punters here, instead of shagging in shop doorways and bobbing over blow jobs in the backs of cars. Impatiently, she turned away, tossing her bag on the bed. She sat down on the edge of the bed, wondering if she should take off her boots or whether he’d want to see that for himself. He was paying her good money, after all. He deserved the best she could do for him.
A tentative knock at the door brought her to her feet again. She yanked the door hard, to overcome the way it always stuck. She eyed him up and down, sardonic amusement in her eyes. ‘Come on then, the meter’s running,’ she said, turning her back on him and heading straight for the bed. ‘I’ve got no time for men who take all night.’
As soon as Tony walked through the door, he dialled Carol’s number. ‘Who’s the voice, Derek?’ he said, absently listening to the ring tone.
‘Carol Jordan,’ she said abruptly.
‘Who’s the voice, Carol,’ he demanded without preamble. ‘It doesn’t make sense. None of the usual voices make sense.’
‘Nice to talk to you too, Tony,’ she said, weary humour in her tone.
‘The thing about voices, they’re a bit like past-life regression.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘When people do those past-life regressions, they’ve never been a stable boy or a mill hand. They’ve always been Cleopatra or Henry the Eighth or Emma Hamilton. It’s the same with people who hear voices. They don’t hear the milkman or the woman who sits behind them on the bus every morning. They hear the Virgin Mary or John Lennon or Jack the Ripper.’
‘Well, it’s hard to imagine your average milkman giving out detailed instructions about carrying out sexual homicide,’ Carol said drily.
Tony paused for a moment. He grinned. ‘So you think it’s more likely the Virgin Mary would be behind that?’ Carol giggled. Tony felt a quick flash of pride. He’d done something very human. He’d made her laugh. He’d almost forgotten how much he liked the sound of her laughter, it had been so long since he’d heard it. ‘But anyway,’ he continued, covering up his momentary lapse from the professional, ‘what I’m trying to get at is that these are grandiose voices. They live inside the head of the person hearing them and they are dynamic. What they say changes according to circumstance. You don’t have to worry about silence. You don’t need silence because the voice doesn’t mind noise. It just makes itself heard when it wants to be, whenever it’s convenient. Well, convenient for the person hearing the voice, not usually convenient for the rest of us,’ he added hastily.
‘And you’re saying Derek Tyler’s voice isn’t like that?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s as if he’s scared of losing it. Scared that it might get swallowed up in the background noise. I’ve never come across anything quite like it, not in life, not in the literature. It’s as if…’ He shook his head. ‘I need to go and do some more research. There must be something in the literature…Unless we’re breaking completely new ground.’ His voice tailed off.
‘Tony?’
‘I’ll call you. I need to think about this. Thanks for listening to me.’ Whatever she said in reply was lost as he hung up the phone. He’d never encountered anything like Derek Tyler’s voice. If it broke all the rules, maybe it was time for him to do the same thing. Instead of working with probabilities, maybe he should start considering improbabilities. He headed upstairs to his study, muttering, ‘Six impossible things before breakfast.’
DS Kevin Matthews stood behind the Woolpack Hotel reception desk, notebook in hand. There wasn’t much room behind the counter, which meant he was uncomfortably close to the seedy individual who had introduced himself as Jimmy de Souza, night manager. In spite of the stench of sweat, cigarettes and stale pizza that ballooned around de Souza, Kevin preferred this view to what was upstairs in room 24. One quick look had been enough to tell him that interviewing the man who had found the body was definitely not the short straw. Much better to be down here where there was nothing more disturbing to see than a cheesy night manager and a stream of SOCOs and cops going in and out.
De Souza was stocky, with a round belly that strained his grubby white T-shirt and the waistband of his shell-suit trousers. His black hair was greased back from a sharp widow’s peak, and a rosebud mouth over a plump, rounded chin gave him a look of petulance. ‘Look, I told you,’ he said, a faint trace of distant parts underpinning his Bradfield accent, ‘I only come out if somebody rings the bell. People like their privacy. That’s what they’re paying for.’
‘By the hour,’ Kevin said, his voice acidic.
‘So? It’s not against the law, is it, renting rooms by the hour? People have needs.’ De Souza started to pick his nose then thought better of it as he noticed Kevin’s lip curl in distaste.
‘So you rented out room twenty-four when exactly?’
De Souza pointed to a thick desk diary lying open on the ledge beneath the counter. ‘There. Ten past six.’
Kevin glanced at it. The time and a name scrawled next to it in a clumsy hand. ‘And who did you rent it out to? I’m assuming–correct me if I’m wrong–it wasn’t Margaret Thatcher.’
‘Slag calls herself Jackie. Skinny bit of stuff with bleach-blonde hair. She used to come in most nights a few times.’
‘You don’t know her surname?’
De Souza leered. ‘You kidding? Who’s interested?’
‘Who was she with?’
‘I dunno. I was in the back, watching the football. She shouted through that she was taking the key and I just wrote down the time. She’d settle up on her way out. I like to give the regulars a bit of leeway.’
‘So you didn’t see who was with her?’ Kevin asked again.
‘I don’t even know if he was with her. Often the blokes hang back a few minutes, so nobody sees them. The girls just tell them what room to come to.’
‘Very handy,’ Kevin said bitterly. ‘So what made you go up there?’
‘Her time was well up, wasn’t it? Normally, she’s out of there in half an hour or so. Like I said, she’d settle up
and I’d go and change the sheets. When the match finished at the back of eight, the key was sitting there on the hook. I was pissed off, I thought she’d done a runner on me. So I went up to see if she’d left the money in there. I went to twenty-four and let myself in…’ For the first time, de Souza looked uncomfortable. ‘Christ, I’m not going to be able to let that room out again in a hurry.’
Kevin looked at de Souza as if he’d like to hit him. ‘My heart bleeds for you.’ He reached over with his pen and snagged the key of room 24 off its hook. He slipped it into a paper evidence bag and tucked it away in his pocket. ‘We’ll need to hang on to that for the time being,’ he said. ‘But, like you said, you’re not going to be needing it any time soon.’
His words roused de Souza’s self-interest. ‘How long are you lot going to be keeping us out of business?’
Kevin smiled sweetly. ‘As long as it takes. This is a crime scene now, pal.’
As he spoke, the street door opened again and Carol Jordan strode in. ‘Where am I going, Kevin?’ she said.
‘Second floor, guv. Room twenty-four. Don’s up there with Jan and Paula. And the SOCOs.’
‘I’m on my way.’
Tom Storey hadn’t been lying when he’d said he had people skills. His work as a housing benefits officer had been fraught with the underlying threat of violence, both verbal and physical. Until his recent erratic behaviour had seen him sent home on sick leave, he’d always been known as the one the bosses could rely on to prevent an awkward client losing it in the worst way. That was why the task Tony Hill had given him seemed less a burden than a genuine challenge he thought he might be able to rise to.
Incarcerated in Bradfield Moor, burdened both with crushing guilt and the fear of the unknown invader eating away his brain, he’d tried to distract himself by watching his fellow inmates. It helped him stay in control of his mind if he had something outside himself to focus on. Of course, the ones who were allowed a certain freedom of movement were the ones who were regarded as safe in the sense that they weren’t about to run amok with a sharpened fork: the obsessive compulsives who were mostly a danger to themselves; the schizophrenics meekly medicated; the manic depressives kept on a level by lithium. In a way, they were more interesting to him than the violent. Tom found it easier to understand how they’d slipped the cogs of normalcy. He didn’t like to think of the personality-disordered ones; he’d seen enough sociopaths in the course of his previous professional life to last him the rest of his days.