by Val McDermid
At first, my path was less than clear. I chose information as my highway, tracking down everything I could about hypnosis, altered states, brainwashing and mind control. And the more I learned, the more I tried to demonstrate my abilities to myself. I practised on school friends, I sneaked under the guard of lovers, I even tried it at work. I soon learned that my skills weren’t all I had hoped for. Sometimes I achieved remarkable results. But, more often, I failed. Most minds remained resolutely beyond my grasp. And no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t break through.
Then I discovered that there was a category of weaker minds that had few defences against my techniques. People the rest of the world dismissed as slow and stupid could be bent to my will. Not perhaps the world-shattering effect I had dreamed of, but something that offered distinct possibilities.
The question then became what I would do with the power I had prepared myself to wield. How could I magnify what was in my grasp?
The answer came out of nowhere. The power of two.
Chapter 4
If knowledge was power, then the choice of how to disseminate it was power in action. So Sam Evans was always willing to trade a little to get a lot. It was surprising how much people would spill if they thought you were being candid with them. So it was with Kevin. In exchange for a couple of snippets he’d picked up about Stacey Chen’s background, Evans had garnered a wealth of information about Don, Paula and Kevin himself. Just the sort of things that could come in useful as subtle little pressure points if he ever needed to push them off balance.
They were sitting in a country pub a few miles from Swindale, recharging their batteries with a well-earned pint after a long and frustrating day fighting petty turf wars and conducting painstaking interviews. They were supposed to be formulating a plan of action for the morning, but they’d tacitly acknowledged that they’d had enough of the grinding depression of dealing with the deaths of children. Station gossip was far more appealing.
Kevin broke off from the story he was telling when his mobile beeped, indicating the arrival of a text message. He looked incredulously at the screen. ‘Is she at the wind-up, or what?’ he exclaimed, turning the phone so Evans could read the screen.
Under the heading STACEY MOBY, it read ‘Killr hs capturd Paula. She’s missng.’
Evans shook his head. ‘Not Stacey. Not her style.’
Kevin was already dialling. As soon as the line opened, he said, ‘What do you mean, the killer has captured Paula? Is this some kind of sick joke?’
‘I wouldn’t joke about something like that,’ Stacey said, clearly offended at the suggestion. ‘I meant just what I said. He’s got Paula. He took her into an alley and she went off the air. By the time we got there, they’d vanished. That was about half an hour ago and we’ve not seen hide nor hair of either of them since.’
‘Shit,’ Kevin swore. ‘We’re coming over. We’ll be there inside the hour.’ He ended the call and turned to Evans. ‘She meant it. While we were sitting here enjoying a pint, our fucking colleagues sat on their hands and let the killer snatch Paula from under their noses.’ He jumped to his feet. ‘Come on, we’re going back to Bradfield.’
Evans abandoned his half-drunk pint and led the way to the door. ‘How the hell did that happen?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said. ‘Carol Jordan was so sure she had all the bases covered.’
Evans raised his eyebrows as he followed Kevin to the car. If anything happened to Paula, it would be goodnight, Vienna for Carol Jordan. He was glad he was well clear of the night’s debacle, working a case that had a better prospect of resolution. It was every man for himself out there. Anyone who thought otherwise was prey. And prey got eaten.
He had no intention of being anyone’s next meal.
It was just after three in the morning when Carol made it home. Paula McIntyre had been missing for a little over six hours. Every door in Temple Fields that would respond to a thunderous tattoo of knocking had opened, every respondent had been questioned. They’d shaken down massage parlours and brothels, accosted whores and rent boys, disrupted bars and clubs. Short of taking a battering ram to all the remaining doors of Temple Fields–shops, offices, flats, bedsits and who knew what else–they had done everything they could to find Paula. But it was as if she and her assailant had vanished into thin air. The maze of alleys, back yards and lanes had yielded nothing in the way of clues. Jan Shields had led a team through the gate in the wall and into the building behind it, which seemed mostly to serve as storage for a local printshop. Their search had turned up nothing to indicate that anyone had passed that way for days.
Finally, Carol had called it a night. Several officers had protested, expressing their willingness to continue searching, but Carol had vetoed their requests. Nothing of use could be done before daybreak, she said firmly. The best service they could offer Paula now was to get some sleep. What none of them was prepared to voice was their conviction that they were already too late.
Carol had walked back to the surveillance van with Jan Shields and Don Merrick in a despondent silence. When they got there, Jan had shaken her head. ‘I’m not coming back yet. I’ve still got contacts out there. There are people I need to talk to. You’ll be amazed who ends up on our side once they realize it’s a cop on the missing list. They’ll want this sorted nearly as badly as we do.’
‘Bad for business, is it?’ Merrick said sourly.
‘Yeah, you could say that.’ Jan pulled her soft leather jacket closer to her face. ‘I’ll see you at the briefing.’
Carol made no attempt to stop her. They watched till she was swallowed up by the mist. ‘I told her this morning she didn’t need to go through with this,’ Merrick said.
Carol could feel the heat of his hostility but was too weary to get into it with him. ‘She knew that already, Don. It was her choice,’ she said heavily. She yanked open the door of the van and climbed inside. ‘I’m going home to get some sleep. I suggest you do the same rather than chase your tail round Temple Fields for the rest of the night.’ She didn’t wait for his response. When he hadn’t followed her after twenty seconds, she slammed the door shut and ordered the driver to take them back to the station.
She thanked Stacey for holding the fort, then asked one of the technicians to run the CCTV footage of Paula’s last encounter again. They watched it half a dozen times on the journey, but none of them saw anything new. When they arrived back at base, she ordered the technicians to do everything they could to enhance both sound and vision. Then she walked to her car, feeling so old and tired she could hardly put one foot in front of the other.
By the time she got to her door, she was trembling with a mixture of despair and exhaustion. She was pathetically grateful to see a light burning in Tony’s study. She leaned on his doorbell. He opened the door dressed in jogging pants and a T-shirt, a puzzled look on his face.
‘He’s got Paula,’ Carol said. Each word felt as if it had been dragged out of her. She closed her eyes tightly, tilting her head back. Tony stepped on to the freezing doorstep and put his arms round her. For a few seconds, her body remained rigid. Then her head was on his shoulder, tears coursing down her face. Tony said nothing. He supported her weight, letting her lean into him, feeling her body shudder as she let go her grief.
Eventually, the storm abated. Carol withdrew slightly, meeting his concerned look. ‘I’m OK,’ she said shakily.
‘No, you’re not.’ Tony led her indoors and helped her sit. ‘You want a drink?’
Carol nodded, wiping the tracks of her tears from her cheeks. ‘Please.’
He nodded, heading for the kitchen. He reappeared a minute later with two glasses of white wine, handing one to Carol before sitting down next to her. ‘You want to talk about it?’
Carol took a mouthful of wine. It tasted alien, as if something had chemically altered her tastebuds. ‘Call it displacement activity if you want, but I can’t talk about Paula until I know where we stand with each other
.’
‘Then you need to tell me what I need to know.’
Carol drank more wine. This time, it tasted closer to what she expected. ‘Since the rape, I’ve felt like I didn’t own my body any more. It took me a while to realize that I needed a sexual experience that would show me I was still in control of my responses. I needed it to be about me and I needed it to be uncomplicated.’ She put the palm of her hand on his back, feeling the warmth of his skin through his shirt.
He snorted. ‘Which ruled me out on both counts.’
Her half-smile signalled agreement. ‘And suddenly there was Jonathan. Understanding, generous, attractive and absolutely not somebody I could fall in love with. So I used him. I’m not particularly proud of that, but there’s no reason for you to feel jealous. You get more of me every day than I let him have.’
‘But I am jealous. I’m jealous that it’s so easy for him and so hard for me.’
‘I was trying to make it easier for both of us.’
‘I know. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, is it? For you and me to be at ease with each other?’
His voice was sadder than she’d ever heard it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said bleakly. ‘I just know that I…’
‘Don’t say it.’ He cut across her harshly. ‘I feel the same. But the timing’s never right, is it? There’s always something with a greater claim on us, something that pushes us apart. And right now, it’s Paula. So tell me what happened tonight.’
Carol outlined the evening’s events. ‘She’s dead. And I let it happen. Knowing what I know about how these things can go wrong, I still let it happen.’
Tony jumped to his feet and started pacing. ‘I don’t think she is dead. This killer wants his victims found, and found while they’re still fresh. He sets it up so they will be found. Paula hasn’t been found, so logic dictates she’s probably still alive.’
Carol shook her head. ‘But why would he change his MO?’
‘That’s a good question. Maybe because he realized Paula’s a cop. If you remember, I said to you after the first night that he might have spotted that she was a decoy.’
‘Even so, why would that make a difference?’
‘He likes power. It may be that he’s keeping her alive because it gives him even more power to savour, having a cop under control. It gives him power over us as well as over her. He’s the stage manager, the conductor of the orchestra. We have to dance to his tune if we want Paula back alive.’
Carol frowned. ‘What do you mean, “dance to his tune”?’
Tony waved a hand impatiently. ‘I don’t know yet. Either he’ll make that clear to us or we’ll have to figure it out for ourselves.’ He paced again then stopped abruptly and whirled round to face her. ‘Carol, how did he know she was wearing a wire?’
‘You answered that yourself. He must have figured out she was a decoy and realized she would be wired. That’s probably why he started pawing her as soon as he got her in the alley.’
‘This is way too sophisticated for Derek Tyler,’ he muttered.
‘But it wasn’t Derek Tyler last night. Derek Tyler’s banged up in Bradfield Moor.’
‘I know, I know. But these are the same crimes, the same brain behind them. And it’s not Derek Tyler’s brain. He’s not smart enough, not controlled enough.’ He fixed Carol with a freshly energized stare. ‘The person behind this isn’t just pulling our strings. He’s pulling the killer’s strings too.’
Carol shook her head stubbornly. ‘I don’t buy it. People don’t kill because somebody asks them to. Only contract killers do that. And if this is a contract killer, then he’s doing it at the behest of someone who wants to send Derek Tyler a “Get out of jail free” card. We need to go back through his life again, find out who might want him out and why.’
‘You’re wrong, Carol,’ Tony sighed. ‘But if you’re determined to go down that path, then maybe you should be looking into the lives of his victims, not Tyler himself.’
Carol drained her glass and stood up. ‘His victims?’
‘If I loved someone who was murdered, and their killer didn’t even get life, if he just got sent to a mental hospital that theoretically he could be released from at any time, I probably wouldn’t feel that justice had been done. I’d want that killer in my grasp. Given the kind of circles his victims moved in, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that there’s someone who loved one of his victims and who is now in a position to hire a contract killer to replicate those crimes, in the expectation that you’ll have to let Tyler go as a result.’ He shrugged. ‘It has a kind of logic to it.’
Carol stared at him, her mouth open. ‘Logic?’ she stammered.
‘No, Carol. It’s bollocks. If there was anything in what I’ve just suggested, the person hiring the contract killer would also have sent a lawyer in to Tyler, pushing him towards an appeal. And that hasn’t happened.’
‘There’s time,’ she said. ‘Maybe he’ll try to use Paula as a bargaining chip.’
‘Carol, if you get a demand from the killer offering you Paula in exchange for an admission that Derek Tyler was wrongly convicted, I will buy you dinner every night for a year.’
‘Deal,’ she said.
He swallowed the last of his wine. ‘And now I think it’s time for sleep. We’ve both got important work to do…’ He glanced at his watch and groaned. ‘Starting in a few hours.’
‘I didn’t thank you for the profile in the Tim Golding case,’ Carol said, following him to the front door ‘It was very helpful.’
‘You’re welcome. I didn’t think you got your money’s worth before.’
‘Will you go out and take a look at the scene?’
He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I was thinking about going out there tomorrow. But with Paula missing…’
‘It can probably wait.’
‘Who have you got on it?’ he asked.
‘Kevin and Sam. And Stacey will do the liaison with the paedophile unit. Don wanted it back, but frankly I’m not convinced he’s up to it. When all this shit is over, I think I’m going to ask Brandon to move him back to mainstream CID. Maybe by then Chris Devine will be able to move north. She’d make a good DI.’ Her face clouded over. ‘God, when I think how much I was looking forward to this assignment. I thought it was going to be my salvation. But right now, it feels like the last nail in the coffin.’
Stacey Chen loved her job. Her parents had embraced computer technology with eagerness when it first became generally available in the late eighties. They owned a chain of Chinese supermarkets and the capacity of the machines to keep track of stock and transactions enchanted them. Stacey could hardly remember a time when there hadn’t been computers in her life. An only child, she’d taken to silicon the way other children took to Barbie dolls or books. Frustrated by the limitations of those early home computers, she’d learned programming code so she could write her own games for machines that had only ever been meant to do word processing and simple accounts. By the time she started studying computer science at UMIST, she’d already earned enough to buy a city-centre loft, thanks to a neat little piece of code she’d sold to a US software giant which secured their operating system against potential software conflicts. Her lecturers predicted a meteoric career for her in the dotcom world. None of them could quite believe it when she’d announced that she planned to join the police.
It made absolute sense to Stacey, however. She loved the unpicking of problems. Rooting around in other people’s systems was meat and drink to her, and here was a way she could satisfy her urges without breaking any laws. And she had enough time off to pursue her own commercial interests without any of the potential clashes that might have arisen if she’d been working for a software company. So what if her police salary was peanuts compared to what she made in her own time? Her job gave her legitimate sanction to invade other people’s secrets, and that was satisfaction enough.
She didn’t even need to be in the office to
creep through everyone else’s data. She’d set up her own home computing systems to allow her network access to all the machines used by the Major Incident Team. And because she’d designated herself as a systems operator she didn’t even have to go through the tiresome process of capturing their passwords. She could simply wander at will through their machines. And so she knew Kevin’s taste for soft-porn sites where he could browse for free without handing over any personal details. She knew Don Merrick’s penchant for American baseball, Paula’s addiction to news websites and Jan’s habit of ordering books from an online women’s bookstore in York. She’d been intrigued by Carol Jordan’s wariness to commit to the machine until she’d uncovered the information that her brother worked in software development. Carol was clearly only too aware of the footprints that any activity left on a computer.
She also knew about Sam Evans’ late-night trawls. She’d sat in her flat noting his keystrokes, watching him trying to break into his colleagues’ files and failing every time at the password hurdle. She should have felt that Sam was a kindred spirit, but instead she despised him for his incompetence. He should stick to hanging out on those gross post-mortem sites he liked so much. That was about his speed. God, but cops were weird.
Tonight she was alone on the system, however. Wherever Sam was, he wasn’t skulking round the office, trying to steal a march on the rest of them. And there was nothing new on the hard drive to interest her. She wondered what was happening over in Temple Fields. A few keyboard commands and a couple of mouse clicks and she could see what the cameras were feeding back to the computer.
Stacey poured herself another cup of coffee from the Thermos on her desk and settled down for a long hard look.