by Val McDermid
Kevin?’
The penny dropped. ‘A pillow with a hole in the middle.’
Sam Evans was fed up. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be doing. Jan Shields had marshalled half a dozen of them back down to Temple Fields to go over what was, as far as he was concerned, old ground. They were ordered to carry out another canvass of the area immediately surrounding the bin where the transmitter pack had been found. They’d dispersed on their rounds and he hadn’t seen Shields since. He’d knocked on the doors assigned to him, asked the same questions, logged the same negative responses.
He decided to have a quick pit stop in Stan’s Café. The coffee was terrible, but the atmosphere was marginally less depressing than that inside the police station. As he walked down the street towards the greasy spoon, he saw Honey on the kerb, touting for trade. ‘Hey, girl, how’re you doing?’ he said easily.
‘Hi, Sammy,’ she said. ‘Crap, actually. You lot are killing the trade.’
‘Fancy a coffee?’ He’d thought she had something for him in the pub, but Jan Shields’ arrival had closed her down tight as a drum. Maybe he could loosen her up again.
‘You buying?’
‘I’m buying.’
‘In that case, you can treat me to an all-day breakfast.’
He grinned. He’d always admired bottle. ‘Come on, then.’
A few minutes later, Honey was attacking a monstrous fry-up with all the gusto of a starving dog. Mouth full of sausage and egg, she mumbled, ‘Brilliant, Sammy.’
‘It’ll kill you, that shit,’ he said censoriously. ‘Clog up your arteries, make you fat.’
She shook her head. ‘I never put a pound on, me.’
Evans gave her a cynical look. ‘Can’t imagine why that would be.’
She winked. ‘All that exercise.’
‘Not to mention the recreational drugs…’
She looked disappointed. ‘Aw, Sammy, don’t spoil it.’
‘I’m a cop, Honey, I can’t help it.’ She acknowledged his reply with a sad little twist of her mouth. ‘You know the other day when we were having a chat?’ he continued. She nodded. ‘I had the feeling you were going to tell me something. And then DS Shields turned up and you did one.’
Honey swallowed, buying herself some time, considering. Then she said, ‘She disgusts me, that one.’
He shrugged. ‘She’s only doing her job. Just like me.’
Honey gave him a disbelieving look. ‘Is that what it’s called?’
This wasn’t going quite where he’d expected but Evans was nothing if not a good listener, especially when it meant adding to his store of knowledge. ‘Meaning what?’ he prompted.
Honey cast her eyes upwards. ‘Come on, Sammy. Don’t tell me you don’t know about the Vice and their freebies?’
At first, he didn’t get it. ‘Are you saying Jan Shields is on the take?’
She picked a piece of bacon rind from between her small, feral teeth. ‘Not like you mean it. Not in money.’ She understood his stillness. She knew he wanted her to spell it out, as if that would somehow make it easier to believe. ‘She takes it in sex. She makes some of the girls have sex with her.’
Evans didn’t much like Jan, but he thought she was a good cop. She’d been the one who’d spotted the Tim Golding photo. And she’d worked her arse off trying to find Paula. He didn’t want to think of her in the light Holly was shining. ‘Come off it, Honey,’ he protested. ‘That’s just people taking a pop at a cop because she’s an easy target.’
Honey put down her fork and knife. She looked both serious and miserable. ‘She’s had me. Face down on a table, rough and ready. She fisted me. I couldn’t walk straight for days. Another time, she fucked me in the arse with a Coke bottle. Do you have any idea how fucking scary that is, someone ramming a glass bottle into you? That’s what your precious detective sergeant likes.’
He recognized truth when he heard it, but he still didn’t want to accept it. ‘I’m finding this hard to believe, Honey.’
Her mouth twisted in a bitter line. ‘Which is why she’s been getting away with it for so long. You lot don’t want to hear this kind of shit about one of your own.’
‘You should have made a complaint.’
‘Yeah, right. Like anyone would believe that a nice lady cop would hit on a slag like me.’ She picked up her cutlery and attacked a slice of fried bread, dipping it in her egg yolk and crunching angrily.
‘Has this happened with other women?’
‘Only a few, as far as I can make out. She’s choosy. And we know to keep our mouths shut unless we want to be banged up on a charge. We all hate her. She drools all over us, makes us kiss her. And, like, that’s the thing we don’t do with punters, you know? It’s sick. And you never know when she’s going to be back for more. Out of the blue, suddenly she’s there.’ She gave him a sidelong glance, knowing she was about to deliver the killer punch. That’s why we call her the Creeper.’
He stared at her, open-mouthed and horrified.
‘See, I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ she said with a kind of sad triumph.
‘What did you call her?’ Evans strained to get the words out.
The Creeper. It’s what the girls she screws call her.’
He gave her the standard-issue policeman’s hard stare. This better be the truth, Honey,’ he said, pushing his chair back.
‘I got no reason to lie about it, Sammy,’ she said huffily.
Evans jumped to his feet and threw some money on the table. ‘Right, Honey. On your feet. You’re coming with me.’ He marched her protesting to the door, pulling out his mobile as he went.
The first thing out of the file case was a thin stack of photographs. Tony recognized the top one immediately. Jackie Mayall lay spreadeagled on the bed where she’d died. But there wasn’t as much blood as he remembered. In the following two pictures, more blood appeared. The final two shots showed crime-scene tape at the edges; in one a SOCO stood by the bed with a ruler in his hand. Tony’s stomach turned over as he realized what he was looking at. Official crime-scene photos…and very unofficial ones.’
With a gesture of disgust, he put them aside and carried on looking. There were more photos, this time of Sandie Foster. They fell into the same two categories: official and unofficial. Under the photos he found a handful of DVD-ROMs. He leaned back on his heels and stared at them. ‘Memories,’ he said softly.
He’d been right. It had taken him far too long to get there, but he’d been right. He thought about phoning Carol, but the need to know, to be certain, was stronger. He gathered everything together and retraced his steps down to the dining-room table.
He sat down in front of the laptop and pressed the button to open the CD/DVD drive. Empty. He was about to insert one of the disks when it occurred to him that it might be worth checking out which websites Jan had bookmarked. He clicked on her comms program, then on the icon for favourite places. Her bank. The BBC website. Amazon. Something called lesbiout.co.uk. And one called simply ‘webcam’. ‘Oh shit,’ he said.
Hurriedly, he checked there was a cable connecting the laptop to a phone line, then he clicked the icon to get online. Against the background sound of modems warbling to each other, he spread out the photographs on the table around him. A bright voice said, ‘Welcome. You have mail.’
Ignoring the prompt to access the incoming mail box, Tony clicked on the webcam link. The screen went black. Then it filled with a blurred image. Seconds later, the pixels shunted into place and with pinprick clarity Paula McIntyre appeared on the screen. ‘Holy fuck,’ Tony said.
At first, he couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive. There was no blood, which was a mercy. He frowned at the screen, trying to work out how to control the image, whether he could zoom in or not, whether there was any way to find where the image was coming from. He was so intent on what he was doing, he completely missed the drift of headlights up the cul-de-sac and the sound of a car engine cutting out only yards from the house.
She knew as soon as she turned into her street that something was seriously wrong. Her house was a blaze of light, upstairs and down. But there were no cars in sight, other than the ones she knew belonged to her neighbours. For a moment, she considered making a run for it. She’d have a head start and she had plans in place for precisely this contingency. However, she reasoned, if it was her colleagues who were on to her, she would have picked up something unusual in the radio traffic. But all afternoon, the police radio in her car had spat out the usual crap. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. She’d heard the call for support when Carl’s body had been found and was glad she’d had the foresight to get rid of him before the fingerprint evidence came back. Besides, if it was her lot, Jordan the ice maiden would have made damn sure that she was well out of the way during the search, performing some pointless task on the other side of town.
So if it wasn’t the cops inside the house, it had to be Tony Hill. She’d sensed something this morning in the car with him, but she’d thought she was being paranoid. Now, it seemed her instinctual nervousness might have been justified. Sudden realization dawned. He must have lifted her keys and had them copied. She swore under her breath. That’s what had happened earlier. She hadn’t been losing it at all. He’d tricked her. Outrage swelled inside her and she knew she wasn’t about to run. Nobody got one over on her. Nobody.
If it was Hill and he was there alone, she could finesse the whole problem out of existence. Get rid of him, move her souvenirs where they couldn’t be found, show terrible remorse at killing the psychologist she’d mistaken in the dark for a burglar. At the most, she’d do a couple of years.
If that was going to play, however, she’d need to make it look like she’d come home as normal. About thirty yards from her house, she cut the lights and switched off the engine, coasting into her drive on momentum and habit. She got out of the car, closing the door with the gentlest of clicks. From the darkness of the drive, she could see the length of her living room.
There he was, the cheeky bastard. Sitting at her dining table, using her laptop like he was Goldilocks and she was the three bears. Well, there was no doubt about it now. She was going all the way.
She crept round to the back of the house, ducking beneath the dining-room window as she passed. She leaned against the wall by the back door, raking through her bag to find the back door key, which she always kept loose, just in case she lost the rest of her keys. A cautious planner, that’s what she was. And why she should have realized earlier that Carl wasn’t her only problem.
She slipped the key into the lock and turned it with infinitesimal care. The click as the tumblers released was barely audible. She kicked off her shoes, pushed down on the handle and inched the door open. Gingerly she stepped through the gap and stood listening. She felt wonderfully alive, buzzing with the knowledge that she was in control, and he had no fucking idea. Through the half-open door between kitchen and dining area, she could hear the tap of keys and the click of the track-pad buttons.
So taut was she that she physically jerked when the sound of his voice cut through the silence. ‘Where are you? Come on, tell me. Where are you, Paula?’ Her heart rate dropped back as soon as she realized he was talking to the image on the screen, not to her.
She took a deep, silent breath. In the dim city glow bleeding in through the kitchen window, she could see the outline of her neat, sterile, modern kitchen. One of the few women she’d brought back to the house to fuck had commented that it looked like somewhere serious microwaving went on. She hadn’t been invited back a second time. By the cooker, the knife block sat, its contents seldom used and still factory sharp. She reached out and gently removed a long-bladed boning knife, then walked soundlessly towards the dining-room door.
Carol reached out her free hand to the wall, unconsciously supporting herself against the weight of the information coming down the phone at her. ‘Are you sure, Sam?’ she said, knowing in her gut that he was right, that Tony had been right, that this was the worst of all possible scenarios for Paula McIntyre. The knowledge wormed its way into her brain, making sense of the loose connections that had been troubling her for days.
‘I’m as sure as I can be,’ Evans said solemnly.
‘Where is she right now?’ Carol asked. Kevin stopped on his way down the stairs, alarmed by the stricken look on her face, the dull inevitability in her voice.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for hours.’
‘We need to find her. Get out on the streets and see if you can track her down. Ask who’s seen her. But keep it off the radio, you understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘Good work, Sam,’ Carol said, knowing nobody else would ever thank him for what he’d achieved. She ended the call. She wanted to curl up in a ball and weep, but that would have to wait for later.
‘Guv?’ Kevin said, his tone concerned. Carol knew his anxiety wasn’t really for her, but she forgave him anyway.
‘The Creeper,’ she said. ‘Sam’s got an ID from one of the street girls.’
Kevin’s face lit up. ‘But that’s great news.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Carol said flatly. It was as if she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. She turned away and began to run down the stairs. ‘Stacey,’ she shouted. ‘And you too, Kevin. With me, now.’
Kevin caught up with her at the car, Stacey at his heels. ‘Who is it?’ he demanded. ‘Who is it?’
Carol’s face clenched momentarily in pain. ‘Jan Shields,’ she said.
Kevin recoiled as if he’d been struck in the face. He gave an incredulous little laugh. ‘It’s a wind-up,’ he said. ‘Somebody with a score to settle.’
‘Sam says not,’ she said heavily. ‘I should have listened to Tony,’ she added, running a hand through her hair. ‘Can we get a move on, please, Kevin?’
Dazed, he unlocked the car and they piled in. ‘Stacey, call the station and get a home address for Jan Shields,’ Carol said over her shoulder. ‘Fuck, I should have listened to Tony.’
‘What? He said it was Jan Shields?’ Kevin sounded incredulous.
‘He said there was a cop behind this. I wouldn’t believe him.’
‘Where am I going?’ Kevin said as Carol slammed the noddy light back on the roof.
From the back seat, Stacey shouted the address. ‘It’s on the Micklefield estate,’ she said.
‘We’ve still only got one hooker’s word for it,’ Kevin said as he carved a line through the traffic. ‘And it makes no sense.’
Carol sighed as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. ‘Oh, it makes sense all right. It’s the first thing that’s made sense since this whole fucking business began.’
Tony clicked another button, hoping it might provide some indication of where the webcam feed was coming from. He’d left the screen itself, unable to bear the sight of Paula’s vulnerability. At least she was still alive. It was, he knew, time to call Carol. Stacey Chen was far better equipped for this task than he was.
He reached for his mobile. He’d barely got his hand out of his pocket when he heard a low voice behind him that chilled him to the bone.
‘You’re a burglar. I’m quite within my rights.’
He froze and slowly turned. Jan Shields was inches from him, her weight balanced perfectly, a glittering blade held almost carelessly in her hand. Her eyes were cold and steady, her whole attitude one of carefully contained violence. ‘Drop the phone on the floor,’ she added.
He did as he was told. He didn’t doubt for a moment that she would have had no hesitation in cutting him if he hadn’t complied. ‘Might be a bit hard to argue reasonable force. I mean, everybody knows I’m a weed.’
Her lip curled in contempt. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever have to make the argument. Because nobody knows you’re here, do they?’
‘Carol knows.’ He said it casually, trying to make it convincing.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. She does things by the book, d
oes the lovely Carol. She would never let you come out to play by yourself. I rather think you’re all mine, Dr Hill.’
She was so accustomed to dominating, he thought. The only way under her guard was to take the power from her. Which was fine in theory. His problem was that he was woefully short on leverage. This isn’t your style, Jan,’ he tried for starters.
For some reason, his words had amused her. ‘You think not?’
‘It’s way too hands-on. You like somebody else to do the dirty work.’
She raised one eyebrow. ‘Are you suggesting I’ve got something to do with these murders?’ she said, her cherub’s face assuming a look of injured innocence.
‘They’re your murders, Jan. You should be proud of them. They’re interesting pieces of work.’
That’s as maybe. But they’re nothing to do with me, Dr Hill. Derek Tyler killed four women. And a retard called Carl Mackenzie did three more copycat murders before he topped himself in remorse only this afternoon. That’s what the evidence shows.’
Oh Christ, she’s killed with her own hands. The knowledge hit Tony with the force of a lightning strike. He felt his own chances shrivel to ash. But still, he had to try. ‘Come on, Jan. There’s no point in lying now. Carl Mackenzie hasn’t done three murders. Paula McIntyre is still very much alive.’
‘You obviously know more about it than I do. Maybe you’re the person behind it all. Maybe you’ve set me up. Maybe you’re the person who’s been sending me all this sick stuff.’
He shook his head, aiming for an air of disappointment. That dog won’t hunt. Carol Jordan knows me too well to fall for that.’
‘I can make it look that way. With you dead and the ends all tied up, who’s going to listen to your favourite blonde? Everybody knows she’s lost it. Face it, Dr Hill, you’re a busted flush.’
Kevin turned into the Micklefield estate and slowed to a halt at the end of the street where Jan Shields lived. ‘What now?’ he said. ‘It’s a cul-de-sac. If she’s looking out for us, she’s going to see us the minute we turn into it.’