Beneath the Bleeding

by Val McDermid

  His mother’s bonhomie left with her. ‘I had a meeting with the Bradfield Cross Trust. I thought I’d better show my face. What are they saying?’

  ‘They’re going to try me in a leg brace, see if I can get out of bed today or tomorrow. I’m pushing to be out of here by next week.’ He recognized the dismay on her face and considered winding her up. But the small boy in him kicked in, warning him that the consequences would probably not be worth the moment of pleasure. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to let them discharge me into your care. Even if I tell them that’s where I’m going, all you’ll have to do is turn up when they’re sending me home. Then you can deliver me to my own house.’

  Vanessa smirked. The girlfriend going to take care of you, is she?’

  ‘For the last time, she is not my girlfriend.’

  ‘No, I suppose that would be too much to hope for. Pretty girl like that. Smart too, I don’t doubt. She could do better for herself, I expect.’ Her lips compressed into a thin line of disapproval. ‘You’ve never had my talent for attracting interesting people. Apart from your father, of course. But then, we’re all entitled to one mistake.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly comment, could I? Since you’ve never told me anything about him.’ Tony heard the bitterness in his voice and wished it gone.

  ‘He thought he was better off without us. In my book, that makes us better off without him.’ She turned away, looking out of the window at a flat grey sky. ‘Listen, I need you to sign something.’ She faced him, leaning her shoulder bag on the bed and taking out a folder of papers. ‘Bloody government, they try to screw us for every penny. Your gran’s house, it’s in both our names. She did it that way to save me paying inheritance tax. It’s been rented out all these years. But with the property market the way–’

  ‘Wait a minute. What do you mean, Gran’s house is in both our names? This is the first I’ve heard of it.’ Tony pushed himself up on one elbow, wincing but determined.

  ‘Of course it’s the first you’ve heard of it. If I’d left it up to you, you’d have had it running as a probation hostel or a halfway house for some of your precious nutters,’ Vanessa said without a trace of indulgent affection. ‘Look, I just need you to sign the instructions to the solicitor and the transfer deed.’ She produced a couple of sheets of paper and placed them on the bed-table, grabbing the bed control and fiddling with the buttons.

  Tony found himself being shunted up and down as Vanessa tried to figure out how to get him to sit up. ‘Why am I only hearing about this now? What about all the rent money?’

  Satisfied with the bed position, Vanessa flipped her wrist dismissively. ‘Would have been wasted on you. What would you have done with it? Bought more bloody books? Anyway, you’ll get your share when you sign up for the sale.’ She raked in her bag and came up with a pen. ‘Here, sign these.’

  ‘I need to read them,’ Tony protested as she pushed the pen between his fingers.

  ‘What for? You’ll be none the wiser once you’re done. Just sign, Tony.’

  It was, he thought, impossible to know whether she was trying to con him. Her manner would have been the same either way. Impatience, irritation, the unmistakable conviction that he, like the rest of the world, was trying to throw any available obstacle in her path. He could try standing up to her, demand the opportunity to read the papers in full and the time to think over what she wanted. But right now, he didn’t care. His leg hurt, his head hurt, and he knew she could take nothing from him that mattered. Yes, she might be keeping from him things that were his. But he’d got along fine without them so far and he probably would continue to do so. Getting her off his case and out of his room was much more important. ‘OK,’ he sighed. But before he could use the pen, the door swung open and Mrs Chakrabarti entered like a predatory schooner, her fleet round her in battle order.

  In a single move, Vanessa spirited the papers away and into her bag. Under the cover of a pat on the hand, she removed the pen, all the while giving Mrs Chakrabarti the benefit of her finest corporate smile.

  ‘You must be the famous Mrs Hill,’ the surgeon said. Tony thought he imagined a dryness in her tone that he couldn’t quite believe.

  ‘I owe you a debt of gratitude for making such a good job of my son’s knee,’ Vanessa replied sweetly. The idea of being crippled for life is one he’d struggle to come to terms with.’

  ‘I think most people would.’ The surgeon turned to Tony. ‘I hear they managed to get your drains out without killing you.’

  His smile felt ancient and tired. ‘Just about. I think it hurt more than being hit in the first place.’

  Mrs Chakrabarti raised her eyebrows. ‘You men are such babies. It’s as well you don’t have to give birth or the human race would have died out a long time ago. So, what we are going to do now is to remove that big heavy splint and see what happens. It’s going to hurt like blazes, but if this pain is too much, then attempting to stand is certainly going to be beyond you.’

  ‘I’ll be off, then,’ Vanessa cut in. ‘I never could stand to see him suffer.’

  Tony let the lie pass. It was worth it to see the back of her. ‘Do your worst, then, he said as the door closed behind Vanessa. ‘I’m tougher than I look.’

  Stacey Chen was also tougher than she looked. She’d had to be. In spite of a phenomenal talent for programming and systems analysis, little had come easily to her. The silicon-based world should have been blind to her gender and her status as the child of immigrant parents, but it had turned out to be just as biased as everywhere else. That was one reason why she’d turned her back on a brilliant academic career and opted for the police. She’d made her first million while she was still an undergraduate with a clever bit of code she’d sold to a US software giant which secured their operating system against potential software conflicts. But success had come with a larding of condescension and she knew she didn’t want to be part of that world.

  In the police, however, you knew exactly where you were. Nobody apart from the bosses in offices far removed from the sharp end pretended your gender and ethnicity didn’t matter. It was prejudiced, but it was honest. She could put up with that because what Stacey loved more than anything was the opportunity the police service gave her to fiddle around inside other people’s computer lives. She could nose around in people’s emails, wriggle her way through their perversions and dig up the secrets they thought they’d buried. And it was all legal.

  The other thing about police work was that there was no possible conflict between her salaried life and her freelance work. Her monthly pay packet barely covered the overheads of her city-centre penthouse, never mind the made-to-measure suits and shirts she wore to the office. The rest of the cash–and there was a lot of it–came from the code she wrote in her home office on her own machines. That was one kind of satisfaction. Poking her nose into other people’s privacy was the other. These days, she had what she wanted, but by God, she’d earned it.

  The only downside was that from time to time, she had to deal with people face to face. For some reason, the police still believed that you got better results when you were breathing the same air as the people you were questioning. Very twentieth century, Stacey thought as her GPS system announced, ‘Destination road reached.’

  The headquarters of Best Days of Our Lives didn’t look like any software company Stacey had ever visited. It was a suburban semi on the outskirts of Preston, a short but traffic-choked distance from the M6. It seemed odd that a company which had been the subject of a multi-million dollar buyout attempt only months before was based in a 1970s box that couldn’t with the best will in the world have been worth much more than a couple of hundred thousand. But it was the address registered at Companies House and the one they’d given her via email.

  The front door opened as Stacey climbed out of the car and a woman in her late twenties dressed in fashionably ripped jeans and a Commonwealth Games rugby shirt smiled cheerfully. ‘You must be DC Chen,’ she said in a West Cou
ntry accent. ‘Come on in.’

  Stacey, who had dressed carefully in geek chic Gap chinos and hoodie, smiled back. ‘Gail?’

  The woman pushed her streaked blonde hair back and held out a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, come on in.’ She ushered Stacey into a living room crammed with sofas and chairs. Children’s toys were piled in a random heap in the corner by the TV set. A coffee table was strewn with magazines and print-outs of lists. ‘Sorry about the mess. We’ve been trying to move for about a year now but we never seem to have the time to look at houses.’

  The idea of not having children ever was fine with Stacey. She loved the clean lines of her loft, its space and its harmony. Living here would drive her nuts. No two ways about it. ‘It’s OK,’ she lied.

  ‘Can I get you a drink? Tea, coffee, herbal tea, Red Bull, Diet Coke…Milk?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Stacey smiled, her dark almond eyes turning up at the corners. ‘I didn’t realize you guys ran the business from home. Cracking idea, by the way.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Gail dropped on to one of the sofas and pulled a face. ‘It started as a hobby. Then it took over our lives. We have big corporations contacting us pretty much every day, wanting to buy us up. But we don’t want it to change and become all about making money. We want it to stay about people, about lives reconnecting. We’ve had people come together after a lifetime apart. We’ve been to weddings. We’ve got a whole cork board of photos of Best Days babies.’ Gail grinned. ‘I feel like a fairy godmother.’

  Stacey recognized the quote. She’d read it in a couple of online interviews Gail had given about the business and its impact on people’s lives. ‘It’s not all sunshine, though, is it? I’ve heard marriages have broken up as well.’

  Gail fiddled with the frayed cloth on the sofa arm. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

  ‘Not good publicity, though, is it?’

  Gail looked slightly baffled, as if she was wondering how this conversation had derailed itself so quickly from the sunny and warm. ‘Well, no. To be honest, we try to avoid talking about that side of things.’ She grinned again, but less certainly this time. ‘No need to harp on about it, I say.’

  ‘Quite. And I’m sure the last thing you want is to be associated in a negative way with a murder inquiry,’ Stacey said.

  Gail looked as if she’d been slapped. ‘Murder? That can’t be right.’

  ‘I’m investigating the murder of Robbie Bishop.’

  ‘He’s not one of our members,’ Gail said sharply. ‘I’d have remembered if he was.’

  ‘We have reason to believe that he was drinking with somebody who is one of your members on the night he was poisoned. It’s possible…’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me one of our members murdered Robbie Bishop?’ Gail reared back into the sofa, as if she was trying to get away from Stacey.

  ‘Please, Gail, just listen.’ Stacey’s patience was wearing thin. ‘We believe the person he was drinking with may have seen something, or Robbie may have said something to them. We need to trace that person and we think they were a member of Best Days of Our Lives.’

  ‘But why?’ Gail looked frantic. ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Because Robbie told another friend he was having a drink with someone from school. And we found a scrap of paper with the website url in the pocket of the trousers he was wearing.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean…’ Gail kept shaking her head, as if the movement could make Stacey disappear.

  ‘What we want you to do is to send a message to all of your male subscribers who were at Harriestown High with Robbie, asking them if they were the person who was drinking with him on Thursday. And because they might be nervous about admitting it, we also want them to send you a recent photograph and an account of their movements between ten in the evening on Thursday and four in the morning on Friday. Do you think you can do that for us?’ Stacey smiled again. It was as well the children were not at home, for her expression would surely have reduced them to terrified tears.

  ‘I don’t think…’ Gail’s voice trailed off. ‘I mean…It’s not what people sign up for, is it?’

  Stacey shrugged. The web is, by and large, a positive place. I think people will respond well to being asked for help. Robbie was a popular guy.’ She pulled out a phone with email capacity. ‘I can email you the message we’d like you to send out.’

  ‘I don’t know. I need to talk to Simon. My husband.’ Gail leaned forward, reaching for the mobile on the coffee table.

  Stacey shook her head, miming regret. The thing is, we don’t have time to waste here. Either we do this the nice way, where you stay in control of your addresses and your system, or we do it the other way, where I get a warrant and we cart your computers out of here and I do whatever it takes to get your subscribers to come across. It may not be pretty and I doubt you’ll have much of a business left to attract the corporate sharks once somebody leaks to the press that you tried to obstruct the investigation into Robbie Bishop’s murder.’ Stacey spread her hands. ‘But, hey, it’s up to you.’ Chris Devine would have been proud of her, she thought, monstering the poor woman so thoroughly.

  Gail looked at her with hatred. ‘I thought you were one of us,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘You’re not the first one to make that mistake,’ Stacey said. ‘Let’s go and send some emails.’

  Vanessa drew her reading glasses from her face and dropped them by her pad. ‘I think that’s us,’ she said.

  The plump woman opposite her settled back in her chair. ‘I’ll get everything under way,’ she said. Melissa Riley had been Vanessa Hill’s second-in-command for four years. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, she persisted in her belief that Vanessa’s steely professionalism disguised a heart of gold. Nobody who was that shrewd or swift in her assessments of human behaviour and personality could really be as hardboiled as Vanessa seemed to be. And today, finally, there was proof of that. Vanessa had cancelled all her appointments to be at the bedside of her injured son. OK, she’d reappeared mid-morning and had been working like a Trojan ever since, but still. She’d only come away because her son’s partner had insisted on relieving her. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, her smooth face shining with concern.

  ‘Feeling?’ Vanessa frowned. ‘I’m fine. It’s not me that’s in the hospital.’

  ‘It must have been a terrible shock, all the same. And to see your son laid up like that…I mean, as a mother, you want what’s best for them, you want to take their pain away…’

  ‘You do,’ Vanessa said, her tone indicating the conversation was at an end. She could see Melissa was gagging for something more intimate. Her social work training had left her avid for other people’s disasters. There were times when Vanessa wondered if Melissa’s brilliant organizational skills were sufficient to outweigh her desire to insinuate her fat little fingers into every crevice of any passing psyche. Today, it was a close call.

  ‘And of course, you’re absolutely riven with anxiety about his recovery,’ Melissa said. ‘Have they said whether he’ll walk properly again?’

  ‘He might have a limp. He’ll probably have to have another surgery.’ It killed Vanessa to reveal this much, but she understood that sometimes she had to give a little to maintain the respect of her team. As Melissa wittered on, she wondered what it felt like to be consumed with maternal concern. Mothers talked about bonding with their kids, but she’d never felt that burning intimacy they spoke of. She’d felt protective towards her baby, but it didn’t seem much different from the way she’d felt about her first puppy, the runt of the litter who’d had to be bottle-fed. In a way, she was relieved. She didn’t want to be chained to this child, to feel a physical absence when they were apart as she’d heard other women describe. But she had known right from the start that her lack of response was not the sort of thing it was acceptable to admit to. For all she knew, there were millions of women who felt as disengaged as she did.

  But as long as ther
e were Melissas out there laying claim to the moral high ground, Vanessa and her multitudes would have to pretend. Well, that wasn’t such a big deal. She’d spent most of her life pretending one thing or another. Sometimes she wondered if she really knew any more what was real and what was constructed.

  Not that it mattered. She would do as she had always done. Look after number one. She didn’t owe Tony a damn thing. She’d fed and clothed him and put a roof over his head till he’d left for university. If there was any debt owed, it was in the other direction.

  Running a unit like hers meant there was no hiding place, Carol thought bitterly as some sixth sense kicked in and she looked up to see the main office door open on John Brandon. The time it took her Chief Constable to cross the office to her cubicle was enough for Carol to compose herself mentally, to review what little there was to share.

  She stood up as he walked into her small domain. She was conscious that Brandon and his wife were her friends, a consciousness that made her stand on ceremony whenever they met in the semi-public arena of the police HQ. ‘Sir,’ she said with a tight smile, waving him to a chair.

  Brandon, his lugubrious bloodhound face reflecting her own low spirits, eased into the chair with the care of a man suffering back pain. ‘The world has its eye on us today, Carol.’

  ‘Robbie Bishop will get the same commitment from my team as every other victim, sir.’

  ‘I know that. But our investigations don’t usually attract quite this much attention.’

  Carol picked up a pen and rolled it between her fingers. ‘We’ve had our moments,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a problem with being the focus of the media’s attention.’

  ‘Other people do, though. I have bosses and they want a quick result. Bradfield Victoria’s board want this brought to a successful conclusion ASAP. It’s unsettling their players, apparently.’ Brandon was enough of a diplomat to hide his feelings generally, but today, his irritation was just visible beneath the surface. ‘And it seems that every citizen of Bradfield was Robbie Bishop’s number one fan.’ He sighed. ‘So where are we up to?’