by Val McDermid
All those things were generic, though. All cops everywhere who had an ounce of sensitivity to what they were doing carried these loads. But this was different. This latest quantum of blame was a personal burden.
She’d thought she could escape these outcomes that twisted inside her like a tightening rope when she walked away from the job, from the badge and the rank. Her relentless pursuit of a multiple murderer had cost the life of her brother and his wife. What possible reason could there be for staying? She’d wanted nothing more to do with a job that demanded such a high price.
But other people had known only too well the buttons to push to draw her back to policing like a moth to a flame.
#1: Boredom. She’d spent six months stripping her brother’s barn conversion to the bare bones then rebuilding it, learning the skills she needed from YouTube videos and old men in the local pub. She’d been driven to erase all traces of what had happened there, as if by remaking it she could convince herself Michael and Lucy’s death had been a hallucination. She’d been close to the final stages of the project when her rage had finally cooled enough for her to understand she was growing bored with her choice. She was a detective, not a builder, as the man asleep in her spare room had forcibly told her.
#2: Loneliness. Carol’s friendships had always been inextricably linked to her job. Her team were her family, and some of them had made it past her barriers to become her friends. Since she’d walked away, she’d pushed them all to arm’s length and beyond. One of her neighbours, George Nicholas, had tried to breach her defences. A generous man, he was the reason she had the dog. Flash was the offspring of his own sheepdog, an anomalous pup who was afraid of sheep. Carol had taken the misfit because she thought they belonged together, somehow. George had seen that as a signal for a closer connection, but he hadn’t been who she wanted. George could never be home for her. A return to policing, though? That would take her back into the orbit of people who made her believe she belonged somewhere.
#3: Pride. That had been the killer vulnerability that had left her open to an offer she should have refused but couldn’t. Pride in her skill, pride in her smarts, pride in her ability to find answers where nobody else could. She knew she was good. Believed she was the best, especially when she had the right hand-picked team around her. Others might have thought her arrogant; Carol Jordan knew she had something to be arrogant about. Nobody could do this job better. She had doubts about all sorts of things but not about her ability as a guv’nor.
And finally, the killer button to press. #4: Temptation. They’d held out so much more than the simple chance to return to a job that had defined and rewarded her for so long. They’d invented something new, something bright and shiny, something that might change the future of the way they did policing. And she was their first choice to lead it. A regional Major Incident Team – ReMIT – that would scoop up all the sudden violent deaths, the most vicious sexual assaults and the sickening child abductions from six separate police forces. The first tentative step towards a national agency like the FBI, perhaps. Who else could do it if not Carol Jordan?
But she’d screwed up before they could even ask her. A screw-up so breathtakingly stupid that the only way to rescue her was an audacious act of noble corruption that she should never have considered accepting for a nanosecond, never mind buying into heart and soul. She’d been blinded by the vote of confidence in her abilities, flattered that a man of honour should risk his integrity to place her where she belonged, and, at the last ditch, doomed by the demands of her own ego.
And now there was more blood on her hands and nobody to blame but herself.
Carol drove her body harder against the gradient, making her muscles complain and her lungs burn. Flash quartered the hill in front of her, a sudden flurry of rabbits scattering before her, dirty white scuts bouncing across the moorland grass like a random release of old white tennis balls. Carol didn’t even break stride, registering nothing around her, locked into the fury she was directing entirely towards herself.
What was she to do now? The one principle she’d always clung to was her drive for justice. It had taken her to dark places and forced her down reluctant paths but it had never failed her. To deliver criminals to judgement had always fulfilled her. That sense of restoring some kind of balance in the world also gave balance to her life. But there could be no justice here.
If Carol admitted the conspiracy she’d been part of, she’d only be a tiny part of the damage and destruction. It would kill ReMIT before it was even up and running properly. And that would improve the chances of serious criminals escaping the consequences of their actions. She’d have screwed up the careers of other officers who had counted on her. She’d likely go to jail. Worse still, so would other people.
The guilt was hers. The blood was on her hands. There was only one road to redemption. She had to make a success of ReMIT. If she could turn it into an elite team that really did deliver arrests and convictions in the most exacting of circumstances, if they could put killers behind bars before more lives were needlessly taken, if she really did make a difference… She’d still owe a debt for those other deaths. But at least there would be something to put on the other side of the balance sheet.
3
‘
I
’m worried about Torin,’ Detective Sergeant Paula McIntyre said as the teenage boy walking away from the car sketched a farewell wave without actually turning round.
Dr Elinor Blessing muted the radio. ‘Me too.’ It had been on her mind for days. The last thing on her mind as she let the oblivion of sleep overtake her, the first thought on waking.
Earlier that morning, she’d groaned at the invasive ringtone from her partner’s iPhone. Bloody cathedral bells. How could such a small slab of silicone produce so much noise? At this rate, she was going to end up as the Quasimodo of the A&E department. ‘Paula,’ she grumbled sleepily. ‘It’s my day off.’
Paula McIntyre snuggled into Elinor and gave her a soft kiss on the cheek. ‘I know. But I’ve got to get me and Torin showered and breakfasted and out the door in good time. You go back to sleep. I’ll be so quiet, you won’t even know I’m there.’
Elinor grunted, unconvinced. A tremor shuddered through the mattress as Paula bounced out of bed and headed for the shower. Combined with the niggle of worry about Torin, the rattle of the extractor fan and hiss of the shower were too much. Any prospect of sinking back into sleep had been booted far into the long grass. Accepting the inevitable, Elinor made a guttural sound of disgust and got up.
Wrapped in her dressing gown, she climbed the stairs to the loft conversion their fourteen-year-old ward had turned into his wannabe man cave. Knocking first – because taking on Torin so recently had meant they’d dutifully read up on how to survive parenting an adolescent – Elinor stuck her head round the door. ‘Morning, Torin,’ she said, sounding a lot brighter than she felt. ‘Sleep well?’
His grunt echoed her own waking, though an octave lower.
‘Time to get up.’ Elinor waited till one long thin hairy leg emerged from the duvet, then retreated downstairs to the kitchen. Coffee. A bowl of fresh fruit for Torin. Toast for Paula. Two eggs standing by to be poached for Torin, baked beans already in the pan. Juice for everyone. All set up and ready to roll without a moment’s thought. What occupied her mind was not the breakfast but the boy.
He’d fallen into their lives by chance. Neither woman had felt the biological pull towards motherhood but after Torin’s mother had been murdered, he had refused point-blank to move away from Bradfield to live with his aunt and grandmother, distant relatives in terms of emotions as well as miles. His father worked offshore and hadn’t been around to any significant degree for years. ‘I need to stay where my friends are,’ he’d insisted, stubborn but not unreasonable, in Elinor’s view. The combination of Elinor’s friendship with his mother and Paula’s professional involvement in the investigation had somehow ended up with Torin in their home and in their care.
Neither was quite sure how it had happened. But neither was willing to reject a boy who had lost his anchor.
And so their life together had expanded to include an adolescent boy. It hadn’t been an obvious match-up, but for months it had appeared to have worked. Elinor had been amazed – and, if she was honest, a little concerned – that Torin seemed to have coped so well with his mother’s death. Their friend, clinical psychologist Tony Hill, had reassured her. ‘Grief is individual. Some like it public, some like it private. For some, it’s complicated because their relationship with the dead was complicated. For others – like Torin, apparently – it’s relatively straightforward. He’s sad, he’s bereaved, but he’s not in the grip of anger or resentment that he can’t come to terms with. No doubt you’ll get unexpected outbursts that seem to come from nowhere. But I don’t think he’s internalising some fucked-up reaction that he’s not letting you see.’ Then he’d smiled his crooked smile and undercut himself. ‘Of course, I could be totally wrong.’
But on the face of it, he’d been right. Torin and the women had adjusted to each other. Elinor and Paula had rediscovered that board games could be fun and that there was a whole new generation of them waiting to be purchased and played. Torin had sat through movies he’d never have considered worth watching. Slowly and carefully, they’d learned what they needed to know about each other.
His schoolwork had recovered from the sudden dip provoked by the shock of his mother’s death and he seemed unworried at the prospect of impending exams. Paula had fretted that he didn’t seem to have much of a social life. At his age, she’d been one of a group of girls who hung around together for hours on end in each other’s bedrooms, experimenting with make-up, comparing the snogging techniques of the boys they’d kissed – for Paula had not yet found a way to explain herself to herself – and gossiping about everyone who wasn’t in their charmed circle. The boys had the same tight knots of friendship, though she had no idea what they talked about except that it was different.
Torin’s life wasn’t like that. He occasionally met up with friends on a Saturday to mooch around the expensive designer shops that cluttered the streets behind Bellwether Square, but mostly he seemed to prefer his own company. Though he was never far from the umbilical connection of one screen or another. But Elinor, whose colleagues at Bradfield Cross Hospital covered a wide range of ages and backgrounds, assured her that this was what teenagers were like these days. They communicated through selfies and Snapchat, through tagging and Twitter, through images on Instagram. And by the turning of the season, it would be another thing altogether. Face to face was so twentieth century.
But over the past two or three weeks, something had shifted. Torin had descended into a moody silence, barely acknowledging their questions or comments. He’d become the grunting, uncommunicative teenager of cliché, contributing nothing to conversation at mealtimes, escaping to his room as soon as he’d finished shovelling food into his mouth. When Elinor asked him if he wanted to talk about his mother, he’d startled as if she’d slapped him. ‘No,’ he said, dark brows drawn down in a heavy frown. ‘What’s to say?’
‘I wondered whether you were missing her more than usual,’ she said, stoic in the face of his hostility.
He sighed. ‘I’d only be a disappointment to her.’ Then he’d pushed his chair back, even though there was still a slice of pizza on his plate. ‘I’ve got homework.’
And now Paula was admitting what Elinor herself had been concerned about. There were good reasons to worry about Torin. As Paula eased the car into the slow-moving morning traffic, Elinor chose her words carefully. ‘I think something is bothering him. More than his mother, I mean. Something we can’t guess at because it’s outside our experience.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Do you think there’s any point in talking to the school? His form teacher was pretty helpful after Bev died.’
Paula joined the queue of traffic turning right. ‘It’s worth a try. Do you want me to get Tony to come round for dinner, see if he can loosen Torin’s tongue?’
‘Let’s hold that in reserve for when we hit the brick wall.’ Elinor tried not to let despondency take hold. ‘Maybe it’s all about being fourteen and not having a man around the place to talk to.’
‘He can FaceTime his dad any time he wants. And he usually talks non-stop to Tony. I don’t think we have to go down the self-flagellation route, Elinor.’ Paula sounded sharp. Elinor hoped it was nothing more than the traffic getting to her.
‘If you say so. But…’
Paula broke the silence. ‘But what?’
Elinor gave a wry smile. ‘Carol Jordan always says you’re the best interviewer she’s ever seen. And you can’t get him to open up. So I reckon it must be serious.’
Paula shook her head. ‘He’s not a suspect, El. He’s a hormonal adolescent boy who’s gone through a major tragedy. I worry that he’s bottling stuff up, not that he’s hiding criminal activity.’
Elinor pushed her long black hair back from her face, enjoying the sensation of having it loose instead of tightly coiffed for work. She chuckled. ‘You’re right. That’s me put in my place. Thank you, you always reassure me.’
Paula scoffed. ‘Even when I don’t reassure myself?’
‘Especially when I sense that little niggle of doubt that tells me you’re human.’ She stroked Paula’s arm. ‘What have you got on today?’
‘Well, we’re only getting properly into our stride in ReMIT now. The internet trolling case, that was an accident rather than something we were formally tasked with. So we’ll just have to wait and see what lands on Carol’s desk. I’m looking forward to it.’
Elinor smiled. ‘I know it.’ She shifted in her seat, craning her neck to see what she could of the road ahead. ‘Pull up after the lights, I’ll cut through to the shops from there, save you going round the block and getting snarled in the Campion Way traffic.’
Paula stopped, and leaned across to give Elinor a parting kiss. ‘It’ll be something and nothing,’ she said. ‘At that age, it always is the end of the world. Except it never is.’ She sounded confident but Elinor read the doubt in Paula’s blue eyes.
As she walked through the morning crowds, Elinor told herself to accept her partner’s words at face value. ‘Something and nothing.’
Even though she didn’t believe them for a moment.
4
N
o matter that Carol had closed the barn door almost silently; Tony Hill had spent so long living alone that even in his sleep he was aware of subtle changes in his environment. The section of the barn that Michael Jordan had built as a guest suite had also doubled as his software lab and he’d made it virtually soundproof. But still Carol’s departure managed to rouse Tony from his perennially light sleep. Some delicate disturbance of the air, some faint disruption of the soundscape of his dreams. Whatever it was, he woke knowing instantly that she had left the building.
He lay there for a few moments, wondering how they remained held in each other’s orbit. They’d both tried to put distance between them at one time or another, but it never persisted. And now here he was, under her roof. Here, though neither could quite bring themselves to admit it, because she needed him to help her through the process of renouncing alcohol and because he needed her to make him feel his humanity was real rather than a mask. Which was why he’d been there when the phone had rung with its dark message.
He’d known at once the call was trouble. Carol’s grey eyes had darkened and her face tightened, exposing fine wrinkles he’d never noticed before. She’d run a hand through her heavy blonde hair, the low lighting in the barn revealing more silver than there had been a few months before. A poignant moment of realisation that she was visibly ageing.
It was odd how these moments stood out in sudden relief. He’d noticed it with his own face. Months would go by without any change impinging then suddenly one morning in the mirror, he’d catch a sideways glimpse and understand that what ha
d once been laughter lines were now permanently etched in hollow cheeks. Sometimes when he got out of bed, his body protested. He remembered Carol laughing at him for making what she called ‘old man’s noises’ when he’d pushed himself to his feet from a chair the other day. He’d never thought much about either of them ageing; now he’d become aware of it, he knew his thoughts would loop back there till he’d figured out what it meant to him. The burden of a psychologist: a job with no downtime.
What he had to figure out now was how to help Carol hold it together in the wake of this latest trouble. He knew her well enough to suspect she’d use it as a spur to push herself even harder. Her own self-worth would be bundled into the success of ReMIT like the double helix of DNA, the two things completely interdependent. And that was a dangerous strategy. Because however good a detective she was, she couldn’t control the outcome of every case.
Before he could descend further into introspection, the faint rumble of an engine caught his attention. The rare traffic on the quiet lane running past the barn was usually audible only for a few seconds, but this vehicle was hanging around, the sound not receding but growing louder. It seemed they had a visitor.
Tony scrambled out of bed, almost falling back again as he struggled awkwardly into his jeans. He grabbed the thick fisherman’s sweater he’d taken to wearing on his boat and headed through the main barn towards the front door, hopping as he registered the cold stone flags under his feet. The engine had stopped, he realised. He opened up as a closing car door made the expensive soft click of German engineering. The man who straightened up to face him was all too familiar.
‘John,’ Tony said, not bothering to hide his weary resignation. The arrival of John Brandon, Carol’s former chief constable, the man who had engineered her return to policing, did not come as a shock. Not after the previous evening’s news. ‘You’d better come in.’