Insidious Intent

by Val McDermid

  Brandon approached, his resemblance to a miserable bloodhound even more pronounced than usual. ‘I’m guessing from your expression that you’ve heard?’

  Tony stepped back to let him enter. ‘She’s got plenty of enemies, John. Did you really think none of them would have picked up the phone?’

  Brandon sighed. ‘Bad news always travels fast.’ He looked around, and Tony clocked his practised copper’s eye taking in the details of the newly refurbished space. The exposed beams, the perfect plasterwork. Spare, simple furnishings and a massive stone fireplace piled with logs ready to be lit. No pictures on the walls yet, no rugs on the flagged floor. Japanese screens that closed off a sleeping area; a squared-off corner that Tony knew hid a luxurious bathroom. ‘She’s made a good job of it,’ Brandon said.

  ‘That should come as no surprise.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Up on the hill with the dog. Taking it out on the landscape.’

  Brandon sat down on one of the deep tweed-covered sofas. ‘Who told her?’

  ‘DCI John Franklin from West Yorkshire. You could say he took a kind of savage pleasure in it.’ The mere memory of Carol’s stricken expression was enough to bring a mutinous cast to Tony’s features. ‘It pretty much devastated her.’

  Brandon sighed. ‘I wish he’d kept his mouth shut.’

  ‘Why? There’s no way to spin this that wouldn’t have the same result.’

  ‘I wanted to tell her. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t her fault. That what happened falls into the category of the law of unintended consequences.’

  ‘What?’ He pushed his fingers through his dark curling hair in a gesture of frustration. ‘You and your powerful friends corrupted the system to have Carol’s drink-driving arrest thrown out on a technicality. Only, that meant another three drivers walked free too. Then one of them gets behind the wheel again, but this time he’s so drunk he kills himself and three other innocent people in a late-night crash? And you think you can shrug that off as an “unintended consequence”?’ Tony made a sarcastic quotation mark gesture in the air.

  ‘Nobody’s shrugging it off. But if anyone has to shoulder the blame, it’s me and the Home Office team who thought it was a good idea in the first place. Not Carol.’

  Tony shook his head, impatient. ‘Good luck with getting her to see things that way. You’ll be lucky if you get to close of play today with her still in post.’

  Brandon shifted awkwardly, twisting his lanky legs around each other. ‘I was hoping you might help me persuade her there’s no point in resigning now. What’s done is done. ReMIT is bound to have a live case sooner rather than later and we need her running the team.’

  ‘I’ve not spoken to her this morning. But she’ll do what she thinks is best, regardless of what either of us has to say, John.’

  While he was speaking, the door opened and Flash bounded across the room, washing Tony’s thigh with a welcoming tongue, then wheeling to face Brandon, ears alert, head forward, scenting the air.

  ‘She will,’ Carol said, taking a handful of steps towards them. ‘I told you at the time it wasn’t a good idea to interfere with a righteous arrest, John.’

  ‘You didn’t put up much of a fight, as I recall.’ The words were defensive but Brandon’s tone was regretful.

  Carol sighed. ‘You calibrated my weakness perfectly. And I gave in to temptation and flattery.’

  ‘It wasn’t flattery,’ Brandon protested. ‘You were the best person to run ReMIT. You still are.’

  Carol slipped out of her jacket and hung it on its peg. ‘You’re quite possibly right. And that’s why I’m going to work now.’ She turned back to face them, her eyes blazing cold with anger. ‘You’ve done a terrible thing to me, John. Four people are dead because you and your pals decided I needed to be whitewashed. You can hide behind your conviction you did the right thing. But I can’t. I let myself be talked into taking the job at ReMIT out of vanity and ego.’ She ran her hands through hair flattened by her walking hat, letting it reassert its natural shape. ‘I let myself believe my motives were pure, but honestly? They weren’t. So I’ve got to live with that guilt. I’m ashamed now that I agreed to be part of your shabby deal. And the only thing I can do that comes anywhere near redeeming myself is to get out there and do a job that might save other people from dying.’

  Tony felt pride and pity at her words. ‘That’s no small thing,’ he said softly.

  ‘Four lives, John,’ Carol said. ‘For all our sakes, you’d better hope nobody unravels what really happened at Calderdale Magistrates Court.’

  5

  P

  aula was surprised to find she was first in the office. Usually, DC Stacey Chen was already ensconced behind her protective carapace of half a dozen computer screens when the rest of the team arrived. But today the self-contained office where she practised the black arts of digital investigation was dark, the door closed and, Paula assumed, locked. She hung up her coat but before she could fuel up from the team’s high-spec bean-to-cup machine, the phone in Carol Jordan’s office rang out.

  The door was open. When Paula had been part of Carol’s old MIT team in Bradfield, the house rule was that no phone went unanswered. So she hustled across the room and snatched the handset on its fourth ring. ‘ReMIT, DS McIntyre,’ she said.

  ‘Is DCI Jordan there?’ An unidentified female voice she didn’t recognise.

  ‘Who’s calling?’

  ‘Detective Superintendent Henderson from North Yorkshire.’

  There were still few enough women at that rank for Paula to know Anne Henderson by reputation. She was one of the quiet but deadly ones. Never raised her voice but was never knowingly outflanked. ‘Behind the door when they handed out a sense of humour,’ had been the verdict of a Bradfield sergeant who had started his career on the North Yorkshire force. Paula didn’t think that made you a bad person, though black humour was often what got MIT detectives through the horrors they routinely confronted. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ Paula said. ‘DCI Jordan’s in a meeting right now. Can I help you? Or take a message?’

  ‘We’ve got something we think you might like to take a look at,’ Henderson said abruptly. ‘How do you proceed with these handovers?’

  ‘I’m not sure of the protocols yet,’ Paula said. ‘But I imagine DCI Jordan would like to bring a team out to the crime scene.’

  ‘That won’t be possible.’ Henderson’s voice was clipped, annoyance in her tone. ‘The officers at the scene did not consider the death suspicious.’

  ‘So, what? They didn’t preserve the scene?’

  ‘It’s complicated. Perhaps the best thing is for the local SIO to email you the details? Then take it from there?’

  Paula didn’t know what to say. What would Carol Jordan want? If the crime scene was a bust, they’d need to start somewhere else. ‘That’s probably best,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get that organised. Once she’s had a look, DCI Jordan can give me a call and we’ll progress things.’

  And that was that. As Paula replaced the phone the squad room door opened and Stacey Chen walked in with DC Karim Hussain at her heels. Stacey looked glum but Karim had all the bounce of a puppy who’s been thrown a brand-new tennis ball. ‘Morning, skipper,’ Karim called. ‘Shall I make us all a brew?’

  Stacey rolled her eyes and made for her office. ‘Earl Grey,’ she muttered, unlocking the door.

  ‘I know,’ Karim said brightly. ‘No milk, the same colour as Famous Grouse.’ There was a miniature of the whisky in the cupboard below the kettle for the purposes of quality control. ‘I learn, Mr Fawlty.’ He batted his ridiculously long eyelashes in a parody of a flirtatious waiter. Nobody paid any attention. He shrugged and carried on making the brews. Just as well his sister couldn’t see him now. She’d love to take the piss out of him, the big detective reduced to chai wallah.

  Paula followed Stacey. ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. I did what needed to be done.’

  ‘
How did he take it?’

  ‘I have no idea. I’ve blocked him from all my comms.’ Stacey settled in behind her screens, their ghostly flickers mapping random colours on her face and her white blouse. Her expression was blank and uninviting. Most people, Paula thought, would relish the opportunity to have a good rant about an ex-boyfriend as treacherous as Sam Evans had turned out to be. Stacey wasn’t most people, however.

  ‘DSI Henderson from North Yorkshire was on a minute ago. They’re pinging details on a case over to us.’

  Stacey’s smile was grim. ‘Good. Something to get our teeth into.’

  Paula retreated, glad of the coffee Karim plonked in front of her. She logged on to the system and checked the ReMIT cloud storage. North Yorkshire hadn’t wasted any time. Their designation, NYP, began the serial identification of the only file folder in the ‘Immediate Attention’ section. Paula felt her pulse quicken. For the first time, ReMIT was faced with a case from an outside force. This was where they began to prove themselves.

  By mid-morning, the small team was assembled in a horseshoe round a pair of whiteboards. DCI Carol Jordan stood in front of them, shoulders tight, hands fists at her side. Apart from Karim, only DI Kevin Matthews looked raring to go, Paula thought. Carol Jordan had dark smudges under her eyes, Stacey resembled a convincing understudy for the Grim Reaper and Tony Hill, their first best hope for hitting the ground running in terms of what they were looking at, hadn’t stopped frowning since he’d walked in ten minutes before. The final member of the team, DS Alvin Ambrose, was impressively impassive, arms loosely folded across his chest in a ‘wait and see’ pose, his shaved head gleaming under the strip lights, his dark suit giving him the air of a nightclub bouncer nobody would want to argue with.

  ‘We’ve got a completely corrupted crime scene,’ Carol began. ‘It’s far from the ideal way to start our ReMIT role. But we’re not going to let that stop us.’ She turned and wrote ‘Kathryn McCormick’ in firm capitals at the top of the board. ‘Three nights ago, a motorist driving on a back road from Swarthdale to Ripon came on a burning vehicle in a lay-by. He parked twenty metres further on, then he and his passenger walked back. The fire was blazing inside the vehicle and they could see the outline of a figure in the driving seat. The driver, a thirty-six-year-old engineer, tried to approach but was driven back by the heat.’ Carol wrote ‘Simon Downey’ on the board in smaller letters. Under it, she wrote ‘Rowan Calvert’. ‘Rowan called the fire brigade while Simon ran back to his car for the fire extinguisher.’

  Kevin snorted. ‘That’d have as much impact as a fart in a thunderstorm.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Carol said. ‘By the time the firefighters arrived seventeen minutes later, the flames had begun to subside but the interior of the car – a Ford Focus – was a shell. A shell with a very badly burned body in the driving seat. The assumption was that the car had somehow caught fire, the driver had pulled over but been unable to get out. The conclusion was accident, with an outside possibility of suicide.’

  ‘Did the witnesses see the driver attempting to get out?’ Paula asked.

  ‘They couldn’t see much through the flames and smoke, but according to their statements, they saw the person making some jerky movements,’ Carol said.

  ‘That’s pretty unlikely,’ Kevin said. ‘An intense fire like that? You’re not going to survive long enough to make any serious attempt to get out.’

  ‘But the connective tissues contract in a fire, don’t they? That’s how burned bodies end up in the pugilistic pose. Maybe the witnesses saw that happening and thought it was spontaneous movement, not the effect of the flames,’ Paula mused.

  ‘Probably.’ Carol took a quick glance at the folder in front of her, checking what the printout from North Yorkshire said. ‘The scene management seems to have been cocked up from start to finish. A couple of the car windows had popped or melted because of the intensity of the fire, so the interior of the car and the body were pretty much doused in chemical foam and water spray. And in the morning, when the car had cooled down enough, they stuck it on a low loader and took it to the fire service warehouse to be examined.’

  ‘What about the body?’ Alvin asked. ‘When did they recover that?’

  ‘Back at the warehouse. Thankfully, they had the pathologist there to supervise the recovery and removal, or who knows what we’d have ended up with.’ Carol sighed. ‘The fire investigator didn’t start work on the car right away because he was already working on an arson over in Harrogate, so it was left in the warehouse.’

  ‘Where presumably anybody could have interfered with it?’

  ‘Not quite anybody, Kevin, but yes, I take your point. Because they thought it was an accident, it wasn’t a high priority.’

  ‘What changed their minds?’ Tony asked.

  ‘What the duty pathologist discovered when he carried out the post-mortem yesterday evening. Whatever happened in that car, it wasn’t an accident. Or a suicide.’

  ‘How come?’ Karim blurted out without thinking. He caught the amused glances that Kevin and Paula exchanged, the barely suppressed eye-roll from Stacey and Alvin’s sudden interest in the floor.

  ‘Because murdered people don’t kill themselves,’ Carol said.

  6

  L

  ess than half an hour later, the main ReMIT office was empty again. Stacey was in her office with the door closed, making a start on tracking Kathryn McCormick’s online footprint. With luck, Paula and Karim would return from their search of the victim’s home with a tablet or a computer that would unlock Kathryn’s life. But until then, Stacey would use all the official access points and unofficial back doors at her disposal to start building an outline that a piece of hardware would help her to colour in.

  At the opposite end of the squad room, Carol and Tony were facing each other across the desk behind the closed door of her office. He knew her well enough to realise she had the lid clamped down so tight on her feelings that she’d have been hard pressed to manage a question about her coffee preferences. He was supposed to be in his office at Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital, managing a supervision session with a post-graduate student, but he’d put her off. Whether Carol liked it or not, today he planned to stick by her side, no matter what.

  ‘Sounds like the pathologist did a decent job at least,’ Tony said.

  ‘Well, he picked up on the lungs right away. No signs of smoke inhalation, no scorching from breathing in hot gases. So she was definitely dead before the fire started.’

  ‘But it still could have been an accident, right? She could have had a brain haemorrhage or an aortic aneurysm or something instantaneous like that and dropped a lighted cigarette. The absence of damage to her lungs isn’t conclusive, is it?’

  ‘Were you not paying attention in there?’ Carol’s tone was sharp, accusatory.

  ‘Sorry, I had a text from the student I cancelled this morning, I had to deal with it.’

  ‘I don’t know why you cancelled in the first place. I’m not a child, I don’t need a nursemaid to keep an eye on the one thing in the world I feel competent to do.’ She sounded weary, her tone a match for the dark smudges under her eyes.

  ‘I thought you might appreciate someone in your corner.’

  Carol scoffed. ‘That’s what that lot out there are. My team. Whatever goes down, they have my back.’

  Tony wasn’t sure whether Carol was trying to convince him or herself. An all-too-recent betrayal – a leak from inside to the press of the dismissed charges against her – was still raw. It had happened once; the awareness that it could happen again must be humming away like a low background noise in her head. And given what was still hidden, another revelation would be a flash-bang grenade so loud it might drown out everything else she’d achieved. ‘We all do,’ he said mildly. ‘But the others have their own tasks to focus on. There’s not much for me to go at yet, so —’

  ‘Anyway,’ she interrupted. ‘What ruled out the kind of accident you’re suggesting was what the p
athologist found when he took a more detailed look. Kathryn McCormick’s hyoid bone was snapped in two. Now, in itself that doesn’t prove she was strangled. Notoriously, the hyoid bone can be broken in a car crash, if the seat belt crushes the throat. But there was no indication of any accident or emergency stop here. Stacey double-checked the pics North Yorkshire sent over and there are no skid marks in the lay-by, no signs of hard braking. And the exterior of the car is undamaged, as far as we can tell from the pics. So the broken hyoid combined with the clean lungs makes it pretty clear that the fire was set to cover up a murder.’

  ‘It didn’t work very well, as cover-ups go, then.’

  ‘No.’ Carol gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘This obsession people have with forensic science and true crime these days makes them all think they know how to outwit us. They’ve seen the TV series, they’ve listened to the podcasts, they’ve read the books. But when it comes down to actually killing another human being and trying to dispose of the body… Well, it’s not so easy. Then the wheels come off and they start to make critical mistakes.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Tony murmured. ‘You’re probably right. They were quick off the mark on the ID, weren’t they? Was that down to the pathologist too?’

  Carol shook her head. ‘Good old-fashioned policing. Well, more or less. The cops at the scene ran the car number plate on the PNC and it came up with Kathryn McCormick’s name and an address in Bradfield. Then some poor sod had to call round the dentists’ practices till they found the one where she was registered. They did the dental comparison earlier this morning and came up with a match.’

  ‘So the ID hasn’t been released?’

  ‘Not publicly. We’ve not tracked down next of kin yet.’ Carol sighed. ‘It’s a weird one, though.’

  Tony nodded agreement. ‘Most killers who go to the trouble of trying to cover up their crime want the body to disappear, not light up the sky like Bonfire Night. I know it was a back road. But all the same, he couldn’t have shouted louder if he’d tried.’ He jumped up from his chair and started quartering the small room, talking as he walked. ‘Was he trying to burn her so badly that nobody would suspect murder? Was he making absolutely sure she was dead, a macabre kind of belt-and-braces job? Or was it all about the fire? Killing her was incidental, burning her, was that the real thrill?’