Insidious Intent

by Val McDermid

So imagine the mixture of emotions he’d felt when he’d seen her sitting at the table. Because she could be the sister of his dead wife, so strong was the resemblance. At that point he’d give a wry, pained smile and tell her he thought he was dreaming.

  By that point, Kathryn had been eating out of his hand. She wasn’t thinking of him as out of her league now; she understood why he’d been drawn to her. It was a masterstroke.

  He glanced at his watch and sipped his caramel crunch latte. He drew his decoy phone from his pocket. Time to draw Amie in even tighter. This was, after all, a kind of courtship dance. A little text for now, to keep her on the hook, to make sure she knew he was thinking of her.

  She’d never guess what his thoughts really were.

  14

  A

  lvin was crammed into the corner of the tiny seating area in a Thai café halfway between RSR Solutions and the office, wolfing down a generous helping of Pad Khing. He was a big lad, he reasoned, so he needed to refuel at regular intervals. And in this job, you seized your moments when you could. He was almost finished when he felt the vibration of his phone against his thigh. Elbowing the man next to him out of the way, he put his container on the table and fished out the phone before it went to voicemail.

  Before he could even identify himself, the woman on the other end had launched into speech. ‘You are Detective Ambrose? Suzanne said I need to talk to you about Kathryn. It’s terrible, what has happened to her —’

  ‘I am Detective Sergeant Ambrose,’ he said firmly, pushing himself to his feet. ‘And you are?’

  ‘I’m Anya. Anya Lewandowska. I work with Kathryn and Suzanne.’ Her accent was faint but discernibly East European.

  Alvin shoved past the people between him and the door, ignoring their protests and complaints and burst on to the pavement like a projectile from a catapult. ‘What is it you wanted to talk to me about?’

  ‘You ask Suzanne if Kathryn had a boyfriend?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She just started going out with a man called David. She met him at Suzanne’s wedding.’

  A surge of excitement set Alvin’s adrenaline flowing. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Only the side of his face. They went through to bar, I think to talk. I saw them when I went to bathroom.’

  ‘Are you at work now? At RSR?’ He was already barrelling down the street towards his car.

  ‘Yes, I am in office.’

  ‘OK. I’m coming back right now, I need to talk to you. And can you ask Suzanne not to go out for lunch because I’ll need to talk to her again too.’ He unlocked the car and squeezed behind the wheel. ‘I’ll be there very soon. And if anybody’s got pictures from the wedding on their phone or their Facebook page, I’ll need to see them too. Sit tight, Anya. And thanks for phoning.’

  ‘I like Kathryn. She hired me, she was always fair to me. I see you soon.’

  Now that was a better epitaph, Alvin thought. He’d heard a lot worse.

  This time, Lauren was waiting for him in reception. She led him back to the room where he’d spoken to Suzanne. Anya was already there, seated by the window, one black stocking-clad leg crossed over the other. She looked in her mid-thirties, her hair in a neat brown bob, her dark eyes narrowed in concern. Her mouth was a full-on scarlet bow, her lips fixed in a straight line.

  Alvin introduced himself and asked if she’d mind him recording their interview. Anya frowned and nodded with an air of reluctance. He took her through the formalities of name, address, date of birth and how long she’d been working at RSR. ‘I came to England in May 2011, and I started work here eighteen months later. Kathryn was deputy office manager then and she was promoted two years ago when Becca left,’ she said. Her reluctance seemed to have evaporated as soon as she started speaking, Alvin thought with relief.

  ‘So, you called me to tell me Kathryn McCormick had a boyfriend called David that she met three weeks before her death at Suzanne Harman’s wedding?’ Clumsy, but he wanted to make sure the details were on the recording.

  ‘That’s right. Like I told you. I went to the bathroom beside the hotel bar because there was a big queue for the one beside the wedding room. I know this hotel, I worked there for a few weeks when I first came to Bradfield. I saw them sitting in the bar together when I went past. She was very smiley, like they were having a good chat.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe about seven o’clock? After the meal and the speeches, and the dancing had started maybe half an hour before. Maybe more, I don’t know. I had a few drinks.’ She shrugged, her lips quirking in a rueful smile.

  ‘And Kathryn introduced you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think she even noticed me.’

  Alvin’s turn to frown. ‘So how did you know this man was called David?’

  Anya gave him an indulgent look. ‘Because I ask her. On Monday, at the coffee machine. “Who was that I saw you with at the wedding?” And she went pink all over her face and neck. “His name’s David,” she said. “I’m meeting him for a pizza tomorrow.” Like she was really pleased with herself. I think she didn’t have a boyfriend for a long time.’ She raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘Can you describe him?’ Alvin wasn’t holding out much hope and it turned out he was right not to.

  Anya spread her hands in a gesture of frustration. ‘Not really. Like I said, I only saw him from the side. He was quite slim, I think. His hair was dark, quite thick, with a bit of grey at the sides.’

  ‘Any idea of age?’

  She shook her head, dubious. ‘I don’t know. Not young, not old. Maybe thirty-five, forty? I wasn’t staring at him, I wasn’t that interested.’

  ‘Do you remember anything about what he was wearing?’

  She looked up at the ceiling. ‘Pale blue shirt, I think a blue tie. Grey suit trousers. Nothing special at all.’ Again the one-shouldered shrug. ‘I wasn’t paying attention, I wanted to get back to party.’

  Alvin took a deep breath. Bloody witness testimony was a nightmare. Notoriously unreliable even when they were adamant, with one as uncertain as Anya, the chances were that the man called David had been wearing blue trousers, a grey shirt and no tie at all. ‘Did you take any pictures at the wedding? On your phone?’

  Anya looked surprised. ‘Only selfies with my friends.’

  ‘Do you mind taking a quick look, see if there’s any with this man David in the background?’ He knew it was a long shot, but he had to try.

  Anya took her phone out of her skirt pocket and brought up the photo album. She thumbed through a few shots, shaking her head. ‘There is nobody in background, only us making faces.’ She turned the phone so he could see she was telling the truth.

  ‘Let’s get Suzanne in and we’ll go through whatever pictures she’s got from the wedding,’ Alvin said wearily. ‘We’ll need a laptop in here with a decent-sized screen too.’ He wasn’t a glass half-empty kind of man, but this felt horribly like a waste of time.

  An hour and a half of scrutinising official and unofficial photographs of Suzanne and My Husband Ed’s wedding snaps and Alvin’s eyes felt like someone had blown sand into them. To be fair to Anya, she’d stuck with it, studying every shot from the wedding photographer and the ones that friends had shared on Facebook.

  Suzanne clicked forward to the next one. Two men clinking pint glasses together, the now-familiar banqueting suite bar in the background. She clicked again, just as Anya said, ‘Wait!’ Shocked, Suzanne went back to the previous shot.

  Anya bit her lip. ‘I think that’s him. There, at the bar. In the background.’ She pointed at a man in not quite full profile who appeared to be talking to his neighbour. ‘It looks like him.’

  Suzanne zoomed in on the man’s face but the definition wasn’t good enough and his features were a blur. ‘He doesn’t look like anyone I know,’ she said. ‘He must be one of Ed’s guests.’

  ‘I need you to email that picture to me,’ Alvin
said. ‘Highest possible resolution.’ He waited while she opened an email program then typed in his address. He’d ping it across to Stacey as soon as possible. ‘I’m going to need copies of all the photos of the wedding that you can track down. And we’ll need to talk to your husband Ed about this man, to see whether he can identify him. Can we do that later, do you think?’

  ‘You want to come round to our house?’ Suzanne sounded almost excited.

  ‘Either me or one of my colleagues.’ With a bit of luck and the following wind of Stacey’s digital expertise, by morning they might be much closer to a prime suspect. For once, Alvin thought, it would be sweet to wrap a case up so straightforwardly.

  But straightforward wasn’t what ReMIT was for.

  15

  I

  t wasn’t so long ago that Torin McAndrew had enjoyed morning break and the dinner hour. Ironically, it was one thing that his mother’s murder had made better. When the truth had first emerged about her abduction and death at the hands of a psychopathic killer, there had been one or two dickheads who’d thought it was smart to slag her off. Make out that it was somehow her fault that a nutter had picked her as a victim. Torin had been too shattered to front them up himself, but even through the fog of his grief, he’d registered the support he’d had from his schoolmates. Not only his mates, either. People he barely knew existed weighed in on his side. And a handful of the older lads from the sixth form, the ones that everybody wanted to be like, they’d stepped up too.

  The bastards had backed off double fast, and Torin had found himself in possession of a posse of pals to hang out with. They kicked a ball around at break if it wasn’t raining, huddled under the library porch if it was. They swapped gaming tips and cheats, made gauche comments about girls, complained about teachers and made tiny plans for the weekend. At lunchtime, they queued for lunch together and talked about football and music as they necked their school dinners, barely paying attention to what they were shovelling down.

  He’d never quite managed to belong to a group like this before. Somehow, he’d never quite fitted in. Torin had always hung around the fringes, torn between the desire to belong and a vague contempt for their concerns. But now he was grateful that he had their companionship. His mother’s death had left him lonely and stranded. Paula and Elinor had been amazing, taking him in and giving him a home. But they’d never had kids. They were lesbians and they didn’t have a clue what it was like to be a teenage boy. So there were holes inside him they didn’t even know existed, never mind that they could come anywhere near filling. Having mates at last made those holes smaller. He’d begun to feel less lonely, less lost.

  But now all that was under threat. Now, it was being in class that was safe. In class, he could pretend nothing bad was happening. In class, they had to turn their phones off; it was a rule that all the teachers stuck to, no exceptions. If you accidentally forgot to turn your phone off and you got caught out with the buzz of a text or the chime of a new post on social media, you got your phone confiscated till the end of the school week. No arguments. They’d all had to sign up to the policy, their parents too.

  So the first thing everybody did when the bell went for break or lunch was to turn their phones on. He remembered a movie he’d seen where there were rows of lifeless automata that suddenly straightened up and became animated at the flick of a switch. He sometimes thought he and his mates were a bit like that. You got through class with a bit of your brain completely switched off. And then you turned on your phone and it was like the light of the screen turned you on too.

  Until a couple of weeks ago, he’d been like everybody else, eager to get plugged back in to the digital world. Who’d posted a mad video, whose meme had gone viral, what new app was getting everybody enthused. They’d share the things that tickled them. Sometimes they’d get into a heated discussion about whether something was sick or not. But mostly, it was a quick catch-up then they’d move on to whatever concerned them that day.

  Not any more, not for Torin. Now, his phone felt like an unexploded bomb in his hand. It had betrayed him and every time he turned it on, he felt it brought him closer to disaster. Sometimes he thought he could hear his mum’s voice saying, ‘Don’t turn it on, then.’ But that would be worse. Because then he wouldn’t know when the bomb went off.

  But that wouldn’t save him from the fallout.

  16

  T

  elford wasn’t DI Kevin Matthews’ cup of tea, he decided within minutes of turning off the M54. He reckoned it wouldn’t have met with the approval of its namesake, the great engineer, who had managed to make the functional attractive in a way that had escaped most new town planners in the sixties and beyond. It wasn’t the aesthetics alone that bothered him. There were elements of the layout that made villainy a lot easier. The swift access to the motorway network made for an easy getaway for any toerag with seriously evil intent. And with his petrol-head world view, Kevin knew the dual carriageway that cut the town in half would be the perfect drag strip for boy racers to burn rubber in their pimped-out hatchbacks, the roar of their phat exhausts splitting skulls till gone midnight every weekend while the traffic cops avoided trouble by picking on drivers further down the motorway. For the residents of the shoebox houses nearby, it would be a perpetual source of misery.

  But mid-morning on a weekday, the boy racers were either in bed or at work. The roads were half-empty and Kevin had no difficulty following his satnav’s directions through the dispiriting centre, past identical houses in labyrinthine clusters until he came to what had obviously been an older village surrounded and swamped by the new town’s development. Here, red-brick cottages clustered round a scrubby triangle of green with a whitewashed pub on one corner. As he arrived, a uniformed PC got out of a car parked outside the pub. Kevin assumed she was the Family Liaison Officer assigned by the local force to support the McCormicks. He pulled up behind her and introduced himself.

  PC Seema Bradley appeared to be a calm and sensible woman in her mid-thirties. ‘I’ve been an FLO for a couple of years now,’ she said as they walked back to the McCormicks’ house. ‘My mum’s Asian and my dad’s from Birmingham so I know how to fit in anywhere round here. The brass like to keep their boxes ticked,’ she added, a wry twist to her smile.

  Kevin laughed. He touched his hair, faded a little with age but still indisputably ginger. ‘Whereas I don’t fit in anywhere except Scotland and Ireland.’

  ‘Fair enough. Is there anything I need to know before we do the knock?’

  Kevin told her what little he knew and together they opened the gate and prepared to blow a hole in two people’s lives.

  Jeremy and Hannah McCormick lived in a neat little terraced house with a minuscule front garden that was home to a couple of variegated euonymus bushes trimmed to geometric precision. Not Kevin’s kind of gardening, but there wasn’t much else you could do with so small a space. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. There was no job in policing worse than the death knock. He rang the bell and took a polite half-step backwards, nearly colliding with Seema on the narrow path.

  The man who opened the door leaned heavily on a stick. His body was stooped and hunched, though he still had a thick head of light brown hair. His face didn’t match the frailty either. It was as if a sixty-year-old’s head had been stuck on the fragile body of a man in his late eighties. He peered up at them through strong glasses. ‘You’re not the chiropodist,’ he said, sounding disappointed.

  Kevin took out his ID. ‘Mr McCormick?’

  The man nodded. ‘Yes. Who are you?’

  Kevin held the slim wallet closer. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Kevin Matthews and this is PC Seema Bradley. Can we come in, please?’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘We’d rather not discuss it on the doorstep. If we could step inside?’ Seema said, her voice quiet but firm.

  From inside, a woman’s voice. ‘Is that not the chiropodist, Jeremy?’

  He turned with dif
ficulty and said, ‘It’s the police.’

  ‘The police?’ Now she appeared behind him, a trim woman with her hair in a neat silver bob. She frowned over his shoulder at the two officers. ‘What’s this about? Has something happened to Kathryn?’ She clearly saw something in Kevin’s face, for her eyes widened and she put a hand on the wall to steady herself. ‘Oh my God,’ she gasped. ‘Something terrible’s happened. Jeremy, something terrible’s happened to Kathryn.’

  Kevin wasn’t quite sure how she managed it, but Seema steered the McCormicks down the hallway to the living room. They clung to each other as if they were afraid of being swept out to sea on a current of fear. They subsided on to a sofa and stared at Kevin with a mixture of horror and disbelief. ‘What’s happened?’ Jeremy McCormick kept saying.

  Kevin sat down opposite them. ‘I’m very sorry to tell you that your daughter Kathryn is dead.’

  Hannah McCormick shook her head. ‘That can’t be right. Not Kathryn. I spoke to her Friday teatime, she was going off for the weekend with a friend. There must be some mistake.’

  Her husband, his face twisted in pain, gripped her arm. ‘They don’t make mistakes about people being dead, Hannah.’

  Kevin’s toes curled tight in his shoes. He hated these confrontations with shock and grief. Nothing he could do or say would mitigate the hell he’d brought down on these people’s heads. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he repeated. ‘But there’s no mistake.’

  Seema pitched in. ‘I know this is a terrible moment for you both and it’s very hard to take in. Kathryn died on Sunday night but it’s taken us till now to make a positive identification. But that identification is quite clear.’

  Tears spilled from Hannah’s eyes. She seemed not to notice. ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Was it a car crash?’

  Christ, Kevin thought. Where do you even begin with this one? ‘There’s no easy way to say this,’ he began, but Jeremy McCormick cut him off.