Insidious Intent

by Val McDermid

  ‘Say what?’ he demanded, anger in his voice. ‘You’ve already told us our only child is dead. What in the name of God could be harder than that?’

  ‘Kathryn’s death is being viewed as suspicious,’ Seema said calmly. ‘We believe someone killed her.’

  ‘No!’ Hannah wailed, her body racked with terrible gulping sobs. Jeremy raised his frail arms and cradled his head, rocking to and fro. There was nothing to be done but sit out their initial anguish. Eventually, the first storm passed and they leaned against each other, exhausted.

  ‘What happened?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘We don’t know exactly,’ Kevin said. ‘Her car was set on fire and her body was inside it.’

  Hannah whimpered.

  ‘She wasn’t alive when the car was set on fire,’ he added hastily. ‘We believe she was strangled earlier. We think the fire was set by the killer to cover his traces.’

  Jeremy moaned. ‘Why would anyone do that to our Kathryn? She was a lovely girl. A good worker. She never did anybody a bad turn.’

  ‘It’s shocking, I know,’ Seema said. ‘Now, I’m going through to the kitchen to make us all a cup of tea. I’m sure you want to help Inspector Matthews as much as you can. I know this is the last thing you feel like doing, but the more we can learn about Kathryn, the sooner we can make progress with the investigation into her death.’

  ‘I do have some questions,’ Kevin said. ‘If that’s OK?’

  Shakily, Hannah nodded. ‘Can we see her? To say goodbye?’

  One of the most dreaded questions. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. She was very badly burned.’

  ‘It’s best that we remember her as she was,’ Jeremy said, reaching for her hand.

  Hannah flinched away and shot him a dark look. ‘She’s my baby. I want to say goodbye.’

  ‘Honestly,’ Kevin tried again. ‘It’s not a good idea. Sleep on it. And if you still feel the same, we can arrange it. But your husband’s right. Better to think of her as she was in life. Though I do understand you want to say your farewells.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Hannah said. ‘If I don’t see her for myself, my imagination’ll run away with me. I’ll be picturing all sorts of terrible things happening to my lovely girl.’

  She had a point, Kevin thought. But really, what kind of peace could there be in seeing the incinerated remains of your child? ‘Kathryn was already dead before the fire,’ he tried. ‘Anything you see now won’t reflect her last moments. She was gone long before that.’

  ‘He’s right, Hannah,’ Jeremy said. ‘We need to hold on to the good memories, not torture ourselves.’ His voice cracked. ‘And we need to help the police. I need to know how this terrible, terrible thing happened to our girl, and we’re not going to find that out by staring at what’s left of her.’

  A long silence, broken finally by Hannah clearing her throat. ‘We’ll do everything we can to help. But I still might want to see her.’ She looked at Kevin with piteous eyes. ‘She was our only one.’ Her hands tormented the tissue that had wiped her tears.

  Jeremy patted her arm. ‘So you’d better ask your questions, Inspector.’

  Kevin took a deep breath. He didn’t want to imagine how he’d feel if this had happened to one of his children. Keeping his emotional distance was the only thing that made this job possible sometimes. ‘Thank you. Now, Mrs McCormick? You said you spoke to her on Friday teatime? About what time was that?’

  ‘About half past six. She’d just got in from work, she said. But she couldn’t talk long because she was going away for the weekend.’

  ‘Did she say who she was going with?’

  Hannah’s brows furrowed. ‘She didn’t say a name. Only that it was a friend from work.’

  ‘You’re sure? A friend from work? Did she say whether it was a man or a woman?’

  ‘I assumed it was a woman. She’s not had a boyfriend since she and Niall split up. And that was, what? Three years since.’

  ‘Would she have told you if it had been a man?’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t have,’ Jeremy said sadly. ‘She wouldn’t have said anything in case we got our hopes up that she’d met someone she could be happy with. We were so upset when Niall left her, you see. She wouldn’t have said anything until she was sure.’

  ‘I see. Did she say where she was going?’

  Hannah pinched the bridge of her nose between finger and thumb, concentrating. ‘She said this friend had the loan of a cottage in the Yorkshire Dales.’ She sighed in frustration. ‘But she didn’t say where. Not even where it was near.’

  Seema came through with four mugs of tea balanced on a chopping board. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t find a tray,’ she said, distributing the mugs. ‘I couldn’t see any sugar either.’

  ‘We don’t take sugar,’ Hannah said firmly.

  Kevin made no complaint even though he usually had a spoonful to make tea palatable. ‘Can I ask which of Kathryn’s friends she might have confided in?’

  They looked at each other blankly. ‘I don’t know,’ Hannah said. ‘She talked about the women she worked with a lot, but I don’t think there was anyone in particular that she would have considered a close friend.’

  And so it continued. Kevin asked every question he could think of, but nothing provoked a useful nugget of information. Not until the very end. ‘Had Kathryn been anywhere recently where she might have met a new man?’ He expected nothing.

  But her father had something to say. ‘She was at a colleague’s wedding a fortnight or so ago. She said she’d been talking to lots of people. She mentioned a friend of the groom’s. Just in passing, you understand. A man called David.’

  ‘Did she say anything more about him?’

  Hannah frowned. ‘No. Only that it was nice to go to a wedding and not have a nasty surprise.’

  Kevin felt a prickle on the back of his neck. ‘What did she mean by that?’

  Hannah and Jeremy exchanged a look. Jeremy took the lead. ‘The last time she was at a wedding, her ex-boyfriend was there. Niall. It gave her a shock, that’s all. She didn’t think he’d have the brass neck to show up somewhere he knew she’d be.’

  17

  B

  y the time Paula and Karim made it back to base, Stacey had already made impressive inroads into the history of the number on the calendar. She barely looked up from her array of screens as they approached. ‘Pay-as-you-go, obviously. Everybody knows how to make my job harder these days.’

  ‘What else —’ Karim began eagerly before Paula jabbed her elbow into his ribs.

  ‘It was bought in a hole-in-the-wall shop in Dudley, in the West Midlands.’ Stacey tapped a key and one of the screens changed to a Google Street View of a down-at-heel street. She zoomed in on the phone shop frontage, flanked by a kebab takeaway and a Marie Curie charity shop. ‘The usual sort of thing. Phones unlocked, laptops repaired. Buy your throwdown phone here, no questions asked.’

  ‘But it’s worth paying them a visit, right? Even if they don’t keep proper records, they might have CCTV?’ Karim asked.

  Paula shook her head. ‘Waste of time. They’ll have complete amnesia and if they have cameras, they’ll have wiped all but the most recent data. He chose this shop for a reason. He won’t fall into our hands that easily.’

  ‘He’s a planner, this man David,’ Karim said.

  ‘The ones we get usually are,’ Paula said. She’d spent years in Major Incident Teams. Enough to know that the random attackers who hit flashpoint and lost control usually hadn’t thought anything through. But killers who had a mission in their head, they took care. They worked out their options and the odds and made plans.

  ‘I suspect the phone’s been destroyed now,’ Stacey went on. ‘There’s been nothing since Friday evening at 6.23. I tried calling it and it didn’t ping on the network.’

  ‘How do you —’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Paula told Karim firmly. ‘What happens with Stacey stays with Stacey.’

  The data analyst looked up m
omentarily and a quick smile flashed across her face. She clicked her trackpad and a list of numbers appeared on a screen. ‘All the calls made from this phone originated in the Bradfield area. He called various restaurants, an indie cinema, the theatre. But the only individual he called or texted from that phone was Kathryn McCormick.’

  ‘Which means it’ll be a waste of time to follow up on the other calls.’ They hadn’t noticed Carol Jordan arrive until she had spoken, so intent were they on what Stacey was showing them.

  ‘You don’t think he was booking meals or tickets?’ Karim asked.

  ‘No. I think he was doing two things,’ Carol said. ‘I think he was deliberately trying to waste our time by having us chase around all over Bradfield checking out bookings and CCTV footage for Kathryn and him out on the town. I’d bet a month’s salary that wherever he took her for a meal, it wasn’t anywhere on this list. And that he paid in cash and booked the table in a false name.’

  Paula nodded. It made perfect sense. ‘You said two things.’

  ‘He wants us to think he’s Bradfield-based. That’s where he wants us to focus our attention. I suspect that means that wherever he lays his hat, it’s not Bradfield.’

  There was a glum silence for a moment, broken by an angry roar from the main squad room. ‘Where the fuck are you hiding, Stacey?’

  Everyone except Karim recognised the sound of an enraged Detective Constable Sam Evans, formerly of the Bradfield Metropolitan Police MIT that Carol had run before the murder of her brother and his wife had pushed her into walking away from the job. As far as Carol knew, he was also Stacey Chen’s boyfriend. What Paula and Stacey knew was that description had been redundant since the night before. What only Stacey knew was that she had, with a few deft keystrokes, destroyed his digital existence. Credit cards withdrawn, bank account emptied and frozen, mortgage messed with, council tax transformed to a debt, social media accounts erased and phone service suspended.

  Just because Stacey had never ravaged anyone’s life before didn’t mean she couldn’t do it with precision and thoroughness.

  What she hadn’t bargained for was him turning up at the ReMIT office. She’d half-expected him to attempt to confront her at home. If she’d understood Sam half as well as she understood her machines, she’d have known he’d always take the easy path. Why try to blag his way past a doorman she’d undoubtedly have told to refuse entry to her ex, when his police ID would grant him access to Skenfrith Street cop shop and thus to their office?

  ‘Stop hiding behind those bloody screens,’ Sam roared. The muffled barking of Flash, secured in Carol’s office, answered his shout. Before anyone else could respond, he had barged into Stacey’s office, pushing past Carol and looking around wildly. ‘Great,’ he shouted, his face flushed with anger. ‘The gang’s all here. Has she told you what she’s done to me?’

  Carol rounded on him. ‘What do you mean by this? How dare you barge in here, shouting the odds? You need to keep your private life private, Sam.’

  His lips tightened and he snarled, ‘Don’t you fucking “Sam” me. You’re the one who started all this, dissing me like you did.’

  ‘If you mean my not choosing you for this squad, you’ve proved my point.’ Carol’s voice dripped contempt but Sam was too far gone in anger for the insult to give him pause.

  ‘And you —’ He pointed at Stacey. ‘I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on last night when I couldn’t get any money out of the hole in the wall. Then this morning, I realised there’s only one person I know who has the skills to do this to me. Why? All because I went for a night out with my mates? That’s mental, Stacey. You need to fix this.’

  Stacey opened her mouth to speak but before she could say anything, Paula charged in, determined not to let this become worse than it already was. ‘You really think Stacey would do something like this over a lover’s tiff? Think again, Sam. Cast your mind back over the crap you’ve pulled lately. The crap that really would upset Stacey a lot more than anything you could do to her personally.’

  Her words stopped Sam in his tracks. He gave Carol a quick glance, obviously checking whether she knew what Paula was referring to. But they’d kept the full extent of his treachery from Carol and she looked startled enough for him to believe that. Which might be enough for him not to drag his betrayal into the light of day. ‘It doesn’t matter what her so-called excuse is,’ he blustered. He stabbed his finger in Stacey’s direction again. ‘You better fix this and fix it now.’

  Stacey stood up, leading with her chin. ‘Or what, Sam? You can’t prove a single thing you’re alleging against me. Whereas I…’ She gave a little shrug, her perfectly tailored jacket moving sinuously with her.

  His eyes widened as he took in the implications of what she was saying. But Carol butted in before he could reply. ‘Is anybody going to tell me what the fuck is going on here?’

  Paula stared Sam down. ‘I think Constable Evans was just leaving.’

  A long pause. Then Sam turned on his heel and barged out of the office. A few seconds later, the door to the main squad room slammed shut. Carol shook her head like a dog emerging from water.

  ‘Is there any chance you could pretend that didn’t happen?’ Paula asked, less tentatively than she felt.

  ‘Would there be any blowback if I did?’ Carol was slowly learning to be more wary of deals, even deals from people she’d count as friends if the chips were down.

  Paula and Stacey exchanged looks. ‘I don’t think so,’ Stacey said.

  Carol ran a hand through her hair. ‘I’ll be in my office. Paula, come and talk to me in five.’

  And she was gone. Karim unpeeled himself from the wall he’d been trying to disappear into and followed Paula back into the main office. ‘Do I have to pretend that didn’t happen too?’ he asked cautiously.

  Paula chuckled. ‘No. Don’t take this the wrong way but you’re too far down the pecking order. If we told the boss, she’d have to do something about it. If Stacey had wanted to go down that road, she’d have done it herself.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  Paula leaned against her desk. ‘You remember that story in the papers last week, about the boss’s drink driving charge being dropped because of a faulty breathalyser?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Man, they made it sound like the whole set-up was totally bent.’

  ‘Exactly. It nearly scuppered ReMIT before we got started. And it had obviously come from a leak, because there was no reporter in the magistrate’s court when the cases were dismissed. So we did a little bit of detective work and discovered the story had come from Sam.’

  ‘How did he know about it?’

  ‘Stacey had told him. She thought she could trust him, not just because he was her boyfriend but because he’s one of us. You know the principle – kick one and we all limp. Except Sam was apparently wearing shin pads. He was furious with Carol because she didn’t choose him for the new squad even though he’d worked for her in Bradfield. So he thought he’d screw her over.’

  Karim drew his breath in sharply. ‘That’s a shit’s trick.’

  ‘Some of us were less surprised than others. But it was Stacey’s call on how to deal with it.’ Her expression revealed a rueful respect. ‘Never ever mess with Stacey. That’s your life lesson for today.’

  ‘What’ll happen now?’

  Paula pushed herself off the desk and headed for Carol’s office. ‘If Sam’s got any sense, nothing. He’ll tell his bank he’s been hacked and sort it out.’ She had her back to Karim so she didn’t see the anxiety on his face. Even if she had, it wouldn’t have given her pause.

  Carol’s door was ajar, so Paula walked in. Flash raised her head and gave a little yelp of welcome. ‘Where’s Tony?’ she said as Carol nodded her to a chair.

  She looked up from the notes she was writing. ‘I dropped him off at Bradfield Moor. He’s got a couple of patient sessions this afternoon. What was that all about?’

  ‘The story in the pap
er about your case being thrown out of court? It was Sam who leaked it.’ Paula tried for a smile but it came off as a grimace. ‘Stacey may have delivered her personal idea of justice.’

  Carol groaned. ‘Well, as long as this is the last I hear about it, good on her. Obviously not having him on the squad was the right call. So, any progress on Kathryn McCormick?’

  Paula reported what little they knew. ‘Alvin’s got them going through the photos from the wedding, Kevin’s confirmed he was using the name David, and that’s about it,’ she concluded. ‘And Kathryn may have had a run-in with her ex at another wedding a while back.’

  ‘Interesting, we’ll need to follow up on that.’ She reached for a notepad and scribbled a reminder. ‘The fire investigator was helpful but we didn’t get anything there that moves us forward. Tony’s muttering under his breath, but that’s par for the course at this stage.’ Carol shifted in her chair, leaning on the desk and smiling. ‘I wanted to talk to you about something else, though.’

  Paula hoped they weren’t going to return to Sam’s outburst. She returned the smile, albeit nervously.

  ‘You need to get your inspector’s exams out of the way,’ Carol said. It was the last thing Paula had expected.

  ‘You don’t need another inspector on the squad,’ she protested. ‘You bumped Kevin back up to his old rank. I’m happy where I am.’

  ‘Kevin only came back on condition that it was temporary. Until I found another inspector I rated to fill the slot. And I think you’re that officer. You know how we work here. You’re the best interviewer I’ve ever worked with and you’re a smart detective. I want you to step up, Paula.’

  ‘I’m not ready for this. And I’m rubbish at paperwork.’

  ‘No worse than anybody else on this squad. So start swotting for your exams. It’s time, Paula.’

  18

  B

  y the end of the afternoon, Alvin felt his brain had turned to mush. Suzanne and Ed’s wedding guest list ran to over ninety people and he’d communicated with all but a handful of them. Phone calls, texts, messages and face-to-face conversations had all led to one irresistible conclusion. Whoever David was, he wasn’t an official guest. Ed had confirmed what Suzanne had already told him. The only David on the guest list had been his sixty-two-year-old uncle who was overweight and bald.