by Val McDermid
‘You want a cab, love?’ she said wearily, her voice dull and nasal.
Kevin flashed his ID and suddenly she seemed to perk up. ‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘Regional. Not local. That sounds exciting. What can I do for you, love?’ It was almost coquettish, which sat ill with the lines of misery on her face.
‘I’m trying to track down some information about a fare one of your cabs picked up on Tuesday. I know people have to book their cabs through you. They can’t hail them on the street, right? So I reckoned’ – he leaned on the counter and gave her his best smile – ‘you would be the one to talk to.’
‘You got that right, at any rate. Nobody understands how this system works better than I do. What is it you need to know?’
‘Tuesday evening. Around eleven p.m. I’m not sure where the pick-up was, but the cab made a drop at 43 Fulwell Crescent then went on somewhere else.’
‘Ooh, now that makes it a bit more complicated,’ she said, already abstracted as her fingers tapped the laptop keyboard. ‘Let’s see…’
Kevin couldn’t quite believe his luck. He was accustomed to the low-level officiousness of almost everybody who ever tapped a keyboard. The knee-jerk reaction of ‘Well, it’s a data-protection issue,’ when the information requested was completely innocuous and absolutely not covered by the legislation on the subject was one of the few things that provoked an irrational rage in him. To come up against someone who appeared not to give a damn about exerting petty power almost restored his faith in the public. ‘I appreciate your help,’ he said.
‘I believe in helping the police,’ the woman said, eyes still on the screen. ‘Our Penny got attacked on the Chevin walking her dog last year and your lot couldn’t have done a better job. The little shit got two years in the end but it wasn’t the police’s fault that the judge was a proper marshmallow.’ She frowned. ‘Here it is. Pick up… Ooh, that’s a lovely restaurant, our Jack took his girlfriend there to propose to her. Drop at Fulwell Crescent then… Oh, that’s a bit odd.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, he picked them up in the city centre, went all the way out to Fulwell Crescent then came all the way back into town to drop him at the station. It would have made much more sense to do the station drop first. Not to mention being a lot cheaper.’
It might not make sense to the taxi dispatcher but Kevin saw exactly what was going on. The man called Mark was making sure Amie would have no reason to doubt anything he said about himself. And laying a false trail for her or anyone else coming along behind. ‘I don’t suppose the driver’s on duty at the moment?’
‘Let me check.’ A couple of mouse clicks then she nodded. ‘You’re in luck, love. Barry Cohen. He came on at noon. Hang on.’ She turned away and walked her chair across the floor to the nearest headset wearer. She tapped the woman on the shoulder and they had a muttered exchange.
‘She’s calling him in,’ the dispatcher said when she returned to the counter. ‘He’s dropping up at Cookridge, he’ll be back in ten minutes.’
Kevin’s smile was a hundred per cent genuine. ‘I really appreciate your help.’
‘It’s a pleasure. Why don’t you wait outside for Barry? He’s driving a silver Skoda Octavia. I’ll let him know it’s all right to talk to you.’
Barry arrived a few minutes later, jammed behind the wheel of his taxi. Fat descended from his shoulders in waves. With his stubbled jaw, he resembled a bull seal who’d been washed up by the tide. Kevin couldn’t imagine him getting out of the car and helping a passenger with luggage. He climbed into the passenger seat and introduced himself. ‘We’re pursuing a lead in a serious inquiry,’ he explained. ‘I need to talk to you about a fare last Tuesday evening.’
‘Aye,’ he grunted. ‘Babs said. Is this going to take long?’
‘That depends how much you can tell me,’ Kevin said.
‘Only, I’m working. I’ve got a wife and four kids to support.’
Kevin shuddered inwardly at the thought of how those children had been conceived. Stella would chide him for being judgemental, but sometimes it was hard not to be. ‘Then the quicker we get started, the sooner you’ll get back to work.’
Barry harrumphed. ‘Easy for you to say, with your inspector’s wages. Me, I’m always struggling. It’s always the working man that loses out. I reckon you should pay me for the fares I’m losing.’
‘That’s not how it works.’ Barry looked as if he might burst into tears and Kevin softened. ‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘Start the meter running and drive round the block.’
Barry didn’t need telling twice. They moved into the stream of traffic and Kevin said, ‘So, this fare on Tuesday evening. You picked them up outside a restaurant?’
‘That’s right. Nice little place. Not that I can afford to go there. Guadalupe, it’s called. It’s down an alley off Briggate, you can’t drive down there. So they were waiting on Briggate itself.’
‘How many passengers?’
‘Just the two.’ Barry moved over to the left lane and stopped at a set of traffic lights. ‘A man and a woman.’
‘Can you describe them?’
‘Not really. I wasn’t paying much attention, to be honest. All I’m bothered about is whether they’re sober enough and if they look like they’ve got the money for the fare. I couldn’t pick them out of a line-up or owt. What’s he done then, this bloke?’
Kevin couldn’t pretend he was disappointed. That had been a long shot. ‘Did you overhear any of their conversation?’
‘Wasn’t listening. Have you any idea how bloody boring most people are? You hear folk taking the piss out of opinionated cab drivers, like we’re stupid bigots. But bloody hell, you should hear the nonsense I have to put up with. So now I leave the radio on Smooth and try to tune them out. All I remember is they were quite chatty, so I reckoned they weren’t married or owt.’ The lights changed and they swung round the corner. Kevin hugged the door to avoid the ample flesh of his driver.
‘Where did you drop them?’
‘She got out at Fulwell Crescent. Not sure what number but it was a block of flats. He walked her to the door. I was keeping an eye on them in case they did a runner. People are tight bastards, especially late at night when they’ve had a drink and they think it’d be a laugh to rip off a cab driver. But he just gave her a kiss and got back in the cab. He was wearing glasses, now I think on. Big round ones like them hipsters wear.’
‘OK. And Babs said you took him back into town?’
‘Aye. That were a surprise. Why come all the way out of town to go straight back in again? I could have dropped him at the station easy enough ahead of taking her home. I never said owt, but I thought he had more money than sense.’
‘You took him to the train station, then?’
‘That’s right.’
This was beginning to feel like a dead end. But Kevin plodded on. ‘Did he say where he was going?’
‘No. But here’s the funny thing. He said his train was at ten to midnight. Only, us taxi drivers know the train times because we’re always dropping people off. And I’m pretty sure there’s not a train at ten to midnight out of Leeds station. I might be wrong, but I don’t think I am.’
‘I’ll check it out.’
‘You’ll be wasting your time. Because here’s the thing. I dropped him off at the station and he walked in the door. I didn’t drive off right away, I stopped for a word with one of the other drivers. And bugger me if he didn’t come straight back out the other door and walk away back into the city centre. So what was all that about, eh?’
If Tony was right and their killer was as careful a planner as they feared, this looked like another attempt to throw sand in their eyes. But perhaps he had miscalculated this time. There were few places in modern Britain quite so thoroughly surveilled as a mainline railway station in a major city. Kevin allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. This was something solid for Stacey to get her teeth into.
36
T
ony only realised how long he’d been staring unseeing at his laptop screen when Flash padded through from the main part of the barn and dropped her head into his lap with a faint yip. He looked at his computer clock and pushed back from the desk, startled at how the time had slipped away. ‘Sorry, Flash,’ he muttered. ‘You must have had your legs crossed.’
Five minutes later they were on the hill, Tony climbing in a series of wide zigzags, the dog flying hither and thither on the trail of whatever random scent caught her attention. There was a sharp breeze cutting across the moorland, alternately buffeting one side of his head then the other. The sky was the solid grey of impending rain. None of this impinged on his consciousness. Tony was digging deep inside himself in a bid to figure out what was going on under the surface of the double murder Carol’s team were charged with solving.
Empathy lay at the root of everything he did, both as a clinical practitioner and a profiler. His ability to slip inside someone else’s skin, someone else’s brain, someone else’s heart was uncanny. It had caused him a deal of grief over the years; there had been times when other people’s pain had threatened to overwhelm his own defences. But he welcomed it. All those years when he’d believed he was only passing as human, that pain had been an anchor. And these days, now he was beginning to trust in the integrity of his own emotions, he still valued that identification with someone else’s discomfort at the world.
He’d been scared of himself for so long because he knew how many of the boxes on the serial offender tick-list applied to him. A mother who failed to show him love and actively demonstrated her contempt for his existence. An overbearing grandmother who’d done most of the child-raising and had a punishment regime whose cruelty wouldn’t have been out of place in the novels of Charles Dickens. A father so absent that Tony had known nothing of him till after his death. The target of bullying, verbal and physical, at school. And early sexual experience that had ended in mockery. His impotence still humiliated him; but sometimes he wondered whether these days he clung to it because it saved him from taking that final step towards Carol that would only end in yet another failure.
What had saved him – and it was something he thought of often now there was a dog on the fringes of his life – was that one person had showed him love when he was in deep adolescent despair. A dinner lady, of all the unlikely people. A dinner lady who had spotted his misery and pushed him into helping her look after her troop of rescue dogs. He’d seen her love for the animals and felt her concern for him and it had hit him at the precise point in his life where his despair might have taken him down a very different road.
He owed it to her memory to use his powers for good.
So now he was trying to feel his way to a sense of the significance that lay beneath these apparently meaningless crimes. ‘You’re not killing these women specifically,’ he said aloud. Talking and walking always helped him to make sense of his cases. He used to pace the floor in his old study. Back and forth, back and forth for hours on end. Then he ended up living on Steeler, the narrowboat that had belonged to his father, and he’d begun to march along the canal towpath that led from the Minster Basin through a secret canyon that ran between tall city centre offices and hotels before it emerged in the scrubby hinterland of the inner city suburbs. And now, here he was, camping in Carol Jordan’s dead brother’s spare room, quartering the moorland behind the barn with a mad-eyed collie who was afraid of sheep. Tony had no idea how he’d ended up in this limbo. But he had to stay for as long as it took Carol to be easy with her new sobriety. Even if it made him wary and uneasy.
‘They’re ciphers,’ he said. ‘They could be anyone. You crash other people’s weddings. Why? Do weddings have some symbolic meaning for you? Is it the wedding that matters, not the women?’ He jumped over a marshy trickle of stream bravely forcing its way through the coarse moorland grasses.
‘Or is it because weddings put lonely women in the right frame of mind to be picked up? Do you target weddings because it’s an environment where women who are sitting on their own stand out? Easier to identify women on their own. Not like a club or a bar where women tend not to arrive alone. They go with their mates, in a group. But women will go to a wedding without a partner. They go because they’re family, or they’re friends, and it would cause offence if they didn’t show up.’
He turned to survey the landscape and catch his breath. The dog bowled up to him and butted his thigh, as if to accuse him of laziness. Tony resumed his walking and Flash darted off, satisfied. ‘So you turn up at the point in the day when the formalities are over and people are dancing and drinking, and you dress to fit in. You make yourself unobtrusive. You stand at the bar and pick up enough to pass yourself off as a friend of the bride or groom to the woman you choose.
‘And then you move in on her. But you’re not only acquiring her and killing her. That’s not what this is all about. You’ve got a more sophisticated agenda than simply acquire and kill. You want them to love you. Or at least you want to be able to believe that they love you. You need to take them on dates so you can construct a fake reality. It’s The Truman Show. They think they’re in the real world, they think you’re really attracted to them, they think you might be Mr Right. Because they met you at a wedding where Mr Right is on every woman’s mind. And you use that to create an image in their head. You listen to them. You don’t come on too strong.’
He frowned, wondering where this narrative was going. ‘And then you kill them. You don’t just kill them. You overkill them. You strangle them, you drive them to a remote roadside and then you set fire to them. You obliterate them.’ He stopped again, hands thrust deep into his pockets. ‘Who are you really killing?’
‘It’s a good question, Dr Hill.’ The voice coming from behind him startled Tony so badly he jumped, stumbled and almost fell. If George Nicholas hadn’t grabbed him, he’d have ended up on his knees on the boggy ground. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I did call your name a couple of minutes ago but you seemed not to hear me.’ Carol’s neighbour let go Tony’s arm and stepped back. He was dressed for the country in corduroy trousers, Hunter wellies and a Barbour jacket, a tweed flat cap on his head. His pink complexion was heightened by the wind and the effort of the climb, making him look a perfect caricature of the country gentleman.
Tony gave a lopsided smile. ‘Sorry, I was thinking.’
‘Aloud, by the sounds of it.’ George smiled. ‘I do that myself. After I lost my wife, I couldn’t be bothered with anybody else’s conversation.’
‘It helps me put my thoughts in order,’ Tony said, trying not to sound brusque. According to Carol, George had made her feel more at home in the valley than any other neighbour. He should try harder to like the man and not make snap judgements based on his wardrobe. But then, he’d spent his working life making judgements about how people chose to present themselves. He wasn’t likely to stop now. Not for some land-owning toff who had let Carol get behind the wheel of her car when he must have known she was over the limit.
‘How’s Carol enjoying being back at work?’ George asked, leaning on the shepherd’s crook walking stick he carried.
‘You’d have to ask her.’ Tony knew he sounded abrupt, but what else could he say.
‘This is a bit awkward…’ George looked embarrassed, his eyes on the far horizon.
‘But?’
‘But I think I ought to say something. I don’t want Carol to be blindsided by more muckraking.’
Tony was immediately on the alert. ‘You’re going to have to explain that, George.’
‘My staff are very loyal. You should know that upfront.’ He sighed. ‘The night Carol was breathalysed on the way home. There’s been a woman asking around about the dinner party. Trying to find out who was working in the dining room that night. She tracked down Jackie, who runs the house for me. Asked her point-blank how much Carol had been drinking.’
The wind filled the silence between them. Then Tony said, ‘What did Jackie sa
y?’
‘She said we didn’t talk to the gutter press and even if we did, we understood the obligations of hospitality.’ A sudden smile flashed across his face. ‘And then she told her to fuck off.’
‘If it’s who I think it is, I can’t say I blame her. Did she describe this woman?’
George nodded. ‘Well dressed, well spoken, long dark hair. Unsuitable shoes, according to Jackie.’
‘Sounds like Penny Burgess from the Evening Sentinel Times. She’s wanted to bring Carol down for a long time. Thanks for letting me know.’
‘I’m afraid there’s a little more. One of the police officers who arrested Carol turned up yesterday. He spoke to Jackie. He asked her the same thing that the journalist woman had. How much had Carol been drinking. Jackie said she couldn’t say for sure, that she hadn’t been in the room the whole time but she didn’t think Carol had had more than a glass of white and a glass of red over the whole evening.’
Tony knew that was a lie. So did George but neither was going to admit it. ‘Did he go away?’
‘He did. But I have a feeling he’s going to go on asking. And it only takes one person to get cold feet when it’s a police officer asking.’
Tony’s heart sank. There would never have been a good time for this story to start stirring. But there couldn’t have been a worse time. Not in the thick of such a crucial case. Not with the burden of guilt she was already carrying. Not when Carol was finally starting to get back on an even keel. He remembered the last time she had become embroiled in other people doing the wrong thing for the right reason and he didn’t know how he was going to break this latest news to her.