Insidious Intent

by Val McDermid

  At twenty past, she’d seen Finch leave the police station, chatting to a female officer. They’d separated and Finch had driven off in a black BMW. Penny set off behind him, keeping her distance since there wasn’t much traffic that early in the day.

  Finch drove straight through the centre of town and turned off into a maze of terraced streets, many of them one-way. Penny managed to keep him in sight as he zigzagged through the blackened stone rows, wondering if he’d spotted her tailing him and was trying to shake her off. Eventually he slowed right down, obviously looking for a parking space. She passed him and turned the corner, abandoning the car across the mouth of an alley.

  She hustled back in time to see Finch squeezing into a space a couple of feet longer than his car. She was on the pavement waiting for him when he emerged. ‘PC Finch?’

  He looked startled. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘Penny Burgess. Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times.’

  ‘You’re a bit off your manor,’ he said. His voice was dark and heavy, matching his looks. He paused and looked her up and down. ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘I suspect you’re as indignant as I am about the four drivers that walked free after you breathalysed them a few weeks ago.’

  His face changed. Eyebrows lowered, jaw belligerently thrust forward. ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’

  ‘Off the record,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for confirmation, that’s all.’

  ‘Like I said. No comment.’

  ‘So, what? It gets brushed under the carpet? Four people dead and we all shrug our shoulders and go, “Oh, well.” And Carol Jordan gets to run ReMIT and tell your lads what to do? Not to mention that it makes you and your partner look pretty shoddy.’

  He was still glaring, but he glanced quickly up and down the street. ‘This isn’t the time or the place.’

  Penny slipped him a card. ‘So you name the time and the place and I’ll be there. It’s not right that you lads are carrying the can for something much bigger than either of you.’

  He’d taken the card and walked away without another word. But later that day, Penny had had a text from an unknown number setting the rendezvous where she was now waiting.

  Had she pitched it wrong, appealing to his indignation and pride? Should she have banged the drum for justice instead? Was he more of an idealist than he appeared? She hoped not. If she was right about this, it was a helluva story. Front page in her own paper and picked up by the nationals and everywhere online. She wasn’t ambitious in terms of moving to Fleet Street or TV, but Penny wanted a reputation that gave people pause when she called them up.

  Her question was answered by a heavy tread behind her. She resisted the urge to turn around and waited for him to sink into the plastic chair opposite her. He was wearing a black puffa jacket over a black polo shirt and a black baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. He looked, she thought, like a low-rent rapper. He unscrewed the cap of a Coke Zero bottle and took a swig. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Shift over-ran. Had to charge some idiot with using his mobile while driving.’

  ‘One less moron on the road tonight, then.’

  ‘Aye. Now, before we get stuck in any further, I don’t want to see my name in the paper.’

  ‘We can keep your name out of it. That’s not a problem.’

  He glanced down at her phone on the table. ‘And you’re not taping this?’

  Penny unlocked her phone and let him see that the voice recording wasn’t activated. He didn’t need to know about the second phone in her pocket that was diligently recording everything they said. ‘You see, PC Finch? Or can I call you Darren?’

  ‘Call me anything you like, except late for dinner.’ He cracked a half-smile at the elderly joke. Definitely not the sharpest crayon in the box, she thought. ‘Now, you wanted to talk to me about the breathalyser business?’

  She nodded. ‘It seems really dodgy: Carol Jordan getting away with drink driving just when she’s about to be announced as the head of this new unit.’

  ‘You think?’ No mistaking the sarcasm.

  ‘What’s your take on it?’

  ‘Word came down from on high,’ he said.

  ‘You know that?’

  ‘What else could it be? There wasn’t anything wrong with the breathalyser.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  He smirked at her, a man whose knowledge was infinitely superior. ‘If you had a faulty breathalyser in your equipment locker, what would you do with it?’

  Penny pondered her answer for a moment. ‘Get it repaired? Or bin it?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Satisfaction in his smile. ‘Now, on the night it happened, there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with it. The four drivers we pulled over and breathalysed, they all had the smell of drink on their breath. There was nothing in the results that made us go, “Wait a minute, there’s something not right.” But here’s the thing. That breathalyser was never taken out of commission. Not that night, not after the court kicked out those four charges. We’re still using that same breathalyser.’

  ‘You’re kidding me!’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s like nobody even bothered to do a cover-up. We just paid no never-mind. Carried on like nothing had happened.’

  ‘That’s so cynical. So where did the order come from?’

  Finch shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Somewhere well above my pay grade.’

  ‘You’ve no idea?’

  He shrugged and took another long swallow from his Coke. ‘All as I know is that when the case came up, the CPS solicitor stood up in front of the mags and said it was being dropped on account of the breathalyser had been discovered to be faulty. And that there were three other cases to be tret the same way.’ He put a hand over his mouth and burped with surprising daintiness.

  ‘What did you think at that point?’

  He sighed. ‘I thought maybe summat had come to light with the breathalyser. I hadn’t been on duty the two nights previous, so I assumed nobody had got round to telling me. But when I went back to the station, duty sergeant said that were the first he’d heard about it. And there were nowt wrong with it so far as he knew. We even did a bit of a check on it ourselves. A couple of us blew into it and compared the results with one of the other machines, and it was bang on.’

  Penny took a sip of her drink, even more disgusting now it had cooled. ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Not much we could do. You can’t start a fight when you don’t know who you’re fighting, can you? We only did it for our own satisfaction, like. But me and my partner, we wanted to cover our backs in case the shit hits the fan down the line. No way are we carrying the can if it all goes south. So I went and had a word with the housekeeper at that George Nicholas’s house. I tried to get her to admit Jordan had been knocking it back, but she wasn’t having it. She knows what side her bread’s buttered. All she’d admit to was that Jordan had “probably” had a glass of white and a glass of red over a period of about four hours. Bollocks, she had.’ His mouth curled to match his bitter tone.

  It was a struggle for Penny not to show her delight at such a stonking story emerging from so unlikely a source. ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘There’s always people who’ve got insurance against the kind of shit that drowns ordinary folk. I’ve got no proof, mind, but I think somebody wanted Carol Jordan for ReMIT very badly.’

  ‘As high up as the Home Office? ReMIT is their initiative, after all.’

  Finch shook his head. ‘I’m only a simple traffic cop, me. I know nowt about how things get decided. All I know is that five people would likely be alive today if those cases had gone ahead. And that’s some price to pay so the bosses can slot somebody they want into a job.’

  43

  T

  ony rang the doorbell and waited. When Torin yanked the door open, he wasn’t surprised. He’d texted from the end of the street to say he was on his way. Tony smiled. ‘It’s time, Torin. You’ve got to do this, mate. T
hat’s the start of sorting things out.’

  ‘You promised.’ The years fell away from him and he looked and sounded like a little boy, ready to burst into tears.

  ‘And I’m keeping my word. You need to be the one doing the talking.’

  ‘I can’t. They’ll be furious.’

  ‘Not with you. They’ll be hurt for you, not because of you. They’re not going to turn their backs on you. I’ve known Paula a long, long time and I’d trust her with my life.’

  Torin made to push past Tony and take off into the night but a voice called from inside. ‘Who’s at the door, Tor?’ Paula. ‘If it’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses, tell them we’re lesbians.’

  ‘It’s only me,’ Tony shouted back.

  Paula appeared behind Torin. ‘So why are you standing on the doorstep? Come in.’

  ‘We were talking about the football,’ Tony said. ‘Didn’t want to bore you.’ He stepped forward and Torin was obliged to move back to let him in. ‘Don’t let me down, lad,’ Tony said softly as he came alongside.

  They all shuffled into the living room, Tony tossing his purple coat over the banister as he passed. Elinor jumped up from the sofa and hugged him. ‘Great to see you, Paula never said you were coming over.’

  ‘I thought it was about time,’ he said. ‘I know Torin has something to say to you guys and I offered him my moral support.’

  Torin’s face showed the anger and betrayal he felt. ‘You promised,’ he spat. Elinor looked bemused.

  ‘I did. I promised to let you speak for yourself.’

  ‘Yeah, but you never said you were going to push me into it.’

  ‘Nobody’s pushing, Torin. I’m here to support you.’

  Torin scoffed. ‘Yeah, right. And now they know I’ve got something to hide.’

  ‘We knew that anyway,’ Elinor said quietly. ‘We live with you. We can see there’s something wrong. We love you, Torin. We want to help.’

  ‘There is no help.’ Torin threw himself into an armchair. ‘I did a really stupid thing, right?’ He sighed angrily. ‘And now it’s coming back to screw my life up completely.’

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘I think you need to be a bit more specific,’ Elinor said calmly. ‘But before you are, I want you to know that whatever your stupidity, we are not going to turn our backs on you.’

  ‘You say that now,’ Torin muttered.

  ‘I say it because it’s the truth. You’re part of this family.’ She gave him her sweetest smile.

  ‘Whether you like it or not,’ Paula added. ‘So you might as well get it over with.’

  Torin glanced up, his eyes brimming. He dashed the back of his hand roughly across his face, blinking the tears back. ‘I was lonely, right? You two, you’ve been great. You are great. But sometimes it just feels a bit rubbish being me. And this girl, she started liking my pictures and then we started talking.’ He squeezed his eyes shut.

  ‘And it got to more than talking?’ Elinor spoke softly.

  ‘Not like you think,’ he said quickly. ‘It was all online.’

  ‘They do things differently these days,’ Tony said. ‘So she sent you pictures of herself?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He gave Tony a pleading look.

  ‘And they got a bit raunchy, right?’

  Torin swallowed hard. ‘That’s a weird old person word. But yeah, they were… you know? Sexy?’ He shifted in his seat, crossing his legs tightly, rubbing a finger along his cheekbone. ‘And she asked me to do the same for her, so I did.’ It came out in a rush.

  ‘Only human,’ Paula said. She’d seen and heard much worse. She caught Tony’s eye. ‘But yeah, a bit stupid.’

  ‘I know. And then…’ Torin screwed his face up. ‘Then she said if I didn’t give her money, she’d mail the videos to everybody in my contacts. And post them on my social media accounts.’

  ‘Oh, Torin, you poor boy.’ Elinor was clearly on the verge of tears.

  A single tear trickled from the corner of his eye. ‘You tell them, Tony.’

  Tony got up and sat on the arm of Torin’s chair, laying an arm across the boy’s shoulders. ‘Torin didn’t want to upset you guys. So he sold a piece of his mum’s jewellery to pay the blackmailer. That’s how the pendant you saw online got there, Paula.’

  Elinor twisted in her seat to stare at Paula. ‘What pendant? What is he talking about?’

  ‘I’ll explain later, it’s not what this is all about.’

  ‘But why am I only hearing this now?’ Elinor asked, plaintive.

  ‘Because you’ve been working and I didn’t have the chance to sit down and explain. Later, Elinor.’ Paula reached for her hand and held it tight. ‘Tony?’

  ‘And now the blackmailer is coming back for more. And we need to put our heads together and come up with a plan.’ Tony rubbed Torin’s shoulder, with no confidence that it would bring the boy any comfort.

  ‘There is no plan,’ Torin said, his voice flat and dull. ‘I’m going to have to get used to my life being wrecked. Everybody will rip the piss out of me. No girl will ever come near me.’ He hung his head. ‘I’m glad my mum’s not here to see this.’

  ‘Your mum would have told you to stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ Elinor said. ‘She’d have told you you’d been an idiot but that was no reason to carry on being one.’

  Torin looked up, shocked at Elinor’s shift to briskness. ‘What else can I be?’

  ‘Like Tony said. We need a plan. And it’s obvious where we start.’ Three pairs of eyes stared at her, uncertain and unconvinced. ‘For heaven’s sake. We’ve got Stacey Chen. Somebody out there thinks they can mess with us, but they’re not Stacey Chen.’

  Later that night, when Tony had gone back to Steeler and Torin had finally fallen asleep, Elinor snuggled into Paula’s side under the duvet. They lay skin to skin, each the other’s shelter from the storm that had blown havoc through their lives.

  ‘In the great scheme of being grateful for small mercies,’ Elinor murmured, ‘I am so glad we didn’t have to look at those photos.’

  ‘Me too. I know all about not being able to un-see things.’ Paula shuddered. ‘It never even crossed my mind that this was what was going on.’

  To her surprise, Elinor gave a soft chuckle. ‘Of all the things I imagined our life would be, I never expected to find myself in the kind of tight corner where Stacey Chen was the answer.’

  Paula kissed her. ‘Me neither. But given the carnage she visited on Sam Evans, I think it’s fair to say whoever thought they could fuck with Torin will be in for a nasty surprise.’

  On the other side of Bradfield, another ReMIT member was awake. For once, Kevin was finding sleep elusive. He normally slept with the intensity of an adolescent, but there was something about this case that had deeply unsettled him. Cremating women in their cars was disturbing enough. But what lay beneath was something far more cruel. There was something callous, something dehumanising about what this killer had done. He had held out a promise to both his victims. He’d offered them romance. Love, even. And under cover of that promise, he’d won their confidence only to betray it. This twisted bastard wasn’t satisfied with murder; he had to lace it with spite. He’d treated the women with scorn and contempt. Some people might think that was irrelevant, that the only thing that mattered was the killing itself. But for Kevin, the indignity the killer had inflicted by playing games with the women’s emotions compounded the felony. If there were degrees of murder, in his mind this was one of the higher exemplars.

  He lay on his back, staring into the dark, consciously still so as not to wake Stella. He ran through all of the actions they’d taken, looking for the loose thread to pull, to make the killer’s careful planning unravel. Step by step, he went over what they’d done till his thoughts tumbled over each other in chaos.

  He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to calm the maelstrom in his mind. One more time, he tried to organise his thoughts. What were the forensic foundations of a case? There was no point in expe
cting anything from the body dumps, not after the fires.

  He needed to come at this from a different angle. Think about the victims themselves as sources of forensic evidence. Their phones had gone in the fires. The killer had covered his tracks as far as his communications were concerned. He’d only ever been in touch —

  And suddenly, a spark ignited a thought in Kevin’s head. He remembered Harrison Braithwaite’s words. ‘They kissed goodnight. Nothing unseemly, but a bit of passion, you know?’

  He must have held her. The killer must have held her. The mouth he kissed had been burned to ash. But the coat Amie McDonald had been wearing might still be hanging in her wardrobe. Hanging in her wardrobe with a killer’s DNA all over it.

  And Kevin had a witness who might be able to identify precisely which coat it had been.

  PART THREE

  44

  T

  onight, he was called Richard. Not Rick or Dick or Richie; Richard, he’d insisted to Eileen when she’d asked if his friends ever shortened his name. He’d spent the morning being himself – Tom Elton, magazine proprietor, briefing a series of freelances in Manchester for the articles he needed to fill the next tranche of magazines. None of them produced copy as good as Tricia, and he didn’t have anybody on his books who could edit and rewrite the way she could. He knew the quality of his product was slipping inexorably and he knew who to blame for that.

  That knowledge only sharpened his edge for continuing with his plan. Every time he carried it through, he learned some new refinement. And each time it was a little easier. As part of his forensic research, he’d read a paper recently by some guy called Dr Tony Hill, a clinical psychologist who did offender profiling for the police, about something called neural adaptation. Scientists had known about this in the physical world for a long time. When you pick up a pen, you’re aware of how it feels in your hand but very quickly your nervous system tells you not to bother registering that sensation. But it turns out the same thing happens with dishonesty. The first time you lie or commit a particular crime, it’s a big step and you’re conscious of it all the way. But the more often you do that same thing, the easier it becomes. He’d always thought it happened that way because once you got away with something, you were less scared the next time. But apparently it was more than that. It was the brain adjusting itself. Wanting to be comfortable with the stuff that felt like crossing a line.