by Val McDermid
‘Will that stop it?’
‘Honestly? Probably not. But it might make it so much harder that his attackers will move on elsewhere. Oh, and he needs to delete all his email contacts too. And I need you to bring his laptop in. Chances are they might have taken control of it and they’re watching him all the time he’s on it. In fact, text Elinor right now and get him to bring in his laptop and his tablet. I’ll see what’s on them and clean it up.’
Paula immediately did as she was asked. ‘Can you not track who’s doing this to him? And stop them at source?’
Stacey sighed. ‘It’s extremely unlikely. These cyber attacks come from places where governments allow anonymous servers that scrub clean all the source information from emails and messages.’
‘What, like Russia?’
‘More likely the Philippines. I’ll do what I can but I don’t hold out much hope.’ Then, as a thought occurred to her, Stacey said slowly, ‘How much money did they ask for?’
‘The first demand was £500. Torin paid up then they asked for £1000. They’ve given him till the end of the month to pay.’ Her phone pinged. ‘That’s Torin. Elinor’s giving him a lift, he’ll be here in about fifteen minutes.’
‘It’s not much return for all that work,’ Stacey said. ‘Usually demands start around the five-grand mark.’
‘Horses for courses,’ Paula said. ‘A lad Torin’s age might be able to raise a few hundred but he’s not going to be able to get his hands on five grand very readily. Better to have some return than none at all. And if they’re doing this to other kids, it’s about the volume, not the individual amounts.’
‘True. And they’ve got the footage of him. They can monetise that on a porn site,’ Stacey mused.
Paula’s eyes widened in horror. ‘They’d put him up on a porn site?’
Realising the weight of what she’d said, Stacey hastily backtracked. ‘Probably not. He’s way too old for the paedos.’
But not for the perverts who liked adolescent boys, Paula thought. It was a grim notion.
‘Look, I’ll do my best. I’ve got a couple of contacts who walk the wrong side of the line. I’ll see what I can drag out of them. And in the meantime we’ll do what we can to minimise the damage.’ She picked up the phone. ‘What’s his passcode? I’ll take a look at this while we’re waiting for him.’
‘Three nine five two three nine,’ Paula said. She’d insisted he give her the code before she’d left the house. She’d had to promise not to abuse it by going through his personal stuff. She supposed she’d deserved that caveat after her unauthorised search of his room. ‘And I’m going outside to wait for them.’ She could vape while she was waiting. What she actually wanted was a cigarette. But she’d kicked the habit hard and she wasn’t prepared to put herself through that misery again. The occasional vaping would have to do.
Waiting for the lift, she sighed from the bottom of her lungs. She’d wanted Stacey to wave the magic wand she’d brought to their cases so often. But as with everything else to do with ReMIT, the old magic seemed to have deserted them.
47
A
fter dinner, Carol was getting twitchy. She flicked impatiently through the lifestyle section of the Sunday paper. ‘Who in God’s name is trivial enough to read a piece about The Ten Best Plates for Outdoor Eating? Or “how to transform your wooden stairs by painting them to look like a stylish runner”?’ Even as she spoke, she knew the answer. Somebody who wasn’t trying to avoid thinking about a refreshing vodka tonic, or a glass of Pinot Grigio so cold it would make her teeth hurt.
Who was she trying to kid? Right now, she’d settle for a cheap Albanian white at blood heat. Or a break in her case to take her mind off the craving for a drink that was running like an electric current through her veins. The inside of her head felt like a swamp she was trying to wade through. How could she solve a case this complicated when her brain had stopped working properly?
Tony looked up from the journal article he was reading on his tablet. ‘Someone who has stairs?’
‘Very funny.’ Carol glared at him and threw the paper aside. ‘This case is killing me. How can there be nothing to get hold of? We’re condemned to running endless streams of data through Stacey’s systems in the hope that they’ll pick up a cross-reference that’ll give us something to latch on to. We’re going to have to fall back on a media appeal.’
‘Unless he sticks to his interval. If he keeps to a three-week cycle, tonight will be the night for another burning car. And every time he does it, we get closer to him. Because his patterns become clearer every time. The more we learn about him, the more possible it becomes to move ahead of him and stand in his way.’ He rubbed his hands along the sides of his head. ‘It grieves me, but my job gets easier the more he kills. It’s the hardest part of what I do, Carol. The guilt I feel because I’m not good enough to latch on to the most important details from the start.’
‘Nobody’s that good. And if you thought about it honestly instead of using it as an excuse to beat yourself up, you’d acknowledge that and forgive yourself.’ The warmth of her tone took the sting from her words. Carol reached across the corner of the table that separated them and enclosed one of his hands in hers. ‘You’re not omniscient.’
‘No. So you end up having to fall back on a media appeal that drags up a net full of red herrings.’ He shrugged. ‘And maybe one genuine lead, if we can pick it out of the catch.’
‘The way things are going —’ Carol was interrupted by the ringing of her phone. She snatched it up. ‘North Yorkshire,’ she muttered, taking the call. ‘DCI Jordan.’
‘It’s DSI Henderson. Control’s been on the phone to me. I set up an alert on vehicle fires in the Dales so that any report comes straight to me. We’ve had a call from a group of bikers about a car on fire in a lay-by on the road between Blubberthwaite and Scarholme. Above Wharfedale.’
‘Thanks for letting me know. Who’s on the way?’
‘Fire brigade and a patrol car,’ Henderson said crisply.
‘Can you speak to the fire chief and ask them not to put the fire out unless there’s a risk to life or property?’
‘I’ve already issued that instruction. I assumed that would be what you wanted. Of course, we can’t be sure at this stage whether this is a random car fire or part of your case, but I thought it best to take precautions.’
‘Yes, ma’am. I appreciate you doing that. I’ll be there with members of my team as soon as possible. If the patrol car officers can see a body in the car, can you arrange for a forensic team to be sent out to the locus?’
‘I’m already across that too. I’ll assign an SIO as soon as we know whether it’s necessary and have them meet you at the scene.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Carol ended the call and gave Tony a rueful smile. ‘More data, by the looks of it. I need to change into something a bit more official-looking than jogging pants and a hoodie.’
‘Where is it?’ he asked, getting to his feet and walking to the bookshelf where Carol kept her maps.
‘Wharfedale. Between Blubberthwaite and Scarholme. More ridiculous North Yorkshire names,’ she added, crossing behind the screen that separated her sleeping area from the rest of the space.
Tony took out the Ordnance Survey Landranger map that covered Upper Wharfedale and spread it out over the table. He pored over it till he found the River Wharfe then traced its route back upstream to the places Carol had mentioned. Both appeared to be little more than a small cluster of dwellings without a church or a pub between them.
What there was, however, was a cycle track on the other side of the river from the road. And what looked like a couple of footbridges leading between the two. ‘Carol,’ he shouted. ‘There’s a bike trail right next to the road.’
She emerged from behind the screen, a loose grey jumper over black trousers. ‘What?’
‘Look, it runs right along the dale. If we’re right about the bike thing, he could be on that trail right now.’
Carol leaned over his shoulder, instantly taking in what he was showing her. ‘Shit,’ she said, crossing to her phone and calling DSI Henderson back. ‘We think he may be making his escape on a bike,’ she said without preamble. ‘There’s a track runs along the Dale. There must be limited places on the trail where he can intersect with a parked car. Is there any chance you can cover those?’
To her credit, Henderson didn’t miss a beat. ‘I’ll talk to our people and see what we can do. Though he may be long gone. Leave it with me.’
The line went dead and Carol stared across at Tony. ‘Good police work,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘We’ve been doing this a long time. We’ve rubbed off on each other. You come up with the psychological insights ahead of me sometimes too.’
‘Nice of you to say so, but I’m not sure I’d agree. Are you coming with me, Sherlock?’
In the car, Tony leaned back in his seat, his head tilted against the rest. ‘They won’t get him,’ he said.
Carol hammered through the lanes leading from the barn to the main road north. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because he’s too careful. He plans everything down to the last detail. He’ll have worked out how long it takes the emergency services to get to the fire and how long it takes to get back to his car. But here’s what interests me. Most serial offenders start to escalate in one way or another. Either the intervals decrease or the crimes become more violent, more elaborate. But that’s not happening here. That’s one important aspect of what’s going on here. And another other thing? He’s obsessed with leaving no traces that can lead back to him. Not because he’s afraid of being caught, per se. That’s not it. It’s because he’s on a mission. And if he’s careless, if he gets caught because he’s made a stupid mistake, he won’t be able to complete his mission.’
Carol flashed a quick glance at him. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘You know my methods, Watson.’ He grinned at her. ‘It’s the explanation that makes most sense of his behaviour, Carol. He’s targeting weddings because it gives him the kind of victims he needs. A woman who’s vulnerable to the promise of romance. But that offers no guarantee of a physical type, or even of an age range. He doesn’t care about these women as individuals. It’s what they represent to him.’
‘And what do they represent?’
‘The woman he wants to kill.’
‘So why doesn’t he kill her?’ A long pause. Carol turned on to the dual carriageway and pushed the Land Rover a shade above eighty miles an hour. ‘What’s stopping him?’
‘If I knew that… Maybe she’s dead already? Maybe she’s beyond his reach for some other reason?’
‘Maybe he wants to get it perfect before he does it to her?’
Tony mulled that over. He exhaled heavily through his nose. ‘That doesn’t feel right. Because he’s got it pretty much perfect from the start.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Carol pulled out sharply to pass a delivery van. ‘We’re only seeing the end result. The body disposal. We don’t have any idea what his ritual is before he kills them. That might be what he’s trying to perfect.’
There was no denying it was a good point and Tony didn’t even bother trying. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘See, I told you I wasn’t nearly as good at this as I’m given credit for. We’re only seeing the beginning of his process and the end. We’ve no idea what’s going on in the middle. And that means we’ve got no idea at all who he really wants to kill.’
48
S
tacey didn’t do crime scenes. Not in a Stella McCartney suit and Nicholas Kirkwood loafers. Even if she’d been dressed appropriately, she still wouldn’t have schlepped up to the middle of nowhere to stand around pretending to be useful. The place where she mattered was right where she was. So as flames devoured the interior of Eileen Walsh’s seven-year-old Vauxhall Astra, Stacey sat alone in the office, waiting for fresh data to feed into her systems, hoping that this time someone would have salvaged something tangible for her machines to gorge on.
In the meantime, she had something to be going on with. Stacey always had something to be going on with while her official work churned on in the background. But tonight what she was focused on had a personal dimension that was usually lacking in her work. Some of her colleagues who knew her less well than they thought might have considered the personal would have scant impact on her.
They would have been well wide of the mark.
Stacey hated people who abused digital systems. It affronted her that they had fatally undermined the fundamental beauty and purity of the internet. They’d corrupted the most revolutionary invention of the twentieth century and turned it into an engine for triviality, for vitriol, for scamming and for undermining the very fabric of democracy. Her family had come from Hong Kong; they’d experienced the effects of tyranny and oppression at first hand, and it wounded Stacey that opportunists and idiots had taken so extraordinary a thing as the internet and made it ugly and exploitative. It was that anger that fuelled her police work as much as the licence it gave her to stick her nose in other people’s data, an exercise of curiosity she justified as a necessary invasion of privacy. She was, after all, one of the good guys.
She’d spent much of the afternoon with Torin, scrubbing his various devices clean of personal data. He’d sat with a glum expression as they’d cleared out and closed down his social media. She’d tried to explain what she was doing and why but he’d cut across her with, ‘I know. If I hadn’t been a total dick you wouldn’t have to wipe my life clean. I get it. So can we just get on with it, please?’
She got it too. She’d have felt equally gutted and miserable if she’d done something with such devastating consequences. Not the exposure part. That was survivable. But the scrubbing clean of all her connectivity? That would be killer. So she sympathised with the boy. ‘When we set you up again after all of this is over, I’ll show you how to put systems in place that’ll stop anything like it happening again,’ she’d replied.
‘Can you do that?’
‘Yes. Well, I can.’
‘Thanks. I’m sorry.’
‘You got unlucky. Most people, they manage to keep their screw-ups under wraps. But don’t imagine you’re the only one who screws up.’ As she knew only too well. ‘Grown-ups do it too.’
When they’d finished, he’d sloped off to catch the bus home, leaving his phone with Stacey. Now she had it plugged into her system. When – and it would be when, not if – his blackmailers contacted him again, she’d bring all her weaponry to bear to find out who was responsible and where they were hiding.
Sure enough, not ten minutes after the news had come in of that night’s fire, a message had pinged on Torin’s phone. Stacey imagined a web of filaments lighting up between the phone and the person who had set these wheels in motion as lines of numbers scrolled down the screen she’d dedicated to Torin for the evening. The IP address tracker she had running was working, following the signal back through cyberspace to the source.
Except it wasn’t. As she had feared, the tracker had hit a dead end. The digital equivalent of a brick wall. Whoever had sent this message to Torin was net-savvy. They knew how to route their messages through a server that couldn’t be identified remotely. Stacey studied the screen, running a couple of checks as she went. It was, as she had thought, a blind alley somewhere in the Philippines, a jurisdiction nobody could compel to identify its black-hat hackers, phishers and scammers.
Stacey breathed heavily through her nose. Not even she could bulldoze her way to this particular truth. She leaned back in her chair and frowned at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling, their pitted surface reminding her of lunar module photographs of the moon’s surface. ‘What is wrong with you?’ she growled, cross with herself for such a frivolous thought at a time like this.
She straightened up, rolled her shoulders to free the tension and considered her options. Tracking the message had failed completely. But there was ano
ther avenue to explore, though the chances were that it would be no more successful. Torin had paid the blackmail money into a prepaid credit card account. The issuing bank would have details of the owner of the account.
But getting those details would be almost impossible. Banks didn’t hand out information like that. It was hard enough getting a warrant for that sort of disclosure when they were dealing with serious major crime, never mind working something off the books like this. Idly, Stacey did an ID check on the sort code attached to the card. To her astonishment, it was a branch of a high street bank in Bradfield. Someone had walked into a bank less than a mile from Skenfrith Street and bought a pre-loaded credit card.
Whoever had turned Torin over was no distant fraudster on the other side of the planet. It was someone a lot closer to home.
49
T
he car was still too hot to approach. Tony could feel the heat from twenty metres away. The occasional flame licked half-heartedly along the window frames but there was clearly nothing much left to burn. The smell was sickening. Burnt plastic and acrid chemicals from the upholstery and, underlying it, the stink of burned meat. The blackened skull, skin and flesh turned to ash, was discernible against the metal frame of the seat. He shuddered inwardly.
‘You don’t stay to watch,’ he said so softly that none could hear him. ‘It’s not the fire that gets you going. It’s the obliteration. Cremating them so there’s nothing recognisable left of a human being. You’re punishing someone but it’s not them. They’re just stand-ins.’
Carol left the knot of detectives and crime scene technicians who were lurking on the fringes of the scene. ‘It’s the same as the others,’ she said.
‘Not quite.’ He walked to the end of the narrow lay-by, leaving her to follow in his wake. ‘And there’s drystone walls flanking the road here. They’re over a metre high. And then you’ve got the river beyond that. To get to the cycle path, you’d either have to ride or walk, carrying the bike, for about five hundred metres till you come to a footbridge across the Wharfe.’