by Val McDermid
‘Almost three months ago. We’d been away for a weekend walking in the Peak District. Tom had had one of his explosions because the hotel had cocked up the booking and we ended up in a poky twin room. And I thought, enough. On the way home, he was outlining how he was going to demolish their reputation on TripAdvisor and Facebook. Something snapped in my head and I thought, now or never. I got him to pull over into the next lay-by and I told him it was over. I know I should have waited till we were home, but I’ll be honest, I thought this time he might throw something at me instead of the wall.’
‘How did he react?’
‘He refused to believe me. He said I didn’t know what was good for me and I’d think differently in the morning. Because I’d come to my senses and realise I could never be happy without him. And then he started the car and drove home.’ She shook her head, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘So what happened next?’
‘I was supposed to be out on the road seeing clients the next day. So I set off early, as usual. I took the car to a dealer who used to advertise with us and traded it in for a van. I bought a load of archive boxes at the stationery store. Then I went back to the flat after Tom had left and packed up all my stuff. Clothes, books, CDs. I was out of there by mid-afternoon and on the south coast by late evening. I checked in to a motel and in the morning, I took the ferry to Santander.’
‘Forgive me, but that’s a pretty extreme strategy. Were you afraid of what he might do if he realised you were serious about leaving?’
‘The truth? Yes. I thought he might try to stop me.’
‘Were you afraid he might be violent? Even though he’d never hurt you before?’
‘I didn’t put a name to what I was afraid of. All I knew was that I needed to get out and I didn’t want to be caught up in Tom’s reaction to that.’
‘Did he contact you?’
She gave a wry smile. ‘I ditched my phone and got a new Spanish mobile. He showered me with emails and social media messages to the point where I closed all my accounts. How did you find me, by the way?’
‘My colleague is the mistress of cyberspace,’ Paula said, always evasive when it came to Stacey’s skills.
Tricia drew in an apprehensive breath. ‘But if that’s how you found me, he might too.’
Paula gave a reassuring smile. ‘I don’t think that’s at all likely. We have access to databases that Tom could never penetrate.’
‘Really? You’re not just saying that?’
‘Really. So when you closed down all your regular communications, how did you communicate? About the lease on the flat, about your shares in the business?’
‘Via my lawyer. He’s a very old friend who would never sell me out to Tom in spite of his efforts to persuade him otherwise. Tom has a pathological need to get his own way and when the world contradicts him, it’s not pretty. But don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a daily thing, because he’s also very good at getting the world to bend to his will. That’s the charming side, which is all most people ever see.’
Now that she felt she had a handle on Tom Elton’s character, Paula decided it was time to change tack. ‘You said you’d been walking in the Peak District. Did you do that a lot, then?’
‘Not as much as we’d have liked. Work was always a big demand on our time. But yes, we loved the Peak District. And of course Tom’s dad lives there, in Eyam, so he could kill two birds with one stone. So maybe once a month we’d go down.’
‘What about the Dales? Did you head up there?’
‘Hardly ever. It’s closer, as the crow flies, but it’s actually really quick with the motorway network to get down into the Dark Peak and those high moorland edges.’ She sighed. ‘That’s one good thing about this part of Spain. There is decent walking in the hills behind Marbella.’
‘So Tom didn’t spend time in the Dales? Walking, or cycling?’
‘Not at all. What’s the big deal about the Dales?’
She’d find out soon enough if she had even rudimentary internet search skills. ‘No big deal, only curious. Have you heard anything from mutual friends about Tom’s reaction to you leaving?’
Tricia gave a little snort of laughter. ‘Plenty. Mostly that he’s pissed off and affronted rather than distressed. Also that he’s outraged I went off without a word. He’s hopeful that I’m having a miserable time in a bedsit in some gloomy Northern town. Luckily, I can trust the few people who know where I am to keep their mouths shut.’
Paula had run out of questions. Given there had been no contact between them for three months, there was no point in asking about changes in behaviour or schedules. And she’d gleaned enough about Tom Elton’s personality to find it credible that he might be their killer. Tony might have a different view, but she doubted it. ‘Thanks for talking to me, Tricia. I appreciate your time and I’m sorry if this has meant revisiting painful memories.’
‘Not really painful. It’s early days yet, but things are going well with me and Gary. And I totally love my new job. I made the right choices, Detective. I’ve no doubts about that. I’m not even sorry I stayed with Tom so long. Even though he was scary sometimes. I learned so much working for Local Words. I couldn’t have done this job without that experience. Anyway, good luck with whatever it is you’re investigating.’
‘Thanks. I hope things continue to go well for you.’ She signed off and leaned back in her chair. Tricia had dumped him in a lay-by after meeting an interesting new man at a wedding. Really, she couldn’t have come up with a better match if she’d tried. Yet another brick in the wall.
63
A
fter Paula had outlined Tricia Stone’s revelations, Tony had retreated to his boat. He wanted peace and quiet to consider. What Paula had learned was almost too neat a fit. But sometimes obvious was also authentic. Not everything had to be sublimated and translated into a different formulation. A man deprived of the direct route to his satisfaction – in this case, killing the woman who had so comprehensively spurned him – might well be inclined to perform a cathartic act as close to the original scenario as possible. Especially since these cases weren’t sexual homicides. The way sexual offenders behaved often had complex codification that placed the killer’s acts at some remove from the events that had provoked him. This was different. And that was why Tony needed time and space to think about the perpetrator. The Wedding Killer, as he’d come to think of him.
There wasn’t much room on the boat for pacing. Ten steps, turn. Ten steps, turn. But it was room enough. Especially if he took his time. He began with the opening paragraphs that always preceded his profiles, stepping out the rhythm of the words. ‘The following offender profile is for guidance only and shouldn’t be regarded as an identikit portrait. The offender is unlikely to match the profile in every detail, though I would expect there to be a high degree of congruence between the characteristics outlined below and the reality. All of the statements in the profile express probabilities and possibilities, not hard facts.
‘A serial killer produces signals and indicators in the commission of his crimes. Everything he does is intended, consciously or not, as part of a pattern. Discovering the underlying pattern reveals the killer’s logic. It may not appear logical to us, but to him it is crucial. Because his logic is so idiosyncratic, straightforward traps will not capture him. As he is unique, so must be the means of catching him, interviewing him and reconstructing his acts.’
Well, that was as true of the Wedding Killer as it was of any sexually motivated murderer. The first question he had to ask himself was whether that distinction was real. Given his experience over the years, he thought it was. Sexual homicide was about sexual satisfaction. Whether the perpetrators acknowledged it or not, the act of killing and the ritual surrounding it had the sole aim of satisfying their desire. Usually that desire had been perverted and distorted by their experiences. But murder and sex had wound round each other as inseparably as a barley sugar twist; the one had become a replic
a of the release that the other offered people whose lives hadn’t been fucked up irredeemably by what had been done to them.
These three murders, he believed, were not about sexual release. The pressure they relieved wasn’t sexual but emotional. If he was having sex with his victims – and on balance, Tony thought he probably was – it wasn’t at the heart of what he was doing. ‘It’s another way of charming them,’ he said. ‘Another step on the journey of falling in love.’
Even before he’d heard what Tricia had to say, he’d been convinced that the victims were not sexual surrogates. Men who were killing for sexual reasons tended towards victims who had similarities. These women – the first two for sure, and if they were right about Eileen Walsh, also her – had far more dissimilarities than they had common ground. Looks, occupations, lifestyles, preoccupations; all different.
‘You’re looking at a different kind of surrogacy,’ he said, pausing at the door to his sleeping cabin. ‘Tricia walking away destroyed your plans. She took your home away. She threatened the business you’d built. And she exposed you to people either feeling sorry for you or going, “I told you she was too good for him”. You wanted to kill her. But you’re smart. Even if you’d known where she’d gone, you knew you couldn’t kill her. Not now. You’d be the prime suspect. The man who’d been spurned, the man who wanted revenge.’
So he’d constructed an alternative plan. A macabre rehearsal for what he wanted – no, intended – to do to Tricia when the time was right. And he went about it with meticulous care. He’d obviously spent long hours researching current forensic techniques to learn how to avoid leaving a trail for detectives to follow. He’d mapped the location of the cameras he needed to avoid. He’d understood how to change his appearance in small, temporary ways. He thought he was cleverer than all of them. He thought he could outsmart the best.
The one time he’d slipped was stealing Claire Garrity’s identity. And it was exactly the kind of mistake that overweening arrogance made time after time. He couldn’t resist the urge to make himself part of the story, even in disguise. He’d made the effort to research a dead woman’s life enough to figure out her password. And he’d squeezed into his victim’s lives undercover and made them be his friend twice over.
Unless that hadn’t been part of the plan. Maybe stealing Claire’s identity had been part of his wider plan to track down Tricia? Friending her friends in another person’s clothes, hoping to triangulate the whereabouts of his ex? But the possibility of inveigling himself into the world of his victims had been too delicious to resist.
This was a man who craved admiration and love. He’d become powerful enough in his own small universe to believe he’d achieved that. Tricia had smashed that illusion and now he was rebuilding it.
‘I can’t profile you,’ Tony said, stopping in his tracks. He could have made a stab at a profile a day or two ago. But now there was a suspect, his process was contaminated. One of the central tenets of offender profiling was to avoid any knowledge of a specific suspect. The danger lay in the temptation to incline the profile towards the person in the crosshairs. If two or more options offered themselves up, it was hard to resist coming down on the side of the choice that fitted someone who was already in the frame. Every profiler remembered a notorious case in the early nineties, where a killer had remained on the loose to murder more women because police and profiler were too eager to follow their first suspicions.
So, no profile. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be useful. He could use this time to think and to work out the strategic advice he wanted to give Carol before the interview with Tom Elton in the morning. If indeed that was still on the agenda after everyone had slept on it.
It would be Paula and Carol there in the interview room, he was sure of that at least. Paula because nobody was better at the subtle dance of interrogation. She probed weaknesses and undermined strengths. She knew when to provoke to incautious anger and when to soothe into unexpected confidences. The Wedding Killer – or Tom Elton, as he must now think of him – might be her match but Tony doubted it. And Carol would be second chair because it was always good to put two women in the room against a man. They either felt insulted at not being taken seriously enough or they relaxed because they felt sure of themselves against such opponents. It was very seldom that they acted as if they were going into battle against an equal.
Good cop/bad cop remained a cliché because it still worked sometimes. In this case, Tony thought Paula could profitably play up to Elton’s idea of himself while Carol could undercut it at every opportunity. Where Paula took for granted that women would be attracted to him, Carol could play the sceptical, even incredulous role. When Paula could admire the killer for his forensic nous, Carol could rubbish the notion, pointing out the endless stream of forensic revelation in podcasts and TV shows. And when Paula patiently plodded through places and times, looking for alibis that probably weren’t there, Carol could sneer and point out that it’d only take one piece of forensic evidence to nail him. And that everybody makes a mistake eventually.
He sat down at the saloon table and started drafting his notes for Paula and Carol. ‘And finally, when he thinks you’ve exhausted all your ammunition, when he’s about to get to his feet and leave, Carol reveals that Paula has spoken to Tricia. He won’t know what’s been said; he won’t know which part of the rug is about to be pulled from under him.’
And that, Tony knew, was when mistakes were made.
Tony wasn’t the only one brooding over what the morning might bring. High on the moors above her home, Carol was also hoping the rhythm of walking might bring some discipline to her thoughts.
She’d come back to policing because she thought it was her rock in a stormy sea. The job had always been a haven, the place where she could lose herself and let her abilities shine. When she looked around at the women she knew from school and university, she envied nothing about their lives. Not their men, not their marriages, not their children. She’d never craved those things. Her commitment to justice had always been the only thing that really mattered to her. Her feelings for Tony, her friendships with colleagues like Paula and John Brandon – they were all bound up with her identity as a detective.
And now it felt as if that was all slipping away from her. She’d become what she’d spent her adult life hunting down. She was a drunk, and because of that, innocent people had lost their lives. She’d conspired in an act of supposedly noble corruption, but really, how did that make her different from every other bent cop who’d ever tried to justify their criminality? Her team despised Sam Evans for the relatively trivial offence of leaking to the press. What would they think of her if they knew who she really was? And her own slide into indiscipline meant she’d kept turning a blind eye when her team took shortcuts and bent the rules.
Maybe – just maybe – she could live with that if she was still doing what had once been second nature to her. But she wasn’t even managing that. There was a man out there killing women apparently at will. Seven weeks of tireless plodding and they had next to nothing. Their failure offended her. She’d lacked the inspiration to send her team down a line of inquiry that might produce a result. And now all these chickens were flocking home to roost.
The single tenuous connection they had tying Tom Elton to the three murders would normally have provoked some optimism in Carol’s heart. But this time, all there was inside her was bleak despair. She didn’t believe they could stop this man. They didn’t have enough to crack someone who was clearly confident and assured. But they didn’t have time to dig deeper. Blake and his cronies were on her back and clearly what drove them was nothing to do with justice, whatever the words they used.
Her instincts told her to wait, to drill down into every aspect of Tom Elton’s life. But she knew if she trusted those instincts it could be too late for her guys. A review squad would be all over them, their nitpicking fingers turning over everything they’d done, finding fault wherever they could. She’d plucked
her team out of positions where they were doing good work with the promise of something more challenging, more fulfilling, something that might change the shape of national policing. She couldn’t just shrug and walk away from that commitment.
Whatever she did next, she had to protect them. If that meant falling on her own sword, then so be it. She’d walk into the interview room with Paula in the morning and give it her best shot. And if that didn’t work, she’d have to make some hard choices about what to do next.
64
A
lvin and Kevin were waiting by the lift doors outside Local Words’ fourth-floor suite when Tom Elton stepped out. He gave them a curious glance but didn’t break stride as he headed for the office. Alvin stepped forward to obstruct him. Elton flashed him an angry look and moved to sidestep his bulk. ‘Mr Elton?’ Alvin sounded the soul of politeness.
Elton paused, gave Alvin closer scrutiny, allowed himself a faint frown of curiosity and said, ‘Who wants to know?’ in the most nonchalant of tones.
‘Detective Sergeant Ambrose of the Regional Major Incident Team.’ He produced his ID as Kevin moved to his side.
‘And I’m Detective Inspector Matthews. Same unit.’
Elton raised his eyebrows, nostrils flaring slightly, his expression verging on the supercilious. But his voice was neutral. ‘Really? What brings you to my door?’
‘We’d like to ask you some questions in an ongoing inquiry,’ Alvin said. As he spoke, the lift doors opened and a couple of young men emerged carrying takeaway coffee, shoulder bags slung across their bodies, each with beautifully barbered facial hair.
‘Hey, boss,’ one said.
Elton glanced at him and grunted, ‘Morning. I’ll be there in a minute,’ he added as one of them swiped his card, opened the door and held it open expectantly. Elton waved his hand distractedly and the two disappeared inside. ‘You’d better come in, I suppose.’