Insidious Intent

by Val McDermid

  ‘There’s a difference between general insomnia and the onset of nightmares.’

  ‘Having bad dreams doesn’t make me special, Tony. Call Paula, ask her how she sleeps. How Elinor sleeps after a bad shift in A&E. Is that it? Is that what you’re basing your diagnosis on?’

  ‘You’re talking about killing someone as if that was a normal, acceptable solution to a problem.’

  ‘You think that’s an easy decision? Something I take lightly? Tony, I have devoted my life to the pursuit of justice. Now, that life is imploding. Penny Burgess and the other jackals are going to take what I value most from me. I’m going to sink without trace. If I’m going to live with myself, I have to make it mean something. Saving other lives is meaningful. You can’t deny that.’

  ‘But turning yourself into a cold-blooded killer isn’t the way to do that. I know what it is to take a life. It took me years of therapy to recover from that, years of sitting with Jacob and letting him help me heal.’

  ‘That was different, Tony. You didn’t mean to kill. You were defending yourself against someone who was intent on killing you. What I’m talking about is different. It’s about justice. It’s about saving lives, not taking one.’

  ‘This isn’t justice, it’s vigilantism.’ His voice rose in a heartfelt plea. ‘Listen to yourself, Carol.’

  ‘There is no other way. There’s no fucking evidence. How many times do I have to say it? How else do we stop him? He’s got carte blanche to carry on murdering innocent women whose only crime was to go to a wedding, and he knows it. You saw him today. That confidence. That arrogance. If I don’t stop him, he’ll keep on doing it. There’s nothing more to be said. So what other symptoms do I allegedly have, according to you?’

  It was like talking to a wall. No, a barricade of rubber tyres, because whatever he said was bouncing right off. ‘You will become what you’ve devoted your life to preventing. You’ll be a murderer. A vigilante. You’ll be despised. Nobody will see what you’ve done as righteous.’

  Carol turned away. ‘Next.’

  ‘Carol —’

  ‘I’m done with this so-called symptom. What else have you got?’

  ‘You’re quick to anger and your temper flares much more than it used to.’

  She burst out laughing. ‘And whose fault is that? You’ve pushed me into giving up drinking. Cold turkey. My whole system is screaming for a drink most of the time, especially running a case like this. Of course I’m short-tempered. It would be bloody amazing if I wasn’t.’

  Tony threw his hands up in frustration. ‘You were edgy long before I helped you get to grips with your alcohol dependency. I think you’ve been clinically depressed since Michael and Lucy died. Maybe even before that. But I’ve been too close to you to see it. Because you’re nearly OK when you’re with me. Being with me is a safe place for you because I always, always make it possible for you to behave exactly as you need to.’ His voice was raised now. ‘I’ve been your co-conspirator, Carol. Your enabler. I’ve greased the wheels for you. Because I love you, I have not been good for you.’

  The words spilling from his mouth silenced them both. He’d broken the unspoken understanding that there were things better left unsaid between them: that there existed bridges better left uncrossed for fear that what lay beyond might make it impossible to retreat. He looked away first. He always looked away first. Because she needed him to.

  ‘I think you’d better go.’ Carol’s voice was cold and hard. ‘There’s nothing more to be said.’

  68

  T

  he days trickled by and the ReMIT squad repeated the same actions for Eileen Walsh’s murder as they had for the previous two killings, with the same fruitless results. Carol spent most of her time bunkered down in her office, reading and rereading the reports that landed in the system. Stacey grew more frustrated with every passing hour when all the digital avenues she sent her bots down turned out to be dead ends. When Alvin came into the office, he couldn’t get out fast enough. Karim had begun to look haunted, his eyes hollow and his hair unkempt. Paula was interviewing Eileen Walsh’s workmates, a task that seemed endless because of the arcane shift patterns of the NHS. And nobody knew where Tony was. On the single occasion he’d turned up in the office, Carol had taken one look at him and walked straight out. ‘Like one of those weather prediction things,’ Paula said. ‘The little wooden houses with a man and a woman on the opposite ends of a stick, and when one goes out, the other goes in.’

  Kevin, in theory, had the most potentially productive task. He was supervising the surveillance teams tasked with watching Tom Elton’s every move. Two teams of two on six-hour shifts. On day one, Elton had gone to work, to lunch with a woman they’d identified as Carrie McCrystal, the owner of a chain of beauty salons, and to a late afternoon meeting in York, where he’d stayed for dinner before checking into a local hotel. Day two, he drove to Leeds where he had coffee with two men in business suits then drove back to Bradfield. The rest of the day in the office then to the pub across the street with a couple of people from the office. A single bottle of overpriced exotic beer, then home. No movement till morning when he’d driven to work, gone to lunch with a board member of Bradfield Victoria. After work, he’d gone bowling with a group of people from work. And that was all they knew because on Friday evening, the surveillance was pulled.

  The trouble had started with a phone call from John Brandon to Carol that morning. These days they didn’t even bother exchanging meaningless pleasantries. Brandon simply came straight to the point. ‘Are you making any concrete progress?’

  Carol squeezed the bridge of her nose in the hope it would ease the headache she’d had for two days. ‘It’s difficult,’ she said. ‘We’re dealing with someone who has a very high level of forensic awareness and is smart enough to stay beneath the radar.’

  ‘That would be a no, then?’

  ‘It’s slow.’

  She could hear him breathing. He wasn’t finding this easy. Good, because neither was she. ‘A significant part of the reasoning behind ReMIT was economies of scale,’ he said. ‘And you’ve got a full-scale surveillance operation – sixteen officer-shifts per day – on a man against whom you have, by your own admission, nothing, except a smattering of circumstantial evidence and a couple of coincidences.’

  ‘Elton’s good for it, sir. I know he is.’

  A sigh. ‘Good though your instinct is, Carol, I’ve got six chief constables breathing down my neck. They share the costs of your operations, you know that. And they’re squealing at what you’re doing to their budgets.’

  ‘We shouldn’t be putting a price on lives,’ she snapped.

  ‘Of course we shouldn’t. But we do it all the time. We have to. Fewer front-line officers, reclassifying certain crimes to make the crime stats look good, rationing forensic tests to the bare minimum. None of us wants to do the job like this but the politicians push us into a corner time and time again.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m under pressure from the chiefs to close down your surveillance on the grounds that it’s nothing more than a fishing expedition. That you’re trying to make the suspect fit the crime, not the other way round. And we all know how badly wrong that can go.’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ Carol protested.

  ‘Nevertheless. They wanted it stopped with immediate effect, but I have managed to buy you a little time. Might even be a reprieve. The senior prosecutor from the Bradfield CPS office is going to come over to Skenfrith Street this afternoon and go through what evidence you have. He’ll give his considered opinion as to whether this is proceeding in a direction that’s likely to lead to a prosecution. And based on that…’

  ‘So I’ve got, what? Four hours to find something?’

  ‘I’d say so. I’m sorry, Carol. It’s a shame your first official case had to prove such a difficult one to nail.’

  ‘Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of us? The difficult ones, the intractable ones
?’

  ‘I thought so. We’re not masters of our fate, Carol.’

  Oh yes, we can be, she thought as they wound up the call. She’d spent three days examining her decision from every angle, all the while waiting for Penny Burgess to cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war on her. She’d even thought about telling Brandon about the sword of Damocles hanging over her. But he couldn’t protect her from the press, and revealing something that might not even happen would only give the brass a reason to accelerate closing her down.

  Nothing had changed. If they didn’t stop Elton, other women would die. She was certain of that. Men like him didn’t stop until they were stopped. Without sufficient evidence to prosecute, there was only one option.

  Her weapon of choice would be a knife, she thought. A sharp kitchen knife, easy to conceal in her shoulder bag. Straight up under the ribs into the heart. Pull it out, a second stab to the guts. It wouldn’t be easy to overcome her residual ties to obedience of the law. But the act itself would be easy, she thought. She’d seen the end result too often to believe it was a complicated thing to do.

  And afterwards? She’d go to jail, obviously. Maybe, in the ultimate irony, she could get Bronwyn Scott to represent her. Just so long as nobody suggested she was suffering from diminished responsibility and got Tony in the witness box yammering on about PTSD. She had no desire to diminish her responsibility for what she was about to do. She’d face the consequences.

  Prison. A career cop, she’d have a rough ride. Except that killing a man who was victimising women might earn her some prestige. But not enough, she suspected. She’d be on the vulnerable prisoners’ wing, spending most of the time locked in her cell. That wouldn’t be so bad, all things considered. She could read, sleep, listen to the radio. She’s be housed, clothed, fed. Better off than the sixty per cent of the world’s population without access to toilets or clean water.

  Carol believed she could do it. She’d spent six months more or less on her own when she’d quit the job before. She’d stripped the barn of everything that Michael and Lucy had installed and rebuilt the interior from scratch. After that, she reckoned there wasn’t much she couldn’t get through. With luck and a compassionate judge, she’d be out in less than ten. Her life would be far from over. She could sell the barn, put the cash on deposit and buy somewhere new, start over when she got out.

  She’d miss the dog, though. She was damned if she’d ask Tony to take Flash, but she knew he’d offer and she’d let him. And he’d visit her. That was one thing she could be certain of.

  Really, none of this was insurmountable.

  Peter Trevithick, the CPS solicitor, had the slightly harried air of a man who has too much to do in the time available. He was in that middle period of a hard-pressed man’s life when his looks offered no clue as to where he sat between thirty-five and fifty-five. His suit was baggy and crumpled but his shirt was clean and pressed, his tie neat over the top button. He had the faint remains of a West Country accent but there was nothing rustic about his mind. Carol had worked with him a few times and she admired his analytical ability.

  ‘They want me to give you a bit of a doing over this investigation,’ he said, as soon as they were alone in her office. ‘But you knew that, right?’

  Carol nodded. ‘I know the answer they want you to come back with.’

  ‘Which is plainly different from the outcome you want.’ He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. ‘I have to be honest, Carol.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But I will try to lean in your direction. I know what a good copper you are. You don’t take the lazy or the obvious route. Unlike some of your colleagues. So, why don’t you take me through it from the beginning?’

  Which she did. Step by laborious step, dead end by frustrating dead end. He listened keenly and jotted indecipherably in a Moleskine notebook. When he was uncertain, he asked questions. Occasionally, he made comments but she had no clue which way he was going to jump.

  When she finally ground to a halt with an account of Eileen Walsh’s final day, he nodded sympathetically. ‘I entirely see why you think as you do,’ he said. ‘But as things stand, this is in no sense contestable by my department. There’s nothing to prosecute with. I’m so sorry, Carol. You know how we work these days – fifty per cent chance of success or nothing happens. As this stands, I’d give it about fifteen per cent if you had a jury who loved you.’ He looked genuinely miserable. ‘The bitch of it is that I actually think you’re right. He smells all wrong, this Tom Elton. But that’s not what your bosses want to hear.’

  ‘You’re going to recommend that they pull their officers off surveillance, right?’

  Trevithick nodded. ‘Nothing else for it, I’m afraid.’ He stood up and thrust his arms into his jacket. ‘But I tell you something, Carol. I’m bloody sure this isn’t going to be the last I hear of Tom Elton.’

  You have no idea how right you are. ‘Thanks, Peter. I’m sure this case will bring us back together, one way or another.’

  ‘I do hope so, Carol. Good luck with closing it down.’

  69

  P

  arking was always difficult on the quiet Halifax street where Vanessa Hill had chosen to live. It was a mix of detached houses from the thirties, post-war semis and a single row of terraced houses of indeterminate age. Not many of the houses had driveways wide enough for modern cars, so visitors struggled. It wasn’t a problem Tony had often had. He seldom visited his mother; she never visited him.

  But for once, he thought talking to her might be useful and so he had put to one side his deep distaste for the woman who had given birth to him but had chosen to sidestep the obligations of motherhood. Tony – ‘your little bastard’ – had mostly been raised by his autocratic and frequently violent grandmother while Vanessa had dedicated herself to getting on in the world. The fact that she had a child at all had often come as a shock to her colleagues and, later, her employees.

  Worse still, she had refused to tell him anything about his father. Tony had had no idea who his father had been until Edmund Arthur Blythe had died and left him his entire estate. A substantial house, a wedge of cash and the boat he now called home. Even then, Vanessa had tried to trick him out of his inheritance.

  To say the two were estranged would be to imply a greater emotional engagement than actually existed. The therapy Tony himself had undergone to enable him to treat others had left him with an understanding of his mother but no desire to include her in his life. He’d worked at a studied indifference and that was how he wanted to keep it.

  Then events beyond the control of either of them had placed them in each other’s path the best part of a year before. A killer seeking revenge on Tony had mistakenly thought he could hurt the son through the mother. He’d been wrong on both counts. Vanessa had proved herself infinitely better at inflicting damage than he was; and even if he had succeeded, Tony’s suffering would have been eminently bearable.

  The encounter had driven them no closer, but what Tony now knew of his mother had brought him to her door tonight. Vanessa had acted in self-defence, technically. But she had prepared for what might happen; she had considered an outcome where she’d had to take the law into her own hands. He wondered how that had gone, what it had felt like. What he might learn that would help Carol.

  He sat in his parked car, staring down the empty street, trying one more time to make sense of what Carol had seemed determined to do. Had she really meant it? He couldn’t be certain. There was a twisted logic to what she had said. She’d always been driven by the urge for justice. He’d been the beneficiary of that himself in the past. And Carol was right that if Penny Burgess published her story, her career was over. She might even face conspiracy charges herself.

  But to consider murder as a reasonable corollary to disgrace? That was the step he couldn’t follow. Either she had spoken wildly, with no intention of carrying it through, or else she must be ill. It was the only answer he could find. He
’d been blind to all the signs, but the more he thought about it, the more he’d grown convinced that she was suffering from PTSD. It wasn’t surprising, after all she’d been through herself, never mind what she’d witnessed.

  It would be no consolation to make that argument after the fact, however. Even if there was a raft of experts singing from the same hymn sheet, even if they persuaded a court that the balance of her mind had been disturbed, she’d still be branded a killer.

  Whatever she said to the contrary, he didn’t think Carol could live with that.

  Somehow he had to stop her. She’d placed herself at a distance from him to prevent him from doing precisely that. But he couldn’t let that continue. He had to put himself in a position where he could forestall what she had in mind. Whatever it took, he’d have to save Carol from herself.

  He looked up at his mother’s house. The curtains were drawn, but through a chink he could see the fluttering light of the television. Vanessa would be stretched out on her luxurious sofa, glass in hand, watching some TV drama, alone in a room designed for one. He’d come tonight to break the habit of a lifetime and seek something from her. He wanted to draw on her experience, to ask her what it had been like for her to kill someone. To slide a knife through flesh and feel the life drain from another human being.

  Even more than that, he wanted to know how she felt afterwards. He’d held a knife that someone else had been impaled on and he knew how he’d struggled to cope with the emotional fallout, even thought it had been a case of kill or be killed. But he was a scientist. He wanted more than a sample of one. And it wasn’t really something he could ask his patients, not for this purpose.

  But now that he was here, on the brink of that discovery, he found that he no longer wanted to know. What could Vanessa say that would have any relevance here? She was one of a kind, and whatever the aftermath of her exercise in self-defence, it could have no parallels now.