by Helen Fields
‘Oh holy shit, sir. Who’s done that?’ Tripp said, actually taking a step backwards before pulling himself together.
‘It’s been sent to the press,’ Callanach said. ‘I need an injunction to stop anyone from publishing either on paper or online, and I need it right now. And get a unit over to Mrs Swan’s house. Send Salter to look after her. She needs to be warned.’
‘So it’s not gone public yet then?’ Tripp asked.
‘Not yet,’ Callanach said, opening the third attachment and beginning to read.
‘So how did we get it, sir?’ Tripp said. Callanach glanced down at the mobile.
‘Tip-off,’ Callanach answered. ‘Now move. And find DI Turner. She needs to be aware of this too.’
Tripp ran from his office as Callanach continued to read.
‘Things you will need,’ was the title. ‘Ammonia inhalants’ was at the top of the list. Smelling salts. That was how she had continued to rouse Michael Swan from unconsciousness. ‘Surgical grade scalpel. Several pairs surgical gloves (these become bloody and slippery quickly). Rope. Cable ties. Industrial knife. Duct tape to minimise noise disturbance. One old librarian. One visionary.’
‘Vous devez être putain blague,’ Callanach whispered.
‘What?’ Ben asked.
‘I said, you have to be fucking kidding. I didn’t expect this. Can you trace it?’
‘No, but what I can tell you is that the same code was used on the Rory Hand email regarding membership to the darknet site,’ Ben said.
‘So the coordinates for the graffiti, the emailed photos from Michael Swan’s murderer and this latest email have all come from the same place. What the hell is that website, Ben?’ Callanach asked.
‘I don’t know yet. But if our application is successful we’ll be able to take a closer look. No way I can do any more before we’re given a password,’ Ben said.
As Ben spoke, Callanach clicked open the final document. It was a poem.
‘He spread his wings and flew for me,
My scarlet Swan, my gaping muse.
Sustained me with his love of life,
Enriched me with his plaintive tears.
I plunged his depths, erased his flaws,
They were skin-deep, they are no more.
Immortalised by this sweet blade,
A man, remembered, at my hand.’
‘I have to go,’ Callanach told Ben. His throat was hoarse.
Ben ended the call without saying anything else. He’d felt the same the first time he’d seen the documents.
This wasn’t your normal psycho. This was someone who had elevated themselves in their own mind as if they were above mere mortals, and those delusions were only going to get more powerful each time she killed.
Ben double-checked his CCTV. He had cameras set up in his hallway, looking out from above his window even though his apartment was on the upper floor, and a few recording internally. There were also motion sensors which would have alerted him during the day had anyone entered. He could see the plain-clothes police officers on the street. They changed each day, were in different vehicles, sometimes making the effort to pretend they were tradesmen, sometimes just sitting in a car reading a newspaper as if waiting to pick up a teenager from a date. But there was always someone watching. If they ever broke in, they wouldn’t like what they found.
He made himself an egg white omelette – once a Californian, always a Californian – and set an alarm that would wake him if the webmaster decided to make Rory Hand a member of his darknet club.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Moderator was tired. After a long day at work, he had returned home to find a to-do list from his wife pinned to the fridge. It included preparing her dinner (she only cooked at weekends, her days were now so lengthy), getting the washing out of the machine (primarily hers, which could not be tumble-dried because of the delicate fabrics) and changing the sheets on their bed (she had left the new bedding out for him, presumably so he didn’t choose the wrong colour). And he had work to do. There truly was no rest for the goddamned wicked.
And now the police were playing games, trying to out Sem Culpa by goading her into a stupid public display. She’d reacted in an entirely predictable way, albeit with more flair than the Moderator had foreseen. But Police Scotland wouldn’t be getting any more information than he chose to release. Everything he did was untraceable and he’d specifically banned site users from communicating directly with the press. If any of the users got caught, it would only take the handing over of passwords and the game would be over before it had served its purpose.
The Moderator emptied the washing machine first, hanging the clothes on the airer, letting them stay rumpled. If his wife wanted crisp linens, she could iron them when she deigned to get home. Dinner was risotto, shop-bought, although he’d put it into an oven dish, added some chicken and would pretend to have made it himself. With that in the oven (sod changing the sheets) he went into his study, shoving a chair under the door handle. There was no real danger of her coming home early, but it was the way of things that she would if he didn’t take precautions.
He logged in. Lots of site traffic today. Everyone so excited by Sem Culpa’s childish scribbles and dreadful poetry, made available to all the users at the same time they’d been released to the press. It only seemed fair. And Sem Culpa was entitled to rebut the reports suggesting her work had been bland and craft-less. The police may have set Sem Culpa up for their own ends, but they were also contributing nicely to the Moderator’s greater plan.
Even Grom was being substantially more exotic than with his previous kills. Crushing the nurse to death with her own chest of drawers had been brutal, and the strangulation of Emily Balcaskie had made the nation weep. But this abduction, keeping a horrified public (not too horrified to stop them wanting more details though) glued to their social media feed for updates, this was brilliant. Waiting not for her to be found, not for her to be freed. No – some truth-telling was overdue – they were waiting to see what shocking, faint-inducing, protest-spawning method of murder would be used to dispatch the lollipop lady.
The Moderator prepared a few more search engine entries, some articles, a blog and some newspaper references, then uploaded them. They would only hold their high positions in the search engine ranks for a very brief amount of time. It would be unhelpful if the subject of the articles came to too many people’s attention for too long. That done, he completed the membership access for a number of waiting applicants. The more the merrier, as long as they were the right kind of people. Each and every one helped fuel the fire of the necessary murders, and not one of them could run to the police without being conspirators. They were all trapped, and he alone knew every detail of their true identities. Finally he looked up an off-the-record home address that Grom had requested. Thank goodness for local government’s penny-pinching cyber security.
Finished, he walked around the house. They had not moved in long ago and it still had that sense of waiting to be filled up. They hadn’t created any of their own history here yet. But that would come. Not children. His wife professed to want them, but they had to be having sex once in a while for that to be possible. He suspected she thought she could order them and have them delivered to the door for all the effort she was putting in. Everyone else got a piece of her – her passion, her dedication, her attention. Just not him. He had his own dreams. Such a shame she’d never really appreciated his potential.
The front door opened as he reached the top of the stairs. It was already past eight in the evening and she walked in as if he just didn’t matter at all.
‘Hey honey, I’m back. Wow, dinner smells great. Have I time for a shower, love?’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Overbeck picked her nails. The tips were ragged with chipped nail varnish, the result of a childhood chewing habit which had recently made an unwelcome return. They’d been in perfect condition this morning, before another day of leaden progress and disappointin
g news. Then the Chief Superintendent had phoned. It had been one of those calls that felt like a professional game of snakes and ladders.
‘Detective Superintendent Overbeck,’ the CS had begun. Not her first name. First names were reserved for good news days. The first nail had slipped into the corner of her mouth and her teeth had begun doing their damage. ‘I hope this isn’t a bad time?’
‘No sir, not at all,’ she’d said.
‘Oh, that’s disappointing. I was hoping you’d be too busy to talk. Always signifies progress when you’re so tied up you can’t pick up the phone,’ he said, a smile in his voice keeping the tone light.
She moved on to her second nail. ‘Well, it’s not that we’re not making progress, sir, it’s just that …’
‘Excellent, I was hoping for some good news. When can we expect to see results?’
‘It’s not exactly a results scenario at the moment, it’s more that we are steadily continuing to follow up leads, sir,’ Overbeck had said.
‘Goodness me, we’re still at the following up leads stage?’ The third nail had taken its place in the biting line. ‘Do you need any help there?’
‘No, sir, I’ve got the investigation properly managed, but it’s kind of you to suggest …’
‘You don’t need help, but you can’t give me a positive progress report? That’s what I’ve always admired about you, Detective Superintendent Overbeck. Your independence,’ the Chief Superintendent said loudly. ‘I shall be sure to tell the board that you’ve refused help in spite of the offer being made. I’m sure they’ll all be as impressed as me.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Overbeck had said, her fourth nail tip in tatters. ‘Actually, I wanted to discuss the overtime restrictions.’
‘Yes, I know,’ the Chief Super cooed, ‘I think you’re doing a great job keeping on top of them. I know you’ll have it in hand and ensure that the costs are capped. Thank goodness we’ve got you in place to think in a businesslike manner about affordability in tandem with public safety. Good of you to reassure me about it. Progress report with an expected date of closure by the end of the week then, yes? I’m sure you’ve got that in hand already. And great job on keeping your face all over the publicity on this one. Always useful for the public to know who the buck stops with. Very responsible.’
And then he was gone, as were the ends of the nails on her right hand, and Overbeck was trying to grip onto the tail of an awfully slippery snake that wanted to deposit her at the bottom of a board she’d spent years playing. Piles of paperwork, endless phone calls, and three nicotine patches later she’d gone home. Several large gin and tonics after that and the state of her nails hadn’t seemed to matter quite so much.
Hangover notwithstanding, she’d risen early the next morning to repair her manicure damage. It was a new day. The Chief Superintendent wanted results and a scapegoat. Overbeck would provide him with one or the other, and the latter wasn’t going to be her.
The package was hanging from the letter box inside Superintendent Overbeck’s front door, evidently unnoticed from postal deliveries the day before. She snatched it as she left for work air-kissing her husband in the general area of his cheek (he didn’t want lipstick marks any more than she wanted her make-up messed up) and trod carefully in her stilettos. Their driveway was terribly pot-holed. She’d asked her husband several times to have it seen to, but still nothing had been done. There were days when she thought that if she weren’t on top of things, he would literally die in his study reading a newspaper, or whatever it was he did in there for hours on end.
The package was marked to Ms Overbeck with their address printed on it. It was roughly the size of a packet of cigarettes, wrapped in brown parcel paper. Bloody postal worker couldn’t even be bothered to push things through properly these days. She threw it on the seat of her car, cursing the pigeons nesting in the trees along her driveway. If they weren’t dispatched soon, her paintwork would be ruined.
It wasn’t a long drive to the police station but it was enough to have her swearing by the time she arrived. What was it with people who couldn’t operate their indicators? And as for the women who let their children run up and down pavements unchecked so you had to crawl past, constantly waiting for the fateful dash into the road, well, she had long since reserved a special place in bad-parenting hell for them.
Overbeck had watched and re-watched the press conference from the previous evening online. At last there had been a break with the information about Lott and Balcaskie’s killer’s nationality, although the result would inevitably be policing some anti-immigrant rally. This case would make or break her, and the latter wasn’t an option she was prepared to consider.
Leaving her car parked across two spaces, Overbeck marched towards her office. The first item on her agenda was an update on the lollipop lady abduction. She’d been notified that Julia Stimple’s daughter had been located when she’d turned up at her mother’s flat expecting to share a pizza with her. How in this day and age people didn’t either turn on the TV, switch on a radio or read the news online was almost unbelievable, but apparently the forty-year-old had been enjoying a day’s shopping in Glasgow and turned everything off, including her mobile.
No doubt the media would make the most of that, bleeding hearts dry with the retelling of the daughter’s shock, seeing her mother’s doorway sealed with crime scene tape, staring through the broken wood at the chaos and desecration within. It was almost worthy of a movie. And if that fancy piece of ass, Callanach, didn’t get his French butt in gear soon, there would be Oscar nominations for the director who had the balls to dramatise the tale of Edinburgh’s worst killing spree in modern history. Overbeck didn’t like Callanach. It was personal, she was big enough to accept that. She’d had her own man she’d wanted to push into the Detective Inspector opening last year, but strings were pulled. A word was whispered into the right ear, no doubt a couple of meals were purchased, and up popped the man with the golden accent. Interpol were no doubt glad to get rid of him after the rape allegation. Not that she believed he’d done it. Her experience of men who looked like Callanach was that they were way too arrogant to bother raping anyone. If you didn’t fall on your back with your legs open, they simply assumed you were gay. It was exactly why she had married so wisely. Her husband might be plain-looking, even dull company, but he was safe and unthreatening.
Overbeck slung her bag on her desk.
‘Liz, black tea with lemon. I’m gasping,’ she shouted at her assistant. The package fell out of her bag. Probably another free sample. She’d been plagued with them since spending a weekend at a spa and signing up for a variety of useless treatments. The only thing that ever seemed to make her look less frazzled was valium. The mirror was less offensive when she’d swallowed one of those.
Picking up a silver letter opener, she cut the tape holding the parcel together. Inside was a second layer of wrapping. Whatever it contained was so small it hardly seemed worth the effort of sending. Presumably that meant the product was over-priced as well as useless. She got through to the final layer of wrapping, kicking her shoes off under the desk and leaning to see if her assistant was fetching her tea yet. No, still playing with emails.
‘Liz, tea now!’ She wasn’t really supposed to speak to her staff like that, but Jesus, did she have to give every command twice? And who the hell was going to complain? Everyone was scared shitless of her.
Overbeck peered at the thing in her hand. It was grey, with a hard upper edge, and a brown substance crusted on the bottom.
‘Oh, holy fucking fuck! Liz, get off that frigging computer and get forensics up here! And get me Detective Inspector Callanach. If he’s not here in the next two minutes, tell him he’s bloody well fired!’ Chair legs scraped the floor and heels clacked staccato down the corridor. Overbeck stared at the half finger that she’d dropped onto her update to the Chief Constable, typed and ready for signature. Now out of date already.
Inside the final layer of tissue paper ha
d been a note with a single word printed on it. It sat in the centre of her prized and polished walnut desk. A desk she’d paid to have brought in, those she’d been offered by Police Scotland hardly the sort of furniture she wanted to stare at day after day.
Callanach appeared in her doorway.
‘Stay there,’ Overbeck instructed. ‘No one comes in until forensics are done.’
‘What is that?’ Callanach asked, his eyes on the organic lump on her desk.
‘It’s the end of someone’s finger, Callanach, and it came with a note.’ She pointed at the scrap of paper without touching it. ‘Technically, it says “piecemeal”, but the real message is a massive “screw you!” Get a team to my house. The parcel was put through my front door.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Callanach said.
‘Then find this motherfucker. Not only does he have my home address, he’s planning to serve us slivers of lollipop lady for lunch and supper!’
Chapter Thirty-Four
Callanach delegated Overbeck’s instructions to his squad then bolted to his office, locking the door and dialling Ben’s mobile. No answer. He’d be at work by now, probably stuck in meetings discussing yesterday’s police visit and the amount of work CyberBallista required to repair their corporate reputation.
There was no way Callanach could risk going back to CyberBallista’s offices. DCI Edgar’s men had followed him before, and now a complaint had been made to Overbeck. They’d recognise Lance, too, after taking photos of Callanach and Ben entering the journalist’s home. And Tripp had been on Edgar’s team. Not many options left.