by Val McDermid
She laughed. ‘Well, that much is true.’ Her voice softened. ‘But there’s no need to apologise. I’ve got no romantic interest in George.’
He wanted to sigh with relief. Instead, one side of his mouth twisted up in a half-smile and he swung round and walked back to the kitchen. Sometimes there was no need to have the last word.
Stacey Chen was beginning to feel as if she was drowning. It hadn’t taken her long to hack her way into the official accounts of Kate Rawlins’ suicide, the ongoing investigation into Jasmine Burton’s presumed suicide and the later addition to the roster – the gas explosion that had killed Daisy Morton. As well as the formal documents, she’d accessed the emails of individual officers, filling in some of the blanks of what they’d pursued and why they’d pursued it. Text messages would take longer and even Stacey had to acknowledge she might not manage to get them. She’d punted everything straight on to Paula so she could pull a report together for Carol Jordan that cut out all the repetition and white noise.
Now came the hard stuff. Which was also the interesting stuff. She’d started with Kate Rawlins, chronologically the first of the three. Gaining access to her social media accounts hadn’t been hard. The password was Madison, her daughter’s name, and the year of her birth. Stacey couldn’t understand why people chose passwords that wouldn’t fool a drunken teenager. When she voiced this opinion, her colleagues always complained that it was too hard to remember random strings of letters and numbers. ‘So use your car registration as the basis for your password,’ she would tell them, not bothering to hide her exasperation. ‘You should be able to remember that. Add something to it like the number of the house where you lived when you were ten, and Robert is your father’s brother.’
What was staggering was the volume of abusive messages that had filled her timelines and home pages. Tracking down everyone who had posted was a huge task, even with the automatic programs Stacey had at her disposal to find individual IP addresses and the associated service providers. Getting through the service providers’ security systems to the names of individuals was generally a lot more difficult, even with the accumulated data she’d acquired over the years. She debated whether to go through the posts and focus only on the worst of them, but dismissed the idea. There was no way she could do that objectively and if it wasn’t objective, it wasn’t worth doing. One person’s traumatic was another person’s trivial, and vice versa.
Once she’d set those searches in motion, she turned to email. Kate’s email address wasn’t one that could readily be guessed so Stacey didn’t expect to find messages from her harasser there, but if Kate had had any unsettling encounters there was a chance she’d have told a friend or a colleague. Once she’d penetrated her email account, she shipped the whole lot on to her own server, setting it to one side to work through later.
She’d repeated the process for the other two women, then finally settled down to fillet the emails for anything that might be relevant. She’d barely started the tedious trawl when Sam’s face swam into view on the security camera screen. ‘Hi, babe,’ his voice squawked from the speaker. ‘I come bearing salted caramel truffles.’ His face was replaced by a cellophane bag of chocolates.
‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ Stacey said as she buzzed him in. She was torn; she still felt her heart contract when he walked into a room, but she was gripped by the challenge of the hunt and she didn’t want to stop now.
She met him at the door and her misgivings swam away on the tide of rising hormones that swept through her when he pulled her close and kissed her, one hand running across the back of her neck, making her tingle. ‘I missed you,’ he said. His voice was thickened with alcohol; she tasted stale wine on his breath. She knew him well enough now to see he’d had a drink, but was a long way from drunk.
‘It’s Tuesday. You usually go to the pub quiz and stay at your place,’ Stacey said, snuggling close as she pulled him inside the flat.
‘Pete and Rick are both out of town,’ he said, pulling the door closed behind him and freeing himself so he could shrug out of the navy cashmere overcoat she’d bought him after she’d heard him admiring it in the window of Harvey Nick’s. ‘There didn’t seem much point with just me and Mitch. So I thought I’d give you the pleasure of my company.’
‘And it’s lovely to see you. But you’re going to have to amuse yourself for a while because I have something I need to work on.’
Sam pouted, giving her his best kicked-puppy look. ‘And here was me thinking you’d be pleased to see me.’
‘I am. Very pleased.’ She ran a hand up the inside of his thigh and he shivered. ‘But you have to let me work for a while.’
He gave a theatrical sigh and crossed to the giant plasma screen TV that dominated the end wall of the living space, tossing his jacket over a chair as he went. ‘I’ll watch the football, then.’
Perfect, Stacey thought. She poured him a glass of wine and retreated to her workspace, putting on her noise-cancelling headphones to cut out the frantic wittering of the football commentary. She began winnowing Kate Rawlins’ email, efficiently getting rid of everything that wasn’t a personal exchange. Once she’d done that, she sidelined everything written or received before Kate had made her pronouncement about rapists then started the tedious business of reading them. She was so engrossed that she didn’t realise Sam was looking over her shoulder till he touched her arm. She pulled off the headphones and frowned up at him. ‘Do you need something?’
‘I need you,’ he said, leaning down to kiss her ear. ‘The football’s finished and I am more interesting than some stranger’s email. What are you doing, anyway? Don’t you have grunts in the office for this kind of thing? And why are you doing it at home?’
Stacey sighed. With anyone else, she’d tell them to piss off and mind their own business. With Sam, she wouldn’t have risked that, even if she’d wanted to. ‘Because it’s a foreigner. I’m doing a favour for Paula,’ she said. She understood enough not to risk Sam’s irritation by invoking Carol. ‘If it was official, of course I’d be able to hand it off to a junior officer to free me up for the things that needed my skillset. But there’s nobody to dump on here so I have to do it.’
‘Why can’t Paula do her own grunt work?’ he grumbled.
‘Because she’s got other fish to fry.’ Stacey tried to focus on her screen but it was hard when Sam was playing with her hair.
‘So have you.’
Stacey sighed. She knew when she was beaten. And besides, what Sam was offering was a lot more appealing than a dead woman’s gossip. It wasn’t as if there was anything urgent there.
And there was definitely something urgent here.
22
Halifax Magistrates’ Court looked like an unfortunate collision between a Victorian town hall and an Italian military academy, complete with a tall, square campanile towering above the entrance. The pale sandstone seemed to glow from within in the morning sun as Carol and Tony arrived far too early that Wednesday morning. In spite of Tony’s insistence that she should have a solicitor to plead in mitigation, she had refused. ‘There’s no point. It’d be a complete waste of money. I’m screwed, Tony, and no matter how aggrieved I feel, there is no defence.’ That had been her last word on the subject.
Tony found a car park a couple of streets away and they sat in silence for a moment, both staring out of the windscreen. ‘We’ve got time to find somewhere for a coffee,’ he said. It was the first thing out of either of their mouths other than directions since they’d left the barn.
‘I think I’d throw up.’ She clamped her mouth shut, the muscles along her jaw bunching tight beneath her skin. She’d worked wonders with make-up. It made him wonder how much she’d been covering up during all the years of drinking when he’d seldom seen her look as haggard as she deserved. She’d dressed carefully too. A loose-fitting navy gabardine jacket over a high-collared shirt, smartly pressed grey tweed trousers, low heels. She looked like someone who should be taken seriously b
ut not high enough up the wealth ladder to be punished for it.
‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ Tony asked.
Carol looked around. Drab and dirty Victorian buildings housed pound shops, charity shops and cheap takeaways. Occasional grim concrete frontages broke up the vista like old amalgam fillings in a mouth of discoloured and decaying teeth. ‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘It’s not exactly going to lift my spirits, is it? Even on a sunny day it looks like it’s been shot in black and white.’
And so they waited. There was nothing he could say that would make things better. Some therapist, he thought. The man who was paid to fix the broken people, exposed for the fraud he probably was. All his working life, he’d been held up as the expert in empathy, the one who knew how to stand inside other people’s skin and report back on what they felt and why they felt it. And every time, Carol Jordan proved how wrong the world was.
The minutes crawled like parasitic worms under his skin until eventually it was a respectable time to show up at court. Carol pressed her fingertips against her forehead and screwed her eyes shut. Then she straightened up. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.
They walked the short distance side by side, steps rhyming like a Leonard Cohen song. Tony tried not to think about what lay ahead, focusing instead on the other lives on the street: youths in hoodies and trainers with the crotches of their jeans halfway down their thighs; elderly women with shampoo-and-sets and tartan shopping trolleys; men with big bellies and cheap jeans smoking outside the betting shop; women pushing prams, their youth buckling under the weight of their make-up; and everywhere, people yammering or stabbing at their mobiles, more interested in someone else, somewhere else. Nobody like him. He’d never fitted in and the passage of time was making no difference to that. For years, Carol had been the only person who had made him feel he belonged. And then she had walked away from him. Now, Paula had made him part of her family and that mattered. But not as much as the prospect of fixing things with Carol.
Inside the court building, neither of them knew where to go, what to do. The time they’d both spent in courtrooms had been on the other side of the fence. There had always been someone available to shepherd them through unfamiliar places. Tony spotted a woman shielded by a high curved desk and a computer screen. He approached, Carol at his shoulder. ‘Excuse me. My friend is appearing before the magistrates this morning. Where should she go?’
The woman barely glanced at them. She looked like a victim of gravity; everything about her tended downwards, from the angled fold of skin above her eyes, through the sagging cheeks to the defeated shoulders. ‘Name?’
‘Carol Jordan.’
She tapped at a keyboard. At once, her attitude changed. Her eyebrows jerked upwards and her eyes opened wide. She looked at Carol, then back at the screen. ‘It says here you have to go up to the first floor. To conference room two. I don’t understand that. That’s not a court. But that’s what it says here. “Carol Jordan. Please direct to conference room two.” Well. I’ve never seen that before.’
Tony exchanged a worried look with Carol. She simply shrugged and set off towards the stairs. He followed in her wake, even more uneasy than he had been earlier.
Conference room two was near the head of the staircase. They paused outside. Carol shrugged again and muttered, ‘Nothing ventured.’ She knocked briskly, and a muffled voice told them to come in. She gave him one last anxious look then turned the handle.
The only person in the wood-panelled room rose to his feet as they entered. He inclined his head to Carol, then to Tony. ‘Nice to see you both,’ John Brandon said. As he settled back down, all Tony could think was that the modern plastic chairs and pale Scandinavian wood table were both at odds with their setting. Shock would do that, he thought, recovering himself. He should have worked it out on the way upstairs. If he’d thought about it, John Brandon would have been in the top three guesses as to who might be in the room. He glanced at Carol. Her face had closed down, unreadable.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you today,’ she said, her voice neutral.
‘No, I don’t suppose you were,’ Brandon said, his lugubrious face breaking into a smile.
‘Not that I’m not pleased to see you. But why are you here?’ Carol pulled out a chair opposite Brandon and sat down. Tony hovered for a moment, then chose a seat between the two of them, on the third side of the table. In case an umpire became necessary.
Brandon leaned back in his chair. ‘Think of me as your fairy godmother. If you want to take a chance on what I’m offering, all of this unpleasantness will go away.’
‘What do you mean, “go away”? It was a righteous arrest. I’ve gone through the system. Been processed and spat out at the other end. How can that go away? It’s all on the record.’
Brandon fiddled with his watch strap. He wasn’t as comfortable with this as he wanted them to think, Tony decided. ‘Carol has a point,’ he said. ‘It’s not like nobody knows what happened to her. The police are gossip central, you know that.’
Brandon nodded graciously. ‘Of course I do. That’s why the news that Carol was tested with a faulty breathalyser machine will also spread like wildfire. Carol and three other people who were also victims of the wrongly calibrated breathalyser will all have their arrests quashed. No further action.’ He paused, then said, ‘If you agree to what we want from you.’
Tony imagined Carol felt as stunned as he did but she showed nothing. ‘Whatever it is, you must want it very badly to be willing to pervert the course of justice, John. I always had you down as an honest copper.’
Brandon winced. ‘That’s how I like to think of myself, Carol. But what we have in mind for you is more important than making a criminal of you over this.’
‘I was driving under the influence of alcohol. I could have killed someone.’ There was no defiance in her voice, merely a bald statement of fact.
‘You drove for less than three miles on an empty country road. I’ve seen you drinking, and I suspect that at that level of blood alcohol, you were driving perfectly adequately.’ Brandon shrugged and spread his hands. ‘It’s right down the bottom of the scale.’
‘It’s still a criminal offence.’
Brandon sighed. ‘Do you want to martyr yourself, Carol? Or do you want to play your one and only get-out-of-jail-free card?’
‘You say there are three other people caught up in this?’
Brandon nodded. ‘Arrested by the same officers in the course of their shift.’
‘So they’ll all have had second breathalysers and possibly blood tests that back up what happened out there at the roadside,’ she said.
Brandon looked as if he wasn’t quite sure where she was headed with that. ‘Yes.’
‘And you think they’re not going to think it’s a bit strange for the charges to be dropped because the first breathalyser was faulty? Fruit of the poisoned tree isn’t a legal principle in this country, unless they’ve changed the law since I was working the streets.’
Brandon shrugged. ‘You know it’s the CPS policy not to pursue cases unless there’s a fifty per cent chance of success. And the faulty first breath test opens up the gates for the hip-flask defence.’
‘Can we back up a minute?’ Tony butted in. ‘What’s the fruit of the poisoned tree? And what’s this hip-flask defence?’
Carol waved a hand at Brandon to indicate he had the floor. ‘Fruit of the poisoned tree is an American legal principle that mostly applies to searches. If the search isn’t legal, nothing you get from it can be produced as evidence. And anything that stems from it, you have to be able to prove you came at it from a different route. What Carol’s saying is that even if the first breath test wasn’t accurate, she thinks the subsequent one at the police station will stand.’
‘And won’t it?’
Carol shook her head. ‘The hip-flask defence is where I say, “Oh, your worship, I was so shocked and stunned at the breath test that I had to take a swig from the hip flask in my handbag while
I was in the back of the police car on the way to the station. And that’s why the second test was over the limit.”’
‘Do people actually get away with that?’
Brandon nodded. ‘There’s precedent. So the CPS can legitimately say the wheels could come off these cases very expensively so let’s not bother. And if anybody asks, we can provide that as a legitimate excuse.’
Tony held his breath for what felt like an impossible length of time before Carol spoke. ‘So what’s the big deal to make all this worth fixing?’
‘You come back into harness.’
‘I won’t work for James Blake again.’ It was obviously a red line, not a bargaining chip.
Brandon smiled, his mouth a wry curve. ‘You won’t have to. This is something quite different.’
Before he could say more, she cut across him. ‘The last time you dragged me back into the ranks, it didn’t go well. I lost one officer and came close to losing another.’
Brandon sighed. ‘Nobody’s more aware of that than I am. But between the two of you, you’ve saved a lot of lives too. And that’s why you’re held in such high regard. Why you’re the one and only person in the frame for this job. What I’m offering you is the chance to run a free-standing Major Incident Team. You’d hand-pick your officers. You’d be on standby to pick up murders, serious sexual assaults and the like over six distinct forces here in the North.’ He leaned down and picked up a computer bag. From it he drew a file. He flicked it open and spread a map out on the table. It showed the force areas of Bradfield Metropolitan Police and five others across the North of England, from East Yorkshire to Cumbria. ‘The Home Office has chosen these forces as a test-bed for this because they already share scenes of crime teams and forensic services. You’d be in charge of high-level investigations with a core team who would call on local CID and uniform for back room support.’