by Val McDermid
‘There was no byline on the story,’ Stacey said. ‘I’ve noticed that sometimes these days on stories that pose potential problems for news organisations. It’s as if they think they might come under attack and they’re trying to make it as hard as possible for anybody to track things through the site.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Say you’re a newspaper and I crack your security and get inside your site. I don’t want to be in there any longer than I absolutely have to be because you might have the kind of suspicious IT person who sets up tripwires against incursions like mine. So if I have the name of the person who wrote the story I’m trying to get to the back door of, I have a very direct starting point. I can go to the journalist’s home on the server and, with luck, I can access all their notes and the evidence trail on the story. But if I don’t have that starting point, I have to try to backtrack from the finished copy as it appears on the screen and try to get to that information the hard way. And that takes time. Time that I might not have if they’re any good.’
Paula nodded. ‘Right. I see what you mean.’
Stacey ran a hand through her hair, pushing it behind her ears. ‘And now you’re going to say, “So can you do it, Stacey?”’ Her smile was ironic and without warmth. ‘Can I do it for Carol?’
Paula felt wrong-footed. This wasn’t the usual script. There was generally nothing Stacey liked more than a devilishly hard conundrum. Set her Mission Impossible and she was like a dog with two tails. ‘So, can you do it, Stacey?’ Paula raised her arms, bent at the elbows like a begging dog, and laid on her best pleading look.
Stacey smiled, apparently in spite of herself. ‘I’ll see what I can do. But I’m warning you, I’ve already got a mountain of work with the suicides. You wouldn’t believe the amount of crap those women had dumped on them. Every time I step away from the screens I feel like I need a shower. It’ll make a pleasant change to be dealing with journalists. The kind of sleazebags I’m used to.’
‘That’s good. Because we need to nail whoever is trying to sink this operation. It’s not just Carol who’s going to be holed below the waterline if we don’t put a stop to it. We’re all in the same boat now, Stacey. It’s sink or swim for all of us.’
38
Sunday morning started gradually before the sun forced its way through the cloud layer and splashed the city with pink and gold. It was a light that flattered even a Northern Victorian metropolis like Bradfield, making the Minster Canal Basin almost picture-postcard pretty. Tony Hill stood on the roof of his narrowboat, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his padded jacket, eyes on the near horizon of renovated mills and brick kilns.
It had been a challenging passage of hours since Carol had pitched up in anguished desperation the day before. He was proud of her for not hiding her need, for not driving to the supermarket and loading up with booze, for not holing up in the barn and drinking the humiliation and anger into submission. Coming to him had been the brave thing to do. And it had cost her. Admitting any kind of failing had never been Carol’s way. Failure had always been the spur to do better.
For Tony, her arrival had provoked a mixture of happiness and anguish. He was pleased to be the one she’d turned to when she couldn’t carry the weight herself. But seeing her so unlike herself had been difficult. He was accustomed to the torment of others; he saw it every day in his clinical practice, and the empathy he felt for his patients was often the first step on the journey of healing and possible redemption. But it was easy to afford empathy when you weren’t emotionally engaged with the person suffering. He didn’t have that luxury with Carol.
But they’d made it. She’d showed him the story that had triggered her emotional storm, and he’d shared her rage and despair. They’d talked about what it meant to her and what it might mean to the opinions of others. They’d discussed and tested out various strategies for dealing with the fallout. He’d made innumerable cups of tea and coffee and had a takeaway delivered from their favourite curry house in Temple Fields. They’d walked right out of the city along the canal towpath and called a taxi to bring them back.
By ten, they were exhausted. Carol leaned her head in her hands and said, ‘I should be going home.’
‘What’s the point? We’re meeting the team here tomorrow, and you’re knackered. It’s daft to drive all the way home only to come back in the morning. Stay here, you know you’re welcome.’
‘What about the dog?’
‘She’s welcome too.’
‘That’s not what I mean. She’s never spent the night away from the barn. And I don’t have any food for her.’
Tony made great play of leaning down to check out Flash, who was stretched out under the table between their feet, fast asleep. ‘Oh yes, because she obviously can’t settle. I’ll walk up to the all-night grocery store and buy a tin of dog food. It won’t kill her to eat like the proletariat for once.’
Carol sighed. ‘There’s only one cabin. And it’s your bedroom.’
‘I’ve got a sleeping bag. You can stretch out here on the banquette, it’s designed to be an extra berth.’
Carol looked at the banquette dubiously. ‘I’m struggling with that.’
‘The back cushions are on rails. They push up and back to cover the windows and give you extra width. Arthur designed half the gadgetry on this boat to his own spec. It does work. If you’re dubious about it, I’ll sleep here and you can have the cabin.’
And so it had been settled. Carol on the banquette, dog at her feet, Tony in his own cabin a few metres away. At first he’d thought he wouldn’t be able to settle with her so close, and in his own space. But the emotional sturm und drang of the day had depleted more of his energies than he’d realised, and within minutes of turning out the light, he was drawn into deep sleep. When he finally woke after the best sleep he’d had in months, he lay wondering what had roused him, then realised it was the sliding of the roof hatch.
He emerged a few minutes later to discover the sleeping bag neatly rolled up, the banquette restored and the saloon empty. On the table lay a note scribbled on a paper bag. ‘Gone for run with Flash. Back soon.’
Glad she hadn’t woken mortified and driven to escape, he’d pulled on a jacket and climbed out on to the roof, drinking in the cool morning air, scanning the environs of the canal basin in the hope of catching a glimpse of Carol and Flash. The ruins of the minster looked spectacular in the low-angled light, but he had no interest in its beauty. The human scale had always been what interested him.
In between keeping watch, he checked his phone to see whether the Sentinel Times story had been picked up by other media. With a sinking heart, he saw it had found its way into the tabloids, though none of them had made a huge drama out of it. Probably worried about the potential for libel. He sighed, and turned back to his vigil. Eventually, his patience was rewarded. Two dark shapes on the distant towpath resolved themselves into detective and dog. They’d be back in time to have breakfast before the rest of the team pitched up. Tony wasn’t quite sure how they were all going to fit into the narrowboat, but it was only a one-off. By tomorrow they’d have their new offices in Skenfrith Street up and running.
An hour later, they started to arrive. Paula was first, hugging a stiff-backed Tony as she greeted him on the quayside. ‘Is she OK?’
‘She’s holding together. It was touch and go, though.’
‘I’m fucking furious. Stacey’s on the hunt for the mole. God help them when we find out who it is.’
‘Yeah. There’s coffee inside, Carol’s here already.’
Kevin and Alvin drove into the car park one after the other. Judging by their body language, Kevin was bringing Alvin up to speed with the media shitstorm. Alvin’s hands bunched into fists and he barrelled down the quayside looking like he wanted someone to hit. ‘Do we know who did this?’ he demanded.
‘No, not yet. And we’re not going to talk about it today,’ Tony said firmly.
Stacey brought up the rear,
laptop and tablet under her arm, face blank as a whiteboard when Tony asked her what progress she’d made. ‘Not a lot,’ she said, gesturing to him to lead the way below.
It was a tight fit, but they managed. The three women along the banquette, Tony in his leather swivel chair, Kevin and Alvin leaning against the galley countertops. Flash had retreated to the stern, sitting alert and fascinated at the life of the basin.
Carol kicked the session off. ‘We started this inquiry as nothing more than an exercise. Tony’s propensity for spotting clusters of connected events came up with some slightly unexpected suicides who had been the victims of vicious online bullying. We took a closer look and we found a very bizarre link. At each of the death scenes, there was a book. Or the remains of one. Two collections of poetry and one essay. The writers had all committed suicide themselves and in broadly the same way as the women we’re looking at. And obviously there could be others that we haven’t found yet. It’s starting to look a lot like a pattern.’
‘And if it’s a pattern, they’re not straightforward suicides,’ Tony said. It was as if there had been no interruption to the smooth flow of the MIT briefings. Everyone had slipped straight back into their old patterns.
Carol nodded. ‘Thanks to the preliminary interviews we’ve done with people who were close to the victims, we can say with a degree of certainty that none of them was a fan of these particular writers. So there is some kind of significance in the presence of these texts at the crime scenes.’
‘Unless there’s been some secret collusion between the women – which makes no sense at all – leaving the books behind tells us there’s somebody else involved, surely?’ Paula cut straight to the heart of what they were all thinking.
‘Exactly,’ Tony said. ‘The question is, precipitation or active participation?’
Alvin stirred, folding his arms across his chest. ‘You’re going to have to put that in words of one syllable for me.’
‘You’ll get the hang of his cryptic crossword announcements,’ Kevin said. ‘He likes to baffle us with science.’
Tony looked hurt. ‘I don’t mean to, I’m sorry. I don’t always explain myself well.’
‘You’re so used to things being blindingly obvious to you that you forget we’re a few beats behind you,’ Carol said. ‘Now tell us what you mean.’
Tony rubbed his hands over his head, screwing his face up in frustration with himself. ‘I’m sorry. The question is whether the perpetrator is acting at a distance, pushing the women into a corner where they feel the only thing they can do is take their own lives, or whether he – or she – is taking an active role in their deaths.’
‘You mean, actually murdering them?’ Alvin asked.
‘Well, technically, talking them into it would also be murder, I think. But yes, I mean actually taking an active part.’
‘How would that work?’ Paula chipped in.
‘I’m not sure,’ Tony admitted. ‘Maybe using date-rape drugs to take control of their actions? You’d get away with something like GHB that wouldn’t show up on a post-mortem tox screening because it breaks down so quickly. That would get round how Daisy Morton suffocated herself with natural gas, for example. Because if you were trying to do that to yourself, I suspect you’d pass out before you succeeded. And it was such a weird thing to do when there are so many other, easier, more straightforward ways to commit suicide.’
Alvin nodded slowly, unfolding his arms and leaning back against the countertop. ‘And he could have walked Jasmine Burton into the water then walked straight back out again. It makes a kind of warped sense.’
‘Given the available evidence, it makes more sense than the theory of pushing them into it from a distance,’ Stacey said. ‘I’ve been through most of the online attacks, and while there are a few that say things like “I hope you get cancer and die”, or “women like you don’t deserve to live”, I didn’t see anything that looked like a concerted campaign to undermine someone to the point of suicide.’
‘What we seem to be saying is that if we accept there is a connection between these deaths, we should work on the presumption that the perpetrator was there at the end?’ Carol said, summing up. The others nodded, grunted, mumbled assent. ‘In that case, we need to go back and look at each of these cases. We have to use our new over-arching MIT status to ask all the investigative teams to revisit the cases and see if we can find any witnesses who saw a third party at what we’re going to designate as crime scenes. So, did anyone see someone in wet clothes around the estuary area on the night Jasmine died? Was anyone spotted coming out of Kate Rawlins’ house or garage at the crucial time? Did the neighbours see anyone hanging around Daisy Morton’s house on the day of the explosion?’
‘They’re going to love us,’ Kevin said. ‘Surely we won’t have jurisdiction to get the Met or Devon and Cornwall to help us out?’
‘We’ll ask politely, like we would have done when we were part of BMP. And if they drag their heels, I’ll get Brandon to pull strings for us.’
Tony caught a fleeting look of dismay pass between Paula and Stacey. He imagined they were thinking John Brandon had already pulled enough strings for Carol. ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that,’ he said repressively. ‘You’ll just have to ask very charmingly. There is another line of approach, of course.’
Carol made a gesture with her hand to indicate he should roll out his thinking. ‘Come on then, don’t keep us in suspense.’
He had to admit to himself that he enjoyed the eager anticipation on their faces as they looked to him for insight. ‘He’s not going to stop at this point. Not when he’s beginning to get the hang of it and before he’s made whatever point he’s aiming for.’ He frowned. ‘And that’s something I’m going to have to think about. What’s this all about, ultimately? But in the meantime, we have to be aware he’s trawling for other victims. If we can identify who they might be, we might be able to intervene. That way we save a life and we stop him. Two for the price of one.’
‘That’s easy to say,’ Paula grumbled. ‘But how do we do that when we don’t know what he’s trying to achieve?’
‘We have to ask ourselves the question: why these particular women? What is it about them that meets his criteria?’
‘So, what do we know about them?’ Carol asked.
‘They’ve all got a public profile,’ Kevin said. ‘They’re not mega, but they have an audience already who support the kind of things they say.’
‘They’re all grown-ups too,’ Paula added. ‘They’re not teenagers. In a way, they’re not easy victims. They’ve presumably had to develop a bit of a thick skin to be doing what they’re doing in the world.’
‘So they’re a bit of a challenge,’ Carol said.
‘But it’s important to silence them.’ Tony’s fingers fidgeted, as if he longed for a whiteboard to scribble on. ‘That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He’s silencing women who have an audience to whom they say things that he finds unpalatable.’
‘What they say? It’s feminist.’ Unusually within a brainstorming session, Stacey butted in. ‘I’ve looked at their online history and it’s not random rants. They’re criticising the behaviour of men but they’re doing it in explicitly feminist terms. So whoever is doing this, I’d say they have an issue with women who speak out for women.’
‘Good point,’ Tony said.
‘I think it’s a man,’ Alvin said. ‘I know there are plenty of women out there who don’t support feminists being vocal about what they believe, but for a woman to be taking this kind of action, she’d have to be pretty far out there. And these murders have taken such careful planning and execution, if you were that disturbed you wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Whereas, for a man, this way of thinking would be much easier to hold in your head as reasonable behaviour. Like you were doing the right thing, the manly thing.’
There was a moment’s silence as they all digested what the new boy had said, then nods and smiles broke out. ‘That makes sense,’
Tony said.
‘It does,’ Carol said.
‘Do we know anything about the writers whose books he’s leaving behind? Like, why them in particular?’ Kevin asked.
‘I looked online,’ Tony said. ‘And I spoke to one of the English lecturers at the university. According to her, they’re all writers who have been embraced by the feminist movement, even though they might not necessarily have self-identified as feminist.’
‘That’s helpful to know,’ Carol said. ‘But the big question remains: how do we use what we know to find his next victim? And how do we develop the evidence that will nail him?’
39
The heavy steel door clanged like a badly struck bell. Tony reached for the light switch and stepped inside his library. He closed the door, sealing himself into the shipping container with its maze of shelves and stacks of boxes waiting to be unpacked. He wanted to attempt a profile and he needed peace and quiet to think it through. Even after the team had departed to attend to their designated tasks (‘Find who the trolls are attacking now, talk to the officers who investigated the suicides to see if there are witnesses, research women writers who killed themselves…’) Steeler wasn’t a restful place to be on a Sunday. The canal boating community were very sociable; Sundays were an occasion for barbecues, parties and live music.
He could have gone to his office at Bradfield Moor, but when people knew he was in the building, they generally found reasons to come and pick his brains. Now he had an alternative. Some might say it resembled a prison cell more than a crucible of inspiration, but Tony liked the sense of isolation it gave him.
He opened his laptop and started a new file with his standard boilerplate introduction.