Splinter the Silence (Tony Hill)

by Val McDermid

  He caught up with the others as they reached the front desk. A dark-haired young man with prison pallor and dark hollowed eyes stared out at them, shifting his shoulders inside an ill-fitting uniform suit. ‘Good morning, how may I help you?’ he asked, his accent from somewhere east of the Danube.

  Carol flashed her ID and leaned on the chest-high counter. ‘You had a resident here last night who is of interest to us. Matthew Martin was his name. Has he checked out yet?’

  A flare of panic lit his eyes. ‘I’m not allowed to release any information about residents.’

  ‘We’re the police, mate,’ Kevin said. ‘Whatever petty rules your boss imposes on you, we trump that. Now tell us what we want to know. Matthew Martin was the name.’

  The receptionist flushed. ‘I cannot do that. You need to speak to my manager.’

  ‘So fetch him. Or her.’ Kevin had always had a good line in bad cop, Tony reminded himself. It often came as a surprise, because he knew Kevin to be not only kind but soft in many crucial areas.

  The receptionist backed away through the door into a back office. ‘Fucking data protection. I bet that’s what they come back with,’ Carol said. ‘They all hide behind it and none of them has any bloody idea what the act actually says.’

  A couple of minutes passed, then a squat man with surprisingly wide hips emerged from the back room. His mousy hair was shaved close at the sides, an elaborate quiff resting on the top of his head like an éclair from a superior patisserie. ‘You’re the police, are you?’ he said, his voice the epitome of Northern camp. ‘Dimitri says you’re asking about one of our guests? A Matthew Martin?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Carol said. ‘Is he here?’

  The manager shook his head with irritating complacency. ‘Oh no, you missed him.’

  ‘When did he check out?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said airily. ‘He used the express checkout. When it was emptied at ten, his key and his checkout form were in there along with a dozen others. People don’t have to check out in person any more, you know.’ He spoke in the condescending tones of someone who thinks he’s dealing with people so far below him that they have no understanding of how the better half lives. If it hadn’t been so pitiful, his pomposity would have been laughable.

  ‘Will his room have been cleaned by now?’ Tony asked.

  ‘I imagine so, we’ve got a very speedy turnaround here, you know. Let me check,’ he said loftily. He moved to a computer terminal behind the counter and clumsily tinkered with the keyboard. ‘Martin, Martin… Yes, room 302. According to this, the clean was done at quarter past nine. So he was obviously gone by then.’ He heaved a weary sigh, his chins wobbling. ‘Look, I’m not being obstructive here. He booked online. He checked in yesterday at 4.37 p.m. He charged nothing to his room. We have no idea what he did or where he went or how long he spent in his room.’

  ‘You must have some idea,’ Kevin said. ‘Those electronic keys record when the punter uses them to enter the room.’

  The manager smirked. ‘Data protection, sir. Digital information. I’m not allowed to divulge that by law. Come back with a warrant and I’ll happily tell you.’

  ‘Told you,’ Carol muttered. ‘Come on, guys. This is a waste of time. He’s not here and he’s not coming back.’ She turned away and led them back towards the car park. ‘Our best hope is that he turns up at Ursula Foreman’s house when Paula and Alvin are there.’

  Right on cue, her phone rang. ‘Alvin,’ she said. ‘Give me some good news.’

  55

  Alvin hit the door like a controlled explosion. The wood bulged and warped round the lock then splintered under the impact, swinging open as he staggered forward, struggling to stay upright.

  Coming up behind him, Paula was momentarily confounded by the eye-level vision of two bare feet sticking out of two tubes of denim. Then her brain made the connections. A woman with a tumble of red curls was hanging by the neck from the balustrade on the first floor. Her face was purple, her tongue protruding, her eyes bulging. ‘Oh Christ,’ Paula groaned, running for the stairs.

  Alvin righted himself, rubbing his left shoulder. He took in the implications of the scene at a glance. He looked around frantically, then spotted what he needed through the open kitchen doorway. He grabbed a solid wooden chair from the kitchen table and brought it back to the hall, placing it under Ursula’s body. He noticed a book lying on the floor but didn’t waste time on it. He climbed on the chair, bent his knees and curled his arms round her thighs. ‘I’ll take her weight,’ he said, straightening his legs. ‘Get that off her neck. You need to cut it, there might be DNA in the knot.’

  ‘Fuck, yes.’ Paula ran back down the stairs to the kitchen, fumbling her mobile out of her pocket and calling the emergency number as she went. She yanked open drawers, looking for a sharp knife, simultaneously talking on the phone. ‘DS McIntyre, Regional MIT. I need ambulance and police back-up,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an attempted hanging victim.’ She was already running back up the stairs. ‘Haxton Grove, number twenty-seven.’ She dropped the phone and leaned over the bannister. With Alvin taking the strain, it wasn’t hard to hack through the strong nylon cord that had bitten deep into Ursula’s neck.

  As the support disappeared, her body collapsed over Alvin’s shoulder like a loosely stuffed sack. He grunted and staggered slightly on the chair but managed somehow to brace himself and keep his footing. Paula ran back down the stairs. ‘Hang on, I’m coming,’ she yelled.

  Between the two of them, they clumsily lowered Ursula to the floor. Alvin carefully rolled her into the recovery position while Paula struggled with the ligature. The slip knot refused to slip back so she slid the knife blade between the cord and the back of Ursula’s neck. It bit so deeply that Paula had actually to pull it free from the swollen flesh. She felt for a pulse, without much hope. Too bloody late. They’d been too bloody late.

  56

  The ambulance was pulling out of Haxton Grove, blue lights flashing and siren bleating, as Kevin swung round the corner. ‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it?’ Tony said. ‘I mean, they don’t hurry if you’re dead.’

  Neither cop graced his comment with a reply. Suddenly Kevin stamped on the brakes. ‘That’s his car,’ he said, pointing at a Passat parked neatly with a perfect view of the Foreman house.

  ‘Bingo,’ Carol said. ‘With any luck, it’ll be a forensic goldmine.’

  Kevin moved off and double-parked behind the two chequer-boarded squad cars; Carol was out of the car almost before he came to a standstill. One of the uniforms was threading crime scene tape through the shrubs that lined the wall at the bottom of the Foremans’ garden. ‘Never mind that for now,’ Carol said. ‘Get down the street and secure that VW Passat halfway down on the other side. Wait with it till the CSIs get here.’

  Alvin was sitting on the wall, head hanging, hands clasped between his knees, looking wasted. He raised his head as they approached and gave a small, tight nod. ‘Paula’s gone with the ambulance. We got an ID from a neighbour. It’s Ursula Foreman. It looks like she might make it. He made a rubbish job of hanging her. You do it properly, you break your neck. You do it badly, you strangle yourself slowly.’

  ‘You did well,’ Carol said.

  ‘Not well enough. We let him walk right past us.’ Alvin shook his head, his mouth tightening in an expression of disgust. ‘He acted like he belonged here. Like he owned the place. We just assumed he was Bill Foreman.’ He tutted at himself.

  ‘That’s all it takes,’ Tony said. ‘Behave as if you have every right to be somewhere and mostly you’ll get away with it.’

  Alvin sighed. ‘He looks different from his driving licence picture. He’s shaved off his beard and his hair’s cut short. And it’s greying now. He didn’t look like we expected. Not like the driving licence pic at all. And we didn’t spot his car because we came in from the other end of the street. I’m sorry.’ He hung his head again.

  ‘No point in beating yourself up,’ Carol
said. ‘Get back to Skenfrith Street and organise an e-fit artist to work with you on a current likeness so we can get something out on the media and the internet as soon as possible.’ She patted his shoulder. ‘Look on the bright side. You and Paula have probably saved Ursula Foreman’s life.’

  ‘Even more important than that,’ Tony said. ‘You’ve almost certainly saved the lives of a bunch of other women as well. All those other books he bought – he had a list, but now it’s blown.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ Alvin said, getting to his feet and wincing at the pain from his shoulder as he straightened up. ‘There was a book on the floor under Ursula Foreman’s feet. It was that Russian woman Stacey talked about.’ He limped off to his car like a wounded bear as the minivan with the crime scene investigators rolled up.

  ‘I’m going to talk to the CSIs,’ Carol said. ‘Cheer them up with the news that they’ve got a car as well as a crime scene to process.’

  Tony sat on the wall and started to say something to Kevin but the detective’s phone rang and distracted him. Seeing the source of the call, he twisted his mouth into a wry line then said, ‘Sorry, Tony, got to take this.’ He walked away, phone to his ear, eyes moving constantly to make sure nobody was close enough to overhear.

  ‘Thanks for getting back to me,’ he said.

  ‘This is worth one in the bank,’ Penny Burgess said. ‘I had to be nice to someone I wouldn’t piss on if he was on fire.’

  Kevin felt a quickening in his chest. ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘The information came from a very reliable source.’

  ‘Stop trying to tease me. Just tell me.’ It was good to feel irritated with her.

  ‘You’re no fun any more, Kevin. That’s nothing to be proud of.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I’ll live with it. The name, Penny. The name.’

  ‘According to the assistant news editor who puts the credit payments through, we paid a woman called Susannah Dean.’

  It meant nothing to Kevin. For a wild moment, he thought they might not have an enemy after all, only an opportunist somewhere in the admin unit at West Yorkshire. ‘Never heard of her,’ he said.

  ‘That’s because she’s a beard. She’s a dentist in Macclesfield.’

  ‘So how does she know our secrets?’ Kevin did a slow 360 degrees, making sure Tony was still sitting on the wall and Carol was still too busy with the CSIs to notice him.

  ‘She has a brother.’

  ‘Who is… who, exactly?’

  ‘He’s one of your own, Kevin. Sam Evans. From your old MIT team. Carol must have done something to really piss him off.’

  The name was a jolt to Kevin’s guts. Sam? He’d always liked Sam well enough when they’d worked together, even though they’d never been the kind of mates who went to the pub together. They didn’t have much in common, that had been the main reason. ‘Are you sure?’ He didn’t want to believe someone who’d sat at the next desk to him would do that to Carol. OK, he’d shamed himself all those years before by leaking stories to Penny Burgess. But he hadn’t done it to discredit a colleague or even an enemy. He’d only passed on stuff that would have come out eventually at a press conference. The brass had accused him of jeopardising the investigation, but that was bollocks. It was a show trial, to draw attention away from the fact that they were going nowhere fast when it came to identifying a serial killer. What Sam had done was a different kind of betrayal. It was mean-spirited and deeply personal. It was the revenge of a petulant child who hasn’t got his own way. Kevin licked his lips. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  ‘It’s not the first time he’s been a confidential source,’ Penny said. ‘That’s why the payment system is already in place. I’m sorry, Kevin. I know it’s not what you wanted to hear.’

  Kevin stared down the street, not taking anything in. ‘Thanks for finding out for me. And Penny – I don’t like having debts hanging over me, so here’s something in return. You know Ursula Foreman?’

  ‘The blogger? Married to Bill Foreman from Bradfield Sound?’

  ‘That’s the one. She’s been rushed into A&E at Bradfield Cross. You might want to check it out.’

  ‘Has she had an accident?’

  ‘I thought you were an investigative journalist?’ He broke the connection as Carol called his name. He hurried over, trying to assimilate what he’d heard.

  ‘We’re going back to base,’ Carol said. ‘There’s nothing we can do here. The CSIs are doing their thing, I’ve set up a door-to-door and I’ve got someone from Skenfrith Street picking up Bill Foreman and taking him to the hospital. Apparently he’s still on air but they’ll put somebody else on. We need to get an alert out on Matthew Martin ASAP, and I need to put together a briefing for John Brandon about the case. Now we actually have some hard evidence.’

  57

  Carol was trying to write a succinct summary of what they had on Matthew Martin and his activities, but Tony wasn’t making it easy for her. He was pacing, as he always did when he was trying to order his thoughts. Up one side of her office, turn through ninety degrees and head for the next corner, then about turn and retrace his steps, repetitive as a Steve Reich tape loop. ‘He knows we know,’ he said. ‘This has all been about creating a picture for the world. We’re all supposed to think these women have been driven to suicide because the backlash against them has forced them to see the error of their ways. But when Paula and Alvin turned up at Ursula Foreman’s house, he must have realised he’d been rumbled.’ Pace, two, three four.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Carol said. ‘Maybe he’s waiting to see what we do next. After all, there are lots of reasons why the police could have been at the door. Alvin said he mentioned the online abuse. It’s possible he thinks he’s got away with it. That we think Ursula did in fact kill herself.’ It felt good to be back in her traditional role of testing his theories to destruction.

  Tony shook his head. ‘He knows that he’s blown. That we’re on to him. You don’t send two detective sergeants to investigate a bit of recreational cyber-bullying. So what’s he going to do?’

  ‘Make a run for it. They all do,’ Carol said absently, tapping out another sentence.

  He reached the corner and pivoted. ‘No, he can’t do that. Because there’s too high a risk that he might be caught. Here’s his problem, Carol. As things are right now, the suicide verdicts stand. We might argue till we’re blue in the face that these were really murders, but without the evidence of his presence, we’ve got no proof. But if he’s taken, the deck is stacked against him managing to keep his big project under wraps. Because once we start looking closely, we’ll find his trail. And if we can prove the suicides are actually murders, then his whole project falls down. While the suicides stay on the record, there’s a chance his plan will work and all you gobby women will shut up.’

  ‘Fat chance,’ Carol muttered.

  Pace, six seven, eight. ‘I keep coming back to why this, why now, why here? I don’t know enough about him and that’s infuriating when it comes to figuring this out. But there is one thing that makes sense.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Still distracted.

  ‘He’s going to kill himself.’

  Startled, she looked up from her screen. ‘That makes no sense.’

  ‘Exactly. Which paradoxically is the best possible reason for doing it. He can’t afford to be taken alive or his whole plan is exposed in court and the idea that women behaving badly and talking about it like they’re proud of it leads to them killing themselves is blown out of the water. The only chance he has to make his point now is to take himself right out of the picture.’

  ‘But surely the truth will be splashed everywhere if he does? We can say what we like then, there’s no legal comeback, no libel or slander implications. And if Ursula lives, she can tell the truth.’

  Tony shrugged. ‘But the internet will have an alternate reality. And the conspiracy theorists often shout loudest. No, he’s smart. He’ll understand how it’s going to play out if he’s
taken.’

  There was a knock and Stacey stuck her head round the door, almost knocking Tony off his stride. ‘I’ve got a bit of background on Martin,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it’s any use?’

  ‘At this point, anything will help,’ Tony said. ‘Come on in and share it.’

  ‘Whose office is this, again?’ Carol grumbled.

  ‘You know you want to hear this,’ Tony said, gesturing to an uncertain Stacey that she should come in.

  She sat in one of the visitor chairs and studied her tablet. ‘He grew up here in Bradfield.’

  Carol groaned. ‘So he knows the ground. He knows how to disappear. Does he have family here? Parents?’

  ‘I did some family records digging. He’s an only child. His dad retired three years ago, sold his house in Harriestown and moved to an apartment in a seaside resort in Bulgaria. His mum died when he was eight. I found a report in the Sentinel Times archive. She was killed in a motorway crash on her way back from a trip to Greenham Common.’

  ‘Yes!’ Tony said emphatically, punching a fist into the other palm. ‘Of course. That’s the underlying driver – Greenham Common. Those evil feminists took his mum away from him. She should have been at home, looking after him, not running off to Greenham with – what was it the Daily Mail called them? Woolly minds with woolly hats, or something. But she wasn’t and she died. Everything he’s doing now is about encouraging women to stay at home and save themselves. That’s why this. And why here, too.’ He paused in his enthusiastic monologue. ‘But why now? I still don’t know why now. What set him off? There’s always a trigger, always a —’

  Stacey cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know for sure, but I might have something there.’