Shatter

by Michael Robotham

  “Is it cold outside?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looks at me. “Did we meet yesterday?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I hold the lift door open for her. She glances at the sleeping detective and steps inside. The doors close.

  Holding her handbag to her stomach, she doesn’t look at her reflection in the mirrored walls.

  “Has he called again?” she asks.

  “Yes, he has.”

  “Who did he call?”

  “Your husband.”

  “Is Charlie all right?”

  “I have no information.”

  We emerge in the hotel foyer. I hold my right hand an inch from the small of her back and point my left hand towards the glass revolving door. The foyer is empty except for a receptionist and a cleaner who is polishing the marble floor with a machine.

  The Range Rover is parked on the corner. She’s moving too slowly. I have to keep stopping and waiting for her. I open the car door.

  “Are you sure we haven’t met before? Your voice sounds very familiar.”

  “We may have talked on the phone.”

  63

  Trinity Road police station sleeps with one eye open. The lower floors are deserted but the lights remain on in the incident room where a dozen detectives have worked through the night.

  Veronica Cray’s office door is closed. She’s sleeping.

  It’s still dark outside. I woke Ruiz and told him to bring me here. First I took a cold shower and put on my clothes and took my medication. It still took me twenty minutes to get dressed.

  The death photos of Christine Wheeler and Sylvia Furness are watching from the whiteboards. There are aerial photographs of the murder scenes, postmortem reports and a tangle of black lines drawing links between mutual friends and business contacts.

  I don’t need to look at the faces. I turn my head away and notice a new whiteboard, a new photograph—this one of Charlie. It’s a school portrait with her hair pulled back and an enigmatic smile on her face. She hadn’t wanted the photograph taken.

  “We get one every year,” Julianne had said.

  “Which means we don’t need another one,” countered Charlie.

  “But I like to compare them.”

  “To see how much I’ve grown.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you need a photograph for that?”

  “Where did you learn to be so sarcastic?” At this point, Julianne had looked at me.

  Monk arrives with the morning papers. There’s a picture of me on the front page, holding my hand up to the cameras as though reaching to rip it from the photographers’ hands. There’s also a picture of Charlie, a different one, taken from the family album. Julianne must have chosen it.

  Someone has ordered croissants and pastries. The fresh coffee smell is enough to wake the DI, who emerges from her office in rumpled clothes. Her hair is cut so short it doesn’t need a comb. She reminds me of a carthorse, heavy footed, slow to anger but immensely powerful.

  Monk briefs her on what happened at the cottage. It doesn’t improve her mood. She wants the house searched properly this time, every cupboard and crawl space in case there are more surprises.

  The DI has summoned Oliver Rabb, wanting him to trace the call. He arrives in the incident room in the same baggy trousers and bow tie as yesterday, complemented by a scarf to keep his neck warm. He stops suddenly, frowning and patting his pockets as though he’s lost something on his way upstairs.

  “I had an office yesterday. I seem to have misplaced it.”

  “End of the corridor,” answers Veronica Cray. “You have a new partner. Don’t let him boss you around.”

  Lieutenant William Greene is already at work behind panes of glass in a boothlike office alongside the radio room.

  “I’m not very good at working with people,” says Oliver glumly.

  “Sure you are. Ask nicely and the lieutenant will let you play with his military satellites.”

  Oliver bucks up and straightens his glasses before heading off down the corridor.

  I want to talk to Veronica Cray before Julianne arrives. She closes her office door and sips a coffee, grimacing as though nursing a toothache. Outside I can see gulls wheeling above the distant docks and a chink of light opening on the horizon. Helen and Chloe Chambers are alive, I tell her. They’re home.

  The information washes over the DI seemingly without effect. She puts two tubes of sugar in her coffee, hesitates and adds a third. Then she picks up the cup and looks at me over the steaming lip, regarding me with a level stare.

  “What do you want me to do? I can’t arrest them.”

  “They’ve conspired to fake two deaths.”

  “Right now I’m more interested in finding your daughter, Professor. One case at a time.”

  “It’s the same case. That’s why Tyler is doing this. We can use Helen and Chloe to negotiate with him.”

  “We’re not swapping your daughter for his.”

  “I know that, but we can use her to draw him out into the open.”

  She strikes a match and lights a cigarette. “Worry about your own daughter, Professor, she’s been missing since lunchtime yesterday.” A coil of smoke curls from her fist. “I can’t force Helen Chambers to cooperate but I’ll send someone to the house to talk to her.”

  She walks to the door of her office. Opens it. Her voice booms across the incident room: “Full briefing at 7 a.m. I want answers, people.”

  Julianne will be here soon. What am I going to say to her? There are no words she wants to hear unless they come from Charlie’s mouth, whispered in her ear, with her arms embracing her.

  I find an empty office and sit in the dark. The sun is beginning to show, putting drops of color into the water of the world. Until a few days ago, I had never heard of Gideon Tyler, but now I feel as though he has been watching me for years, standing in the darkness, staring down at my sleeping family, blood dripping from his fingers to the floor.

  Although not physically powerful, not a bodybuilder or a strong man, Gideon’s strength lies in his intellect and his planning and his willingness to do what others cannot comprehend.

  He is an observer, a cataloger of human characteristics; a collector of clues that can tell him about a person. The way they walk and stand and talk. What car they drive. What clothes they wear. Do they make eye contact when they talk? Are they open, trusting, flirtatious or more enclosed and introspective? I do the same—observe people—but in Tyler’s case it’s a prelude to harm.

  Any sign of weakness is preyed upon. He can recognize a flagging heart, distinguish inner strength from a charade and find the fault lines in a psyche. We’re not so different, he and I, but we aspire to different ends. He tears minds apart. I try to repair them.

  Oliver and Lieutenant William Greene are at work in their goldfish-bowl-like office, leaning over laptops and comparing data. They make an odd couple. The lieutenant reminds me of one of those windup toy soldiers with a stiff-legged gait and a fixed look on his face. The only thing missing is a large key rotating between his shoulder blades.

  A large map takes up the entire wall, dotted with colored pins and crisscrossed with lines that join them, forming series of overlapping triangles. The last call from Gideon Tyler originated from Temple Circus in the center of Bristol. Police are studying CCTV footage from four cameras to see if it can link the call to a vehicle.

  The mobile phone hidden in Charlie’s bedroom went missing from a boating supply shop in Princes Wharf on Friday. The handset Gideon used to make the call has been traced to a phone shop in Chiswick, London. The name and address of the buyer were those of a student living in a shared house in Bristol. A gas bill and credit card receipt (both stolen) were used as proof of identity.

  I study the map, trying to acquire the nomenclature to read the red, green and black pins. It’s like learning a new alphabet.

  “It’s not complete,” says the lieutenant, “but we’ve mana
ged to trace most of the calls.”

  He explains that the colored pins represent phone calls made by Gideon Tyler and the nearest transmitting tower to each signal. The duration of each call has been logged, along with the time and signal strengths. Gideon hasn’t used the same handset more than half a dozen times and he never calls from the same location. In almost every case the handset was turned on only moments before he made the call and turned off immediately afterwards.

  Oliver talks me through the chronology, starting with Christine Wheeler’s disappearance. The signals can place Gideon Tyler in Leigh Woods and near the Clifton Suspension Bridge when she jumped. He was also within a hundred meters of Sylvia Furness when her body was handcuffed to the tree and in Victoria Park in Bath when Maureen Bracken aimed a pistol at my chest.

  I study the map again, feeling the landscape rise up from the paper, becoming solid. Among the predominantly red, green and blue pins, a lone white pin stands out.

  “What does that one mean?” I ask.

  “It’s an anomaly,” explains Oliver.

  “What sort of anomaly?”

  “It wasn’t a phone call. The handset pinged for a tower and then went dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Perhaps he turned the phone on and then changed his mind.”

  “Or it could be a mistake,” suggests the lieutenant.

  Oliver looks at him irritably. “In my experience mistakes happen for a reason.”

  My fingertips brush the pinheads as if reading a document in Braille. They come to rest on the white pin.

  “How long was the phone turned on for?”

  “No more than fourteen seconds,” says Oliver. “The digital signal is transmitted every seven seconds. It was picked up twice by the tower we’ve marked. The white pin is the location of the nearest tower.”

  Errors and anomalies are the bane of behavioral scientists and cognitive psychologists. We look for patterns in the data to support our theories, which is why anomalies are so damaging and why, if we’re very lucky, a theory will hold together just long enough for a better one to come along.

  Gideon has been so careful about not leaving footprints, digital or otherwise. He has made precious few mistakes that we know of. Patrick’s sister ordered a pizza with Christine Wheeler’s mobile—that’s the only mistake I can remember. Perhaps this was another one.

  “Can you trace it?” I ask.

  Oliver has pushed his glasses up his nose again and tilted his head back to bring my whole face into focus.

  “I suppose the signal may have been picked up by other towers.”

  The lieutenant looks at him incredulously. “The phone was only turned on for fourteen seconds. That’s like trying to find a fart in a windstorm.”

  Oliver raises his eyebrows. “What a colorful analogy! Am I to assume that the army isn’t up to the job?”

  Lieutenant Greene knows that he’s being challenged, which he finds vaguely insulting because he clearly thinks Oliver is a chinless, pale, limp-wristed boffin who couldn’t find his arse with both hands.

  I take some of the tension out of the moment. “Explain to me what’s going to happen when Tyler calls again.”

  Oliver explains the technology and the benefit of satellite tracking. The lieutenant seems uncomfortable discussing the subject, as though military secrets are being revealed.

  “How quickly can you trace Tyler’s call?”

  “That depends,” says Oliver. “Signal strengths vary from place to place in a mobile network. There are dead spots created by buildings or terrain. These can be mapped and we can make allowances, but this isn’t foolproof. Ideally we need signals from at least three different towers. Radio waves travel at a known rate, so we can work out how far they’ve traveled.”

  “What if you get a signal from only one tower?”

  “This gives us DOA—direction of arrival—and a rough idea of the distance. Each kilometer delays the signal by three micro-seconds.”

  Oliver takes a pen from behind his ear and begins drawing towers and intersecting lines on a piece of paper.

  “The problem with a DOA reading is the signal could be bouncing off a building or an obstacle. We can’t always trust them. Signals from three base stations give us enough information to triangulate a location as long as the clocks at each of the base stations are synchronized exactly.”

  “We’re talking microseconds,” adds Oliver. “By calculating the difference in the arrival times it’s possible to locate a handset using hyperbolas and linear algebra. However, the caller must be stationary. If Tyler is in a car or on a bus or a train it won’t work. Even if he walks into a building there will be a change in signal strength.”

  “How long does he have to stay in one place?”

  Oliver and the lieutenant look at each other. “Five, maybe ten minutes,” says Oliver.

  “What if he uses a landline—something fixed?”

  The lieutenant shakes his head. “He won’t risk it.”

  “What if we make him?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “How do you plan to do that?”

  “How easy is it to shut down mobile phone towers?”

  “The phone servers would never agree. They’d lose too much money,” says Lieutenant Greene.

  “It won’t be for long. Ten minutes, maybe.”

  “That’s going to stop thousands of phone calls. Customers are going to be very pissed off.”

  Oliver seems more open to the idea. He looks at the map on the wall. Most of Gideon’s calls have come from central Bristol where most of the phone towers are concentrated. More servers would have to cooperate. He thinks out loud. “A limited geographical area, fifteen towers maybe.” His interest is sparked. “I don’t know if it’s ever been done.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “Feasible.”

  He turns and sits at a laptop, his fingers dancing on the keyboard, as his glasses slip further and further down his nose. Oliver, I sense, is happier in the company of computers. He can reason with them. He can understand how they process information. A computer doesn’t care whether or not he brushes his teeth or cuts his toenails in the bath or wears socks to bed. Some would say this is true love.

  64

  There are shouts and people running. Veronica Cray is yelling orders above the commotion and police officers are heading for the stairs and the lift. I can’t hear what she’s saying. A detective almost knocks me over and mumbles an apology as he picks up my walking stick.

  “What’s happened?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  A shiver of alarm swarms across my shoulder blades. Something is wrong. I hear Julianne’s name mentioned. I yell above the voices.

  “Tell me what’s happened.”

  Faces turn. They’re looking at me, staring. Nobody answers. The soft wetness of my own breathing is louder than the ringing phones and shuffling feet.

  “Where’s Julianne? What’s happened?”

  “One of our officers has been seriously injured,” says Veronica Cray, hesitating for a moment before continuing. “He was guarding your wife’s hotel room.”

  “Guarding her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We’re searching the hotel and surrounding streets.”

  “She’s missing?”

  “Yes.” She pauses. “There are cameras in the foyer and outside on the street. We’re retrieving the footage…”

  I’m watching her mouth move but not hearing the words. Julianne’s hotel was near Temple Circus. According to Oliver Rabb, that’s the same area that Gideon phoned me from at 3:15 a.m. He must have been watching her.

  Everything has changed again, shivering and shifting, detaching from my conception like a fragment of sanity jarred loose in the night. I close my eyes for a moment and try to picture myself free, but instead witness my own helplessness. I curse myself. I curse Mr. Parkinson. I curse Gideon Tyler. I will not let him take my family from me. I will not
let him destroy me.

  The morning briefing is standing room only. Detectives are perched on the edge of desks, leaning on pillars and looking over shoulders. The sense of urgency has been augmented by disbelief and shock. One of their own is in hospital with a collapsed windpipe and possible brain damage from oxygen deprivation.

  Veronica Cray stands on a chair to be seen. She outlines the operation—a mobile intercept involving two dozen unmarked vehicles and helicopters from the police air wing.

  “Based on previous calls, Gideon will use a mobile and keep moving. Phase one is protection. Phase two is to trace the call. Phase three is contact with the target. Phase four is the arrest.”

  She goes on to explain the communications. A radio silence will operate between the cars. A codeword and number will identify each unit. The phrase “Pedestrian knocked down” is the signal to move, accompanied by a street and cross street.

  A hand goes up. “Is he armed, boss?”

  Cray glances at the sheet in her hand. “The detective guarding Mrs. O’Loughlin was carrying a regulation sidearm. The pistol is now missing.”

  The resolve in the room seems to stiffen. Monk wants to know why it’s an intercept and arrest. Why not follow Tyler?

  “We can’t take the risk of losing him.”

  “What about the hostages?”

  “We’ll find them once we have Tyler.”

  The DI makes it sound like the logical course of action, but I suspect her hand is being forced. The military want Tyler in custody and know exactly how to apply pressure. Nobody questions her decision. Copies of Tyler’s photograph are passed from hand to hand. Detectives pause to look at the image. I know what they’re wondering. They want to know if it’s obvious, if it’s visible, if someone like Tyler wears his depravity like a badge or a tattoo. They want to imagine they can recognize wickedness and immorality in another person, can see it in their eyes or read it on their faces. It’s not true. The world is full of broken people and most of their cracks are on the inside.

  From across the incident room comes the sound of a toppling chair and the clatter of a wastepaper bin being kicked through the air. Ruiz comes raging between desks, stabbing his finger at Veronica Cray.