by Val McDermid
But it was pointless to rage against what had happened. Those responsible were too well insulated for even a Chief Constable to make much of a dent in their lives. The only thing John Brandon could do now for Carol was to offer her a lifeline back into the profession she loved. She’d been probably the best detective he’d ever had under his command, and all his instincts told him she needed to be back in harness.
He’d discussed it with his wife Maggie, laying out his plans before her. “What do you think?” he asked. “You know Carol. Do you think she’ll go for it?”
Maggie had frowned, stirring her coffee thoughtfully. “It’s not me you should be asking that, it’s Tony Hill. He’s the psychologist.”
Brandon shook his head. “Tony is the last person I’d ask about Carol. Besides, he’s a man, he can’t understand the implications of rape the way a woman can.”
Maggie’s mouth twisted in acknowledgement. “The old Carol Jordan would have bitten your hand off. But it’s hard to imagine what being raped will have done to her. Some women fall to pieces. For some women, it becomes the defining moment of their lives. Other women lock it away and pretend it never happened. It sits there like a time bomb waiting to blow a hole in their lives. And some find a way to deal with it and move forward. If I had to guess, I’d say Carol would either bury it or else work through it. If she’s burying it, she’ll probably be gung ho to get back to serious work, to prove to herself and the rest of the world that she’s sorted. But she’ll be a loose cannon if that’s what she’s trying to do, and that’s not what you need in this job. However…” She paused. “If she’s looking for a way through, you might be able to persuade her.”
“Do you think she’d be up to the job?” Brandon’s bloodhound eyes looked troubled.
“It’s like what they say about politicians, isn’t it? The very people who volunteer for the job are the last ones who should be doing it. I don’t know, John. You’re going to have to make your mind up when you see her.”
It wasn’t a comforting thought. Brandon squared his shoulders and headed for the concrete labyrinth where Carol Jordan waited at the epicentre like a sibylline riddle.
* * *
Find them in the first six hours or you’re looking for a corpse. Find them in the first six hours or you’re looking for a corpse. The missing children mantra mocked Detective Inspector Don Merrick. He was looking at sixteen hours and counting. And counting was just what the parents of Tim Golding were doing. Counting every minute that took them farther from their last glimpse of their son. He didn’t have to think about what they were feeling; he was a father and he knew the visceral fear waiting to assail any parent whose child is suddenly, unaccountably not where they should be. Mostly, it was history in a matter of minutes when the child reappeared unscathed, usually grinning merrily at the panic of its parents. But it was history that left its mark bone deep.
And sometimes there was no relief. No sudden access of anger masking the ravages of ill-defined terror when the child reappeared. Sometimes it just went on and on and on. And Merrick knew the dread would continue screaming inside Alastair and Shelley Golding until his team found their son. Alive or dead. He knew because he’d witnessed the same agony in the lives of Gerry and Pam Lefevre, whose son Guy had been missing now for just over four months. Merrick had been the bagman on that inquiry, which was the main reason why he’d been assigned to Tim Golding. He had the knowledge to see whether there were obvious links between the cases.
He leaned against the roof of his car and swept the long curve of the railway embankment with binoculars. Every available body was down there, combing the scrubby grass for any trace of the eight-year-old boy who had been missing since the previous evening. Tim had been playing with two friends, some complicated game of make-believe involving a superhero that Merrick vaguely remembered his own son briefly idolising. The friends had been called in by their mother and Tim had said he was going down the embankment to watch the freight trains that used this spur to bring roadstone from the quarry on the outskirts of the city to the railhead.
Two women heading for the bus stop and bingo thought they’d caught a glimpse of his canary yellow Bradfield Victoria shirt between the trees that lined the top of the steep slope leading down to the tracks. That had been around twenty to eight. Nobody else had come forward to say they’d seen the boy.
His face was already etched on Merrick’s mind. The school photograph resembled a million others, but Merrick could have picked out Tim’s sandy hair, his open grin and the blue eyes crinkled behind Harry Potter glasses from any line-up. Just as he could have done with Guy Lefevre. Wavy dark brown hair, brown eyes, a scatter of freckles across his nose and cheeks. Seven years old, tall for his age, he’d last been seen heading for an overgrown stand of trees on the edge of Downton Park, about three miles from where Merrick was standing now. It had been around seven on a damp spring evening. Guy had asked his mother if he could go out for another half-hour’s play. He’d been looking for birds’ nests, mapping them obsessively on a grid of the scrubby little copse. They’d found the grid two days later, on the far edge of the trees, crumpled into a ball. That had been the last anyone had seen of anything connected to Guy Lefevre. And now another boy seemed also to have vanished into thin air. Merrick sighed and lowered the binoculars. Time to round up the usual suspects.
He pulled out his mobile and called his sergeant, Kevin Matthews. “Kev? Don here. Start bringing the nonces in.”
“No sign, then?”
“Not a trace. I’ve even had a team through the tunnel half a mile up the tracks. No joy. It’s time to start rattling some cages.”
“How big a radius?”
Merrick sighed again. Bradfield Metropolitan Police area stretched over an area of forty-four square miles, protecting and serving somewhere in the region of 900,000 people. According to the latest official estimates he’d read, that meant there were probably somewhere in the region of three thousand active paedophiles in the force area. Fewer than ten percent of that number was on the register of sex offenders. Rather less than the tip of the iceberg. But that was all they had to go on. “Let’s start with a two-mile radius,” he said. “They like to operate in the comfort zone, don’t they?” As he spoke, Merrick was painfully aware that these days, with people commuting longer distances to work, with so many employed in jobs that kept them on the road, with local shopping increasingly a thing of the past, the comfort zone was, for most citizens, exponentially bigger than it had ever been even for their parents’ generation. “We’ve got to start somewhere,” he added, his pessimism darkening his voice.
He ended the call and stared down the bank, shielding his eyes against the sunshine that lent the grass and trees below a blameless glow. The brightness made the search easier, it was true. But it felt inappropriate, as if the weather was insulting the anguish of the Goldings. This was Merrick’s first major case since his promotion, and already he suspected he wasn’t going to deliver a result that would make anybody happy. Least of all him.
* * *
John Brandon was shaken to see the change in Carol Jordan. The woman who waited in the doorway for him to emerge from the lift bore almost no resemblance to his memory of her. He might well have passed her in the street. Her hair was radically different, it was true, but she had altered in more fundamental ways. The flesh seemed to have melted from her face, giving it a new arrangement of planes and hollows. Where there had been an expression of intelligent interest in her eyes, now there was a blank wariness. She radiated tension rather than the familiar confidence. In spite of the warmth of the early summer day, she was dressed in a shapeless polo neck sweater and baggy trousers instead of the sharply tailored suits Brandon was used to seeing her in.
He paused a couple of feet from her. “Carol,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
STUNNING PRAISE FOR VAL MCDERMID’S NOVELS
THE WIRE IN THE BLOOD
“This book [has] a sense of gravitas and inte
lligence utterly beyond lesser writers in the field … This is a wholly satisfying read which cleverly subverts tradition and expectation.”
— Ian Rankin
“This is a shocking book, stunningly exciting, horrifyingly good. It is so convincing that one fears reality may be like this and these events the awful truth.”
— Ruth Rendell
“Ye Gods, she’s Good.”
— Colin Dexter
“A superb psychological thriller.”
— Cosmopolitan
“Truly frightening. McDermid’s capacity to enter the warped mind of a deviant criminal is shiveringly convincing.”
— The Times (UK)
“The story, handled with verve, wit, and style, never flags.”
— Mail on Sunday (UK)
“Clever and exciting.”
— Sunday Telegraph (UK)
“Horripulation guaranteed.”
— Literary Review (UK)
KILLING THE SHADOWS
“Vivid and adept … mounts in tension while at the same time making readers aware of their complicity in craving the grisly shocks the genre provides … as Stephen King did in BAG OF BONES, McDermid is trying to address the inhumanity that’s all too easy for popular writers to lapse into as they seek to titillate an increasingly jaded readership …
McDermid is a whiz at combining narrative threads … and ending chapters with cliffhangers that propel you to keep reading. In terms of hooking her readers and carrying them along out of sheer desire to find out what happens next, McDermid is as smooth a practitioner of crime fiction as anyone out there … KILLING THE SHADOWS is further proof that she’s the best we’ve got.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“McDermid skillfully alternates points of view and creates memorable scenes and complex characters.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A compelling intricately plotted page-turner.”
— Library Journal
“Nerve-jangling suspense … A gripping read with layers of plot complexity, heart-stopping suspense, and guts and gore aplenty.”
— Booklist
“Terrific … McDermid’s deft mix of the whodunnit, the psychological thriller, some sparkling action and plenty of tension results in a hugely entertaining, gripping read.”
— The Times (UK)
“As compelling as A PLACE OF EXECUTION … puts the much-overrated Patricia Cornwell to shame.”
— The Guardian (UK)
“[McDermid] is still head and shoulders above … the competition.”
— The Observer (UK)
“[KILLING THE SHADOWS] could rank as McDermid’s finest yet crime novel.”
— Publishing News (UK)
A PLACE OF EXECUTION
“One of my favorite authors, Val McDermid is an important writer—witty, never sentimental, taking us through Manchester’s mean streets with the dexterity of a Chandler.”
— Sara Paretsky
“Compelling and atmospheric … a tour de force.”
— Minette Walters, author of The Shape of Snakes and The Breaker
“From the first page of McDermid’s A PLACE OF EXECUTION, we know we’re in the hands of a master.”
— Jeffery Deaver, author of The Empty Chair and The Bone Collector
“One of the most ingenious mystery novels ever.”
— Newsday
“A novel about a murder in which the police find the culprit but not the body—a circumstance rich in the stuff of which page-turners are made … McDermid generates curiosity and, finally, whiplash surprise.”
— The Atlantic Monthly
“One jaw-dropping suspense after another.”
— San Jose Mercury News
“A modern masterpiece … a book that will haunt us forever.”
— Denver Post
“A stunning and cunning novel.”
— The Orlando Sentinel
“An extraordinary story [told] with extraordinary skill.”
— San Antonio Express-News
“If you only have time to read one mystery this or any other season, make it A PLACE OF EXECUTION.”
— Associated Press
“Val McDermid is one of the bright new lights of the mystery field … [she] proves herself a lively storyteller.
— Washington Post
“McDermid can’t write an uninteresting sentence.”
— Women’s Review of Books
“McDermid’s a skillful writer—comparisons with such American novelists as Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton are appropriate. Clever, absorbing and lots of fun.”
— Chicago Tribune
“A cleanly written, fast-paced escapade. This tale jumps out of the gate at top speed.”
— Publishers Weekly
THE MERMAIDS SINGING
“Compelling and shocking.”
— Minette Walters
“A dark tale … Complex, carefully crafted, and disturbing … powerful … psychologically terrifying … impossible to put down.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Exciting, rapid-fire … A satisfying descent into the territory of a twisted mind.”
— Booklist
“[A] terrific chiller from Manchester’s answer to Thomas Harris.”
— The Guardian (UK)
“Truly, horribly good.”
— Mail on Sunday (UK)
ALSO BY VAL McDERMID
The Distant Echo
Killing the Shadows
A Place of Execution
TONY HILL NOVELS
The Torment of Others
The Last Temptation
The Wire in the Blood
The Mermaids Singing
KATE BRANNIGAN NOVELS
Star Struck
Blue Genes
Clean Break
Crack Down
Kick Back
Dead Beat
LINDSAY GORGON NOVELS
Hostage to Murder
Booked for Murder
Union Jack
Final Edition
Common Murder
Report for Murder
NON-FICTION
A Suitable Job for a Woman
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers.
THE WIRE IN THE BLOOD
Copyright © 1997 by Val McDermid.
Excerpt from The Mermaids Singing © 1995 by Val McDermid.
Excerpt from Killing the Shadows © 2000 by Val McDermid.
Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
ISBN: 0-312-98365-4
EAN: 80312-98365-9
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / July 2002
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
eISBN 9781429977685
First eBook edition: April 2014
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