How the Dead Speak

by Val McDermid

  ‘As good a place to start as any.’ Rutherford sounded unimpressed. He squared his shoulders and fastened the middle button of his suit jacket. ‘Let’s get on with it. I want answers and I want them to start arriving soon.’

  10

  Some people kill because they want to do things with a body that they can’t do with a living person. Some kill because they take pleasure in the process of stripping someone else’s life away. And some kill because they believe it’s the only solution to the position they find themselves in. They’re the ones who take the most elaborate route to hiding the body because they don’t want it hanging around reminding them of who they really are.

  From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

  The woman still formally known as Sister Mary Patrick sat with her face pointing towards the window. She might as well have been blind for all she registered beyond the glass. Her fingers moved below the desktop, slipping from one amber bead to the next as she methodically told the rosary. It was a habit so ingrained it had become unconscious, just the thing she did with her hands when they weren’t otherwise occupied. Atonement was a long road, one she’d barely started down. Or so she was told with monotonous regularity. Easy for them to say.

  She managed to listen to the BBC radio news every morning, despite not living in the UK any longer. To her amazement, there was Wi-Fi in the house where she’d been put. When she’d walked into the town and bought herself a smartphone, she hadn’t been struck down by a thunderbolt, nor had anyone seemed to take any interest in her acquisition. And so she could listen covertly to the radio on her earphones in the privacy of her cell. Well, it was a room, really, but the monastic habit of thought had stayed with her and she thought of it as a cell. Particularly since she was enduring a sort of imprisonment.

  She’d always known that one day she’d hear a headline that brought the past right into the present. Other people seemed to have been convinced that their history was dead and buried along with the bodies in the linen winding sheets, but she’d known the truth. She’d read her Faulkner. ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ She carried that past with her everywhere she went, every night when she laid her head down on the hard pillow, every morning when she opened her eyes after an apparently blameless sleep. The past didn’t keep her awake; instead it haunted her consciousness like a stalker.

  She’d learned to live with the easy rush to judgement of others, the ones whose world hadn’t collided with the kind of girls the sisters had had to deal with. It wasn’t the nice girls who ended up at St Margaret Clitherow. Not the well-brought-up lasses who never answered back and stuck in at school. No, what she was landed with were the ones nobody else wanted. The ones who ran wild, the ones who made a vulgar jibe out of the home’s very name, the ones with the eating disorders, the ones who were already in love with drink and drugs before they even made it into their teens. The self-righteous who were so ready to condemn her wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the convent of the Order of the Blessed Pearl.

  She’d always known there would be consequences. And she’d rather they came in this world. Better that than prejudicing her chances in the next one. All the same, if she could keep things neatly boxed off in the confessional and the manageable penance of Hail Marys and decades of the rosary, so much the better.

  That morning, in the measured tones of the news reader, laden with middle-class sang froid, she’d felt the weight of her personal impending disaster come hurtling towards her. It had taken its time to build up momentum, but now it was barrelling down the road in a straight line. The Church had done all it could to keep its dirty linen walled up in a dark hiding place.

  But now the stone had been rolled away by the unlikely angel of the BBC.

  11

  The pressure to find someone to blame when investigators are faced with the darkest of crimes is almost overwhelming. Senior officers, the media, the family and friends of the victim – they all demand answers. As if answers were as easy to come by as the common cold.

  From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

  Her encounter with Vanessa had left Carol agitated and angry. She reached for her usual calming solution – boots, outdoor jacket, hat, Buff and gloves – and strode up the rough slope behind the barn, Flash running elaborate figures of eight around her. There was a chill wind sweeping down from the moor top, bringing tears to her eyes. She told herself it was just the wind, but when she turned into the lee of the ridge, the tears took a little longer to dry than her excuse could justify.

  Bloody Vanessa. The woman didn’t care how low she sank to find the leverage she needed to have her way. Whatever gun she’d held to Tony’s head, it had worked. It didn’t matter that Tony had said he wasn’t asking Carol to do what Vanessa asked; they both knew she wouldn’t refuse. She was past caring about herself or the tatters of her reputation. But Tony was a different matter.

  She’d once reached a point where she’d thought she could walk away from her feelings towards him. Leave behind all the complicated emotional baggage and rebuild her life without him at the heart of it. That hadn’t lasted beyond the first threat to his future. That time, it had been Paula who had drawn them back together. Carol had never imagined that this time it would be Vanessa. ‘It’s not like you’ve got anything better to do,’ she’d said, her scorn for Carol’s handiwork palpable.

  In that moment, Carol experienced an unexpected flash of insight. The first case she’d worked with Tony, more years ago than she cared to count, they’d been tracking a killer who had made beautifully crafted medieval torture engines to harrow his victims. Had she unconsciously been building a weird link to their past with that choice to work in wood? Or was she just reaching for any connection to their joint history?

  Carol breathed deeply and ran through a couple of her exercises. ‘Put it out of your mind,’ she muttered. What she had to concentrate on now was figuring out how to track down the fraudster who had been reckless enough to cross Vanessa. There wasn’t much to go on. A name, the suggestion of a trust, a vague hint at location. At least Harrison Gardner was an uncommon name. Thankfully, these days, records of births, marriages and deaths were accessible online. No more traipsing down to London and poring over registers till your eyes burned and the skin on your fingers grew dry from turning pages. She could glean that information in a matter of minutes. Probably.

  But what then? Carol knew that it was possible to search the Land Registry by name to discover what properties were owned by that individual. She also knew from past experience that this was an index available under strictly limited criteria. Doing Vanessa’s dirty work didn’t remotely fit any of those criteria. In one previous investigation, Carol’s Major Incident Team had had to get a warrant from a judge before they were allowed to interrogate that list. But now she was no longer a police officer, she had no conceivable standing to apply for such a warrant.

  On the other hand, when legal options were unavailable, there were sometimes other possible approaches. And Carol was no stranger to unorthodox methods. She hated asking favours on her own account, but she could swallow her pride and ask on Tony’s behalf. Especially since the person she’d be making demands of would understand very well what was at stake.

  Satisfied that she’d figured out the first couple of steps, Carol turned to head back home. There was no defined path for the first part of her descent, so all her attention was on her feet as she moved swiftly across the rough grasses dotted with clumps of bilberry and heather. On days like this – the larks filling the air with streams of song, the breeze stirring the gorse bushes and not another building in sight – it was hard to believe the urban sprawl of Bradfield was only forty minutes’ drive away. When she finally met the narrow track that led to the converted barn she’d turned into an enviable home, she was able to look around again, to appreciate the long vista across the moorland to the rise of the next range of hills. But her scrutiny was rudely interrupted as her gaze travelled over the slates of her roof. />
  A sleek black car sat on her driveway alongside Carol’s Land Rover. She didn’t recognise the car and she wasn’t expecting visitors. Two unheralded callers in one day was unheard of. She felt a familiar tension build in her chest, the precursor to a choking sense of panic. Instead of giving in to it, she remembered the exercises she’d learned in Edinburgh and slowly stretched her arms out, pushing against an imaginary weight, sweeping them round to the sides as if thrusting something away from her. Again and again, she repeated the exercise and gradually, the anxiety receded a little.

  Carol crouched low to the ground and breathed deeply. She practised the tiny eye flicks Melissa Rintoul had shown her, fleeting glances to either side. Ten, fifteen, twenty-five, till at last she felt her heart rate slow to something approaching normal. Now it was safe to look. Now she could think rationally about what to do.

  There was nothing to see. Just a stranger’s car parked outside her home. Nobody got out to ring her doorbell. Presumably they’d already done that while she was concentrating on Vanessa’s problem or on her fancy footwork coming down the hill. Her first instinct was to stay put. They’d leave eventually. Bound to, she thought. If her visitor was an urban dweller, they might not think to look up the hill to see whether she was there. So she could wait them out and return to the security of her four stone walls.

  But they might have already spotted her. If it had been Carol or one of her well-drilled team, they’d have rung the bell then, when there was no reply, scanned the hillside to see whether she was anywhere to be seen. If they’d been acute enough to do that, they’d know she was out on the hill. They’d know they could stay in the warmth and comfort of their car while it got cold and dark on the exposed hillside. That she’d have to come down eventually.

  And there was no guarantee that they weren’t watching her right now. Carol wasn’t wearing bright clothes, but that didn’t mean she was camouflaged against the mixed yellows, greys and greens of the moor. Even though Flash was belly-down beside her, the dog’s black-and-white coat stood out like a waving flag among the vegetation.

  Carol stood up and started moving down the hill at a steady pace, gaze shifting constantly between the uneven path and her destination. She knew Melissa wouldn’t approve. It would come under the heading of reckless behaviour, no doubt. But on balance, this wasn’t a Mexican stand-off she could win. Better to get it over and done with and confront whoever was in the black car while she had the energy to seize the upper hand.

  As she neared the level ground behind the barn, the driver’s door opened. So she’d been right. Her visitor knew exactly where she was and had been keeping her under surveillance. Carol signalled Flash to come to heel and moved steadily forward, hands loose at her side, ready for whatever challenge lay ahead. She was going to feel really stupid if this was her neighbour George Nicholas come to show off a new car.

  But it wasn’t George who began to emerge. Not unless he had taken to wearing black stockings and stilettos. A swagger of camel cashmere covering a tailored charcoal suit followed the legs. A flourish of shoulder-length hair whose fifty shades of dark blonde bore testament to an expensive hairdresser’s talents. A skilful make-up job that banished the years as surely as Vanessa Hill’s. A juddering moment of recognition pitched Carol into the physical and emotional reaction she now recognised as PTSD. For years, this woman had been her adversary. But the last time she’d seen her had been at Tony’s trial, the defence solicitor constantly on the shoulder of his barrister.

  Now Bronwen Scott had come calling. And Carol’s heart raced when she considered why that might be.

  12

  It’s the job of police officers to investigate the backgrounds of suspects. They have access to all sorts of information that’s not readily available to anyone else. The product of those inquiries is the invaluable raw material for any psychologist who is advising them on angles of approach in an interview.

  From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

  One of the secrets of Paula’s success as an interviewer was to suck up as much background information about her subject as possible. So much so that Stacey had once referred to them as Paula’s ‘victims’. She’d said it was a slip of the tongue, but none of the others in the squad had pulled her up on it. So while Stacey was data-mining for individuals they could pursue, Paula set about a different kind of digging. Stacey might be all over the dark side of the information highway, but Paula knew how to google.

  When the Blessed Pearl had closed down five years before, it hadn’t made much of a stir online. The closure of a convent and its associated children’s home wasn’t of much interest, not even in nearby Bradfield. There were no allegations of sexual abuse against the nuns and priests of the Blessed Pearl, and if anybody had been complaining about any other kind of abuse, it hadn’t grabbed the interest of the mainstream media or the citizen journalists of cyberspace.

  So the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times had contented itself with a short news feature about the closure of an institution that had existed almost unnoticed on the edge of the satellite village of Bradesden for more than seventy years. They had a quote from the Mother Superior, a woman weirdly called Sister Mary Patrick: ‘It’s very sad to see the end of a community that has educated and raised hundreds of children and led them to productive lives in society. But there are fewer women entering the Order of the Blessed Pearl and we can no longer sustain the level of involvement and training required to care for girls who are often very disturbed and have complex emotional needs. St Margaret Clitherow Refuge and School has been an anchor for those children but now it’s time to pass the baton to others.’

  The archdiocese had chipped in too. ‘The sisters of the Order of the Blessed Pearl have given remarkable service to generations of young people. We salute their hard work and sacrifice. Young people will always find a home in the Catholic Church, but in less formal arrangements than before.’

  Interestingly, in the light of what the bulldozers had uncovered, there were no quotes from any of the former residents of the St Margaret Clitherow Refuge and School. Paula knew journalists could be lazy, letting themselves be spoon-fed easy answers. But not to have sought out any of the children who’d been raised by the sisters seemed wilfully negligent, given the level of allegations of sexual abuse that had risen like a polluted tide around the Catholic Church in recent years.

  Perhaps the answer was even more mundane than overworked or under-curious hacks. Perhaps the answer was that the dead of St Margaret Clitherow were the victims of a different kind of abuse. It was certainly worth considering.

  Towards the end of the article, the fate of the nuns from Bradesden was reported. According to the Mother Superior, they were to be redistributed among the other establishments run by the order. Paula wondered if that was the whole story. If she was running an order of nuns and it looked like at least some of them had been engaged in questionable behaviour, she’d want to farm them out to another sisterhood altogether. Somewhere nobody would come looking. The Little Sisters of Perpetual Hypocrisy, or something.

  Paula carried on googling, looking for any hints of impropriety surrounding the wider Order of the Blessed Pearl. It was named for St Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic martyr in Elizabethan England, she discovered. She’d been known locally as the Blessed Pearl of York. The order honouring her had been established in 1930, a year after Margaret had been beatified by Pope Pius XI. Paula read about Margaret’s sixteenth-century martyrdom with the same sickening disgust that years of working serial homicide had provoked. Her executioners had stripped her naked and laid her flat on the ground, a sharp stone pressing into her spine. Then they’d laid a heavy door on top of her and piled it with rocks till her spine was broken and her chest crushed so she could no longer breathe. Her crime? Hiding Catholic priests from the post-Reformation Protestant zealots. Paula wondered what Tony would make of them, and the Virgin Queen who had been head of their church. Though it turned out Elizabeth had written to the populace of Yor
k expressing her unhappiness at the execution. Not at the method, but the fact that Margaret, as a woman, shouldn’t have been executed. Tony was big on rehabilitation and redemption but Paula had a hunch Elizabeth’s letter wouldn’t have cut it.

  Margaret had acquired the status of a local hero, a rallying point for Catholics hiding their faith. Then, when it became possible openly to espouse that faith, she became the focus of a campaign for sainthood, led by the sisters of the Order of the Blessed Pearl, who got their reward in 1970 when Margaret was canonised by Pope Paul VI.

  According to Wikipedia, the Blessed Pearl had never been one of the major orders of nuns. The Mother House was in York, less than a mile away from the house in the Shambles where Margaret had lived with her butcher husband and three children. And, apparently, assorted hidden priests. The chapel of the Mother House held the order’s most sacred relic, the embalmed heart of the saint. Again, Paula felt that shudder of revulsion. It seemed fundamentally primitive to her to revere the body parts of the long dead, however spiritual they might be considered.

  Apart from the Bradesden establishment, there were also convent houses in Liverpool, Galway and another in rural Norfolk. None of them had schools attached, though the Norfolk nuns had run a children’s home until 1982. There appeared to be no whiff of scandal associated with any of them. Lives of quiet piety seemed to be their speciality. They didn’t even go in for the obvious good works of teaching or caring for the sick and elderly in the wider community. Really, Paula thought, what was the point of them?

  She’d got this far in her deliberations when Stacey dropped a sheaf of papers on her desk. ‘I’ve sent you digital copies, but I know you like to work with paper,’ she said.