How the Dead Speak

by Val McDermid

  ‘We haven’t got time to sit on our hands. Besides, this a team. We don’t chase individual glory here, Alvin. I’ll speak to the Crime Scene Manager, make sure we’ve got a full forensics team on board. Alvin, arrange transport to the scene. Chen, why are you still standing here?’

  Stacey didn’t react. She simply leaned across Alvin’s keyboard and copied the interview across to her system then walked calmly to her chair and started typing. Target of warrant, reasons justifying the issuing of a warrant, locations to be covered by the warrant. She checked the list of duty magistrates and chose one she knew they’d worked with in the past. If she’d done a good job of pitching their reasons, he’d issue the warrant electronically. If not, he’d come back to her on Skype and she’d have to be persuasive. It wasn’t a skill that came naturally to her face to face.

  Meanwhile, Alvin lined up his search team. He’d use the officers from Fielding’s team to secure the property and the outbuildings. The house search he’d leave to the three of them because they knew best what they were looking for. Once he’d arranged for transport and confirmed the forensics team was on standby, he ambled over to Stacey’s desk, hands stuffed in his trouser pockets. ‘How’s it looking?’

  She shrugged. ‘This mag usually comes back pretty quickly if he’s happy. My guess is he’s running it past somebody else. We just have to wait and see. When’s Paula due back, do you know?’

  ‘Her flight gets in around six. I’ll try and stall the start of the interview till she gets back. But I don’t think the boss will go for that.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Stacey sounded glum. ‘It’s not just that this is Paula’s work product . . . ’ She tailed off, not wanting Alvin to think she didn’t rate him.

  ‘It’s that she’s better at the head-to-head than any of us.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m going to get a pie from the canteen, do you want anything?’

  ‘Chips,’ Stacey said.

  Alvin gave her a puzzled look. ‘You never eat chips.’

  ‘I want to feel bad about myself because all my digital wizardry got knocked out of the park by a nun. Which is about as medieval as it gets.’

  He patted her shoulder and headed out of the room. But before he could satisfy their cravings for junk food, his phone rang. ‘Get back now,’ Stacey said. ‘The warrant’s through.’

  There was nothing subtle about ReMIT’s arrival at Mark Conway’s house. But it soon became obvious there was nobody there to be alarmed about the arrival of a cavalcade of police and scene-of-crimes vehicles. Alvin directed the BMP officers to check out the garage and the other outbuildings and to secure the house once they’d taken the battering ram to the back door. ‘Makes it less obvious if Conway comes back in the middle of our fun and games,’ Alvin said. From the well-equipped utility room, he called Sophie in the incident room to report Conway’s absence.

  ‘Can you get someone to check whether he’s in his office?’ Alvin asked.

  ‘Have we not got a team at his office?’

  ‘We didn’t get the warrant for his office. Just his home. The magistrate didn’t think there was sufficient cause for us to raid his company HQ. At least, not yet.’

  ‘Why did nobody tell me that?’

  Alvin decided to treat that as a rhetorical question. ‘So, we’re going to crack on with searching the house. The forensics crew are on site.’

  ‘We’re going to end up with egg on our faces,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m as keen as anyone to catch this killer but I simply can’t believe Mark Conway is a serial killer. Full stop. And young boys? That makes no sense. I got no gay vibe off him, ever.’

  Alvin shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean he wasn’t perving over teenage boys. If we’ve learned anything from the whole #MeToo thing, it’s that powerful men are very good at using their power to hide the bad stuff they do.’ He wanted her to stop defending Conway so he could get on with his job but she was the ranking officer so he had to put up and shut up. He stared unseeingly at a shelf of laundry products and let it wash over him.

  ‘Yeah, but a lot of the time their behaviour was an open secret among the poor sods who had to keep their mouths shut to save their jobs and their own reputations. I never heard anything like that about Mark. Sure, he was supportive of young men coming up in the business. He often talked about how he’d had to overcome so many obstacles when he was starting out. But he held out a hand to young women too, there was nothing inappropriate in any of it.’ There was a defensive note in her voice, as if she was waiting to be shot down in flames unreasonably.

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right and we’re all going to look like bunch of fuckwits. But I wouldn’t like to try to pull the wool over Paula’s eyes.’

  Sophie harrumphed. ‘Nobody’s infallible, Alvin.’

  ‘I need to get on, guv,’ he said, closing down the call. He knew who his money would be on if this were a race. ‘Right. Steve, you take the home office. Karim, living room. I’ll do the master bedroom.’

  Gloved and suited up, he moved upstairs, checking each room on the first floor as he went. The master bedroom was unmistakable. Not only was it the largest, with a luxurious en suite bathroom and a separate bedroom, it was the only one that showed any sign of being inhabited. The laundry basket contained underwear, socks, a T-shirt and a dress shirt, the pillows were randomly depressed and the duvet on the superking bed was rumpled. Clearly Conway didn’t have live-in staff, or even a daily housekeeper, even though he could have readily afforded it. Alvin wondered whether that was because he was anxious about prying eyes.

  A massive TV filled most of the wall opposite the bed. Alvin picked up the remote and flicked it on. The default was a sports channel showing a repeat of Liverpool’s remarkable European Championship semi-final victory over Barcelona. Not a glory likely to crown Bradfield Vics’ season any time soon, Alvin reckoned. Next to the remote on the bedside table, a thin hardback called Black Boots and Football Pinks. Alvin picked it up and thumbed through it. Some sort of nostalgic tribute to the beautiful game.

  There was little else of interest in the room. No drugs stash in the bedside table drawers, unless you counted a box of vitamin C and zinc supplements. No porn tucked under the mattress. No sex toys in the ottoman at the foot of the bed, unless a fake fur winter-weight throw was what turned you on. Even the decorations on the walls – three framed, signed Bradfield Vics shirts – gave nothing away about who Mark Conway was beneath his carefully confected public image.

  The bathroom offered no surprises. An array of expensive toiletries lined the glass shelves. A box of condoms, a blister pack of ibuprofen, a half-squeezed tube of haemorrhoid cream, a jar of CBD muscle rub, a tub of cotton wool buds and an electric razor were the entire contents of the mirrored bathroom cabinet. In the shower, a large sponge sat in a chrome caddy alongside shampoo and shower gel. Conway didn’t even have gold taps, which Alvin had thought was compulsory for any self-respecting self-made man who was also a football fanatic.

  The dressing room revealed that his suits were all made-to-measure by the same Bradfield tailor. Alvin, a relatively recent immigrant to the city, didn’t recognise the name of a craftsman who had made his reputation in the 1990s providing sharply styled suits for a slew of famous actors and musicians. He did recognise that the quality of the clothes made his own off-the-peg M&S sale suit look shabby.

  Opposite the twenty or so suits were about three dozen dazzlingly white shirts, sheathed in dry cleaner’s plastic. Next to them, a tie hanger with an array of silk ties that would have left Alvin scratching his head over the choice every morning. Who had the time for stuff like this? Well, obviously a man who didn’t have kids and had control over his own working life.

  The end wall was divided into open cubicles above three shelves of shoes. Dress shoes arranged from tan through to black. A dozen pairs of trainers. Deck shoes. Chelsea boots. An old, creased pair of Docs that were the only nod to the kind of world Alvin inhabited. The cubicles were just as neatly organised. Jeans and joggers. Ts
hirts and sweatshirts folded, grouped by colour. Shorts, likewise.

  And right in the middle, if Sister Mary Patrick was to be believed, the body disposal outfit of choice for Mark Conway. Four cubes filled with an array of Bradfield Victoria replica shirts, home and away.

  Alvin pulled out the top cube. Eight neatly folded tops, the current season’s home kit on top. He flipped through the pile, realising they were arranged in chronological order. There was no way of knowing which shirt the nun had spotted, except that it would have had to have been more than five seasons ago, given when the convent had closed its doors. To be on the safe side, he bagged and tagged all of the canary yellow home shirts. There was nothing more for him to do; it was time to leave the bedroom to the forensics team for what he expected to be a fruitless search for traces of young men who might or might not have been here over a long span of years.

  He headed downstairs, hoping Steve or Karim might have had more luck. But before he had the chance to seek them out, another figure emerged from the utility room, barely recognisable in her white suit and hood.

  ‘Boss!’ Alvin exclaimed. ‘I wasn’t expecting you for another—’ he glanced at his watch. ‘Hour and a half at least. How did you manage to get back so soon?’

  ‘On my broomstick,’ Paula said. ‘There was an earlier flight to Liverpool, I don’t know how I made it. Then I got the local traffic boys to whizz me over here. So where’s Conway?’

  ‘All I know is, he’s not here.’

  ‘Bugger. What have you got there?’

  ‘A pile of Conway’s Bradfield Vics’ replica shirts. Not that I imagine there’ll be anything there for forensics to find. And I don’t suppose there’s any chance of your nun picking out the particular shirt in question.’

  ‘More chance of the Pope joining a boy band.’ But she frowned, as if something was tugging at her memory. ‘Lyle Tate,’ she said slowly.

  ‘One of the victims, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ She drew the word out over a few syllables. ‘Somebody went down for his murder. He couldn’t have done the most recent bodies because he was banged up. So unless he was working with Conway on the earlier murders, it’s got to be a miscarriage of justice.’

  ‘That takes us where, exactly? You think the perp on the Lyle Tate murder can maybe give us Conway?’

  ‘That’s not what I was thinking, but I suppose it’s an outside possibility. No, what I’m getting at is that I took a look at the Lyle Tate case. And according to the accused, the reason for the blood in his flat was that Tate had a nosebleed earlier in the evening. If that’s true – and it’s looking likely now that we got the wrong guy, since he couldn’t have done the later victims – if he’d got into a struggle later, his nose might have bled again. What do you think? Maybe one of Mark Conway’s football shirts has traces of blood?’

  Without them noticing, Karim had approached. ‘These Conway’s shirts?’

  Alvin nodded. ‘Chronological order, looks like.’

  ‘Surely he’d have washed them if he’d got any blood on them?’ Karim said.

  ‘Fuck,’ Alvin breathed. He pushed past Paula and hustled into the utility room. She followed and found him gazing at a shelf of laundry detergents.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re all non-bio. Non-allergenic.’

  ‘Still takes stains out,’ Paula said.

  A wide grin spread across Alvin’s face. ‘I’ve got one word for you, boss. Chromophores.’

  60

  Some killers know they’re smart. They believe they can outsmart the system, and they often succeed to a depressing extent. But sometimes their very cleverness can start to work against them as they come up with more and more elaborate ways to outwit the forces pitted against them.

  From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

  Incredulous, Chrissie O’Farrelly stared at Paula and Alvin. ‘You’re not serious? Look, I mentioned something in passing to Sergeant Ambrose. It’s right out there on the edge of what’s possible. It’s science that’s not been tested in the courtroom. Hell, it’s barely made it into the peer-reviewed literature.’

  ‘It’s all we’ve got at this point,’ Paula said.

  ‘You don’t even know you’ve got it, if I understand you correctly.’

  ‘But there’s a good chance,’ Alvin chipped in. ‘I thought you scientists liked a challenge?’

  Chrissie shook her head. ‘Oh no, you don’t catch me out like that. I’ve been flattered by experts. I don’t even know how we’d go about something like this. We’d certainly end up destroying the garment because we’d have to test so many pieces. And your DCI would be screaming about his budget.’

  ‘Murder always trumps budget in my book,’ Paula said.

  ‘If there’s a point to it, yes.’

  It felt like stalemate. Paula had been convinced by Alvin’s sketchy explanation: ‘There are these chemicals called chromophores that make blood look red. Washing them gets rid of the visible stain. But the bit of the blood with the DNA in? It stays in the material if you’ve washed it in non-biological detergent,’ he’d said. It sounded unlikely to Paula but Alvin was positive he’d got it right. And now Chrissie O’Farrelly was snatching away the one corroboration they had of Sister Mary Patrick’s evidence. But Paula wasn’t going to give up without a fight. ‘What about your students? You must have some keen young researchers who’d love to make their mark by helping to solve a high-profile series of murders? Science doesn’t move forward because people are scared of busting their budgets, Chrissie. Give us a break here.’

  Chrissie fiddled with her pen. ‘I can’t make that call on their behalf. It’d have to be done after hours, when the equipment isn’t being used for cases that are logged and listed.’

  ‘But it could be done?’

  ‘You just don’t know when to back off, do you, Paula?’

  ‘Not when it comes to serial murder. This man has killed eight people that we know of. We don’t know why he’s doing it, but the chances are his eighth victim isn’t going to be his last. Unless he’s Chinese and he’s got some warped idea about lucky numbers. God, listen to me, I sound like Tony on a mad day. Chrissie, he’s going to keep doing this until we stop him.’ She meant what she said, and it shone through. What was the point of them if they couldn’t go the extra mile when it truly was a matter of life and death?

  Chrissie looked away, refusing to meet the judgement in Paula’s eyes. ‘I’m on your side,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know whether I can deliver what you’re asking.’

  Thanks to the club website, they’d narrowed down the likely shirts that would have been current at the time of Lyle Tate’s murder and placed them in separate evidence bags. Paula dumped the bags on the table and pushed them towards Chrissie.

  ‘Try. That’s all we’re asking. You’d be examining these shirts anyway on the off chance of trace evidence. Just push it the extra mile. Please.’

  Chrissie gave a tired smile of concession. ‘No promises. I’ll talk to the person who raised it in the conference I was at. See if I can figure out how to proceed. Don’t put any probative weight on this yet, Paula. Don’t be saying, “We’ve got you bang to rights, your shirt’s going to put you away.”’ She caught Paula’s look of surprise and chuckled. ‘Yes, I know what you lot are like.’

  ‘We’ll be as silent as the graves where those young men were buried,’ Alvin said. ‘Do what you can for us.’

  ‘Don’t raise your hopes too high. It might come to nothing. Don’t stop looking for other ways to make your case.’

  ‘As if,’ Paula said.

  They both longed to go home, to make a brief escape into the normality of family life where the confrontations were never as grim or as dangerous as the ones they faced at work, the place where they could close the door on the horrors for a short time. Paula and Alvin both had their own justifications for what they did. For Paula, it was a kind of bargain – ‘If I face down the darkness and the pain and the rage out there, in retu
rn, my family will be safe.’ For Alvin, it was a simple equation – ‘Every villain I take off the streets is one less potential threat to my family.’ Both understood the strength they derived from their home lives. Even when the battle lines were drawn – and every family had its battles – they knew this was what mattered.

  But tonight, they needed to draw on another kind of family. Every case had its own momentum. And there came a tipping point in every case where it might be won or lost. That was when the team had to come together and share. When Carol had been running ReMIT, there had been no question of her not being part of that brainstorming. This time round, nobody even suggested Rutherford should be included. It saddened Paula that there seemed to be a divide between the DCI and the rest of them. It wasn’t good for morale and that wasn’t good for creativity.

  They met in a corner of the Skenfrith Street police canteen, Alvin and Steve equipped with loaded burgers to accompany their mugs of tea. Paula brought them up to speed on their visit to the lab and Chrissie O’Farrelly’s promise to look at the possibility of invisible blood. ‘The science just gets weirder and weirder,’ Karim observed.

  ‘Talking about weird – that house of Mark Conway’s is well weird,’ Steve said through a half-chewed mouthful. He swallowed. ‘It’s completely impersonal. Even the pictures he’s got framed in his office are like a parody of what you see on the telly – Conway shaking hands with famous people, Conway with some footballer’s arm draped over his shoulders, Conway posed with the rest of the directors of Bradfield Vic. But you look beyond that and there’s nothing. No family photographs, no personal letters, no stash of greetings cards from anybody special.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Alvin said. ‘Bedroom’s like a stage set. Nothing that gives anything away beyond the superficial. Well-groomed rich man who loves football. I don’t have any sense of who he is or what he’s like.’

  ‘I’ve told you what he’s like,’ Sophie sighed. ‘He’s a decent guy who’s built up a successful business from nothing. He encourages his workforce, he doesn’t exploit his position in a sleazy way. I still can’t get my head round the idea of you all thinking he’s some kind of monster.’