Splinter the Silence (21 page)

‘Then what happened?’

She spread her hands. ‘Nothing much. I made a report, somebody took some notes and I went home. And then that woman MP went on
Question Time
and said more or less the same thing I’d said and they all lost interest in me.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m prettier than her but she gets more attention in the media, so there’s more traction in trying to terrorise her.’

‘And nobody turned up at your house?’

Shakila shook her head. ‘That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have, if some other bright shiny thing hadn’t caught their eye. These people are scum, you know?’

Paula knew. ‘I expect you were very upset.’

‘Upset doesn’t begin to touch it. I was frightened for my life. And for the women who work for me. What if one of those bastards had set fire to this place? What if a bunch of them had taken it into their heads to attack me on my way home? I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I had a couple of weeks of absolute hell. I’m a tough woman, Sergeant. You have to be tough to make it in the rag trade. But I was buckling under the stress of it all. Thank God I have a strong family around me.’ For a moment, her composure slipped and Paula caught a glimpse of the unravelling that had threatened her.

‘This might sound like a strange question, but I’m asking because we’re looking at other women who’ve had similar experiences to you. Was there anyone suggesting you should kill yourself?’

Shakila gave a shaky laugh. ‘There was all sorts. To tell you the truth, I stopped reading them after a couple of days. I decided I didn’t need that shit in my head. I didn’t delete them, in case anything happened and your lot finally decided to do something. But I didn’t go through them. If you want to take a look, send somebody over, they can go through what’s on my laptop. They’ll have to do it here, though. My life, my business, they’re all on that machine, I’m not letting it out of my hands.’

Paula smiled. ‘That’s OK. I have a colleague who can make a shadow copy of your hard drive in next to no time. Then she can take it away and analyse all that crap. But you don’t remember anyone specifically encouraging you to kill yourself?’

‘Plenty telling me the world would be a better place if I was dead, quite a few saying if I loved jihad so much why didn’t I become a suicide bomber. You can see for yourselves.’

‘I’ll arrange for DC Chen to come over and copy your hard drive,’ Paula said. ‘And we’ll see whether we can track down any of the men who have been harassing you.’

‘I’m happy to press charges,’ Shakila said. ‘Even if it means I get more of the same. All I did was express an opinion. Somebody has to show these people they don’t get to shut the rest of us up because they don’t like what we have to say.’

27

E
verybody seemed to like Skype except him, Tony thought, closing his office door then settling in front of his screen. His dislike was both personal and professional. Everybody looked weird on Skype. Everyone, frankly, looked like a potential patient. There was something very unsettling about that fish-eyed stare. Even people he liked looked deranged. From a professional perspective, the trouble was you could never see enough of the person you were in conversation with to gauge their body language. They might be giving off all sorts of signals you’d be aware of in what his boss had taken to calling ‘F2F encounters’, but the Skype interface could hide a multitude of clues.

But sometimes it was impossible to avoid. Like this morning. Paula was in Manchester, interviewing Shakila Bain, the British Asian fashion designer who’d been a recent victim of harassment. Stacey was in the digital forensics unit of BMP grinding her way through routine analyses of the hard drives of suspected fraudsters. And he was seeing patients at Bradfield Cross. They’d settled on a time; all he had to do now was get his Skype up and running.

He was only four minutes late joining the other two, who were deep in discussion of Paula’s interview with Shakila. Paula broke off to greet him, adding, ‘Shakila was incredibly helpful. She’s given us access to her hard drive and her social media accounts so Stacey can check out the bastards who were harassing her, see if we can come up with any crossover.’

‘Great,’ he said. ‘So, have we got anything at all to suggest linkage between the three victims?’

‘Before we get on to that, what happened yesterday? Was it adjourned, or what? Neither of us could find anything online about it,’ Paula said.

‘Which is very strange, in my experience,’ Stacey added. ‘What with the courts being open to the public.’

Tony rubbed the back of his head, screwing his face up. ‘I should have called you. Sorry. It all got a bit complicated. The case was dismissed.’

There was a moment of shocked silence. ‘Dismissed? How can that be?’ Stacey looked almost affronted. Almost as if she’d known how rock solid the case had been.

‘I thought they had her bang to rights?’ This from Paula. ‘She sounded like she was resigned to losing her licence. The works.’

For once, Tony was glad Skype robbed them of the ability to see his body language. ‘The breathalyser was faulty. So Carol and three other people had their cases dismissed.’

Paula grinned like a birthday child. ‘So she’s off the hook? No record, still driving?’

‘Still out there, able to do it again, you mean,’ Stacey said gloomily. ‘Not that I wish anything bad for Carol, but she shouldn’t do it.’

‘She’s not drinking,’ Tony said. ‘It was a wake-up call, Stacey.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, I know she’ll be in touch herself later.’

Paula gave him a quick sideways look. ‘What are you not telling us?’

That, he thought, was the downside of building friendships. People could see more than you necessarily wanted to show. ‘Nothing you won’t find out in due course from the appropriate source,’ he said stiffly. ‘Please, Paula, don’t put me on the spot.’

‘So Carol’s got something to tell us and it must be a big deal or you’d have spilled the beans by now.’

‘Stop teasing him,’ Stacey said with mock-severity. ‘There’s no point. He won’t tell us and we’ll only make him even more uncomfortable.’

Tony couldn’t remember Stacey ever having so much to say that wasn’t directly related to the digital universe. Apparently her relationship with Sam had mellowed her to the point where she noticed other people existed. He liked that people still had the power to surprise him in a good way. ‘So, now we’ve established I’m not going to tell you what’s not mine to tell, can we move on to the purpose of this conference call?’ he said.

Paula rolled her eyes. ‘Stacey, you go first.’

‘OK. I won’t bore you with all the numbers of troll posts, which are surprisingly high across all social media. I knew this was an issue, guys, but I hadn’t quite grasped that it was the same scale of epidemic as images of child sex abuse. I know I’m a geek, but even I regret some of what the internet has made possible.’

‘Bloody hell, is that the sound of the sky falling?’ Paula demanded.

‘Not funny. The key figures for our victims are these – only seven people trolled all three women. Of those seven, only five did so repeatedly. So if you’re looking for a starting point, I’d say that’s one possibility.’

‘And do we actually know who those five individuals are? In flesh-and-blood terms, I mean?’ Tony was cautiously interested.

‘I have ID on three of them. The other two are being a bit more elusive but I should be able to crack them.’

‘That’s amazing work, Stacey. It’s good to see you’ve not lost your touch, even though they’ve got you doing the equivalent of shovelling coal,’ Tony said. ‘That definitely gives us a place to start pushing.’

‘There’s something else that’s a bit odd,’ Paula said. ‘Kate Rawlins had a book of poetry on the driver’s seat next to her. According to her family, she never read poetry and they don’t recognise the book as belonging to Kate. It was by some American called Anne Sexton who killed herself. She apparently had a lot of mental health issues. But what makes it even more intriguing is that the pages of a book of poetry by Sylvia Plath were scattered all over Daisy Morton’s garden after the explosion. Plath was also an American. Also with mental health problems. Also killed herself. As if that’s not enough of a coincidence, Kate and Daisy killed themselves in roughly the same way as the dead poets did. Sexton locked herself in the garage with the engine running and Plath stuck her head in the gas oven. Though there wasn’t an explosion.’

Abruptly, Tony slapped his forehead. ‘Of course,’ he shouted. ‘I am so stupid sometimes.’ He spread his hands and grinned. ‘It’s been bothering me for days – Jasmine’s death. Walking into the river with her pockets full of stones. I knew there was something nagging at the back of my mind.’ He looked triumphant.

‘What?’ Paula said. ‘You’re going to have to give us more of a clue.’

‘Virginia Woolf. Not an American, admittedly, but another woman writer who killed herself. She committed suicide by walking into a river with her pockets full of stones. Honestly, some days I think I’m losing it altogether. Did anyone say anything about finding a Virginia Woolf book?’

Paula shook her head. ‘No. But they’re not very clear where exactly she went into the river. I imagine they didn’t think it was important to know the precise point. Apparently there’s a cycleway and footpath that runs along the estuary. She’d parked her car near the path but they’re not sure how far she walked along the bank before she walked in.’

‘Do we know anybody down there who might take a look for us?’ Tony asked.

The two women looked at each other, blank. ‘I got nothing,’ Paula said.

‘Me neither. At least, not that I know of. I don’t know the geographical whereabouts of all my network.’

Tony said no more. If Carol decided to pursue this, she could organise liaison with the local force. If she wasn’t plunged directly into a live case. Which was always a possibility. Before he could say more, Paula started. ‘My phone,’ she said, turning away. She glanced back at them. ‘Gotta go, it’s Carol.’ She disappeared from the screen, leaving Tony and Stacey staring uncertainly at each other.

‘Send me what you have on those three you’ve identified,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if anything jumps out at me.’

‘Didn’t she write
A Room of One’s Own
? Virginia Woolf?’

‘Yes. She said women needed a room and five hundred pounds a year if they were going to be writers. I suppose that was a kind of middle-class feminism,’ he said.

‘The feminism of privilege,’ Stacey said. He could hear her fingers whispering over the keys. ‘That’s more than twenty-seven grand a year in today’s money. She wouldn’t have done very well on the Jobseeker’s Allowance.’

‘All of our victims were making their own living, though. They weren’t expecting a man or the state to keep them. They were modern feminists.’ Tony sighed. ‘I wonder, are we making this up as we go along?’

Stacey smiled. He wasn’t familiar with her smile and was surprised by its sweetness. ‘Does it matter? There’s enough substance here to make it worth looking into. And it’s worth looking into because it needs to be dealt with.’

‘And how do we do that?’

A long pause. Then Stacey said, ‘I’m not sure. But I think I’ll know when we get there.’

28

H
e was going to have to try harder, that was becoming obvious. These women were like some sort of monster in a fantasy movie. Every time you cut off one head, two more appeared. Maybe he was more attuned to what was going on in the world around him. Living with Sarah, before she’d signed her own death warrant, he guessed he hadn’t been paying so much attention to what was happening in the outside world. Or maybe it was the way that social media gave a platform to anybody, regardless of how screwed-up their message was.

One thing was certain. If Daisy Morton was anything to go by, they’d go to any lengths to twist things so they looked like the opposite of what he’d meant. How could anybody think Daisy Morton’s death had been an accident? How do you accidentally turn on all the gas rings and stick your head and shoulders in the oven? How do you accidentally blow up a house with yourself inside it? He’d been enraged when he’d read that interview with her husband. ‘Daisy must have banged her head when she was making sure the stove was working properly.’ It beggared belief.

But most of the coverage had hinted that Daisy Morton’s death had been intentional. It pointed out how vocal she’d been online and how much criticism, all of it legitimate in his eyes, she’d drawn to herself. Reading between the lines, the media view was the one he wanted the world to understand – that Daisy Morton had killed herself because of the pressure from people pointing out how wrong and stupid she was.

But he’d realised he needed to step up the pressure. To turn it into a wave that nobody could ignore. And so he’d moved a little sooner than he’d planned, because Jasmine Burton played right into his hands with her little holiday in Devon. All alone in her isolated cottage. It had been child’s play to wait for her to come home at the end of the evening and knock her to the ground with a leather cosh he’d bought from a militaria website months before. This time, it didn’t matter so much if there was damage to her body; the actions of the water would explain any bumps or bruises. She’d dropped like a stone and he’d had a couple of anxious moments, fearing he’d killed her too soon. That would have ruined his plan; he needed her to be breathing when he put her in the water. He needed her to drown.

He’d already collected the stones from further up the estuary, where he’d also left the template text. Virginia Woolf this time. Killed herself because she was an unfulfilled childless depressive who had no idea how to be a wife. Probably a lesbian too, so all the more appropriate.

Then he’d filled Jasmine Burton’s pockets with stones and driven to a slipway on the estuary where he’d dumped her on an ebbing tide. Let them try to pretend that one was an accident. It served her right, spouting her crap about how women needed to be protected from men. Women needed to learn how to behave.

There was a beauty in what he was doing, he thought. An elegance. Nobody truly felt sorry for a suicide, in spite of what bleeding-heart commentators sometimes said in public so they could sound sensitive and caring. Mostly what people felt was contempt or anger. Contempt for people who were too weak to face up to their problems. Anger for the selfishness that didn’t care about the pain inflicted on the ones left behind. So when he made their deserved deaths look like suicide, he was condemning them to a complete loss of respect. A loss of value. Nobody could take their opinions seriously when these women had opted for such a selfish, easy way out.