The Torment of Others (38 page)

By the time she got to her door, she was trembling with a mixture of despair and exhaustion. She was pathetically grateful to see a light burning in Tony’s study. She leaned on his doorbell. He opened the door dressed in jogging pants and a T-shirt, a puzzled look on his face.

‘He’s got Paula,’ Carol said. Each word felt as if it had been dragged out of her. She closed her eyes tightly, tilting her head back. Tony stepped on to the freezing doorstep and put his arms round her. For a few seconds, her body remained rigid. Then her head was on his shoulder, tears coursing down her face. Tony said nothing. He supported her weight, letting her lean into him, feeling her body shudder as she let go her grief.

Eventually, the storm abated. Carol withdrew slightly, meeting his concerned look. ‘I’m OK,’ she said shakily.

‘No, you’re not.’ Tony led her indoors and helped her sit. ‘You want a drink?’

Carol nodded, wiping the tracks of her tears from her cheeks. ‘Please.’

He nodded, heading for the kitchen. He reappeared a minute later with two glasses of white wine, handing one to Carol before sitting down next to her. ‘You want to talk about it?’

Carol took a mouthful of wine. It tasted alien, as if something had chemically altered her tastebuds. ‘Call it displacement activity if you want, but I can’t talk about Paula until I know where we stand with each other.’

‘Then you need to tell me what I need to know.’

Carol drank more wine. This time, it tasted closer to what she expected. ‘Since the rape, I’ve felt like I didn’t own my body any more. It took me a while to realize that I needed a sexual experience that would show me I was still in control of my responses. I needed it to be about me and I needed it to be uncomplicated.’ She put the palm of her hand on his back, feeling the warmth of his skin through his shirt.

He snorted. ‘Which ruled me out on both counts.’

Her half-smile signalled agreement. ‘And suddenly there was Jonathan. Understanding, generous, attractive and absolutely not somebody I could fall in love with. So I used him. I’m not particularly proud of that, but there’s no reason for you to feel jealous. You get more of me every day than I let him have.’

‘But I am jealous. I’m jealous that it’s so easy for him and so hard for me.’

‘I was trying to make it easier for both of us.’

‘I know. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, is it? For you and me to be at ease with each other?’

His voice was sadder than she’d ever heard it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said bleakly. ‘I just know that I…’

‘Don’t say it.’ He cut across her harshly. ‘I feel the same. But the timing’s never right, is it? There’s always something with a greater claim on us, something that pushes us apart. And right now, it’s Paula. So tell me what happened tonight.’

Carol outlined the evening’s events. ‘She’s dead. And I let it happen. Knowing what I know about how these things can go wrong, I still let it happen.’

Tony jumped to his feet and started pacing. ‘I don’t think she is dead. This killer wants his victims found, and found while they’re still fresh. He sets it up so they will be found. Paula hasn’t been found, so logic dictates she’s probably still alive.’

Carol shook her head. ‘But why would he change his MO?’

‘That’s a good question. Maybe because he realized Paula’s a cop. If you remember, I said to you after the first night that he might have spotted that she was a decoy.’

‘Even so, why would that make a difference?’

‘He likes power. It may be that he’s keeping her alive because it gives him even more power to savour, having a cop under control. It gives him power over us as well as over her. He’s the stage manager, the conductor of the orchestra. We have to dance to his tune if we want Paula back alive.’

Carol frowned. ‘What do you mean, “dance to his tune”?’

Tony waved a hand impatiently. ‘I don’t know yet. Either he’ll make that clear to us or we’ll have to figure it out for ourselves.’ He paced again then stopped abruptly and whirled round to face her. ‘Carol, how did he know she was wearing a wire?’

‘You answered that yourself. He must have figured out she was a decoy and realized she would be wired. That’s probably why he started pawing her as soon as he got her in the alley.’

‘This is way too sophisticated for Derek Tyler,’ he muttered.

‘But it wasn’t Derek Tyler last night. Derek Tyler’s banged up in Bradfield Moor.’

‘I know, I know. But these are the same crimes, the same brain behind them. And it’s not Derek Tyler’s brain. He’s not smart enough, not controlled enough.’ He fixed Carol with a freshly energized stare. ‘The person behind this isn’t just pulling our strings. He’s pulling the killer’s strings too.’

Carol shook her head stubbornly. ‘I don’t buy it. People don’t kill because somebody asks them to. Only contract killers do that. And if this is a contract killer, then he’s doing it at the behest of someone who wants to send Derek Tyler a “Get out of jail free” card. We need to go back through his life again, find out who might want him out and why.’

‘You’re wrong, Carol,’ Tony sighed. ‘But if you’re determined to go down that path, then maybe you should be looking into the lives of his victims, not Tyler himself.’

Carol drained her glass and stood up. ‘His victims?’

‘If I loved someone who was murdered, and their killer didn’t even get life, if he just got sent to a mental hospital that theoretically he could be released from at any time, I probably wouldn’t feel that justice had been done. I’d want that killer in my grasp. Given the kind of circles his victims moved in, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that there’s someone who loved one of his victims and who is now in a position to hire a contract killer to replicate those crimes, in the expectation that you’ll have to let Tyler go as a result.’ He shrugged. ‘It has a kind of logic to it.’

Carol stared at him, her mouth open. ‘Logic?’ she stammered.

‘No, Carol. It’s bollocks. If there was anything in what I’ve just suggested, the person hiring the contract killer would also have sent a lawyer in to Tyler, pushing him towards an appeal. And that hasn’t happened.’

‘There’s time,’ she said. ‘Maybe he’ll try to use Paula as a bargaining chip.’

‘Carol, if you get a demand from the killer offering you Paula in exchange for an admission that Derek Tyler was wrongly convicted, I will buy you dinner every night for a year.’

‘Deal,’ she said.

He swallowed the last of his wine. ‘And now I think it’s time for sleep. We’ve both got important work to do…’ He glanced at his watch and groaned. ‘Starting in a few hours.’

‘I didn’t thank you for the profile in the Tim Golding case,’ Carol said, following him to the front door ‘It was very helpful.’

‘You’re welcome. I didn’t think you got your money’s worth before.’

‘Will you go out and take a look at the scene?’

He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I was thinking about going out there tomorrow. But with Paula missing…’

‘It can probably wait.’

‘Who have you got on it?’ he asked.

‘Kevin and Sam. And Stacey will do the liaison with the paedophile unit. Don wanted it back, but frankly I’m not convinced he’s up to it. When all this shit is over, I think I’m going to ask Brandon to move him back to mainstream CID. Maybe by then Chris Devine will be able to move north. She’d make a good DI.’ Her face clouded over. ‘God, when I think how much I was looking forward to this assignment. I thought it was going to be my salvation. But right now, it feels like the last nail in the coffin.’

Stacey Chen loved her job. Her parents had embraced computer technology with eagerness when it first became generally available in the late eighties. They owned a chain of Chinese supermarkets and the capacity of the machines to keep track of stock and transactions enchanted them. Stacey could hardly remember a time when there hadn’t been computers in her life. An only child, she’d taken to silicon the way other children took to Barbie dolls or books. Frustrated by the limitations of those early home computers, she’d learned programming code so she could write her own games for machines that had only ever been meant to do word processing and simple accounts. By the time she started studying computer science at UMIST, she’d already earned enough to buy a city-centre loft, thanks to a neat little piece of code she’d sold to a US software giant which secured their operating system against potential software conflicts. Her lecturers predicted a meteoric career for her in the dotcom world. None of them could quite believe it when she’d announced that she planned to join the police.

It made absolute sense to Stacey, however. She loved the unpicking of problems. Rooting around in other people’s systems was meat and drink to her, and here was a way she could satisfy her urges without breaking any laws. And she had enough time off to pursue her own commercial interests without any of the potential clashes that might have arisen if she’d been working for a software company. So what if her police salary was peanuts compared to what she made in her own time? Her job gave her legitimate sanction to invade other people’s secrets, and that was satisfaction enough.

She didn’t even need to be in the office to creep through everyone else’s data. She’d set up her own home computing systems to allow her network access to all the machines used by the Major Incident Team. And because she’d designated herself as a systems operator she didn’t even have to go through the tiresome process of capturing their passwords. She could simply wander at will through their machines. And so she knew Kevin’s taste for soft-porn sites where he could browse for free without handing over any personal details. She knew Don Merrick’s penchant for American baseball, Paula’s addiction to news websites and Jan’s habit of ordering books from an online women’s bookstore in York. She’d been intrigued by Carol Jordan’s wariness to commit to the machine until she’d uncovered the information that her brother worked in software development. Carol was clearly only too aware of the footprints that any activity left on a computer.

She also knew about Sam Evans’ late-night trawls. She’d sat in her flat noting his keystrokes, watching him trying to break into his colleagues’ files and failing every time at the password hurdle. She should have felt that Sam was a kindred spirit, but instead she despised him for his incompetence. He should stick to hanging out on those gross post-mortem sites he liked so much. That was about his speed. God, but cops were weird.

Tonight she was alone on the system, however. Wherever Sam was, he wasn’t skulking round the office, trying to steal a march on the rest of them. And there was nothing new on the hard drive to interest her. She wondered what was happening over in Temple Fields. A few keyboard commands and a couple of mouse clicks and she could see what the cameras were feeding back to the computer.

Stacey poured herself another cup of coffee from the Thermos on her desk and settled down for a long hard look.

Paula had no idea how long she had been lying in the stark, oppressive room with its bare bulb making everything brutally vivid. At first, all she’d felt was overwhelming relief and gratitude that she was still alive. She had no idea why that should be; she knew his previous victims must have been attacked almost as soon as he’d snatched them from the street. And when he had produced that vile, horrifying implement, she’d been sure she was going the same way. But no. He’d simply exposed her genitals to the camera, brandished the lethal dildo in front of her and giggled. Then he’d checked her bindings and stepped back, fingering his cock through the faded denim of his baggy trousers. She’d thought then he was going to rape her, but that fear wasn’t realized either. He’d gazed hungrily at her for a few minutes, stroking his erection as if it were a pet rat. Then he’d checked the video camera and the webcam and left. Since then, she’d been alone. She’d struggled to free herself, but soon gave up, understanding that the only thing she was achieving was the fruitless expenditure of energy she might need later. She’d tried shouting for help, but the gag pressing against her mouth was far too effective to allow anything other than a moan to escape. There was nothing to do but lie there, shivering with cold and fear. The puddle of piss beneath her had soaked into the thin mattress and spread out, making her even colder.

Paula tried to convince herself they’d be coming to get her soon. Carol Jordan would never abandon her. That he’d left her alive made her think he believed they were close on his heels. He’d gone because he didn’t expect to have the time to sit and watch her die once he’d cut her. But as the time trickled by, she began to lose faith. At one point she’d thought she heard faint footfalls and muffled conversation. But even as she strained to hear, the sounds faded and she was left wondering if it had all been her imagination.

This was all her own fault. How could she have missed him cutting the wire? If she’d been paying attention to her mission instead of freaking out because he’d pinched her nipple so painfully, she’d have known she was on her own. Then, as soon as they reached the room and she’d seen confirmation in the tools of his trade arranged on the table, she could have taken him by surprise and nailed him. But she’d dropped the ball. She’d focused on her reactions rather than on the job and now she was paying the price.