Cross and Burn (28 page)

Paula kicked out at a sawhorse in her frustration then shouted at Carol for the first time in her life. ‘It’s not about pity, for fuck’s sake. It’s about justice. The woman I used to know cared about justice.’ The slam of the door behind her as she left was the only satisfying moment of the whole encounter.

T
ony sat on the edge of the narrow ledge that passed for a bed in the Skenfrith Street custody suite, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. He’d been in police cells before, but only in the course of business. Talking to the damaged, the deranged and the demonised had brought him to places like this, but always with the door open. He’d often tried to put himself in the shoes of the captive, imagining how it must feel when that door slammed shut and they were alone. But he’d always started from a place of empathy – what it would be like for them. As opposed to how he would feel himself.

Mostly what he felt was uncomfortable. Being on his own in a small space didn’t bother him. For a man who had learned to live on a narrowboat, it was no big deal. The noises-off didn’t bother him either. Working in a secure mental hospital was an inoculation against unexpected and inexplicable human clamour. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty yet, so that wasn’t an issue. But there was no getting away from the discomfort. The bed was hard. There was a thin wafer of foam which he assumed was meant to be a pillow. It was lumpy and peculiarly distorted. Using it was like putting his head on a bag of liquorice allsorts. The physical discomfort made thinking much harder. And thinking was what he needed to do.

When the custody sergeant had closed the door behind him, Tony had almost expected him to throw it open and shout, ‘Surprise!’ That was how hard it was for him to credit what had happened. All through that bizarre interview with Paula and Alex Fielding, part of him had refused to take it seriously. He couldn’t escape the notion that it was either a wind-up or a terrible mistake that he’d be able to put right in no time. Then it had dawned on him that Fielding was serious. Serious as only someone who didn’t know him could be. Serious as only a detective driven by ambition could be.

Paula knew. Paula understood that whatever the physical evidence said, it was impossible to envisage him as a killer. But Paula wasn’t the one making the decisions in that interview room. Paula was on trial too, her loyalty to the new boss under fire. Would she follow blindly where the evidence appeared to lead? Or would her fidelity to the old regime undermine Fielding’s determination to get a quick and spectacular resolution to the case? On the walk down to the cells, she’d indicated she was on his side. But she had to be careful. For both their sakes, it was vital that she didn’t get moved off the investigation. And there was only so much good that she could do by stealth.

Fielding scared him. That rush to judgement, that adamantine certainty that the evidence was king, that unwillingness to twist the Rubik’s cube and look at things from a different angle – they all unsettled him, because there was no room for discussion. It wouldn’t be enough for him to provide an explanation for the physical evidence against him. He’d have to find a reason to direct her hunter-killer instincts towards the real murderer.

Tony shifted awkwardly from one buttock to the other. If he hadn’t let Carol down so badly, he’d never have found himself in this position. She simply wouldn’t have allowed it to happen. No matter what cards might have been stacked against him, she would have taken his part, because she understood the limits of his capabilities.

He permitted himself a wry smile. Nobody knew his limits better than Carol. He’d always thought she could do better than him, that there must be other men out there who could give her more of what she needed than he had. But either she wasn’t looking or she wasn’t meeting the right men. Until her brother’s death, she’d been happy to settle for their incomplete and inconclusive relationship. And then they’d found something that divided them so deeply nothing could bridge the gap. Not a shared history, not a mutual understanding. Not even love.

Impatient with himself, Tony jumped to his feet. If sitting or lying was torture, then he would pace. Six strides one way, ninety-degree turn then eight strides the other way. Six, eight. Six, eight. Stop brooding about Carol. She was gone. She wouldn’t be there to pull him out of this particular pile of shit. It was over. He was on his own. Perhaps with a little help from his friend. Six, eight.

So. He had to explain the bloodstain. Others could find the verification of his story once he’d reached deep inside and accessed the truth. The thumbprint, too. That wasn’t ringing any bells. ‘I know I live in my head half the time, but you’d think I’d remember picking up somebody else’s phone,’ he shouted in exasperation.

Tony stopped pacing and leaned his forehead on the cool cement wall. He closed his eyes and dropped his shoulders. He deliberately relaxed his muscles from his scalp through his neck and arms. ‘Think about blood. Your blood. About bleeding. Bleeding enough to stain somebody else,’ he said out loud. There was the knee. The time when a crazed patient had gone on the rampage with a fire axe and had taken a swipe at Tony when he tried to talk him down. But that had been years ago, long before Nadia Wilkowa had ever come to Bradfield. A couple of times, he’d cut himself in the galley, unaccustomed to the occasional sudden movement of the boat. But there had never been anybody else there and besides, there hadn’t been much blood. It had to be something that happened at work. In Bradfield Moor. He summoned up the hospital, as if he was offering someone a guided tour. The reception area. The locked doors, the faceless corridors. His office, the therapy rooms.

And then he remembered. Suddenly, it was all there, in crystal clear Technicolor detail. He threw his arms in the air. ‘Halle-fucking-lujah!’ The explanation of the thumbprint could wait. The DNA was the killer piece of evidence and now he knew how it had got there.

Tony grinned. Paula would be pleased. Now he just had to think of something that would lead them to the person who was actually killing women who looked like Carol Jordan.

W
hile Tony was dredging his memory, another conversation went like this: ‘Bronwen Scott here.’

‘This is Carol Jordan.’

A pause. ‘As in, DCI Carol Jordan?’ Cautious, very cautious.

‘As in ex-DCI Carol Jordan. I’m not a cop any more. But you, I presume, are still the best criminal defence lawyer in Bradfield?’

‘That’s quite an accolade, Ms Jordan. And I always thought you hated me.’

‘I don’t have to like you to appreciate your professional qualities.’

‘So, to what do I owe this call? I’m assuming you didn’t phone me at this time of night just to bolster my self-confidence. Don’t tell me someone’s had the temerity to arrest you?’

‘I have a job for you. A client for you to represent. And a proposition in relation to that.’

‘Sounds fascinating.’ A long-drawn breath. ‘But it’s late. Won’t it wait till morning?’

‘I don’t think so, no. Can you meet me in the car park opposite Skenfrith Street police station in half an hour?’

‘Very Deep Throat. Why should I do this, Ms Jordan? What’s in it for me?’

‘A high-profile case. And the chance to fuck up BMP. I imagine no day is wasted for you if you get to fuck up an SIO.’

A throaty chuckle. ‘You know which buttons to push, Ms Jordan.’

‘I had an excellent teacher. Do we have an appointment?’

‘It had better be good. It had better be very good.’

Carol smiled. ‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.’ She ended the call and changed down to third gear to negotiate a series of bends that climbed over the moor top before the descent into Bradfield. It hadn’t been easy to maintain her composure during the phone call to the toughest criminal defence lawyer she’d ever jousted against. To say her feelings about the course of action she’d settled on were mixed was like saying the government had racked up a few debts. Her gut was churning and her hands were clammy on the wheel. Part of her wished she’d managed to ignore Paula altogether.

But she hadn’t. When Paula had stormed out, Carol had barely paused before she gave chase. She caught up with her before she was halfway to her car. It didn’t take much to persuade Paula back inside, where she gave Carol the kind of briefing that had been second nature when they worked together. The more she heard, the more Carol had been inflamed by the absurdity of what had happened to Tony. ‘Not all evidence is created equal,’ she’d protested. ‘More often than not, it’s coloured by its connections. You look at someone like Tony and your starting point is, this man didn’t kill two women. So how is it that the evidence seems to point towards him? You don’t just go, “Here’s a bit of evidence, it must be you.” That’s not how you get justice.’

And so of course she had to wade in. It wasn’t quite that simple, though. She couldn’t entirely escape the notion that she’d been played by Paula. She suspected the detective had motives that went beyond unpicking Fielding’s over-hasty decision. But if Paula thought she had set Carol on the road to reconciliation with Tony, she was in for a disappointment. This was about justice, pure and simple. The only sense in which it was about her and Tony was that their past history meant she knew him well enough to understand he wasn’t a killer. On a personal level, she wasn’t averse to the idea of him rotting in jail for something he didn’t do, since the law had no way to punish him for what he had done. But that would leave a killer at large, and that was unacceptable. She might not be a cop any longer but Carol understood what justice was about.

That was more than she could say for Bronwen Scott. Having to get into bed with Scott was almost as hard as having to stand up for Tony. For years, Scott had been a thorn in her side, exploiting every weakness in the law to help the guilty. In theory, Carol held fast to the idea that everyone deserved a defence, no matter what their crime. But its manifestation in practice made her want to weep. She hated Scott for the maxim the lawyer regularly delivered with an air of injured innocence – ‘Do your job, Detective. Then there would be no technicalities for me to exploit.’ She despised Scott’s cavalier ability to defend clients who were manifestly guilty. Most of all, she hated the way she felt when criminals walked free because Scott had played on sentiment and emotion in the teeth of evidence.

But now she no longer had the power of the job on her side, she’d have to exploit Scott’s skills if she wanted to see justice done. Crucially, there was no doubt in Carol’s mind that someone had to speak for the two dead women. Fielding wasn’t doing that and because she wasn’t, Paula couldn’t. Somebody had to fill the breach. Getting Tony off the hook was merely the first step on a journey to the truth.

All these high-flown ideals were a perfect distraction. The more Carol wrapped herself in the flag of justice, the less she had to consider her feelings for Tony. The notion that she was reaching for a way to bridge the distance between them was one she would have dismissed with contempt if she’d allowed herself even to admit it as a possibility. It wasn’t about forgiveness. It was simply that she didn’t want him in her life.

Driving into Bradfield was a strange sensation. It had been months since she’d travelled city streets and although she could still easily navigate routes that used to be second nature she felt like a tourist following a map she’d learned by heart. This had been her home for years but she had cut her ties and already there were changes to the traffic flow. Nothing major; the odd lane change at junctions, an alteration of priorities at traffic lights. Enough to make her a stranger.

She pulled into the multi-storey car park in Skenfrith Street five minutes early. The sixties brutalist structure was stark in the fluorescent lights. It was past eleven and there were few cars left on the ground level. Carol parked her Land Rover Defender in the middle of a strip of empty slots and got out. Her footsteps echoed on the stained concrete like a clichéd movie soundtrack. She leaned against the front of the Landie, feeling a faint flutter of nervousness. She was a woman alone in a deserted late-night city-centre car park. When she’d been a cop, the simple fact of that status had acted as a protection. Now, although it made no sense, she felt distinctly more vulnerable. Even her choice of clothes contributed to that element of risk. She’d grown accustomed to the aura of strength and competence that came from her new work clothes. Donning her former work uniform of suit and blouse and low heels made her much more of a target for passing predators. She hoped Bronwen Scott wasn’t going to be late.

Right on schedule, a set of tyres screamed as an Audi TT took the car park entrance a little too fast. It reversed into the space opposite Carol, like a pair of gunslingers facing off. Bronwen Scott’s legs appeared first, gleaming in the light, black patent spike heels leading the way. Carol’s eyes were drawn upwards to a pencil skirt topped with a tailored jacket over a camisole. Over it all, a loose, flowing camel coat. Her hair was dyed a hundred shades of dark blonde, shoulder length and glossy, and her immaculately made-up face showed no trace of the same years that had carved lines into Carol’s. Although much of her practice was state-funded legal aid, the fancy clothes and the expensive car came from representing people who had not come by their wealth honestly, and every cop in the city knew it. The pursuit of justice was pushing Carol into the arms of strange bedfellows.

Scott stopped a couple of feet from Carol. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

‘That might possibly work in our favour,’ Carol said.

‘So what’s all this cloak and dagger in aid of?’ Scott swept her hair from her face in a practised gesture. Carol wondered what it must be like to devote so much attention to your appearance. She wasn’t stupid; she’d seen the way men looked at her and she was aware that she was attractive. But it had never been how she defined herself, so when her looks began to lose the gloss of youth, she took it in her stride. But women like Bronwen Scott seemed to see ageing as a challenge, a war to be fought every day, taking advantage of every possible weapon, be it surgical or pharmaceutical. Carol had never seen the point of battles you couldn’t win.

‘There’s a prisoner in the cells in Skenfrith Street who needs a good lawyer.’

‘What’s the charge?’

‘Murder, times two.’

‘Who’s the arresting officer?’

‘DCI Alex Fielding.’

‘And what’s your interest?’

Carol tilted her head back and studied the fluorescent tubes. ‘Easily misconstrued.’ She sighed and met Scott’s curious stare. ‘My interest is in seeing justice done. The man under arrest didn’t do it. So there’s a killer out there on the street who’s going to kill again while Fielding’s busy playing games with an innocent man.’

‘I still don’t see why you’re bothered. I spend half my life clearing up the mess made by stupid cops who can’t get past the first idea in their heads. What’s special about this case? Apart from the fact that the accused man apparently can’t pick up a phone himself?’ Scott was beginning to sound irritated. That wasn’t the goal. Time to get to the point.

‘Tony Hill.’

Scott frowned. ‘What about him? He’s been keeping a very low profile since Jacko Vance.’

‘He’s under arrest. He’s across the street in the cells. He thinks he doesn’t need a lawyer because he’s not done anything wrong.’

Scott cackled. ‘One born every minute. You’d think he’d know better. Did you teach him nothing, all those years?’

‘I think he needs you. Because there’s some very tasty evidence stacked up against him.’

‘Can he afford me?’

‘Inheritance. Insurance. He can afford you.’

‘Go on.’ Scott was on the hook. Now Carol just had to reel her in.

‘His blood on the cuff of the jacket of the first victim. His alleged thumbprint on the mobile phone of the second victim. And the key evidence, as far as Fielding is concerned, is that both of the victims look a bit like me.’

The tip of Scott’s tongue slipped between her lips then she bit her lower lip. It was almost sexual. ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘And where is this coming from?’

‘Do you remember Paula McIntyre?’

Scott made a sardonic face. ‘Killer interviewer. Yes, I remember Paula very well.’

‘She’s Fielding’s bagman now. She’s always had something of an alliance with Tony. She doesn’t like what’s happening, but she can’t put her head above the parapet or Fielding will shoot it off.’

‘Makes sense.’ Scott shivered and pulled her coat closer. ‘So what do you want me to do about it?’

‘I want you to go over the street and demand to see your client and do what needs to be done before Fielding gets her claws into him in the morning. They did an interview under caution and they plan to reinterview him and search his home and his office, according to Paula.’

‘Will he do what he’s told?’

Carol shrugged. ‘That’s debatable. I imagine it will depend on what you tell him.’

Scott shook her head, resigned. ‘They never know what’s best for them. Not even the smart ones. I suppose I should thank you for dropping this in my lap. So, thank you, Carol.’ She laid a hand on Carol’s arm, the dramatic scarlet nails drawing attention from her hand’s betrayal of the attrition of age.

Carol looked down at the false gesture of intimacy and Scott withdrew it, though not hastily. ‘I’m not done,’ Carol said.

Scott cocked her head to one side. ‘Of course you’re not. I presume you want to be briefed?’

‘More than that. I want to come in with you.’

Scott laughed, the sound echoing spookily round them. ‘You know better than that, Carol,’ she said merrily, as if it was the funniest thing she’d heard all day.

‘Why not? I’m not a police officer. And you’re the kind of superstar lawyer who’s always got interns running after you, carrying your files and sharpening your pencils. What could be more natural than an ex-cop considering a career in the law?’

Scott was still grinning. ‘Gamekeeper turned poacher with a vengeance. What’s in it for me? How does it help my client?’

‘I have the inside track. Paula’s never going to trust you with confidential information. But spilling the beans to me? That’s second nature to her. Plus you get all the benefits of a shit-hot investigator on your side at no extra charge.’

Scott shook her head, still unconvinced. ‘It stretches the limits of credibility.’

‘That’s never stopped you before. Come on, you know you want to. If only for the look on Fielding’s face. Think of it, Bronwen – you’ll be dining out on that one for months. Especially when she’s forced to release Tony without charge.’

‘It’s appealing, I’ll admit. But we’d never get it past the custody sergeant.’

‘I thought you liked a challenge?’ Carol’s smile dared Scott.

‘Oh, fuck it.’ Again the flip of the hair. ‘Why not? I’ve not had a ruck with a custody sergeant for weeks. I’m getting rusty. Let me get my briefcase and we’ll go and give them hell.’

They crossed the street side by side like a latter-day Cagney and Lacey. As they were about to walk into the police station, Carol paused and said, ‘There is one thing you should know.’

Scott looked almost relieved, as if this was the dropping shoe she’d been waiting for. ‘What?’

‘Tony and I haven’t actually spoken to each other since the Jacko Vance investigation. I said some pretty harsh things to him. It’s possible he might not be too thrilled to see me.’

Scott smiled like a gratified cat. ‘This just gets better and better.’