Insidious Intent
‘Because we don’t always do things exactly by the book,’ Kevin said. ‘It makes us vulnerable.’
‘We’ll just have to make sure we get it sorted, then.’ Alvin’s bass rumble was, they all knew, a false reassurance. But Carol could see it made the others relax a little. It only served to make her feel even more inadequate to the task.
Then Kevin leaned forward. ‘Well,’ he drawled. ‘I might have something to take us in the right direction. According to Amie McDonald’s neighbour, Harrison Braithwaite, the man we think killed Amie gave her a passionate kiss on the doorstep. And it dawned on me that it’s hard to snog somebody without getting your DNA all over their coat. And it turns out that Amie’s good coat is quite distinctive. Mr Braithwaite picked it out from her coat rack right away. So I bagged it and tagged it and drove out to the lab with it myself. If the gods are smiling, we’ll get DNA. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Tony, it’s that serial killers don’t start off with homicide. Seems to me his DNA is a dead cert for the offender database.’
Carol had visibly perked up at Kevin’s report until he reached the end. She shook her head. ‘Great work, Kevin. But Tony thinks it’s possible he’s not got the usual kind of form. We talked about gateway offences last night and Tony reckons he’s all about being in control. If he’s shown up on the radar at all, it’ll be for getting into a ruck with a police officer, or a confrontation with a bartender who wouldn’t serve him an after-hours drink.’
‘Doesn’t matter though, does it?’ Karim said eagerly. ‘Whatever he’s done, we’ll make the connection if he’s on the database.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ Paula said. ‘It’s a coat. Amie will have come into contact with lots of people. On that night out alone. She’ll have taken a taxi into town. There’s a megadose of stranger DNA right there. One of the waiters could have taken her coat. More fresh DNA. The taxi back to the flat, more of the same. And we don’t know whether she wore that coat between their date night and now. So yes, we might get lucky and it’s better than no shot at all, but it won’t give us any kind of definitive answer.’
Carol sighed. ‘There are times when I think DNA is more trouble than it’s worth.’
Kevin chuckled, still feeling pleased with himself. ‘What? Are you hankering back to the days when we could just give them a good slap in the interview room?’
‘Hardly. But I do sometimes wonder whether the technology has de-skilled us as detectives. How long before we’ve got algorithms for questioning? Before skills like Paula’s are deemed to be redundant.’ Carol wiped her mouth and threw her crumpled napkin at the bin, missing by inches. She stood up. ‘God, listen to me. Ignore me, guys. We are going to get this bastard, believe me. We are going to get him.’
She walked to her office, head up, shoulders back, dog tailing her. They all looked at each other. In spite of her body language, not one of her squad believed she believed her own words.
51
T
ony had gone to bed convinced he needed to do something to shake Carol out of the redoubt of guilt she’d dug herself into. When they’d got back from the crime scene in the small hours, she’d stood talking to him outside the barn in the chill night air while Flash tore around the rough pasture behind the barn, celebrating her liberation from guarding the house.
It broke his heart to hear her piling blame on herself for deaths that were not her responsibility. The five people who had died because a drunk driver had been allowed to walk free on her account. The victims of a killer she hadn’t caught after his first excursion into murder. These were the burdens she had assumed to add to the demons she’d kept at bay for so long with alcohol. Her dead crowded the shadows of her heart and her mind. Her brother Michael and Lucy, the woman he’d loved to distraction. Officers she’d been responsible for who had encountered killers far more ruthless than their hunters. And all the victims she believed she’d let down with delayed justice.
None of it was her fault. But it was eating away at the slender rope of her well-being and self-confidence. He’d tried talking to her in therapeutic mode but she saw through that in about two minutes and stomped back indoors to make a cup of fruit tea. He’d whistled the dog to his side and followed her in. This time he tried talking like someone who cared about her. She told him not to patronise her and suggested it was time he retreated to his end of the barn.
He’d slept badly, worrying about her. He’d known plenty of addicts in his time, both patients and colleagues. He knew how fragile her hold on sobriety was right now. He’d seen her driven almost mad with rage and with grief, but he’d never seen her so close to the edge of herself. In the morning when he woke, he’d known he had to do something to change the direction of her emotions.
Ten minutes on Google and he had the makings of a plan. By the time he’d showered and wolfed some toast and coffee, she was out with the dog. She’d mentioned a ReMIT briefing, but he had other ideas. He made sure he left well in advance of her so she couldn’t see that instead of turning left at the end of the lane, towards Bradfield, he turned right towards Hebden Bridge and Halifax.
The house he parked outside was a handsome detached Victorian villa with a pair of tiny turrets on the corners of the frontage. The pale York stone had been stained with the smoke and soot of the area’s dark satanic mills. Some of the other houses in the leafy lane had been sandblasted back to their original creamy yellow but the Barrowclough family home wore its industrial heritage like a badge of honour. He sat in the car for a few minutes, persuading himself again that he was doing the right thing. Not everyone would agree, he knew. But for Tony, trying to rescue Carol from herself was a greater priority than negotiating some moral quagmire. She was the person he owed a duty to, not the one he was about to deceive.
The woman who answered the door had the haggard look of someone who had lost a lot of weight too quickly. Her dark hair fell lifeless to her shoulders, a line of white showing at the parting. She was dressed carelessly; her clothes were clearly expensive and stylish, but nothing matched and her long cardigan was inaccurately buttoned.
‘Mrs Barrowclough?’ She nodded. ‘I’m Dr Tony Hill. I’m a specialist in the psychology of risk. I work with the police. I know you’ve suffered a terrible shock lately and you have my sincere condolences. But I can’t imagine anyone having a better idea of what Dominic was like. And I hoped you might be willing to talk to me.’
She looked blank, as if he’d spoken in a language foreign to her. ‘It won’t bring him back, will it?’
‘No. But it might help us understand more so that we can try to stop what happened to Dominic happening to someone else.’
‘Nicky. We called him Nicky, not Dominic.’
‘I’m sorry. Perhaps we could talk about him over a cup of coffee?’ He felt bad for playing her, but Carol was more important to him even than a grieving mother. He was taken aback to realise, after all these years, that there was apparently a hierarchy of empathy.
Mona Barrowclough had no resistance. She stepped back and allowed him to enter. She led the way down a panelled hall painted in a pink-tinged grey that probably had a name like Rabbit’s Nostril. The carpet underfoot was a rich burgundy that swallowed their footsteps. At the end of the hall they entered a vast kitchen warmed by a four-oven Aga. It opened into a conservatory filled with well-established flowering plants. Wasn’t this how one of the Raymond Chandler novels opened?
She waved vaguely at a pine refectory table surrounded by captain’s chairs well supplied with comfortable-looking cushions. Tony sat down and while her back was turned filling the kettle, he double-checked that his phone was recording.
She fussed with the cafetiere, the mugs and a tin of ground coffee but eventually they were sitting at the end of the table with china mugs full of weak coffee in front of them. ‘You didn’t know Nicky,’ she said. ‘He was a lovely boy. So loving. He never went out the door without giving me a hug and a kiss, still. But he was always wild. He had that s
treak in him from a toddler.’
‘I imagine it’s like a light has gone out.’
She sipped her coffee, her eyes sad and ancient. ‘That’s it exactly. A light that’s gone out.’
‘That’s hard. And a shock too.’ He led her gently into her story, his eyes on hers, his expression filled with concern. Tony had spent years learning how to draw out the hurt and damage in people. But it had never felt more important than today.
She sighed, long and deep. ‘A shock, maybe. But not a surprise. It’s a funny thing to say about your own child, but I never thought he’d make old bones. He was always reckless. He’d throw himself at things without a thought. God knows, we tried to teach him to take more care, but we might as well have saved our breath. He had so many accidents when he was a child, we had social services at the house.’ She made a noise halfway between a laugh and a cough. ‘It wasn’t funny at the time, mind.’
‘Had he had accidents in the car before?’
‘He’d scraped it and banged it into things through not paying attention. In car parks and the like. But he’d never had a proper accident. Nicky loved speed but he was a good driver. He knew how to handle a car. But that girlfriend of his, Casey? I blame her. She wasn’t content with going out in town. She always wanted to be off to Leeds or Bradford or else some pub up on the moors with live music. So then Nicky would take a drink…’ Her voice tailed off and her eyes filled with tears.
‘And when he took a drink?’
‘He thought he was indestructible.’ She turned her head and stared into the conservatory. ‘I half-hoped he’d get caught. I was daft enough to think that would put a stop to the madness.’
‘But he did get caught.’
Mona gripped her mug tightly. ‘And much good it did him. When we got the call from the police the night he was arrested, we decided not to go and pick him up. We thought a few hours in the cells among the low-life drunks and druggies might make an impression on him.’
Not likely, Tony thought. Not for someone like Dominic who believed the rules simply didn’t apply to him. ‘And did it?’
She seemed to slump further into her chair. ‘Not a bit of it. He said it wouldn’t make any odds to him. Even if he got banned, he said, he’d still drive. “I’ll change cars, get something they’re not looking out for,” he said.’
Tony’s heart leaped. That was what he needed to hear. The sentence that might take away some of Carol’s guilt. Dominic Barrowclough would have carried on drinking and driving regardless of any ban handed down by the court. He was an arrogant, irresponsible arse; nothing could have altered his self-imposed fate.
Mona was still talking and Tony forced himself to pay attention. He had to see this through to the end. ‘His dad was raging. He said if Nicky got banned and carried on driving, he’d throw him out of the house and out of the business. He worked for his dad, you see. He’s an estate agent, my husband. And you need to be able to drive, obviously. I was that upset, I didn’t know how Nicky would manage.’
Generation Y man-child, Tony thought. Men in their twenties whose parents still let them dodge responsibility. ‘But he didn’t get banned?’
‘No. There was something wrong with the equipment, they said in court. So they had to drop the charges.’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know what to feel. Nicky’d got away with drinking and driving, but at least he still had a roof over his head and a job. We sat him down after the court case, me and his dad, and we gave him a good talking to. But he just laughed. He said he was safe behind the wheel. He said nobody was going to stop him driving. Not the police, not the courts, not his dad.’ She crossed her arms across her stomach, hands gripping her elbows. ‘I don’t know what we did wrong. We did our best, but he was always a law unto himself. I don’t know where he got it from. We’re not impulsive people, me and my husband.’
‘You shouldn’t blame yourself,’ Tony said. ‘There are so many factors that shape the way we turn out. Did Nicky ever have a head injury when he was a child?’
She looked startled. ‘How did you know that? He fell off the top of a kiddies’ slide when he was a toddler. He’d not long turned two. He knocked himself out. He had to stay in hospital for two nights for observation but the hospital said he was fine. Is that what made him the way he was?’
‘It may have had an effect.’ Tony touched his forehead. ‘This part of the brain here, the frontal lobe? It’s the part of our brain that controls impulses. Sometimes a head injury can change people’s behaviour quite dramatically. You mustn’t blame yourself, Mrs Barrowclough. The work we’re doing on what affects our attitude to risk is turning up more and more evidence that physical brain injuries are more common than we think and they have a more profound impact than we’d previously realised.’ That was mostly bullshit made up on the hoof, but he hoped it would stop her wondering later why on earth he’d come to see her and asked the questions he had.
‘So all those times we tried to make him see sense, he wasn’t ignoring us out of badness? He couldn’t help himself?’
‘To some degree, yes. When he said to you he’d keep on driving regardless, that was probably a manifestation of his poor impulse control. It ran counter to logic and sense, but they didn’t matter enough. Did he say anything else about his determination to keep driving, regardless?’
She thought for a moment. ‘He kept on insisting that nobody had the right to tell him what to do. That he was safer behind the wheel even with a drink in him than most idiots were when they were sober. When I think about that, it makes me so angry.’
‘I understand that.’ Tony’s voice was gentle.
‘I can’t walk down the street in this town any more. I feel so ashamed of what Nicky did. Four other people died because of him. Four other families devastated, but it’s worse for them because they don’t have the guilt. I’ll never get past this, Doctor. Even though you tell me it was something inside Nicky’s brain that made him the way he was, I’ll never be able to let myself off the hook.’
Tony believed her. The rest of Mona Barrowclough’s life would forever be shaped by the manner of her son’s death. There was no comfort he could offer that would alter that. But at least he’d given her something to cling to when the guilt threatened to engulf her.
More importantly, he had a recording on his phone that might offer Carol a slender crack of light in the gloom of her guilt.
52
T
hat the prepaid credit card Torin had loaded with £500 had come from a local bank branch offered Stacey options she hadn’t expected. Usually, if it couldn’t be done digitally, it didn’t feature on her radar. But for once, she decided she needed to get out from behind her screens and do what needed to be done in person.
She wouldn’t have done it for just anyone. But Paula was her friend. Over the years they’d moved from mutual wariness to mutual loyalty. If Stacey had needed proof of that, the support she’d had from Paula over Sam’s betrayal had settled the matter. So because this was about Torin, and because Torin owned a place in Paula’s heart, Stacey was willing to do what it took.
She’d stayed up into the small hours, partly because there were search parameters coming in from the crime scene, but mostly because what she was planning was extremely risky and she wanted to be sure she’d done everything possible to cover her back.
By three a.m., she’d done her research and prepared all the materials she reckoned she’d need. Unusually for her, she’d slept badly and woken feeling edgy and nervous. For someone accustomed to being in command of herself and her environment, what she was planning was actually terrifying. Kevin was right about their methods making them vulnerable. It never bothered her when it came to her digital exploits; she knew she could outsmart any investigator the job set on her tail. But going into the field was a very different matter. She didn’t want to count up the potential offences she was about to commit. It was, frankly, scary.
Stacey unearthed an old box of kava tea that she’d bought when
she first started seeing Sam, a period of her life when she’d felt in a permanent state of anxiety. Two strong cups made no appreciable difference. She was going to have to screw up the courage to go through with her plan all by herself.
And so at half past nine, palms clammy and damp, she walked into the Campion Way branch of the Northern Bank and asked to see the manager. She met with some initial resistance, not having an appointment. But the production of a warrant card wore down the gatekeepers and within fifteen minutes she was seated opposite a man with a plaque on his desk that told her he was Patrick Haynes, Branch Manager. He had the smooth skin and perfectly groomed hair of a man who spent too much time looking in the mirror, but his shirt let him down, Stacey decided. It probably sat perfectly when he was standing up admiring himself, but seated, it strained and gaped across the beginnings of a pot belly. ‘So, what’s this all about?’ he asked. He was almost cordial, but anxiety seeped through his words.
‘I’m Detective Constable Xing Ming,’ she said, presenting ID that was not that of ReMIT. ‘As you can see, I’m attached to the Anti-Terrorism Unit.’
Haynes looked confused. ‘I don’t understand?’
‘Perhaps this will help?’ Stacey produced an envelope from her businesslike handbag and passed it to him. She put the bag on the desk nonchalantly.
He extracted two sheets of paper which, to anyone unfamiliar with such things, appeared to be a warrant authorised under the Prevention of Terrorism Act by a District Judge, requiring the bank to provide all details relating to a prepaid credit card, number listed below. He frowned as he read it through to the end. ‘I still don’t understand,’ he said.
‘I’d have thought it was perfectly clear. Pursuant to our inquiries under the Act, we have come into possession of certain information that may indicate that this card has been used to make purchases relating to the preparation of acts of terrorism. A warrant has been obtained and you are obliged to tell me who bought that prepaid credit card and when.’ Stacey delivered her little speech with a chilly authority that completely disguised the racing of her heart and the trickle of sweat on her spine.