Splinter the Silence (27 page)

‘No.’ Paula turned into a broad tree-lined avenue. Through the gaps between the substantial semi-detached houses, Carol caught glimpses of the unnaturally vivid green of the golf course. Living somewhere like this, you could almost forget you were part of a seething, diverse city, crime always a lurking presence. Up here, there was an illusion of calm prosperity. But behind those well-tended front gardens and smartly painted front doors, the truth was often just as nasty as you’d find in any inner-city alley. Paula slowed, checking the house numbers, then stopped outside a gabled mock-Tudor house fronted by a monoblock driveway. ‘I said we’d be happy to come and talk to him at work, but Morton said he’d rather see us here.’

The glossy black front door was opened by a well-groomed woman in her forties. Her understated make-up blanded out any signs of mourning but her expression was serious. Carol gauged her wardrobe as Marks & Spencer rather than anything more extravagant; her black trousers and dark plum jumper suited her unremarkable figure and spoke of practical good sense. ‘I’m Trish Adamson,’ she said in response to their introduction. ‘John’s sister-in-law. Come on in, he’s through in the conservatory. Would you like some coffee? Or tea?’

‘That would be kind. Coffee, please,’ Carol said.

‘We’re all still in a state of shock,’ Trish said, leading the way towards the rear of the house. ‘Every morning when I wake up I have to remind myself that Daisy’s gone. She was so full of life, it’s impossible…’ Her voice tailed off as she opened the door into a compact conservatory with a panoramic view of the golf course. A big man was hunched up in a wicker armchair, folded in on himself like a bird at rest. ‘John, it’s the police.’

Carol introduced them again as Trish withdrew. John Morton said nothing, simply acknowledging their presence with a tight little nod. Carol sat opposite him, taking in his long gaunt face, the dark hollows under his eyes. And the two-day stubble on his cheeks. His dark hair was shot with white, lank with the need of a wash. ‘Thanks for agreeing to talk to us,’ Carol said.

He moistened his top lip with the tip of his tongue. ‘All I want is an answer.’ His voice was dry and broken, as if his throat were damaged.

As they’d agreed, Paula took over. ‘I appreciate that. And we’re here to review the investigation, to see whether anything was missed at the time. I wonder whether Daisy said anything to you about something completely unexpected happening that day?’

He sighed. ‘Not a thing. Look, you must hear this all the time from people after someone kills themselves. But Daisy wasn’t the kind of person to commit suicide. She loved life. She loved her kids, she loved her job, she loved me.’

‘She’d been at the eye of a storm for the last couple of weeks of her life,’ Paula said.

He smiled with his mouth, but his eyes misted with tears. ‘That didn’t bring her down, believe me. She relished a fight. Daisy always said that was how you knew you were on the right track. When the opposition came out fighting.’ He looked up as Trish came in with a tray. ‘Isn’t that right, Trish? Daisy loved to take on her critics.’

Trish put the tray down and handed out mugs of instant coffee. ‘That’s right. She stood up for what she believed in and she didn’t care who stood against her. She’d always been like that, even when she was a lass. She never took any nonsense from anybody.’

‘But she’d had some particularly vile abuse on social media. I’ve seen some of what was directed at her and it was horrible. Didn’t that upset her?’

John held his mug to his chest as if he needed the warmth. ‘It shocked her a bit at first. But then it made her angry. That was how she was. She used the hostility to fuel her own spirit.’

‘But something cut through that spirit,’ Paula said. ‘Do you have any idea what that might have been?’

‘We’ve asked ourselves that every day since it happened,’ Trish said. ‘And we come back to the same answer. She never killed herself. It was some freak accident. The coroner agreed with us, he gave the open verdict, he knew it wasn’t suicide.’

John stared into his mug. ‘She would never have done something so selfish. All I can think is that she was maybe cleaning the oven and she was overcome with fumes. And the gas filled the house, and when somebody called her mobile, the spark set off the explosion. Nothing else makes sense.’

Stacey had accessed the forensic report into the explosion, so Carol knew there had been no trace of oven cleaner at the scene. She also knew that Daisy had died from asphyxiation as a result of inhaling natural gas, and that wasn’t something that happened by accident. ‘Do you think she was perhaps not paying as much attention as she normally would because she was distracted by the abuse she was getting? Because it had gone beyond the online stuff, hadn’t it? I imagine some of what was happening must have been quite frightening.’

‘The brick through the window was,’ John said. ‘It made me scared for her, but Daisy was adamant that it was a coward’s way. She said people who throw bricks are too weak to do anything face to face. And what happened proved it.’

‘There is one other thing that puzzles me,’ Paula said. ‘When I was reading the reports, I saw there were book pages scattered all over the front garden.’ Carol couldn’t help admiring her sergeant’s style. She somehow managed to combine acquiescence and compassion and still move the interview forward.

‘She read a lot,’ Trish said. ‘Fighting for the library service, that was one of her big causes.’

‘She’d have had a fight on her hands recently with that one,’ Paula sympathised.

‘She understood that books pave the way for working people to improve their condition in life,’ John said. It sounded like a line he’d delivered more than once.

‘So she was a fan of Sylvia Plath?’

Trish frowned. ‘She never said. I assumed it was a private thing, poetry. John?’

He looked dazed. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember her reading poetry. But she read all sorts that she didn’t share with me. I’m a history man, me.’

‘Why are you interested in a book of poems?’ Trish asked.

Paula gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘I’m a big Sylvia Plath fan myself, I was just curious, that’s all.’ And then the question to move the conversation away from the anomaly, so that wouldn’t be the last thing they remembered talking about. ‘This latest campaign of Daisy’s – asking dads to step up to the plate? Was this the first time she’d addressed this issue in such a public way?’

Trish and John looked at each other, as if that would provide an answer. John shook his head. ‘She’d mentioned it to me, in passing. But she’d never gone properly public with it before. Mostly she talked about local stuff. But the party were pushing her to consider standing for parliament and she wanted to show she could manage a bigger stage.’

‘But she told me they liked that she’d stirred things up. That she was someone who could draw attention to issues,’ Trish added. ‘She was on her way up. That’s what makes losing her so much worse. Especially in a such a tragic accident.’

John straightened up in his chair. ‘Like Trish says, it has to be some kind of freak accident. Daisy would never have killed herself. And if somebody was going to do away with her, they’d have made it obvious, wouldn’t they? Otherwise there would be no point.’

35

O
ne question kept rattling round Tony Hill’s head as he marched along the canal towpath, eyes on the ground, dog at his heels. What kind of serial killer wants their crimes to stay hidden? He’d investigated several, he’d interviewed others and read about dozens more. They generally didn’t want to be caught, at least not at the start of their project. But they wanted their activities to be headline news. They wanted notoriety, respect and fear. They wanted to be acknowledged. But this killer – and Tony was convinced by now that there was a killer – seemed determined to stay below the radar.

In his experience, nothing enraged a killer more than someone else taking credit for his handiwork. A tiny part of them might be satisfied if blaming someone else meant they were left alone to go about the business that drove them so hard. But much bigger than that was the sense of grievance that someone else was reaping the glory – as they saw it – for their successes. But whoever was behind the deaths of these women appeared to be content with invisibility. An invisibility so absolute that in the eyes of the world, he didn’t even exist.

Flash stopped to investigate a particularly intriguing smell and Tony paused too, finding a gap in his thoughts to feel surprised that he was actually paying attention to the dog. Normally when he was walking to think, he was so absorbed in his thoughts that nothing else penetrated. But the dog ticked some box in his brain that meant he was linked to it without making a conscious connection. He wondered whether the roots of his behaviour lay in his deep past, bound to the first person who had ever shown him love. Joan, the dinner lady who had taken on rescue dogs and later, the young Tony, a rescue boy. Joan, who had saved him from the otherwise inevitable consequences of a home without love, without affection, without compassion. He’d been a connoisseur of pain and loneliness till Joan had taken him under her wing on the pretext that she needed a hand with the dogs.

He’d always believed he didn’t care much about the dogs. That it had all been about Joan and her brisk kindness. But perhaps he’d been wrong about that. He’d taken so readily, so unexpectedly to Flash. Maybe this mad-eyed collie had plugged into something so deep he’d never acknowledged it before. Not for the first time, Carol Jordan had opened something up for him.

Flash darted on ahead and he resumed his contemplation. So what reason could there be for a killer who wanted to hide his crimes, his identity, his very existence? The answer had to lie in the crimes themselves. This was a killer who was sending a message that was more important than the simple satisfaction of his ego. If he was in the limelight, the message would somehow be obscured. And that was the opposite of what he wanted.

The next step was to figure out what that message was. If Tony could tease that out, it might offer a path to the killer himself. It must have something to do with the women writers whose work formed part of the crime scenes. Inevitably, it would also be connected to power and control. And that linked in to the other key question that Tony needed to answer before he sat down again with Carol’s new MIT. Was his target killing at one remove, by driving his victims to a place where the only way out was to take their own lives? Or was his a more active role? Was he actually hands-on, murdering them in a way that could pass for suicide?

When he knew the answer to that question he’d be a damn sight closer to finding the underlying explanation for whatever was going on here. Once they had that, they could pool their considerable skills to find a killer that nobody but them believed in.

Paula was pleased to discover that Alvin chose the same kind of place for a rendezvous as she would have. It was a proper pub, lacking loud music, supplied with craft beers and frequented by people old enough on be on their second major relationship. She treated herself to a half-pint of Hook Norton and found a quiet corner where she could update her notes on the interview with John Morton. Sylvia Plath was interesting. So was the fact that this was the first time Daisy’s controversial views had taken flight from the purely local to a wider audience. The other two victims had already had a higher profile; if someone was looking for victims, he would have come across them more readily than the old Daisy. But the new Daisy, the one in touch with her political ambitions, she was visible in a way she hadn’t been before. It made Paula think they were looking for someone used to moving around the country, not someone bound to one place and uneasy in others.

She was pondering the implications of this when Alvin arrived. He stopped at the bar for a drink, raising his hand in the traditional interrogative gesture to Paula, who shook her head. He lowered his frame on to the stool opposite her and carefully centred his pint on a beer mat. ‘Too much driving today,’ he said, stifling a yawn.

‘But you got a result,’ Paula said. She’d still been with Carol when Alvin had called to pass on his news. ‘Three’s the charm.’

He took a delicate sip of his beer, savoured the taste, then took off quarter of the glass in one easy swallow, smacking his lips with pleasure. ‘I’m not entirely sure what the hell I’m doing here. Is this some kind of dry run? Are we going through the motions and playing with people just to get ourselves up to speed? Because if that’s what’s going on here, I’m not happy about it. We shouldn’t be using real grief like a playpen.’

Paula scratched her eyebrow. ‘I think it started as something Tony thought was a bit odd. He likes odd. But he usually keeps it to himself. Only, this time, he shared it with Carol, just when all this started to take shape. And once we looked at it a bit more closely, it began to feel like something that was happening for real.’

Her explanation seemed to appease Alvin. He drank some more beer and visibly relaxed. ‘So tell me who we’re going to see.’

‘Jasmine Burton’s girlfriend. Her name is Emma Cotterill and she’s an architect. Works for the city council. According to Jasmine’s secretary, they’d been together for around eighteen months. They didn’t live together but they spent a lot of time together. If anybody knew what was going on inside Jasmine’s head, it was Emma.’

Alvin sighed. ‘Poor woman. It’s bad enough the person you love kills themselves without having to dig it all up again for the likes of us.’

‘Except that it might not have been as straightforward as that. And what we find out might make it feel a bit better.’

‘I suppose.’ He drained his pint. ‘Come on then, let’s get it over with.’

The house was a peculiar infill in a street of individually designed houses from between the wars. It looked like a miniature ocean liner, frontage like a prow, windows like portholes. Although it was clearly modern it had the feel of art deco about it. When Emma opened the door, Paula couldn’t help thinking the architect had designed herself to match the house. Her hair was raven black and cut in a geometric bob. Her make-up resembled an advert from the twenties, and she wore a boat-necked striped sweater over the sort of bell-bottom trousers traditionally worn by stage sailors. ‘You must be Sergeant McIntyre,’ she said, meeting Paula’s eyes unflinchingly. Her accent was generically Southern, not a trace of Midlands creeping through.