Beneath the Bleeding (15 page)

The front door opened as Stacey climbed out of the car and a woman in her late twenties dressed in fashionably ripped jeans and a Commonwealth Games rugby shirt smiled cheerfully. ‘You must be DC Chen,’ she said in a West Country accent. ‘Come on in.’

Stacey, who had dressed carefully in geek chic Gap chinos and hoodie, smiled back. ‘Gail?’

The woman pushed her streaked blonde hair back and held out a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, come on in.’ She ushered Stacey into a living room crammed with sofas and chairs. Children’s toys were piled in a random heap in the corner by the TV set. A coffee table was strewn with magazines and print-outs of lists. ‘Sorry about the mess. We’ve been trying to move for about a year now but we never seem to have the time to look at houses.’

The idea of not having children ever was fine with Stacey. She loved the clean lines of her loft, its space and its harmony. Living here would drive her nuts. No two ways about it. ‘It’s OK,’ she lied.

‘Can I get you a drink? Tea, coffee, herbal tea, Red Bull, Diet Coke…Milk?’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Stacey smiled, her dark almond eyes turning up at the corners. ‘I didn’t realize you guys ran the business from home. Cracking idea, by the way.’

‘Thanks.’ Gail dropped on to one of the sofas and pulled a face. ‘It started as a hobby. Then it took over our lives. We have big corporations contacting us pretty much every day, wanting to buy us up. But we don’t want it to change and become all about making money. We want it to stay about people, about lives reconnecting. We’ve had people come together after a lifetime apart. We’ve been to weddings. We’ve got a whole cork board of photos of Best Days babies.’ Gail grinned. ‘I feel like a fairy godmother.’

Stacey recognized the quote. She’d read it in a couple of online interviews Gail had given about the business and its impact on people’s lives. ‘It’s not all sunshine, though, is it? I’ve heard marriages have broken up as well.’

Gail fiddled with the frayed cloth on the sofa arm. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

‘Not good publicity, though, is it?’

Gail looked slightly baffled, as if she was wondering how this conversation had derailed itself so quickly from the sunny and warm. ‘Well, no. To be honest, we try to avoid talking about that side of things.’ She grinned again, but less certainly this time. ‘No need to harp on about it, I say.’

‘Quite. And I’m sure the last thing you want is to be associated in a negative way with a murder inquiry,’ Stacey said.

Gail looked as if she’d been slapped. ‘Murder? That can’t be right.’

‘I’m investigating the murder of Robbie Bishop.’

‘He’s not one of our members,’ Gail said sharply. ‘I’d have remembered if he was.’

‘We have reason to believe that he was drinking with somebody who is one of your members on the night he was poisoned. It’s possible…’

‘Are you trying to tell me one of our members
murdered
Robbie Bishop?’ Gail reared back into the sofa, as if she was trying to get away from Stacey.

‘Please, Gail, just listen.’ Stacey’s patience was wearing thin. ‘We believe the person he was drinking with may have seen something, or Robbie may have said something to them. We need to trace that person and we think they were a member of Best Days of Our Lives.’

‘But why?’ Gail looked frantic. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘Because Robbie told another friend he was having a drink with someone from school. And we found a scrap of paper with the website url in the pocket of the trousers he was wearing.’

‘That doesn’t mean…’ Gail kept shaking her head, as if the movement could make Stacey disappear.

‘What we want you to do is to send a message to all of your male subscribers who were at Harriestown High with Robbie, asking them if they were the person who was drinking with him on Thursday. And because they might be nervous about admitting it, we also want them to send you a recent photograph and an account of their movements between ten in the evening on Thursday and four in the morning on Friday. Do you think you can do that for us?’ Stacey smiled again. It was as well the
children were not at home, for her expression would surely have reduced them to terrified tears.

‘I don’t think…’ Gail’s voice trailed off. ‘I mean…It’s not what people sign up for, is it?’

Stacey shrugged. The web is, by and large, a positive place. I think people will respond well to being asked for help. Robbie was a popular guy.’ She pulled out a phone with email capacity. ‘I can email you the message we’d like you to send out.’

‘I don’t know. I need to talk to Simon. My husband.’ Gail leaned forward, reaching for the mobile on the coffee table.

Stacey shook her head, miming regret. The thing is, we don’t have time to waste here. Either we do this the nice way, where you stay in control of your addresses and your system, or we do it the other way, where I get a warrant and we cart your computers out of here and I do whatever it takes to get your subscribers to come across. It may not be pretty and I doubt you’ll have much of a business left to attract the corporate sharks once somebody leaks to the press that you tried to obstruct the investigation into Robbie Bishop’s murder.’ Stacey spread her hands. ‘But, hey, it’s up to you.’ Chris Devine would have been proud of her, she thought, monstering the poor woman so thoroughly.

Gail looked at her with hatred. ‘I thought you were one of us,’ she said bitterly.

‘You’re not the first one to make that mistake,’ Stacey said. ‘Let’s go and send some emails.’

Vanessa drew her reading glasses from her face and dropped them by her pad. ‘I think that’s us,’ she said.

The plump woman opposite her settled back in her
chair. ‘I’ll get everything under way,’ she said. Melissa Riley had been Vanessa Hill’s second-in-command for four years. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, she persisted in her belief that Vanessa’s steely professionalism disguised a heart of gold. Nobody who was that shrewd or swift in her assessments of human behaviour and personality could really be as hardboiled as Vanessa seemed to be. And today, finally, there was proof of that. Vanessa had cancelled all her appointments to be at the bedside of her injured son. OK, she’d reappeared mid-morning and had been working like a Trojan ever since, but still. She’d only come away because her son’s partner had insisted on relieving her. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, her smooth face shining with concern.

‘Feeling?’ Vanessa frowned. ‘I’m fine. It’s not me that’s in the hospital.’

‘It must have been a terrible shock, all the same. And to see your son laid up like that…I mean, as a mother, you want what’s best for them, you want to take their pain away…’

‘You do,’ Vanessa said, her tone indicating the conversation was at an end. She could see Melissa was gagging for something more intimate. Her social work training had left her avid for other people’s disasters. There were times when Vanessa wondered if Melissa’s brilliant organizational skills were sufficient to outweigh her desire to insinuate her fat little fingers into every crevice of any passing psyche. Today, it was a close call.

‘And of course, you’re absolutely riven with anxiety about his recovery,’ Melissa said. ‘Have they said whether he’ll walk properly again?’

‘He might have a limp. He’ll probably have to have another surgery.’ It killed Vanessa to reveal this much, but she understood that sometimes she had to give a little to maintain the respect of her team. As Melissa wittered on, she wondered what it felt like to be consumed with maternal concern. Mothers talked about bonding with their kids, but she’d never felt that burning intimacy they spoke of. She’d felt protective towards her baby, but it didn’t seem much different from the way she’d felt about her first puppy, the runt of the litter who’d had to be bottle-fed. In a way, she was relieved. She didn’t want to be chained to this child, to feel a physical absence when they were apart as she’d heard other women describe. But she had known right from the start that her lack of response was not the sort of thing it was acceptable to admit to. For all she knew, there were millions of women who felt as disengaged as she did.

But as long as there were Melissas out there laying claim to the moral high ground, Vanessa and her multitudes would have to pretend. Well, that wasn’t such a big deal. She’d spent most of her life pretending one thing or another. Sometimes she wondered if she really knew any more what was real and what was constructed.

Not that it mattered. She would do as she had always done. Look after number one. She didn’t owe Tony a damn thing. She’d fed and clothed him and put a roof over his head till he’d left for university. If there was any debt owed, it was in the other direction.

Running a unit like hers meant there was no hiding place, Carol thought bitterly as some sixth sense kicked
in and she looked up to see the main office door open on John Brandon. The time it took her Chief Constable to cross the office to her cubicle was enough for Carol to compose herself mentally, to review what little there was to share.

She stood up as he walked into her small domain. She was conscious that Brandon and his wife were her friends, a consciousness that made her stand on ceremony whenever they met in the semi-public arena of the police HQ. ‘Sir,’ she said with a tight smile, waving him to a chair.

Brandon, his lugubrious bloodhound face reflecting her own low spirits, eased into the chair with the care of a man suffering back pain. ‘The world has its eye on us today, Carol.’

‘Robbie Bishop will get the same commitment from my team as every other victim, sir.’

‘I know that. But our investigations don’t usually attract quite this much attention.’

Carol picked up a pen and rolled it between her fingers. ‘We’ve had our moments,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a problem with being the focus of the media’s attention.’

‘Other people do, though. I have bosses and they want a quick result. Bradfield Victoria’s board want this brought to a successful conclusion ASAP. It’s unsettling their players, apparently.’ Brandon was enough of a diplomat to hide his feelings generally, but today, his irritation was just visible beneath the surface. ‘And it seems that every citizen of Bradfield was Robbie Bishop’s number one fan.’ He sighed. ‘So where are we up to?’

Carol weighed up her choices. Should she make the
little she had sound more or less than it was? More would put pressure on her to deliver on it; less would put pressure on her to find something to chase. She settled for laying it out exactly as it was. At the end of her short recital, John Brandon looked even more miserable. ‘I don’t envy you,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t want a result. Anything you need in terms of bodies and resources, let me know.’ He got up.

‘It’s not a matter of resources now, sir. It’s a matter of information.’

‘I know.’ He turned to go. His hand was on the door handle when he looked back. ‘Do you need me to sort out another profiler? With Tony out of action?’

Carol felt a flash of panic. She didn’t want to have to forge a working relationship with somebody whose judgements would be based on a scant knowledge of her and her team. She didn’t want to have to worry about how to mitigate another psychologist’s conclusions. ‘It’s his leg that’s busted, not his brain,’ she said hastily. ‘It’ll be fine. When there’s something for a profiler to get his teeth into, Dr Hill will be there for us.’

Brandon raised his eyebrows. ‘Don’t let me down, Carol.’ Then he was gone, walking across the office with a word of encouragement.

Carol stared at his back, fizzing with anger. The implied criticism in his words was out of order. No other officer under John Brandon’s command had done more to demonstrate commitment to the job, or to the abstract principles of justice that drove her. No other officer had a better track record when it came to dealing with the kind of destructive high-profile cases that fucked up lives and made Bradfield’s
citizens look over their shoulders in fear. And he knew that. Somebody somewhere must have given him one hell of a kicking to make him act as if he didn’t.

DC Sam Evans was supposed to be canvassing residents of the converted warehouse where Robbie Bishop had lived. The boss had had this idea that Robbie might have said something to a fellow resident in the sauna or the steam room after his night out at Amatis, something that might lead them to the poisoner. Sam thought the idea was crap. If there was one thing that people like Robbie Bishop learned, it was to keep your mouth shut in front of anybody who might be tempted to grass you up to
Heat
or the
Bradfield Evening Sentinel
diary. He knew that Carol Jordan thought he needed to mend his maverick ways, especially after Don Merrick’s decision to follow a hot lead without waiting for back-up had ended so disastrously. She had indicated there was no room now for anything other than team spirit, but he knew she hadn’t got where she was today by putting her own interests second. She couldn’t blame him for doing his own thing as long as he got results.

So instead of pointless door-knocking, he was holed up in his own living room, laptop on his knees, Robbie Bishop’s emails on his screen. Stacey had said there was nothing there, but he didn’t think she’d had time to go through them one by one. Not when she’d been doing all the techie stuff with his hard drive as well. She might have skimmed the emails, but he’d bet this month’s salary that she hadn’t scrutinized them in detail.

After an hour, he couldn’t find it in his heart to
find fault with Stacey for her presumed dereliction. It was bad enough that Robbie cleaved to the text message style of prose, making it less than straightforward to read. Even worse was the banality of his messages. If there was a duller correspondent than Robbie Bishop, Sam hoped earnestly he’d never have to wade through his mail. He supposed the ones about music might contain something worth reading if you had a consuming passion for the minutiae of obscure trip-hop tracks. Maybe Robbie’s fascination for bpm made Bindie’s heart race. All it did for Sam was provoke a strong desire for sleep.

The love stuff was almost as boring as the music. And since Bindie was his principal correspondent, love and music was most of what there was. But Sam wasn’t about to give up. He understood that the most interesting information was often the stuff that was most deeply buried. And so he persevered.