JENNY EMERGED FROM THE underground bar to find rain falling from the blackening sky and to a chorus of indignant bleeps from her phone. In the absence of a signal she had missed three calls from Ryan and one from Michael. Michael? As if life wasn’t complicated enough. He was the very last person she felt like dealing with. Heading off along the street, she began to text him a message reminding him that he was no longer welcome in her life, but as she kicked through the melting slush she lost heart. She hadn’t the energy to be angry. All she wanted was to be left alone to think and plan what she would do next. On top of having to cope with the fact that she had nearly allowed herself to be seduced by a duplicitous detective who hadn’t even had the grace to tell her his real name, she now had to wrestle with the possibility that Kelly Hart wasn’t who she appeared to be either.
If Falco was to be believed – and that was a big if – Kelly was likely either to have spent ten years in hiding, having been a court witness to serious crime, or else she was a police informer who happened to be sleeping with her handler. Either possibility meant that her reconvened inquest on Monday would be full of excitement, to say the least. There was no way the police could emerge from it well, and little chance of Ryan keeping his job if Kelly admitted to sleeping with him. No wonder he had been trying to call her. From the very first moment he had appeared at her gate, his tactic must have been to keep her close, to build an emotional bond, just as he had with his female informers. Except in this case it was to obscure her thinking, rather than to tease out the truth.
It was going to be her pleasure to make sure he got exactly what he deserved. First thing on Monday morning he would find himself in the witness box answering her summons. She would make sure he had no inkling that Falco was coming next, and let him lie and lie, feeding him all the rope he needed to hang himself. And when he was done she would bring on Falco, then Ryan’s past informers, and then Kelly. And finally she would bring Ryan back to the witness box and watch him dance as the noose tightened around his sorry neck.
Propelled by a stream of angry, cathartic fantasies, she made her way back to the office, making plans to issue summonses not only to Ryan, but to Superintendent Abbott and the Chief Constable, too. She wanted the world to hear precisely why it was that the most important piece of evidence in her case had been wilfully withheld from her. And if they were no-shows this time there would be no parley with Simon Moreton, just warrants for their arrest, with the press primed and ready to capture their walks of shame. She slotted the key into the lock, feeling the headiness from the champagne overtaken by a much more powerful intoxicant: she was going to be revenged.
She pushed open the door to see Alison at the top of a stepladder in the corner of the room. Alison pressed a hand to her chest and exhaled in relief.
‘It’s you, Mrs Cooper. I thought you were him.’
Jenny came inside and closed the door behind her. The computer on Alison’s desk was switched on and the drawers were open.
‘What are you doing?’ Jenny asked, preparing herself to discover that Alison had completely lost her mind.
‘The telephone engineer – Lafferty. You remember him – the good-looking Irish boy.’ She was coming excitedly down the steps with something in her hand. The front of the grey telephone junction-box high on the wall was hanging from a single screw, exposing the knot of multicoloured wires inside. ‘It was him!’
‘Him, what?’ Jenny said dubiously.
Reaching the ground, Alison held a small black object two inches square in her palm. A short length of cable was extending from it, at the end of which was a phone jack. ‘It’s a bug. It was wired into the phone line. We used to use them in CID. A bit bigger in those days, but the same idea. It’s got a SIM card inside, like a mini phone. All you have to do is dial in, and you can listen in on phone calls and hear everything going on in this room.’
Jenny took it from her and turned it over in her hands. It certainly looked suspicious. ‘Is it working now?’
‘No. There’s no power to it. I thought he was taking a long time. He must have been stalling, just waiting for an opportunity to be in here by himself when I popped out.’
‘Hold on.’ Jenny tried to reorganize her thoughts and bring the phone engineer to mind. He had hardly made an impression on her. She could picture his face – boyish, covered in light-brown stubble – but mostly she remembered cringing as Alison clumsily flirted with him while she was trying to work. ‘Start from the beginning. What led you to this?’
‘Those Facebook messages, of course. I told you they were nothing to do with me. The only machines I use are this one and the iPad at home. Paul can barely send an email, so it stood to reason something had happened here. Then I remembered Lafferty – all those hours he spent here. And just before he finished, I’d gone out for sandwiches and left him alone in here for fifteen minutes.’ Alison went behind her desk and angled her computer monitor so Jenny could see it, too. ‘Look.’ She brought up the program menu. ‘I had an anti-spyware program. It’s gone. Deleted. You know what that means? He could have installed a keystroke tracker. Everything I write, every key I press gets secretly emailed to him.’
‘Have you found any evidence?’
‘I wouldn’t be able to. You need a geek for that. But that’s the only explanation – there’s no other way, Mrs Cooper.’
‘Wow,’ Jenny said, unable to dislodge the suspicion that Alison might just have spent the last few days constructing an elaborate ruse to get her job back. ‘Do we have his credentials? Can we check him out?’
‘I’ve tried BT. They’ve never heard of a Lafferty in the Bristol team. I know what you’re thinking – you can try them yourself. Here’s the maintenance-depot number.’ She found a scrap of paper on her desk and pressed it into Jenny’s hand. ‘You call them. Calum Lafferty. They’ll also tell you there was never any problem with frozen bloody connections. It was just more bullshit.’ Her cheeks flushed deep red. ‘Pardon me, Mrs Cooper. I’m furious. I could wring his neck.’
‘Excuse me a moment. You understand.’
‘Of course,’ Alison said, failing to disguise her hurt at being mistrusted. ‘I’ll make us some tea, shall I?’
Jenny went through to her office and in a state of stillness that felt like the eerie quiet before the storm, dialled the local number Alison had given her. She got through to a helpful depot manager who confirmed that he had no one called Lafferty working for him in Bristol. Nor had there been any reports of faults in Jamaica Street since the previous year. It seemed Alison was telling the truth. Setting down the receiver, Jenny attempted to absorb the implications. It was becoming close to impossible not to conclude that Falco was on to something, and that the tragedy at Blackstone Ley was inextricably connected with violent criminals happy to slaughter innocent children to protect their interests.
‘You look ill, Mrs Cooper,’ Alison said, as she appeared with mugs of tea. ‘Still feeling queasy?’
‘You were right,’ Jenny said. ‘There is no Lafferty.’
‘I’ve got a theory,’ Alison said, her eyes widening with excitement. ‘It’s all about Blackstone Ley. Gloucester CID were terrified of us solving Susie Ashton’s murder and making them look like idiots, so they’ve done this to keep tabs. It’s a wrecking operation.’
‘There are some things I ought to tell you,’ Jenny said, ‘if only because I’m not sure I should be only one who knows them.’
They looked at each other in silence.
‘Do you think it’s safe to talk in here?’ Alison said.
‘For all the difference it’s going to make, I really don’t care.’
It was a relief to at last be able to share all that had happened in the last few days. Jenny didn’t hold back. She started with the attempt to intimidate her at her home, moved through all the twists and turns with Falco and the hapless Tomasz Zaleski, and told the story of her association with Ryan, from the first time he turned up at her house until her discovery that he was going under a false name, and Falco’s revelation that he had moved from handling informers to hiding witnesses in the countryside. Finally, she shared what had happened with Philip and Clare Ashton, and Clare’s claim that the child in the video was Robbie Morgan. It felt to her as improbable as it sounded. She had laid it all out, end to end, but the different parts failed to add up to a whole.
When Jenny had finished, Alison looked momentarily perplexed, and then, like a parting of clouds, a smile appeared. ‘Now I think I know where Burden must fit in.’
‘Then you’re ahead of me,’ Jenny said.
‘Passports. Every time Ryan put a witness on his programme he would have to have arranged a new identity. Birth certificate, national-insurance number, driver’s licence and passport. I’ll bet you Burden had access to those files. Think what they must be worth in the wrong hands.’
‘Yes. Yes.’ the idea gained traction in Jenny’s mind, and began to manoeuvre into place like a piece in some complex three-dimensional puzzle. Except that an awkward corner refused to fit: ‘But if Burden was looking at Kelly, why would Ryan tell me she’d been married to a criminal? Surely that breaks the first rule of his job.’
‘Has she told you her story herself?’
Jenny had to admit that she’d never asked her to delve deep into her past.
‘Then I’m with Falco on the double bluff. You said Ryan studied psychology – he’s probably trying to play some mind trick on you.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’
Alison scratched the flattened part of her forehead, her face creased up in concentration. ‘Burden’s starting to make sense, though – the fancy computer and the facial-recognition software. If he was being asked to assist in creating a new identity, the police wouldn’t disclose the original one – only a handful of officers wouldc’
Jenny completed her thought for her: ‘And he’d got himself the wherewithal to uncover the original identities from photographs alone.’
Alison slurped her tea noisily, pulling more unusual faces as further connections formed in her brain. ‘DI Ballantyne’s lot won’t know about the hard drive Burden had, and they certainly hadn’t put him in Blackstone Ley. And Burden wasn’t stupid – he wouldn’t have left that thing lying around for a burglar to lift, and he wouldn’t have put it anywhere obvious, either.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper and leant across the desk with a sense of pressing urgency. ‘You need to get over to his place before someone else does, Mrs Cooper?’
‘Me? I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Then what you need is someone who knows their way around. An ex-detective, perhaps?’
They made their way to Janus Avenue in separate cars. Alison went ahead, intending to call past her flat en route, in order to collect her ‘search kit’. She took off with the enthusiasm of a child impatient for an adventure, already making plans for how she would improve office seccnother of life’s many injustices. Sometimes Jenny longed to be like those who could sail through each day in a state of callous detachment. How easy it must be to live without empathy.
As if on cue the phone rang; it was Ryan’s name on the screen. She let it go unanswered, waiting to see if he would leave a message. He did, sounding for once as if his emotions were getting the better of him: ‘This is a message for Mrs Cooper. It’s 5.20 p.m. I need to speak to you urgently. Kelly Hart isn’t at her flat and she isn’t answering her phone. I need to know if she has communicated with you and I’m concerned for her safety. Please call me.’
If he was telling the truth, Kelly was either in trouble or had decided to put herself out of Ryan’s reach. She had seemed genuinely distraught when she gave her statement about Philip Ashton. It had felt to Jenny like a moment in which she had started to confront the burden of having lived her life as a continual object of men’s fantasies. It stood to reason she would be avoiding Ryan. If she stood any chance of being free, she would have to begin by getting out from under his control.
Jenny switched on her mobile phone and checked for new messages. There was nothing from Kelly, but Michael had called again, also leaving a message. Gritting her teeth, she dialled in to hear what he had to say. His sounded deadly serious: ‘Jenny, I’ve now had two calls from a fellow called Ryan, who claims he’s a detective. It seems he’s trying to track you down. He sounds a complete arsehole, but I got the impression he thinks you might be in some danger. Can you at least let me know if you’re all right?’
Jenny sighed and texted him back. ‘I’m fine. And yes, he is.’
As she went to slot the phone back in her pocket, Michael texted back – he must have responded instantly. ‘Good. I’m here. M.’
Alison was already waiting on the pavement outside 15 Janus Avenue, between the grubby heaps of melting snow, a small rucksack slung over her shoulder. A short, irritable man wearing a camel-coloured coat climbed out from a white Mercedes as Jenny approached.
‘This is Mr Hoskins – the owner,’ Alison explained as Jenny joined them.
‘I thought the police had already searched that flat,’ Hoskins said, not troubling himself to say hello.
‘I’m the coroner, Mr Hoskins. My inquiry is quite independent of the police.’ She handed him one of her business cards.
He gave it a cursory glance, unimpressed. ‘His brother’s coming to clear the place out tomorrow. Couldn’t it wait till then?’
‘No,’ Jenny answered coolly. ‘I won’t need to detain you – just as long as you can let us in.’
‘And leave you alone to wreck the place? You must be joking.’ He stomped bad-temperedly to the front door.
Hoskins stood with his arms crossed indignantly over his belly as Alison and Jenny began their search of the four rooms, which seemed to have remained untouched since Jenny’s initial visit. Jenny went into the bedroom to look through the cupboards and drawers, while Alison went into the bathroom.
‘What are you looking for anyway?’ Hoskins demanded.
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say,’ Jenny said.
‘Not drugs, is it? That’s all I need. Have you any idea how hard it is to let a flat where someone’s topped themselves? You can’t hide a damn thing these days – it’s all on the bloody internet.’ He called through to Alison. ‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Unscrewing the bath panel. I’ll put it back.’
‘Damn right you will.’
Jenny resisted the urge to slap Hoskins down, reasoning that sooner or later Alison was bound to oblige, and set about searching Daniel Burden’s meticulously organized bedroom. He may have become a man, but no man Jenny had ever met kept his belongings as neatly. Right down to his socks and underwear, everything was ironed and folded. She went through a chest of drawers, searched the wardrobe and under the bed, but didn’t find so much as a stray button. The habits he had learned in the Navy had clearly stayed with him: his sense of wellbeing seemed to have been intimately linked with external order. It was the same in the kitchen. Everything in its place; utensils and crockery gleaming. No superfluous items and scarcely a personal touch. After inspecting one spotless cupboard after another, Jenny couldn’t help but feel that Burden’s obsession with tidiness was more than just a habit: it was as if he’d been consciously trying to erase all traces of himself. The rented flat was merely a space he occupied; a temporary way-station on his journey to becoming his true self.
Having drawn a blank, Jenny joined Alison in the sitting room, where she was down on her hands and knees behind the sofa, which she had pulled away from the wall.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Hoskins said. ‘This isn’t going to take much longer, is it? I’ve got to be somewhere.’
‘Please?’ Jenny said, as she stepped past him. She was rapidly becoming impatient.
He snorted and turned into the hall.
Jenny tried not to look at the mini-gym from which Burden’s body had been hanging, and turned her back to it. ‘I can’t see anything that looks like a hard drive.’ Jenny said.
‘You wouldn’t have,’ Alison said confidently.
‘Oh?’
‘This is the only partition wall in the place. It’s going to be in here. Yes!’
Jenny looked behind the sofa and saw that Alison had removed a small plastic cap that sat at the bottom of a double electric socket.
‘USB port,’ Alison said triumphantly. ‘It’s behind here. I can see where he’s patched the plaster. Pass the hammer would you? It’s in the bag.’
Jenny glanced to the doorway. Hoskins had stepped into the bathroom. She fetched the heavy club hammer from Alison’s rucksack and handed it over.
‘He’s going to love this,’ Alison said, and swung it hard into the wall.
There was a hurried toilet flush and Hoskins emerged red-faced from the bathroom, tugging at his zip. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Smashing a hole in the wall – what does it look like?’ Alison said from amidst a cloud of dust.
Hoskins’s cheeks puffed up like red balloons as with another big swing the several fist-sized holes she had made became one large one. ‘Now, listen here—’
‘Got it!’ Alison reached through the hole she had punched through the plasterboard and brought out a small black box with two cables attached.
Jenny couldn’t help herself: ‘Don’t worry, Mr Hoskins, by the time we move the sofa back you won’t even notice it’s there.’
When Jenny had finally calmed the irate landlord down and packed him off with a promise to make good the damage, Jenny resolved that her first priority must be to get the contents of the hard drive copied and safely uploaded to an online storage facility as soon as possible. It wasn’t safe to take it to the office, and Jenny was feeling superstitious enough not to attempt to drive it all the way home across the Severn Bridge and along the twisting roads of the Wye Valley without having secured the data first. Opting for safety in anonymity, they drove the short distance to the McDonald’s restaurant at Stoke Gifford. It wasn’t glamorous, but it had free Wi-Fi, and by running Jenny’s laptop on battery and using its power lead to get the hard drive up and running, Alison was able to hook them together with a USB connector she had picked up at Burden’s flat. While Jenny filled her aching stomach with a tasteless portion of fries, Alison managed to access the contents.
A list of several hundred files scrolled up the screen. It was immediately apparent that this was the repository of Burden’s entire digital life. A glance at the file names revealed that here was stored everything from emails to games to favourite music and movies.
Jenny felt briefly overwhelmed at the extent of the material, but Alison quickly homed in on a file named Idencofit and clicked it open. The program was huge and took several minutes to load. Once running, Alison navigated her way through to a sub-file that Jenny was sure she would never have found by herself, which contained the details of the most recent searches. Two rows of thumbnail photographs came up. Of the twenty or so images, six were headshots of Kelly. The first was a plain passport photograph of the type taken in a pay-booth. The rest had clearly been cropped out of pictures taken in several different locations. Two looked as if they may have been taken outside the house at Blackstone Ley, and one image showing Kelly in a low-cut blouse with an array of bottles behind her appeared to have been captured in the bar where she worked.
Alison clicked on the passport photograph, selected the ‘matches’ option from the pop-up menu and a split second later the stored results appeared on the screen.
Jenny froze, her cup halfway to her mouth. Tens of photographs spilled onto the screen, all of different sizes; all harvested from the internet. Every last one was from a newspaper or magazine and they all featured one of two shots. The first was a posed school portrait of a beautiful, olive-skinned schoolgirl in neat blue blazer, and the second was of the same girl a year or two older, sandwiched between two much larger female police officers.
Alison clicked on the clearest rendering of the second picture and opted to visit the web page from which it was drawn. Another window opened, displaying an archive article from the Gibraltar Chronicle, dated 13 April 1998. The headline above the picture declared: ‘GIB GIRL NOT GUILTY OF MURDER’.
Jenny’s eyes skimmed over the text below:
15-year-old Malia Sanders, who, along with 17-year-old Liam Doyle of Queensway Road, had been standing trial charged with the murders of 11-year-old Gabriella Vallejo and her younger sister Amelia, 9, walked free today, after Mr Justice Davies instructed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty in her case, shortly after proceedings commenced.
The bodies of Gabriella and Amelia Vallejo were discovered by their parents, floating in the pool at their home in Europa Road in early January. Miss Sanders, a student at Eastside School, was frequently employed by the family as a babysitter. At the time of their deaths, Doyle was working part-time as a pool cleaner. The court today heard evidence from pathologist Professor Rex Ferris that both girls showed signs of having been sexually assaulted and violently asphyxiated.
The case against Doyle continues.
‘That’s Kelly,’ Alison said, stating the obvious. ‘From Gibraltar. That must be where she gets her looks from. Two girls.’ The symmetry between the events of Kelly’s past and present seemed almost too horrible to remark upon. The food lying in Jenny’s stomach had turned to acid. ‘Fifteen yeccan find a picture of Doyle . . .’
Alison brought up a search engine and entered his name. Amongst the many irrelevant references to different Liam Doyles, numerous reports of his conviction for double murder were returned. She worked through them all, but none carried a photograph. Being technically a juvenile at the time of his sentence, he had been legally protected from having his image published, and back at the dawn of the internet such rules, which nowadays were routinely flouted, were capable of being enforced.
‘There. Look. She turned Queen’s evidence against him.’ Jenny pointed to a passage in a report of Doyle’s trial, which stated that Malia Sanders, as she then was, had been a principal witness for the prosecution. She had told the court that while working as a regular babysitter for the two girls, she had become friendly with Doyle, who worked for the pool-maintenance company. They soon fell into a sexual relationship which Sanders described as ‘intense and passionate’. On the night the girls died, she claimed Doyle had plied her with marijuana and alcohol and that she fell asleep on the sofa and later woke to find Doyle gone and the girls dead. Panicking, she fled the scene before their parents returned.
Doyle gave no evidence in his defence. Instead his barrister argued that the prosecution had constructed only a flimsy circumstantial case, which could apply equally to Malia Sanders, whom he described as a ‘devious and calculating young woman, hiding behind an innocent, doe-eyed exterior.’ The jury did not agree with him. Doyle was found guilty on a majority verdict and given a mandatory life sentence with a recommendation that he serve at least fifteen years.
‘Sounds to me like she was in it up to her neck,’ Alison said. ‘No wonder they fixed her up with a new identity. There was no way she could have stayed in a small place like that.’
Oblivious to the noise and clatter of the fast-food restaurant going on around her, Jenny clicked back to the images of the young Malia and stared at her perfect and ever-so-slightly melancholic face. She was truly mesmerizing, though not in an obvious way; hers was a beauty that drew you closer and closer in, inviting you to seek her out; a dark well drawing you into its depths. Jenny recalled Darren Brooks’s words – Once in a man’s lifetime he’ll fall for a woman who is not of this earth – and for the first time she began to understand. There was indeed something darkly and diabolically enchanting about Malia Sanders, something that could touch even someone like her, who had never regarded another woman in that way.
‘What would Burden have wanted from her?’ Jenny said, thinking aloud. ‘She doesn’t have money – she lived in a council house.’
‘You can ask her at the inquest, can’t you?’ Alison said. ‘You won’t be so afraid of hurting her feelings now we know who she is. Do you think Ed knew? Or do you think Burden told him?’ Alison turned to her, wide-eyed. ‘And Susie Ashton. What about Susie Ashton?’
Jenny had begun to have the same thought. Wherever Kelly went, death seemed to go with her.