Val McDermid - The Wire in the Blood

It was almost ten when she drove down the ramp to the Barbican complex’s underground car park. She was pleased to see the car park attendant clearly remembered her, as she’d hoped, though he looked startled to see her face smiling uncertainly round the door of his office. ‘Hello, stranger,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ve not seen you around for a long time.’

‘I’ve moved up to Leeds,’ she said, carefully avoiding any hint of how recent her move had been. It had been more than eighteen months since she’d last been here, but the reasons for that were nobody’s business but hers.

‘Chris didn’t say to expect you,’ the car park attendant said, getting up from his seat and walking towards her. Shaz backed out of the booth and down the steps as he followed her.

‘It was all a bit last-minute,’ she said noncommittally, opening her car door.

That seemed to satisfy the attendant. ‘Are you here overnight?’ he asked, frowning as he scanned the car park for an appropriate space.

‘No, I’m not planning on staying long,’ Shaz said firmly, starting her engine and crawling down the aisles of cars, following the attendant and slotting the car into the space he indicated.

‘I’ll let you into the block,’ he said as she joined him. ‘What’s it like up in the frozen north, then?’

Shaz smiled. ‘The football’s better,’ was all she said as he pulled back the massive glass and metal door and waved her inside. Just as well I’m not a terrorist sleeper, she thought as she waited for the lift.

On the third floor, she stopped halfway along the carpeted corridor. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the doorbell. In the silence that followed, she breathed out through her nostrils in a slow steady stream, trying to contain the nervousness that was turning her stomach into a jacuzzi. When she’d almost given up hope, she heard the faint whisper of footfalls. Then the heavy door inched open.

Tousled chestnut hair, bleary brown eyes with dark smudges under them and frown lines between, a snub nose and a yawn half-stifled behind a square hand with blunt, well-manicured fingers appeared in the gap.

For once, Shaz’s narrow smile made it as far as her eyes. The blaze of warmth melted Chris Devine, and not for the first time. The hand dropped away from the mouth, but the lips remained parted. Astonishment came first, then delight, then consternation. ‘Any chance of a cup of coffee?’ Shaz asked.

Chris stepped back uncertainly, pulling the door wide. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

Nothing worth having had ever come easy. He told himself that at regular intervals through two days of torment, though it was not a lesson he was ever likely to forget. His childhood had been scarred with oppressive discipline, any rebelliousness or frivolity stifled by force. He had learned not to show the currents that moved under the surface, to present a bland and acceptable face to whatever adversity people threw in his teeth. Other men might have revealed some traces of the seething excitement that swirled inside whenever he thought of Donna Doyle, but not him. He was too practised at dissemblement. No one ever noticed his mind was ranging through entirely different territory, detached from his surroundings, entirely elsewhere. It was a trait that in the past had saved him pain; now it kept him safe.

In his head he was with her, wondering if she was keeping her promise, imagining the excitement burning in her veins. He thought of her as a changed being, charged with the secret weapon of knowledge, convinced she had the edge on every tabloid astrologer because she knew for sure what her future held.

Of course, hers could not be the same vision as his, he realized that. It would have been hard to imagine two more disparate fantasies, so far apart on the continuum that there could exist no single uniting factor. Apart from orgasm.

Imagining her imagining a false future had its own frisson of delight that cohabited and alternated with the sliver of fear that she would not keep her word, that even as he played computer games with the stricken inhabitants of a children’s cancer ward, Donna was huddled in a corner of the school cloakroom revealing her secret to her best friend. That was the gamble he took every time. And every time, he’d judged the roll of the dice perfectly. Not once had anyone come looking for him. Well, not in the investigative sense. There had been one time when the distraught parents of a missing teenage girl asked for a TV appeal because, wherever she’d run off to, their daughter would never miss her weekly fix of Vance’s Visits . Sweet irony, so delicious he’d grown hard for months afterwards just thinking about it. He could hardly have told them that the only way they were ever going to talk to their daughter again was via a medium, could he?

For two nights running, he went to sleep in the early hours and woke at dawn tangled in damp sheets, his pulse racing and his eyes wide open. Whatever the evaporated dream, it robbed him of further sleep, leaving him to prowl the confined spaces of his hotel room, alternately exulting and fretting.

But nothing lasted forever. Thursday evening found him in his Northumberland retreat. Only fifteen minutes’ drive from the centre of the city, it was nevertheless as isolated as a Highland croft. Formerly a tiny Methodist chapel that could never have held more than a couple of dozen, it had been bought when it was reduced to four bulging walls and a sagging roof. A team of local builders happy to have the cash in hand renovated it to very particular specifications, never doubting the reasons they were given for the desired features.

He savoured the preparations for his visitor. The sheets were clean, the clothes laid out. The phone was switched off, the answering machine turned down low, the fax shut away inside a drawer. The fibre optics might sing all night with calls for him, but he wouldn’t be hearing them till morning. The table was covered with linen so white it seemed to glow in the dark. On it, crystal, silver and porcelain were arranged in traditional patterns. Red rosebuds in an engraved crystal vase, candles splendid in simple Georgian silver. Donna would be captivated. Of course, she wouldn’t realize that it would be the last time she’d ever use cutlery.

He looked around, checking everything was as it should be. The chains and leather straps were all out of sight, the silken gag tucked away, the carpentry bench innocent of tools except for the permanently mounted vice. He had designed the workbench himself, all the tools arrayed on a solid piece of wood like the drop leaf of a table attached to the far end of the bench at ninety degrees to the work surface.

One last glance at his watch. Time to drive the Land Rover across the rutted field track to the empty B-road that would take him to Five Walls Halt with its isolated railway station. He lit the candles and smiled with sheer pleasure, confident now that she would have kept faith and silence alike.

Won’t you come into my parlour? said the spider to the fly.

Tim Coughlan had finally had his prayers answered. He’d found the perfect spot. The loading bay was slightly less wide than the factory proper, leaving a recess about seven feet square at one end. At first glance, it looked as if the alcove was blocked off by flattened cardboard cartons stacked on their ends. If anyone had bothered to look more closely, they would have noticed that the cartons weren’t tightly packed and that, with a little effort, it wouldn’t be too hard to squeeze between them. Anyone inclined to investigate further would have found Tim Coughlan’s bedsit, containing a stained and greasy sleeping bag and two carrier bags. The first bag contained one clean T-shirt, one clean pair of socks and one clean pair of underpants. The other held one dirty T-shirt, one dirty pair of socks, one dirty pair of boxer shorts and a pair of shapeless cords that might once have been dark brown but were now the colour of seabirds after the oil slick has trapped them.