Val McDermid: Beneath the Bleeding

Michael rolled his eyes. ‘Stop hiding behind the history.’

‘It’s not about hiding. History like ours, you need crampons and oxygen to get over it.’ Carol found a space in the traffic and edged to the kerb, hazard lights flashing. ‘This is the part where you run away,’ she said in a bad imitation of Shrek.

‘You’re dropping me here?’ Michael sounded mildly outraged.

‘It’ll take me ten minutes to get round to the front of the Institute,’ Carol said, leaning past him to point out of the passenger window. ‘If you cut through the new shopping arcade, you’ll be at your client meeting in three.’

‘God you’re right. We’ve only been away from the city for three months and already I’m losing the mental map.’ He put an arm across her shoulders, gave her cheek a dry kiss then climbed out of the car. ‘Speak to you in the week.’

Ten minutes later, Carol walked into Bradfield Police headquarters. In the short gap between dropping Michael off and leaving the lift on the third floor, where the team she thought of as the ragged misfits was based, she had made the shift from sister to police officer. The only element the two personae shared was the mild hangover.

She carried on down a corridor whose lavender and off-white walls were broken up by doors of plate glass and steel. Their central sections were frosted so it was hard to see any detail of what was going on behind them unless it was happening on the floor or dangling from the ceiling. The tarted-up interiors still reminded her of an advertising agency. But then, modern policing often seemed to have as much to do with image as it did with catching villains. Happily, she’d managed to keep herself as close to the sharp end as was possible for an officer of her rank.

She pushed open the door of 316 and stepped into the land of the dead and the damaged. This early on a Monday morning, the living were thin on the ground. DC Stacey Chen, the team’s IT wizard, barely glanced up from the pair of monitors on her desk, grunting something Carol took to be a greeting. ‘Morning, Stacey,’ Carol said. As she crossed to her office, Detective Sergeant Chris Devine stepped out from behind one of the long whiteboards that encircled their desks like covered wagons keeping the enemy at bay. Startled, Carol stopped in her tracks. Chris held her hands up in a placatory gesture.

‘Sorry, guv. Didn’t mean to freak you out.’

‘No harm done.’ Carol let her breath out in a sigh. ‘We really do need to get those see-through incident boards.’

‘What? Like they have on the telly?’ Chris gave a small snort. ‘Don’t see the point, myself. I’ve always thought they’re a proper bitch to read. All that background interference.’ She fell into step beside Carol as her boss made for the glassed-off cubicle that served as her office. ‘So what’s the latest on Tony? How’s he doing?’

It was, thought Carol, a funny way to put it. She gave a half-shrug and said, ‘As far as I know, he’s fine.’ Her tone was calculated to close the subject.

Chris swung around so she was walking backwards in Carol’s path, checking out her boss’s expression. Her eyes widened. ‘Oh my good god, you don’t know, do you?’

‘Don’t know what?’ Carol felt the clutch of panic in her stomach.

Chris put a hand on Carol’s arm and indicated her office with a jerk of her head. ‘I think we’d better sit down,’ she said.

‘Christ,’ said Carol, allowing herself to be led inside. She made for her chair while Chris closed the door. ‘I’ve only been in the Dales, not the North Pole. What the hell’s been going on? What’s happened to Tony?’

Chris responded to the urgency in her voice. ‘He was attacked. By one of the inmates at Bradfield Moor.’

Carol’s hands came up to her face, covering her cheeks and pushing her mouth into an O. She drew breath sharply. ‘What happened?’ Her voice was raised, almost a shout.

Chris ran a hand through her short salt-and pepper hair. ‘There’s no way to soften it, guv. He got in the way of a madman with a fire axe.’

Chris’s voice sounded as if it was coming from a long way off. Never mind that Carol had inured herself to sights and sounds that would have made most people whimper and gibber. When it came to Tony Hill, she had a unique vulnerability. She might choose not to acknowledge it consciously, but at moments like this, it altered everything. ‘What …?’ Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. ‘How bad is it?’

‘From what I heard, his leg’s pretty smashed up. He took it in the knee. Lost a lot of blood. It took a while for the paramedics to get to him, on account of there was a madman with an axe on the prowl,’ Chris said.

Bad though this was, it was far less than her imagination had managed to conjure in a matter of seconds. Blood loss and a smashed knee were manageable. No big deal, really, in the great scheme of things. ‘Jesus,’ Carol said, relief in her released breath. ‘What happened?’

‘What I heard was that one of the inmates overpowered an orderly, got his key off him, trampled his head to a bloody pulp then got into the main part of the hospital where he broke the glass and got the axe.’

Carol shook her head. ‘They have fire axes in Bradfield Moor? A secure mental hospital?’

‘Apparently that’s precisely why. It’s secure. Lots of locked doors and wire-reinforced glass. Health and Safety says you have to be able to get the patients out in the event of fire and a failure of the electronic locking systems.’ Chris shook her head. ‘Bollocks, if you ask me.’ She threw up her hands in the face of Carol’s admonitory expression. ‘Yeah, well. Better a few mad bastards burn than we get this kind of shit. One orderly dead, another one on the critical list whose internal organs are never going to be right again and Tony smashed up? I’d shed a few homicidal nutters to avoid that.’ Somehow, the sentiment sounded even worse in Chris’s strong Cockney accent.

‘It’s not an either/or, and you know it, Chris,’ Carol said. Even though her own gut reaction matched that of her sergeant, she knew it was emotion and not common sense talking. But these days, only the reckless and the heedless casually spoke their mind in the workplace. Carol liked her mavericks. She didn’t want to lose any of them because the wrong ears heard them sounding off, so she did her best to curb their excesses. ‘So how did Tony get caught up in it?’ she asked. ‘Was it one of his patients?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Dunno. Apparently he was the hero of the hour, though. Distracted the mad bastard enough for a couple of nurses to drag the injured orderly out of harm’s way.’

But not enough to save himself . ‘Why did nobody contact me? Who was our duty officer this weekend? Sam, wasn’t it?’

Chris shook her head. ‘It was supposed to be Sam, but he swapped with Paula.’

Carol jumped up and opened the door. Scanning the room, she saw DC Paula McIntyre hanging her coat up. ‘Paula? In here a minute,’ she called. As the young detective crossed the room, Carol felt the familiar wash of guilt. Not so long ago, she had put Paula in harm’s way and harm had come running. Never mind that it had been an officially sanctioned operation: Carol had been the one who had promised to protect Paula and had failed. The double whammy of that botched operation and the death of her closest colleague had set Paula teetering on the brink of abandoning her police career. Carol knew that place. She’d been there herself, and for scarily similar reasons. She’d offered what support she could to Paula, but it had been Tony who had talked her back from the edge. Carol had no idea what had passed between them, but it had made it possible for Paula to continue being a cop. And for that she was grateful, even if it meant having that constant reminder of her own inadequacy on her team.