The Torment of Others by Val McDermid Read Free Book Online

Brandon’s offer. He’d encouraged her to accept the job, but since she’d told him of her decision to go ahead, his emails had been curiously bland and noncommittal, as if he was deliberately making her stand on her own two feet. ‘What’s your point, Don?’ she asked.
‘Tim Golding was my case,’ he said angrily. ‘And I was the bagman on Guy Lefevre. There’s nothing we left undone.’
‘Now you understand why we’re going to be the station pariahs,’ Carol said gently. ‘There are another half-dozen SIOs out there smarting because cases they couldn’t close have been passed on to us. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tim Golding’s case had been put in deliberately to keep us on our toes. So even though I have every confidence that you did all you could, we’re still going to treat this case just like the others.’
Merrick scowled. ‘All the same, ma’am…’
There are people in this organization who would probably be very happy to see us fail. If you let this wind you up, Don, you’re playing into their hands.’ Carol gave him her warmest smile. ‘I trust you, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this room. But we’re all capable of missing something, no matter how much we think we’ve covered all the ground. So I don’t want the officers reviewing this case to keep their thoughts to themselves for fear of offending you. Like I said earlier: no secrets or lies.’
Carol didn’t wait for a reaction. She walked into her office, leaving the door open. Was this the first sign that someone was out to undermine her squad and, by extension, their new Chief Constable? She knew she fell too easily into mistrust these days, but she’d rather be too cautious than blithely oblivious to someone putting the shaft in. After all, it wasn’t paranoia if they really were out to get you.
She’d barely settled behind her desk when Don Merrick appeared in the doorway carrying a file. ‘A word, ma’am?’
Carol gestured towards the visitor’s chair with her head. Don sat down, holding the file to his chest. Tim Golding,’ he said.
‘I hear you, Don. Hand it over.’
He pulled it even closer to him. ‘It’s just that…’
‘I know. If anybody’s going to poke their nose into your case, you’d rather it was me than one of the new faces.’ Carol reached a hand out.
Reluctantly, Don shifted forward in his seat and extended the file towards her. ‘We couldn’t have done more,’ he said. ‘We just kept hitting brick walls. We couldn’t even give Tony Hill enough to go on to make a profile worthwhile. He said himself it was a waste of resources. But I couldn’t think of anything else to try. That’s why it’s ended up as a cold case this early on.’
‘I wondered about that. It seems very soon to consign it to the back burner.’
Don sighed. There just wasn’t anywhere else for us to go with it. We’ve still got a couple of DCs keeping an eye on it, feeding the press whenever they decide to take another crack at it. But nothing active’s happened for at least a month.’ Don’s misery was written all over him, from the hangdog eyes to the slump of his shoulders.
It provoked a sympathetic echo in Carol. ‘Leave it with me, Don. I don’t expect I’ll see anything you’ve missed.’
He got to his feet, a rueful look on his face. Thing is, ma’am, I remember when I was working the case that I wished you were around. Just so I could run it past you. You always had the knack of seeing things from a different angle.’
‘What is it they say, Don? Don’t wish too hard for what you want because you might get it.’
Tony Hill leaned forward and gazed intently through the observation window. A neat, balding man sat folded in the chair bolted to the floor. He looked somewhere in the region of fifty, though his placid expression went some way towards erasing the lines etched into his face. For a fleeting, incomprehensible moment, Tony thought of a child’s lollipop, tightly wrapped in cellophane, Sellotape