The Burning (42 page)

Jenny told herself to be cautious. He was a shark. Don’t give him everything. Just enough.

‘Kelly Hart.’

‘What about her?’

‘She came from London ten years ago with two daughters. She was married to a villain called Molyneux.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Ryan told me. Which given what you’ve just said doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why would he tell me her story if it was meant to be a secret?’

‘Double bluff? Throw you off the scent.’

‘I think he might be sleeping with her.’

Falco laughed. ‘That’s sick, even for a detective. Jesus.’

‘It’s true. I suppose it could have been going on for a while. Her partner called her a whore in his final note.’

‘I read she works up the road from here behind a bar. It’s not exactly a low-profile occupation – perhaps he’s running her as an informer? Or –’ his face lit
up with delight as he presented another possibility – ‘she could have been informing on Ed Morgan and whatever he was into up at Fairmeadows. Maybe he rumbled her and took it out on the
kids.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Now we are talking. This is dynamite. Might even keep me out of jail if I’m allowed a credit. I’m presuming the police have kept you
entirely in the dark over this?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid they have.’

‘So what do you want to do? Fuck it, what have I got to lose? I’ll swear a statement for you. I’ll go in the witness box at your inquest and give you Ryan’s life story. I
might even be able to dredge up some of his old girlfriends. Embarrass the shit out of him. How does that sound?’

‘Good,’ Jenny said. ‘Perfect.’ She decided to keep what she had learned about Burden to herself. She was happy to have Falco working for her, but she didn’t trust
him an inch. She raised her glass. ‘To truth.’

Falco slapped a hand onto the table. ‘Amen.’

J
ENNY 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?’