Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

Torin followed her, shuffling his oversized trainers across the floor in the typical slouch of an adolescent who’s still not quite accustomed to the margins of his body.
    Paula opened the door on a tiny boxroom with barely enough space for a table and three steel-framed chairs upholstered in a zingy blue-and-black pattern. Seen worse , she thought, ushering Torin to a seat. She sat opposite him, pulling from her shoulder bag a spiral notebook with a pen rammed down its metal spine.
    ‘Right then, Torin. Why don’t you start at the beginning?’
    Being stalled at the rank of Detective Constable had been the price Paula had willingly paid for membership of DCI Carol Jordan’s Major Incident Team. So when that squad had been wound up, she’d applied for the first three-stripe job that had come up with Bradfield Metropolitan Police. It had been so long since she’d passed her sergeant’s exams, she was afraid they’d make her resit.
    This wasn’t how she’d imagined her initiation into the rank of Detective Sergeant. She’d thought doing preliminary interviews would be someone else’s scut work now. But then, that was the thing about being a cop. Not much ever turned out the way you imagined.

4

    T he blackout blinds did exactly what they were supposed to. And that was good, because pitch-black meant you didn’t get shadow tricks setting your imagination on fire. The one thing Carol Jordan didn’t need was anything to stimulate her imagination. She could manage quite enough on her own without any extra provocation.
    It wasn’t as if she was a stranger to bloody crime scenes. Most of her adult life had been punctuated by images of sudden violent death. She’d been confronted with victims of torture; banal domestic violence gone overboard; sexual sadism that was nothing to do with middle-aged, middle-class fantasy; pick your brutality of choice and Carol had seen its end result. Sometimes they’d kept sleep at bay, driven her to the vodka bottle to blur the outlines. But never for more than a few nights. Her need for justice had always stepped in, transforming horror into a spur to action. Those images became the engine that drove her investigations, the motivation for bringing killers to face the consequences of their crimes.
    This time was different, though. This time, nothing diminished the power of what she’d seen. Not time, not drink, not distance. These days, there seemed to be a film running on a perpetual loop in her head. It wasn’t a long film, but its impact wasn’t dulled by repetition. The weird thing was that it wasn’t simply a rerun of what she’d seen. Because she was in the film. It was as if someone had been right behind her with a hand-held camera, making a jerky home movie of the worst moment of her life, the colours slightly off, the angles somehow wrong.
    It began with her walking into the barn, the view over her shoulder the familiar interior with its inglenook fireplace, exposed stone walls and hammer beams. Sofas she’d once lounged on; tables where she’d discarded newspapers, eaten meals, set wine glasses down; hand-stitched wall hangings she’d marvelled at; and a sweater she’d seen her brother wear a dozen times, casually thrown over the back of a chair. There was a crumpled T-shirt on the floor near the dining table, where the remains of lunch still sat. And at the foot of the gallery stairs, two uniformed bobbies in their high-vis jackets, one looking appalled, the other embarrassed. Between them, a concertina of fabric that might have been a skirt. Disconcerting, but not terrifying. Because film couldn’t convey the stink of spilt blood.
    But as Carol approached the wooden stairs, the camera panned back to reveal the ceiling above the sleeping gallery. It was like a Jackson Pollock painting whose sole palette was red. Blood; sprayed, slashed and streaked across the stark white plaster. She’d known then that it was going to be very, very bad.
    The camera followed her up the steps, recording every stumbling step. The first thing she saw was their legs and feet, marbled with blood, drips and smears on the bed and the floor. She climbed higher and saw Michael and Lucy’s bloodless bodies marooned like pale islands in a sea of scarlet.
    That was where the film froze, locked on that single terrible frame. But her brain didn’t stop running just because the film had. The blame circled and rattled in her head like a hamster on a wheel. If she’d been a better