The Telling Error Read online

  Also by Sophie Hannah

  Little Face

  Hurting Distance

  The Point of Rescue

  The Other Half Lives

  A Room Swept White

  Lasting Damage

  Kind of Cruel

  The Carrier

  THE TELLING ERROR

  Sophie Hannah

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  1

  Copyright © Sophie Hannah 2014

  The right of Sophie Hannah to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 73675 5

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Also by Sophie Hannah

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Monday 1 July 2013

  Chapter 2: Monday 1 July 2013

  Chapter 3: Tuesday 2 July 2013

  Chapter 4: Wednesday 3 July 2013

  Chapter 5: Wednesday 3 July 2013

  Chapter 6: Thursday 4 July 2013

  Chapter 7: Thursday 4 July 2013

  Chapter 8: Thursday 4 July 2013

  Chapter 9: Sunday 7 July 2013

  Chapter 10: Monday 8 July 2013

  Chapter 11: Tuesday 9 July 2013

  Chapter 12: Tuesday 9 July 2013

  Chapter 13: Tuesday 9 July 2013

  Chapter 14: Tuesday 9 July 2013

  Chapter 15: Tuesday 9 July 2013

  Chapter 16: Thursday 11 July 2013

  Acknowledgements

  For my genius editor and amazing friend Carolyn Mays, who has been the bright side of my dark side for nine years

  MEN SEEKING WOMEN

  IntimateLinks > uk > all personals

  Reply: [email protected]

  Posted: 2013-07-04, 16:17PM GMT

  Looking for a Woman with a Secret

  LOCATION: WHEREVER YOU ARE

  Hello, females!

  Are you looking on here because you’re hoping to find something that stands out from all the dull one-line I-want-a-blow-job-in-my-hotel-room-type adverts? Well, look no further. I’m different and this is different.

  I’m not seeking casual sex or a long-term relationship. I’ve had plenty of the first in my time, and I’ve got one of the second that I’m happy with. Actually, I’m not looking for anything sexual or romantic. So what am I doing on Intimate Links? Well, as I’m sure you’re aware if you’re clever (and I suspect that the woman I am looking for is very bright), there are different kinds of intimacy. There’s taking off your clothes and getting dirty with an illicit stranger, there’s deep and meaningful love-making with a soulmate … and then there’s the sort of intimacy that involves two people sharing nothing more than a secret. An important secret that matters to both of them.

  Perhaps these two people have never met, or perhaps they know each other but not very well. Either way, they can only establish a bond of common knowledge once the one who has the information has given it to the one who needs it. Think of the rush of relief you’d experience if you shared your burden, after the agony of prolonged silence with the secret eating away at you … If you’re the person I’m looking for, you’ll be desperate to confide in someone.

  That’s where I come in. I’m your confidant, ready and eager to listen. Are you the keeper of the secret I’m waiting to be told?

  Let’s find out by asking a question that only the person I’m looking for would be able to answer. It will make no sense to anyone else. You’ll have to bear with me. Before I get to the question part, I’ll need to lay out the scenario.

  Picture a room in a large Victorian house: a spacious, high-ceilinged first-floor bedroom that’s used as a study. There are overstuffed built-in bookshelves in this room, a pale blue and brown jukebox with curved edges that has a vintage look about it and is much more beautiful than the kind you sometimes see in pubs, an armchair, a filing cabinet, a long desk with square wooden legs and a green glass top that has a laptop computer at its centre. The computer is neither open nor closed. Its lid is at a forty-five-degree angle, as if someone has tried half-heartedly to push it shut but it hasn’t gone all the way. The laptop is surrounded on all sides by cheap-looking biros, empty and half-empty coffee mugs, and scattered papers: handwritten notes, ideas jotted down.

  Pushed back from the desk is a standard black office-style swivel chair, and lolling in the chair, his head leaning to the left, is a dead man. While alive, he was well known and – though this might well have nothing to do with anything – strikingly attractive in a stubbly, cowboy-without-a-hat kind of way. If I were to include his name in this account, I think most people would have heard of him. Some of you might shudder and say, ‘Oh, not that vile bigot!’ or, more light-heartedly, ‘Not that ridiculous attention-seeker!’ Others would think, ‘Oh, I love him – he says all the things I’m too scared to say.’ Our dead body is (was) somebody who inspired strong feelings, you see. So strong that he got himself murdered.

  How was he killed? Well, this is the interesting part. The murder process comprised several stages. First, he was immobilised. His arms were pulled behind the back of his chair and taped together at the wrists. The same was done to his ankles, which were taped together round the pole of the chair’s base, beneath the seat. Then his murderer stood behind him and brought a heavy object down on his head, rendering him unconscious. The police found this object on the floor beside the dead man’s desk: it was a metal kitchen-knife sharpener. It didn’t kill our well-known man (the pathologist told the police after examining the body), though it would have made an excellent murder-by-bludgeoning weapon, being more than heavy enough to do the job. However, it seems that although the killer was happy to use the knife sharpener to knock his victim out, he did not wish to use it to murder him.

  There was a knife in the room too, but it had not been used to stab the dead man. Instead, it was stuck to his face with parcel tape. Specifically, it was stuck to his closed mouth, completely covering it. The tape – of which there was plenty – also completely covered the lower part of the murder victim’s face, including his nose, causing him to suffocate to death. The knife’s blade, flat against the dead man’s mouth, was sharp. Forensics found evidence that it had been sharpened in the room, and detectives suspect that this happened after the victim was bound to the chair and unconscious.

  Above the fireplace, on the wall between two bookshelf-filled alcoves, someone had written in big red capital letters, ‘HE IS NO LESS DEAD.’ I imagine that the first police to arrive at the scene took one look at that and leaped to a mistaken conclusion: that the red words had been written in the victim’s blood. Then, seconds later, they might have noticed a tin of paint and a red-tipped brush on the floor and made a more informed guess that turned out to be correct: the words on the wall were written in paint. Dulux’s Ruby Fountain 2, for anyone who is interested in the details and doesn’t a
lready know them.

  Detectives examined the dead man’s laptop, I assume. They would have found this surprisingly easy because the killer had red-painted, ‘Riddy111111,’ on a blank sheet of white A4 paper that was lying on the desk. This was the well-known man’s password and would have led police straight to his email inbox. There they’d have found a new, unopened message from a correspondent by the name of No Less Dead, with an email address to match. There were no words in the message, only a photograph of someone standing in the room beside the unconscious, not-yet-deceased victim, wearing what looked like a protective suit from a Hollywood film about biological outbreaks – the sort that covers the head and body of the person wearing it. The killer’s eyes would presumably have been visible if he or she hadn’t taken care to turn away from the camera; as it was, the picture showed a completely unidentifiable person with one outstretched arm (for the taking of the photo), holding aloft a knife in his or her other hand, above the unconscious man’s chest, in a way designed to suggest that a stabbing was imminent. The knife in the photograph was the same one (or identical to the one) that ended up taped to the murder victim’s face, suffocating him rather than spilling his blood.

  And now the question is coming up, so pay attention, ladies! (Actually, it’s questions, plural.)

  The murderer planned the crime in advance. It was about as premeditated as a killing can be. It involved bringing to the crime scene a knife, a knife sharpener, parcel tape, red paint, a paintbrush and a bio-hazard suit. The killer obviously knew the deceased’s computer password. How? There was no evidence of a break-in. Did her victim let her in? (I’m saying ‘her’ because that’s my hunch: that it was a woman. Maybe it was you?) Did the well-known man say to her, ‘Go on, then: bind me to my chair, knock me out and kill me’? That seems unlikely. Maybe the killer pretended it was some sort of erotic game, or maybe I’m only speculating along these lines because Intimate Links is the perfect place to do so – the online home of sexual game-players of all kinds.

  The most puzzling question is this: why arrive at the victim’s house with a knife and a knife sharpener when you have no intention of stabbing him? Why sharpen that knife at the crime scene if all you’re going to do is tape it, flat, against his face? For that purpose, the knife would work just as effectively if its blade were blunt.

  Or, looking at it another way … if you’ve got a newly sharpened knife, and you’ve covered your clothing to protect it from blood splashes, and if, coincidentally, you also want to write a strange message in big red letters on the wall, why not stab the guy and use his blood to write with? Because you particularly want to suffocate him? Then why not do it more straightforwardly, with, say, a plastic bag over his head, taped round his neck to make it airtight? Why use a knife at all?

  For some reason, you wanted to kill this man with a sharp knife, but you didn’t want to stab him. Why not? And the photograph you emailed – what’s that about? What are you trying to communicate? Is it ‘Look, I could so easily have stabbed him, but I didn’t’?

  I realise I’ve slipped into using ‘you’ when I talk about the murderer, rather than ‘she’, or ‘he or she’. I’m sorry. I’m not accusing you of killing anybody. Maybe you’re not the murderer of the well-known man. You might be someone who wishes he were still alive, someone who loves him, or once did – a lover, a close friend. I’m really not sure. All I know is that you’re reading this and you know the answers to the questions I’m asking. You desperately want to tell someone what you know.

  I’m the person to trust with the information. I’ve taken a huge risk in sharing so many secrets, in the hope of eliciting a reply from you. So, please, contact me. I’m waiting, and I promise I won’t judge you. Whatever you’ve done, you had your reasons. I am ready to listen and understand.

  Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

  C (for Confidant) x

  • Location: Wherever You Are

  • It’s NOT OK to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

  Posted: 2013-07-04, 16:17PM GMT

  1

  Monday 1 July 2013

  It can’t be him. All policemen wear high-visibility jackets these days. Lots must have sand-coloured hair that’s a little bit wavy. In a minute he’ll turn round and I’ll see his face and laugh at myself for panicking.

  Don’t turn round, unless you’re someone else. Be someone else. Please.

  I sit perfectly still, try not to notice the far-reaching reverberations of every heartbeat. There is too much distance trapped in me. Miles. I can’t reach myself. A weird illusion grips me: that I am my heart and my car is my chest, and I’m shaking inside it.

  Seconds must be passing. Not quickly enough. Time is stuck. I stare at the clock on my dashboard and wait for the minute to change. At last, 10:52 becomes 10:53 and I’m relieved, as if it could have gone either way.

  Crazy.

  He’s still standing with his back to me. So many details are the same: his hair, his height, his build, the yellow jacket with ‘POLICE’ printed on it …

  If it’s him, that means I must be doing something wrong, and I’m not. I’m definitely not. There’s no reason for him to reappear in my life; it wouldn’t be fair, when I’m trying so hard. Out of everyone sitting in their cars in this queue of traffic, I must be among the most blameless, if I’m being judged on today’s behaviour alone: a mother driving to school to deliver her son’s forgotten sports kit. I could have said, ‘Oh well, he’ll just have to miss games, or wear his school uniform,’ but I didn’t. I knew Ethan would hate those two options equally, so I cancelled my hair appointment and set off back to school, less than an hour after I’d got home from dropping the children off there. Willingly, because I care about my son’s happiness.

  Which means this has to be a different policeman up ahead. It can’t be him. It was my guilt that drew him to me last time. Today, I’m innocent. I’ve been innocent for more than three weeks.

  Drew him to you?

  All right, I’m guilty of superstitious idiocy, but nothing else. If it’s him, he’s here on Elmhirst Road by chance – pure co-incidence, just as it was last time we met. He’s a police officer who works in Spilling; Elmhirst Road is in Spilling: his presence here, for reasons that have nothing to do with me, is entirely plausible.

  Rationally, the argument stands up, but I’m not convinced.

  Because you’re a superstitious fool.

  If it’s him, that means I’m still guilty, deep down. If he sees me …

  I can’t let that happen. His eyes on me, even for a second, would act as a magnet, dragging the badness inside me up to the surface of my skin, making it spill out into the open; it would propel me back to where I was when he first found me: the land of the endangered.

  I don’t deserve that. I have been good for three weeks and four days. Even in the privacy of my mind, where any transgressions would be unprovable, I haven’t slipped up. Once or twice my thoughts have almost broken free of my control, but I’ve been disciplined about slamming down the barriers.

  Turn round, quick, before he does.

  Can I risk it?

  A minute ago, there were at least fifteen cars between mine and where he’s standing on the pavement, a few hundred metres ahead. There are still about ten, at a rough guess. If one of the drivers in front of me would do a U-turn and go back the way they came, I’d do the same, but he’s more likely to notice me if I’m the first to do it. He might recognise my car, remember the make and model – maybe even the number plate. Not that he’s turned round yet, but he could be about to. Any second now …

  He’d wonder why I was doubling back on myself. The traffic isn’t at a standstill. True, we’re crawling along, but it’s unlikely to take me more than ten minutes to get past whatever’s causing the delay. All I can see from my car is a female police officer in the road, standing up straight, then bobbing down out of sight; standing up again, bobbing down again. I think she must be saying someth
ing to the driver of each car that passes. There’s another male officer too, on the pavement, talking to …

  Not him. Talking to a man who, please God, isn’t him.

  Inhale. Long and deep.

  I can’t do it. The presence of the right words in my mind is not enough to drive away the panic, not when I’m breathing jagged and fast like this.

  I wish I could work out what’s going on up there. It’s probably something dull and bureaucratic. Once before, I was stopped by fluorescent-jacketed police – three of them, like today – who were holding up traffic on the Rawndesley Road as part of a survey about driver behaviour. I’ve forgotten what questions they asked me. They were boring, and felt pointless at the time. I remember thinking, My answers will be of no benefit to anyone, and answering politely anyway.

  The car in front of mine moves forward at the exact same moment that the policeman with his back to me turns his head. I see him in profile, only for a second, but it’s enough. I make a choking noise that no one hears but me. I’m embarrassed anyway.

  It’s him.

  No choice, then. Driving past him is unthinkable – no way of avoiding being seen by him if his colleague stops my car to speak to me – so I’ll have to turn round. I edge forward and swerve to the right, waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic on the other side of the road so that I can escape. Please. I’ll feel OK as soon as I’m travelling away from him and not towards him.

  I edge out further. Too far, over the white line, where there’s no room for me. A blue Toyota beeps its horn as it flies past, the driver’s open mouth an angry blur. The noise is long and drawn out: the sound of a long grudge, not a fleeting annoyance, though I’m not sure if I’m still hearing its echo or only remembering it. Shock drums a rhythmic beat through my body, rising up from my chest into my throat and neck, pulsing down to my stomach. It pounds in my ears, in the skin of my face; I can even feel it in my hair.