Free Splinter the Silence by Val McDermid

‘Yes, of course, sorry. I’d forgotten her name. How crap is that? A woman gets driven to suicide because of a bunch of bullying bastards, and I can’t even remember her name.’ She flushed, feeling a wash of shame. ‘But what’s that got to do with Jasmine Burton? They didn’t even choose the same method. Didn’t Kate Rawlins do the car exhaust thing?’

‘That’s right,’ Tony said. ‘And I know this is incredibly tenuous, and my cause is not helped by me not being able to summon up what it is that’s bothering me, but it’s my job to see patterns where other people see white noise. And in my head, there’s a pattern here. Two women. Strong, competent, professionally respected women who stuck their heads over the parapet all the time, except that one time it was picked up on by the internet trolls.’

‘I prefer to think of them as inadequate wankers,’ Carol said. ‘The trolls in Terry Pratchett’s books are quite lovable. Not even their mothers could find anything remotely lovable about these twats.’

Tony scrunched his face up, as if her words pained him. ‘Well, strictly speaking, most of the people who do this have been revealed as quite pathetic and even vulnerable young men whose mothers probably do love them.’ He held his hands up to ward off the protest Carol started to voice. ‘But some of them are much more dangerous and insidious than that, you’re right.’

‘All of this is very interesting, but…?’ Paula gently interjected.

‘The pattern. Yes. Strong women with a mind of their own who didn’t back down. They stood up to the trolls – sorry, bastards. They didn’t run away and hide, they didn’t backtrack, they stuck to their guns. They acted as though they felt brave. They behaved with conviction. And then out of the blue they killed themselves. Pattern.’

‘Are you suggesting they were murdered?’ Paula had heard some wild theories from Tony over the years, but seldom anything that had strained her credulity quite this far.

‘Not as such,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Not in the conventional sense of someone killing them directly. But something happened. Something intervened between their determination to see off the bastards and their deaths. Once would be an oddity. Twice makes me wonder.’

‘And he thinks I need something to keep my detective skills from atrophying,’ Carol said drily. ‘Though what I’m going to use them for in future is anybody’s guess. So we’re all going to play at running a case.’

There was a long silence while everyone suddenly became very interested in the contents of their cups and the beardie weirdie indie track playing in the background. It was Paula who spoke first. ‘So what exactly is it you want me to do?’

‘You might want to get Stacey on board,’ Carol said. ‘We want everything you can get your hands on. Investigating officer reports, interview product, pathology, the works.’

‘We’re looking for something we don’t know exists and we won’t know what it is till we find it,’ Tony said. ‘But if it does exist, you know you can rely on us to spot it.’ He flashed her his sweetest smile, the one that made men and women alike eager to do whatever it took to provoke it again.

‘And meanwhile I’ll be backtracking through the news sites online to see whether I can find any more that fit the pattern,’ Carol said cheerfully.

‘Great,’ Paula said.

Tony twinkled at her. ‘Go on, admit it. You’ve missed us, haven’t you?’

But what their followers never talked about was the fact that it was a path to the grave. Those women his mother had read and admired – Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf – and those others he’d discovered since, they realised that what they’d been shouting about wasn’t a blueprint for life, it was a set of directions to hell. They’d invented a life of misery for themselves. They’d created a recipe for disaster. Their feminist revolution had led them straight down a