Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 8

One week later

Even though he was going through them for the third time, Alvin Ambrose was still totally absorbed by the witness interviews in the Jennifer Maidment case. School friends, teachers, other kids she’d communicated with via RigMarole. Officers from as far afield as Dorset, Skye, Galway and a small town in Massachusetts had talked to teenagers whose reactions ranged from freaked out to completely freaked out by what had happened to their correspondent. Ambrose had already sifted the information twice, his instincts on full alert for something that struck a bum note, oblivious to the buzz and hum of the squad room. So far, nothing had given him a moment’s pause.

The interviewing officers had been briefed to ask about the elusive ZZ, but nothing had come of that either. ZZ only showed up on Rig; there was no reaction of familiarity from teachers or family or friends who didn’t use the social networking site. Those who had encountered ZZ online knew nothing more than the police had already established from Jennifer’s conversations. ZZ had managed to worm his way into her network but in the process had given away nothing that would help identify him. It was frustrating beyond words.

A shadow fell across his desk and he looked up to see Shami Patel pretending to rap her knuckles on a non-existent door. ‘Knock, knock,’ she said, her smile awkward.

If she’d made the effort to seek him out, the chances were she had something to say worth listening to. Besides, with her generous curves and hair waved in a long bob, she was easy on the eye. That wasn’t something you could say about most of the human scenery in the CID office. Ambrose responded with an expansive gesture towards the flimsy folding chair that sat at the end of his desk. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘How’s it going with the Maidments?’ When it had become clear that the Maidments might be one of the few sources of leads in their daughter’s murder, he’d checked her out with mates in the West Midlands, where she’d come from. He needed to be sure she wasn’t going to miss anything crucial. But his sources soon set him straight on that score. They said Patel was probably the best family liaison officer they had. ‘Too fucking sharp for holding hands, if you ask me,’ one of them had said. ‘Don’t know what she’s doing, leaving us for you turnips.’

Patel sat down and crossed one well-shaped leg over the other. There was nothing coquettish in the gesture, Ambrose noted, almost with regret. He was generally content in his marriage, but still, a man liked to know he was worth flirting with. ‘They’re exhausted,’ she said. ‘It’s like they’ve gone into hibernate mode to conserve what they’ve got left.’ She stared at her hands. ‘I’ve seen it before. When they come out of it, chances are it’ll be with all guns blazing at us. They’ve got nobody else to blame, so we’ll be the ones who take the flak unless we find the person who killed Jennifer.’

‘And that’s not happening,’ Ambrose said.

‘So I gathered. What about forensics? Nothing there?’

Ambrose shrugged his massive shoulders, the seams of his shirt straining at the movement. ‘We’ve got some evidential stuff. Not the sort that produces leads, the sort that you can build a case with once you’ve got a suspect. We’re still waiting for the forensic computer specialist, but he’s less and less hopeful with every day that goes by.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Patel bit her lip, frowning a little.

‘Have you picked something up from the family? Is that why you’re here?’

She shook her head hastily. ‘No. I wish . . . It’s just . . .’ She wriggled in her chair. ‘My bloke, he’s a DC with West Midlands. Jonty Singh.’

It was a short sentence but Ambrose immediately constructed the story behind Shami Patel’s apparently perplexing move to Worcester. A nice Hindu girl with traditional, devout parents who had her lined up for some nice Hindu boy. And she goes and falls for a Sikh. Either they’d found out and there had been a family bust-up or else she’d moved down here before the wrong person spotted her and Jonty in the back row of the pictures. By moving to Worcester, she could have a life where she wasn’t constantly looking over her shoulder. ‘OK,’ Ambrose said cautiously, wondering where this was going.

‘You remember that business in Bradfield last year? The footballer that got murdered, and the bomb at the match?’

Like anybody was going to forget that in a hurry. Thirty-seven dead, hundreds injured when a bomb ripped through the corporate hospitality booths during a Premier League match at Bradfield Victoria. ‘I remember.’

‘Jonty was involved on the periphery. Before the bombing. One of the initial suspects in the murder was an old collar of his. He stayed in touch with his contact on the investigation, a guy called Sam Evans. He’s on Bradfield’s MIT. Anyway, I was telling Jonty how frustrated we all were at the lack of progress with Jennifer. I know I shouldn’t have, but he’s in the job, he knows not to talk—’

‘Never mind that,’ Ambrose said. He trusted this woman’s judgement. ‘What did he have to say, your DC Singh?’

‘He told me the Bradfield MIT work with a profiler who’s been a key factor in their success rate.’

Ambrose tried to keep his scepticism from his face, but Patel picked it up anyway. Her words accelerated, bumping into each other. ‘This guy, he sounds exceptional. Sam Evans told Jonty he’s saved lives, solved cases that nobody else could get a handle on. He’s the business, Sarge.’

‘The boss thinks it’s mumbo jumbo, profiling.’ Ambrose’s voice was a deep rumble.

‘And you? What do you think?’

Ambrose smiled. ‘When I’m running the shop, I’ll have an opinion. Right now, there’s no point.’

Patel looked disappointed. ‘You could at least talk to Sam Evans at Bradfield. See what he has to say?’

Ambrose stared at the cluttered surface of the desk, his big hands curled like empty shells on the stacks of paper. He didn’t like creeping around behind Patterson. But sometimes you had to take the back alley. He sighed and reached for a pen. ‘What’s this profiler’s name, then?’

Carol walked into her squad room, feelings mixed when she saw her team already settled round the conference table, ready for the morning meeting. She was proud that they were pulling out all the stops in their bid to assure their future, but bitter because she felt it was futile. ‘What’s going on here?’ she said, detouring to the coffee machine. ‘Did the clocks go forward without me noticing?’

‘You know we like to keep you on your toes, chief,’ Paula said, passing a box of pastries round the table.

Carol sat down, blowing gently on the steaming coffee. ‘Just what I need.’ It wasn’t clear whether she was referring to the drink or to being kept on her toes. ‘So, anything in the overnights?’

‘Yes,’ and ‘No,’ said Kevin and Sam simultaneously.

‘Well, which is it?’

Sam snorted. ‘You know that if this kid was black and from a council estate with a single mum this wouldn’t even have made the overnights.’

‘But he’s not and it did,’ Kevin said.

‘We’re just capitulating to white middle-class anxieties,’ Sam said scornfully. ‘The kid’s with some girl or else he’s had it up to here with Mummy and Daddy and taken off for the bright lights.’

Carol looked at Sam with surprise. The most nakedly ambitious of her team, he was generally first out of the starting blocks on anything that had the potential to raise his profile and improve his standing. To hear him spout a position that appeared to have its roots in class politics was akin to tuning in to the Big Brother house to hear them discussing Einstein’s theory of special relativity. ‘Any chance of anyone explaining what you guys are talking about?’ she said mildly.

Kevin consulted a couple of sheets of paper in front of her. ‘This came in from Northern Division. Daniel Morrison. Fourteen years old. Reported missing by his parents yesterday morning. He’d been out all night, they were worried stiff but assumed he was making some point about being a big boy now. They rang round his friends and drew a blank, but they reckoned he must be with somebody they didn’t know about. Maybe a girlfriend he’d kept quiet about.’

‘It’s a reasonable assumption,’ Carol said. ‘From what we know of teenage boys.’

‘Right. They thought they’d re-establish contact with him when he turned up at school yesterday. But he didn’t show. That’s when his parents decided they should talk to us.’

‘I take it there’s been nothing since? And that’s why Northern are punting it our way?’ Carol held her hand out and Kevin handed over the print-out.

‘Nothing. He’s not answering his mobile, not responding to emails, not activated his RigMarole account. According to his mother, the only way he’d let himself be that cut off is if he’s dead or kidnapped.’

‘Or else he doesn’t want Mummy and Daddy to find him shacked up with some cutie,’ Sam said, clamping his mouth shut in a mutinous scowl.

‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said slowly. ‘Teenage boys want to boast about their conquests. It’s hard to believe he’d resist letting his mates know what he was up to. And these days, that means RigMarole.’

‘My thoughts precisely,’ Carol said. ‘I think Stacey should check out whether his phone’s switched on and, if it is, whether we can triangulate his position.’

Sam half-turned away from the table and crossed his legs. ‘Unbelievable. Some over-privileged white boy goes out on the razz and we’re falling over ourselves to track him down. Are we that desperate to make ourselves look indispensable? ‘

‘Clearly,’ Carol said, her voice sharp. ‘Stacey, run the checks. Paula, talk to Northern Division, see where they’re up to, if they want any help from us. See if you can get them to send us any interview product. And by the way, Sam, I think you’re wrong. If this was a black kid from an estate with a single parent who took his disappearance seriously, so would we. I don’t know why you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about this, but lose it, would you?’

Sam blew out his cheeks in a sigh, but he nodded. ‘Whatever you say, guv.’

Carol put the pages to one side for later and looked round the table. ‘Anything else new?’

Stacey cleared her throat. There was a faint lift at the corners of her mouth. Carol thought it translated as the equivalent on anyone else of a shit-eating grin. ‘I’ve got something, ‘ she said.

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘The computer Sam brought in from the old Barnes house,’ Stacey said, pushing a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I’ve been working it pretty hard for the past week. It’s been very instructive.’ She tapped a couple of keys on the laptop in front of her. ‘People are amazingly stupid.’

Sam leaned forward, accentuating the planes and angles of his smooth-skinned face. ‘What did you find? Come on, Stacey, show us.’

She clicked a remote pointer and the whiteboard on the wall behind her sprang into life. It showed a fragmentary list, with missing letters and words. Another click and the gaps filled with highlighted text. ‘This program predicts what’s not there,’ she said. ‘As you can see, it’s a list of steps for murdering Danuta Barnes. From smothering her to wrapping her in clingfilm to weighting her down to dumping her body in deep water.’

Paula whistled. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You’re right. Amazingly stupid.’

‘That’s very lovely,’ Carol said. ‘But any decent lawyer’s going to point out that it’s circumstantial at best. That it could be a fantasy. Or the outline of a short story.’

‘It’s only circumstantial till we find Danuta Barnes’s body and compare the cause of death with what we’ve got here,’ Sam said, reluctant to let go of the possibilities of his discovery.

‘Sam’s right,’ Stacey said over the chatter that his words provoked. ‘That’s why this other file is so interesting.’ She clicked the remote again and a map of the Lake District appeared. The next click revealed a chart of Wastwater that clearly showed the relative depths of the lake.

‘You think she’s in Wastwater.’ Carol stood up and walked over to the screen.

‘I think it’s worth taking a look,’ Stacey said. ‘According to his list, he was planning on somewhere he could drive to but somewhere that was also quite remote. Wastwater fits the bill. At least, looking at the map, it looks like there’s not many houses round there.’

‘No kidding. I’ve been there,’ Paula said. ‘A bunch of us went up for a weekend break a few years ago. I don’t think we saw another living soul apart from the woman that ran the B&B. I’m all for a bit of peace and quiet, but that was bloody ridiculous.’

‘He had a kayak,’ Sam said. ‘I remember that from the original file. He could have draped her across the kayak and paddled out.’

‘Good work, Stacey,’ Carol said. ‘Sam, get on to the underwater unit up in Cumbria. Ask them to set up a search.’

Stacey raised a hand. ‘It might be worth asking the geography department at the university if they’ve got any access to ETM+.’

‘What’s that?’ Carol asked.

‘Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus. It’s a global archive of satellite photos managed by NASA and the US Geological Survey,’ Stacey said. ‘It might be helpful.’

‘They can spot a body from space?’ Paula said. ‘I thought being able to watch my home TV in another country was about as far out as it gets. But you’re telling me the geography department at Bradfield Uni can see underwater from a satellite? That’s too much, Stace. Just too much.’

Stacey rolled her eyes. ‘No, Paula. They can’t necessarily see a body. But they can zoom in so far these days you can get a lot of detail. They might be able to narrow down where we should be looking by eliminating where there definitely isn’t anything.’

‘That’s wild,’ Paula said.

‘That’s technology. There’s a geography faculty in the USA that reckons they’ve pinpointed where Osama bin Laden’s hiding by narrowing down possibilities from satellite photography, ‘ Stacey said.

‘You’re kidding,’ Paula said.

‘No, I’m not. It was a team at UCLA. First they applied geographic principles developed to predict the distribution of wildlife - distance-decay theory and island biogeographic theory—’

‘What?’ Kevin chipped in.

‘Distance-decay theory . . . OK, you start with a known place that fulfils the criteria this organism needs for survival. Like the Tora Bora caves. You draw a series of concentric circles out from there, and the further you get from the centre, the less likely you are to find those identical conditions. In other words, the further he goes from his heartlands, the more likely he is to be among people who are not sympathetic to his goals and the harder it is to hide. Island biogeographic theory is about choosing somewhere that has resources. So, if you were going to be stuck on an island, you’d rather it was the Isle of Wight than Rockall.’

‘I don’t understand where the satellites come in,’ Paula said, frowning.

‘They figured out the likely zone where Bin Laden might be, then they factored in what they know about him. His height, the fact that he needs regular dialysis so he has to be somewhere with electricity, his need for protection. And then they looked at the most detailed satellite imagery they could find and narrowed it down to three buildings in a particular town,’ Stacey said patiently.

‘So how come they’ve not found him yet?’ Kevin pointed out, not unreasonably.

Stacey shrugged. ‘I only said they reckoned. Not that they’d actually succeeded. Yet. But the satellite imaging is getting more detailed all the time. Each image used to cover thirty metres by thirty metres. Now it’s more like half a metre. You wouldn’t believe the detail the experts analysts can pick up. It’s like having an overhead Google Street View of the whole world.’

‘Stop, Stacey. You’re making my head hurt. But if we can harness that, I will be eternally grateful. Have a word with the satellite bods,’ Carol said. ‘But let’s concentrate on getting the Cumbria team onside. Anything else?’ Glum looks round the table told her all she needed to know. She hated being in this position. What they needed was something big, something headline-grabbing, something spectacular. Only trouble was that what would be meat and drink to Carol and her team would be the worst kind of bad news for somebody else. She’d experienced too much of that sort of tribulation to want to visit it on anyone else.

They were just going to have to grin and bear it.