Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 9

Even the advent of his teens hadn’t broken Seth Viner’s habit of candour where his parents were concerned. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt he needed to keep secrets from either of his two mothers. OK, sometimes it was easier to talk to one rather than the other. Julia was more practical, more down to earth. Calmer in a crisis, more likely to listen all the way through to the end. But she’d weigh things up and she wouldn’t always come down on his side of the issue. Kathy was the emotional one, the one who rushed to judgement. Nevertheless, she’d always be in his corner - my kid, right or wrong. Still, she was the one who made him stick to things, the one who wouldn’t let him take the easy way out when things were difficult. But he’d never regretted telling either of them something, even things he was embarrassed about. They’d taught him that there was no place for secrecy with the people you love most in the world.

The other side of the equation was that they’d always listened to his questions and done their best to answer them. Everything from ‘why’s the sky blue?’ to ‘what are they fighting about in Gaza?’ They never fobbed him off. It sometimes weirded out his teachers and made his friends give him the fish-eyed stare, but he knew all sorts of stuff just because it had occurred to him to ask and it had never occurred to Julia and Kathy not to answer. He reckoned it was something to do with their determination to be honest with him about how he’d ended up with two mothers.

He couldn’t remember when it had dawned on him that it was pretty far out there to have two mothers instead of one of the more conventional arrangements like a mum and a dad or a step-dad, or a single mum and a bunch of grandparents, uncles and babysitters. Everybody starts out thinking their family is normal because they’ve no other experience to measure it against. But by the time he started school, he knew the family that embraced him was different. And not just because of the colour of Kathy’s skin. Oddly enough, the other kids seemed almost oblivious to his difference. He remembered one time when Julia had picked him up from school during his first term. Kathy usually did the school run because she ran her website design service from home, but she’d had to go out of town for some meeting, so Julia had left work early to collect him. She’d been helping him on with his wellies when Ben Rogers had said, ‘Who are you?’

Emma White, who lived on their street, had said, ‘That’s Seth’s mum.’

Ben had frowned. ‘No, it’s not. I’ve met Seth’s mum and this isn’t her,’ he’d said.

‘This is Seth’s other mum,’ Emma had insisted.

Ben had totally taken it in his stride, moving straight on to the next topic of conversation. It had stayed like that - part of the landscape, how the world was, unremarkable - until Seth had been nine or ten, when his passion for football had brought him into direct contact with kids who hadn’t grown up with the notion that having two mums was just part of the spectrum of family life.

One or two of the bigger lads had tried to use Seth’s unusual domestic set-up to get some leverage against him. They soon found out they’d picked the wrong target. Seth seemed to move inside a bubble of invulnerability. He deflected insults with bemused good nature. And he was too well liked among the other boys to make a physical campaign possible. Confounded by his self-confidence, the bullies backed off and chose someone easier to victimise. Even then, Seth thwarted them. He had a way of letting those in authority know when bad things were going on without ever being seen as a grass. He was, it seemed, a good friend and a pointless enemy.

So he’d moved seamlessly into adolescence - kind, popular and direct, his only apparent problem his anxiety not to fail. Julia and Kathy held their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It seemed like they’d been doing that since the day Julia had inseminated. There had been plenty of Jonahs ready with dire warnings. But Seth had been a happy, easy baby. He’d had colic once. Just once. He’d started sleeping through the night at an incredible seven weeks. He’d avoided childhood ailments apart from the occasional cold. He hadn’t been the toddler from hell, partly because the first time he’d tried it in public, Kathy had walked away and left him standing red-faced and howling in the middle of a supermarket aisle. She’d been watching from round the end of the breakfast cereals, but he hadn’t realised that at the time. The horror of abandonment had been enough to cure him of temper tantrums. He whinged sometimes, as they all did, but neither Kathy nor Julia responded in the desired way, so he’d mostly given that up too.

The personality trait that saved him from being too good to be true was the constant stream of chatter that often seemed to start when his eyes opened in the morning and only ended when they closed again at bedtime. Seth was so entirely fascinated by the world and his place in it that he saw no reason why anyone would not want a blow-by-blow account of his every action and thought, or a remarkably detailed recitation of the plot of whatever DVD he’d last seen, the more trivial the better. Occasionally, belatedly, he would register his audience’s eyes rolling back in their sockets, or their whole faces glazing over as they waited for him to get to the point. It didn’t give him even a flicker of hesitation. He carried on to the bitter end, even when Kathy would lay her head on the kitchen table and moan softly.

In the great scheme of things, it wasn’t the worst character flaw. His mothers had both noticed it seemed not to have the same effect on his friends as it had on them. And they were grateful that the onset of adolescence hadn’t turned their beautiful boy into a surly, monosyllabic hulk. Most of his friends made them shudder these days. Cute, loving boys who had scampered round their house engaged in all sorts of fantasy games had morphed into grunting, smelly creatures who regarded communication with adults as somehow letting the side down. It was, Kathy said, some kind of miracle that Seth had escaped this particular aspect of the rites of passage into manhood.

‘He does have terrible taste in music,’ Julia had pointed out more than once, as if that counterbalanced his better qualities. She had no idea where he’d acquired his taste for early grunge; she was just grateful that so far it hadn’t infected his wardrobe too much.

‘It could be worse,’ Kathy always said. ‘He could be into musicals.’

Seth’s inability to keep anything to himself meant Julia and Kathy were relaxed about his computer use. Not so relaxed that they didn’t have the appropriate parental controls bolted on, with all the extra security that Kathy used to protect the websites she designed. But they didn’t physically look over his shoulder, though Kathy routinely checked his RigMarole page for weirdos and undesirables.

Not that there was much need for that. A lot of Seth’s table talk revolved around Rig - who he was talking to, what they had to say about whatever people were twittering over that week, what fascinating new app he’d heard about.

The trouble with living life in a play-by-play mode is that other people eventually tune out in a kind of self-defence. These days, Julia and Kathy only half-listened to Seth’s news of the world. Much of what he had to say got lost in the slip-stream of words that spilled round the kitchen table. The first time he mentioned a new Rig friend called JJ, Kathy registered the name and checked him out on Seth’s pages. He seemed a regular geeky teenager analysing the lyrics of Pearl Jam and Mudhoney, full of a mixture of pomp and angst. Nothing to worry about there.

And so JJ became part of the background noise, just another set of references they could let wash over them. Naturally, then, when Seth casually mentioned that he was meeting up with JJ so they could go on a rare sounds quest in Bradfield’s second-hand CD stores, no alarm bells rang.

When you’re used to candour, it never occurs to you that what you’re hearing is something less than the truth.

Tony googled the Worcester estate agent’s website then clicked on the ‘New Properties’ button. The woman he’d dealt with at the agency had sounded like one of his bipolar patients in an unmedicated manic phase. She’d assured him two days ago that the photographs would be taken that very afternoon and the details placed on the website ‘within hours’. It had taken him till now to work up the nerve to look at the information about the house he was selling without ever having seen.

Given the price the agent had suggested, he knew it must be a substantial property, but he wasn’t prepared for the ample Edwardian villa that confronted him. It was a double-fronted house in mellow red brick with the deep bay windows and imposing doorway picked out in contrasting pale yellow. Heavy swags of curtains were visible at the margins of the windows, and the garden looked opulently landscaped. ‘Unique opportunity to purchase fine family home overlooking Gheluvelt Park,’ the strapline across the top shouted. ‘Four beds, three recep, three bath. Fully fitted workshop with power.’ Tony’s eyebrows rose and his mouth puckered. It was a hell of a lot of house for a man living alone. Perhaps he liked to entertain. Or maybe he just liked to demonstrate to the world how well he’d done. Edmund Arthur Blythe obviously hadn’t been short of a bob or two.

It occurred to Tony that this sale would mean the same for him. He already had £50,000 from the legacy sitting in his bank account, but that was a fraction of what the house would bring. He’d never imagined having this sort of cash at his disposal, so he’d never speculated about what he would do with it. He had no expensive tastes. He didn’t collect art, drive fast cars or wear expensive suits. He wasn’t good at taking holidays at the best of times, and he had no inclination towards exotic destinations where the weather was too hot, the drains were suspect and you had to have needles stuck into your arms and buttocks before you could board the plane. The things he enjoyed most happened to be what he was paid for - treating patients and profiling off-kilter minds. But soon he was going to be a rich man, whether he liked it or not.

‘I can always give it away,’ he said aloud. There were plenty of charities who would make something worthwhile out of a windfall like that. And yet, it didn’t appeal to him quite as much as he would have expected it to. Apparently Cyndi Lauper was right when she sang that money changes everything. Impatiently, he turned his attention back to the screen.

There were more pictures available at the click of a mouse. Tony’s finger hovered. He wasn’t sure he was ready for this. He’d deliberately chosen not to explore the domain of the man who had contributed half of his genetic material. He didn’t want to discover a happy and fulfilled life, to unearth a popular and well-balanced man, to find out that he’d been ignored by someone who could have transformed his childhood from a wilderness of misery to something approaching normality. Disinterring that truth could lead to nothing but bitter resentment. Being Vanessa’s son had been a direct route to wretchedness. Both his mother and the grandmother who had carried most of the routine burden of raising him had left him in no doubt that he was beyond worthless, that he contained the seeds of iniquity, that he could hope to be nothing more than a pathetic apology for a man. What he had learned as a psychologist was that his childhood experiences were a blue-print for the sort of creature he spent his profiling life tracking. He was more like them than anyone else, even Carol, could have guessed. They hunted victims; he hunted them. They profiled victims; he profiled them. The need was the same, he suspected.

His needs would have been very different if Blythe had been part of his life. And he didn’t want to think about what that would have meant. So he’d made all the arrangements by phone and email, having Blythe’s solicitor send the keys directly to the estate agent. The solicitor had acted as if this had been perfectly normal behaviour, but Tony knew it wasn’t. He understood only too well that he was building walls between himself and the man who hadn’t been willing to be his father. There was no reason why he should put his own fragility at risk for the sake of someone who had only had the courage to acknowledge his son after death.

But still there was a nagging voice at the back of his head, telling him there would come a time when he would regret maintaining this distance. ‘Maybe so,’ he said aloud. ‘But I can’t do this now.’ For a moment, he wondered if he should put the house sale on hold, so Blythe’s home would remain intact, available for his scrutiny when he was ready for it. He dismissed the idea almost before it was fully formed. He might never be ready, and there was something morally wrong about leaving houses empty when people needed homes.

Impatient with his own lack of clarity, he shut down the house details and pulled a patient file towards him. Here was where he could make a difference, intervening in the lives of people whose behaviour had diverged disastrously from what the majority regarded as normal. His own history with his mother had given him an insider’s knowledge of how different the world could look when the view had been dramatically distorted. He knew only too well what not belonging felt like, how terrifying it could be to negotiate a world whose rules and conventions were so at odds with the ones that had made survival possible. Since Tony had taught himself how to pass for human, he reckoned he could help others to overcome their damage. Too many of his patients were beyond repair, but some could be redeemed, rehabilitated and restored to something approaching normal life.

His reading was interrupted by the phone. Half-distracted, he picked it up. ‘Hello?’ Carol had told him more than once that his phone greeting sounded astonished and wary, as if he was taken aback by a ringing piece of plastic that spoke when you lifted it. ‘You remind me of a poem I read when I was at school,’ she’d said. ‘“A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”, it was called.’

The person on the other end of the phone was hesitant. It sounded like he’d have agreed with Carol, given half a chance. ‘Is that Dr Hill? Dr Tony Hill?’

‘Yes? Who is this?’

‘I’m Detective Inspector Stuart Patterson. West Mercia CID.’

‘We’ve not met, have we?’ Tony always liked to get that out of the way. He was good with faces but names often escaped him. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d thought he was talking to a complete stranger only to discover they’d sat together at some dinner a month before.

‘No. I was told you were the person to talk to about profiling. ‘

‘Well, I’m certainly one of them,’ Tony said. He grimaced at the phone. ‘I have some experience in the field.’

‘We’ve got a case down here. I think we could use your help.’

‘West Mercia? That’s Worcester, right?’ Now he sounded wary even to himself.

‘And the surrounding area, yes. But the murder was on the outskirts of the city. Have you read about it? Is that why you’re asking?’ Patterson’s words ran into each other in his haste, but Tony could distinguish an accent that had the faint burr he associated with the Borsetshire accents in The Archers.

‘No, I just wasn’t exactly sure . . . Geography isn’t my strong suit. So, what is it about this case that makes you think you need someone like me?’

Patterson took a deep breath. ‘We’ve got a fourteen-year-old girl who’s been murdered and sexually mutilated. We’ve been working the case for over a week and we’ve got nothing you could call a lead. We’ve covered all the obvious bases but there’s nothing to go at. We’re desperate, Dr Hill. I want to close this case, but we’re not getting there by the numbers. I need a fresh approach.’ There was a pause. Tony stayed silent, sensing there was more to come. ‘I’ve been told you might be able to provide us with that.’

That was the second time Patterson had spoken of being told. So he was coming to Tony not from conviction but because he was under pressure. Faced with a crime like the one Patterson had described, Carol Jordan and a clutch of other homicide detectives Tony had worked with would have been on the phone to him within hours. That was because they were believers. Working with sceptics always doubled the amount of work on a profiler’s plate. But on the other hand, it meant you couldn’t get away with anything other than solid, evidence-based conclusions. It was always good to be dragged back to basics.

Then he thought, Worcester, and detected the hand of Carol Jordan. She thinks she can’t get me to take an interest in Blythe, so she’s setting me up with a murder in Worcester so I have to go there. She thinks once I’m there, I won’t be able to resist poking my nose in. ‘Do you mind me asking who suggested I might be able to help?’ he asked, sure of the answer.

Patterson cleared his throat. ‘It’s a bit complicated.’

‘I’m in no hurry.’

‘Our FLO - Family Liaison Officer, that is . . . Her bloke’s with West Midlands. One of the lads from Bradfield MIT, a DC called Sam Evans, he liaised with her bloke on the Bradfield bombings case last year. Anyway, the two of them stayed in touch, meeting up for the odd curry now and again. And this DC Evans, he’s been singing your praises. My DS, he put a call in to DC Evans and got your number.’ Patterson gave a small cough, clearing his throat. ‘And my DS persuaded me it was time to think outside the box.’

‘You didn’t speak to DCI Jordan?’ Tony couldn’t believe it.

‘I don’t know a DCI Jordan. Is he DC Evan’s boss?’

An assumption that might have annoyed Tony in other circumstances convinced him Patterson was telling the truth. This wasn’t a Carol Jordan set-up. ‘What was the cause of death?’ Tony asked.

‘Asphyxiated. She had a plastic bag over her head. She didn’t fight, she was off her face on GHB.’

‘GHB? How do you know? I thought you couldn’t detect that because we’ve got it in our blood already?’

‘Not at these levels. She hadn’t been dead long when we found her, so it was more obvious,’ Patterson said heavily. ‘We’re still waiting for a full tox screen, but at this point, it looks like she was given enough GHB to make the killer’s job very easy.’

Tony was automatically scribbling notes as he listened. ‘You said “sexually mutilated”.’

‘He took a knife to her. A long-bladed knife, I’m told. Made a right mess inside her. What do you think, Doc? Are you going to be able to help us?’

Tony dropped the pen and pushed his reading glasses up to rub the bridge of his nose. ‘I don’t know. Can you email me the crime-scene pictures and the summary reports? I’ll take a look at them and get back to you first thing tomorrow. I’ll know then if I can be of any use.’

‘Thanks. If it’s a yes, will you need to come down here?’

A man already worried about his budget. ‘I need to see the crime scene for myself,’ he said. ‘And I’ll probably want to talk to the parents. A couple of days at the most. Maybe one overnight. Two at the most,’ he said, showing he understood. He gave Patterson his email address, took his phone number and arranged to talk to him in the morning.

Tony replaced the phone and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. West Mercia Police wanted him to go to Worcester on the very day when he’d set in train the sale of Edmund Arthur Blythe’s house in Worcester. Some people he knew would build a whole edifice of predestination out of that. But he set no store by coincidence. He had patients who read all sorts of fateful meanings into coincidence; during his brief tenure as a university lecturer, he’d warned his students not to be sucked into those fantasies. How did it go again?

‘We’ve all been there. On holiday, in some out of the way village or on a beach that isn’t in the Lonely Planet guide or in some fabulous little seafood restaurant recommended by the locals. And we come face to face with somebody who plays football with our brother or catches our bus every morning or walks their dog in the same park as we do. And we’re amazed. It’s the thing we tell everybody when we get home - “you’ll never believe who I ran into . . .” But stop and think about it. Think of the myriad moments of each day on your holiday when you didn’t run into anyone you recognised. Come to that, think of the myriad moments of every single day at home when you don’t run into anyone you recognise. Mathematically, the chances are that you are going to run into someone you recognise eventually pretty much wherever you go. The world is a shrinking contact zone. Every year that passes, our chances of these apparently meaningful encounters grows. But they are not meaningful. Unless of course you do have a stalker, in which case you need to disregard everything I am saying and call the police.

‘So when your patients put forward some version of their mission that relies on assigning meaning to random events, remember that there is no meaning in coincidence. It happens. Accept it and ignore it.’

His computer beeped, announcing the arrival of a new email. DI Patterson being quick off the mark, he suspected. Tony let himself fall forward in his chair, opening his eyes and groaning. ‘Accept it and ignore it,’ he said out loud.