Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 12

It made sense to take the train to Worcester. More time to reread the case information. The possibility of arriving fresh rather than frazzled from negotiating the maze of motorways round Birmingham. A no-brainer. Normally, Tony wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But without a car, he’d be at the mercy of West Mercia Police. If he wanted to drive past Arthur Blythe’s house or take a look at his factory, he’d have to embark on an awkward explanation to some police driver. And if he felt the need to visit the crime scene in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep, he’d earn himself a reputation for being even more weird than they were expecting. He decided freedom was worth the trade-off.

By the time he pulled into his hotel in Worcester, he’d lost count of the number of times he’d cursed his own stupidity. Why hadn’t he thought of hiring a car once he’d arrived? He’d estimated two hours’ driving; it had taken three and a half and left him feeling like he’d had the worst kind of workout. Tony laid his head on the steering wheel and tried in vain to loosen the muscles of his neck and shoulders. He dragged himself out of the car and checked in.

He’d barely closed the door behind him when he felt the heavy hand of depression settle on him. He knew there were hotels whose rooms gladdened the heart. He’d even stayed in a couple over the years, mostly when deluded companies had hired him under the misapprehension that he could help motivate their management teams. This was not one of those rooms. The décor - no, you couldn’t call it décor, not in any meaningful sense of the word; there were various dead shades of brown in the room, ranging from cheap-and-nasty milk chocolate to tobacco. The window was too small and looked out on the car park. The TV had only seven channels and the bed had all the give of a wooden pallet. He understood the exigencies of police budgets, but surely there must have been a better option than this?

Sighing, Tony dumped his bag and sat on the bed facing a print of the African veldt. The connection between Worcester and wildebeest was lost on him. He took out his phone and called DI Stuart Patterson. ‘I’m at the hotel,’ he said without preamble.

‘I don’t know how you go about this,’ Patterson said. ‘I think you said you wanted to see the crime scene?’

‘That’s right. It’s a good first stop for me. I’d like to talk to the parents too, if that’s possible.’

Patterson offered to send DS Ambrose over to pick him up. Tony would have preferred a face-to-face with Patterson himself, but working with new teams always meant adjusting to the way they ran the game. So he’d settle for the bagman for now and build a bridgehead from there.

With half an hour to kill, Tony decided to take a walk. The hotel was on the fringe of the city centre and five minutes’ walk brought him to a street of banks, estate agents and the sort of chain stores that had replaced traditional small shop-keepers, selling the same chocolates, shoes, greetings cards, alcohol and dry-cleaning services as every other high street in the country. He ambled along, vaguely looking in the windows until he was brought up short by the familiar name of the estate agency he’d been dealing with.

Front and centre in the window were the details of the very house he was trying to sell. ‘For a man who doesn’t believe in coincidence, I seem to be confronting a few. Might as well roll with it, eh?’ The sound of his voice broke the moment and before he could stop and think, he walked into the agency. ‘Good morning,’ he said cheerily. ‘Can I talk to someone about that house in the window?’

Paula had never been more relieved to see her boss. The police surgeon and the forensics team were eager to remove Daniel Morrison’s body, but she’d enlisted Franny Riley’s support to insist that it stayed where it was till the DCI had seen it. ‘You can’t shift the cadaver till the SIO has signed off on it,’ she’d protested. ‘I don’t care if your guv wants rid. It stays till DCI Jordan gets here.’

Kevin Matthews had turned up in time to back her up. But the atmosphere was growing increasingly hostile as time drifted past and Carol failed to appear. Finally Paula saw her striding up the drive towards them, looking decidedly more chic than usual. Wherever she’d been, she’d made a definite effort to impress. ‘Sorry to keep you all waiting,’ Carol said, charm on full beam. ‘I got stuck behind an accident on the Barrowden road, right down in the valley where there’s no mobile signal. Thank you all for being so patient.’

When she was on form like this, there was nobody like Carol Jordan. She had everybody scrambling to please her, to earn that look of approval. It didn’t hurt that she was easy on the eye, but the set of her mouth and the directness of her gaze meant nobody was ever going to take her for a bimbo. Paula knew she was a little bit in love with her boss, but she’d learned to live with that as an exercise in futility. ‘It’s this way, chief,’ she said, leading the way over to the trench, introducing Riley on the way. ‘DS Riley’s been my liaison, it would be helpful if we could keep him on board,’ she said. Code for ‘he’s one of us, in spite of appearances.’

She stood at Carol’s shoulder, looking down at the grievous distortion of humanity lying at the bottom of the ditch. Dirt and blood smeared the boy’s clothes, and his head inside the transparent plastic looked unreal, like some hideous prop from a straight-to-DVD horror flick. ‘Christ,’ Carol said. She turned her face away. Paula could see a faint tremble shiver through her boss’s lips. ‘OK, let’s have him out of here,’ she said, stepping aside and beckoning the others over to join them.

‘We’re going to assume that we’re looking at Daniel Morrison here,’ Carol said. ‘The body answers the description of the missing boy and he’s wearing the William Makepeace sweatshirt under his jacket. That means we’re sixty hours out from the last time Daniel was seen by someone who knew him. So we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Once we get an approximate time of death, we’ll know how many hours we need to fill in. But I want those hours accounted for. Paula, you liaise with DS Riley, make sure we have all their product. Kevin’s going to go with the FLO to break the news to the parents, but I also want you to do the follow-up, Paula.’ Carol started to walk back to the perimeter of the scene, her team at her heels.

‘For now, Paula, you take the school. Teachers and friends. It’s a private school, you’re going to come up against more than your fair share of wankers, but they’re not going to wind you up and you are going to find out exactly what kind of lad Daniel Morrison was. We’ll get Stacey on to his computer. Oh, and Paula? I want a fingertip search of the roadside from the end of the drive to the main drag. Tell DS Riley I said so.’ At the end of the plastic panels, she turned back to face them, her smile weary. ‘We owe Daniel a result. Let’s do it.’

‘Do I need to pick up Tony at Bradfield Moor?’ Paula asked. Over Carol’s shoulder, she saw Kevin make the throat-cutting gesture with one finger.

The muscles of Carol’s face tensed. ‘We’re going to have to manage without Tony this time. If we think we need a profiler, we’ll have to rely on someone from the National Police Faculty.’

She hid her disdain well, Paula thought. You’d have to really know the chief to realise how little store she set by the Home Office’s blue-eyed boys and girls.

‘One more thing,’ Carol said. ‘We need to check out who knew about this place. Kevin, as soon as you’re clear, get on to the builder, get a list of his crew, also architects, surveyors, the whole kit and caboodle. I’ll arrange some bodies from Northern to cover the initial background checks and interviews, then we can review what comes up.’ She ran a hand through her hair in a gesture Paula recognised. It was her boss’s way of buying herself some time. ‘Anything I’ve missed?’ she asked. Nobody spoke. One day, Paula dreamed she’d come up with something remarkable, something that hadn’t occurred to Carol or anyone else. She turned away and reached for a cigarette. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be today.

The house looked more attractive in reality than it had in the photo. There was a better sense of its proportions, an awareness of its relationship to the garden, a context for its solid Edwardian lines. Tony opened the gate and walked up the drive, his feet crunching uneven on the gravel. It made him aware of the slight limp that still afflicted him after his encounter with an unmedicated patient and a fire axe. They’d offered him further surgery, but he’d said no. He’d hated being incapacitated, loathed the awareness of how little control he had over his life when his physical movement was compromised. For as long as he could manage without an operation, he would.

He was early for the viewing appointment with the agent so he walked round the side of the house and found himself in a formal rose garden. The bushes were little more than bare contorted twigs at this time of the year, but he could picture how they would look in summer. He knew nothing about gardening, but it didn’t take much knowledge to see this was a well-tended arrangement, designed for pleasure. Tony sat down on a stone bench and gazed out across the roses. Arthur Blythe would have done the same thing, he imagined.

His thoughts would have been very different, however. He wouldn’t have spent the middle of his day pacing a muddy lay-by, trying to climb inside the mind of a killer who had chosen this particular spot to dump his teenage victim. Alvin Ambrose, Patterson’s bagman, had been helpful, giving Tony useful background about the area and the condition of the victim. The mutilation had occurred post mortem. ‘But not here,’ Tony had said. ‘He’d need privacy.’

‘Plus the weather,’ Ambrose added. ‘It was lashing with rain and blowing a gale. The weather set in late afternoon, round about the time Jennifer left her pal Claire. Frankly, you wouldn’t want to be walking the dog in it, never mind . . . you know. What he was doing.’

Tony looked up and down the lay-by. ‘He’d need somewhere sheltered from the weather and from prying eyes. But she was already dead, so he didn’t have to worry about being overheard. I suppose he could have worked on her here, in the back of a van or a truck.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, summoning up what the lay-by would be like under cover of darkness. ‘That would let him pick the perfect moment to dump her. Better than just driving in on the off-chance . . .’ His voice tailed off and he clambered through the undergrowth towards the sheltering trees. It smelled of loam and pine resin and stale urine. It suggested nothing to him, so he made his way back to Ambrose, patient by his car. ‘Either he’s used it before, or he’s deliberately scouted it out. Not that there’s any way of telling which it is. And if he has used it before, there’s no reason to believe it was for criminal purposes. He could just have stopped to take a leak or have a catnap.’

‘We’re coming by every night, talking to whoever’s parked up here, asking if they’ve noticed anything unusual,’ Ambrose said, clearly knowing it wasn’t enough. Tony liked that the sergeant showed none of the contempt or arrogance that often met his profiling sorties. Ambrose seemed stolid and unemotional, but his silence wasn’t the silence of the dull. He spoke when he had something to say, and so far what he’d had to say had been worth listening to.

‘Hard to think what would qualify as unusual to a bunch of truckers,’ Tony muttered. ‘The dump site is a problem, though. The weight of probability is on it not being a local. So hauling in the usual suspects isn’t going to get you anywhere.’

‘Why do you think it’s not a local?’ Ambrose sounded genuinely interested in the answer.

‘I imagine there’s a lot of better places to dump a body round here that a local would know about - more out of the way, less busy. Just safer all round for the killer. This is a relatively high-risk dump site. I think that, even if he did scout it out before, this was essentially a site of opportunity for someone who didn’t know anywhere better and didn’t want to risk driving any distance with a dead body on board.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘I try to,’ Tony said wryly.

Ambrose grinned, his impassivity disappearing in an instant. ‘That’s why we brought you in.’

‘Your first mistake.’ Tony turned back and prowled along the fringe of the lay-by again. On the one hand, this killer planned carefully. He’d spent weeks grooming Jennifer, setting her up to take his bait. He’d captured her, apparently avoiding witnesses and suspicion. And according to Ambrose, he’d left no forensic traces that had any investigative value. And then he’d dumped her by the side of the road, apparently not caring when she would be found. ‘Maybe he’s just not very strong,’ he called to Ambrose. ‘Maybe he couldn’t carry her very far.’ As he drew closer, he continued. ‘We tend to ascribe superhuman qualities to this kind of offender. Because deep down we think they’re monsters. But they’re mostly pretty average in terms of physique. Now you, you’d have no trouble carrying a fourteen-year-old girl all the way into those woods, back where she might not be found for weeks or months. But me? I’d struggle to get her out of the car and off the roadway. So maybe that’s the reason for the apparent contradiction.’

That had been his most profound conclusion from his crime-scene visit. He hoped for more from the Maidments, but they couldn’t see him till later that afternoon. Her father had apparently decided he needed to spend some time back at work, so he wouldn’t be available till four. If Tony had been given to believing in signs and portents, he would have had to chalk that up as another one. He’d been fully prepared to cancel his arrangement with the agent if it had clashed with meeting Jennifer’s parents. Instead, their availability had dovetailed perfectly with his plans.

Ambrose had dropped him at the hotel. He probably thought Tony was poring over witness statements, not sitting in a rose garden waiting for an estate agent to show him round a house he already owned. That wasn’t normal, by any standards of behaviour. Not as crazed as murdering teenage girls, but still a long way from normal.

It was, Tony thought, as well that Ambrose didn’t know the truth.