Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 13

In her lowest moments, Carol imagined the worst fate James Blake could have in mind for her. Promotion. But not the sort of promotion that would let her lead her troops into battle. The sort that would have her sitting behind a desk, fretting about policy, while all the important work was being done elsewhere.

Like those times, thankfully rare, when her team were occupied on the front line, doing what needed to be done to find Daniel Morrison’s killer and she was sitting in her office trying to fill the time before she was due at the boy’s post mortem. Usually she tried to occupy her mind with administration and paperwork. But that day, she had something more pressing on her mind.

Leading her team in their cold-case work had added new weapons to Carol Jordan’s detective arsenal. She’d always been good at digging into the backgrounds of victims and suspects, but now she’d learned how to direct her archaeological skills backwards to a time when there were no computerised records or mobile phone bills to speed the plough. Like the years when Edmund Arthur Blythe had been living and presumably working in Halifax. Libraries were the most fruitful source, often leading to living experts who could fill in remarkable details. But there were also obscure electronic gateways to information. And Carol had access to the best of those.

Stacey was surrounded by a battery of screens. She’d now built a barricade of information between herself and the rest of the team. She’d started with two, expanded to three, and now there were six monitors arrayed in front of her, each of them showing different processes in action. Even though she was currently concentrating on filtering the city-centre CCTV footage through the face-recognition software, other applications were running, whose function was a mystery to Carol. Stacey glanced up as her boss approached. ‘No luck yet,’ she said. ‘The trouble with these CCTV cameras is that they’re still not very high res.’

‘We’ll just have to keep plugging away,’ Carol said. ‘Stacey, is there somewhere online where I can access old telephone directories?’ She made a mental bet with herself that Stacey would show no signs of surprise at the request.

‘Yes,’ she said, her eyes returning to the screens. Her fingers flew over the keyboard and one of the screens changed to display a map with a flashing cursor.

‘And that would be?’

‘Depends how far back you want to go.’

‘The early 1960s.’

Stacey’s hands paused above the keys for a moment. Then they started typing again. ‘Your best bet is one of the genealogy sites. They’ve digitised a lot of public domain social information: phone books, street directories, electoral rolls. They’re also really user friendly because they’re aimed at—’

‘Idiots like me?’ Carol said sweetly.

Stacey allowed herself half a smile. ‘Non-ICT professionals, I was going to say. Just google “old phone books” and “ancestors” and you might find something. Don’t forget, back in the 1960s, most people didn’t have phones, so you might not get lucky.’

‘I can only hope,’ Carol said. She was pinning her hopes to the fact that Blythe had re-emerged in Worcester as an entrepreneur. Perhaps he’d started in business back when he’d been courting Vanessa.

Half an hour later, she was thrilled to be proved right. It was there, on the screen, in black and white in the 1964 directory. Blythe & Co., Specialist Metal Finishers. Carol checked the years either side and discovered the company was listed for only three years. So when Blythe left, the company ended. It looked like a dead end. What were the chances of tracking down anyone who had worked there forty-five years before, never mind someone who had known him well enough to remember anything useful?

Still, she’d faced more hopeless pursuits. Now it really was time for the library. A quick online search and she had the number of the local reference library. When she got through, she explained that she was looking for a local history expert who might know about small businesses in the 1960s. The librarian um-ed and ah-ed for a moment, had a muffled conversation with someone else and finally said, ‘We think you need to talk to a man called Alan Miles. He’s a retired woodwork teacher, but he’s always been very keen on the industrial history of the area. Hang on a mo, I’ll get you his number.’

It took Alan Miles almost a dozen rings to answer his phone. Carol was about to give up when a suspicious voice said, ‘Hello?’

‘Mr Miles? Alan Miles?’

‘Who wants to know?’ He sounded old and cross. Great, just what I need.

‘My name is Carol Jordan. I’m a detective chief inspector with Bradfield Police.’

‘Police?’ Now she could hear anxiety in his voice. Like most people, talking to the police provoked worry, even for those who had nothing to worry about.

‘I was given your number by one of the staff at the central library. She thought you might be able to help me with some background research.’

‘What sort of background research? I know nowt about crime.’ He sounded eager to be gone.

‘I’m trying to find out anything I can about a man called Edmund Arthur Blythe who ran a company of specialist metal finishers in Halifax in the early 1960s. The librarian thought you were the best person to talk to.’ Carol tried to sound as flattering as she could.

‘Why? I mean, why do you want to know about that?’

God preserve me from suspicious old men. ‘I’m not at liberty to say. But my team specialises in cold cases.’ Which was nothing less than the truth, if not the whole truth.

‘I don’t like the phone,’ Miles said. ‘You can’t get the measure of a person over the phone. If you want to come over to Halifax, I’ll talk to you face to face.’

Carol rolled her eyes and suppressed a sigh. ‘Does that mean you can help me with information about Blythe and Co?’

‘Happen I can. There’ll be stuff I can show an’ all.’

Carol considered. Everything here was under control. They were nowhere near arrest or interview on anything. Unless something very unusual happened at the post mortem, she could easily disappear for a couple of hours in the evening. ‘How are you fixed this evening?’ she asked.

‘This evening? Seven o’clock. Meet me outside Halifax station. I’ll be wearing a fawn anorak and a tweed cap.’

The line went dead. Carol glared at the phone, then saw the funny side and smiled to herself. If it took her further forward on her quest for Tony’s not-father, dealing with grumpy Alan Miles would be more than worth it.

When Ambrose arrived to take him to meet Jennifer Maidment’s parents, Tony could barely hide his relief. After the estate agent’s tour, he’d struggled to focus his thoughts on the crime scene he’d visited earlier. He knew something was nagging at him about this killer, but he wasn’t sure what it was, and the more he tried to think about it, the more his mind’s eye was invaded by images of Arthur Blythe’s home. Tony was seldom influenced by his immediate surroundings. The notion of interior design had never planted itself in his consciousness. So he was all the more bemused by the inescapable fact that he envied Arthur Blythe this house. It went beyond mere comfort. It felt like a home, a place that had grown organically round one man’s idea of what mattered to him. And although he hated to admit it, it pierced Tony that Arthur Blythe had cast him off and gone on to make a home that felt so complete in itself. Nobody would ever feel like that about his house. He certainly didn’t. He didn’t have that absolute sense of himself that had clearly invested the man he never got to call his father.

So Ambrose’s arrival felt like a liberation from his troublesome thoughts. It wasn’t a relief that lasted for long. ‘Did you bring the RigMarole print-outs?’ Tony asked as soon as he’d settled into the car. When he’d heard about ZZ, he’d asked Ambrose to bring copies of whatever they’d salvaged from the sessions so he could study them.

Ambrose stared straight ahead. ‘The boss doesn’t want them to leave the office. He’s happy for you to read them, but he wants you to do it in-house.’

‘What? He doesn’t trust me? What does he think I’m going to do with them?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what he said.’ Ambrose’s hands were tight on the steering wheel. His discomfort was like a vibration in the air.

‘It’s not because he’s worried I’m going to sell them to the Daily Mail,’ Tony said, irritated out of proportion to the offence. ‘It’s about control. He’s afraid of losing control of his investigation.’ He threw his hands in the air. ‘I can’t work like this. It’s a waste of my energy to get caught up in this sort of pettiness. Look, Alvin, I work the way I work. I can’t concentrate the way I need to if I’ve got somebody looking over my shoulder. I need to be away from the bustle, the running around. I need to study this stuff and I need to do it on my terms.’

‘I get that,’ Ambrose said. ‘The DI isn’t used to working with somebody like you.’

‘Then he needs to get on the learning curve,’ Tony said. ‘It might help if he was keener to meet me face to face. Can you sort this out, or do I need to talk to him?’

‘Leave it with me,’ Ambrose muttered. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ They travelled the rest of the way in silence, Tony trying to bury everything that was standing between him and the next step of this process of discovery. Right now, all that mattered was drawing the Maidments out of their pain so they could tell him what he needed to know.

The man who opened the door held himself stiff and brittle as a dried reed. Ambrose introduced them and they followed Paul Maidment into the living room. Tony had often heard it said that people took grief differently. He wasn’t sure he agreed. They might outwardly react in different ways, but when you got right down to it, what grief did was tear your life in half. Life before your loss and life after your loss. There was always a disconnect. Some people let it all hang out, some people rammed it into a hole deep inside and rolled a heavy stone over it, some people pretended it wasn’t happening. But speak to them years later and they were always able to date memories in terms of their loss. ‘Your dad was still alive then,’ or ‘That was after our Margaret died.’ It was as precise as BC and AD. Come to think of it, that had been about grief and loss too, whatever your views on the authenticity of Jesus as the son of God.

In his role as a profiler, he mostly got to meet people when they were on the wrong side of the chasm of grief. He seldom knew what they’d been like before their lives had been torn in half. But he could often make an educated guess at what had existed on the other side of the gap. His consciousness of what had been lost formed a crucial part of his ability to empathise with where they were now, stranded in unfamiliar territory, trying to make sense of the map with part of the compass missing.

His first impression of Paul Maidment was of a man who had decided to draw a line under his daughter’s death and move on. It was a decision he was clearly struggling to stick to. At this point, Tony thought, he was close to going under for the third time.

‘My wife . . . she’ll be down in a minute,’ he said, looking around him with the air of someone who is seeing his environment for the first time and isn’t quite sure how he got there.

‘You went back to work today,’ Tony said.

Maidment looked startled. ‘Yes. I thought . . . There’s too much to be done, I can’t leave it to anyone else. Business . . . it’s really not good just now. And we don’t need to lose the business on top of . . .’ He tailed off, distracted and distressed.

‘It’s not your fault. This would have happened whether you’d been home or not,’ Tony said. ‘You and Tania, you’re not to blame for this.’

Maidment glared at Tony. ‘How can you say that? Everybody says the internet’s dangerous for teenagers. We should have taken better care of her.’

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. Predators like this, they’re determined. Short of locking Jennifer up and never letting her communicate with anyone else, there was nothing you could have done to stop this.’ Tony leaned forward, drawing Paul Maidment into his space. ‘You need to forgive yourselves.’

‘Forgive ourselves?’ The woman’s voice came from behind him, slightly slurred from drink or drugs. ‘What the hell do you know about it? You’ve lost a child, have you?’

Maidment buried his head in his hands. His wife moved to the centre of the room with the exaggerated care of someone who is sufficiently in control to know they are slightly out of it. She looked at Tony. ‘You’ll be the shrink, then. I thought it was your job to analyse the bastard who killed my daughter, not us.’

‘I’m Tony Hill, Mrs Maidment. I’m here so I can learn a bit more about Jennifer.’

‘You’re a bit late for that.’ She subsided into the nearest chair. Her face was a mask of perfectly applied make-up but her hair was tangled and unkempt. ‘A bit late to get to know my lovely girl.’ Her voice trembled a little under the careful articulation.

‘And I’m very sorry about that,’ Tony said. ‘Maybe you can help me. How would you describe her?’

Tania Maidment’s eyes grew moist. ‘Beautiful. Clever. Kind. That’s what everyone says about their dead child, isn’t it? But it was true about Jennifer. She was no trouble. I’m not stupid enough to say things like “we were each other’s best friend” or “we were like sisters”, because we weren’t. I was her parent, her mother. Mostly, we got on. Mostly she told me what she was doing and who she was doing it with. Nine days ago I’d have said she always told me. But obviously I was wrong. So I might have been wrong about all the other stuff too. Who knows any more?’

Maidment raised his head, tears sparkling on his cheeks. ‘She was all of those things. And more too. We dreamed of a child like Jennifer. Bright, talented, good fun. And that’s what we got. A dream daughter. And now the dream’s gone, and it’s worse than if it had never come true.’

There was a long silence. Tony could find nothing to say that didn’t seem banal. It was Ambrose who broke the moment. ‘There’s nothing we can do to bring Jennifer back, but we are determined to find the person who killed her. That’s why Dr Hill’s here.’

Grateful for the way in, Tony said, ‘I know you’ve already spoken to the police, but I wanted to ask you what Jennifer said about RigMarole. How she talked about it, what she said she used it for.’

‘She went on about it for ages,’ her mother said. ‘You know that thing they do, teenagers? “Mum, everybody’s got—” whatever it is. And you ask around and actually, nobody has whatever it is, they’re all just desperate to get it. She was like that with RigMarole, dying to have her own account. Claire was the same. I spoke to her mum and we talked it over with the girls. We said they could both have an account, provided that they installed all the privacy controls.’

‘Which they did,’ Maidment said bitterly. ‘And that lasted for a matter of days. Just long enough for us all to be convinced they were being responsible about it.’

‘They were being responsible as they saw it, Paul,’ Tania said. ‘They just didn’t understand the risks. You don’t at that age. You think you’re invulnerable.’ Her voice crashed and broke, catching in her throat like a crumb going down the wrong way.

‘Did she ever say anything that suggested there might be something going on that made her uncomfortable with Rig?’

The both shook their heads. ‘She loved it,’ Maidment said. ‘She said it was like it opened the world up for her and Claire. And of course, we all assumed that was in a good way.’

‘Had she ever met anyone previously that she’d got to know online?’

Maidment shook his head and Tania nodded. ‘You never said anything about that,’ he said, the accusation inescapable.

‘That’s because it was completely innocuous,’ Tania said. ‘Her and Claire met up with a couple of girls from Solihull. They went for an afternoon out at Selfridges in Birmingham. I spoke to the mother of one of the girls beforehand. They had a good laugh and said they’d do it again.’

‘When was this?’ Tony asked.

‘About three months ago.’

‘And it was just the four of them? You’re sure of that?’

‘Of course I am. I even asked Claire again. After you lot started going on about RigMarole. She swore there had been nobody else involved.’

But someone else could have electronically eavesdropped the arrangements. There could have been a fifth pair of eyes taking in everything they did. It would have taken a crueller man than Tony to voice those thoughts. ‘Jennifer sounds like a very sensible girl.’

‘She was,’ Tania said softly, her fingers stroking the arm of her chair as if it were her daughter’s hair. ‘Not in a boring, goody-two-shoes way. She had too much spirit for that. But she knew the world could be a dangerous place.’ Her face crumpled. ‘She was so precious to us. Our only child. I made sure she understood that there were times when it made sense to be cautious.’

‘I understand that,’ Tony said. ‘So what would entice her to meet someone in secret? What would make her ignore her good sense and meet a stranger? What would tempt her so much she had to lie to her best friend? I mean, we all lie to our parents from time to time, that’s the way the world works. But teenage girls don’t lie to their best mates without a very pressing reason. And I’m struggling to think what that might be. Was there anything - anything at all - that Jennifer wanted so badly she’d throw caution and good sense out of the window?’

The Maidments looked at each other, nonplussed. ‘I can’t think of anything,’ Tania said.

‘What about boys? Could there have been somebody she was infatuated with? Somebody who could have persuaded her to keep him secret?’

‘She’d have told Claire,’ Tania said. ‘I know they talked about the boys they fancied. Telling Claire wouldn’t have counted as breaking a promise.’

She was probably right, he thought. What she was describing was standard operating procedure for females, particularly teenagers. Tony got to his feet. There was nothing more for him there. The police had already searched Jennifer’s room. It would be too disturbed now to tell him anything useful. ‘If you think of anything, call me,’ he said, handing Paul Maidment a card with his mobile number. ‘Or if you just want to talk about Jennifer. I’m happy to listen.’ The Maidments both looked nonplussed at the abrupt ending to the conversation. Tony thought they probably expected an extended outpouring of compassion. But what would be the point of that? He couldn’t make them feel better, even if they wanted to. Still, Tania Maidment wasn’t taking anything lying down right now.

‘That’s it?’ she said. ‘Five minutes of your precious time and you’re out of here? How the hell can you have learned anything about my daughter in five minutes?’

Tony was startled. The recently bereaved who wanted to lash out generally picked on the police, not him. He was accustomed to sympathising with Carol, not taking it on the chin himself. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time,’ he said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘I’ll be talking to her friend Claire, I’ll be reading her emails. You’re just one of the sources for my picture of Jennifer.’

Tania looked as if he’d knocked the wind out of her. She made a noise that on another day might have been a contemptuous snort. ‘That’s what it’s come to, is it? I’m just one of the sources for my daughter’s life.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tony said abruptly. Staying would merely prolong the immediate pain for the Maidments. His only value to them lay elsewhere. So he simply nodded to them both and walked from the room leaving Ambrose to scramble after him.

The detective caught him up halfway to the car. ‘That was a bit hairy,’ he said. ‘I think they thought you were a bit curt.’

‘I’m not good at small talk. I said what I needed to. They’ve got something to think about now. That might shake something loose in their memories. Sometimes what I do, it looks brutal. But it works. Tomorrow, I want to talk to Claire. Jennifer might have spoken to her.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I promise to play nice.’

‘What do you want to do now?’ Ambrose asked.

‘I want to read the messages you got from her computer. Why don’t you drop me at my hotel and bring me the paperwork as soon as you can persuade your boss that if he wants to get what his budget is paying for he should let me do things the way that works for me.’ He put a hand on Ambrose’s arm, realising how brusque he had sounded. He still got it wrong more often than he liked when it came to responding like normal people. ‘I really appreciate your help with this. It’s not easy to explain how the profiling works. But it does involve thinking myself inside someone else’s skin. I don’t like being around other people when I’m going there.’

Ambrose ran a hand over his smooth skull, his eyes troubled. ‘I don’t imagine you do. Tell you the truth, it’s all a bit spooky to me. But you’re the expert.’

He spoke as if that were something to be pleased about. Tony stared up at the Maidments’ house, wondering what sort of messy head had wrecked their lives. Soon he’d have to pry his way in there and find out. It wasn’t an enticing prospect. For a brief moment, he missed Carol Jordan so much it made him feel nauseous. He turned back to Ambrose. ‘Somebody has to be.’