Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 19

It wasn’t that she missed him when he was away. It wasn’t like they lived in each other’s pockets. When they were both busy, they could easily go for a week without spending an evening together. But Carol was always conscious of the emptiness of the house above her basement flat when Tony was away. Their lives were separate, their space private, the doors at the head and foot of the internal staircase creating a sort of airlock between them.

And yet . . . She knew when he was not there. Maybe there was a genuine reason; perhaps his movements created a vibration at some subliminal level in the house’s fabric and whose absence unsettled her reptile brain. Or maybe they were, as Blake had implied, a little too closely in tune. Carol shivered at the thought. Her feelings for Tony were a complicated web whose strength and fragility she preferred not to test.

So she told herself it was just as well that he wasn’t here, as if his presence would somehow hamper her exploration of his history. Certainly it would be more than likely to sharpen the nag of guilt she felt at continuing to go behind his back and against his expressed wishes. Nevertheless she logged on to Google and soon found herself on the home page of the Halifax and Huddersfield Herald. First she tried ‘Eddie Blythe’ but got no result. But when she replaced the first name with Edmund, a string of results unrolled on the screen.

The first on the list, the most recent in terms of date, was the story Alan Miles had shown her in the pub. Frustratingly, the photograph hadn’t been scanned in. The next result was a story about the proposed sale of Blythe’s company to the Sheffield firm. Halfway through the story was a paragraph that stopped her in her tracks. ‘The factory’s owner, Mr Edmund Blythe, was unavailable for comment. Mr Blythe is recovering from a recent violent assault, as reported in this newspaper.’

A violent assault? Alan Miles hadn’t mentioned anything about that. Carol hastily scrolled down the rest of the results, looking for something that wasn’t about the factory. A few stories down, she hit pay dirt.

VIOLENT ATTACK IN SAVILE PARK

A Halifax businessman was recovering in hospital last night after a brutal attack as he walked home through Savile Park with his fiancée.

Edmund Blythe, 27, the managing director of Blythe & Co, Specialist Metal Finishers, was stabbed by a thug who attempted to rob him at knife-point.

When he refused to hand over his wallet, the man struck out with his weapon and hit Mr Blythe in the chest. According to hospital staff, the blow came close to his heart and it was a matter of pure luck that the consequences were not fatal.

Mr Blythe, of Tanner Street, and his fiancée were returning to her parents’ home after spending the evening with friends who live on the far side of the park.

His distraught fiancée, who has asked not to be named, said, ‘It was a terrible shock. One minute we were walking along arm in arm, minding our own business. Then a man stepped out from the shadow of some bushes and brandished a knife. I could see the blade gleaming in the moonlight.

‘I was terrified. He told Edmund to hand over his wallet, but he refused. Then the man rushed at him and there was a struggle. I started screaming and the man ran off.

‘It was too dark for me to see him clearly. He was about six feet in height and wore a flat cap pulled down over his hair. He sounded local, but I doubt I should be able to recognise his voice again. It was all so frightening.’

Detective Inspector Terrence Arnold said, ‘This man is clearly very dangerous. We advise members of the public to be on their guard when walking in secluded areas after dark.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Carol said aloud as she reread the article. Why on earth had Vanessa failed to mention this dramatic incident? It wasn’t like her to miss the chance for a touch of the limelight. Not to mention the sympathy she’d elicit for being involved in such a terrifying attack.

It did go some way to explain why Blythe had decided to abandon Halifax for Worcester. An unprovoked assault like that would make anyone anxious about the place they were living. But she’d have expected him to want to take his fiancée with him. Of course, if Vanessa hadn’t wanted to leave Halifax, no amount of persuasion would have shifted her.

Carol poured herself a fresh glass of wine. She checked the other articles, but there was no more about the attack. Clearly no arrest had been made. Not entirely surprising, with no description of any value. Doubtless the usual suspects had been dragged in and slapped around a bit, but nothing had come of it. And Blythe himself had clearly been unwilling to discuss it. It seemed he’d sold up and left town almost immediately. It was all very sudden.

It was beginning to look as if Carol might have to pay another visit to Tony’s mother. Only this time, she wouldn’t be taking no for an answer. The only thing that stopped her heading straight back to Halifax and Vanessa’s lair was a text from Paula.

‘Oh shit,’ Carol said. Strictly speaking, she didn’t need to turn out on this one. But her sense of obligation was heightened by her earlier dereliction. I’ll be there within the half hour, she texted back to Paula. Hold the fort till then.

Niall Quantick hated his life. He hated his useless mother. He hated the scuzzy streets round their spazoid flat. He hated never having any money. He hated school, hated that he had to show up every day, thanks to his arsehole mother’s deal with the head teacher that, if he didn’t show, he wouldn’t get even his pitiful allowance from her. OK, so he planned to play the system to get away from her and her fucking hateful little life, but he didn’t want her to know that. He would have gone to school anyway, but his small rebellion against the machine last term had totally paid off. Pretty much the one thing he didn’t hate about his life was that he was clever enough to outsmart everybody who tried to get one over on him.

He took a toke off the joint he indulged in every day after school when he walked the stupid dog to get out of the flat so he could chill out in the crappy park with its used needles and scumbags and glue bags and dogshit. What a fucking life.

Most of all, he hated his fuckwit arsehole father for turning his life into this drudged-out hell. His life might not feel so shit if he couldn’t remember a time when it had been different. The other kids he hung out with didn’t seem as pissed off with their lives as he was and he thought that might be because they didn’t have anything better to contrast it with. Oh sure, they thought they knew what it would be like to have a flash car and a big gaff and holidays where the sun shone every day. But that was just fantasy footballer world to them. Not to Niall. Niall remembered what it was like to have all of those things.

Before this scummy flat in a part of Manchester so bad that jobseekers had to lie about their postcode, they’d lived in a detached house on the outskirts of Bradfield. Niall had had his own bedroom plus a playroom. He’d had a PS3 and an Xbox. There had been a room full of gym equipment with a plasma-screen TV at the end of the treadmill. His dad’s Mercedes had sat in the double garage next to his mum’s Audi. They’d had season tickets for Manchester United, they’d gone abroad on holiday three times a year and Niall couldn’t keep track of his Christmas and birthday presents.

Then three years ago, it had all come crashing down. His mum and dad had been fighting like EastEnders for months. He couldn’t figure out what the trouble was, just that they couldn’t seem to get through a day without being at each other’s throat. Finally, his dad had taken them on holiday to Florida, supposedly to patch things up. But he’d walked out of the rented villa on the third night after yet another row. His mum had said to hell with him, they were going to enjoy the rest of the holiday. They came home ten days later to find the house sold, the rooms stripped bare, the cars gone and the locks changed. He’d sold the house out from under them and taken their clothes in bin bags round to Niall’s mum’s parents’ house in Manchester.

It was breathtakingly evil. Niall had thought so at the time and he thought so still.

His mum got lawyered up, but it didn’t do her any good. It turned out that his dad’s company owned the house and everything else. On paper, his dad didn’t have a pot to piss in. And so now, neither did Niall or his useless mother.

He was amazed at his dad’s capacity for pure evil. His mother had dragged them both round to his car dealership one afternoon, trying to shame him into giving them more than the fifty quid a week he was shelling out for Niall. They’d shut Niall out of the room, leaving him with the clueless receptionist while they screamed at each other. But he could still hear every word. ‘He’s not even my kid,’ his dad had yelled at the height of the row.

His mum hadn’t said anything, but Niall heard a loud crack, like something glass being thrown at a wall. Then the door had opened and he’d seen a spider web of cracks where the big plate-glass window on to the showroom should have revealed gleaming rows of cars. ‘Come on,’ she’d said, grabbing his arm and making for the door. ‘We don’t want money off that despicable lying bastard anyway.’

Speak for yourself, Niall had thought. All the more reason for taking his money, him being a despicable lying bastard. Who the fuck did he think he was, making out that Niall’s mum was some sort of slut who’d have another man’s kid and pass it off as his? She might be a useless cow, but he knew she wasn’t a slag. Unlike his dad, who would do anything rather than put his hand in his pocket to support his wife and kid.

So thanks to him they were stuck in the shit, no way out till Niall could carve out his own possibilities. He’d keep his nose clean and turn his life around then show his dad what a man was.

But meanwhile, he was stuck in this shitty life that he hated. There was only one little flicker of light at the bottom of the mineshaft. He wanted to learn Russian because he wanted to work for some oligarch and learn how to get rich himself. Those guys didn’t give a shit whose toes they stood on. Hell, they’d break them just to pass the time. But none of the teachers at his poxy school could teach Russian. So he’d gone looking for some free Russian tuition locally. And then DD had turned up on his RigMarole page, offering to help out.

Niall didn’t know what DD stood for. Probably some Russian first name and patronymic. But DD was the real thing. He’d given Niall some basic lessons online, to make sure he was serious. And this week, they were going to meet up for the first time. They’d have their first lesson face to face, and Niall would be on the road to riches. And maybe even his own football team.

That’d show the despicable lying bastard a thing or two.

Posing the question was one thing. Finding the answer was another entirely. His difficulty was not that he was in a strange place; Tony felt paradoxically relaxed in Blythe’s home. It had the sort of tranquil, organic feel he’d have chosen himself, if he ever could have roused himself to take enough interest in his surroundings.

What bothered him was his inability to find a plausible reason for the attack on Jennifer Maidment. It was hard to imagine a personal motive against a fourteen-year-old girl that would lead to murder. If it had been a peer-group killing, it would have been a knife attack on the street or some back alley. There would almost certainly have been witnesses or, at the very least, other teenagers or family members who knew about it after the fact. But this was far too organised. Far too mature a killing method. And besides, the killer had to have had access to a vehicle. And there would have been no genital mutilation in a peer-group murder.

It was possible that Jennifer’s death was the most brutal of messages to either parent. Or both, perhaps. But on the surface, it was hard to see how the Maidments could intersect with the sort of person who would regard murdering and mutilating a teenager as a proportionate response to anything. He ran an engineering company, she was a part-time teacher of children with special needs. And again, if it was a message killing, it was a bloody strange way to go about it. The relatively peaceful death followed by the brutal mutilation. No, whatever this was about, it wasn’t about coercion or revenge or any other obvious message to the parents.

As his thoughts picked over possibilities and rejected them almost as soon as he’d developed them, he ranged through the house, moving from room to room without thinking about it, not even conscious of how at ease he was with his surroundings. When his mind finally stopped churning over, he found himself in the kitchen and realised he was hungry. He opened a couple of cupboards, looking for something to eat. There wasn’t much choice, but Tony had never considered himself a gourmet. He chose a packet of oatcakes and a tin of baked beans and sat down at the breakfast bar with a spoon and plate. Absently, he loaded the oatcakes with cold beans and ate the result with more relish than it warranted. There was something satisfying about this - he felt like Hansel and Gretel secretly exploring the witch’s cottage. Only for him there would be no witch.

Once he’d satisfied his appetite, he went back to the armchair where he’d left the paperwork and crawled through it again. He looked at the locations of the various computers used to send messages to Jennifer Maidment and vaguely recalled Ambrose saying something about hoping they could use them to narrow down a location for the killer. Tony hadn’t paid a great deal of attention because that sort of analysis wasn’t something he used himself. He trusted his own observations and his own capacity for empathy, his own experience and his own instincts. He was uncomfortable with the idea of reducing human behaviour to a set of algorithms, even though he knew it had produced startling results on occasion. He just didn’t feel comfortable with it.

But he knew a woman who did.

Fiona Cameron’s number was stored in his phone. They’d met at various conferences over the years, and she’d called him in for a second opinion on a case she’d been working in Ireland. There had been nothing he could fault her on, but he had been able to offer a couple of helpful suggestions. They’d worked well together. Like Carol, she was intelligent and diligent. Unlike Carol, she’d managed to marry a demanding professional life with a long-term relationship. Tony glanced at his watch. Just after nine. She’d probably be doing whatever it was normal people did at this time of the evening. He wondered what that might be, exactly. Finishing off dinner? Watching TV? Sorting the laundry or just sitting talking over a glass of wine? Whatever it was, she probably wouldn’t appreciate a call from him.

Knowing that had never stopped him before, and it wasn’t going to stop him now. The phone rang out. Just when he was about to give up she answered, sounding a little flustered. ‘Tony? Is that really you?’

‘Hi, Fiona. Is this a bad moment?’

‘No, not at all. I’m stuck in a hotel room in Aberdeen.’ So, not like normal people, then. Just like him. All alone and a long way from home. ‘I was just putting my room-service tray out in the hall, I nearly locked myself out. So, how are you?’

‘I’m in Worcester,’ he said, as if that was an answer. ‘Something’s come up on a case I’m working on and I wanted to ask you if you thought it was something that was susceptible to that geographic profiling program you use.’

She chuckled, the distance doing nothing to diminish the warmth in her voice. ‘Same old Tony. Absolutely no small talk.’

She had a point, he thought. But he’d never bothered trying to pretend otherwise with a woman as acute as Fiona. ‘Yeah, well, leopards and spots, what can I say?’

‘It’s OK, I don’t mind. Anything to take my mind off the yawning tedium of the evening ahead. I daren’t leave my room. I’m doing a seminar tomorrow and there are a couple of colleagues down in the bar I would slit my wrists to avoid. So I’m very happy to have something to pass the time with. What is it?’

‘It’s the murder and mutilation of a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s a killer who’s going to do it again if we can’t stop him. We’ve got an unidentified suspect who’s been spending time online with our victim. He uses public-access computers spread across a hundred miles or so. Mostly single use but some of them more than once. So it’s not offences, as such. Just locations that we know he’s used. Is that something you can do anything with?’

‘I’m not sure till I see it. Can you fire it over to me?’

‘I’ll have to type it in. I’ve only got a hard copy.’ And Patterson will have a nervous breakdown if I ask for an electronic copy so I can send it to someone right outside the loop.

‘Poor you. I hope it’s not too long a list.’

‘I’ll get it to you in the next hour or so.’

‘I’ll look out for it. Take care. Good to talk to you.’

He pulled out his laptop and booted up, pleased to see that Blythe’s wireless broadband appeared still to be functional. It didn’t really matter whether Fiona Cameron could help. He was doing something positive, and experience had taught him that starting down that road always freed up the part of his brain that came up with the inspired connections that made him so effective a profiler.

There was a reason why Jennifer Maidment had died the way she had. And Tony sensed he was edging closer to it.