Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 36

Carol recognised the buzz in the MIT squad room that morning. It was always like this when the team was teetering on the edge of a breakthrough. The phone call she’d taken from Paula late the night before had signalled a new phase in their investigation and she’d called them together for this seven o’clock briefing because nobody wanted to wait to get cracking. That Nigel Barnes had chosen to confess to the disposal of the bodies in Wastwater was just a bonus.

They assembled round the table, coffees in hand. At the very last minute, Tony walked in. ‘No show without Punch,’ he said cheerily, grabbing the nearest chair and dumping his papers in front of it. He looked around, feigning surprise. ‘I thought there was a new kid on the team?’

‘DS Parker has been unavoidably called back to the faculty,’ Carol said, glaring repressively at him. ‘So we’re stuck with you.’

‘Welcome back, Doc,’ Kevin said.

Carol cut across the general greeting. ‘If we can get down to business?’ They came to order and she began. ‘We have some movement to report. Paula, would you like to explain how that’s come about?’ Carol raised her eyebrows at Paula. She’d already made it clear that, while she welcomed the breakthrough, she didn’t appreciate Paula bringing an outsider into the middle of their confidential investigation.

Paula sounded as if she’d been rehearsing how to play this. ‘I came into the office late last night with Dr Elinor Blessing—’

Her best-laid plans went up in smoke as her colleagues whooped and whistled. Carol knew they needed release from the tension of the case, so she let them have their head. Besides, Paula had asked for it. ‘Couldn’t you just get a room?’ Kevin said innocently.

‘Very funny. You’re all very bloody comic,’ Paula said, taking it in good part. Elinor’s discovery might have brought an end to romance for the evening, but Paula was still on a lingering high from their encounter. And possibly also from lack of sleep. ‘Some of you may remember Dr Blessing from the Robbie Bishop case, and how helpful she was then.’ More whooping and nudging. ‘Well, she’s come to our rescue again.’ Paula nodded to Stacey, who tapped a few keys on the webbook in front of her. The familiar strips of DNA analysis came up on the whiteboard. ‘On the left, you have Daniel’s DNA. On the right, Seth’s. If we look more closely, we can see strong similarities.’ Areas of the DNA strips were highlighted. ‘According to Dr Blessing, this indicates that Daniel and Seth are blood relatives.’

Stacey tapped some more keys and another two DNA profiles appeared. ‘Jennifer and Niall,’ Paula said. ‘And the same phenomenon.’ Again, areas were highlighted. ‘I got Dr Shatalov out of bed at two o’clock this morning to double-check that Elinor was right. And he agrees. He called in someone at the university who’s more of an expert in DNA analysis than Dr Shatalov himself. Her view is that they are all half-siblings.’

‘Are you saying all these women had affairs with the same man and got pregnant by him? In the same year?’ Kevin sounded incredulous. ‘That’s mad.’

‘Of course that’s not what I’m saying. It’s obvious. At least, it is to a lesbian. Donor insemination. It’s got to be. Nothing else makes sense. And we already know Seth was a donor baby.’

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Tony leaned forward. ‘The bad seed,’ he said. ‘The end of the line. That’s what he’s doing. He’s not killing them because they look like him. He’s killing them because they are him.’

For DI Stuart Patterson, this was an interview that couldn’t be delegated. Just as the Maidments had deserved a senior officer when they had to be told their daughter was dead, they were entitled to the same courtesy for the deeply personal question that had to be asked this morning. With luck, both of them would be home this early in the day.

Paul Maidment opened the door. He was suited up and freshly shaved. He looked exactly like any other successful businessman girded up for the start of the working week except that his eyes held no light. He nodded and sighed at the sight of the policeman. ‘Come in,’ he said lifelessly.

Patterson followed him to the kitchen. Tania Maidment sat at the kitchen table in her dressing gown. Her hair was uncombed, matted and asymmetrical from sleep. Dark shadows surrounded her eyes and she was smoking what was clearly not the first cigarette of the day. ‘Have you arrested him yet?’ she demanded as soon as she caught sight of Patterson.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, standing near the doorway. No one invited him to sit down. ‘We are making progress.’

‘Progress?’ Maidment said explosively. ‘What does that mean?’

Patterson didn’t know what to say to that. He wished Ambrose was with him. He could have used that stolid certainty standing alongside. ‘I need to ask you a question about Jennifer,’ he said. ‘I appreciate the sensitive nature of this, but we need to know the answer.’

Tania snorted. ‘I didn’t think we had any sensitivities left that hadn’t been trampled all over. Do you have any idea how hard it is to cling on to your memories when the police and the media trample all over your daughter’s life?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Patterson said. ‘But I do need you to help me with this.’ His collar felt tight. ‘Was Jennifer conceived using artificial insemination?’

Tania pushed her chair back, the legs scraping harshly against the floor tiles. She jumped to her feet, her face an angry mask. ‘What the hell has that to do with anything? Christ, have we no privacy left?’

Maidment hurried to her side and put his arm round her. She turned to him, clutching his shirt tight in her fist and beating it against his chest. ‘Yes,’ he said, holding her close, his eyes glistening. ‘We longed for a child of our own. We tried.’ He sighed. ‘We tried for a long time. Then we had tests. It turned out I was firing blanks. So we went to a fertility clinic in Birmingham. Tania got pregnant the second time we inseminated.’

She turned a tear-stained face to Patterson. ‘Paul always treated her as if she was his own daughter.’

‘She was my own daughter,’ he insisted. ‘I never thought about it from one year’s end to the next.’

‘Did Jennifer know?’ Patterson asked.

Maidment looked away. ‘We never told her. When she was little, we planned to tell her the truth one day. But . . .’

‘I decided we wouldn’t tell her,’ Tania said. ‘There was no need. We matched the donor to Paul, so she looked a bit like him. Nobody knew but us, so it wasn’t like anybody else in the family could let something slip.’

Which answered Patterson’s next question. ‘Thanks for being so frank,’ he said.

‘Why are you asking this now?’ Maidment asked.

‘It might have some bearing on a line of inquiry we’re pursuing. ‘

‘Christ. Could you say anything more meaningless?’ Tania said. ‘Go away. Please.’

Maidment followed him down the hall. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘No need.’

‘She’s not doing well.’

‘I can see that. We are doing our best, you know.’

Maidment opened the door. ‘I know. What bothers her is that it might not be enough.’

Patterson nodded. ‘It bothers me too. But we’re not giving up, Mr Maidment. And we really are making progress.’ He walked back to the car, feeling the bereaved father’s eyes on him, knowing that, whatever the outcome, for Tania Maidment it would never be good enough. Patterson was sufficiently selfish to be grateful that he didn’t have to live with that particular hell.

Paula was about to give up on Mike Morrison when the door finally opened. He was wearing a T-shirt and boxers and reeked of alcohol. He peered blearily at her. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he grunted, turning on his heel and walking back into the house.

Paula took that as an invitation and followed him into the wreckage of the living room. Empty whisky bottles were lined up along the side of one sofa. On the coffee table, seven malt whisky bottles stood in a row, the levels varying from almost full to almost empty. A smeared tumbler sat next to them. Morrison reached for the tumbler as he sat down heavily on the sofa. There was a duvet next to him and he wrapped it round his legs. The room was cold but still it smelled of stale booze and stale man. Paula tried to breathe discreetly through her mouth.

The TV screen caught her eye. In freeze-frame, Daniel and his mother were dressed in winter sports gear, mugging at the camera. In the background, snowy mountains. Morrison poured a slug of Scotch and noticed her eye-line. ‘The wonders of modern technology. Brings them right back to life,’ he slurred.

‘This isn’t a great idea, Mike,’ she said gently.

He gave a cracked laugh. ‘No? What else is there? I loved my wife. I loved my boy. There’s fuck all else in my life to love.’

It was hard to argue with that, Paula thought. She’d call his GP later. And she’d call his office. See if they knew who his friends were. This was pain she couldn’t ignore. ‘I need to ask you a question,’ she said.

‘What difference does it make? You can’t bring them back.’

‘No. But we can stop him doing this to another family.’

Morrison laughed again, the manic edge obvious. ‘You think I’ve got it in me to care about anybody else any more?’

‘Yeah, Mike. I think you do. You’re a decent man, you don’t want to put anybody else through this.’

Tears welled in his eyes and he dashed them away with the back of his hand. He took another drink and said, ‘Fuck you, officer. Ask your question, then.’

Here goes. Time to run for cover. ‘Did you and Jessica have fertility treatment when you had Daniel?’

He paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. ‘How the fuck did you know that?’

‘I didn’t know it. That’s why I’m asking you.’

He rubbed his stubbled chin. ‘Jess kept having miscarriages. She was desperate for a kid. Me, I wasn’t that bothered. But I could never say no to her.’ He stared at the screen. ‘They did tests.’ His mouth curled. ‘She was allergic to my sperm. Can you believe that? There was us, thinking we were perfectly suited, and all the time she couldn’t tolerate me.’ He swallowed more whisky. ‘I’d have left it at that, but she wouldn’t. So we went along to the fertility clinic at Bradfield Cross and got some other bugger’s sperm.’

‘That must have been hard for you.’

‘You have no bloody idea. I felt like some other man had been there. Inside my wife.’ He scratched his head. ‘I knew in my head it wasn’t like that, but in my heart it was a different story.’

‘What was it like after Daniel was born?’

A tender smile lit his ravaged face. ‘It was love at first sight. And I never wavered in that. But at the same time, I knew he was an alien. He wasn’t flesh of my flesh. I never really knew what was going on in his head. I loved him to bits, but I never knew him.’ He gestured at the TV. ‘That’s what I’m still trying to do. But I never will now, will I?’

There was nothing to say. Paula stood up and patted him on the shoulder. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ She couldn’t remember the last time she’d said anything emptier.

‘That was the beginning of the end of my marriage,’ Lara Quantick said bitterly. ‘I thought a baby would bring us together. But he was like a bloody silverback gorilla. He hated Niall because he was another man’s child in his eyes. Plus it was a constant reminder that he wasn’t a real man. I bet he’s not even sorry.’

Sam nodded, trying to look sympathetic. He’d got what he came for. Confirmation that Niall Quantick was a donor baby and that the sperm had come from Bradfield Cross Hospital. He couldn’t see what else Lara Quantick might have that would be any use to him. Now he just had to get out of here before he got sucked into a complete rerun of her fucked-up marriage. He almost felt sorry for her ex. He wouldn’t mind betting that every time they had a row, Lara threw his lack of manhood in his face. He stood up. He was a copper, not a counsellor, and while he was stuck in this crappy flat with her, the real action was elsewhere.

‘We’ll be in touch,’ he said, already halfway to somewhere else in his head.

Ambrose had felt ambivalent about the government’s anti-terrorist measures ever since they’d been introduced. The policeman applauded anything that gave them the powers to make the streets safer. But the black man was made uneasy by anything that made it easier to isolate and target minorities. This lot were supposed to be the left, but they were capable of some pretty repressive stuff. Who knew how the new rules might be applied under a regime that really didn’t care much for civil liberties. Look how much damage had been done to the US in the Bush years. And they had way more checks and balances than the UK.

But he had to admit there were some aspects of the legislation that made his job a lot easier. OK, sometimes you had to stretch a point and make somebody out to be a lot more dangerous than they were, but you could get all sorts of information these days that used to take a lot of time and more evidence than was often readily available. Take air passenger lists. It used to be a nightmare getting airlines to give you access to the names of the people who had flown on any individual plane. Warrants had to be obtained from magistrates who didn’t always agree that your need to know was stronger than the airline’s right to customer confidentiality. Then you had to hope the passenger list still existed.

But now, it was easy. You flew, you were in the security services computer system. And the likes of Ambrose could generally find a friendly officer who totally understood that catching killers was a lot more important than some notional idea of personal privacy. Especially if you were the kind of copper who made a point of making friends rather than enemies.

So it was that Monday morning that Ambrose received a text from an unidentified caller which simply said, Ur pal misd his plane. Didn’t make another flite.

Ambrose congratulated himself on his instincts. He’d covered a lot of ground the day before. There had been a couple of possibles on his list by the end of play. But he’d had a gut feeling about the computer security geek, especially when his girlfriend had shown them the extent of their equipment. If anyone could have performed the cyber stalking evident in this case, it was Warren Davy. And whatever his girlfriend believed, Warren Davy wasn’t in Malta. He was out there somewhere, a serial killer on a roll.

Wherever he was, Ambrose bet he was grooming his next victim.

After the frustration of the past few days, Carol felt almost exhilarated at the way information was coming at her. Connections were starting to emerge, and she felt the thrill of the hunter who is finally getting the scent of their prey. The DNA breakthrough had turned everything on its head, confirming Tony’s earlier conclusion that these were not sexual homicides.

Now they knew for certain that all four victims had been born as a result of artificial insemination. Three of the mothers had been treated at Bradfield Cross Hospital’s sub-fertility unit, the fourth at a private clinic in Birmingham. Her next stop should be the clinic here in Bradfield. She had no idea what they could tell her. Her knowledge of the law around donor sperm was scant, but she did know that back when these babies had been made, the donations had been anonymous.

She was about to call Paula to get her coat on and join her when the phone rang. ‘Stuart Patterson here,’ he said before she could even identify herself. ‘I think Alvin’s come up with a suspect.’

‘That’s your sergeant, right? The one that’s over in Manchester?’

‘That’s right. He was on the knocker yesterday, trying to make something out of the car registrations we got. He had a couple of possibles, but one of them, his girlfriend, who is also his business partner, she said he’s in Malta, but he’s not. And he’s perfect for it. They’ve got a company, DPS, that deals in computer security and data storage—’

‘Slow down, Stuart.’ Carol’s head was spinning as she tried to process his garbled sentences. ‘What’s Malta got to do with it?’

‘Sorry, sorry. I’m just . . . this feels like the first proper break, you know? Everything coming together - the profiling, the back-to-basics door-knocking coppering and the technology - and giving us what we need.’ She could hear him take a deep breath. ‘Right. One of the cars that came into Worcester the day Jennifer was killed was a Toyota Verso registered to a guy called Warren Davy. He’s a partner in a computer security company, DPS. When Alvin went to his place, it turned out he’s not been at home for over a week. According to his girlfriend, he flew out to Malta to set up a security system for a client. But when Alvin checked the passenger manifests, he found that Davy hadn’t flown on the flight he was ticketed for. And he didn’t take another flight instead. Davy went off the map after Jennifer was killed but before the three boys. He told his girlfriend the lie about Malta to buy himself freedom to commit the other murders.’

‘What about the girlfriend? Does Alvin think she knows what’s going on?’

‘Clueless, he reckons. She’s supposed to get Davy to call Alvin next time he checks in. But so far, he’s not been in touch.’

‘You think he will be?’

‘Depends how clever he thinks he is. He might reckon he’s smart enough to bluff us.’ Patterson still sounded excited. She knew how he felt but was better at hiding it. A shadow fell across her doorway and she saw Stacey hovering. She held up two fingers, indicating she was almost done.

‘You think we should go public with this?’ Patterson was saying. ‘Put out his photo, tell people to call him in? Should we hit the farm where he lives with the girlfriend? See what we can find there?’

That was one she wanted to run past Tony. Her instincts were to hold back, but without any clue as to when he planned to strike next, it was a high-risk strategy. ‘Can I get back to you on that, Stuart? I don’t want us to make a snap decision. I’ll call you later. Tell Alvin that’s brilliant work.’

Carol ran a hand through her hair and summoned Stacey in. ‘Nothing for days, then it’s mayhem on steroids,’ she said. ‘I need you to pull everything you can off the grid about a man called Warren Davy who runs a computer security firm called DPS. I want everything. Credit details, mobile phone records.’

Stacey’s eyebrows rose. ‘I know Warren Davy.’

Shocked, Carol said, ‘You know him? How?’

‘Well, when I say know, I mean cyber-know. He’s a security expert. He’s approached me a couple of times about software apps. We’ve chatted online. He’s very good.’ She looked worried. ‘Is he our suspect?’

‘Is that a problem for you?’

Stacey shook her head but still looked troubled. ‘It’s not a problem in the sense of a conflict of interest. He’s not a friend, he’s not someone I have a business relationship with . . . It’s just that, if he doesn’t want to be found, it’ll be hard to find him.’

‘Great. That’s all I need,’ Carol groaned.

Stacey’s face cleared. ‘I’ll consider it a personal challenge. The one thing I have going for me is that he doesn’t know me as a cop. He thinks I’m just another geek. If he thought he was going up against me, he’d be taking every precaution he could think of, but if he thinks he’s just dealing with standard plod, he might be a bit careless. I’ll get right on to it. But there’s something else I wanted to run past you.’

It was always worth paying attention when Stacey took the time to talk. ‘I’m listening.’

‘I’ve been doing some tinkering,’ she said. ‘The codes that the RigMarole people very kindly handed over have let me in the back door of their system. It would be quite easy for me to set up a global C&A on Rig.’

‘Can you translate that?’ Carol said. ‘I thought C&A was a chain of European department stores.’

‘Capture and analyse. You tell the server to look for a particular combination of keystrokes and then set up elimination criteria. I could set it up to deliver me anyone whose username is a double letter. Then we could manually look at what they’re saying. We might be able to identify the next targets that way and stake them out. Then we’d be able to catch the killer in the act.’

Carol looked dubious. ‘Could that really work?’

‘The computer end of it is perfectly feasible. I can’t speak for what will happen once you go live into the field with it. It’s a lot of work. But I think it’s worth trying.’

Carol thought for a moment then made her decision. ‘OK. Do it. But Warren Davy is a priority. If you can ping his mobile and locate him that way, that would be a huge bonus.’

‘Abracadabra,’ Stacey said as she left. Carol could have sworn there was irony there.