Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 37

Alvin Ambrose was late. Paula had been detailed to meet him and bring him up to speed, but he’d just called to say he had a flat tyre and would be another forty minutes at least. She’d got his message in the car park at Bradfield Cross, just as she and Carol were heading back from a frustrating meeting with the consultant in charge of fertility services. ‘I’m going to talk to Blake,’ Carol said. ‘I need him to authorise the surveillance if Stacey comes up with a potential victim. Why don’t you grab something to eat before you meet up with DS Ambrose? The way things are going today, it might be your last chance.’

Paula knew how to make that an even better idea. She texted Elinor’s pager: In Strbks. Lattes r on me. She wasn’t holding her breath, but it would be more fun if she didn’t have to eat alone. She bought two coffees and a panini and sat by the window. Back to the hospital, though. She didn’t want to look pitifully eager.

Eleven minutes later - not that she was counting - Elinor appeared in a flurry of white coat and black jeans. ‘I’ve only got twenty minutes,’ she said, leaning down to give Paula a warm kiss on the cheek.

‘I’ve not got much more than that myself.’ She pushed one of the lattes towards Elinor. ‘I didn’t know if you wanted anything to eat.’

‘I’m OK. How’s your day been?’

‘Up and down. I was in the office till four, then back at seven. Your brainwave with the DNA has really given us a new angle. Thanks.’ She grinned. ‘Even if I did get the piss taken out of me mercilessly.’

‘Just as well Stacey was there to alibi us,’ Elinor said drily.

‘In spite of the piss-taking, I did get to be the star of the morning briefing. Which was nice, because it’s been downhill since then.’ She told Elinor about her encounter with Mike Morrison.

‘I can’t imagine how distraught he must be,’ Elinor said. ‘How do you climb back from losing your son like that, then your wife too?’

Paula sighed. ‘It’s amazing what you can recover from.’

Elinor gave her a shrewd look. ‘You can tell me about it one of these days.’

Paula smiled. ‘It’s a pity not all doctors are as accommodating as you.’

‘Meaning what?’ Elinor stirred her coffee and gave Paula a speculative look.

Paula chuckled. ‘Not like that. We’ve just had an exasperating encounter with your Mrs Levinson.’

Elinor made a face of horror. ‘Not my Mrs Levinson. Thankfully I’ve managed to avoid her team. She makes Mr Denby look humble. You know what they say about fertility specialists?’ Paula shook her head. ‘All doctors like to think they’re God, but fertility doctors know they’re God. The rest of us only have power over death. Mrs Levinson and her cronies have the power to bestow life. And don’t they know it.’

‘I think that only explains part of why she was so unhelpful, ‘ Paula said. ‘I do actually think in this case she does have the law on her side.’

‘What were you after?’

‘Well, we established that all four of our victims are blood relatives. Half-siblings, probably. In three cases, the mothers were inseminated here at Bradfield Cross. We wanted to know how we could find out who the donor was.’

Elinor pursed her mouth into an O and drew her breath in sharply. ‘You guys have no fear, do you?’

‘We try to hide it.’

‘And she told you there was no way you could find that out?’

‘That’s right. Jordan threatened her with a court order and she just laughed. I tell you, I’ve never seen anybody do that to Carol Jordan before.’

‘She’s right, though. A court order would be useless. Because even Mrs Levinson doesn’t have access to that information. Back when everything was anonymous, a donation was given a unique identifying number. The only place where the number and the ID can be matched is on the database of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. It’s kept on a standalone computer. Even if Stacey hacked the HFEA, she couldn’t get at it. You’d have to be physically present. You’d actually have to hack the machine itself.’

‘How do you know this stuff?’ Paula asked. ‘You just said, you’ve never worked for Mrs Levinson.’

‘I wrote a dissertation about medical information sharing in a digital age for my BSc,’ Elinor said. ‘I’m an ambitious junior doctor. I’m addicted to qualifications.’

‘There must be a back-up,’ Paula said. ‘You wouldn’t rely on just one computer for that.’

‘I’m sure there must be. But I have no idea where it is and I don’t imagine anyone outside the ICT team at the HFEA would know.’ Elinor stirred her coffee thoughtfully.

‘She could have told us all that, but she didn’t,’ Paula complained. ‘She just sent us off with a flea in our ear. She wouldn’t even tell us how the same sperm ended up in Birmingham.’ Paula bit into her panini savagely.

‘I can tell you that. It’s no big secret. We’ve got guidelines that say we should avoid producing more than ten live births from the same donor. The reason being that you don’t want to compromise the gene pool with hundreds of kids running around with the same gametes. But you don’t necessarily want ten kids of approximately the same age and with the same father in the same town. Because the psychologists tell us we’re more likely to fall in love with an unknown sibling than a stranger.’

‘Really? That’s wild.’

‘Wild but true. So if you’ve got a particularly fertile donation, it’s common after half a dozen successful pregnancies to swap sperm with a clinic in another city. I imagine that’s what happened here.’

‘That makes sense.’ Paula gave Elinor a frank look. ‘You’re doing quite a job of making yourself indispensable.’

‘What I live for.’ She was still looking pensive. ‘I know this might sound a little off the wall . . . But are you guys thinking that the sperm donor might be the killer?’

Wondering where she was going with this, Paula said, ‘Our profiler thinks that’s a possibility.’

‘I don’t know much about these things, but it seems to me that someone who’s going around killing people might have come to your attention before,’ Elinor said. ‘If he has, wouldn’t he be on the national DNA database?’

‘I suppose so,’ Paula said. ‘But their DNA is different.’

‘I know. But I vaguely remember reading about a cold case where they got the killer after twenty years because his nephew was convicted of something and the database flagged it up.’ Elinor pulled out her iPhone and connected to the internet, turning the screen so they could both see it.

‘So how do you know this? Another dissertation?’ Paula teased as Elinor navigated to Google and typed dna murder relative cold case into the search terms box.

‘Dustbin mind. I have a desperate accumulation of trivia in my head. I’m your girl on pub quiz night.’ She scrolled through the results. ‘There, that’s it.’

‘“Man convicted fourteen years after crime by relative’s DNA sample,”’ Paula read. As she read on, she grinned. ‘Good to see you’re not infallible.’

‘So it was fourteen years, not twenty.’

‘And rape, not murder,’ Paula said. ‘But I take your point.’ She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Now I have to go and talk to Stacey.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘And meet a colleague from Worcester.’

Elinor walked her to the door. ‘My twenty minutes are up too. Thank you.’

‘What? For mercilessly picking your brains?’

‘For getting me off the ward and reminding me there’s life out here.’ She leaned into Paula and kissed her, warm breath tickling her ear. ‘Go and catch your killer. I have plans for you when this is all over.’

A delicious shiver unsettled Paula. ‘There’s an incentive, if I ever heard one.’

When Carol finally made it back to her squad room, she found Tony sitting in the visitor’s chair in her office. He was leaning back, fingers interlocked behind his head and feet on the wastepaper bin, eyes closed. ‘I’m glad someone’s got time for a nap round here,’ she said, shrugging off her coat and kicking off her shoes. She snapped the blinds closed, opened her desk drawer and took out a miniature of vodka.

Tony straightened up. ‘I was thinking, not napping.’ He watched her open the vodka, look at him, then screw the cap back on and throw it back in the drawer. She glared at him and he held his hands up in a gesture of appeasement. ‘I didn’t say a word,’ he protested.

‘You didn’t have to. You can do sanctimonious without moving an eyebrow.’

‘How did it go with Blake?’

‘No secrets round here, are there?’ Carol fell into her chair. ‘This job sometimes offers moments of pure pleasure. It was a beautiful thing to watch him wrestle between his smouldering desire to save money and his burning desire to kick off his time here with a brilliant coup. Even more beautiful because he made the right decision. If we can identify the next victim, we get to go with full surveillance.’

‘Well done. I also hear that DS Ambrose has found us a suspect. ‘

Carol had had more time to think about Patterson’s phone call. ‘Well, he’s found a possibility. It’s based on a lot of assumptions. First, that Fiona Cameron’s geographic profile is on the money. Second, that the killer used his own vehicle. And third, that Warren Davy isn’t just off having a jolly with his mistress.’

‘Good points, all of them. But I still think Davy’s a strong possible. If Stacey can identify the next victim, that’s likely to be a more definite way to go. Do we know anything about Davy yet?’

Carol brought her monitor to life and clicked on her message queue. There was a brief from Stacey. ‘He’s got no form. He’s got one credit card which he seems to use for business only. No store cards. No loyalty cards. She says it’s a typical profile for someone in his field. He knows how easy it is to breach security so he keeps his presence to a minimum. His phone hasn’t been switched on for days. The last time it was on was when Seth disappeared on Central Station. And it pinged the nearest tower to . . . Care to guess?’

‘Central Station,’ Tony said.

‘Got it in one. So he’s definitely elusive.’

‘Has anyone spoken to the girlfriend about him?’

Carol shook her head. ‘I don’t want to spook her into warning him off. He’s perfectly placed to fake or steal an identity. If he chose to run now, we’d struggle to find him. He could go to ground anywhere. Here or abroad.’

Tony shook his head. ‘He’s not going to disappear. He’s got a mission and he’s not going to stop until he’s finished. Unless we stop him, that is.’

‘So what’s his mission?’

Tony jumped out of the chair and began to pace in the confines of the office. ‘He thinks he’s the bad seed. Something’s happened to fill him with fear and self-hatred. Something that he thinks is passed on through the blood. I don’t think it’s as straightforward as a medical condition, although that is possible. But he’s determined to weed out the bad seed. To be the end of the line. He’s going to kill all his biological children. And then he’s going to kill himself.’

Carol stared at him, horrified. ‘How many?’

‘I don’t know. Can we find out?’

‘Apparently not. According to the extremely unhelpful consultant at Bradfield Cross, all information about anonymous donors is totally off limits. So bloody off limits that, frankly, you wonder why they keep it. If they’re never going to use it, why not just destroy it? Then nobody could ever abuse it.’ Carol took the vodka from her desk drawer again. She also took out a small can of tonic water. She poured them both into the empty water glass on her desk. ‘You want a drink?’ she said defiantly.

‘Oh no, not me. I’m high enough with all that’s buzzing in my brain right now. Because there’s something not quite right with this picture,’ he said.

‘But it makes sense of everything we know. I can’t think of another theory that fits the facts.’ She sipped her drink and felt some of the tension in her neck start to ease.

‘Neither can I. But that doesn’t mean I’m right.’ He turned sharply and stopped by her desk. ‘If this information’s so hard to get hold of, how did he find it out? And what happened to set him off on this crusade? He’s spent ages grooming his victims. How has he kept it all together?’

‘Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe his girlfriend’s been covering his back at work.’ She knocked back the rest of her drink and sighed in satisfaction. ‘God, that’s better.’

‘I wish I could talk to her,’ he muttered.

‘I know. But we have to hang fire till we see what Stacey can do.’

‘I appreciate that. But I’ve almost never come across a serial offender who’s had a sustained emotional relationship. If we’re right about Warren Davy, there are so many questions she could answer. So many insights she could give us.’ He sighed.

‘You’ll get your chance.’

Tony grinned. ‘I’ll be like a kid in a sweet shop.’

Carol shook her head, amused. ‘You’re weird.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that when there are people like Warren Davy out there. Compared to him, I’m normality itself.’

She laughed out loud. ‘I wouldn’t bank on it, Tony.’