Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 14

Paula watched another adolescent boy slouch out of the small room they’d been allocated to conduct interviews in. ‘Were you like that when you were fourteen?’ she asked Kevin.

‘Are you kidding? My mother would have slapped me if I’d spoken to an adult like that. What I can’t decide is whether it’s a generation thing or a class thing. Seems to me that working-class lads have got an attitude too, but there’s something different about these pillocks. I don’t know if it’s a sense of entitlement or what, but they’re really pissing me off.’

Paula knew exactly what he meant. She’d been in schools after kids had died in knife attacks, the sudden nightmare that seemed to happen out of nowhere, almost at random. She’d felt that sense of shock that permeated the corridors, seen the anxiety on teenage faces as they wondered whether death was going to touch them next, heard the fear under the defiance in pupils’ voices. There was none of that here. It was as if Daniel’s death was something that had happened far from them - an item on the news, something parents talked about as a remote threat. The only person who’d seemed at all upset was Daniel’s form teacher. Even the headmaster of William Makepeace had behaved as if this were a minor inconvenience rather than a tragedy. ‘If I had kids, this is the last place I’d be sending them,’ she said.

‘You ever think about it? Having children, I mean.’ Kevin cocked his head to one side, considering her.

Paula puffed her cheeks and blew her breath out. ‘Nothing like the big questions, eh, Sarge? To be honest, I’ve never felt the ticking of the biological clock. What about you? You like being a dad?’

He looked surprised at having his question turned back on him. ‘It’s the best thing and it’s the worst thing,’ he said slowly. ‘The way I love my kids, Ruby especially - it’s total, unconditional, forever. But the downside is the fear of loss. Cases like this, where parents end up burying their kids? It’s like a nail in your heart.’

A knock at the door interrupted their exchange and another teenage boy walked in without waiting to be invited. Slim and dark, he was the shortest lad they’d seen all morning by several inches. Perfect skin the colour of roasted almonds, a thick mop of glossy dark hair, a Viking longship prow of a nose and a rosebud mouth - an off-kilter arrangement of features that demanded a second look. ‘I’m Asif Khan,’ he said, dropping into a chair. Hands in pockets, legs thrust straight out and crossed at the ankles. ‘And you’re the cops.’

Here we go again. Kevin introduced them both and got straight down to business. ‘You know why we’re here. Was Daniel a friend of yours?’ He wasn’t expecting much; the boys identified as having been close to Daniel had been the first half-dozen sent in to talk to them. There had been another eight or nine since, none admitting to more than acquaintance.

‘We was bruvvahs, innit?’ Asif said.

Paula leaned right forward in her chair, her face close to the boy. ‘Do me a favour, Asif. Cut it out. You’re a pupil at William Makepeace, not Kenton Vale. Your daddy’s a doctor, not a market trader. Don’t give me the fake street shit. Talk to us properly, with respect, or we’ll be doing this at the police station, on our turf, on our terms.’

Asif’s eyes widened in shock. ‘You can’t talk to me like that - I’m a minor. I should have an adult present. We’re only talking to you because the school said it would be best.’

Paula shrugged. ‘Fine by me. Let’s get your dad down to the station too, see how impressed he is with his boy’s big talk.’

Asif held Paula’s stare for another few seconds, then dropped one shoulder and half-turned away from her. ‘OK, OK,’ he muttered. ‘Daniel and I were mates.’

‘Nobody else seems to think so,’ Kevin said as Paula retreated back into her chair.

‘I didn’t mix with that bunch of wankers Daniel hung around with, if that’s what you mean. Me and Daniel, we did other stuff together.’

‘What kind of stuff?’ Kevin said, his imagination stumbling over the possibilities.

Asif uncrossed his feet and tucked them under his chair. ‘Comedy,’ he said, apparently embarrassed.

‘Comedy?’

He fidgeted in his seat. ‘We both wanted to be stand-ups, OK?’

One of the other lads had mentioned Daniel’s interest in comedy, but hadn’t mentioned this ambition. ‘That’s pretty wild,’ Paula said. ‘Not on the curriculum here, I bet.’

A ghost of a smile lit Asif’s eyes. ‘Not until we get our BBC3 series and make it respectable,’ he said. ‘Then it’ll be right up there in drama class.’

‘So you and Daniel shared this ambition. How did you find out you both wanted to do that?’ Kevin asked.

‘My cousin, he manages a club in town. They have a comedy night once a month. My cousin, he lets me in, even though he shouldn’t. So I was going in one night, and there’s Daniel arguing with the guy on the door, making out he’s eighteen. Which he wasn’t going to get away with, not even with the fake ID. So I ask him what’s going on and he says there’s one of the acts he really wants to see, he heard him on the radio and he wants to see his routine. So I talk my cousin into letting him in, and we get talking and that’s when I find out he totally wants to get into the comedy game. So we start meeting up every couple of weeks round my house, trying out our material on each other.’ He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘He was pretty funny, Daniel. He had this great routine about adults who try to be, like, down with da kids. And he had this, like, presence.’ He shook his head. ‘This is so bad.’

‘We think Daniel went to Temple Fields after school on Tuesday,’ Kevin said. ‘Did he say anything to you about meeting anybody there?’

Asif frowned. ‘No.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

‘Well, he didn’t say anything about any specific meeting,’ Asif said. ‘But the last time we got together, last week, he said he’d met somebody online who was setting up some radio show to showcase young comedy talent. Like, kids who were too young to get on stage on the club circuit.’ He shrugged. ‘Kids like us. I asked if he could get me in on it and he said, sure, but he wanted to meet the guy first, get his feet under the table.’ He looked suddenly miserable. ‘I got a bit pissed off with him, I thought maybe he was trying to cut me out, keep it for himself, like. But he said, no, it wasn’t like that, we were mates and he still owed me for getting him into the club in the first place. He just wanted to make the first contact, sort it all out, then bring me in afterwards.’ Sudden light dawned and his eyes widened. ‘Shit. You think that’s what got him killed?’

‘It’s too early in the investigation to say,’ Kevin said hastily. ‘At this stage, we don’t know what might be relevant. So it would be helpful if you could tell us anything about this contact of Daniel’s. How did they meet, do you know?’

Asif nodded. ‘It was on RigMarole. You know, the networking site? They were both in a Gavin and Stacey mosh pit - that’s what we call a sort of fan group. They liked a lot of the same stuff so they got talking in a private sidebar and that’s when it came out about him being a comedy producer.’

‘Did Daniel mention his name?’

‘No. That was one of the things I got pissed off about. He wouldn’t even tell me the guy’s name. He was, like, the guy didn’t want it spread around in case somebody jumped the gun on him. So I never knew his name. Only that he made programmes at the BBC in Manchester. Supposedly,’ he added.

‘You weren’t convinced?’ Kevin asked.

‘It just seemed like a funny way to go about things,’ he said. ‘I mean, he’d never heard Daniel do his schtick. How could he know he was good on his feet? But you couldn’t tell Daniel anything. He was, like, his own law.’

‘Did Daniel say where they were meeting? Or when?’ Kevin tried.

‘I told you. He was acting like it was a state secret. No way he was going to let the details slip. What I told you, that’s all I know.’

It was, Paula thought, a start. Not much of one, but a start at least.

Ambrose felt his spirits give a little lift when he walked into Patterson’s office to find his boss closeted with Gary Harcup. He hadn’t been looking forward to attempting to put an upbeat gloss on the odd little profiler from Bradfield. But with Gary here, there would be something to divert Patterson’s attention. There might even be a bit of something to get their teeth into.

Looking at Patterson, Ambrose saw a man who desperately needed some good news. He was pale and wan, his eyes heavy-lidded and baggy, his hair lifeless and stiff. It was always the same when they weren’t moving forward fast enough on a case. Patterson absorbed all the pressure and all the pain, till you thought he was going to crack up. Then something inside him would shift, he would see possibilities begin to open up and suddenly he’d be upbeat and full of confidence again. It was just a matter of waiting it out. ‘Come on in,’ Patterson said, waving Ambrose forward and gesturing to a chair. ‘Gary’s just this minute got here.’

Ambrose nodded to the chubby computer expert, who looked as dishevelled as ever. Hair awry, T-shirt crumpled, something adhering to his beard that Ambrose didn’t want to examine too closely; he didn’t exactly inspire confidence. But he’d come through for them often enough in the past for Ambrose not to care how he looked. Maybe he should suspend his judgement on Tony Hill. Not leap to conclusions just because the guy seemed kind of unorthodox in the way he approached things. He should wait and see if he too came up with the goods the way Gary did. ‘All right, Gary?’ he said.

Gary nodded so vigorously his belly shook. ‘Doing good, Alvin. Doing good.’

‘So, what have you got for us?’ Patterson asked. He sat back in his chair, gently tapping the desk with a pencil.

Gary produced a couple of transparent plastic envelopes from his backpack. Each contained a few sheets of paper. ‘It’s a bit of a mixed bag. This—’ he slapped the first ‘—this is a list of the machines I was able to identify. I only got about half of them. The others are out there in no man’s land, passed on second- or third-hand.’

Patterson took the papers from the folder and scanned the top sheet. When he’d done, he passed it to Ambrose. It didn’t take them long to look through the list of seventeen machines Gary had identified. Internet cafés, public libraries and one airport. ‘It’s all over the place,’ Patterson said. ‘Worcester, Solihull, Birmingham, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Telford, Stafford, Cannock, Stoke, Stone, Holmes Chapel, Knutsford, Stockport, Manchester Airport, Oldham, Bradfield, Leeds . . .’

‘I wasn’t completely accurate when I said he used a different machine every time,’ Gary said. ‘When I went back and analysed all the messages we’ve still got, I found some of them were double or triple use. The ones he went back to twice are Worcester, Bradfield and Stoke. He used Manchester Airport three times. But they’re all public-access machines.’

‘It’s the motorway network,’ Ambrose said, seeing the roads unfurl in his mind’s eye like veins on a forearm. ‘M5, M42, M6, M60, M62. These are all easy access off the motorway. If he was stalking Jennifer, Worcester was one end of his journey. ‘ He looked up, eyes bright with a fresh idea. ‘And Leeds was the other end. Maybe that’s where he lives.’

‘Or maybe that’s where his next target lives,’ Patterson said. ‘He used Manchester Airport three times. Maybe that’s the one that’s nearest to where he actually lives. You need to run this past our profiler, see what he thinks. Don’t they have some kind of computer program for figuring out where the killer lives? I’m sure I heard about that when they had that pair of random snipers in America.’

Gary looked dubious. ‘I don’t know if geographic profiling would work on something like this. Plus, it’s a pretty specialist field.’

Suddenly animated, Patterson sat up straight and waved a hand at the papers. ‘Get him in, let him have a look. That’s what we’re paying him for.’

Ambrose almost said something, then realised it wasn’t the moment to raise Hill’s demands to see the material on his ground. He’d have to wait till Gary had left. ‘What’s the other stuff, Gary?’ he asked.

‘Not quite so good,’ Gary said, placing the other file on the desk. It looked pretty thin. ‘But before I get to that, I wanted to tell you one other thing I did try. I thought that since ZZ was using Rig to contact Jennifer, he must have a page of his own. It turns out that he did, but the page was deactivated around four o’clock on the afternoon Jennifer disappeared. He was burning his bridges behind him.’

‘Is there any way of getting at what was on the page?’

Gary shrugged. ‘You’d need to get Rig on board. I don’t think they’d give you anything without a warrant. And you’ve got a whole issue around data protection. They don’t actually own the personal data people put up there. After the trouble Facebook got into over ownership of what’s on the member pages, all the networking sites have been very careful to put up Chinese walls between their customers and themselves. So if there is some residual information on Rig’s servers, you might not be able to get at it even with a warrant. Not without fighting their lawyers.’

‘That’s insane,’ Patterson protested.

‘That’s the way it goes. These companies, they don’t want to be seen as a pushover when the cops come calling. There’s all sorts of stuff going on in their private sidebars. If you guys can just walk in and take what you want, they’re going to have no clients in about five minutes flat.’

‘God help us,’ Patterson muttered. ‘You’d think they wanted to encourage murderers and paedophiles to use their sites.’

‘Only if they’re got valid credit cards and like to shop online,’ Ambrose said. ‘Thanks anyway, Gary. I’ll talk to the people at Rig and see what they have to say. So, how did you get on with the fragments you found on the hard disk?’

‘I’ve managed to pull out some of the last conversation between Jennifer and ZZ. The one she erased. It’s only partial, but it’s something. There’s two copies in there,’ he added.

Thin divided by two, then. Ambrose took the two sheets of paper Patterson offered him.

ZZ: . . . 4 . . . king 2 me . . . priv8 here &no . . .

Jeni: Y u want 2 be . . .

ZZ: . . . ke I sd . . . BIG secr . . .

Jeni: no i don’t

ZZ: u don’t no wo . . .

Jeni: . . . noth . . .

ZZ: . . . i no truth . . .

Jeni: . . . ow . . . my biz

ZZ: cuz i no wh . . . 2 find stuf . . . idd . . . aces t look 4

inf . . . u don . . .

Jeni: . . . makin it up?

ZZ: cuz when i . . . no its tr . . . ul c . . .

Jeni: . . . so spill

ZZ: take a deep breth

Jeni: u mak . . . nd big deal

ZZ: ur . . . ur real . . .

Jeni: . . . fkd in t hed

ZZ: i can prove . . .

Jeni: LIAR

ZZ: . . . et me 2moro . . . @ ca . . . el u, show . . .

Jeni: . . . lieve u?

ZZ: cuz we need 2 . . . 30 @ c . . . nt tel . . .

Jeni: . . . b ther. U btr not b ly . . .

Patterson frowned. ‘It’s not exactly easy to read,’ he said. ‘It’s hardly bloody English. It’s like a different language.’

‘It is. It’s called textspeak. Your Lily would be able to read that like it was a newspaper,’ Ambrose said. ‘Basically, ZZ is saying he knows Jeni’s big secret. He says something that Jennifer is totally pissed off about. She says he’s fucked in the head and then she shouts that he’s a liar. That’s what the capital letters mean, she’s shouting.’

‘Mental,’ Patterson muttered.

‘Then I think he’s saying they should meet tomorrow. He gives her a time and place and tells her not to tell. And she says she will be there and he better not be lying,’ Gary said.

‘So where’s he telling her to meet?’ Patterson said, pink with frustration.

Gary shrugged. ‘Who knows? Somewhere beginning with “ca”. Café? Car park? Castle Street? The cathedral?’

‘You can’t narrow it down any more than that?’

Gary looked hurt. ‘You’ve got no idea, have you? It’s taken me more than a week to get this much. I had to beg a mate for some software that’s still in development to get this far. Given what there was on that computer, it’s a miracle we’ve got this much. At least now you can rule out a lot of places where she didn’t go.’

Patterson chewed the skin by his thumbnail in an act of suppressed rage. ‘I’m sorry, Gary,’ he grunted. ‘I know you’ve done your best. Thank you. Send us your bill.’

Gary extracted himself from the chair with an attempt at dignity, grabbed his backpack and marched to the door. ‘Good luck,’ was his parting shot.

‘He’s an annoying little twat, isn’t he?’ Patterson said as the door closed.

‘But he does deliver.’

‘Why else do you think I give him houseroom? So, we need to narrow down everywhere in the city that begins with “ca” and check what CCTV cover there is from nine days ago. Plenty there for the team to get stuck into.’ Patterson was vibrant with energy now. He’d turned the corner from despair to optimism. It was, Ambrose thought, the perfect moment to pitch him on Tony Hill’s behalf.

‘Since we’re going to be flat out on this,’ he began, ‘we’re not going to want any extra bodies cluttering the place up. Are we?’