Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 22

Friday was the best day of Pippa Thomas’s week. Since she’d cut her working week at the surgery to four days, she’d found a space in her life for her. One whole day when she didn’t have to poke and prod, drill and fill to improve other people’s smiles. One whole day when Huw was at work and the kids were at school and she was free. And she loved it.

But most of all, she loved the Friday Morning Club. There were five of them. Monica, who worked afternoons and evenings at the Citizens Advice Bureau; Pam who looked after her demented mother and chose to spend her limited respite budget to liberate her for Friday mornings; Denise, who was a Lady Who Lunched except on Fridays; and Aoife, who ran the front of house at the Bradfield Royal Theatre. Rain or shine, they met in the car park of the Shining Hour inn, high up on the moors between Bradfield and Rochdale. And rain or shine, they would run a dozen miles over some of the roughest terrain in the north of England. They’d first met on a Breast Cancer Fun Run one Sunday in Grattan Park. ‘Talk about oxy-moron, ‘ Denise had muttered as the five of them searched in vain for a toilet that was unlocked. ‘Fun and breast cancer. Yeah, right.’ They’d ended up acting as lookouts for each other as they squatted in the rhododendrons to empty their middle-aged bladders before they could run. By the end of the afternoon, the Friday Morning Club had been born.

That Friday it was a bright blue day with an exfoliating edge to the north-east wind that knifed its way across the Pennine moors. Pippa hugged herself inside her lightweight top. Soon she’d feel that delirious sense of her body moving freely through this amazing landscape. As soon as they set off Pippa assumed the lead. Denise took up position on her shoulder and they exchanged a few catch-up sentences. But soon they needed all their breath to feed oxygen to their muscles for the long slow climb up to the summit of Bickerslow.

Head down, Pippa felt her quads stretch and swell as they carried her onwards. No time for the view now. All her focus was on reaching the marker cairn, where they would wheel west and find the shelter of the hill’s shoulder and metalled surface, a brief respite from rough going. They’d barely started up the single-track road that dribbled across the moor top when Pippa stopped in her tracks. Denise cannoned into her, almost sending them both flying. ‘What the hell is it?’ Denise demanded.

Pippa said nothing. She just pointed at the soaking bundle lying in a gully by the road. In spite of the bag that covered one end of the filthy cloth, there was no doubting that it was the remains of a human being.

Friday would never be the same again.

Paula helped herself to a mug of the coffee someone had already brewed and parked herself behind her desk. Although it was only half past nine and the chief had rearranged the morning briefing for ten, the team were already here. At least, she thought Stacey was here. The battery of screens was so effective that she was almost invisible. But the faint tap and click of mouse and keys indicated her presence. As usual. Paula sometimes wondered if Stacey ever went home. Or even if she had a home to go to. Paula had never worked with anyone more secretive than Stacey. One way or another, she’d been in the home of everyone on the squad except for her. It wasn’t that she was unfriendly. Just from another planet. Though lately, Paula thought she’d seen signs of Stacey thawing a little where Sam was concerned. Nothing major. Just making him the occasional brew and actually volunteering information about where he was and what he might be doing. Which she never did about anyone else.

Paula reminded herself there were more important things to think about this morning than her colleagues’ personal lives. Every police station she had ever worked in had been a gossip factory. It was as if they had to make up for the unpleasantness of most of their work with an obsessive curiosity about the possible secrets of everyone else in the place. Overheated imaginations ran riot, perhaps because they were supposed to be bound so tight by fact in their professional lives.

She switched on her computer, but before she could check the overnights for any further progress, Sam Evans, freshly returned from the Lake District, perched on the corner of her desk. He was fractionally too close, just marginally in her personal space. It was a thing that men did unconsciously to diminish women, she thought. To put us on the back foot.

But with Sam, it never bothered her. He was one of those few men who were entirely relaxed around lesbians. There was nothing threatening in his closeness. If Paula was honest, she liked Sam. She knew he was nakedly ambitious, always out for number one. What amused her was that he thought nobody apart from the chief had sussed him. And if you knew what somebody’s weakness was, it was easy to circumvent it. She liked Sam’s quick mind. And, curiously, she liked his smell. His cologne was spicy, with a hint of lime, but it didn’t completely erase the maleness of his natural odour. Mostly it was the smell of individual women that pleased Paula, but Sam was a rare exception and she knew it made her more susceptible to his charm.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Ten o’clock briefing in the middle of a high-profile murder. What’s going on with the guv’nor?’

Paula pulled a face. ‘No idea. I assumed she was briefing the incident room at Northern about Daniel Morrison and talking to Central about the search for Seth Viner.’

Sam shook his head. ‘She was at Northern at half past eight. Sorted out the actions for the day and she was out the door by ten to nine. My spies tell me she’s not been at Central yet.’

Kevin was openly eavesdropping on their conversation. ‘And she was on the missing list yesterday morning. When you called in from the crime scene, she wasn’t here.’ He went to refill his coffee then joined Paula and Sam.

‘Where was she?’ Paula asked.

‘Don’t know. It took her a while to get there, though. So not anywhere in the immediate vicinity.’

‘And she wasn’t around yesterday evening,’ Sam said.

‘She was,’ Paula said. ‘When I texted her about Jessica Morrison’s heart attack, she was there soon as.’

‘Earlier, I mean. I came back here, thinking she’d be around. I’ve got news and I wanted to talk to her, but she wasn’t here. Stacey said she’d been and gone. Not a word about where.’ Sam folded his arms confidentially and said, ‘You think its lurve? You think her and Tony have finally noticed what everybody else has known for years?’

Paula snorted. ‘Give me a break. Those two are never going to be an item. He’d analyse it to death. He’d have diagrams all over his whiteboard.’

‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said. ‘She can be very imposing. Very commanding. If anybody can get Tony to shut up shop and pay attention to her, it’s the guv’nor.’

‘Maybe that’s the real reason he’s not working this case,’ Sam said. ‘Maybe it’s got nothing to do with budget. You know what she’s like. She wouldn’t have him working with us if they were getting it on in their spare time. She’d see it as a conflict. And she’d knock it into touch. She’s a law unto herself when it comes to running a case, but as far as internal discipline is concerned, she doesn’t like it when we step out of line.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ Kevin muttered. Years ago, Carol had been instrumental in his disgrace and demotion. That she had also been the agent of his rehabilitation made him feel he would never escape being in her debt. He’d tried hard to like her, but he’d never quite succeeded. ‘If that’s what’s going on, she’s chosen the worst possible time for it. With Blake on our backs, we need all the help we can get. I know I used to think Tony was a weird fuck, that he didn’t have any place on our team. But I’ve learned different. And I think we need him now.’

As he spoke, Sam straightened up, cleared his throat and said loudly, ‘Morning, ma’am.’

Carol swept in, coat spreading around her as she strode to the conference table. How much had she heard? Paula wondered. ‘I couldn’t agree more, Kevin,’ Carol said, dumping bags and coat on the floor by her chair. ‘But Mr Blake says we need to cut our budget. So if we need expertise, we have to find it on the cheap. Apparently the National Crime Faculty has some baby profilers they’d like to try out in the field. Halle-fucking-lujah.’ She looked at them all in turn and grinned complicity. ‘Is there any coffee in this godforsaken hole?’

Five minutes later, they were all settled in their usual positions. Paula couldn’t help wondering whether Sam was right. Or half-right, maybe. Perhaps there was a man in Carol’s life. Just not Tony. One who brought out her appetite for battle, apparently, if her energy this morning was anything to go by. She took their reports one by one, filleting the key elements and suggesting new avenues of approach. But it was clear by the end of their accounts that there was almost nothing to take them any further forward in the case of Daniel’s murder and not much more as far as Seth’s disappearance was concerned.

Kevin had followed up on Asif Khan’s tale of the comedy producer who was looking for young talent. He’d spoken to commissioning editors at the BBC in Manchester, Glasgow, London and Cardiff, but nobody had ever had a pitch remotely like this. And there was certainly nothing in the pipeline that might fit even loosely the version Daniel had given his friend. ‘So it’s a dead end.’ He pushed his notebook from him. ‘To be honest, I thought it’d go nowhere, but you gotta cover the bases.’

‘You do,’ Carol agreed. ‘And we do it better than most.’

Paula lifted her hand a few inches. ‘Can I just check, chief? Are we working on the basis that these two cases are linked? Daniel and Seth?’

Carol nodded. ‘Good question, Paula. I think we have to acknowledge that there’s a strong probability we’re looking at one perp. We need to be cautious at this stage. Because coincidences do happen. And so do copycats.’

‘But from what Seth’s girlfriend said to me, this JJ’s been stalking Seth online for ages. Surely that precludes a copycat?’ Paula said.

‘That’s making a lot of assumptions,’ Sam said, amazingly up to speed for a man who’d been a hundred miles away for days. He was such a hot dog, Paula thought with a trace of resentment. ‘It’s assuming Seth’s been abducted, not just gone underground for some reason nobody knows about or nobody’s letting on about. It’s also assuming that, if he has been abducted, it’s the person he’s been talking to online, this JJ. Who might just be straight up.’ He held up a hand to still their noisy protests. ‘He might be. It’s possible. I’m just agreeing with the guv’nor. We need to keep an open mind. And it could be an opportunist copycat.’

‘No, it couldn’t,’ Kevin said. ‘Seth was already missing before we found Daniel’s body.’

‘We’d released Daniel to the media as a missing person,’ Stacey pointed out. ‘It’s possible.’

Paula watched Carol cover her eyes with her hand and wished she’d kept her mouth shut. ‘Point taken,’ she said hastily.

Carol looked up and gave her a faint smile. ‘You lot are very feisty this morning,’ she said.

‘Picking it up from you, boss,’ Kevin said. ‘So where do we go from here?’

‘Let’s hear what Stacey has to say first,’ Carol said.

Stacey treated them all to a neat little smile. ‘I’ve not had much luck with facial-recognition software and the city-centre CCTVs. They’re too low-res, and the angles are pretty crap, frankly.’

‘I sometimes wonder why we bother with all this surveillance, ‘ Carol said. ‘Whenever we need it, nine times out of ten it’s as much use as a chocolate teapot.’

‘If Stacey was running the game, none of us would have a single secret left,’ Sam said.

Stacey looked surprised and pleased at what she took as a compliment. ‘The cameras would work a lot better, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘As far as the other stuff goes, RigMarole seemed to be the place to start. I’ve had access to Seth’s computer and there’s a lot of chat with this JJ character. On the surface, it’s all pretty innocuous, and very similar to shedloads of other online chatter. But he is definitely holding out a hand to Seth. And the interesting thing is that his personal pages on Rig have disappeared. They were closed down the afternoon Seth went missing. Which gives more weight to Paula’s assumption, I’m afraid.’

‘Have you been able to find out any more about this JJ?’ Carol asked.

‘I spoke to RigMarole yesterday. They say they don’t own the data posted by individuals on their personal pages. They say they don’t have access to it either. They say we need a warrant and that’s no guarantee that we can access anything on their server.’

‘Bastards,’ Kevin said.

‘So I went in anyway.’

Carol rolled her eyes. ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell me this stuff, Stacey.’

‘I have to tell you, otherwise you can’t distinguish between what’s evidential and what’s stuff we’re not supposed to know.’ There was a certain sense to Stacey’s logic, Paula thought. Shame it made Carol green around the gills.

‘What did you find that I’m not supposed to know?’ Carol said, her earlier bounce starting to fade.

‘All the personal data JJ used to set up the account is bullshit. None of it checks out. And he used a popmail account that doesn’t need any ID to set up. So, in essence, he’s a straw man.’

‘Another dead end,’ Paula said. ‘He’s a clever bastard, this one.’

‘Possibly too clever by half,’ Stacey said. ‘There is one strange thing, though. You all know who Alan Turing is, right? The guy who cracked the Enigma code and basically invented modern computers?’

‘Who killed himself because of the shame of being prosecuted for being homosexual,’ Paula said. ‘In case you’d forgotten that bit.’

Kevin groaned. ‘Not even the boss was in the job back then, Paula. What about Alan Turing, Stacey?’

‘There’s a famous photograph of him as a young man, still a student, I think, running at an athletics meeting. Anyway, JJ has cropped the head shot out of this picture, cleaned it up a bit and used it as his photo on his personal page. I’m not sure what that tells us, but it’s not random, is it?’

This is when we need Tony, Paula thought. They were capable of making guesses and advancing hypotheses, but they had no way of weighing them against each other. ‘So, do we think JJ’s gay, then?’ she asked.

‘Or a geek,’ Sam said. ‘Would you say, Stacey?’

‘Well, Turing’s a bit of a geek hero,’ she said. ‘But it might just be a red herring. If he’s that clever.’

‘Did we get anywhere with Daniel?’ Carol asked. ‘I know we don’t have his webbook, but I wondered if you’d been able to access his email account at all?’

Stacey looked slightly shamefaced. ‘Well, while I was poking around behind the scenes at Rig, I thought I’d check out Daniel’s account.’

Carol closed her eyes momentarily. ‘Of course you did. And what did you find?’

‘The person who’s been talking to him in a sidebar about the comedy circuit calls himself KK.’

‘Oh fuck,’ someone breathed.

‘And KK’s pages were cancelled the afternoon Daniel went missing. He used a different Turing photo, with a Photoshopped haircut so he doesn’t look so 1940s. Sorry to burst your balloon, Sam, but I think there’s not much room for doubt. We’re looking for the same person in both cases.’

They all wore the same look of desperation. ‘It’s not very likely that Seth’s still alive, is it?’ It was Paula who said what they were all thinking.

‘We still have to operate as if he might be,’ Carol said firmly. ‘But the one thing we all know from past experience is that a killer like this isn’t going to stop at two. Sam, do I take it the fact that you’re back means nothing much is happening up in Wastwater?’

Sam looked pleased at having the attention turned back on him. ‘Um, no. The opposite, in fact. But I thought you’d like to hear what’s happened face to face. Plus what I need to do, I can do better from here.’

Carol gave him a hard stare. He’s on the verge of undermining her authority and I’m not sure he even knows it. Paula sat back and waited to see whether Sam would save himself or not. ‘What has happened?’ Carol said, all the warmth gone from her voice.

‘The kind of result you can’t argue with,’ he said. ‘Late yesterday afternoon the divers pulled a plastic-wrapped bundle out of Wastwater, in one of the exact places Stacey had identified. ‘ He paused to beam at them all.

‘Do I take it we have a victim?’ Carol said repressively, reminding them all that finding a body could never be cause for celebration.

The realisation that he’d struck entirely the wrong note dawned visibly on Sam. He rearranged his face and cleared his throat. ‘More than one victim, I’m afraid.’

‘Mother and daughter, wasn’t it?’ Carol said.

‘Yes. And they did find the remains of a very young child. But—’ He couldn’t help himself. He just had to pause for dramatic effect.

‘But?’ Carol was definitely on the wrong side of cross now.

‘But that’s not all. There was a third set of remains. If that’s Danuta Barnes and her daughter, there’s another person down there with them. And it’s probably a bloke.’