Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 23

Tony stared down at his shoes, shoulders in a defensive hunch. ‘Thanks, Alvin,’ he mumbled, feeling like a barely tolerated idiot. ‘I appreciate you coming down to vouch for me.’

Ambrose had a look of angry disgust on his face. ‘I stuck my neck out to get the DI to bring you on board. And now this? This is the stuff of legend. And not in a good way. Now I look like a complete twat for even suggesting you. That’ll be my rep all over this force now. “Alvin Ambrose, the twat who hired the profiler that got arrested for being an intruder in his own house.” Thanks, Doc.’

‘I mean it, I’m really sorry.’

‘Why didn’t you just tell me about your dad?’

Tony sighed. ‘He wasn’t my dad. That’s the problem, really.’ Explaining himself to Ambrose, that was the worst of it. He’d spent his life building walls against the world, keeping to himself the things he wanted no one else to know. And all it took to bring the walls crashing down was one act of madness. This must be how his patients felt.

It had been the stuff of comedy, though there had actually been nothing funny about it. The screams of the estate agent had galvanised Tony, sending him diving out of bed in his boxers to grab his clothes. Unfortunately, it had also galvanised the house viewers, who had had the presence of mind to call the police and report an intruder.

The police had arrived in an amazingly short time. Tony was barely dressed, the estate agent still freaked out, the viewers with her on the other side of the door, refusing to let him out. In vain he had tried to explain that he had every right to be in the house. The fact that he had keys cut no ice with the cops. What made sense to them was the estate agent’s story that he’d viewed the house as a prospective buyer the previous day and now he was claiming he lived there. He had to admit, he’d have believed her. He’d have thought the madman in the bedroom definitely needed to be taken down to the police station till either he could be sectioned or his story could be verified. Or not, as they were pretty sure would be the case.

Once they were at the nick, it had all been sorted out very quickly. A call to his solicitor and another to DS Ambrose had straightened things out. He’d been released, with a none too gentle warning that next time he wanted to sleep in a house for sale, he should tell the estate agent beforehand. When he’d emerged, chastened and embarrassed, Ambrose had been waiting for him, his expression a lot less friendly than it had been to date.

‘What do you mean, he wasn’t your dad?’ Ambrose demanded as they drove off.

‘I never knew him. I didn’t even know his name till he died and left me the house.’

Ambrose gave a long whistle. ‘That’d fuck with your head.’

Especially if your head was already fucked up to start with. ‘You could say that.’

‘So this job must have felt like you were getting a message from beyond the grave to come and check out his ground, right?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. More that it was a chance I couldn’t ignore. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I just didn’t expect the house to have such an effect on me.’ I thought it would be alien, distant, untouchable. Instead, it had felt like a homecoming, which was a reaction too uncomfortable for Tony to want to revisit right now.

‘All the same, the DI’s not going to be thrilled when he hears about this. He already thinks you’re on the wrong side of normal.’

‘A perceptive man, your DI Patterson. However, he might be a bit happier when you tell him that I do have some suggestions about your killer.’

Ambrose took his eyes off the road and gave him a quick appraising glance. ‘Terrific. How do you normally go about this?’

Tony smiled with relief. The fact that Ambrose was interested in the process of profiling suggested that he’d decided to forgive him. And given that there was nothing more fascinating to Tony than what he did professionally and how he did it, there was plenty of scope for satisfying Ambrose’s curiosity. He was off and running. ‘There’s two parts to it, I suppose. The first part is a sort of reverse logic - instead of reasoning from cause to effect, I go the other way. I start with the victim. Getting a picture of who they are and what it is in their life that might make them attractive to a predator. Then I look at what’s been taken from them. Their lives, obviously. But also the other aspects. Their individuality. Their gender. Their power. That sort of thing. And finally, I look at what’s been done to them. The actuality of what the killer has done and the order he’s done it in. And when I’ve absorbed all that, I start going backwards. I ask myself questions. If I’m the killer, what’s in it for me? What do these actions mean to me? What am I getting from this? Why does it matter to me that I do these things in this particular order? Then I go further back. What is it that happened to me in the past that makes this meaningful? And by that stage, I’m hopefully well on the way to figuring out what’s going on in the killer’s head.’ His hands were making patterns in the air, a physical representation of the twists and turns going on inside his head.

‘And then I look at the probabilities. What sort of life is possible for a person with this sort of history? What impact has their damage had on their life? What kind of relationships are possible for them?’ He spread his hands and shrugged. ‘It’s not an exact science, obviously. And every case throws up different questions.’

Ambrose sighed. ‘Fascinating. But that wasn’t actually what I meant. What I was asking was how you present your profile. On paper or in person?’

‘Oh.’ Tony knew Ambrose’s response should have knocked the wind from his sails but he was unabashed. One thing he didn’t envy the normal world was what he saw as a depressing lack of curiosity. As far as he was concerned, Ambrose should have been pleased to be on the receiving end of his explanation. But if all he wanted was the prosaic, Tony could provide that too. ‘Usually I write it up on the laptop then fire it over to the SIO. If they want clarification, I’ll go through any points they’re not clear on. But I’m not quite ready to profile. I’ve not got enough of a sense of Jennifer yet. I really want to talk to the best friend, Claire thingie.’

‘Darsie. Claire Darsie.’

‘Yes, of course, sorry.’

‘That’s where we’re headed now,’ Ambrose said. ‘I cleared it with the school for her to get out of class to talk to you. You can take a walk through the school grounds, or find a quiet corner to sit down in.’

‘Perfect. Thanks.’

‘So, what can you tell me now? About what you think?’

‘Not much. Because at this point, I’m not thinking very much that’s concrete.’ There was one thing that he had to drive home, though, and it was so counter-intuitive, Tony knew he’d have to lay the ground for it. ‘I mean, I’m thinking this is not as straightforward as we first thought, and I’m wondering if that’s deliberate or incidental.’

‘What do you mean?’

Tony pulled a face. ‘I’m not convinced this is a sexual homicide. ‘

‘Not sexual?’ Ambrose was incredulous. ‘He virtually raped her with that knife. How can that not be sexual?’

‘See, this is what I mean. I’m not ready to do a full profile yet so I’ve not got all my ducks in a row. But humour me for a moment. For the sake of argument, let’s say this isn’t about sexual gratification.’ He looked expectantly at Ambrose, who sighed again.

‘OK. It’s not about sexual gratification. For the sake of argument. ‘

‘But he cut her vagina, really drove that knife deep into her. Like you said, he made it look like she’d been raped with the knife. What I need to work out is whether he did that deliberately to make us think it was sexual. Or whether he did it for another reason and the fact that it looks sexual is just by the by.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Ambrose said.

He wasn’t the first cop who’d had that response to some of Tony’s wilder ideas. Not all of them had been wrong, but they were in the overwhelming majority. ‘Possibly,’ Tony said. ‘But like I said, I don’t know enough yet for a full profile, and theories based on half the information are more likely to be half-baked. However, when you get away from the unscientific stuff that I specialise in and turn to the hard science options, you can get a lot further with not much to go on.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Algorithms. I spoke to a colleague who’s more familiar with the geographic profiling process than I am. It’s her view that your killer probably lives in South Manchester.’

‘Manchester? You serious?’

‘My colleague is. And she knows this stuff better than anyone. If you remember, when we were at the dump scene I said I thought the location made most sense if the killer wasn’t from round here? Well, it looks like I was right on that at least. Well, if we believe Fiona, I was.’

‘Manchester, though? She can be that accurate?’

‘She’s cautiously confident. She’s sending me a map with the red zone marked on it. It’s the part of town that thinks it’s hip. Students, green politics, vegan grocery store, artisan bakery, media types and lawyers. Very cool. Not the natural stomping ground for a stalker killer, I’d have said. But the algorithms don’t lie. Although because a trail of computer use has different criteria from a series of crimes, they maybe don’t tell quite as accurate a story as usual.’

‘I didn’t know serial killers had a particular habitat,’ Ambrose said.

Tony pondered for a moment. ‘They tend towards rented accommodation. Mostly because they’re not very good at holding down jobs long-term. So their employment history isn’t helpful when it comes to getting a mortgage. So yes, the balance of probabilities is that he lived in rented accommodation. ‘

‘That makes sense.’

Time to turn back to the one thing he knew was important. ‘And so does what I said before, Alvin. I know you said it was crazy, but the more I think about it, the more I believe that really, truly, you need to listen to me on this one. And not just for the sake of argument. This is not a sexual homicide.’

Again, Ambrose took his eyes off the road to look at Tony. This time the car jittered in a slight swerve before he righted it. ‘It still sounds crazy to me.’ He sounded completely incredulous. ‘How could it not be a sexual homicide? Did you not look at the crime-scene photos? Did you not see what he did to her?’

‘Of course I did. But he didn’t spend any time with her, Alvin. He spent weeks getting alongside her, lulling her into a sense of false security. If this was about sex, he’d have kept her for days. Alive or dead, depending on his tastes. He wouldn’t have got rid of her in the time scale we’re talking about here.’

Ambrose gave Tony the look reserved for madmen and weirdos. ‘Maybe he panicked. Maybe the reality was way more extreme than he’d fantasised about. Maybe he just wanted rid.’

It was a possibility Tony had considered as he’d been dropping off to sleep. And he’d dismissed it almost immediately. ‘If that had been the case, he wouldn’t have taken the time and trouble to perform the mutilation. He’d just have killed her and dumped her. Believe me, Alvin, this crime is not about sex.’

‘So what is it about, then?’ Ambrose’s jaw set in a stubborn line, muscles tight, lower lip jutting.

Tony sighed. ‘Like I said. That’s what I don’t know yet. I can’t read it at this point.’

‘So you know what it’s not, but you can’t tell us what it is? Help me out here, Doc. How is this supposed to help us?’ Ambrose sounded angry again. Tony understood why. They’d hoped he’d wave a magic wand and make things better but, so far, all he’d done was create more problems.

‘At least it stops you wasting time in the wrong places. Like your local sex offenders. That’s not who you’re looking for here.’

‘So when will you have a profile that might help us find out who we are looking for?’

‘Soon. Later today, hopefully. I’m hoping Claire will help me understand Jennifer better. Maybe then I can get a sense of what might have motivated someone to kill her. The victim’s always the key, Alvin. One way or another.’

DC Sam Evans was glad to be back in what he regarded as fully fledged civilisation. A place where coffee and bacon butties were possible, where it never got truly dark and where there was always somewhere to shelter from the rain. It didn’t hurt that he’d had the rare pleasure of leaving everybody at the morning briefing gobsmacked.

The only problem now was following up on the small bombshell of the extra body in the lake. He had to walk a tightrope here. While he was waiting for the forensic team to come up with some leads, he had to make it look as if he was busy. If she thought he was twiddling his thumbs, Carol Jordan would reassign him to some donkey work on the live caseload. And if he was out of the office when the forensic evidence came in, someone else could pinch the case from under his nose and nick the glory. And that was something he wasn’t prepared to put up with.

Sam took out his notebook and flicked back a couple of pages, looking for the number of the Cumbrian DI he was supposed to be liaising with. He was about to call him when his mobile rang. He didn’t recognise the number. ‘Hello?’ he said, never willing to give anything away for free.

‘Is that DC Evans?’ It was a woman. She sounded brisk, youngish, confident.

‘Speaking.’

‘Are you the officer who emailed me a set of dental records?’

‘That’s right.’ CID had obtained a set of records from Danuta Barnes’s dentist back when she’d first gone missing and at the suggestion of one of the Cumbrian cops, Sam had forwarded it to the University of Northern England at Carlisle.

‘Good. I’m Dr Wilde, forensic anthropologist at UNEC. I’ve been taking a look at the remains from Wastwater. I’m not done yet, but I thought you’d appreciate an update.’

‘Anything you can give me,’ Sam said. Thank you, God.

‘Well, the good news, depending on your perspective, I suppose, is that the dental records match the smaller adult skeleton, which I am pretty certain is that of a woman aged between twenty-five and forty.’

‘She was thirty-one,’ Sam said. ‘Her name was Danuta Barnes.’

‘Thank you. I’ve got my students working up DNA for all three sets of remains. We should be able to establish whether she’s the mother of the child. Who is aged between four and six months, I’d estimate,’ Dr Wilde continued.

‘Lynette. Five months,’ Sam said. He’d been struck by the pitifully small bundle sandwiched between the two larger ones. He wasn’t given to sentiment, but even the hardest heart couldn’t avoid being touched by so early and unnecessary a death.

Dr Wilde sighed. ‘Hardly a life at all. Not much of an epitaph, is it? “Lived for five months: made a great teaching aid.” Anyway, as soon as I can confirm that connection, I’ll let you know.’

‘Appreciate it. Anything you can tell me about the other body?’ Not that he was expecting much from a bag of bones and some slurry whose components he didn’t want to think too much about.

Dr Wilde chuckled. ‘You’d be amazed. For example, I can tell you his name was Harry Sim, and he died some time after June 1993.’

Sam was thrown for a second. Then he laughed. ‘What was it? Credit card or driving licence?’

She sounded disappointed. ‘Smarter than the average DC,’ she said in a cod American accent.

‘I like to think so. Which was it, then?’

‘Credit card. A Mastercard that ran from June 1993 to May 1997 in the name of Harry Sim. That should give you something to chase. I hope you’re pleased.’

‘You have no idea,’ Sam said with heavy emphasis. ‘Will you be checking his DNA against the kid as well?’

‘Oh yes,’ Dr Wilde said. ‘It’s a wise child who knows its father.’

‘Anything on cause of death?’

‘They make them greedy down Bradfield way,’ she said, not so amused now. ‘Impossible to say at this point. No obvious trauma to any bones, so probably not shot, strangled or battered with a blunt instrument. Could have been poisoned, asphyxiated. Could have been natural causes, but I doubt it. I suspect we’ll never be able to establish a cause of death. If you’re hoping for a murder charge, you might have to settle for circumstantial evidence.’

That was never good news. But he had no grounds for whining about it, given how much Dr Wilde had already given him. Who knew what he’d find when he started unpeeling the layers of Harry Sim’s life and mysterious death? He thanked Dr Wilde and hung up, already knowing the next stop on his journey.