Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 29

Niall slouched his way across the estate to the bus stop, shoulders spread, legs wide, making himself look as big and unattractive a target as he could. You never knew round here where the agg was going to come from. Too many fuckwits on too many drugs to be reliably bad. Some guy you’d been nodding mutual respect to for weeks could just turn on you like that and next thing you know, it’s all gone off.

There were already a couple of Asian lads lounging in the bus shelter. He’d seen one of them from time to time hanging around in the school yard at break. He cut his eyes at Niall, looking away before they could make proper contact. ‘Where you going, then?’ the boy asked.

Niall knew it would be suicide to say, ‘I’m meeting up with someone who’s going to give me a Russian lesson. How exciting is that?’ He shrugged and said, ‘Into town, innit? Hang with my crew.’

The Asian lad’s lip curled. ‘I never seen you with no crew. You don’t got no crew, you Billy No-Mates.’

‘What you know?’ Niall said, trying to sound like he couldn’t be bothered with this. Which he couldn’t, really. He had more going on.

Before they could really get into it, a car drew up at the bus stop. All three of them acted as if it was nothing to do with them. The window rolled down and the driver leaned across. ‘It’s Niall, isn’t it?’

He frowned. This was a stranger, OK. But a stranger who knew his name. ‘Who wants to know?’ he said.

‘I’m so glad I caught you. DD asked me to come and pick you up. He tripped on the stairs last night and broke his ankle - can you believe it? Three hours we were stuck in Casualty at Bradfield Cross. Anyway. Obviously he couldn’t meet you in town, but he still wanted to get together, so he asked me to come and pick you up.’

It made sense, but Niall wasn’t entirely won over. ‘How did you know I was going to be here?’

‘DD knew what bus you were getting off, so I’ve just been working forwards from the end of the route. He printed me off your Rig page with your photo, see?’ The driver brandished a print-out with Niall’s moody scowl in one corner. ‘Jump in, DD’s really looking forward to seeing somebody more interesting than me.’ A winning smile, hard to resist.

Niall opened the door and climbed in. ‘See ya, losers,’ was his parting shot. The Asian boys were working so hard at being unconcerned that they were almost no use to the police when it came to describing either car or driver. But that was later. Much later.

Carol rubbed her eyes. They were so gritty and tired, she wondered whether she should be thinking about a visit to the optician. Last time she’d seen the doctor, complaining about back pain, he’d cheerfully informed her that she’d reached the age where things started falling apart. It felt unfair. She hadn’t done half the things with her body that she’d intended and she really wasn’t ready to say goodbye to all those wild ambitions and vague longings. She remembered Tony turning forty and pretending to complain that he’d never lead Bradfield Victoria out in a cup final. She suspected there were similar impossible dreams she should be saying goodbye to.

Her office blinds were open now and she looked through her glass wall at her team. She could see a thin wedge of Stacey’s hair and arm. Every now and again she’d tuck her hair behind her ear. It was a habitual gesture, a pause for thought, a moment while a screen refreshed. Carol wasn’t sure what exactly Stacey was working on right now, but knew that whatever arcane avenue she was pursuing, there was a good chance it would produce something useful.

Kevin was on the phone, leaning back and swinging round in his swivel chair, twirling a pen in his fingers. He was good at liaising between the different divisions, easy with the laddish camaraderie that Carol was inevitably excluded from. He managed to walk the line between siding with the lads and never forgetting he was on her team. She kept thinking she would lose him to promotion, but she thought he’d stopped applying for it. She wondered if that was because he had lost his former ambition or simply that he enjoyed what he was doing. He’d rediscovered his attachment to his wife and kids over the past couple of years; maybe that had something to do with it. He was the only one of them who was a parent. His own son was only a year or so younger than Seth and Daniel. Carol made a mental note to touch base with him, make sure these deaths weren’t becoming too personal.

Paula was revisiting Kathy and Julia, her visit a mixture of demonstrating that they were aware of their grief, and trying to see if there was anything else of use that they might remember. Carol wasn’t hopeful on either count.

Sam, too, was out of the office. When he’d come back from sorting out Tim Parker, she’d sent him to Worksop, to the head offices of RigMarole. The owners hadn’t been thrilled about coming in on a Saturday, but Sam had a warrant. They were supposed to hand over the keys to the kingdom - the codes that would allow Stacey official access to the back end of their system, to see if there was anything at all on their server that might point to the identity of the killer. Sam would also be checking their physical files, to see what sort of a paper trail might exist. Getting the warrant hadn’t been easy - data protection had become such a totem. These days it was almost easier to get into a Swiss bank account than some data sources.

She hoped one of them was going to come up with a lead that would give them somewhere to go on these murders, and soon. This was supposed to be the age of total surveillance. But this killer seemed able to elude the ever-watching eyes in the sky. He covered his back. And his keystrokes. She was horribly afraid that he was already planning to add to his tally of victims.

Carol turned back to her own screen and called up the post-mortem reports. Maybe Grisha had some results for them. Absorbed in her reading, she didn’t notice Tim Parker’s approach until he was in her doorway. ‘Hi,’ he said, inappropriately bright and breezy. ‘Just thought I’d bring you a hard copy of my profile. I’ve emailed it to you, but, you know, belt and braces.’

‘That was quick work.’ Probably too quick.

He put it down on the desk. ‘So, I’ll head down to the canteen for a coffee. Maybe you could call me when you’re ready to talk it through?’

‘That would be good,’ Carol said. A couple of pages, by the looks of it. Barely time for him to drink a coffee, she reckoned. He looked expectantly at his work then at her. She smiled. ‘Off you go, then.’

Carol waited till he’d left the main office before she picked up his profile. She read it slowly and carefully, not wanting to be accused of unfairly dismissing him. But her most strenuous attempts at fairness couldn’t tamp down the rising burn of anger. There was nothing here that her own team couldn’t have generated. They’d all picked up enough of the basics from working with Tony over the years. They could have told her all the obvious stuff that Tim Parker had dressed up with fancy prose. Organised killer. White male, 25-40. Uncomfortable with his homosexuality. Incompetent in relationships. Living alone or with mother. Likely to live in Bradfield. Criminal record may include arson, animal cruelty, minor sexual offences such as indecent exposure. Spotty employment record.

It was all straight out of the textbook. There was nothing here to carry them forward an inch. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Carol said. She picked up the two sheets of paper and headed for the door, face grim. She caught Kevin’s eye as she marched past and shook her head.

‘Flak-jacket time for the boy wonder, then,’ Kevin said to her retreating back.

‘I’m doing it in the canteen so I won’t be tempted,’ Carol said without pausing.

She found Tim on a sofa in the far corner of the canteen, nursing a cappuccino and reading the Guardian. He looked up at her approach, his smile fading as he took in her expression. Carol dropped the profile in front of him. ‘Is that it, then? Is that the product of your expensive training at the faculty?’

He looked as shocked as if she’d slapped him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that this is facile. It’s superficial. It reads like it’s been copied from the FBI’s Sexual Homicide textbook. It gives me no sense of this killer at all. I don’t know what he’s getting from these crimes—’

‘Well, sexual satisfaction, obviously,’ Tim said. He sounded put out. She’d thought he was flushed with shame but realised now it was umbrage. ‘That’s what sexual homicide’s about.’

‘You think I don’t know that? I need specifics. Why this process and not something else? What does it mean to him? Why the peaceful death and then the hideous mutilation? What’s going on there?’ She had her hands on her hips, standing over him, knowing she looked like a bully but not caring. He’d committed one of the worst crimes in her book - wasting time and resources in a murder inquiry.

‘It’s impossible to theorise with so little data,’ he said pompously. ‘Technically he’s not a serial killer yet. That’s three plus one, if you take Ressler’s definition.’

‘You think I don’t know that either? You were still at school when I started working homicide. I’ve worked with one of the best profilers in the business for years. I’ve learned the basics. I could have written this. This is the sloppiest piece of work I’ve seen in a long time.’

Tim got to his feet. ‘Nobody could have done any more with the limited information you gave me. If your detectives had come up with more evidence, it would be easier to write a meaningful profile.’

‘How dare you blame my team? Let me tell you, on this showing, there would be no place for you on it. Where’s the insight? There’s nothing here we don’t already know. Why these victims? You don’t even discuss whether the victims are high or low risk. How he acquires the victims. Where he’s killing them. None of that.’

‘You’re asking me to speculate without data. That’s not what the job’s about.’

‘No, I’m asking you to make something of what you’ve been given. If this is the best you can do, you’ve no right to call yourself a profiler. And you’re no use to me.’

His face took on a stubborn set. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘I got some of the highest marks for my course work. I know what I’m doing.’

‘No, Sergeant. You don’t know what you’re doing. Classroom is not incident room. Now, take this back and do some work. I don’t want another shallow pass at this killer. Think. Empathise. Get under his skin. Then tell me something useful. You’ve got till tomorrow morning before I have to tell my boss that you’re a complete waste of space and budget.’ She didn’t wait for his response. He hadn’t earned the right of reply.

She thought she’d never missed Tony more than she did right then.

The team at RigMarole had made Sam’s afternoon a misery. He’d finally had to lose his temper to get them to behave. He didn’t understand how anyone could weigh their business against the lives of innocent teenagers and hesitate for a nanosecond about opening their files. Once he’d pointed out to them how closely the victims overlapped their primary source of income, and how quickly that income stream could disappear once the media got hold of RigMarole’s reluctance, they’d finally seen the light and agreed to hand over the access codes to Stacey and open their hard copy files to him. The contents of those files had turned out to be minimal and a complete waste of time. It was infuriating when he was so close to being ready to confront Nigel Barnes.

The tedious drive back from Worksop gave Sam plenty of time to plan his tactics, against both Carol and Barnes. He had to get the DCI on side. This was the sort of case break that would make him hard to ignore in the upper echelons of Bradfield Police, but it was also in the interests of Carol herself and the MIT. That gave him a better than even chance of getting her to agree that he could arrest Barnes on suspicion of something.

It was a pity he couldn’t haul Tony in on his side of the argument. But he knew better than to show Carol he’d gone behind her back. The last time one of the team had played away with Tony, she’d just about lost her mind. And that had been her blue-eyed girl Paula. He’d just have to persuade her they had enough to make it worthwhile.

He looked at the dashboard display as he left the M1. With luck, he’d be back in Bradfield by eight. Carol would still be at her desk. After all, what else would she be doing on a Saturday night in the middle of a double murder inquiry? It wasn’t as if she had a life.