Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 32

The team of officers on the knocker in the Brucehill flats didn’t take long to turn up the two Asian lads who’d stood at the bus stop with Niall the previous afternoon. It was clear from the get-go that this murder was not connected to the quotidian villainies of the estate, so for once there was no threat to anyone local in talking to the police. The normal rules of grassing did not apply. True, some refused to talk to the cops on principle, but there were plenty who still thought the murder of a fourteen-year-old who wasn’t connected to any of the estate’s gangs should not go unavenged. There had been enough people more than happy to give up the witnesses.

So within a couple of hours of the discovery of Niall’s body, Sadiq Ahmed and Ibrahim Mussawi had been huckled into Southern Divisional HQ for questioning. Sam, who had left Stacey and the FLO with Niall’s mother, had a brief discussion with Paula on how to play it. Neither wanted to work with an unfamiliar partner, but the alternative was for them to take one witness and to leave the other to a pair of detectives from Southern about whose abilities they knew nothing. ‘What do you think?’ Sam said.

‘Look at their sheets. Mussawi’s got half a dozen arrests for minor stuff, he’s been in court. He knows the system. He’s not going to be going out of his way to help us. But Ahmed, he’s a virgin. Never been arrested, never mind charged. He’s going to want to keep it that way, I think. We should take him, you and me. Leave Mussawi to the local boys and hope they get lucky,’ Paula said.

They found Ahmed in an interview room, lanky limbs in a hoodie and low-slung designer jeans, gold chain at his neck, feet in outsized designer trainers, laces undone. A couple of hundred quid’s worth of gear on a fifteen-year-old kid. Well, there’s a surprise, Paula thought. Dad works in a local restaurant, Mum’s at home with five other kids. She didn’t think Ahmed was getting his spending money from a paper round. She sat back while Sam did the introductions.

‘I want a lawyer, innit.’

Paula shook her head, doing the ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ look. ‘See, there you go. Making yourself look like you’re guilty of something before I’ve even asked your name and address.’

‘I haven’t done nothing, I want a lawyer. I know my rights. And I’m a minor, you need to get me an appropriate adult.’ His narrow face was aggressive, all sharp angles and twitchy little muscles round the mouth.

‘Sadiq, my man, you need to chill,’ Sam said. ‘Nobody thinks you did anything bad to Niall. But we know you were at the bus stop with him, and we need you to tell us what went down.’

Ahmed rolled his shoulders inside his hoodie, trying for nonchalant. ‘I don’t got to tell you nothing.’

Paula half-turned to Sam. ‘He’s right. He doesn’t have to tell us anything. How lovely do you think his life is going to be in these parts when we let it be known that he could have helped us catch a stone killer, only he didn’t want to?’

Sam smiled. ‘Exactly as lovely as he deserves.’

‘So there you have it, Sadiq. This is probably the one and only time in your life that you’re going to have the chance to do yourself a favour with us without it coming back to bite you in the arse.’ Paula’s voice was at the opposite end of the kindness scale from her words. ‘We don’t have time to fuck around on this one, because this guy will kill again. And next time, it might be you or one of your cousins.’

Ahmed looked at her, calculation obvious in his face. ‘I do this, I get a free pass off you twats?’

Sam lunged forward and grabbed the front of his hoodie, almost yanking him off the chair. ‘You call me a twat one more time and the only free pass you’ll be getting is to Casualty. Capisce?’

Ahmed’s eyes opened wide and his feet scrabbled on the floor for purchase. Sam shoved him away and he teetered backwards before his chair settled on all four legs. ‘Fu-u-uck,’ he complained.

Paula shook her head slowly. ‘See, Sadiq? You’d have been better off paying attention to me. You need to start talking politely to us or the next thing you know you will need a lawyer because DC Evans here will be charging you with police obstruction. So, what time was it when you and Ibrahim arrived at the bus stop?’

Ahmed fidgeted for a moment, then caught her eye. ‘About half three, twenty to four,’ he said.

‘Where were you going?’

‘Into town. Just to hang about, right? Nothing special.’

A little light larceny. ‘And how long were you there before Niall showed up?’

‘We’d only just got there, like.’ He leaned back in the chair, feigning cockiness again.

‘Did you know Niall?’ Sam asked.

A shrug. ‘I knew who he was. We didn’t hang about, nothing like that.’

‘Did you speak to him at all?’ Paula said.

Another shrug. ‘Might have.’

‘Never mind “might have”. Did you?’

‘Ibrahim goes, “Where you going, brah?” And he goes, like, he’s going into town to hang with his crew. Only, we know he don’t have a crew so it’s bullshit, right? So Ibrahim calls him Billy No-Mates.’

‘The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie,’ Sam said wryly.

‘Do what?’

‘Nothing. So what did he say when you called him Billy No-Mates? ‘

Ahmed ran a finger round the inside curve of his ear then inspected it. ‘Fuck all he could say, was there? Cuz that’s when the car turned up, right?’

‘Tell me about the car,’ Paula said.

‘It was silver.’

Paula waited but nothing more was forthcoming. ‘And? You must have noticed more than that.’

‘Why the fuck would I? It was, like, a pile of crap. It was this silver hatchback thing. Medium sort of size. Total fucking nothing car. Something, like, of no interest.’

Of course it was. ‘So what happened then?’

‘The window comes down and the driver says something like, “You’re Niall, right?”’

‘He definitely used Niall’s name?’ If Ahmed was right, it proved this was a premeditated set-up.

He gave her the, ‘Well, duh,’ eye-roll. ‘I said so, innit?’ he drawled. ‘He definitely said the name Niall.’

‘What happened then?’ Sam was back in the act. Paula wished he’d shut up, almost wished she was with a Southern Division detective she could have intimidated into silence.

‘Niall stuck his head in the window, so I didn’t catch what was going on between them. Niall said something like, how did the geezer know he was going to be there. But I couldn’t make out what the driver was saying.’

Why was it always like this? Paula wondered. One step forward, one step sideways then one back. ‘What did he sound like, the driver?’

Ahmed pulled a face. ‘What you mean, what did he sound like?’

‘Accent? High voice, low voice? Educated, not?’

She could see Ahmed struggling to recall. Which meant what he said would probably be worthless. ‘It wasn’t, like, deep. It was kind of ordinary. Like everybody round here speak. But like old people like my parents speak, you know? Not like one of us.’

‘Did you get a look at him?’

‘Not really. He was wearing a ball cap. He had long hair, brown, like down to his collar.’

Probably a wig. ‘What did the cap look like? What colour? Any slogan?’

‘It was grey and blue. I didn’t pay attention, you know? Why would I be interested? Some geezer stops and talks to somebody I hardly know, why would I be paying them any of my attention?’ He leaned back again and sighed. ‘This is so bullshit, me being here like this.’

‘So what happened next?’ Paula said.

‘Niall gets in the car and they drive off. End of.’

And that was also the end of Sadiq Ahmed’s useful testimony. They hung on to him while they compared notes with the other interview team, who had even less to show for their chat. But they had no cause to hold either Ahmed or Mussawi any longer so they cut them loose. Paula watched them swagger down the street, jeans at half-mast, hoodies over their heads. ‘Sometimes I feel like counting the days to retirement,’ she said wearily.

‘Not a good move,’ Sam said. ‘It’s always going to be too many. Even when it gets down to one.’

For Tony, there were no longer enough hours in the day. Carol had called him as soon as she’d left Blake. Her next call would be to Stacey, to instruct her to open the case files to Tony. She told him about Blake’s parting shot, but he didn’t care. Who paid the piper had never been his issue. All that mattered was having access to the information he needed to build his portrait of the killer.

Information on this scale, however, could be a curse as much as a blessing. Stacey had emailed him the codes so that he could directly access all their files. But the amount of raw data generated by three missing-person inquiries that had turned to murders was vast. Just reading through it would take days. But thankfully, there were digests of the reports that had been prepared so that Carol’s team could have a more accessible overview of the cases. The downside of that was that important details could have been lost in the sifting. So every time Tony came across something that piqued his curiosity, he had to backtrack to the original report to see what had been said or done in the first instance.

The worst of it was that he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. His conclusion that these killings did not have their roots in a sexual motive meant he had to reconsider evidence from anyone close to the victims. Because he didn’t know what linked the victims, anything could be significant.

There was no way round it. He had to go back to square one and start looking in the dark corners of the victim’s lives. The victims were always the key to cracking a series. But in all his years of profiling serial offenders, Tony had never known a case where they were as crucial as they were here. He settled down to work, completely oblivious to the digital recorder that was now buried under a drift of paper.

To Carol’s surprise, DI Stuart Patterson couldn’t have been less territorial about his inquiry. In her experience, SIOs jealously hugged their murders close to their chests. You generally had to drag information out of them piecemeal. But it soon became clear that he genuinely believed two heads were better than one. Even if it was also obvious that he wasn’t at all sure that the addition of Tony Hill’s was an unmixed blessing.

‘He’s not your usual sort of expert witness,’ he said cagily when Carol commented on Tony’s brilliant linkage of the cases.

‘He’s one of a kind,’ she agreed.

‘Probably just as well. You do know he nearly got himself arrested down here? My bagman had to pull him out of the mire.’

Carol stifled a giggle. ‘He did mention there had been a spot of bother, yes. I’d just put it down to the price you have to pay for having him on the team.’

‘So what’s the easiest way for us to proceed?’

They ran through the rules of engagement, working out how they could link the two investigations in practical terms. Stacey featured large in the conversation, and Carol couldn’t help noting a certain wistfulness in Patterson’s voice on the subject of resident geeks. ‘We don’t have anyone with that level of skill,’ he said. ‘I have to buy in that kind of expertise. You take what you can get, and it’s not always what you might hope for. Not to mention you’re always having to butter them up just to keep them on side.’

‘You’re welcome to use Stacey on this if there’s anything you’ve got that might benefit from a more thorough analysis.’

‘Thanks, Carol. I think we’re covered, but I will bear it in mind. We have actually got an intel-based joint op going on with GMP already on this case.’

‘Really? One of our bodies was dumped on the border between us and them. What’s the connection?’

‘It came from Tony Hill. We’d got a series of locations for public-access computers the killer used to communicate with Jennifer Maidment. He asked a colleague to run them through a geographic profiling program and it spat out a hot spot in South Manchester. So we took the product from our number-plate recognition system to DVLA and asked for details of all the Manchester-registered vehicles that came into town around the day Jennifer was abducted.’

Carol was impressed. It was the kind of lateral thinking she looked for from her own team. ‘Great idea. So what was the pay-off?’

‘Fifty-three possibles. I’ve sent my sergeant up there to work alongside the GMP officers. They’re going round the addresses, checking alibis and looking for people with connections to the ICT industry. That’s where Tony Hill reckons our perp works.’

‘Sounds like that might just break something open. I’ll be very interested to hear how it pans out.’

Patterson sighed. ‘Me too. Because, frankly, it’s the only lead we’ve got right now.’

Paula’s phone vibrated against her hip. She pulled it from her pocket and got a quick hit of pleasure when she saw her caller was Elinor Blessing. She walked away from the knot of Brucehill teenagers she and Sam were pointlessly engaging with, phone to her ear.

‘I saw the news,’ Elinor said. ‘I imagine you’re having a rough day.’

‘I’ve had easier,’ Paula admitted, fishing a cigarette from her pack and wrestling her lighter free of her pocket. ‘It’s nice to hear a friendly voice.’

‘I won’t keep you. I realise you’re busy. But I wondered if there was any chance of you having time for a late supper?’

It was a thought so beautiful that Paula could have cried. ‘I would love to,’ she sighed. ‘If by late, you mean something like half past nine, I could probably make it. Unless there’s something specific that needs a late-night posse, we’re usually through by then. Well, I say through. What I really mean is that we’re usually out of the office.’

‘Good. Do you know Rafaello’s? It’s just off the Woolmarket.’

‘I’ve seen it, yes.’

‘I’ll book a table. Nine thirty, unless you hear from me.’

‘See you then.’ Paula ended the call. She felt five years lighter, the weight of her recent past slipping from her. Restoration, that’s what it felt like. Being restored to a person for whom a relationship was a possibility. She turned back, enjoying the look of shock on Sam Evans’s face when he saw her transformed from leadenness to buoyancy. Oh, but it was going to be a fine evening.

Meanwhile, there was the small matter of the Brucehill boys to deal with. The way she felt now, they better watch out.

It had taken all Alvin Ambrose’s powers of persuasion for Patterson to assign him to the Manchester trawl. The DCI thought this was donkey work for the lowly, but Ambrose wanted to be there with his hand on whatever transpired. He’d pointed out that a good lead would be something for him to follow up on anyway, so he might as well be one of the bodies already on the ground. ‘It’s less than a hundred miles,’ he’d said. ‘If something breaks down here, I can be back on the motorway, blues and twos, in not much more than an hour.’ Finally, Patterson had given in.

Now he was in the thick of it, Ambrose was less than excited about his assignment. But that was OK. He didn’t have a problem with the fact that so much police work was pure drudgery. He’d arrived in Manchester with a list of fifty-three vehicles registered locally that had been in Worcester on the day of Jennifer Maidment’s murder and abduction. DCI Andy Millwood had been welcoming, setting him up with a desk in the main Serious Crimes Unit. He’d given Ambrose a CID aide - a uniformed officer on assignment to the plain clothes branch to see if the work suited her - who would drive Ambrose round the unfamiliar territory and sit in on his interviews. Millwood made it sound like he was offering unparalleled assistance, but Ambrose knew the rookie was the lowest form of life available to be loaned out. And that she was there as much to keep an eye on the out-of-town guy as to help him. Still, it was a lot better than nothing.

‘We think our perp’s job is something to do with computers or ICT,’ Ambrose said. ‘But that’s a suggestion, not a definite, so we want to keep an open mind on that one. What we’re looking for is an alibi for the time they were in Worcester. What they did. Where they went. Who they were with.’

‘OK, skip,’ the aide said. She was a short block of a woman with legs like cricket stumps, her plain face redeemed by a luxuriant shock of blue-black hair and luminous dark blue eyes. Ambrose felt she was wary of him. He wasn’t sure whether that was because he was an outsider or because of the colour of his skin. ‘It’s quite a compact area. Mostly Victorian terraces and big semis, a lot of them turned into student flats.’

‘Let’s make a start, then.’

Four hours in, they’d followed up ten leads and run the gauntlet of middle-class citizens who knew their rights and wanted to deliver a lecture on how the government was eroding civil liberties. It was a common theme right across the age spectrum, from students to legal aid lawyers. Ambrose, accustomed to a smaller city whose political ghettos ran to single streets rather than whole suburbs, felt stunned by the onslaught.

But once they’d expressed their trenchant views, it turned out that these were also the law-abiding types. Eight had given chapter and verse on where they’d been and who they’d met, information that could easily be checked by a phone call or a visit by the troops back in Worcester. One had only come off the motorway to try the food at a newly refurbished gastro-pub. He had a timed receipt from the pub, and another from a petrol station on the outskirts of Taunton which seemed to make it clear he couldn’t have killed Jennifer. The tenth had set Ambrose’s antennae twitching, but the longer they talked to him, the clearer it became that the reasons were nothing to do with murder. The guy, a market trader, was obviously hiding something. But not what they were after. As they walked away, the aide scampering to keep up, Ambrose said, ‘You might want to get the local boys to turn over his lock-up. I bet they find it stacked to the rafters with pirate DVDs, counterfeit perfumes and fake watches.’

Six other vehicle owners hadn’t been home. They’d stopped at a café for lunch when Patterson rang with the gobsmacking news that Jennifer’s murder was now officially tied in to three others in Bradfield, thanks to that clever bugger Tony Hill. Even more surprising was that the victims were male. Now they had three other abduction dates to use as disqualifying alibis for their potential suspects. Ambrose ended the call and gave a grim smile. ‘We’ve just been upgraded.’

‘How do you mean?’ she said through a mouthful of steak pie.

‘This is now officially a serial-killer investigation,’ Ambrose said. He pushed his plate of fish fingers and chips away. His appetite had disappeared with Patterson’s news. Jennifer’s death had been hard enough to bear. But add three other teenagers to the mix and the weight pressed down like a physical encumbrance. When he worked murders, Ambrose always got to the end of the day feeling like he’d literally been carrying an extra burden around. His muscles ached and his joints felt stiff, as if his body was taking on the psychological load. Tonight, he knew he’d lower himself gingerly into bed, hurting like he’d gone half a dozen rounds in the ring. ‘We need to get back on the job,’ he said, nodding at the aide’s half-eaten food. ‘Five minutes. I’ll see you back at the car.’

They dealt with the next two hits swiftly enough. The first, a computer salesman, seemed promising. But they soon realised he knew next to nothing about the details of what went on inside what he sold. And he’d been on a three-day break to Prague with his wife which covered the abduction and murder of Daniel Morrison. The next was a woman whose entire time in Worcester was accounted for by meetings with the cathedral clergy to discuss designs for new vestments.

And then they arrived at the address where Warren Davy’s Toyota Verso was registered.