Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 43

Tony pulled his tie off as he came through the front door, tossing it over the banister. He walked straight through to the kitchen and poured himself a tumbler of water, drinking it straight down. He stood leaning on the sink, staring at nothing. He’d left Carol and her team drinking in the back room of their favourite Thai restaurant. He understood their need to release the fearsome pressure of a multiple murder inquiry, but he couldn’t join in their celebration.

For him, there was nothing to celebrate in the final disintegration of Diane Patrick. That screaming, gibbering wreck had once been a competent, successful woman with a career and a relationship. A single obsession had taken control of her, obliterating everything else. And when she had finally understood not only that it couldn’t happen but that it had been taken from her by the one person she truly loved, something inside her had become unhinged. For most people in that state, it would have been enough to have killed Warren Davy. And if that had been all, she might have found a measure of forgiveness in the system, the balance of her mind having been well and truly disturbed by the appalling betrayal of her lover.

But Diane Patrick’s obsession had been so overwhelming, so deep-seated a need that she had to obliterate him utterly. And that meant destroying the children who had been created with his genes. It was utterly unreasonable yet entirely comprehensible. But the system didn’t have room to accommodate the complexities of human fixations, not when they included murdered children. Diane Patrick would never see freedom again. She’d end up somewhere like Bradfield Moor, if she was lucky, a maximum security prison if she wasn’t.

It wasn’t that he thought she should avoid some kind of retribution for her crimes. But he couldn’t help feeling pity rather than hatred. He wondered how he would have coped with the hand she’d found herself looking at.

It didn’t bear thinking about.

Tony pulled off his jacket and dumped it on the back of a kitchen chair. He took a beer from the fridge and sat down at the table. The downlighters under the kitchen cabinets glinted on something half-hidden in the drift of paper on the table. Unthinking, he reached for it and found the digital recorder Arthur had left for him. He stared at it long and hard. This whole case had been about fathers and children, he reminded himself. And at the heart of it had been ignorance.

There was nothing clever about avoiding knowledge. He’d known that all along. He just hadn’t been ready for it. He picked up his beer and went through to his study, where there were comfortable padded headphones. Tony plugged them in to the tiny recorder and settled down in his favourite armchair. The other chair was still sitting opposite, left from his exercise with the mind of the killer the other night. He imagined Arthur sitting there, and pressed play.

‘Hello, Tony. This is Arthur. Or Eddie, as I used to be known back when I was walking out with your mother in Halifax,’ he began. His voice was light and musical, still threaded through with the Yorkshire accent of his youth. ‘Thank you for being willing to listen to what I have to say.

‘There’s nothing I can say or do that will make up for not being part of your life. To begin with, I didn’t know you existed. When I left Halifax, I cut off all ties. I’ll explain why in a bit. So I knew nothing about your birth. Fourteen years later, I was on holiday in Rhodes when by sheer chance I ran into a couple who used to work in my factory in Halifax. Of course, they knew me straight away. There was no point in trying to deny who I was. They insisted on buying me a drink and bringing me up to date with all my old employees.

‘They’d moved to Sheffield with the new company, but they had family back in Halifax so they’d kept in touch with things back there too. They remembered I’d been engaged to Vanessa, and they talked about what a polite young lad her boy had turned into. Not like most teenagers, they remarked. It didn’t take much working out to realise that if Vanessa’s lad was already a teenager, there was a good chance you were mine.

‘But I’ve never been one to jump to conclusions. And so I didn’t allow myself to hope, not really. When I got back from my holiday, I hired a private investigator to find out what he could about you. He tracked down your birth certificate and he took some photographs of you. The dates were right, and you looked a lot like I did at your age. I was amazed. I was overjoyed. There was no doubt in my mind that you were my son.’ Arthur’s voice trembled and Tony pressed pause. His eyes were damp and he could hardly swallow. He forced a mouthful of beer down and carried on listening.

‘Then it dawned on me that there was nothing I could do about it. Vanessa had clearly decided we weren’t to know about each other. I was afraid if I tried to come into your life, she would somehow take it out on you. And I knew she was capable of it.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Also, I was afraid of the effect it might have on you. You were doing well at school and I didn’t want to interfere with that. Fourteen’s an awkward age. You might not have welcomed me in your life. You’d have had good reason to be angry with the man who had abandoned you to Vanessa’s care. So I kept my distance. I like to think it was for your sake, but probably some of it was to do with me being cowardly. And I’ll explain why I had my reasons for that too.

‘This is the hard bit for me. What I’m going to tell you, you might think I’m making it up. You might think I’m off my head. But this is the truth. I swear. You can believe it or not, it’s your choice. You know your mother at least as well as I did. You can judge whether you think my story has the ring of truth or not.

‘Back then, I was a bright young man who was going places. I’ve always had a flair for invention. Most of the ideas go nowhere, but a few of them have turned out well. My first company was successful because I’d come up with a unique process for electroplating precision surgical instruments. I was doing well, and there were a couple of big companies prepared to pay a lot of money for my patent. I was pretty pleased with myself. I knew I was on the road to becoming rich and successful, which was quite something for a working-class lad from Sowerby Bridge.

‘I was walking out with your mother at the time. I was besotted with Vanessa. I’d never met a woman like her. She had star quality. She made every other lass in Halifax look colourless. I knew she was tough. Your grandmother was hard as nails and she’d brought Vanessa up in her own likeness. But when we got serious about each other, she seemed to soften. She was grand company. And she was beautiful.’ His voice was passionate now, rich and strong. Tony had seen enough of his mother’s charm with others to understand how she could have wrapped Arthur round her little finger.

‘When I asked her to marry me, there was part of me was convinced she’d turn me down flat. But she accepted. I was on cloud nine. We talked about a spring wedding and Vanessa suggested we make wills in each other’s favour. She was working in a solicitor’s office at the time, so she could get it done for free. And of course, she would have been giving up work when we got wed, so it made sense to do it while we could still get it for free.’ He gave a wry little chuckle. ‘You’ll be thinking I’m a typical Yorkshireman. Owt for nowt, eh? Well, the will might have come for free, but there’s other ways that it nearly cost me very dear indeed.

‘We did the wills, both leaving everything to each other. Round about this time, a company from Sheffield came after me. They wanted to buy the business outright, and my patent too. They were offering a lot of cash plus a lifetime royalty on the process. It would have been a good deal for a man who didn’t have ambitions to go a lot further. But I did. I had all sorts of dreams and hopes for the future and they included my business and my workforce. Vanessa thought I was crazy. She thought I should sell up and live high on the hog on the proceeds. “But what will we do when the money runs out?” I wanted to know. She said she knew me, I’d come up with some other clever idea and we’d do the same thing all over again. But I wasn’t convinced. I’d read about too many other inventors who never come up with a second idea that works.

‘Now, I reckon you probably know what your mother’s like when she gets an idea in her head. It’s like arguing with a steamroller. But I dug my heels in. It was my business and I wasn’t going to give in to her. I told myself I had to stand firm or I’d spend the whole of my life giving in to what she wanted. So there we were, stalemate. Or so I thought.

‘We were walking home one night through Savile Park. It was dark, it was late and there wasn’t another living soul in sight. Vanessa was on at me again about selling. I remember saying, “Over my dead body,” and the next thing I knew was this terrible searing pain in my chest. It was like everything went into slow motion. Vanessa was standing in front of me, and there was a knife in her hand, covered in blood. I looked down and my shirt front had a big red patch on it. I could feel myself falling and I swear I heard her say, “You said it, Eddie.”

‘The next thing I knew, I was in hospital, with the doctor saying it was a miracle I was alive. And there was Vanessa, holding my hand and smiling sweetly. I thought I was losing my mind. But when the doctor left us alone, she said, “I told the police we were mugged. If you try and tell them anything different, they’ll think you’re mad.”

‘I was supposed to die, you see. So she could have her way. But I didn’t die. I ran away. After I recovered, I sold up and cleared out. I spent a year studying metallurgy in Canada, then I came back and settled in Worcester. It seemed like a nice place and I knew nobody who had any connections there. I never took up with anybody else, not seriously. Vanessa spoiled me for anything like that. It’s hard to let yourself fall in love when the last person you loved tried to kill you.

‘I made a good life for myself, though. And then I found out about you. Once I knew about you, I kept a discreet eye on you. I’ve watched your career with pride. I know I can’t claim any of the credit, but I am proud of how you’ve turned out. I’d have liked to see you settled with a family of your own, but it’s not too late. I’m told you’re close to that detective you work with, Carol Jordan. If she’s the one, don’t let her go past you.

‘Anyway. I’ve said what I wanted to. And I’m still sorry that I was never a father to you. I hope you understand now, even if you don’t feel inclined to forgive me. And I hope you enjoy spending the money I’ve left you. Good luck with your life, son.’ Then silence. The last word was the killer, of course.

Tony pulled the headphones from his ears and bit his lip. A weight of sorrow pressed down on him, making his chest and throat ache. He wasn’t sure what was worse - hearing what he’d just heard, or not doubting its reliability. To hear such a shocking revelation about your mother would drive most men into a frenzy of rage. It wouldn’t occur to them to believe it. Their first response would be that this was a vile fantasy. Because most men didn’t have a mother like Vanessa.

For as long as he could remember, Tony had felt like the man Diane Patrick had described. The bad seed. The man who knew he carried the potential for evil inside him. One of the reasons he did what he did was his abiding conviction that he could so easily have become the sort of person he spent his life tracking down then trying to help. His empathy had to come from somewhere, and he had always believed it was rooted in his own potential for the road less travelled by.

And of course, Vanessa had never missed an opportunity to make him feel worthless. He had enough insight to understand how much she had undermined him, but even his professional training didn’t allow him to blame upbringing and circumstances for everything. There had to be a genetic component too. A balance of nature and nurture, conditioning and circumstance. And now he knew just how much of the bad seed was in him.

But for the first time, he also knew that his own fantasy of his father was false. He’d always thought a man who could walk out on his child must have a fatal flaw. Tony had believed he was the product of two profoundly fucked-up people, a legacy that offered him little potential to rise above it in emotional terms. Now he had to reset his own expectations of himself. Because half of what had made him had been a decent man who knew how much he’d let him down. And who had been proud of him.

It was going to be a big adjustment. And even as he thought this, Tony realised that change needed its own environment. Somewhere in his life, he was going to have to find an outward symbol of this transformation.