Fever of the Bone

by Val McDermid

  ‘No chance of catching him leaving?’

  Riley scratched his belly. ‘Too many options. Too much manpower to throw at a missing teenager. You know how it is. And still no guarantees. He could be in there right now, sacked out in somebody’s bloody warehouse flat. Or he could have left in the back of somebody’s car and we’d be none the wiser.’

  ‘Not good.’ Paula got to her feet and joined Riley in his scrutiny of the city below. Somewhere out there was the key to Daniel Morrison’s disappearance. It might as well have been in Iceland for all the use it was to them right now. ‘Not good at all.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it? Talk to the family?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s not up to me. But I’ll be advising my chief to let it lie till something changes. It sounds like you’ve covered the bases already.’

  Riley seemed taken aback. ‘Right you are,’ he said, failing to hide a note of surprise. ‘If we’re no further forward by tomorrow morning, we’ll likely wheel the parents out at a press conference. I’ll give you fair warning.’

  Paula stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Thanks, Sarge.’ She felt his eyes on her back as she crossed the roof to the fire stairs. She reckoned she’d made a new friend. The day had not been wasted.

  Tony looked around the crowded curry house. He and Carol had been coming to the same Indian restaurant on the fringes of Temple Fields since the first case they’d worked together, and in spite of changes of décor and chef, it was still one of the busiest and the best. He’d once been concerned that the tables were so close that people would be put off their food by the conversations he and Carol shared, until he’d realised there was so much background noise that eavesdropping was impossible. And so it had become a regular rendezvous. Tony suspected they both appreciated its neutrality, a no man’s land where neither had territorial advantage in the complicated skirmishes of their relationship.

  He glanced at his watch again and this time when he looked up he spotted Carol threading her way through the packed tables towards him. Her cheeks were pink from the chill of the evening, making her eyes seem bluer. Her thick blonde hair was ready for a cut, the layers growing shaggy and disordered. If pressed, Tony would have admitted he preferred the current look to the groomed perfection of a fresh cut. But then, nobody was likely to press him, least of all Carol.

  She dropped into her chair with a whoosh of a sigh, shrugging off her coat and reaching for the sweating bottle of Cobra sitting in front of her. She clinked it against Tony’s and took a long swallow. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Thirsty work, getting here on time.’

  ‘Good day?’ Tony knew the answer; they were here because the text she’d sent had invited him here to celebrate.

  ‘I think so,’ Carol said. Their waiter glided to a halt by the table and they both rattled off their orders without having to consult the menu. ‘We may just have the key to a fourteen-year-old cold case.’ She outlined the fresh evidence against Nigel Barnes. ‘The good news is that Stacey’s managed to narrow down the possible zones for the body dump, so Cumbria’s underwater search team are willing to take a crack at it. I’ve sent Sam up there to liaise with them.’

  ‘Well done. That should get you the kind of headlines to keep Blake off your back.’

  The corners of her mouth turned down. ‘I don’t know. I suspect he’ll just write it off as something that would have happened whoever was doing cold cases, but he’d be wrong. See, most detectives, when they heard Nigel Barnes had moved house, they wouldn’t bother following up the way Sam did. They’d regard it as an excuse to let the whole thing drop. But my team are special. They think in tangents, not straight lines. It’s hard to explain to a man like Blake what that means on the ground.’

  ‘Especially if he doesn’t want to understand,’ Tony said.

  Carol gave a wry smile. ‘Quite. But let’s not think about that tonight, let’s just enjoy the fact that my team are on the verge of another success.’

  ‘You do a good job. It’s hard, having to tell families their worst nightmares have come true, but at least you end the uncertainty. And bringing killers to justice, that’s always worth something. It’s the old cliché, but it’s true. You’re there to speak for the dead, to act on their behalf.’ He smiled at her, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. He was glad the evening had got off to a good start. He had a feeling it might not continue so smoothly.

  A plate piled with vegetable and fish pakora arrived and they both helped themselves. There was a respectful silence as they worked their way through. At last, Tony sighed in satisfaction. ‘I didn’t realise how hungry I was.’

  ‘You always say that,’ Carol mumbled through her last mouthful of crisp batter and soft cauliflower.

  ‘It’s always true.’

  ‘So, how’s your day been?’

  Wary now, Tony said, ‘Well, I’m pleased to say that even if James Blake doesn’t want me, there are others who do. I had a call today asking me to consult on a murder, so it looks like I’m still in demand.’

  ‘That’s great. Anyone I know?’ Carol looked genuinely pleased. He imagined that might not last.

  ‘A DI called Stuart Patterson.’

  Carol frowned and shook her head. ‘Name doesn’t ring a bell.’

  ‘From West Mercia.’

  Surprise flashed across her face, freezing her expression. ‘West Mercia? You’re going to Worcester?’ The accusation he’d expected was there in her voice.

  ‘That’s where I’m needed, Carol. I didn’t chase this. It chased me.’ He didn’t want to sound defensive but he knew he did.

  ‘You didn’t have to say yes.’

  Tony threw his hands in the air. ‘I never have to say yes. And I always have to say yes. You know that. Like I just said, we’re the only ones left to speak for the dead.’

  Carol hung her head. ‘I’m sorry. You’re right. It just seems . . . I don’t know. When I tried to talk to you about your father, you cut me off at the knees. You didn’t want to deal with it. And yet here you are, first chance you get, off to the city where he lived most of his adult life. You’ll be walking the streets he walked, seeing the buildings he saw, maybe even drinking in the same pubs as people who knew him.’

  ‘I can’t help that, Carol. It’s not like I drove down to Worcester to murder and mutilate a teenage girl on the off-chance West Mercia would call me in to do them a profile. This is what I do best, this is what makes me come alive. I’m good at it and I can help.’ He stopped speaking as the waiter arrived with their main courses.

  Once they were alone again, she said, ‘So are you going to pretend you’ve got no connection with the place once you’re there?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be a pretence. I don’t have any connection.’

  Carol gave a dry laugh as she loaded a piece of naan with karahi chicken. ‘Apart from owning a house and a boat there.’

  ‘That’s an accident, not a connection.’

  She gave him a long look, compassionate and tender. ‘You won’t be able to resist, Tony. If you try to, it’ll eat a hole in your heart.’

  ‘That’s a bit melodramatic for you,’ he said, trying to deflect her concern. ‘Where’s my pragmatic detective chief inspector?’

  ‘Trying to get you to accept your own needs for once. You spend your life trying to fix what’s broken. You do it for your patients. You do it when you profile for us. You do it for the people you care about, people like Paula. And me. All I want is for you to be selfish this time and do it for yourself.’ She reached out and put a hand over his. ‘We’ve known each other a long, long time, Tony. We know a lot of the ways we’re both fucked up. When you’ve spotted opportunities to help me, you’ve taken them. Why won’t you let me do the same for you?’

  He felt his throat swell, as if he’d swallowed a naga chilli whole. He shook his head, pushing his plate away. ‘I just want to do my job.’ Getting the words out was a strain.

  ‘I know that.’ Carol spoke gently, almost inau
dible against the background noise. ‘But I think you’d do it better if you acknowledged your need to come to terms with your history.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He drank some beer and cleared his throat. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He managed a weak smile. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’

  She shook her head. ‘How can I? I don’t like to see you hurting because you’re in denial.’

  Tony laughed. ‘Excuse me, but I’m supposed to be the psychologist here.’

  Carol pushed his plate back towards him. ‘And I’m a good learner. Now eat your dinner and let me tell you what I’ve managed to find out.’

  ‘You win,’ he said meekly, reaching for his fork.

  ‘It’s not like it’s anything approaching the whole picture,’ Carol said. ‘But it’s somewhere to start. The first good thing is that he didn’t have a criminal record. He even had a clean driving licence, though he did have a couple of speeding convictions in 2002. Probably down to the installation of speed cameras on the nearest main road.’

  ‘And then he learned to be careful.’ Tony slowly began to eat, one tiny morsel at a time.

  ‘The second good thing - at least, I think it was probably good for him, if not for the people who were close to him - is that his death was very quick. No lingering illness, no long period of debilitation. The cause of death was a massive heart attack. He’d been at some sort of canal boat rally and he was walking back to his boat when he collapsed on the quayside. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was beyond help.’

  Tony imagined what that must have been like. The paralysing grip of sudden pain. The loss of control. The agonising understanding that this was it. The darkness descending. The terrible loneliness, the absence of anyone he cared about. No chance to say goodbye. No chance to make amends. ‘Did he know he was likely to have a heart attack?’

  ‘Not really. He’d been diagnosed with ischaemic heart disease, but it didn’t seem to have had any impact on the way he lived. He played golf, he spent a lot of time pottering about on the canals in his narrowboat, and he went to work. He smoked a cigar most evenings, he drank the best part of a bottle of red wine every day and he enjoyed eating out in expensive restaurants several times a week. Not the way you behave if you’ve got an eye on a long and healthy life.’

  Tony shook his head. ‘How did you find this stuff out?’

  ‘I’m a DCI. I called the coroner’s officer.’

  ‘And they just told you all this? Didn’t they wonder why you wanted to know?’ Tony knew he shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of privacy the state offered its citizens, but there were still times when it amazed him how easy it was to garner information that was supposed to be confidential. ‘You could have been anybody,’ he added.

  ‘He did wonder, yes. I reassured him that we didn’t think there was anything untoward about Edmund Blythe’s death, just that we were looking into the possibility that someone on our patch had stolen his identity. So naturally I needed some details.’ She grinned and helped herself to a spoonful of tarka daal.

  ‘You’re very devious. I’d never have thought of that.’

  Carol raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re one to talk. I’ve seen you be more twisted than a corkscrew in the interview room. I’d never come up with some of the stuff that comes second nature to you when you’re trying to get inside someone else’s skin.’

  He tipped his head in acknowledgement of her accuracy. ‘True. Well, thanks for that. You’re right, it’s not the end of the world to know this.’

  ‘There is more. You up for it?’

  Again he felt wariness rising, a constriction in his gut. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything in what I’ve found out that could cause you a problem,’ Carol said carefully. ‘I wouldn’t be pushing you so hard if I thought it was going to fuck you up.’

  He looked across the restaurant at the crammed tables. Judging by the faces of the diners, all human life was here. Romance, business, disagreement, friendship, joy, sadness, family ties, first dates. Everyone in the room had the potential for all of these aspects of relationships. What was he so afraid of? What could hurt him about a dead man who’d known nothing about him when he’d been alive? He turned back to Carol. Her eyes seemed not to have left his face. He was, he thought, lucky to have her in his life, even if her persistence sometimes drove him crazy. ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘He was a smart bloke, your father—’

  ‘Not my father,’ Tony interrupted, instantly angered. ‘Please, Carol. No amount of pushing’s going to make that acceptable.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It wasn’t meant to be a push. I just wasn’t thinking, that’s all. What do you want me to call him?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘Edmund? Blythe?’

  ‘His friends called him Arthur.’

  ‘Then Arthur will do.’ He glared at his food. ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you. But I can’t think of him that way. I really can’t. I’ve said it before: “father” implies a relationship. Good or bad, honest or dishonest, loving or hating. But we didn’t have any kind of relationship.’

  Carol’s expression was apology enough. ‘Arthur was a smart bloke. He set up his company, Surginc, a couple of years after you were born. I’m not sure what he was doing before that. The woman I spoke to at Surginc has worked there for thirty-odd years, but she didn’t know anything about Arthur’s life before he came to Worcester except that he came from up north somewhere.’

  A twist of a smile. ‘That would be Halifax, we assume, since that’s where my mother was living at the time. So what does this Surginc do?’

  ‘It’s all a bit technical, but the gist of it is that they make disposable surgical instruments. Where Arthur was ahead of the game was that he developed a series of recyclable disposable instruments made from a combination of plastics and metal. So instead of them being single use, the materials could be reclaimed and reused. Don’t ask me what’s so special about the process they use, but it’s apparently unique. He had a patent on it. One of several he held, apparently.’ Her smile softened the lines of her face, reminding him of why people often underestimated her toughness. ‘Turns out you’re not the first innovative thinker in your bloodline.’

  Against all his determination, Tony couldn’t help feeling pleased at Carol’s news. ‘For all her faults, so’s my mother. It’s good to know I don’t get all my creativity from her.’

  Carol’s expression tightened at the mention of his mother. Tony wasn’t surprised. The antagonism between the two women had sparked on first meeting. Tony had been in hospital, recovering from a brutal attack at the hands of a Bradfield Moor patient. He’d been in no fit state to act as a buffer between the two women, and the fact that Carol had intervened to stop Vanessa ripping him off over Arthur Blythe’s estate had cemented their mutual loathing. ‘Well, there’s one big difference between Arthur and Vanessa,’ she said. ‘From all accounts, Arthur was one of the good guys. As well as being smart, he was apparently a good employer - his firm even had a profit-sharing system with the workers. He was very sociable, good company, generous. He employed about twenty-five people, but he knew all about their families. Always remembered their kids’ names, that sort of thing. When he sold the company two years ago, he took the entire staff and their partners off to a country-house hotel for a weekend break. No expense spared.’ Carol paused, expectant.

  Tony summoned up an anodyne response. ‘No wonder they liked him.’

  ‘The one thing none of them could work out was why he stayed single. In all the years this woman worked for him, he never turned up at an office event with a woman on his arm. One or two of them thought he was gay, but she didn’t think so. He appreciated women too much, she thought. She wondered if maybe he’d been widowed or divorced when he was really young. So I checked out the records at the Family Records Centre. He never married.’

  Tony gave a laugh. ‘Sounds like he was as good at relationships with women as me.’ And probably for the s
ame reason. We were both fucked up by Vanessa.

  As if reading his thoughts, Carol said, ‘Well, there is a common factor there.’

  Tony reached for his beer. ‘Vanessa’s toxic. But I can’t blame her for everything.’

  Carol looked as if she didn’t agree. ‘Well, one thing we can say is that, once Arthur moved out of her orbit, he really made something of his life. I know you can’t set aside the fact that he ignored your existence while he was alive, but from what I’ve learned about him . . . I don’t know, it feels like there must have been a good reason for his absence. And if anyone knows what that is, it must be Vanessa.’

  ‘In that case, it can stay a mystery. I’ve no plans to talk to her in the foreseeable future.’ Tony pushed his plate to one side and signalled to the waiter. He hoped Carol would read his desire to change the subject. ‘You want another beer?’

  ‘Why not? When are you going down to Worcester?’

  ‘Probably tomorrow or the day after. I need to talk to DI Patterson again in the morning, once I’ve taken another pass through the stuff he sent me. I don’t imagine I’ll be gone for more than a couple of days. Nobody’s got any budget for luxuries like me any more,’ he added drily.

  ‘It’s that teenage girl, right? I’ve seen the news coverage. How are they doing?’

  He ordered the beers and gave her a crooked smile. ‘How do you think? They’re calling me in. That should tell you all you need to know.’

  ‘So, bugger all to go on, then?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘I don’t envy you.’

  ‘I don’t envy myself. One body, it’s always hard to draw strong conclusions. You know how it goes. The more deaths, the better I get.’ It was, he thought, the worst thing about profiling. It gave a whole new meaning to profiting from someone else’s misery. One of the hardest things he had ever had to come to terms with was that he was in the only job where he relied on serial offenders to make him look good.