Fever of the Bone

by Val McDermid

  When she was on form like this, there was nobody like Carol Jordan. She had everybody scrambling to please her, to earn that look of approval. It didn’t hurt that she was easy on the eye, but the set of her mouth and the directness of her gaze meant nobody was ever going to take her for a bimbo. Paula knew she was a little bit in love with her boss, but she’d learned to live with that as an exercise in futility. ‘It’s this way, chief,’ she said, leading the way over to the trench, introducing Riley on the way. ‘DS Riley’s been my liaison, it would be helpful if we could keep him on board,’ she said. Code for ‘he’s one of us, in spite of appearances.’

  She stood at Carol’s shoulder, looking down at the grievous distortion of humanity lying at the bottom of the ditch. Dirt and blood smeared the boy’s clothes, and his head inside the transparent plastic looked unreal, like some hideous prop from a straight-to-DVD horror flick. ‘Christ,’ Carol said. She turned her face away. Paula could see a faint tremble shiver through her boss’s lips. ‘OK, let’s have him out of here,’ she said, stepping aside and beckoning the others over to join them.

  ‘We’re going to assume that we’re looking at Daniel Morrison here,’ Carol said. ‘The body answers the description of the missing boy and he’s wearing the William Makepeace sweatshirt under his jacket. That means we’re sixty hours out from the last time Daniel was seen by someone who knew him. So we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Once we get an approximate time of death, we’ll know how many hours we need to fill in. But I want those hours accounted for. Paula, you liaise with DS Riley, make sure we have all their product. Kevin’s going to go with the FLO to break the news to the parents, but I also want you to do the follow-up, Paula.’ Carol started to walk back to the perimeter of the scene, her team at her heels.

  ‘For now, Paula, you take the school. Teachers and friends. It’s a private school, you’re going to come up against more than your fair share of wankers, but they’re not going to wind you up and you are going to find out exactly what kind of lad Daniel Morrison was. We’ll get Stacey on to his computer. Oh, and Paula? I want a fingertip search of the roadside from the end of the drive to the main drag. Tell DS Riley I said so.’ At the end of the plastic panels, she turned back to face them, her smile weary. ‘We owe Daniel a result. Let’s do it.’

  ‘Do I need to pick up Tony at Bradfield Moor?’ Paula asked. Over Carol’s shoulder, she saw Kevin make the throat-cutting gesture with one finger.

  The muscles of Carol’s face tensed. ‘We’re going to have to manage without Tony this time. If we think we need a profiler, we’ll have to rely on someone from the National Police Faculty.’

  She hid her disdain well, Paula thought. You’d have to really know the chief to realise how little store she set by the Home Office’s blue-eyed boys and girls.

  ‘One more thing,’ Carol said. ‘We need to check out who knew about this place. Kevin, as soon as you’re clear, get on to the builder, get a list of his crew, also architects, surveyors, the whole kit and caboodle. I’ll arrange some bodies from Northern to cover the initial background checks and interviews, then we can review what comes up.’ She ran a hand through her hair in a gesture Paula recognised. It was her boss’s way of buying herself some time. ‘Anything I’ve missed?’ she asked. Nobody spoke. One day, Paula dreamed she’d come up with something remarkable, something that hadn’t occurred to Carol or anyone else. She turned away and reached for a cigarette. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be today.

  The house looked more attractive in reality than it had in the photo. There was a better sense of its proportions, an awareness of its relationship to the garden, a context for its solid Edwardian lines. Tony opened the gate and walked up the drive, his feet crunching uneven on the gravel. It made him aware of the slight limp that still afflicted him after his encounter with an unmedicated patient and a fire axe. They’d offered him further surgery, but he’d said no. He’d hated being incapacitated, loathed the awareness of how little control he had over his life when his physical movement was compromised. For as long as he could manage without an operation, he would.

  He was early for the viewing appointment with the agent so he walked round the side of the house and found himself in a formal rose garden. The bushes were little more than bare contorted twigs at this time of the year, but he could picture how they would look in summer. He knew nothing about gardening, but it didn’t take much knowledge to see this was a well-tended arrangement, designed for pleasure. Tony sat down on a stone bench and gazed out across the roses. Arthur Blythe would have done the same thing, he imagined.

  His thoughts would have been very different, however. He wouldn’t have spent the middle of his day pacing a muddy lay-by, trying to climb inside the mind of a killer who had chosen this particular spot to dump his teenage victim. Alvin Ambrose, Patterson’s bagman, had been helpful, giving Tony useful background about the area and the condition of the victim. The mutilation had occurred post mortem. ‘But not here,’ Tony had said. ‘He’d need privacy.’

  ‘Plus the weather,’ Ambrose added. ‘It was lashing with rain and blowing a gale. The weather set in late afternoon, round about the time Jennifer left her pal Claire. Frankly, you wouldn’t want to be walking the dog in it, never mind . . . you know. What he was doing.’

  Tony looked up and down the lay-by. ‘He’d need somewhere sheltered from the weather and from prying eyes. But she was already dead, so he didn’t have to worry about being overheard. I suppose he could have worked on her here, in the back of a van or a truck.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, summoning up what the lay-by would be like under cover of darkness. ‘That would let him pick the perfect moment to dump her. Better than just driving in on the off-chance . . .’ His voice tailed off and he clambered through the undergrowth towards the sheltering trees. It smelled of loam and pine resin and stale urine. It suggested nothing to him, so he made his way back to Ambrose, patient by his car. ‘Either he’s used it before, or he’s deliberately scouted it out. Not that there’s any way of telling which it is. And if he has used it before, there’s no reason to believe it was for criminal purposes. He could just have stopped to take a leak or have a catnap.’

  ‘We’re coming by every night, talking to whoever’s parked up here, asking if they’ve noticed anything unusual,’ Ambrose said, clearly knowing it wasn’t enough. Tony liked that the sergeant showed none of the contempt or arrogance that often met his profiling sorties. Ambrose seemed stolid and unemotional, but his silence wasn’t the silence of the dull. He spoke when he had something to say, and so far what he’d had to say had been worth listening to.

  ‘Hard to think what would qualify as unusual to a bunch of truckers,’ Tony muttered. ‘The dump site is a problem, though. The weight of probability is on it not being a local. So hauling in the usual suspects isn’t going to get you anywhere.’

  ‘Why do you think it’s not a local?’ Ambrose sounded genuinely interested in the answer.

  ‘I imagine there’s a lot of better places to dump a body round here that a local would know about - more out of the way, less busy. Just safer all round for the killer. This is a relatively high-risk dump site. I think that, even if he did scout it out before, this was essentially a site of opportunity for someone who didn’t know anywhere better and didn’t want to risk driving any distance with a dead body on board.’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘I try to,’ Tony said wryly.

  Ambrose grinned, his impassivity disappearing in an instant. ‘That’s why we brought you in.’

  ‘Your first mistake.’ Tony turned back and prowled along the fringe of the lay-by again. On the one hand, this killer planned carefully. He’d spent weeks grooming Jennifer, setting her up to take his bait. He’d captured her, apparently avoiding witnesses and suspicion. And according to Ambrose, he’d left no forensic traces that had any investigative value. And then he’d dumped her by the side of the road, apparently not caring when she would be found. ‘Maybe he’s just no
t very strong,’ he called to Ambrose. ‘Maybe he couldn’t carry her very far.’ As he drew closer, he continued. ‘We tend to ascribe superhuman qualities to this kind of offender. Because deep down we think they’re monsters. But they’re mostly pretty average in terms of physique. Now you, you’d have no trouble carrying a fourteen-year-old girl all the way into those woods, back where she might not be found for weeks or months. But me? I’d struggle to get her out of the car and off the roadway. So maybe that’s the reason for the apparent contradiction.’

  That had been his most profound conclusion from his crime-scene visit. He hoped for more from the Maidments, but they couldn’t see him till later that afternoon. Her father had apparently decided he needed to spend some time back at work, so he wouldn’t be available till four. If Tony had been given to believing in signs and portents, he would have had to chalk that up as another one. He’d been fully prepared to cancel his arrangement with the agent if it had clashed with meeting Jennifer’s parents. Instead, their availability had dovetailed perfectly with his plans.

  Ambrose had dropped him at the hotel. He probably thought Tony was poring over witness statements, not sitting in a rose garden waiting for an estate agent to show him round a house he already owned. That wasn’t normal, by any standards of behaviour. Not as crazed as murdering teenage girls, but still a long way from normal.

  It was, Tony thought, as well that Ambrose didn’t know the truth.

  CHAPTER 13

  In her lowest moments, Carol imagined the worst fate James Blake could have in mind for her. Promotion. But not the sort of promotion that would let her lead her troops into battle. The sort that would have her sitting behind a desk, fretting about policy, while all the important work was being done elsewhere.

  Like those times, thankfully rare, when her team were occupied on the front line, doing what needed to be done to find Daniel Morrison’s killer and she was sitting in her office trying to fill the time before she was due at the boy’s post mortem. Usually she tried to occupy her mind with administration and paperwork. But that day, she had something more pressing on her mind.

  Leading her team in their cold-case work had added new weapons to Carol Jordan’s detective arsenal. She’d always been good at digging into the backgrounds of victims and suspects, but now she’d learned how to direct her archaeological skills backwards to a time when there were no computerised records or mobile phone bills to speed the plough. Like the years when Edmund Arthur Blythe had been living and presumably working in Halifax. Libraries were the most fruitful source, often leading to living experts who could fill in remarkable details. But there were also obscure electronic gateways to information. And Carol had access to the best of those.

  Stacey was surrounded by a battery of screens. She’d now built a barricade of information between herself and the rest of the team. She’d started with two, expanded to three, and now there were six monitors arrayed in front of her, each of them showing different processes in action. Even though she was currently concentrating on filtering the city-centre CCTV footage through the face-recognition software, other applications were running, whose function was a mystery to Carol. Stacey glanced up as her boss approached. ‘No luck yet,’ she said. ‘The trouble with these CCTV cameras is that they’re still not very high res.’

  ‘We’ll just have to keep plugging away,’ Carol said. ‘Stacey, is there somewhere online where I can access old telephone directories?’ She made a mental bet with herself that Stacey would show no signs of surprise at the request.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her eyes returning to the screens. Her fingers flew over the keyboard and one of the screens changed to display a map with a flashing cursor.

  ‘And that would be?’

  ‘Depends how far back you want to go.’

  ‘The early 1960s.’

  Stacey’s hands paused above the keys for a moment. Then they started typing again. ‘Your best bet is one of the genealogy sites. They’ve digitised a lot of public domain social information: phone books, street directories, electoral rolls. They’re also really user friendly because they’re aimed at—’

  ‘Idiots like me?’ Carol said sweetly.

  Stacey allowed herself half a smile. ‘Non-ICT professionals, I was going to say. Just google “old phone books” and “ancestors” and you might find something. Don’t forget, back in the 1960s, most people didn’t have phones, so you might not get lucky.’

  ‘I can only hope,’ Carol said. She was pinning her hopes to the fact that Blythe had re-emerged in Worcester as an entrepreneur. Perhaps he’d started in business back when he’d been courting Vanessa.

  Half an hour later, she was thrilled to be proved right. It was there, on the screen, in black and white in the 1964 directory. Blythe & Co., Specialist Metal Finishers. Carol checked the years either side and discovered the company was listed for only three years. So when Blythe left, the company ended. It looked like a dead end. What were the chances of tracking down anyone who had worked there forty-five years before, never mind someone who had known him well enough to remember anything useful?

  Still, she’d faced more hopeless pursuits. Now it really was time for the library. A quick online search and she had the number of the local reference library. When she got through, she explained that she was looking for a local history expert who might know about small businesses in the 1960s. The librarian um-ed and ah-ed for a moment, had a muffled conversation with someone else and finally said, ‘We think you need to talk to a man called Alan Miles. He’s a retired woodwork teacher, but he’s always been very keen on the industrial history of the area. Hang on a mo, I’ll get you his number.’

  It took Alan Miles almost a dozen rings to answer his phone. Carol was about to give up when a suspicious voice said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mr Miles? Alan Miles?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’ He sounded old and cross. Great, just what I need.

  ‘My name is Carol Jordan. I’m a detective chief inspector with Bradfield Police.’

  ‘Police?’ Now she could hear anxiety in his voice. Like most people, talking to the police provoked worry, even for those who had nothing to worry about.

  ‘I was given your number by one of the staff at the central library. She thought you might be able to help me with some background research.’

  ‘What sort of background research? I know nowt about crime.’ He sounded eager to be gone.

  ‘I’m trying to find out anything I can about a man called Edmund Arthur Blythe who ran a company of specialist metal finishers in Halifax in the early 1960s. The librarian thought you were the best person to talk to.’ Carol tried to sound as flattering as she could.

  ‘Why? I mean, why do you want to know about that?’

  God preserve me from suspicious old men. ‘I’m not at liberty to say. But my team specialises in cold cases.’ Which was nothing less than the truth, if not the whole truth.

  ‘I don’t like the phone,’ Miles said. ‘You can’t get the measure of a person over the phone. If you want to come over to Halifax, I’ll talk to you face to face.’

  Carol rolled her eyes and suppressed a sigh. ‘Does that mean you can help me with information about Blythe and Co?’

  ‘Happen I can. There’ll be stuff I can show an’ all.’

  Carol considered. Everything here was under control. They were nowhere near arrest or interview on anything. Unless something very unusual happened at the post mortem, she could easily disappear for a couple of hours in the evening. ‘How are you fixed this evening?’ she asked.

  ‘This evening? Seven o’clock. Meet me outside Halifax station. I’ll be wearing a fawn anorak and a tweed cap.’

  The line went dead. Carol glared at the phone, then saw the funny side and smiled to herself. If it took her further forward on her quest for Tony’s not-father, dealing with grumpy Alan Miles would be more than worth it.

  When Ambrose arrived to take him to meet Jennifer Maidment’s parents, Tony could barely hide his r
elief. After the estate agent’s tour, he’d struggled to focus his thoughts on the crime scene he’d visited earlier. He knew something was nagging at him about this killer, but he wasn’t sure what it was, and the more he tried to think about it, the more his mind’s eye was invaded by images of Arthur Blythe’s home. Tony was seldom influenced by his immediate surroundings. The notion of interior design had never planted itself in his consciousness. So he was all the more bemused by the inescapable fact that he envied Arthur Blythe this house. It went beyond mere comfort. It felt like a home, a place that had grown organically round one man’s idea of what mattered to him. And although he hated to admit it, it pierced Tony that Arthur Blythe had cast him off and gone on to make a home that felt so complete in itself. Nobody would ever feel like that about his house. He certainly didn’t. He didn’t have that absolute sense of himself that had clearly invested the man he never got to call his father.

  So Ambrose’s arrival felt like a liberation from his troublesome thoughts. It wasn’t a relief that lasted for long. ‘Did you bring the RigMarole print-outs?’ Tony asked as soon as he’d settled into the car. When he’d heard about ZZ, he’d asked Ambrose to bring copies of whatever they’d salvaged from the sessions so he could study them.

  Ambrose stared straight ahead. ‘The boss doesn’t want them to leave the office. He’s happy for you to read them, but he wants you to do it in-house.’

  ‘What? He doesn’t trust me? What does he think I’m going to do with them?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what he said.’ Ambrose’s hands were tight on the steering wheel. His discomfort was like a vibration in the air.

  ‘It’s not because he’s worried I’m going to sell them to the Daily Mail,’ Tony said, irritated out of proportion to the offence. ‘It’s about control. He’s afraid of losing control of his investigation.’ He threw his hands in the air. ‘I can’t work like this. It’s a waste of my energy to get caught up in this sort of pettiness. Look, Alvin, I work the way I work. I can’t concentrate the way I need to if I’ve got somebody looking over my shoulder. I need to be away from the bustle, the running around. I need to study this stuff and I need to do it on my terms.’