Fever of the Bone

by Val McDermid

  ‘We think Daniel went to Temple Fields after school on Tuesday,’ Kevin said. ‘Did he say anything to you about meeting anybody there?’

  Asif frowned. ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t sound very sure.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t say anything about any specific meeting,’ Asif said. ‘But the last time we got together, last week, he said he’d met somebody online who was setting up some radio show to showcase young comedy talent. Like, kids who were too young to get on stage on the club circuit.’ He shrugged. ‘Kids like us. I asked if he could get me in on it and he said, sure, but he wanted to meet the guy first, get his feet under the table.’ He looked suddenly miserable. ‘I got a bit pissed off with him, I thought maybe he was trying to cut me out, keep it for himself, like. But he said, no, it wasn’t like that, we were mates and he still owed me for getting him into the club in the first place. He just wanted to make the first contact, sort it all out, then bring me in afterwards.’ Sudden light dawned and his eyes widened. ‘Shit. You think that’s what got him killed?’

  ‘It’s too early in the investigation to say,’ Kevin said hastily. ‘At this stage, we don’t know what might be relevant. So it would be helpful if you could tell us anything about this contact of Daniel’s. How did they meet, do you know?’

  Asif nodded. ‘It was on RigMarole. You know, the networking site? They were both in a Gavin and Stacey mosh pit - that’s what we call a sort of fan group. They liked a lot of the same stuff so they got talking in a private sidebar and that’s when it came out about him being a comedy producer.’

  ‘Did Daniel mention his name?’

  ‘No. That was one of the things I got pissed off about. He wouldn’t even tell me the guy’s name. He was, like, the guy didn’t want it spread around in case somebody jumped the gun on him. So I never knew his name. Only that he made programmes at the BBC in Manchester. Supposedly,’ he added.

  ‘You weren’t convinced?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘It just seemed like a funny way to go about things,’ he said. ‘I mean, he’d never heard Daniel do his schtick. How could he know he was good on his feet? But you couldn’t tell Daniel anything. He was, like, his own law.’

  ‘Did Daniel say where they were meeting? Or when?’ Kevin tried.

  ‘I told you. He was acting like it was a state secret. No way he was going to let the details slip. What I told you, that’s all I know.’

  It was, Paula thought, a start. Not much of one, but a start at least.

  Ambrose felt his spirits give a little lift when he walked into Patterson’s office to find his boss closeted with Gary Harcup. He hadn’t been looking forward to attempting to put an upbeat gloss on the odd little profiler from Bradfield. But with Gary here, there would be something to divert Patterson’s attention. There might even be a bit of something to get their teeth into.

  Looking at Patterson, Ambrose saw a man who desperately needed some good news. He was pale and wan, his eyes heavy-lidded and baggy, his hair lifeless and stiff. It was always the same when they weren’t moving forward fast enough on a case. Patterson absorbed all the pressure and all the pain, till you thought he was going to crack up. Then something inside him would shift, he would see possibilities begin to open up and suddenly he’d be upbeat and full of confidence again. It was just a matter of waiting it out. ‘Come on in,’ Patterson said, waving Ambrose forward and gesturing to a chair. ‘Gary’s just this minute got here.’

  Ambrose nodded to the chubby computer expert, who looked as dishevelled as ever. Hair awry, T-shirt crumpled, something adhering to his beard that Ambrose didn’t want to examine too closely; he didn’t exactly inspire confidence. But he’d come through for them often enough in the past for Ambrose not to care how he looked. Maybe he should suspend his judgement on Tony Hill. Not leap to conclusions just because the guy seemed kind of unorthodox in the way he approached things. He should wait and see if he too came up with the goods the way Gary did. ‘All right, Gary?’ he said.

  Gary nodded so vigorously his belly shook. ‘Doing good, Alvin. Doing good.’

  ‘So, what have you got for us?’ Patterson asked. He sat back in his chair, gently tapping the desk with a pencil.

  Gary produced a couple of transparent plastic envelopes from his backpack. Each contained a few sheets of paper. ‘It’s a bit of a mixed bag. This—’ he slapped the first ‘—this is a list of the machines I was able to identify. I only got about half of them. The others are out there in no man’s land, passed on second- or third-hand.’

  Patterson took the papers from the folder and scanned the top sheet. When he’d done, he passed it to Ambrose. It didn’t take them long to look through the list of seventeen machines Gary had identified. Internet cafés, public libraries and one airport. ‘It’s all over the place,’ Patterson said. ‘Worcester, Solihull, Birmingham, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Telford, Stafford, Cannock, Stoke, Stone, Holmes Chapel, Knutsford, Stockport, Manchester Airport, Oldham, Bradfield, Leeds . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t completely accurate when I said he used a different machine every time,’ Gary said. ‘When I went back and analysed all the messages we’ve still got, I found some of them were double or triple use. The ones he went back to twice are Worcester, Bradfield and Stoke. He used Manchester Airport three times. But they’re all public-access machines.’

  ‘It’s the motorway network,’ Ambrose said, seeing the roads unfurl in his mind’s eye like veins on a forearm. ‘M5, M42, M6, M60, M62. These are all easy access off the motorway. If he was stalking Jennifer, Worcester was one end of his journey. ‘ He looked up, eyes bright with a fresh idea. ‘And Leeds was the other end. Maybe that’s where he lives.’

  ‘Or maybe that’s where his next target lives,’ Patterson said. ‘He used Manchester Airport three times. Maybe that’s the one that’s nearest to where he actually lives. You need to run this past our profiler, see what he thinks. Don’t they have some kind of computer program for figuring out where the killer lives? I’m sure I heard about that when they had that pair of random snipers in America.’

  Gary looked dubious. ‘I don’t know if geographic profiling would work on something like this. Plus, it’s a pretty specialist field.’

  Suddenly animated, Patterson sat up straight and waved a hand at the papers. ‘Get him in, let him have a look. That’s what we’re paying him for.’

  Ambrose almost said something, then realised it wasn’t the moment to raise Hill’s demands to see the material on his ground. He’d have to wait till Gary had left. ‘What’s the other stuff, Gary?’ he asked.

  ‘Not quite so good,’ Gary said, placing the other file on the desk. It looked pretty thin. ‘But before I get to that, I wanted to tell you one other thing I did try. I thought that since ZZ was using Rig to contact Jennifer, he must have a page of his own. It turns out that he did, but the page was deactivated around four o’clock on the afternoon Jennifer disappeared. He was burning his bridges behind him.’

  ‘Is there any way of getting at what was on the page?’

  Gary shrugged. ‘You’d need to get Rig on board. I don’t think they’d give you anything without a warrant. And you’ve got a whole issue around data protection. They don’t actually own the personal data people put up there. After the trouble Facebook got into over ownership of what’s on the member pages, all the networking sites have been very careful to put up Chinese walls between their customers and themselves. So if there is some residual information on Rig’s servers, you might not be able to get at it even with a warrant. Not without fighting their lawyers.’

  ‘That’s insane,’ Patterson protested.

  ‘That’s the way it goes. These companies, they don’t want to be seen as a pushover when the cops come calling. There’s all sorts of stuff going on in their private sidebars. If you guys can just walk in and take what you want, they’re going to have no clients in about five minutes flat.’

  ‘God help us,’ Patterson muttered. ‘You’d think they wanted to encourage murd
erers and paedophiles to use their sites.’

  ‘Only if they’re got valid credit cards and like to shop online,’ Ambrose said. ‘Thanks anyway, Gary. I’ll talk to the people at Rig and see what they have to say. So, how did you get on with the fragments you found on the hard disk?’

  ‘I’ve managed to pull out some of the last conversation between Jennifer and ZZ. The one she erased. It’s only partial, but it’s something. There’s two copies in there,’ he added.

  Thin divided by two, then. Ambrose took the two sheets of paper Patterson offered him.

  ZZ: . . . 4 . . . king 2 me . . . priv8 here &no . . .

  Jeni: Y u want 2 be . . .

  ZZ: . . . ke I sd . . . BIG secr . . .

  Jeni: no i don’t

  ZZ: u don’t no wo . . .

  Jeni: . . . noth . . .

  ZZ: . . . i no truth . . .

  Jeni: . . . ow . . . my biz

  ZZ: cuz i no wh . . . 2 find stuf . . . idd . . . aces t look 4

  inf . . . u don . . .

  Jeni: . . . makin it up?

  ZZ: cuz when i . . . no its tr . . . ul c . . .

  Jeni: . . . so spill

  ZZ: take a deep breth

  Jeni: u mak . . . nd big deal

  ZZ: ur . . . ur real . . .

  Jeni: . . . fkd in t hed

  ZZ: i can prove . . .

  Jeni: LIAR

  ZZ: . . . et me 2moro . . . @ ca . . . el u, show . . .

  Jeni: . . . lieve u?

  ZZ: cuz we need 2 . . . 30 @ c . . . nt tel . . .

  Jeni: . . . b ther. U btr not b ly . . .

  Patterson frowned. ‘It’s not exactly easy to read,’ he said. ‘It’s hardly bloody English. It’s like a different language.’

  ‘It is. It’s called textspeak. Your Lily would be able to read that like it was a newspaper,’ Ambrose said. ‘Basically, ZZ is saying he knows Jeni’s big secret. He says something that Jennifer is totally pissed off about. She says he’s fucked in the head and then she shouts that he’s a liar. That’s what the capital letters mean, she’s shouting.’

  ‘Mental,’ Patterson muttered.

  ‘Then I think he’s saying they should meet tomorrow. He gives her a time and place and tells her not to tell. And she says she will be there and he better not be lying,’ Gary said.

  ‘So where’s he telling her to meet?’ Patterson said, pink with frustration.

  Gary shrugged. ‘Who knows? Somewhere beginning with “ca”. Café? Car park? Castle Street? The cathedral?’

  ‘You can’t narrow it down any more than that?’

  Gary looked hurt. ‘You’ve got no idea, have you? It’s taken me more than a week to get this much. I had to beg a mate for some software that’s still in development to get this far. Given what there was on that computer, it’s a miracle we’ve got this much. At least now you can rule out a lot of places where she didn’t go.’

  Patterson chewed the skin by his thumbnail in an act of suppressed rage. ‘I’m sorry, Gary,’ he grunted. ‘I know you’ve done your best. Thank you. Send us your bill.’

  Gary extracted himself from the chair with an attempt at dignity, grabbed his backpack and marched to the door. ‘Good luck,’ was his parting shot.

  ‘He’s an annoying little twat, isn’t he?’ Patterson said as the door closed.

  ‘But he does deliver.’

  ‘Why else do you think I give him houseroom? So, we need to narrow down everywhere in the city that begins with “ca” and check what CCTV cover there is from nine days ago. Plenty there for the team to get stuck into.’ Patterson was vibrant with energy now. He’d turned the corner from despair to optimism. It was, Ambrose thought, the perfect moment to pitch him on Tony Hill’s behalf.

  ‘Since we’re going to be flat out on this,’ he began, ‘we’re not going to want any extra bodies cluttering the place up. Are we?’

  CHAPTER 15

  Carol had lost count of the number of times she’d stood in a pathology suite watching a pathologist performing their precise and grisly duty. But she’d never grown inured to the pitiful nature of the procedure. Seeing a human being reduced to their component parts still filled her with sadness, but it was always tempered with the desire to deliver justice to whoever was responsible for bringing the cadaver to this place. If anything reinforced Carol’s need for justice, it was the morgue rather than the crime scene.

  The pathologist today was a man who had become her friend. In a reflection of his mixed heritage, Dr Grisha Shatalov ran his department at Bradfield Cross Hospital with a paradoxical blend of White Russian authoritarianism and Canadian moderation. He believed the dead merited the same respect as the living patients whose histology slides he studied under the microscope, but that didn’t mean things had to be run with chilly formality. Right from the start, he’d welcomed Carol into his world and made her feel part of a team whose goal was to bring secrets from obscurity into the light.

  Lately, Grisha had begun to share the pallor of his subjects. Long hours coupled with a young baby had left his skin grey, his long triangular eyes surrounded with dark patches like the bandit mask of a racoon. But today, he’d recovered his colour, almost seeming healthy and fit. ‘You look good,’ Carol said as she settled herself against the wall to the side of the dissecting table. ‘Have you been on holiday?’

  ‘I feel like I’ve had a vacation. Finally my daughter has learned how to sleep for more than three hours at a time.’ He grinned at her. ‘I’d forgotten how wonderful it feels to wake up naturally.’ As he spoke, his hand moved automatically to the tray beside him, instinctively selecting the first of a chain of instruments that would expose what was left of Daniel Morrison to their prying eyes.

  Carol let her thoughts run down their own roads as Grisha worked. She didn’t need to pay close attention; he would make sure he alerted her to anything she needed to know. Her team were liaising with Northern Division to make sure all the routine elements of the investigation were in place. Something might leap out from those initial interviews and inquiries. Stacey’s brilliant computer skills might produce a loose thread for them to pick at. But that would only be if they got lucky. There was little else that could be done now until the information started flowing back to their squad room so they could pore over it, trying to identify something that didn’t fit. You could never explain in advance what that bad fit might turn out to be. There were no guidelines, no training, no checklist. It was a mixture of experience and instinct. It was an indefinable quality that each of her officers possessed, and one of the main reasons they were on her squad. Each of them had different areas where their antennae were most finely tuned, and together they were more than the sum of their parts. What a bloody waste it would be if Blake had his way and they were scattered to the four winds.

  She was so absorbed in her own thoughts that the post mortem flashed past. She could hardly believe it when she heard Grisha invite her through to his office to go over the key points again. ‘Again?’ she said as she followed him, sparing a glance for the body on the table. An assistant was closing the long incisions that Grisha had made on Daniel’s torso. When it was possible these days, he used a keyhole approach to the task, avoiding the traditional Y-incision that left everyone looking like a victim of Baron von Frankenstein. That wasn’t possible when he was dealing with a murder victim. Shuddering in spite of herself, Carol wished it was.

  ‘It makes it easier on the families,’ he’d explained to her. ‘They’ve got this horrible image in their head of what a cadaver looks like after a post mortem, so if we can explain that it won’t be like that, they’re more inclined to agree to post mortems when it’s a medical rather than a forensic exercise.’ Looking at Daniel now, she could see the force of his argument.

  Carol followed him into his office. It was hard to believe, but there seemed to be even less room for Grisha and his visitors than the last time she’d been there. There was paper everywhere. Charts, folders, periodicals and stacks of books filled shelves, st
ood in piles on the floor and leaned precariously against the computer monitor. When Carol shifted a mound of computer print-outs to sit on the visitor’s chair, she could barely see Grisha behind the desk. ‘You’re going to have to do something about this,’ she said. ‘Don’t you have a PhD student with nothing better to do?’

  ‘I swear to God, I think other people have started dumping their shit in here. Either that or the peer-reviewed stuff is breeding.’ He shifted a heap of folders so he could see her better. ‘So, your boy Daniel . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It always feels wrong, looking at a bunch of organs that have seen so little use. It’s hard not to think of all the good things he’s missed out on. The things we enjoy doing that leave their nasty repercussions waiting to ambush us.’

  Carol had no response that didn’t feel sentimental or trite. ‘What’s the verdict, then? Cause of death?’

  ‘Asphyxiation. Heavy-duty polythene bag taped over his head effectively cut off his oxygen supply. No signs of a struggle, though. No blood or skin under his nails, no bruising anywhere apart from a mark on his thigh which looks about three or four days old and is, in my opinion, completely not sinister.’

  ‘Do you think he was drugged?’

  Grisha frowned at her over his glasses. ‘You know I don’t know the answer to that. We won’t have any kind of answer till we get the tox screens back, and even then we’ll be none the wiser if it was GHB because the levels we already have in our blood rise after death. If I was dumb enough to make guesses about this kind of thing, I would guess he was incapacitated by drugs. Not drink, because there was no smell of alcohol in the stomach. His last meal, incidentally, consisted of bread, fish, salad and what looks like jelly babies. Probably a tuna salad sandwich, and probably eaten no more than an hour before he died.’