Fever of the Bone

by Val McDermid

  Sam grinned. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘We’ll rope it, get airbags underneath then winch the lot up. Then we’ll take a look inside.’

  The recovery process seemed to take forever. Sam tried to suppress his impatience, but he couldn’t keep still. He walked the shoreline, climbing up a low bluff from where he could get a better view of the boat a few hundred yards away. But he was too far away to see much of what was going on. At last, a black-wrapped lump the size of a Portaloo began to emerge, sluicing water in its wake. ‘Christ, that’s big,’ Sam said aloud, transfixed by the struggles of the dive team to get it on board without capsizing their boat.

  The sound of their engine split the hush of the late afternoon and Sam hustled back down to the rough scree of the little beach they’d launched from. The boat nosed right on to the shore but Sam hung back, not wanting to ruin his shoes unnecessarily. It took five of them to manhandle the constantly shrinking bundle from the boat on to dry land, staggering up the beach to lay it down on the grass by the support vehicle. Water still leaked generously from all sides.

  ‘What now?’ Sam asked.

  The dive team leader pointed to one of his men emerging from the support vehicle with a camera. ‘We take photos. Then we cut it open.’

  ‘You don’t take it to a secure area first?’

  ‘We don’t take it anywhere until we know what the appropriate destination might be,’ he said patiently. ‘It might be rolls of carpet. Or dead sheep. No point in hauling them off to the mortuary, is there?’

  Feeling stupid, Sam just nodded and waited while the officer with the camera took a couple of dozen shots of the oozing package. At last he stepped back and one of the divers took a long knife from a sheath at his waist and slit the package open. As he peeled the plastic back, Sam held his breath.

  The remaining water flowed away. Inside the black plastic, three packages were sheathed in polythene turned opaque by time and water, bound with duct tape.

  Sam had been expecting Danuta Barnes and five-month-old Lynette. This was clearly more than he’d bargained for.

  While Tony might not have appreciated Carol’s characterisation of him as a lost boy, it wasn’t so far off the mark. In the hour since Alvin Ambrose had delivered his hard-won bundle of papers, Tony had barely been able to string two thoughts together. The couple in the next room had concluded their blazing row with equally blazing sex. Through the other wall someone was listening to some sort of motorsport that involved throaty engines and squealing tyres. It was intolerable.

  It almost made him believe in fate.

  Except that he knew deep down that if it hadn’t been the noise, it would have been something else. After all, there was plenty to choose from. The poor lighting. The hardness of the bed. The chair that was the wrong height for the desktop. Any one of them would have justified the decision he was about to make. The decision he had, if he was honest with himself, made that afternoon when, as soon as he’d freed himself from the estate agent, he’d paid a visit to a firm of solicitors whose office was also within easy walking distance of the hotel.

  Tony picked up the papers and slipped them into his still-packed bag. He didn’t actually check out. That could wait till morning. He got into his car and retraced the route he’d driven earlier, only making a couple of mistaken turns along the way. Hell, there were days when he made more errors than that between Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital and his own front door.

  He parked on the street outside the house he supposed he could call his. Although that seemed too presumptuous. This was unquestionably Edmund Arthur Blythe’s house still. And yet, Tony imagined that if his benefactor had a ghost it wouldn’t mind his presence.

  The keys the solicitor had handed over turned smoothly in the twin mortise locks and the door swung open without the faintest creak. Inside, it was blissfully quiet. Discreet double glazing smothered the traffic noise and not even the ticking of a clock disturbed the silence. Tony gave a contented sigh and made his way through to the drawing room he’d admired earlier that afternoon. Its deep bay window gave on to the garden, though at this time of day there wasn’t much to be seen through the growing dark. From upstairs, there was a view of the park, but at this level, the garden felt secluded and isolate, a private space for the house and its owner to enjoy.

  He turned away and his eye caught a tall cabinet filled with CDs. As he approached, light flooded the shelves, startling him. He looked up and caught sight of a motion sensor on the front of the cabinet. ‘Clever,’ he murmured, casting an eye over a collection that encompassed nineteenth-century classical music and the more melodic twentieth-century jazz. He’d clearly enjoyed something with a tune, Tony thought. Out of curiosity, he turned on the CD player. Rich, smooth saxophone with a swing to its rhythm, the last music Edmund Arthur Blythe had chosen to listen to. A ticker display across the front of the CD player’s illuminated panel said, ‘Stanley Turrentine: “Deep Purple”’. Tony had never heard of the man but he recognised the tune and liked the way the sound made him feel.

  He walked away and switched on a standard lamp, perfectly placed to cast its light over a high-backed armchair with a convenient side table next to it. The ideal arrangement for a man who wanted to read and perhaps to make the occasional note. Tony took the papers out of his bag and settled into the chair. For the next hour, he sat with the transcripts and unobtrusive saxophones, trying to get a feel for ZZ and to make sense of the fragmentary final session. ‘ur . . . ur real . . .’ he read over and over. ‘Your what? You are what? You are who? You’re really, what? Your real what?’ He puzzled over ‘. . . el u, show u.’ ‘Tell, that’s it. I’ll do more than tell you, I’ll show you. Of course, that’s it. You want to show her, don’t you? But what? What do you want to show her?’

  He got to his feet and paced, trying to find some hypothesis that would cover those imponderable gaps in the conundrum. The more he could read into this exchange, the closer it might bring him to both victim and killer. ‘Tell you you’re really what? Show you you’re something . . . But what? What’s the secret? The secret she doesn’t even know she’s got? What kind of secret can we have that we don’t even know about?’

  His prowling brought him face to face with a drinks table. Not the predictable heavy crystal tumblers that would have been of a piece with the slightly old-fashioned, comfortable furniture, but modern, stylish glasses that fit the hand in the most unassertive of ways. He picked one up and enjoyed the heft of it. On the spur of the moment, he poured himself a small Armagnac. It wasn’t a drink he’d normally have chosen, but the presence of three different varieties on the table convinced him that this had been the preferred tipple of Edmund Arthur Blythe. It felt appropriate to raise a glass of the old man’s favourite drink to his memory. Well, not to his memory as such, since Tony had no memory of him at all. Maybe to his attempt to make amends from beyond the grave. Even if it was a doomed attempt.

  He sipped as he paced, mulling over everything he’d learned about Jennifer Maidment and her killer. Something stirred at the back of his mind. Something that had nibbled at the edge of his thoughts earlier. What had it been? He returned to his bag and took out the material Patterson had initially emailed to him. Crime-scene photos and the post-mortem report, that’s what he was interested in.

  He studied each photograph carefully, paying particular attention to the shots of Jennifer’s mutilated body on the autopsy table. Then he read the original crime report again, taking particular note of the times. ‘The last confirmed sighting is quarter past four. The missing report comes in just after nine. And unless all the truckers are lying, you couldn’t have dumped her after half past seven, when the first two HGV drivers pulled in together. Really, you only had her for a couple of hours.’ He put down the report and paced again, coming to rest by the ornate wooden fire surround. He leaned on the mantel and stared down into the empty grate, trying to ease his way into the mind of Jennifer’s killer, trying to feel what he’d felt, know what
he’d known.

  ‘You had to get her away from people, drug her, suffocate her with the plastic, mutilate her and get her to the dump site,’ he said slowly. ‘Where’s the pleasure for you? Where’s the why? What are you getting off on? Possessing her? Controlling her?’

  He turned away and walked back to the window, frowning into the gloom. ‘It’s just not long enough. You spent weeks grooming her. For what? A couple of hours? I don’t think so. You commit that much planning, that much time, that much energy, you want more than a snatched couple of hours. You’ve lusted after her. You need to slake that thirst. But not you, apparently. You just killed her, cut her and dumped her. That doesn’t make any sense . . .’ Everything he knew told him killers like this relished the time they spent with their victims. They set up their hiding places away from prying eyes so they could satisfy themselves again and again and again. They didn’t take all the risks involved in capturing a victim only to turn their backs on the possibility of stretching the pleasure to the max. The ones who liked live prey held them captive, violating them again and again, torturing them and savouring the chance to make their fantasies flesh and blood. Often with the emphasis on the blood. The ones who preferred the passivity of a corpse often went to great lengths to keep the body as fresh as possible for as long as possible. The early stages of decomposition were seldom a deterrent to the seriously screwed up.

  But that’s not what happened with Jennifer. ‘Killed her, cut her and dumped her,’ he repeated. ‘No time to play. Something happened to stop you. But what?’ It had to be something unforeseen. Perhaps he’d lost access to the place where he’d planned to take her. Or else something had erupted in his other life that made it impossible to carry out his plans. Whatever it was, it must have been compelling. Nothing less than that would keep a killer from his satisfaction, not once he had his victim in his power.

  It made sense, Tony thought. But not the sort of sense that satisfied. ‘Killed her, cut her and dumped her,’ he muttered under his breath as he walked back to the drinks table and poured himself a taster of the second Armagnac bottle. He took a tiny sip and returned to his pacing.

  Suddenly he stopped short. ‘Cut her. Cut her.’ Tony slapped his forehead. He hurried back to the photographs, confirming what he thought he remembered. ‘You cut out her vagina, ripped up her cervix, slashed her uterus. You went to town on her. But you didn’t bother with her clitoris.’

  Tony drained his glass and returned for a refill. The conclusion that was rattling round his head seemed inescapable. Any investigator of this kind of crime would think it absurd in its counter-intuitiveness. But he’d never been afraid to accept possibilities that others shied away from. It was one of the reasons Carol Jordan had always prized his mind. Somehow, he didn’t think DI Stuart Patterson would be so generous. But there was no getting away from it. It was the only thing that made sense of the two incongruities he’d recognised.

  ‘This isn’t a sexual homicide,’ he declared to the empty room. ‘There’s nothing sexual about it. Whatever’s going on here, it’s not about someone getting their rocks off.’

  Which begged a question that was, to Tony, even more disturbing. If it wasn’t about sex, what was it about?

  CHAPTER 18

  Alan Miles wasn’t hard to spot. He was the only person standing outside Halifax station in a gentle mist of rain wafting down from the Pennines that defied the canopy. Carol parked where she shouldn’t and walked briskly over to the slightly stooped figure peering out at the world through the kind of glasses she hadn’t seen anyone wear since the NHS stopped doing free prescription pairs. Heavy black plastic across the top, steel wire round the rest of the lenses, and thick as milk-bottle bottoms. Face like an Easter Island slab. She could imagine him giving the bottom-stream fourth-year boys hell. ‘Mr Miles?’ she said.

  He turned his head with the articulation of an elderly tortoise and appraised her. Evidently he liked what he saw for a smile of extraordinary sweetness transformed him utterly. His hand went to the brim of his cap and he raised it fractionally. ‘Miss Jordan,’ he said. ‘Very prompt. I like that in a woman.’ In the flesh, he sounded like a basso profondo version of Thora Hird.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I hope I wasn’t rude to you on the telephone. I have no telephone manner. It’s a device that completely flummoxes me. I know I sound most off-putting. My wife tells me I should leave it alone and let her deal with it.’

  ‘If I had the choice, I would leave it to somebody else to deal with,’ Carol said. She meant it; she’d spent the last twenty minutes talking to division commanders, press officers and her own team, making sure everything that could be done to find Seth Viner was being done. And that nobody was forgetting about Daniel Morrison either. The guilt at jumping ship was tremendous. But not enough to divert her from her other mission.

  ‘Now, I see you’ve arrived by car, which is perfect, really,’ Miles said. ‘If you don’t mind driving, we can make our way to the very premises where Blythe and Co held sway. That’ll give you a sense of the place. There’s a very pleasant public house a few streets away where we can have a small libation while I outline what I’ve got for you. If that’s acceptable to your good self?’

  Carol struggled to keep a straight face. She felt as if she’d stumbled into a BBC TV series by one of the other Alans - Bennett or Plater - who specialised in Yorkshire eccentrics. ‘That would suit me fine, Mr Miles.’

  ‘Call me Alan,’ he said with a roguish look. If he’d had mustachios, he would have twirled them, Carol thought as she led the way back to her car.

  He sat stiffly in the passenger seat, a whiplash of a man leaning towards the windscreen, the better to see where they were going. He directed her through a convoluted one-way system, leaving the town centre behind and climbing a steep road flanked by small stone-faced terraced houses. They turned off about halfway up the hill into a warren of narrow streets. The final turn brought them into a dead end. On one side Carol could see a line of brick houses whose front doors opened directly on to the street. Opposite was the side wall of what looked like a warehouse or a small factory. It was obviously not a recent construction, being made of stone with a slate roof. Beyond the building was a small yard for vehicles, cut off behind a high chain-link fence. A metal sign said, Performance Autos - Yorkshire. ‘There you go,’ Miles said. ‘That used to be the premises of Blythe and Co, Specialist Metal Finishers.’

  It was hard to feel excited about so prosaic a building, but it did mark a real step forward in her journey. ‘That’s quite something, Alan. Seeing it still standing.’ If he wanted to, Tony could make this journey and send his imagination travelling through time. Somehow, she thought he might give it a miss. ‘So what have you got to tell me about Blythe’s and its owner?’

  ‘Shall we repair to the public house?’

  ‘With great pleasure,’ Carol said, wondering why she was starting to sound as if she too inhabited TV Yorkshire. I’ll be ordering a port and lemon next.

  The Weaver’s Shuttle huddled down a lane near an old Victorian mill that had been converted into apartments. The pub had avoided a makeover, its exposed stone walls and low beams stubbornly enclosing an old-fashioned bar where couples sat and talked quietly, old men played dominoes and a group of middle-aged women were having a very decorous darts match. The barman nodded to Miles as they walked in. ‘Evening, Alan. The usual, is it?’ Reaching for a half-pint glass and a wooden pump handle.

  ‘Indeed, landlord. What can I get you, young lady?’ Miles removed his cap, revealing a gleaming bald dome fringed with steel-grey curls.

  ‘Let me, Alan.’ Carol smiled. ‘I’m thinking of a dry white wine,’ she said, doubting whether the wine would come up to the class of the real ales whose badges were lined up on hand pumps along the bar.

  ‘I’ve got a South African Sauvignon Blanc or a Pinot Grigio open tonight,’ the barman said. ‘Or I’ve a Chilean Chardonnay cold.’

  ‘I’ll try a glass of the
sauvignon,’ she said, realising how ready she was for a drink. It had been a while since she’d gone this late in the day before having her first glass. Maybe she really was getting past the point where alcohol had been the one reliably bright element in her days. Something else that might please Tony.

  When it came, the wine was cold and vivid with the smell of grass and the taste of gooseberry. Alan Miles was watching her attentively as she took her first mouthful. He chuckled. There was no other word for it, Carol thought. ‘Not what you expected,’ he said.

  ‘So little in life is,’ she said, surprised at her candour.

  ‘When you say it like that . . . well, that’s a pity, Miss Jordan,’ he said. ‘But enough of us. You want to know about Blythe’s. Eddie Blythe was nearly a local lad, grew up down the road in Sowerby Bridge. A bright lad, by all accounts. He went to the technical college in Huddersfield and showed a lot of aptitude in the field of metallurgy. Whether it was by chance or design, he happened on a new process for coating metals that was very useful in the field of medical instruments. Scalpels and forceps and the like, as I understand it. He patented his bright idea and set up the factory to manufacture his products. He was doing very well, apparently. And then suddenly, in the spring of 1964, he sold up, lock, stock and barrel, to some steel firm in Sheffield. Within weeks, they’d moved production to Sheffield. They took the key workers with them. Paid their removal costs and everything.’ He paused and supped some of his glass of mild.

  ‘That seems very generous,’ Carol said.

  ‘Supposedly it was part of the deal Eddie Blythe made.’ He took a slim envelope out of his inside pocket. ‘Here’s a photocopy of a newspaper article.’ He passed it to her.

  ‘Local firm sold,’ the headline read. The few paragraphs said little more than Miles had already related. But there was a photograph across two columns. The caption read, ‘Mr E.A. Blythe (L) shakes hands on the deal with Mr J. Kessock (R) of Rivelin Fabrications.’ She squinted at the photograph, strangely moved. There was, she thought, a look of Tony in the set of his shoulders, the angle of his head, the shape of his face. She took out a pen and scribbled down the date of the article.