Cross and Burn (4 page)

T
he tram rattled across the high Victorian viaduct, sleek modern lines a contrast to the soot-stained redbrick arches. It was, Tony thought, a powerful metaphor for the whole area surrounding the Minster Canal Basin. Opposite the viaduct was the ruined apse of the medieval minster itself, its stained limestone tracery all that had been left standing when a stick of Luftwaffe bombs had reduced the rest of the building to rubble. A dozen years ago, the viaduct and the minster had bookended a higgledy-piggledy scrum of random buildings, half of them empty and decaying, their window frames rotten and their rooflines sagging. The canal district had been the least lovely and least loved of inner-city Bradfield’s precincts.

Then a bright spark on the city council had discovered an EU fund aimed at reinvigorating depressed and deprived inner-city environments. These days, the canal basin was the hub of a lively area. Craft workshops, indie publishers and software developers worked cheek by jowl, flats and studio apartments occupied the upper floors and a sprinkling of bars and bistros provided somewhere for locals and visitors to mingle. One of Bradfield Victoria’s premier league stars had even lent his name to a Spanish tapas bar that he occasionally deigned to grace with his presence.

The basin itself had become a mix of permanent residential moorings and short-stay marina slots for the narrowboats that provided holidays and day trips where once they’d shifted cargoes round the country.

Attractive though it now was, it had never previously crossed Tony’s mind as a possible home. He’d sat outside one of the waterside pubs with Carol Jordan once, when they’d been pretending to be normal people who could have a drink and a conversation that didn’t involve the interior life of fucked-up individuals. Another time, he’d shared a clutter of tapas with a couple of American colleagues who’d come to look round the secure mental hospital where he worked. More than once, he’d walked the canal from one side of the city to the other while he mulled over a complex case. There was something about walking that freed up his mental processes to consider options other than the obvious.

So, he was familiar with the basin. Yet he’d never wondered what it would be like to live on the water in the heart of the city until it was all that was left to him. His former house in Bradfield was gone, sold to strangers when he thought he’d finally found a place he could with conviction call home. And now that was gone too, a burned-out shell that was an uncomfortable metaphor for what had happened to the life he’d imagined he could lead there. Everywhere he looked, bloody metaphors galore.

Tony crossed the cobbled area that separated the tapas bar from the houseboat moorings and swung aboard a pretty narrowboat whose name,
Steeler
, unfurled on a painted gold-and-black ribbon across the stern. He unfastened the heavy padlocks that held the hatch closed and clattered down the steep steps to the cabin below. As he passed, he threw the switches that activated the boat’s electricity supply, generated by an array of solar panels. Even gloomy Bradfield skies provided enough energy for one person whose power needs were far from extravagant.

He’d been surprised by how readily he’d adapted to living in so confined a space. Life with a place for everything and everything in its place had proved unexpectedly soothing. There was no room for anything inessential; living like this had stripped his material life down to the bone, forcing him to reconsider the worth of stuff that had cluttered his life for years. OK, he didn’t love the practical necessities like emptying the toilet tank and topping up the water reservoir. Nor was he entirely at ease with the camaraderie of the water, a connectivity that seemed to draw together the most unlikely combinations of people. And he still hadn’t mastered the heating system. Now the nights were getting colder, he was growing fed up with waking in a freezing cabin. He was going to have to settle for the action of last resort – sitting down with the manual and actually reading the instructions. But in spite of all the inconveniences, he had grown comfortable in this calm, contained world.

He dumped his bag on the buttoned leather banquette that ran along the saloon bulkhead and put the kettle on for a cafètiere of coffee. While he waited for the water to boil, he booted up his laptop and checked his email. The only new message was from a cop for whom he’d profiled a serial rapist a few years before. Half-hoping it was an invitation to work with him again, he opened it.

Tony stared at the screen, the words blurring. Rollo Harris wasn’t the only one who didn’t know where Carol Jordan was, or how to get in touch with her. Most people who knew them both would have struggled to believe it, but Tony hadn’t spoken to Carol for the best part of three months. And he wouldn’t have known where to find her if he’d felt able to break that silence. The last thing she’d said to him after the hunt for Vance was done was, ‘It’s not all that’s over, Tony.’ And it appeared she’d meant it. She’d cut herself loose from his life.

At first, he’d managed to keep track of her. Although her final weeks at Bradfield Metropolitan Police had been classified as compassionate leave, she was obliged to let her employers know where she was. And because Paula McIntyre knew better than most how close the bond between Carol and Tony had been, she’d kept him in the loop. Carol had rented a service apartment in Bradfield for a month, then she’d moved into her parents’ house.

Then she stopped being a DCI with BMP and, according to Paula, within days she was no longer under her parents’ roof. ‘I called her mobile and it wasn’t working. So I rang her parents’ number and spoke to her dad. He wasn’t very forthcoming but he did admit she wasn’t living there any more. He either didn’t know or he wouldn’t say where she is,’ Paula had told him. Given the quality of Paula’s interrogation skills, Tony reckoned David Jordan probably didn’t know where his daughter was living.

He couldn’t help wondering how that had happened. Going home to her parents, in the circumstances, wouldn’t have been his professional advice. Her brother was dead, murdered by a killer he and Carol had failed to catch soon enough. And grief generally imposed a need to distribute blame. Was it Carol’s guilt or her parents’ pain that had driven a wedge between them?

However it had played out, it hadn’t ended well. Tony would have put money on that. And since Carol needed to hold him responsible for Michael and Lucy’s death because he had been too slow to realise what Vance had planned, then it followed that she would blame him for the rift with her parents. Insult to injury.

Tony rubbed his eyes with a knuckle. Wherever Carol Jordan was hiding, he would be the last to know. Sooner or later he was going to have to man up and either do something about that or let it go for ever.

G
artonside was a district nobody had ever chosen to live in. Even when the narrow streets of basic brick terraces had been built back at the tail end of the nineteenth century, their original residents knew they were destined to be slums before the decade was out. Thin walls meant cold and damp were perennial problems. Cheap materials diminished privacy. Outside toilets and no bathrooms did nothing for the hygiene or health of the factory workers who filled the two-bedroom houses to bursting point. Gartonside became the cheerless port of call of the feckless, the hopeless and the city’s newest arrivals. Only the immigrants ever escaped its dead-end streets.

Finally, in one of the last hurrahs of the twentieth century, Bradfield city council had decreed that Gartonside was to be bulldozed and replaced with a planned housing estate of more spacious houses with parking spaces at the front and tiny gardens at the rear. A decade later, the first phase – the emptying of existing residents and the demolition of their former homes – was not yet complete. There were still a handful of streets in the shadow of Bradfield Victoria’s vast stadium where residents lingered on. And beyond them, a huddle of houses were boarded up, waiting for the wrecking crews to reduce them to rubble.

Paula’s satnav still believed in the streets of Gartonside, which made her even later to the crime scene. By the time she reached Rossiter Street, the perimeter was well established with festoons of crime-scene tape and stony-faced uniforms in high-vis jackets. She added her car to the impromptu parking lot at the end of the street and logged into the scene. ‘Where’s DCI Fielding?’

The constable with the clipboard nodded towards a mobile incident room parked further down the street. ‘In the van, getting suited and booted for the scene.’

That was a relief. Not quite as late as she feared. When she’d finally said goodbye to Torin and found her way to the CID squad room, Paula had been taken aback by the absence of bodies. Instead of the usual buzz of chat and phone conversations there was a preternatural quiet broken only by the mutter of laptop keys struck by a couple of heavy-fingered operatives.

The one nearest the door looked up and raised his unruly eyebrows. ‘You must be the new skip, right? McIntyre, yeah?’

Paula was tempted to slap him down with a quick
Sergeant McIntyre to you
, but she didn’t know the lay of the land yet so she settled for, ‘And you are?’

He pushed a thick fringe of black hair back from his shiny forehead. ‘Detective Constable Pat Cody.’ He gave an expansive sweep of his arm. ‘And this is Skenfrith Street CID. Only, most of the firm are on a shout. A murder, down Gartonside.’

So much for hopes of a quiet day. ‘Is that where DCI Fielding is?’

Cody gave a twisted little smile. ‘Got it in one. And she’s not very happy that her new bag man isn’t with her.’ The caterpillar eyebrows rose again. He was enjoying himself.

Paula wasn’t about to explain herself to him. ‘You got an address for me?’

‘Rossiter Street, Gartonside.’

‘Do we have a number?’

He smirked. ‘The numbers fell off those doors years ago. The houses are boarded up, waiting for the council budget to afford bulldozers. You’ll recognise the crime scene from the activity.’

And so she had. Paula dodged the puddles and potholes and climbed the metal steps into the mobile incident room. As she entered, a tiny woman wrestling her body into a white protective suit paused to look her up and down. ‘McIntyre?’

Clearly the standard form of address in this firm. ‘That’s right. DCI Fielding?’

‘That’s me. Nice of you to join us. Get suited up, quick as you like.’ There was something bird-like about Fielding. It wasn’t simply her size or her fine-boned appearance. Her eyes darted around, even as she climbed into her suit, and there was a quick jerkiness to her movements that made Paula think of a blackbird raiding the earth for worms.

‘I was taking a witness statement. Misper.’ Paula checked the pile of J-suits. Fielding had snaffled the only small. She settled for a medium and began the inconvenient process of getting into it.

‘That’s a bit beneath your pay grade.’ Fielding’s Scottish accent was the honey-seductive rather than the half-brick aggressive sort.

‘I happened to recognise the teenager who was reporting. I’ve actually met his mother. I thought it would save time if I dealt with it since the front counter was sticking to the letter of twenty-four hours.’

Fielding paused with the zip halfway over her small bosom. She frowned, olive skin crinkling into a relief map of shallow furrows and ridges. ‘That’s because he’s been trained to follow protocols. Protocols that are put in place so detectives like us don’t waste our time on folk having a spur-of-the-moment night out.’

Paula shoved a second leg into the suit, annoyed by her trouser leg rucking up around the knee. ‘I’ve always understood that when there’s a child or a vulnerable adult left at risk by a disappearance, we take action straight away.’ According to the grapevine, Fielding was a mother. She should get it.

Fielding grunted. ‘Been a while since you’ve been at the sharp end, McIntyre. Major Incident Team’s spoiled you.’ She pulled a face. ‘In an ideal world, you’d be right. But we’re not in an ideal world. Cuts and redundancies have fucked us all up.’ She frowned again, brown eyes glaring at Paula. ‘We haven’t got the bodies to jump in early on mispers. We leave that to uniforms. I need you here. Not fucking about on the tail of somebody who’s probably chosen not to be where they’re expected to be.’ She held up a hand to shut Paula up before she could speak. ‘I know. The reasons for those choices are usually fucking horrible. But we’re not social workers.’

‘Ma’am.’ Angered but not chastened, Paula turned away and finished zipping herself into the suit. OK, Fielding had a point, but that didn’t mean Paula had to hang up her humanity at the door. She’d check Bev’s movements on her own time. Somehow. Still facing away from Fielding, who had the kind of physical presence that filled more space than seemed possible, she dragged the conversation away from her supposed transgression. ‘So what are we looking at here?’

‘Junkie squatters have been using one of the houses on and off for a few months now. They were at some music festival near Sheffield at the weekend. They got back a couple of hours ago and found the body of a woman in the middle of the living room.’ Her voice muffled as she bent to pull on the blue plastic shoe covers. ‘I suppose we should be grateful they phoned us instead of doing a runner.’

‘Did they recognise her?’

‘They say not.’

Paula raised the hood to cover her hair and pulled on the chilly blue nitrile gloves. ‘Given that they phoned it in and didn’t leg it, they’re probably telling the truth. If they’d known her, they’d have been less likely to report it. People who live outside the mainstream tend not to trust us to do an unbiased job.’

Fielding cocked her head to acknowledge the comment. ‘Good point. OK, let’s do it.’ She didn’t mess around holding the door open for Paula, who caught it seconds before the spring slammed it shut. As they headed for the house, Fielding looked over her shoulder. ‘I’d have liked a quieter start, so we could be clear about how it’s going to work between us. I am aware this is your first assignment as a sergeant.’

‘I worked as DCI Jordan’s bagman on MIT, ma’am.’ Paula was quick to stand up for herself. Fielding needed to understand she wasn’t someone who could be pushed around. She needed to know she could count on Paula. ‘I understand about having your back.’

Fielding’s expression shifted, cold assessment giving way to acceptance. ‘I’m proud of my team. We might not have the specialists you had at MIT, but we get more than our share of results. I’ve heard good things about you. Don’t prove your friends wrong.’

It wasn’t the most welcoming speech Paula had ever heard. But it was a start. And given how much she wanted her career to have a future, she’d make the most of it.

Just as soon as she’d found out what had happened to Bev McAndrew.