Fever of the Bone (13 page)

‘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 same 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.

It didn’t help him sleep at night.

Paula picked her way across the oblong plastic stepping stones that provided an authorised route from the periphery of the crime scene to its heart. It was bloody bleak up here. She wondered what it had been about this barren hillside that had convinced some speculative builder to develop the site. Even a nature lover would struggle to find much appeal up here. There was a distant cluster of trees, through which she could make out what looked like a low stone house. A hill farm, probably, given the sheep grazing the slopes above and beyond the building site that had become the focus of such intense activity.

‘At least it’s not raining,’ Franny Riley greeted her as she reached the knot of people at the end of the pathway. The unlit cigarette in his mouth bobbed up and down as he spoke.

‘Good morning to you too, Sarge,’ Paula said. A couple of the other detectives at the scene gave her a curious glance, but the white-suited forensic team didn’t even raise their eyes. They were more concerned with the dead than the living. ‘Thanks for the heads-up.’ She’d been less than thrilled when her day-off, lie-in sleep had been broken by the insistent bleat of her mobile, but Franny Riley’s news had certainly been worth a wake-up call.

‘I think we’ve found him,’ he’d said, his voice sombre so she knew it wasn’t the good kind of finding. ‘I’ll text you directions. ‘

She’d called Carol, showered in four minutes and a further twenty minutes later she’d given her name to the officer running the access to the crime scene. He’d clearly been expecting her, reinforcing her sense of Franny Riley as an effective copper. And now here they were, standing a few feet away from a concrete-lined trench where the presumed body of Daniel Morrison lay.

‘Who found the body?’ she asked.

‘Anonymous phone tip. He sounded very fucking frightened. ‘ Franny gestured with his thumb towards the tarmac drive. ‘There’s some fresh tyre tracks where somebody’s pulled off. Fresher than the body, apparently. And a mess of bootprints. All since yesterday afternoon when it rained, the lads who know about these things are saying. It’s looking like some gobshite drove up here on the off-chance of finding something worth robbing and got more than he bargained for.’

‘Do we know for sure if it’s Daniel Morrison?’

‘Chances are.’ Franny rolled his beefy shoulders inside his anorak. ‘Come on, let’s get outside the cordon so we can have a fag and I can bring you up to speed.’ Without waiting for a response, he was off across the plastic plates like a man on a mission. As soon as they were clear of the police tapes, his cigarette was lit. Joining him, Paula caught a couple of disapproving glances from uniformed officers. These days, it felt like smoking was up there alongside child abuse on the list of social crimes. She kept meaning to give up, but somehow it always slipped off the agenda. She’d stopped before, but after she lost a friend and colleague to the dangers of the job and came close to death herself, she’d embraced nicotine like a lover returned from peril. It was a better drug in times of crisis than others she’d seen claim friends and colleagues. At least it didn’t impair your judgement or lead you into compromising positions with scumbag dealers.

‘So, what’s down there in the trench?’ Paula said.

‘A young lad. Answering Daniel’s description. Wearing the right school sweatshirt.’

‘Don’t you have photographs?’

Riley sighed a stream of attenuated smoke. ‘We’ve got pics. But until we get the body on the slab, that’s not a huge help. He’s got a plastic bag over his head. Taped tight round his neck. Looks like that’s how he died, judging by the state of him.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s not the worst of it, though.’

Paula’s stomach contracted. She’d seen enough to understand what that short sentence might comprehend. ‘Mutilated?’

Riley looked over her shoulder towards the distant trees, his battered face a forbidding mask. ‘Just a bloody hole where his cock and balls should be. No sign of them in there with him, but we won’t know for sure till we lift him.’

She was glad she hadn’t had to look at the body. She knew only too well the pity and horror that always walked hand in hand with the bodies of the violently dead, particularly young victims. They always looked so short-changed, their vulnerability an accusation. ‘What’s your boss saying?’ she asked. ‘I mean, this is about as major as it gets.’

Riley snorted. ‘He’s crapping himself. I think we can safely say it’s pass-the-parcel time. We’ll carry on processing the scene, but you need to tell your guv’nor it’s all yours now. I’ll make sure all the paperwork’s in order and over to your office soon as.’

‘Thanks,’ Paula said, reaching for her phone. A chance to prove themselves to Blake, she thought. But Daniel Morrison had paid a hell of a price for that chance. And his family hadn’t even made the down-payment yet.

What had always driven Carol Jordan was her desire for justice. It infused her personal life as much as her professional one. When it came to the people she loved, she felt deeply the responsibility to put right whatever wrongs afflicted them. In Tony’s case, she’d mostly been frustrated because the roots of his damage lay too deep for her to grasp, far less put right. But meeting Vanessa Hill had opened up possibilities. Never mind that the woman was a shallow, selfish bitch who should never have been allowed to raise a child. Carol would have swallowed the woman’s insults and insinuations if she’d thought it would help her to help Tony. But when she had uncovered Vanessa’s devious scheme to deprive her son of his inheritance from the father he’d never known, she knew Vanessa had burned any bridges that might possibly lead to co-operation.

And yet, Carol couldn’t resist the idea that she had to try. Even though Tony thought it wasn’t what he wanted, she needed to do her best for him. It wasn’t easy to go against his wishes, but his reaction the night before had persuaded her she was right to swallow her doubts. She was convinced that the information she’d been able to garner about Arthur Blythe had meant something positive to Tony. But there was still so much to discover. She wanted to know where Blythe had been before he popped up in Worcester and what he had been doing. She assumed he’d been in Halifax, where Tony had grown up in his grandmother’s house. It was where Vanessa’s recruitment and training consultancy was still based. Carol wondered how she was doing in a job market that seemed to be contracting daily as the global recession bit deeper into every area of employment. If anybody was likely not merely to survive but to come out ahead of the game, it was Vanessa Hill.

Going head to head with Vanessa was not something Carol relished. But there was no escaping the fact that Tony’s mother was the primary source for information on Arthur Blythe. No detective worth their salt would put her anywhere but number one on the list of people to talk to about Arthur’s history. Sure, you’d take everything with a pinch of salt, but you couldn’t ignore her potential.