Fever of the Bone (6 page)

And then there was Kevin. It occurred to Carol that, now John Brandon had retired, DS Kevin Matthews represented her longest professional relationship. They’d both worked the first serial killer investigation Bradfield Police had run. Carol’s career had skyrocketed as a result; Kevin’s had imploded. When she’d returned to Bradfield to set up the MIT, she’d been the one to give him a second chance.
He’s never entirely forgiven me for that
.

All those years and still she couldn’t buy him a drink without checking what his fancy was. One month it would be Diet Coke, the next black coffee, then hot chocolate. Or, in the pub, it would be cask-brewed real ale, or ice-cold German lager or a white-wine spritzer. She still wasn’t sure if he was easily bored or easily swayed.

Two members of the team were absent. Sergeant Chris Devine was lying on some Caribbean beach with her partner. Carol hoped her thoughts were a million miles from murder, but knew that if Chris had an inkling of what was going on here she’d jump on the first flight home. Like all of them, Chris loved what she did.

The final member of the team, DC Sam Evans, was unaccountably missing. Carol had either told or texted them all about the meeting, but none of the others seemed to know where Sam was. Or what he was pursuing. ‘He took a call first thing then he grabbed his coat and left,’ Stacey had said. Carol was surprised she’d even noticed.

Kevin grinned. ‘He can’t help himself, can he? The boy could take Olympic gold in paddling your own canoe.’

And this isn’t the time for demonstrating that the MIT isn’t so much a team as a collection of bloody-minded individuals who sometimes end up looking like a line-dancing set by accident
. Carol sighed. ‘I’ll go and order the drinks. Hopefully he’ll be here soon.’

‘Get him a mineral water,’ Kevin said. ‘Punishment.’

As he spoke, the door opened and Sam hurried in, a computer CPU under one arm and a self-satisfied look on his face. ‘Sorry I’m late, guv.’ He swung the bulky grey box out and brandished it in front of his chest like the Wimbledon Men’s Singles plate. ‘Ta-da!’

Carol rolled her eyes. ‘What is it, Sam?’

‘Looks like a generic PC box, probably early to mid-nineties, given it’s got a slot for a five-inch floppy as well as a three-and-a-half-inch one,’ Stacey said. ‘Tiny memory by today’s standards, but enough for basic functions.’

Paula groaned. ‘That’s not what the chief means, Stacey. What’s it all about, that’s what she’s on about.’

‘Thank you, Paula, but I’ve not quite been rendered speechless by Sam’s arrival.’ Carol touched Paula’s shoulder and smiled, taking the sting out of her words. ‘As Paula says, Sam, what’s it all about?’

Sam plonked the CPU down on a table and patted it. ‘This little baby is the machine that Nigel Barnes swore didn’t exist.’ He pointed a finger at Stacey. ‘And this is your chance to put him away for his wife’s murder.’ He folded his arms across his broad chest and grinned.

‘I still have no idea what this is about,’ Carol said, knowing this was what she was meant to say and already halfway to forgiving Sam for his late arrival. She knew Sam’s tendency to go out on a limb was dangerous and bad for solidarity, but she found uncomplicated anger hard to sustain. Too many of his divisive characteristics were precisely the ones that had driven Carol so hard at the start of her own career. She just wished he’d get past the naked ambition stage and realise you didn’t always travel fastest when you were alone.

Sam tossed his jacket over a chair and perched on the table beside the computer. ‘Cold case, guv. Danuta Barnes and her five-month-old daughter went missing in 1995. Disappeared without a single validated sighting. The feeling at the time was that her husband Nigel had done away with them.’

‘I remember it first time around,’ Kevin said. ‘Her family were adamant that he’d killed her and the baby.’

‘Spot on, Kevin. He didn’t want the kid, they’d been fighting constantly about money. CID searched the house top to bottom, but they didn’t turn up a single bloodstain. No bodies. And enough gaps in the wardrobe to back up his story that she’d just done a runner with the baby.’ Sam shrugged. ‘Can’t blame them, they covered all the bases.’

‘Not quite all of them, by the looks of it,’ Carol said, a wry twist to her lips. ‘Come on, Sam, you know you’re dying to tell us.’

‘It came across my desk six months ago, just a routine review. I went round to see Nigel Barnes, but it turned out the file wasn’t up to date. He sold the house just over a year ago. So I asked the new owners if they’d come across anything unusual when they’d been doing the place up.’

‘Did you know what you were looking for?’ Kevin asked.

Sam tipped his head to him. ‘I did, as it happens. Back in ‘97, some eagle-eyed SOCO noticed that the computer monitor and keyboard didn’t match the CPU. Different make, different colour. Nigel Barnes swore blind that’s how he’d bought it, but the Stacey wannabe knew he was lying because the monitor and keyboard came from a mail-order brand that only sold complete packages. So at some point, there had to have been another CPU. I wondered whether the hard drive was still knocking around somewhere. But the new owners said no, the house had been stripped bare. Tight bastard even took the lightbulbs and the batteries out of the smoke alarms.’ He pulled a clown’s face of sadness. ‘So I thought that was that.’

‘Until your phone rang this morning,’ Paula chipped in. By now, they all knew how and when to prompt each other through their war stories.

‘Correct. Turns out the new owners decided to tank the cellar, which meant ripping off all the old plasterwork. And guess what was hiding behind the plasterboard?’

‘Not the old computer!’ Paula threw up her hands in mock amazement.

‘The old computer.’ Sam caught Stacey’s eye and winked. ‘And if it’s got any secrets to reveal, we all know who’s the woman to find them.’

‘I can’t believe he didn’t destroy it,’ Kevin said, his carrot-red curls catching the light as he shook his head.

‘He probably thought he’d wiped the hard disk clean,’ Stacey said. ‘Back then, people didn’t understand how much data gets left behind when you reformat the drive.’

‘Even so, you’d think he would take it with him. Or dump it in a skip. Or give it to one of those charities that recycles old computers to Africa.’

‘Laziness or arrogance. Take your pick. Thank God for them both, they’re our best friends.’ Carol stood up. ‘Nice job, Sam. And we’re going to need as many of those as we can muster over the next three months.’ Their expressions ranged from bewilderment to resignation. ‘Our new Chief Constable thinks MIT is too much of a luxury. That we don’t earn our keep because anybody can deliver results in the cold cases we work on when we’re not totally occupied with live jobs. That our talents should be at the service of the whole CID across the piece.’

The immediate response was a tangle of exclamations, none of them offering Blake’s position a shred of support. Their voices died away, leaving Sam’s, ‘Twat,’ to bring up the tail.

Carol shook her head. ‘Not helpful, Sam. I don’t want to go back to being part of a routine CID squad any more than any of you do. I like working with you all, and I like the way we structure our investigations. I like that we can be creative and innovative. But not everybody appreciates that.’

‘That’s the trouble with working for an organisation that rewards respect for the pecking order. They don’t like legitimised individualism,’ Paula said. ‘Misfit outfits like us, we’re always going to be in the firing line.’

‘You’d think they’d appreciate our clear-up rate,’ Kevin complained.

‘Not when it makes them look less efficient,’ Carol said. ‘OK. We have three months to demonstrate that MIT is the most effective vehicle to achieve the things we do best. I know you all give a hundred per cent on every inquiry we take on, but I need you to find something extra to help me justify our existence.’

They exchanged looks. Kevin stood up, pushing his chair back. ‘Never mind the drinks, guv. Better get cracking, hadn’t we?’

The rain was still teeming when Alvin Ambrose arrived to pick up his boss from the post mortem on Jennifer Maidment. Any chance of garnering trace evidence from the crime scene was long gone. The only source of physical information about Jennifer’s fate was the girl’s body itself. DI Patterson trotted to the car, head down and shoulders hunched against the sharp sting of the rain, and threw himself into the passenger seat. His face was scrunched up in disgust, blue eyes almost invisible between lids swollen from lack of sleep. Ambrose wasn’t sure if the disgust was because of the weather or the autopsy. He nodded to the coffee carton in the cup holder. ‘Skinny latte,’ he said. Not that Patterson needed anything to make him skinnier.

Patterson shuddered. ‘Thanks, Alvin, but I’ve not got the stomach for it. You have it.’

‘How did it go?’ Ambrose asked, easing the car towards the car park exit.

Patterson yanked on his seat belt and stabbed it into its slot. ‘It’s never good, is it? Especially when it’s a kid.’

Ambrose knew better than to press for more. Patterson would take a few moments to compose himself, assemble his thoughts, then he’d share what he thought his bagman ought to know. They reached the main road and Ambrose paused. ‘Where to?’

Patterson considered, never one to leap to judgement. ‘Anything new come in while I’ve been in there?’

There had been plenty, a ragbag of bits and pieces signifying not a lot. Stuff that was going nowhere, bits and pieces that officers way down the totem pole would have eliminated by teatime. One of Ambrose’s roles in their partnership was to sift through what came in and decide what was worth Patterson’s attention. It was a responsibility he’d been apprehensive about when Patterson had first picked him out for his bagman, but he’d soon learned he had judgement worth trusting. That Patterson had known this ahead of him only cemented Ambrose’s respect for his boss. ‘Nothing that needs your attention, ‘ Ambrose said.

Patterson sighed, his hollow cheeks puffing in and out. ‘Let’s go and see the parents, then.’

Ambrose turned into the traffic and summoned up a mental map of the best route. Before he’d made the first turning, Patterson began talking. It was, Ambrose thought, quick off the mark for his boss. A measure of how heavy Jennifer Maidment was weighing on his spirit.

‘Cause of death was asphyxiation. The polythene bag over her head, it was taped tight to her neck. No sign of a struggle at all. No blow to the head. No scratches or bruises, no blood or skin under her fingernails.’ His voice was leaden, the words slow and deliberate.

‘Sounds like she was drugged.’

‘Looks that way.’ Patterson’s face altered as anger replaced depression. Two dark flushes of colour tinted his cheeks and his lips were tight against his teeth. ‘Of course, it’ll be fucking weeks before we get the toxicology results. I tell you, Alvin, the way we do forensic science in this country, it’s a joke. Even the crappy old NHS is faster. You go to the GP for a full set of blood tests and you get the results, what, forty-eight hours later? But it takes anything up to six weeks to deliver a toxicology result. If the bloody politicians really want to deter criminals and up the detection rate, they should throw money at the forensic services. It’s insane that we can only afford the technology in a tiny percentage of cases. And even when the accountants let us have some access, it takes fucking for ever. By the time we get the results, nine times out of ten all it does is back up what we’ve already pulled off with old-fashioned coppering. The forensics should be there to help the investigation, not just to confirm we’ve arrested the right villain. That
Waking the Dead
? And
CSI
? I sit there in front of the telly and it’s like some horrible black comedy. One episode and I’d have used up my entire budget for a year.’

It was a familiar rant, one of several that Patterson trotted out whenever he felt frustrated with a case. Ambrose understood that it wasn’t really about whatever his boss was criticising. It was about what Patterson saw as his failure to deliver the sort of progress that might help the grieving families with their pain. It was about being fallible. And there was nothing Ambrose could say that would make either of them feel better about that. ‘Tell me about it,’ was all he said. There was a long pause while he gave Patterson time to compose himself. ‘So what else did the doc have to say?’

‘The genital mutilation was apparently the work of an amateur. A long-bladed knife, very sharp. Probably not anything exotic - could have been a carving knife.’ Patterson made no attempt to disguise his revulsion. ‘He inserted the blade into the vagina and twisted it round. The doc reckons he might have been trying to cut out the whole lot - vagina, cervix, uterus. But he didn’t have the skill for it.’

‘So we’re probably not looking for someone with medical knowledge,’ Ambrose said, calm and apparently imperturbable as ever. But under the surface, he felt the slow build of a familiar dull anger, a rage he’d learned to contain as a teenager when everyone assumed that a big black lad was always going to be up for a fight. Because when he gave in to it, the fact that he was a big black lad meant he was always going to be in the wrong, one way or another. Better to burn inside than end up taking the weight of everybody else’s need to prove themselves. And that included teachers and parents. So he’d learned to box, learned to put the power of his fury under the discipline of the ring. He could have gone all the way, everyone said so. But he’d never enjoyed the demolition of his opponents enough to want to make a living out of it.

‘The doc said he wouldn’t even ask this one to carve a bloody turkey.’ Patterson sighed.

‘Any signs of sexual assault?’ Ambrose signalled to turn into the Maidments’ street. He knew how Patterson adored his Lily. There would be no mercy, no pity in this hunt if the killer had raped his victim too.

‘Impossible to tell. No anal trauma, no sperm in her mouth or throat. If we get really lucky, there might be something in the samples that have gone to the lab. But don’t hold your breath.’ The car drew to a halt. When they caught sight of him, the lounging pack of journalists came to life and surrounded the door. ‘Here we bloody go,’ he muttered. ‘Neither use nor ornament, most of them.’ Patterson shouldered his way through the throng, followed by Ambrose. ‘I’ve got no further comment,’ he muttered.