Fever of the Bone

by Val McDermid

‘Right. They thought they’d re-establish contact with him when he turned up at school yesterday. But he didn’t show. That’s when his parents decided they should talk to us.’

  ‘I take it there’s been nothing since? And that’s why Northern are punting it our way?’ Carol held her hand out and Kevin handed over the print-out.

  ‘Nothing. He’s not answering his mobile, not responding to emails, not activated his RigMarole account. According to his mother, the only way he’d let himself be that cut off is if he’s dead or kidnapped.’

  ‘Or else he doesn’t want Mummy and Daddy to find him shacked up with some cutie,’ Sam said, clamping his mouth shut in a mutinous scowl.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said slowly. ‘Teenage boys want to boast about their conquests. It’s hard to believe he’d resist letting his mates know what he was up to. And these days, that means RigMarole.’

  ‘My thoughts precisely,’ Carol said. ‘I think Stacey should check out whether his phone’s switched on and, if it is, whether we can triangulate his position.’

  Sam half-turned away from the table and crossed his legs. ‘Unbelievable. Some over-privileged white boy goes out on the razz and we’re falling over ourselves to track him down. Are we that desperate to make ourselves look indispensable? ‘

  ‘Clearly,’ Carol said, her voice sharp. ‘Stacey, run the checks. Paula, talk to Northern Division, see where they’re up to, if they want any help from us. See if you can get them to send us any interview product. And by the way, Sam, I think you’re wrong. If this was a black kid from an estate with a single parent who took his disappearance seriously, so would we. I don’t know why you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about this, but lose it, would you?’

  Sam blew out his cheeks in a sigh, but he nodded. ‘Whatever you say, guv.’

  Carol put the pages to one side for later and looked round the table. ‘Anything else new?’

  Stacey cleared her throat. There was a faint lift at the corners of her mouth. Carol thought it translated as the equivalent on anyone else of a shit-eating grin. ‘I’ve got something, ‘ she said.

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘The computer Sam brought in from the old Barnes house,’ Stacey said, pushing a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I’ve been working it pretty hard for the past week. It’s been very instructive.’ She tapped a couple of keys on the laptop in front of her. ‘People are amazingly stupid.’

  Sam leaned forward, accentuating the planes and angles of his smooth-skinned face. ‘What did you find? Come on, Stacey, show us.’

  She clicked a remote pointer and the whiteboard on the wall behind her sprang into life. It showed a fragmentary list, with missing letters and words. Another click and the gaps filled with highlighted text. ‘This program predicts what’s not there,’ she said. ‘As you can see, it’s a list of steps for murdering Danuta Barnes. From smothering her to wrapping her in clingfilm to weighting her down to dumping her body in deep water.’

  Paula whistled. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You’re right. Amazingly stupid.’

  ‘That’s very lovely,’ Carol said. ‘But any decent lawyer’s going to point out that it’s circumstantial at best. That it could be a fantasy. Or the outline of a short story.’

  ‘It’s only circumstantial till we find Danuta Barnes’s body and compare the cause of death with what we’ve got here,’ Sam said, reluctant to let go of the possibilities of his discovery.

  ‘Sam’s right,’ Stacey said over the chatter that his words provoked. ‘That’s why this other file is so interesting.’ She clicked the remote again and a map of the Lake District appeared. The next click revealed a chart of Wastwater that clearly showed the relative depths of the lake.

  ‘You think she’s in Wastwater.’ Carol stood up and walked over to the screen.

  ‘I think it’s worth taking a look,’ Stacey said. ‘According to his list, he was planning on somewhere he could drive to but somewhere that was also quite remote. Wastwater fits the bill. At least, looking at the map, it looks like there’s not many houses round there.’

  ‘No kidding. I’ve been there,’ Paula said. ‘A bunch of us went up for a weekend break a few years ago. I don’t think we saw another living soul apart from the woman that ran the B&B. I’m all for a bit of peace and quiet, but that was bloody ridiculous.’

  ‘He had a kayak,’ Sam said. ‘I remember that from the original file. He could have draped her across the kayak and paddled out.’

  ‘Good work, Stacey,’ Carol said. ‘Sam, get on to the underwater unit up in Cumbria. Ask them to set up a search.’

  Stacey raised a hand. ‘It might be worth asking the geography department at the university if they’ve got any access to ETM+.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Carol asked.

  ‘Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus. It’s a global archive of satellite photos managed by NASA and the US Geological Survey,’ Stacey said. ‘It might be helpful.’

  ‘They can spot a body from space?’ Paula said. ‘I thought being able to watch my home TV in another country was about as far out as it gets. But you’re telling me the geography department at Bradfield Uni can see underwater from a satellite? That’s too much, Stace. Just too much.’

  Stacey rolled her eyes. ‘No, Paula. They can’t necessarily see a body. But they can zoom in so far these days you can get a lot of detail. They might be able to narrow down where we should be looking by eliminating where there definitely isn’t anything.’

  ‘That’s wild,’ Paula said.

  ‘That’s technology. There’s a geography faculty in the USA that reckons they’ve pinpointed where Osama bin Laden’s hiding by narrowing down possibilities from satellite photography, ‘ Stacey said.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Paula said.

  ‘No, I’m not. It was a team at UCLA. First they applied geographic principles developed to predict the distribution of wildlife - distance-decay theory and island biogeographic theory—’

  ‘What?’ Kevin chipped in.

  ‘Distance-decay theory . . . OK, you start with a known place that fulfils the criteria this organism needs for survival. Like the Tora Bora caves. You draw a series of concentric circles out from there, and the further you get from the centre, the less likely you are to find those identical conditions. In other words, the further he goes from his heartlands, the more likely he is to be among people who are not sympathetic to his goals and the harder it is to hide. Island biogeographic theory is about choosing somewhere that has resources. So, if you were going to be stuck on an island, you’d rather it was the Isle of Wight than Rockall.’

  ‘I don’t understand where the satellites come in,’ Paula said, frowning.

  ‘They figured out the likely zone where Bin Laden might be, then they factored in what they know about him. His height, the fact that he needs regular dialysis so he has to be somewhere with electricity, his need for protection. And then they looked at the most detailed satellite imagery they could find and narrowed it down to three buildings in a particular town,’ Stacey said patiently.

  ‘So how come they’ve not found him yet?’ Kevin pointed out, not unreasonably.

  Stacey shrugged. ‘I only said they reckoned. Not that they’d actually succeeded. Yet. But the satellite imaging is getting more detailed all the time. Each image used to cover thirty metres by thirty metres. Now it’s more like half a metre. You wouldn’t believe the detail the experts analysts can pick up. It’s like having an overhead Google Street View of the whole world.’

  ‘Stop, Stacey. You’re making my head hurt. But if we can harness that, I will be eternally grateful. Have a word with the satellite bods,’ Carol said. ‘But let’s concentrate on getting the Cumbria team onside. Anything else?’ Glum looks round the table told her all she needed to know. She hated being in this position. What they needed was something big, something headline-grabbing, something spectacular. Only trouble was that what would be meat and drink to Carol and her team would be the worst kind of b
ad news for somebody else. She’d experienced too much of that sort of tribulation to want to visit it on anyone else.

  They were just going to have to grin and bear it.

  CHAPTER 9

  Even the advent of his teens hadn’t broken Seth Viner’s habit of candour where his parents were concerned. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt he needed to keep secrets from either of his two mothers. OK, sometimes it was easier to talk to one rather than the other. Julia was more practical, more down to earth. Calmer in a crisis, more likely to listen all the way through to the end. But she’d weigh things up and she wouldn’t always come down on his side of the issue. Kathy was the emotional one, the one who rushed to judgement. Nevertheless, she’d always be in his corner - my kid, right or wrong. Still, she was the one who made him stick to things, the one who wouldn’t let him take the easy way out when things were difficult. But he’d never regretted telling either of them something, even things he was embarrassed about. They’d taught him that there was no place for secrecy with the people you love most in the world.

  The other side of the equation was that they’d always listened to his questions and done their best to answer them. Everything from ‘why’s the sky blue?’ to ‘what are they fighting about in Gaza?’ They never fobbed him off. It sometimes weirded out his teachers and made his friends give him the fish-eyed stare, but he knew all sorts of stuff just because it had occurred to him to ask and it had never occurred to Julia and Kathy not to answer. He reckoned it was something to do with their determination to be honest with him about how he’d ended up with two mothers.

  He couldn’t remember when it had dawned on him that it was pretty far out there to have two mothers instead of one of the more conventional arrangements like a mum and a dad or a step-dad, or a single mum and a bunch of grandparents, uncles and babysitters. Everybody starts out thinking their family is normal because they’ve no other experience to measure it against. But by the time he started school, he knew the family that embraced him was different. And not just because of the colour of Kathy’s skin. Oddly enough, the other kids seemed almost oblivious to his difference. He remembered one time when Julia had picked him up from school during his first term. Kathy usually did the school run because she ran her website design service from home, but she’d had to go out of town for some meeting, so Julia had left work early to collect him. She’d been helping him on with his wellies when Ben Rogers had said, ‘Who are you?’

  Emma White, who lived on their street, had said, ‘That’s Seth’s mum.’

  Ben had frowned. ‘No, it’s not. I’ve met Seth’s mum and this isn’t her,’ he’d said.

  ‘This is Seth’s other mum,’ Emma had insisted.

  Ben had totally taken it in his stride, moving straight on to the next topic of conversation. It had stayed like that - part of the landscape, how the world was, unremarkable - until Seth had been nine or ten, when his passion for football had brought him into direct contact with kids who hadn’t grown up with the notion that having two mums was just part of the spectrum of family life.

  One or two of the bigger lads had tried to use Seth’s unusual domestic set-up to get some leverage against him. They soon found out they’d picked the wrong target. Seth seemed to move inside a bubble of invulnerability. He deflected insults with bemused good nature. And he was too well liked among the other boys to make a physical campaign possible. Confounded by his self-confidence, the bullies backed off and chose someone easier to victimise. Even then, Seth thwarted them. He had a way of letting those in authority know when bad things were going on without ever being seen as a grass. He was, it seemed, a good friend and a pointless enemy.

  So he’d moved seamlessly into adolescence - kind, popular and direct, his only apparent problem his anxiety not to fail. Julia and Kathy held their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It seemed like they’d been doing that since the day Julia had inseminated. There had been plenty of Jonahs ready with dire warnings. But Seth had been a happy, easy baby. He’d had colic once. Just once. He’d started sleeping through the night at an incredible seven weeks. He’d avoided childhood ailments apart from the occasional cold. He hadn’t been the toddler from hell, partly because the first time he’d tried it in public, Kathy had walked away and left him standing red-faced and howling in the middle of a supermarket aisle. She’d been watching from round the end of the breakfast cereals, but he hadn’t realised that at the time. The horror of abandonment had been enough to cure him of temper tantrums. He whinged sometimes, as they all did, but neither Kathy nor Julia responded in the desired way, so he’d mostly given that up too.

  The personality trait that saved him from being too good to be true was the constant stream of chatter that often seemed to start when his eyes opened in the morning and only ended when they closed again at bedtime. Seth was so entirely fascinated by the world and his place in it that he saw no reason why anyone would not want a blow-by-blow account of his every action and thought, or a remarkably detailed recitation of the plot of whatever DVD he’d last seen, the more trivial the better. Occasionally, belatedly, he would register his audience’s eyes rolling back in their sockets, or their whole faces glazing over as they waited for him to get to the point. It didn’t give him even a flicker of hesitation. He carried on to the bitter end, even when Kathy would lay her head on the kitchen table and moan softly.

  In the great scheme of things, it wasn’t the worst character flaw. His mothers had both noticed it seemed not to have the same effect on his friends as it had on them. And they were grateful that the onset of adolescence hadn’t turned their beautiful boy into a surly, monosyllabic hulk. Most of his friends made them shudder these days. Cute, loving boys who had scampered round their house engaged in all sorts of fantasy games had morphed into grunting, smelly creatures who regarded communication with adults as somehow letting the side down. It was, Kathy said, some kind of miracle that Seth had escaped this particular aspect of the rites of passage into manhood.

  ‘He does have terrible taste in music,’ Julia had pointed out more than once, as if that counterbalanced his better qualities. She had no idea where he’d acquired his taste for early grunge; she was just grateful that so far it hadn’t infected his wardrobe too much.

  ‘It could be worse,’ Kathy always said. ‘He could be into musicals.’

  Seth’s inability to keep anything to himself meant Julia and Kathy were relaxed about his computer use. Not so relaxed that they didn’t have the appropriate parental controls bolted on, with all the extra security that Kathy used to protect the websites she designed. But they didn’t physically look over his shoulder, though Kathy routinely checked his RigMarole page for weirdos and undesirables.

  Not that there was much need for that. A lot of Seth’s table talk revolved around Rig - who he was talking to, what they had to say about whatever people were twittering over that week, what fascinating new app he’d heard about.

  The trouble with living life in a play-by-play mode is that other people eventually tune out in a kind of self-defence. These days, Julia and Kathy only half-listened to Seth’s news of the world. Much of what he had to say got lost in the slip-stream of words that spilled round the kitchen table. The first time he mentioned a new Rig friend called JJ, Kathy registered the name and checked him out on Seth’s pages. He seemed a regular geeky teenager analysing the lyrics of Pearl Jam and Mudhoney, full of a mixture of pomp and angst. Nothing to worry about there.

  And so JJ became part of the background noise, just another set of references they could let wash over them. Naturally, then, when Seth casually mentioned that he was meeting up with JJ so they could go on a rare sounds quest in Bradfield’s second-hand CD stores, no alarm bells rang.

  When you’re used to candour, it never occurs to you that what you’re hearing is something less than the truth.

  Tony googled the Worcester estate agent’s website then clicked on the ‘New Properties’ button. The woman he’d dealt with at t
he agency had sounded like one of his bipolar patients in an unmedicated manic phase. She’d assured him two days ago that the photographs would be taken that very afternoon and the details placed on the website ‘within hours’. It had taken him till now to work up the nerve to look at the information about the house he was selling without ever having seen.

  Given the price the agent had suggested, he knew it must be a substantial property, but he wasn’t prepared for the ample Edwardian villa that confronted him. It was a double-fronted house in mellow red brick with the deep bay windows and imposing doorway picked out in contrasting pale yellow. Heavy swags of curtains were visible at the margins of the windows, and the garden looked opulently landscaped. ‘Unique opportunity to purchase fine family home overlooking Gheluvelt Park,’ the strapline across the top shouted. ‘Four beds, three recep, three bath. Fully fitted workshop with power.’ Tony’s eyebrows rose and his mouth puckered. It was a hell of a lot of house for a man living alone. Perhaps he liked to entertain. Or maybe he just liked to demonstrate to the world how well he’d done. Edmund Arthur Blythe obviously hadn’t been short of a bob or two.

  It occurred to Tony that this sale would mean the same for him. He already had £50,000 from the legacy sitting in his bank account, but that was a fraction of what the house would bring. He’d never imagined having this sort of cash at his disposal, so he’d never speculated about what he would do with it. He had no expensive tastes. He didn’t collect art, drive fast cars or wear expensive suits. He wasn’t good at taking holidays at the best of times, and he had no inclination towards exotic destinations where the weather was too hot, the drains were suspect and you had to have needles stuck into your arms and buttocks before you could board the plane. The things he enjoyed most happened to be what he was paid for - treating patients and profiling off-kilter minds. But soon he was going to be a rich man, whether he liked it or not.

  ‘I can always give it away,’ he said aloud. There were plenty of charities who would make something worthwhile out of a windfall like that. And yet, it didn’t appeal to him quite as much as he would have expected it to. Apparently Cyndi Lauper was right when she sang that money changes everything. Impatiently, he turned his attention back to the screen.