‘And I deserve my privacy. This conversation is over, Carol.’ Vanessa walked past her and threw open the door. ‘Next time you come here, you better have a warrant.’
Furious and frustrated, Carol walked past Vanessa, head held high. A humiliating waste of time, that’s what this had been. But as she slammed her car door, Carol vowed that Vanessa Hill would not defeat her. Now she had an added spur in her search for Edmund Arthur Blythe’s story. Not just to help Tony but to spite his mother. Right now, it was hard to say which gave the stronger impetus.
CHAPTER 12
It made sense to take the train to Worcester. More time to reread the case information. The possibility of arriving fresh rather than frazzled from negotiating the maze of motorways round Birmingham. A no-brainer. Normally, Tony wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But without a car, he’d be at the mercy of West Mercia Police. If he wanted to drive past Arthur Blythe’s house or take a look at his factory, he’d have to embark on an awkward explanation to some police driver. And if he felt the need to visit the crime scene in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep, he’d earn himself a reputation for being even more weird than they were expecting. He decided freedom was worth the trade-off.
By the time he pulled into his hotel in Worcester, he’d lost count of the number of times he’d cursed his own stupidity. Why hadn’t he thought of hiring a car once he’d arrived? He’d estimated two hours’ driving; it had taken three and a half and left him feeling like he’d had the worst kind of workout. Tony laid his head on the steering wheel and tried in vain to loosen the muscles of his neck and shoulders. He dragged himself out of the car and checked in.
He’d barely closed the door behind him when he felt the heavy hand of depression settle on him. He knew there were hotels whose rooms gladdened the heart. He’d even stayed in a couple over the years, mostly when deluded companies had hired him under the misapprehension that he could help motivate their management teams. This was not one of those rooms. The décor - no, you couldn’t call it décor, not in any meaningful sense of the word; there were various dead shades of brown in the room, ranging from cheap-and-nasty milk chocolate to tobacco. The window was too small and looked out on the car park. The TV had only seven channels and the bed had all the give of a wooden pallet. He understood the exigencies of police budgets, but surely there must have been a better option than this?
Sighing, Tony dumped his bag and sat on the bed facing a print of the African veldt. The connection between Worcester and wildebeest was lost on him. He took out his phone and called DI Stuart Patterson. ‘I’m at the hotel,’ he said without preamble.
‘I don’t know how you go about this,’ Patterson said. ‘I think you said you wanted to see the crime scene?’
‘That’s right. It’s a good first stop for me. I’d like to talk to the parents too, if that’s possible.’
Patterson offered to send DS Ambrose over to pick him up. Tony would have preferred a face-to-face with Patterson himself, but working with new teams always meant adjusting to the way they ran the game. So he’d settle for the bagman for now and build a bridgehead from there.
With half an hour to kill, Tony decided to take a walk. The hotel was on the fringe of the city centre and five minutes’ walk brought him to a street of banks, estate agents and the sort of chain stores that had replaced traditional small shop-keepers, selling the same chocolates, shoes, greetings cards, alcohol and dry-cleaning services as every other high street in the country. He ambled along, vaguely looking in the windows until he was brought up short by the familiar name of the estate agency he’d been dealing with.
Front and centre in the window were the details of the very house he was trying to sell. ‘For a man who doesn’t believe in coincidence, I seem to be confronting a few. Might as well roll with it, eh?’ The sound of his voice broke the moment and before he could stop and think, he walked into the agency. ‘Good morning,’ he said cheerily. ‘Can I talk to someone about that house in the window?’
Paula had never been more relieved to see her boss. The police surgeon and the forensics team were eager to remove Daniel Morrison’s body, but she’d enlisted Franny Riley’s support to insist that it stayed where it was till the DCI had seen it. ‘You can’t shift the cadaver till the SIO has signed off on it,’ she’d protested. ‘I don’t care if your guv wants rid. It stays till DCI Jordan gets here.’
Kevin Matthews had turned up in time to back her up. But the atmosphere was growing increasingly hostile as time drifted past and Carol failed to appear. Finally Paula saw her striding up the drive towards them, looking decidedly more chic than usual. Wherever she’d been, she’d made a definite effort to impress. ‘Sorry to keep you all waiting,’ Carol said, charm on full beam. ‘I got stuck behind an accident on the Barrowden road, right down in the valley where there’s no mobile signal. Thank you all for being so patient.’
When she was on form like this, there was nobody like Carol Jordan. She had everybody scrambling to please her, to earn that look of approval. It didn’t hurt that she was easy on the eye, but the set of her mouth and the directness of her gaze meant nobody was ever going to take her for a bimbo. Paula knew she was a little bit in love with her boss, but she’d learned to live with that as an exercise in futility. ‘It’s this way, chief,’ she said, leading the way over to the trench, introducing Riley on the way. ‘DS Riley’s been my liaison, it would be helpful if we could keep him on board,’ she said. Code for ‘he’s one of us, in spite of appearances.’
She stood at Carol’s shoulder, looking down at the grievous distortion of humanity lying at the bottom of the ditch. Dirt and blood smeared the boy’s clothes, and his head inside the transparent plastic looked unreal, like some hideous prop from a straight-to-DVD horror flick. ‘Christ,’ Carol said. She turned her face away. Paula could see a faint tremble shiver through her boss’s lips. ‘OK, let’s have him out of here,’ she said, stepping aside and beckoning the others over to join them.
‘We’re going to assume that we’re looking at Daniel Morrison here,’ Carol said. ‘The body answers the description of the missing boy and he’s wearing the William Makepeace sweatshirt under his jacket. That means we’re sixty hours out from the last time Daniel was seen by someone who knew him. So we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Once we get an approximate time of death, we’ll know how many hours we need to fill in. But I want those hours accounted for. Paula, you liaise with DS Riley, make sure we have all their product. Kevin’s going to go with the FLO to break the news to the parents, but I also want you to do the follow-up, Paula.’ Carol started to walk back to the perimeter of the scene, her team at her heels.
‘For now, Paula, you take the school. Teachers and friends. It’s a private school, you’re going to come up against more than your fair share of wankers, but they’re not going to wind you up and you are going to find out exactly what kind of lad Daniel Morrison was. We’ll get Stacey on to his computer. Oh, and Paula? I want a fingertip search of the roadside from the end of the drive to the main drag. Tell DS Riley I said so.’ At the end of the plastic panels, she turned back to face them, her smile weary. ‘We owe Daniel a result. Let’s do it.’
‘Do I need to pick up Tony at Bradfield Moor?’ Paula asked. Over Carol’s shoulder, she saw Kevin make the throat-cutting gesture with one finger.
The muscles of Carol’s face tensed. ‘We’re going to have to manage without Tony this time. If we think we need a profiler, we’ll have to rely on someone from the National Police Faculty.’