She hid her disdain well, Paula thought. You’d have to really know the chief to realise how little store she set by the Home Office’s blue-eyed boys and girls.
‘One more thing,’ Carol said. ‘We need to check out who knew about this place. Kevin, as soon as you’re clear, get on to the builder, get a list of his crew, also architects, surveyors, the whole kit and caboodle. I’ll arrange some bodies from Northern to cover the initial background checks and interviews, then we can review what comes up.’ She ran a hand through her hair in a gesture Paula recognised. It was her boss’s way of buying herself some time. ‘Anything I’ve missed?’ she asked. Nobody spoke. One day, Paula dreamed she’d come up with something remarkable, something that hadn’t occurred to Carol or anyone else. She turned away and reached for a cigarette. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be today.
The house looked more attractive in reality than it had in the photo. There was a better sense of its proportions, an awareness of its relationship to the garden, a context for its solid Edwardian lines. Tony opened the gate and walked up the drive, his feet crunching uneven on the gravel. It made him aware of the slight limp that still afflicted him after his encounter with an unmedicated patient and a fire axe. They’d offered him further surgery, but he’d said no. He’d hated being incapacitated, loathed the awareness of how little control he had over his life when his physical movement was compromised. For as long as he could manage without an operation, he would.
He was early for the viewing appointment with the agent so he walked round the side of the house and found himself in a formal rose garden. The bushes were little more than bare contorted twigs at this time of the year, but he could picture how they would look in summer. He knew nothing about gardening, but it didn’t take much knowledge to see this was a well-tended arrangement, designed for pleasure. Tony sat down on a stone bench and gazed out across the roses. Arthur Blythe would have done the same thing, he imagined.
His thoughts would have been very different, however. He wouldn’t have spent the middle of his day pacing a muddy lay-by, trying to climb inside the mind of a killer who had chosen this particular spot to dump his teenage victim. Alvin Ambrose, Patterson’s bagman, had been helpful, giving Tony useful background about the area and the condition of the victim. The mutilation had occurred post mortem. ‘But not here,’ Tony had said. ‘He’d need privacy.’
‘Plus the weather,’ Ambrose added. ‘It was lashing with rain and blowing a gale. The weather set in late afternoon, round about the time Jennifer left her pal Claire. Frankly, you wouldn’t want to be walking the dog in it, never mind . . . you know. What he was doing.’
Tony looked up and down the lay-by. ‘He’d need somewhere sheltered from the weather and from prying eyes. But she was already dead, so he didn’t have to worry about being overheard. I suppose he could have worked on her here, in the back of a van or a truck.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, summoning up what the lay-by would be like under cover of darkness. ‘That would let him pick the perfect moment to dump her. Better than just driving in on the off-chance . . .’ His voice tailed off and he clambered through the undergrowth towards the sheltering trees. It smelled of loam and pine resin and stale urine. It suggested nothing to him, so he made his way back to Ambrose, patient by his car. ‘Either he’s used it before, or he’s deliberately scouted it out. Not that there’s any way of telling which it is. And if he has used it before, there’s no reason to believe it was for criminal purposes. He could just have stopped to take a leak or have a catnap.’
‘We’re coming by every night, talking to whoever’s parked up here, asking if they’ve noticed anything unusual,’ Ambrose said, clearly knowing it wasn’t enough. Tony liked that the sergeant showed none of the contempt or arrogance that often met his profiling sorties. Ambrose seemed stolid and unemotional, but his silence wasn’t the silence of the dull. He spoke when he had something to say, and so far what he’d had to say had been worth listening to.
‘Hard to think what would qualify as unusual to a bunch of truckers,’ Tony muttered. ‘The dump site is a problem, though. The weight of probability is on it not being a local. So hauling in the usual suspects isn’t going to get you anywhere.’
‘Why do you think it’s not a local?’ Ambrose sounded genuinely interested in the answer.
‘I imagine there’s a lot of better places to dump a body round here that a local would know about - more out of the way, less busy. Just safer all round for the killer. This is a relatively high-risk dump site. I think that, even if he did scout it out before, this was essentially a site of opportunity for someone who didn’t know anywhere better and didn’t want to risk driving any distance with a dead body on board.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘I try to,’ Tony said wryly.
Ambrose grinned, his impassivity disappearing in an instant. ‘That’s why we brought you in.’
‘Your first mistake.’ Tony turned back and prowled along the fringe of the lay-by again. On the one hand, this killer planned carefully. He’d spent weeks grooming Jennifer, setting her up to take his bait. He’d captured her, apparently avoiding witnesses and suspicion. And according to Ambrose, he’d left no forensic traces that had any investigative value. And then he’d dumped her by the side of the road, apparently not caring when she would be found. ‘Maybe he’s just not very strong,’ he called to Ambrose. ‘Maybe he couldn’t carry her very far.’ As he drew closer, he continued. ‘We tend to ascribe superhuman qualities to this kind of offender. Because deep down we think they’re monsters. But they’re mostly pretty average in terms of physique. Now you, you’d have no trouble carrying a fourteen-year-old girl all the way into those woods, back where she might not be found for weeks or months. But me? I’d struggle to get her out of the car and off the roadway. So maybe that’s the reason for the apparent contradiction.’
That had been his most profound conclusion from his crime-scene visit. He hoped for more from the Maidments, but they couldn’t see him till later that afternoon. Her father had apparently decided he needed to spend some time back at work, so he wouldn’t be available till four. If Tony had been given to believing in signs and portents, he would have had to chalk that up as another one. He’d been fully prepared to cancel his arrangement with the agent if it had clashed with meeting Jennifer’s parents. Instead, their availability had dovetailed perfectly with his plans.
Ambrose had dropped him at the hotel. He probably thought Tony was poring over witness statements, not sitting in a rose garden waiting for an estate agent to show him round a house he already owned. That wasn’t normal, by any standards of behaviour. Not as crazed as murdering teenage girls, but still a long way from normal.
It was, Tony thought, as well that Ambrose didn’t know the truth.
CHAPTER 13
In her lowest moments, Carol imagined the worst fate James Blake could have in mind for her. Promotion. But not the sort of promotion that would let her lead her troops into battle. The sort that would have her sitting behind a desk, fretting about policy, while all the important work was being done elsewhere.
Like those times, thankfully rare, when her team were occupied on the front line, doing what needed to be done to find Daniel Morrison’s killer and she was sitting in her office trying to fill the time before she was due at the boy’s post mortem. Usually she tried to occupy her mind with administration and paperwork. But that day, she had something more pressing on her mind.