So thanks to him they were stuck in the shit, no way out till Niall could carve out his own possibilities. He’d keep his nose clean and turn his life around then show his dad what a man was.
But meanwhile, he was stuck in this shitty life that he hated. There was only one little flicker of light at the bottom of the mineshaft. He wanted to learn Russian because he wanted to work for some oligarch and learn how to get rich himself. Those guys didn’t give a shit whose toes they stood on. Hell, they’d break them just to pass the time. But none of the teachers at his poxy school could teach Russian. So he’d gone looking for some free Russian tuition locally. And then DD had turned up on his RigMarole page, offering to help out.
Niall didn’t know what DD stood for. Probably some Russian first name and patronymic. But DD was the real thing. He’d given Niall some basic lessons online, to make sure he was serious. And this week, they were going to meet up for the first time. They’d have their first lesson face to face, and Niall would be on the road to riches. And maybe even his own football team.
That’d show the despicable lying bastard a thing or two.
Posing the question was one thing. Finding the answer was another entirely. His difficulty was not that he was in a strange place; Tony felt paradoxically relaxed in Blythe’s home. It had the sort of tranquil, organic feel he’d have chosen himself, if he ever could have roused himself to take enough interest in his surroundings.
What bothered him was his inability to find a plausible reason for the attack on Jennifer Maidment. It was hard to imagine a personal motive against a fourteen-year-old girl that would lead to murder. If it had been a peer-group killing, it would have been a knife attack on the street or some back alley. There would almost certainly have been witnesses or, at the very least, other teenagers or family members who knew about it after the fact. But this was far too organised. Far too mature a killing method. And besides, the killer had to have had access to a vehicle. And there would have been no genital mutilation in a peer-group murder.
It was possible that Jennifer’s death was the most brutal of messages to either parent. Or both, perhaps. But on the surface, it was hard to see how the Maidments could intersect with the sort of person who would regard murdering and mutilating a teenager as a proportionate response to anything. He ran an engineering company, she was a part-time teacher of children with special needs. And again, if it was a message killing, it was a bloody strange way to go about it. The relatively peaceful death followed by the brutal mutilation. No, whatever this was about, it wasn’t about coercion or revenge or any other obvious message to the parents.
As his thoughts picked over possibilities and rejected them almost as soon as he’d developed them, he ranged through the house, moving from room to room without thinking about it, not even conscious of how at ease he was with his surroundings. When his mind finally stopped churning over, he found himself in the kitchen and realised he was hungry. He opened a couple of cupboards, looking for something to eat. There wasn’t much choice, but Tony had never considered himself a gourmet. He chose a packet of oatcakes and a tin of baked beans and sat down at the breakfast bar with a spoon and plate. Absently, he loaded the oatcakes with cold beans and ate the result with more relish than it warranted. There was something satisfying about this - he felt like Hansel and Gretel secretly exploring the witch’s cottage. Only for him there would be no witch.
Once he’d satisfied his appetite, he went back to the armchair where he’d left the paperwork and crawled through it again. He looked at the locations of the various computers used to send messages to Jennifer Maidment and vaguely recalled Ambrose saying something about hoping they could use them to narrow down a location for the killer. Tony hadn’t paid a great deal of attention because that sort of analysis wasn’t something he used himself. He trusted his own observations and his own capacity for empathy, his own experience and his own instincts. He was uncomfortable with the idea of reducing human behaviour to a set of algorithms, even though he knew it had produced startling results on occasion. He just didn’t feel comfortable with it.
But he knew a woman who did.
Fiona Cameron’s number was stored in his phone. They’d met at various conferences over the years, and she’d called him in for a second opinion on a case she’d been working in Ireland. There had been nothing he could fault her on, but he had been able to offer a couple of helpful suggestions. They’d worked well together. Like Carol, she was intelligent and diligent. Unlike Carol, she’d managed to marry a demanding professional life with a long-term relationship. Tony glanced at his watch. Just after nine. She’d probably be doing whatever it was normal people did at this time of the evening. He wondered what that might be, exactly. Finishing off dinner? Watching TV? Sorting the laundry or just sitting talking over a glass of wine? Whatever it was, she probably wouldn’t appreciate a call from him.
Knowing that had never stopped him before, and it wasn’t going to stop him now. The phone rang out. Just when he was about to give up she answered, sounding a little flustered. ‘Tony? Is that really you?’
‘Hi, Fiona. Is this a bad moment?’
‘No, not at all. I’m stuck in a hotel room in Aberdeen.’ So, not like normal people, then. Just like him. All alone and a long way from home. ‘I was just putting my room-service tray out in the hall, I nearly locked myself out. So, how are you?’
‘I’m in Worcester,’ he said, as if that was an answer. ‘Something’s come up on a case I’m working on and I wanted to ask you if you thought it was something that was susceptible to that geographic profiling program you use.’
She chuckled, the distance doing nothing to diminish the warmth in her voice. ‘Same old Tony. Absolutely no small talk.’
She had a point, he thought. But he’d never bothered trying to pretend otherwise with a woman as acute as Fiona. ‘Yeah, well, leopards and spots, what can I say?’
‘It’s OK, I don’t mind. Anything to take my mind off the yawning tedium of the evening ahead. I daren’t leave my room. I’m doing a seminar tomorrow and there are a couple of colleagues down in the bar I would slit my wrists to avoid. So I’m very happy to have something to pass the time with. What is it?’
‘It’s the murder and mutilation of a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s a killer who’s going to do it again if we can’t stop him. We’ve got an unidentified suspect who’s been spending time online with our victim. He uses public-access computers spread across a hundred miles or so. Mostly single use but some of them more than once. So it’s not offences, as such. Just locations that we know he’s used. Is that something you can do anything with?’
‘I’m not sure till I see it. Can you fire it over to me?’
‘I’ll have to type it in. I’ve only got a hard copy.’ And Patterson will have a nervous breakdown if I ask for an electronic copy so I can send it to someone right outside the loop.
‘Poor you. I hope it’s not too long a list.’
‘I’ll get it to you in the next hour or so.’
‘I’ll look out for it. Take care. Good to talk to you.’
He pulled out his laptop and booted up, pleased to see that Blythe’s wireless broadband appeared still to be functional. It didn’t really matter whether Fiona Cameron could help. He was doing something positive, and experience had taught him that starting down that road always freed up the part of his brain that came up with the inspired connections that made him so effective a profiler.
There was a reason why Jennifer Maidment had died the way she had. And Tony sensed he was edging closer to it.
CHAPTER 20
Paula knew she was the best interviewer on the team. But still she felt ill at ease when she was confronted with teenage girls. Her own adolescence had been so atypical, she always felt she had no common ground to build on. It was ironic, she thought. She could find a starting point to reach out to violent sex offenders, to paedophiles, to stone-hearted people traffickers. But when it came to teenage lasses, she always found herself at a loss.