‘What’s wrong?’ Carol said urgently, her face mirroring what he realised she was seeing on his. Fear and horror in equal proportion, he suspected.
He breathed deeply. ‘I’m not sure I can find the words for what I’m feeling,’ he said. ‘It scares me sometimes, how much of Vanessa there is in me.’
Carol looked as if she was going to burst into tears. ‘Are you crazy? You couldn’t be less like your mother. You’re like polar opposites. She cares about nobody but herself. You care about everybody except yourself.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m her son. Sometimes that terrifies me.’
‘You’re what you’re made yourself,’ Carol said. ‘What I’ve learned about profiling from you is that people are shaped by what happens to them and how they respond to it. You can’t offer that grace to the killers you profile and deny it to yourself. I will not sit here and listen to you put yourself in the same box as Vanessa.’ Her fierceness was hard to deny. To have provoked that in her, there must be something worth defending about himself. He couldn’t refuse to accept that.
He sighed. ‘So what’s Vanessa’s version of the story behind the story?’ He prodded the cutting with one finger.
Carol called on her most unusual gift, an eidetic memory for the spoken word. She had total recall of conversations, interviews and interrogations. It was an ability that had led her into some of the most dangerous places a police officer could be sent, and these days she regarded it as an extremely mixed blessing. Now, she closed her eyes and took Tony through the entire conversation. It was a depressing recitation, he thought, given all the more validity by the confirmation in Arthur’s letter that Vanessa hadn’t told him she was pregnant. If she was telling the truth about that, which hardly showed her in the best of lights, she was probably telling the truth about the rest of it. Carol was right. He hadn’t learned anything about the real Edmund Arthur Blythe by sitting in his chair and sleeping in his bed.
‘Thanks,’ he said when she reached the end. It occurred to him that Carol had answered one question whose existence she knew nothing of. No, he didn’t need to listen to whatever self-serving tale Arthur had concocted for the record. He knew now what had happened. It wasn’t pretty, but then most of life wasn’t. He’d kidded himself for a day and a night that he was descended from someone decent, kind and smart. No, be honest. You kidded yourself about that for years. You always had fantasy dads that were all of those things and more. He dredged a smile from somewhere. ‘You got time for coffee?’
Carol smiled. ‘Of course.’ Then she undercut everything he’d just told himself. ‘And Tony - remember, Vanessa’s always looking out for herself. She might have sounded like she was telling the truth, but don’t forget what a good liar she is. The truth might be a long way from her version.’
CHAPTER 29
Niall slouched his way across the estate to the bus stop, shoulders spread, legs wide, making himself look as big and unattractive a target as he could. You never knew round here where the agg was going to come from. Too many fuckwits on too many drugs to be reliably bad. Some guy you’d been nodding mutual respect to for weeks could just turn on you like that and next thing you know, it’s all gone off.
There were already a couple of Asian lads lounging in the bus shelter. He’d seen one of them from time to time hanging around in the school yard at break. He cut his eyes at Niall, looking away before they could make proper contact. ‘Where you going, then?’ the boy asked.
Niall knew it would be suicide to say, ‘I’m meeting up with someone who’s going to give me a Russian lesson. How exciting is that?’ He shrugged and said, ‘Into town, innit? Hang with my crew.’
The Asian lad’s lip curled. ‘I never seen you with no crew. You don’t got no crew, you Billy No-Mates.’
‘What you know?’ Niall said, trying to sound like he couldn’t be bothered with this. Which he couldn’t, really. He had more going on.
Before they could really get into it, a car drew up at the bus stop. All three of them acted as if it was nothing to do with them. The window rolled down and the driver leaned across. ‘It’s Niall, isn’t it?’
He frowned. This was a stranger, OK. But a stranger who knew his name. ‘Who wants to know?’ he said.
‘I’m so glad I caught you. DD asked me to come and pick you up. He tripped on the stairs last night and broke his ankle - can you believe it? Three hours we were stuck in Casualty at Bradfield Cross. Anyway. Obviously he couldn’t meet you in town, but he still wanted to get together, so he asked me to come and pick you up.’
It made sense, but Niall wasn’t entirely won over. ‘How did you know I was going to be here?’
‘DD knew what bus you were getting off, so I’ve just been working forwards from the end of the route. He printed me off your Rig page with your photo, see?’ The driver brandished a print-out with Niall’s moody scowl in one corner. ‘Jump in, DD’s really looking forward to seeing somebody more interesting than me.’ A winning smile, hard to resist.
Niall opened the door and climbed in. ‘See ya, losers,’ was his parting shot. The Asian boys were working so hard at being unconcerned that they were almost no use to the police when it came to describing either car or driver. But that was later. Much later.
Carol rubbed her eyes. They were so gritty and tired, she wondered whether she should be thinking about a visit to the optician. Last time she’d seen the doctor, complaining about back pain, he’d cheerfully informed her that she’d reached the age where things started falling apart. It felt unfair. She hadn’t done half the things with her body that she’d intended and she really wasn’t ready to say goodbye to all those wild ambitions and vague longings. She remembered Tony turning forty and pretending to complain that he’d never lead Bradfield Victoria out in a cup final. She suspected there were similar impossible dreams she should be saying goodbye to.
Her office blinds were open now and she looked through her glass wall at her team. She could see a thin wedge of Stacey’s hair and arm. Every now and again she’d tuck her hair behind her ear. It was a habitual gesture, a pause for thought, a moment while a screen refreshed. Carol wasn’t sure what exactly Stacey was working on right now, but knew that whatever arcane avenue she was pursuing, there was a good chance it would produce something useful.
Kevin was on the phone, leaning back and swinging round in his swivel chair, twirling a pen in his fingers. He was good at liaising between the different divisions, easy with the laddish camaraderie that Carol was inevitably excluded from. He managed to walk the line between siding with the lads and never forgetting he was on her team. She kept thinking she would lose him to promotion, but she thought he’d stopped applying for it. She wondered if that was because he had lost his former ambition or simply that he enjoyed what he was doing. He’d rediscovered his attachment to his wife and kids over the past couple of years; maybe that had something to do with it. He was the only one of them who was a parent. His own son was only a year or so younger than Seth and Daniel. Carol made a mental note to touch base with him, make sure these deaths weren’t becoming too personal.
Paula was revisiting Kathy and Julia, her visit a mixture of demonstrating that they were aware of their grief, and trying to see if there was anything else of use that they might remember. Carol wasn’t hopeful on either count.
Sam, too, was out of the office. When he’d come back from sorting out Tim Parker, she’d sent him to Worksop, to the head offices of RigMarole. The owners hadn’t been thrilled about coming in on a Saturday, but Sam had a warrant. They were supposed to hand over the keys to the kingdom - the codes that would allow Stacey official access to the back end of their system, to see if there was anything at all on their server that might point to the identity of the killer. Sam would also be checking their physical files, to see what sort of a paper trail might exist. Getting the warrant hadn’t been easy - data protection had become such a totem. These days it was almost easier to get into a Swiss bank account than some data sources.