Cross and Burn

  ‘Hi. I’m Marie Mather. The new marketing director.’ She held out a hand.

  Gareth accepted the handshake with no enthusiasm. His hand was cool and dry, the pressure firm but not aggressive. ‘I figured that’s who you must be. I’m Gareth Taylor, one of the screen and phone grunts.’

  ‘I prefer to think of you as frontline staff.’

  Gareth raised his eyebrows. ‘Doesn’t change the reality.’

  ‘You’re in early.’

  He shook his head, sighing. ‘Look, I know Rob will have given you the bullet points. Coming to work is the only consistent thing in my life right now. I don’t want sympathy. I’m not like him with his “pity me, my wife left me” shtick. I just want to be left alone to get on with things, all right?’ His voice was tight with frustration. She could only imagine how hard it was to deal with other people’s well-meaning interference on top of such a devastating loss.

  Marie leaned forward and peered at his screen. ‘Message received and understood. So what are you working on?’

  She’d hoped he might at least smile. Instead, he scowled. ‘It won’t mean anything to you till you’ve got your feet under the table. I’m implementing a strategy to switch silver surfer customers to long-term contracts. And I think we’re doing it wrong, so maybe you might want to come back and talk to me about it when you’re up to speed.’

  There were two ways of taking Gareth’s brusque response. For now, Marie elected to avoid confrontation. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’ She sipped her cappuccino. ‘I’m always happy to hear from my team.’

  Tonight, when she relaxed with a glass of white wine while Marco cooked dinner, she’d enjoy telling him about this encounter. As they often did, they’d set up some light-hearted wagers about how it would go with her new colleagues. Would she win Gareth over or would he be determined to remain alienated? Would Rob’s obvious desire to flirt cross the line to the point where she’d have to bring HR into the picture? She and Marco loved to play their little game of speculation, sometimes even using their fantasy workplace lives to spice up their own bedroom games.

  It was harmless fun, Marie thought. Completely harmless.

  6

  Torin’s adolescent inability to disguise his anxiety was immediately obvious to Paula. Luckily for her, maintaining a cool façade under pressure took more skill and effort than he had at his command. Normally she’d have offered him a drink to settle him down, but Skenfrith Street was alien territory for her and she didn’t know how long it would take her to rustle something up. The last thing she wanted was to keep her new boss waiting any longer than absolutely necessary.

  Technically, she should probably have sorted out a so-called appropriate adult before she questioned Torin. But she reckoned she was more than appropriate enough. And it wasn’t as if he was being interviewed about a crime. Paula gave Torin an expectant look. ‘When did you start to worry there might be something wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly.’ He frowned.

  ‘What time does she usually get in from work?’

  He raised one shoulder in a shrug. ‘About half past five, but sometimes she’ll do the shopping on the way home, so then it’s more like quarter to seven.’

  ‘So it’s fair to say that by seven, you were beginning to worry?’

  ‘Not worry, exactly. More like, wonder. It’s not like she’s not got a life. Sometimes she goes out with one of her mates for a pizza or a movie or whatever. But if she’s doing that, she usually tells me in advance, in the morning. Or she texts me if it’s more, like, spontaneous.’

  Paula wasn’t surprised. Bev McAndrew had struck her as a sensible woman. ‘So did you text her?’

  Torin nodded, chewing the corner of his lower lip. ‘Yeah. Just, you know, what’s for my tea, will you be back soon, kind of thing.’

  Standard teenage-boy stuff. ‘And she didn’t respond?’

  ‘No.’ He fidgeted in his chair, then leaned forward, his forearms on the table, his hands clenched together. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t really worried, more, like, pissed off.’ He gave her a quick up-and-under glance, checking whether he was going to get away with a mild swear word in front of a copper.

  Paula smiled. ‘Pissed off and hungry, I’m guessing.’

  Torin’s shoulders relaxed a degree or two. ‘Yeah. That too. So I looked in the fridge and there was leftover cottage pie from the night before, so I nuked it and ate it. And still nothing from my mum.’

  ‘Did you call any of her friends?’

  His head reared back slightly in a gesture of incomprehension. ‘How would I do that? I don’t know their numbers. They’re all in her phone, not written down anywhere. I mostly don’t even know their names.’ He waved a hand in the air. ‘And there’s no way to look up, like, “Dawn from work”, or “Megan from the gym”, or “Laura that I was at school with”.’ He had a point, she realised. It used to be when someone went missing, you checked their address book, their diary, the list of numbers by the phone. Now everybody carried their whole lives around with them and when they disappeared, so did the means of tracking them.

  ‘No relatives you could call?’

  Torin shook his head. ‘My gran lives in Bristol with my auntie Rachel. Mum hasn’t spoken to my dad this year, and anyway, he’s doing a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He’s an army medic.’ A note of pride, Paula thought.

  ‘What about work? Did you think of ringing there?’

  He glowered. ‘They only answer the outside line during regular opening hours. In the evening, the pharmacy’s just for hospital emergency prescriptions. So even if I’d rung, nobody would have picked up.’

  Paula cast her mind back to her own early teens and wondered how unnerved she’d have felt if her staid and respectable parents had gone inexplicably AWOL. In the circumstances, she thought Torin was doing pretty well not to lose control in the face of what probably felt like pointless questions that only served to slow down the process of finding his mother. It was that understanding of other people’s points of view that had helped Paula develop her skills as an interviewer. Now she needed to keep Torin on side, make him feel someone cared about his plight so she could extract enough information to do something useful.

  ‘So what did you do?’

  Torin blinked fast and furious. Ashamed or upset, Paula wasn’t sure which. ‘I went on my Xbox and played Minecraft till I was tired enough to go to sleep. I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘You did well. A lot of people your age would have panicked. So what happened this morning?’

  ‘I woke before my alarm went off. At first I thought it was Mum moving around that had woken me, but it wasn’t. I went through to her room, and the bed was still made.’ He chewed his lip again, dark eyes troubled. ‘She hadn’t come home. And she just doesn’t do shit like that. One of my mates, his mum sometimes stops out all night without telling him. And that geezer on the front counter there, you could tell he was thinking, “Poor mutt, his mum’s a slapper and he’s the last to know it.”’ He was on a roll now, words tumbling into one another. ‘But I’m telling you, my mum’s not like that. She’s really not. Totally. Not. Plus it’s, like, a house rule. We always text each other if we’re going to be late. Like, if I’ve missed the bus or somebody’s parent’s late picking us up. Or she’s been held up at work. Whatever.’ He ran out of steam abruptly.

  ‘And so you came down here.’

  His shoulders slumped. ‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do. But you lot don’t care, do you?’

  ‘If that was true, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you, Torin. Usually, we wait twenty-four hours to start a missing person inquiry, it’s true.’ Unless there’s a vulnerable individual in the picture. ‘But not when it’s someone like your mum, someone who has responsibility for a child or an old person, for example. What I need to do now is take down some details about you and your mum so I can set the ball rolling.’

  A tap at the door interrupted Paula’s flow. Be
fore she could say anything, the front-counter officer stuck his head round the door. ‘DCI Fielding wants to know how long you’re going to be.’ He didn’t do any kind of job of hiding his self-satisfaction.

  Paula dismissed him with a pitying look. ‘I’m interviewing a witness. It’s what I’m trained to do. Please tell the DCI I’ll be with her as soon as I’ve finished here.’

  ‘I’ll pass the message on.’

  Torin gave him a look of contempt as the door closed. ‘You in the shit now? For talking to me?’

  ‘I’m doing my job, Torin. That’s what matters. Now, I’m going to need some background information.’

  It didn’t take long. Torin, fourteen. Pupil at Kenton Vale School. Bev, thirty-seven, chief pharmacist at Bradfield Cross Hospital, divorced eight years ago from Tom, currently serving at Camp Bastian. Torin and Bev shared a semi-detached house at 17 Grecian Rise, Kenton, Bradfield. No known reason why Bev wasn’t where she should be. No history of mental illness or depression. No known financial pressures, other than the ones everyone in the public sector lived with these days.

  Paula jotted down mobile numbers for mother and son then put her pen down. ‘Have you got a picture of your mum?’

  Torin fiddled with his phone, then turned it to face her. Paula recognised Bev from the picture, which wasn’t always a given with smartphone snaps. It was a head shot, apparently taken on a sunny beach. Thick blonde hair, mid-blue eyes, oval face with regular features. Pretty but not drop-dead gorgeous, a face animated by a cheery smile complete with laughter lines. Seeing the picture reminded Paula that she’d found Bev attractive. Not that she’d exactly lusted after their dinner host. More of a private acknowledgement that Bev was her type. In the same way that Carol Jordan was. A particular configuration of features and colouring that always caught her attention. Not, interestingly, a match for Dr Elinor Blessing. Paula knew her partner was beautiful; her heart always rose at the sight of her fine black hair with its threads of silver, and the laughter in her grey eyes. But it hadn’t been Elinor’s looks that had tweaked Paula’s attention when they first met. It had been her kindness, which trumped blonde every time. So yes, there had been a moment when she’d appreciated Bev’s appeal. And if she’d noticed it, chances were that she wasn’t the only one.

  ‘Can you email that to me?’ She flipped to a fresh page in her notebook and wrote down her mobile number and email address, tore it out and passed it to Torin. ‘Has she got any scars, or birthmarks, or tattoos? It makes it easier for us to check with the local hospitals in case she’s had an accident and been brought in without her handbag.’

  He glanced at the scrap of paper Paula had given him then met her eyes again. ‘She has a tattoo of a bluebird on her left shoulder. And she’s got a scar on her right ankle where she broke it and they had to put a pin in.’

  Paula made a quick note. ‘That’s very helpful.’

  ‘What are you going to do about my mum?’

  ‘I’ll make some phone calls. Talk to her colleagues.’

  ‘What about me?’

  It was a good question. Torin was a minor and she knew she should phone the social services department and get a case worker assigned to him. But Bev might prove Paula’s professional unease unfounded. She might still turn up, embarrassed and awkward after an unpredicted night on the tiles. Then unpicking the process set in train by the social workers would be a nightmare for mother and son. She’d be stigmatised as an unfit mother and he’d be classified ‘at risk’. It might even have an impact on her job. Paula didn’t want that on her conscience. ‘Why don’t you just go to school?’

  ‘Like normal?’

  She nodded. ‘Text me when you get out of school and we’ll take it from there. Hopefully, she’ll have turned up at work and that’ll be the end of it.’ She tried to reassure him with a smile that matched her voice.

  He looked dubious. ‘You think?’

  No. But, ‘Chances are,’ was what she said as she stood up and eased him out the door. She watched him as far as the front entrance, his shoulders hunched, his head down. She wanted to believe Bev McAndrew was fit and well and on her way home. But convincing herself would have required a triumph of hope over experience, and Paula didn’t have it in her.

  She turned away, momentarily nostalgic for her old team. They would have understood exactly why she was bothering with Torin and his barely missing mum. But that was then. Instead she had DCI Fielding to face. She’d heard good things about Fielding’s conviction rates and this was definitely a team she wanted to hitch her wagon to. But already she’d kept her new boss waiting. It was far from the perfect start she’d hoped for. Hopefully, it wasn’t too late to redeem herself. She’d simply have to try that little bit harder.

  7

  The tram rattled across the high Victorian viaduct, sleek modern lines a contrast to the soot-stained redbrick arches. It was, Tony thought, a powerful metaphor for the whole area surrounding the Minster Canal Basin. Opposite the viaduct was the ruined apse of the medieval minster itself, its stained limestone tracery all that had been left standing when a stick of Luftwaffe bombs had reduced the rest of the building to rubble. A dozen years ago, the viaduct and the minster had bookended a higgledy-piggledy scrum of random buildings, half of them empty and decaying, their window frames rotten and their rooflines sagging. The canal district had been the least lovely and least loved of inner-city Bradfield’s precincts.

  Then a bright spark on the city council had discovered an EU fund aimed at reinvigorating depressed and deprived inner-city environments. These days, the canal basin was the hub of a lively area. Craft workshops, indie publishers and software developers worked cheek by jowl, flats and studio apartments occupied the upper floors and a sprinkling of bars and bistros provided somewhere for locals and visitors to mingle. One of Bradfield Victoria’s premier league stars had even lent his name to a Spanish tapas bar that he occasionally deigned to grace with his presence.

  The basin itself had become a mix of permanent residential moorings and short-stay marina slots for the narrowboats that provided holidays and day trips where once they’d shifted cargoes round the country.

  Attractive though it now was, it had never previously crossed Tony’s mind as a possible home. He’d sat outside one of the waterside pubs with Carol Jordan once, when they’d been pretending to be normal people who could have a drink and a conversation that didn’t involve the interior life of fucked-up individuals. Another time, he’d shared a clutter of tapas with a couple of American colleagues who’d come to look round the secure mental hospital where he worked. More than once, he’d walked the canal from one side of the city to the other while he mulled over a complex case. There was something about walking that freed up his mental processes to consider options other than the obvious.

  So, he was familiar with the basin. Yet he’d never wondered what it would be like to live on the water in the heart of the city until it was all that was left to him. His former house in Bradfield was gone, sold to strangers when he thought he’d finally found a place he could with conviction call home. And now that was gone too, a burned-out shell that was an uncomfortable metaphor for what had happened to the life he’d imagined he could lead there. Everywhere he looked, bloody metaphors galore.

  Tony crossed the cobbled area that separated the tapas bar from the houseboat moorings and swung aboard a pretty narrowboat whose name, Steeler, unfurled on a painted gold-and-black ribbon across the stern. He unfastened the heavy padlocks that held the hatch closed and clattered down the steep steps to the cabin below. As he passed, he threw the switches that activated the boat’s electricity supply, generated by an array of solar panels. Even gloomy Bradfield skies provided enough energy for one person whose power needs were far from extravagant.

  He’d been surprised by how readily he’d adapted to living in so confined a space. Life with a place for everything and everything in its place had proved unexpectedly soothing. There was no room for anything inessential; l
iving like this had stripped his material life down to the bone, forcing him to reconsider the worth of stuff that had cluttered his life for years. OK, he didn’t love the practical necessities like emptying the toilet tank and topping up the water reservoir. Nor was he entirely at ease with the camaraderie of the water, a connectivity that seemed to draw together the most unlikely combinations of people. And he still hadn’t mastered the heating system. Now the nights were getting colder, he was growing fed up with waking in a freezing cabin. He was going to have to settle for the action of last resort – sitting down with the manual and actually reading the instructions. But in spite of all the inconveniences, he had grown comfortable in this calm, contained world.

  He dumped his bag on the buttoned leather banquette that ran along the saloon bulkhead and put the kettle on for a cafètiere of coffee. While he waited for the water to boil, he booted up his laptop and checked his email. The only new message was from a cop for whom he’d profiled a serial rapist a few years before. Half-hoping it was an invitation to work with him again, he opened it.

  Hi Tony. How are you doing? I heard about the business with Jacko Vance. Terrible thing, but without your input it could have been so much worse.

  The reason I’m writing is because we’re organising a conference to promote the use of offender profiling in high-visibility cases. Not just murders, but other serious offences too. It’s getting harder to persuade top brass and police authorities that it’s cost-effective in these times of austerity all round. We’re trying to make the case that it’s a front-end expense that saves a lot of back-end costs. I thought Carol Jordan would be the perfect keynote speaker, given how closely she’s worked with you over the years. But I’m having some difficulty tracking her down. BMP tell me she’s no longer on their books. They informed me she was transferring to West Mercia. But they say she’s not on their strength. I tried the email address I had for her, but it bounced back at me. And the mobile number I had for her isn’t working any more. I wondered if maybe she was deep undercover, but either way I reckoned you’d know where I can get in touch with her.