The Torment of Others (2 page)

He pulled out his mobile and called his sergeant, Kevin Matthews. ‘Kev? Don here. Start bringing the nonces in.’

‘No sign, then?’

‘Not a trace. I’ve even had a team through the tunnel half a mile up the tracks. No joy. It’s time to start rattling some cages.’

‘How big a radius?’

Merrick sighed again. Bradfield Metropolitan Police area stretched over an area of forty-four square miles, protecting and serving somewhere in the region of 900,000 people. According to the latest official estimates he’d read, that meant there were probably somewhere in the region of 3,000 active paedophiles in the force area. Fewer than ten per cent of that number was on the register of sex offenders. Rather less than the tip of the iceberg. But that was all they had to go on. ‘Let’s start with a two-mile radius,’ he said. ‘They like to operate in the comfort zone, don’t they?’ As he spoke, Merrick was painfully aware that these days, with people commuting longer distances to work, with so many employed in jobs that kept them on the road, with local shopping increasingly a thing of the past, the comfort zone was, for most citizens, exponentially bigger than it had ever been even for their parents’ generation. ‘We’ve got to start somewhere,’ he added, his pessimism darkening his voice.

He ended the call and stared down the bank, shielding his eyes against the sunshine that lent the grass and trees below a blameless glow. The brightness made the search easier, it was true. But it felt inappropriate, as if the weather was insulting the anguish of the Goldings. This was Merrick’s first major case since his promotion, and already he suspected he wasn’t going to deliver a result that would make anybody happy. Least of all him.

Dr Tony Hill balanced a bundle of files on the arm carrying his battered briefcase and pushed open the door of the faculty office. He had enough time before his seminar group to collect his mail and deal with whatever couldn’t be ignored. The psychology department secretary emerged from the inner office at the sound of the door closing. ‘Dr Hill,’ she said, sounding unreasonably pleased with herself.

‘Morning, Mrs Stirrat,’ Tony mumbled, dropping files and briefcase to the floor while he reached for the contents of his pigeonhole. Never, he thought, was a woman more aptly named. He wondered if that was why she’d chosen the husband she had.

‘The Dean’s not very pleased with you,’ Janine Stirrat said, folding her arms across her ample chest.

‘Oh? And why might that be?’ Tony asked.

‘The cocktail party with SJP yesterday evening–you were supposed to be there.’

With his back to her, Tony rolled his eyes. ‘I was engrossed in some work. The time just ran away from me.’

‘They’re a major donor to the behavioural psychology research programme,’ Mrs Stirrat scolded. ‘They wanted to meet you.’

Tony grabbed his mail in an unruly pile and stuffed it into the front pocket of his briefcase. ‘I’m sure they had a wonderful time without me,’ he said, scooping up his files and backing towards the door.

‘The Dean expects all academic staff to support fundraising, Dr Hill. It’s not much to ask, that you give up a couple of hours of your time–’

To satisfy the prurient curiosity of the executives of a pharmaceutical company?’ Tony snapped. ‘To be honest, Mrs Stirrat, I’d rather set my hair on fire and beat the flames out with a hammer.’ Using his elbow to manipulate the handle, he escaped into the corridor without waiting to check the affronted look he knew would be plastered across her face.

Temporarily safe in the haven of his own office, Tony slumped in the chair behind his computer. What the hell was he doing here? He’d managed to bury his unease about the academic life for long enough to accept the Reader’s job at St Andrews, but ever since his brief and traumatic excursion back into the field in Germany, he’d been unable to settle. The growing realization that the university had hired him principally because his was a sexy name on the prospectus hadn’t helped. Students enrolled to be close to the man whose profiles had nailed some of the country’s most notorious serial killers. And donors wanted the vicarious, voyeuristic thrill of the war stories they tried to cajole from him. If he’d learned nothing else from his sojourn in the university, he’d come to understand that he wasn’t cut out to be a performing seal. Whatever talents he possessed, pointless diplomacy had never been among them.

This morning’s encounter with Janine Stirrat felt like the last straw. Tony pulled his keyboard closer and began to compose a letter.

Three hours later, he was struggling to recover his breath. He’d set off far too fast and now he was paying the price. He crouched down and felt the rough grass at his feet. Dry enough to sit on, he decided. He sank to the ground and lay spreadeagled till the thumping in his chest eased off. Then he wriggled into a sitting position and savoured the view. From the top of Largo Law, the Firth of Forth lay before him, glittering in the late spring sunshine. He could see right across to Berwick Law, its volcanic cone the prehistoric twin to his own vantage point, separated now by miles of petrol-blue sea. He checked off the landmarks: the blunt thumb of the Bass Rock, the May Island like a basking humpback whale, the distant blur of Edinburgh. They had a saying in this corner of Fife: ‘If you can see the May Island, it’s going to rain. If you can’t see the May Island, it’s already raining.’ It didn’t look like rain today. Only the odd smudge of cloud broke the blue, like soft streamers of aerated dough pulled from the middle of a morning roll. He was going to miss this when he moved on.

But spectacular views were no justification for turning his back on the true north of his talent. He wasn’t an academic. He was a clinician first and foremost, then a profiler. His resignation would take effect at the end of term, which gave him a couple of months to figure out what he was going to do next.

He wasn’t short of offers. Although his past exploits hadn’t always endeared him to the Home Office establishment, the recent case he’d worked on in Germany and Holland had helped him leapfrog the British bureaucracy. Now the Germans, the Dutch and the Austrians wanted him to work for them as a consultant. Not just on serial murder, but on other criminal activity that treated international frontiers as if they didn’t exist. It was a tempting offer, with a guaranteed minimum that would be just about enough to live on. And it would give him the chance to return to clinical practice, even if it was only part-time.

Then, there was Carol Jordan to consider. As always when she came into his thoughts, his mind veered away from direct confrontation. Somehow, he had to find a way to atone for what had happened to her, without her ever knowing that was what he was trying to do.

And so far, he had no idea how he could achieve that.

Day Two. And still no trace of Tim Golding. In his heavy heart, Merrick knew they were no longer searching for a living child. He’d visited Alastair and Shelley Golding that morning, cut to the bone by the momentary flash of optimism that lit their eyes when he walked into their neat Victorian terraced cottage. As soon as they’d comprehended that he had nothing to offer them, their eyes had glazed over. Fear had gnawed at them till there was nothing left inside but barren hope.

Merrick had left the house feeling bleak and empty. He glanced down the street, thinking ironically that Tim Golding had, in a way, been a victim of gentri-fication. Harriestown, where the Goldings lived, had been a working-class enclave until enterprising young couples in search of affordable housing had begun buying up decaying properties and restoring them, creating a trendy new suburb. What had been lost was a sense of community. The avid followers of
Changing Rooms
and
Home Front
were interested in their own lives, not those of their neighbours. Ten years before, Tim Golding would have known most of the people on his street and they would have known him. On a summer evening, people would have been out and about, walking to allotments or from the pub, standing in their doorways chatting as they soaked up the last rays of the sun. Their very presence would have protected the boy. And they would have noticed a stranger, would have clocked his passage and kept an eye on his destination. But these days, those residents of Harriestown not whipping up some exotic recipe from a TV chef in their exquisitely designed new kitchens would have been in their back yards, cut off from neighbours by high walls, designing their Mediterranean courtyard gardens or arranging the Greek urns that held their fresh herbs. Merrick had scowled at the blank doors and windows of the street and longed for a simpler time. He’d headed back to the incident room, feeling ill at ease and jaded.

His team had worked through the night, interviewing the known paedophiles on their patch. Not a single pointer had emerged to move the inquiry forward. A couple of punters had phoned in, reporting a white Transit van cruising slowly round the narrow streets at about the time Tim had disappeared. By chance, one of them had remembered enough of the index number to make it worth checking out on the Police National Computer. They’d identified half a dozen possibles in the local area, which had given the incident room a fresh surge of energy.

But that lead had died on its knees within a matter of hours. The third van on the list belonged to a company who made home deliveries of organic vegetables. The driver had been going slowly because he was new to the round and wasn’t sure of the layout of the local streets. That alone wouldn’t have been enough to get him off the hook. But the clincher was that he’d been accompanied by his fifteen-year-old daughter, augmenting her pocket money by helping him out.

Back to square one. Merrick shoved his hands in his trouser pockets and glared at the pinboard in the incident room. It was pitifully bare. Usually by this stage in a missing-child inquiry, information was pouring in. It certainly had in the Guy Lefevre case, although it had all proved fruitless in the long run. But for some reason all they were getting was a pathetic trickle. Of course there were the time-wasters, calling to say they’d seen Tim on the Eurostar train with an Asian woman; in a McDonald’s in Taunton with a grey-haired man; or shopping for computer games in Inverness. Merrick knew these so-called sightings were worthless. Whoever had taken Tim certainly wouldn’t be parading him round the streets for everyone to see.

Merrick sighed. The images in his head now were not of a small boy playing with his friends. What he saw when he closed his eyes was a shallow woodland grave. A flash of yellow football shirt in the long grass of a field margin. A tangle of limbs in a drainage ditch. Christ, but he felt inadequate to the task.

He racked his brains for some other avenue of approach, summoning up the images of previous bosses, wondering how they would have handled things differently. Popeye Cross would have been convinced their abductor was someone they already had on the books. He’d be sweating the nonces, determined to get a confession out of someone. Merrick was confident he’d covered that already, even though his team knew better than to exert the kind of pressure Popeye had been famous for. These days, you leaned too heavily at your peril. Courts had no patience with police officers who bullied vulnerable suspects.

He thought of Carol Jordan and reached for his cigarettes. She’d have come up with some tangential line of attack, he had no doubt of that. Her mind worked in ways he’d never managed to fathom. His brain was wired differently from hers, and he’d never in a million years arrive at one of her inspired angles. But there was one thing Carol would have done that he could pursue.

Merrick inhaled and reached for the phone. ‘Is the boss in?’ he asked the woman who answered. ‘I’d like to talk to him about Tony Hill.’

John Brandon climbed the steps up from the Barbican station. The dirty yellow bricks seemed to sweat and even the concrete underfoot felt hot and sticky. The air was stuffy with the thick, mingled smells of humanity. It wasn’t the best preparation for what he suspected was going to be a difficult conversation.

No matter how much he’d tried to prepare himself for his meeting with Carol Jordan, he knew he didn’t really have a clue what he’d find. He was certain of only two things: he had no idea how she felt about what had happened to her; and work would be her salvation.

He’d been appalled when he’d heard about the botched undercover mission that had ended with the violent assault on Carol. His informant had tried to stress the significance of what her operation had achieved, as if that were somehow a counterbalance to what had been done to her. But Brandon had cut impatiently across the rationale. He understood the demands of command. He’d given his adult life to the police service and he’d reached the top of the tree with most of his principles intact. One of those was that no officer should ever be exposed to unnecessary risk. Of course danger was part of the job, particularly these days, with guns as much a fashion accessory in some social groups as iPods were in others. But there was acceptable risk and unacceptable risk. And in Brandon’s view, Carol Jordan had been placed in a position of intolerable, improper risk. He simply did not believe there was any end that could have justified such means.

But it was pointless to rage against what had happened. Those responsible were too well insulated for even a Chief Constable to make much of a dent in their lives. The only thing John Brandon could do now for Carol was to offer her a lifeline back into the profession she loved. She’d been probably the best detective he’d ever had under his command, and all his instincts told him she needed to be back in harness.