The Torment of Others (34 page)

‘I do, Don. And now I’m going home to bed. It’s been a bitch of a day, and I’ve got to brief the Tim Golding team first thing in the morning.’ As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Carol cursed herself.

‘I was going to ask you about that,’ Merrick said. ‘I want you to put me on that inquiry.’

Carol shook her head. ‘No, Don. I need you working this case. There has to be an inspector in charge of the statement readers and the action assignments. Somebody has to have an overview.’

‘So get someone else,’ he said impatiently. ‘Tim Golding was my case. I worked on Guy Lefevre’s disappearance too. Nobody’s put more into finding those lads than me. I lost sleep over them, I worked my arse off for them. I know those cases inside out. I know the families. And they know me. Anybody else would be starting from scratch. And it would be just another case to them.’

Carol considered diplomacy and rejected it. She was too tired to go round the houses. And besides, it would probably be wasted on Merrick. ‘That’s a large part of the reason why I’m not transferring you. We’ve got a fresh scenario and I want someone running the shop who isn’t bringing any preconceptions to it.’ Merrick recoiled as if she’d slapped him. But Carol ploughed on. ‘The other reason is that the Foster and Mayall cases are live and ongoing. Bringing someone else in to replace you would mean they’d have the impossible task of reviewing all that’s already been done while still trying to keep on top of fresh statements and actions.’ Belatedly, she tried to soften her response. ‘Don, I know you took these disappearances very personally. And that’s not a bad thing. It means you went the extra mile for Tim and Guy. But now it’s time to step back. Sandie and Jackie had families too. They deserve answers as much as the Goldings and the Lefevres. And I need you by my side on this one.’

Merrick looked momentarily as if he wanted to argue. Instead his shoulders slumped and he stood up, bending over so he wouldn’t crack his head on the roof of the van. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, ma’am,’ he said bitterly. Then he was gone, leaving her to contemplate another piece of botched staff management.

‘What a fucking day,’ she said under her breath as she climbed out of the van and made for her car. She’d stood over a child’s grave, then driven to the Goldings’ home to tell them that in all probability it belonged to their son. Next she’d had to break the news to Jonathan before he heard it on the radio or the TV. Then four hours stuck in a van in an atmosphere pregnant with expectation. And now she’d pissed off her number two. Her nerves were shot. She needed a large drink, and she needed it soon.

The last thing she expected when she pulled up outside the house was to see Jonathan huddled over his motorbike. She glanced up at Tony’s windows and was reassured to see they were all dark. She stifled a groan and got out. As she approached, he dismounted stiffly, stretching his long limbs and straightening his spine. She couldn’t help admiring the sight. ‘This is a surprise,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize you’d be working this late. But once I’d waited an hour…’ He shrugged and spread his hands.

‘There’s nothing more I can tell you, Jonathan. We don’t have a positive ID yet, never mind a cause of death…’

‘I didn’t come because I wanted more information,’ he said. ‘I came because…well, I just couldn’t settle. The whole thing kept going round in my head, and I thought how much worse it must be for you, and I thought it might help both of us…’ He saw the look on her face and began to turn away. Obviously I was wrong.’

‘No, no,’ she said hastily. ‘I was just taken aback, that’s all. I’m not used to…’ Her voice tailed off.

‘People regarding you as human?’

She sighed. ‘Something like that. Now you’re here, would you like to come in for a drink?’

He looked uncertain. ‘It’s late, you probably want to get some sleep.’

‘Both of those statements are true, but the first thing I was planning to do was to pour myself a very large glass of wine. You’re welcome to join me.’

‘If you’re sure?’

Carol shook her head in mock exasperation. ‘Can we not waste good drinking time standing here talking about it?’

She’d thought the ceilings in her flat were relatively high, but Jonathan had barely a few inches of clearance. He sat down hastily, looked around her living room and smiled. ‘You’ve not been here long, have you?’

Carol pulled a face. ‘Does it feel so unlived in?’

‘It’s not that, it’s just that there’s no clutter. Me, I can make a place look like the wreck of the
Hesperus
in three days.’

‘I’m not greatly given to clutter,’ Carol said. ‘But what there is of it is in my London flat.’ She spoke over her shoulder as she headed for the fridge. ‘White wine or beer?’

‘Wine, please. So are you planning on selling your London flat?’ he called after her.

Carol came back with the bottle and two glasses. ‘Not sure yet. Right now it feels like too much of a commitment.’ She handed Jonathan a glass and poured the wine. She turned on the CD player and slotted in Arvo Pärt’s
Alina
, then sat down next to him. There was enough distance between them for the decision not to seem weighty. The lambent notes of the piano and violin eased the way into conversation.

‘How do you get through this stuff?’ he asked.

‘I just open my mouth and swallow,’ Carol joked. ‘It’s not that bad, is it?’

‘You know that’s not what I meant. OK, we’ll talk about something else.’

‘I’m sorry. I get so used to flippancy and graveyard humour I sometimes find it hard to shake off. You waited for hours in the cold, you deserve an answer. Except that I don’t really have one. Some cops drink too much. Some focus so hard on catching the person who did it that they deliberately lose sight of the victim. Some go home and hug their kids. Some go home and beat their wives. And some crack up.’

‘And you? What do you do?’

Carol stared into her glass. ‘I try to turn the anger into positive energy. I try to feed off it, use it to drive myself to the edge of exhaustion and beyond.’

‘Does that work?’

Carol could feel tears pricking at the back of her eyes. ‘I don’t know any more. I don’t know a lot of things any more. Things I thought were bred in the bone. Now they sometimes feel like fairy tales I used to tell myself to stop me being afraid of the dark.’

He reached out and curled his arm round her shoulders. Without hesitation, she moved against his side. ‘You haven’t lost it, you know. You’re still a good person. And a good cop.’

‘How would you know?’

‘I saw you out there today. I saw how you managed the scene without anybody realizing you were doing it. And with all that going on, you still found the time to be kind to me. And here you are, being kind to me again.’

Carol sighed, an exhalation that seemed to come from the very core of herself. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that the person I’m being kind to is myself? Jonathan, I don’t want to be alone tonight.’

She felt his muscles tense. ‘You mean…?’

Another deep, heartfelt sigh. ‘Yes, that’s what I mean. But, Jonathan…’ She pulled away so that she could see his face. ‘Only if you’re absolutely sure you’re not in love with me.’

Just after five, Tony abandoned the unequal fight against wakefulness. He’d been drifting in and out of sleep for a while, troubled by thoughts of Tim Golding. And Guy Lefevre, the child almost forgotten in all the excitement. The message Carol had left telling him about the discovery in Swindale hadn’t specifically asked him for help, but he had promised her he would look at the scene and he felt Bradfield police were still in credit on that case. He’d been asked for a profile in the early stages by Don Merrick, and he was painfully aware that he’d only been able to provide a very limited outline. That hadn’t been his fault; he’d said right from the start that he needed more data before he could be of much use. But now he had more information, and a visit to Derbyshire would offer even more. It should be possible to come up with something a little more detailed.

He lay on his back, arms folded behind his head. The room was dark, but that was fine. He didn’t have to see to think. He ran through what he thought he knew about the man who had taken Tim Golding and killed him. And probably done the same previously to Guy Lefevre. It would have been a man. There was an infinitesimal degree of doubt on that point. It was always about probabilities. But you had to keep an open mind at the same time, because the nature of sexual homicide was also very particular; it was about appetites that didn’t occur often enough to form a proper statistical base.

So, a man. In age, anywhere between his late twenties and his early forties. It took time to mature into this kind of killer. Teenagers and men in their early twenties were often sexual predators but seldom took it to the point of no return. Sometimes they became murderers almost by accident, when restraining their victims went too far and ended in death. If they liked the way it made them feel, then the next time it wouldn’t be an accident and another serial killer would be walking the streets. But mostly that first time was deliberate. And it took time for a man’s fantasies to develop the commanding power that would drive him to take a life. So it was mostly safe to assume a higher starting age than for rape or sexual assault. The upper limit wasn’t arbitrary either. By their mid-forties, the urgent rage of youth had faded or been dulled by alcohol. If they hadn’t started killing by then, the chances were they were never going to take that step. The fucked-up childhood was more or less a given too. Of course, it was possible to have all the markers without growing up to embrace the darkness. Tony knew that only too well; anyone examining his own past would have found a series of indicators that, in another man, would have been the first steps on the tortuous route to psychopathy. For him, they had provided the foundation of his empathy with those who had ended up on a different path. He was never entirely sure where the crucial fork in the road had been, but he had ended up a different kind of hunter. And just as the serial killer had a sure instinct for his victims, so Tony had an apparent sixth sense for tracking his prey. In spite of his public insistence that his was a scientific approach, he was well aware that his most crucial insights were drawn directly from the well of intuition. He was practised in hiding this aspect of his work; Carol was probably the only person who understood and forgave it.

So what could he safely say now about the abductor of Guy Lefevre and Tim Golding? Gender, age. Probably a loner, probably with superficial social skills but an inability to make deeper personal connections. He was at home in the countryside; he’d known a location isolated enough for a killing ground, and he’d known the area well enough to feel safe about parking in a public car park and transporting the boy a mile through the landscape to the final destination. He must have known there would be few people around at that time of the morning. But he was also comfortable in the environs of the city, since it was assumed he’d lifted Tim from a street in broad daylight.

At that point, Tony’s thoughts stumbled. Assumption wasn’t fact. There had been no witnesses. The cops had struggled to believe it could have happened without someone seeing something, even though there were precedents in this sort of case. The notorious child abductor and murderer Robert Black had snatched at least two of his victims from the street without anyone noticing. But what if it hadn’t happened like that?

Tony reviewed the evidence. Guy had gone off into woodland to search for birds’ nests. He’d never been seen again, though his map of the nests had been found near the canal. Tim had told his friends he was going down to the railway embankment to watch the freight trains. The women at the bus stop said they thought they’d glimpsed his yellow football shirt between the trees. What if their killer hadn’t been in a vehicle on the streets? What if he’d been on the embankment or in the woods, waiting, ready with some tale that would enrapture a young boy and make him come willingly? Maybe a particularly exotic nest, or some piece of railway machinery? Interestingly, both locations were connected by transport links to the Derbyshire peaks, only a dozen or so miles from Swindale, though not links that the killer could have used. The canal led to a railhead with a direct line down into the dales. And that particular spur of the railway line led to a quarry on the fringes of the Peak District.