But before he could get ready for that, he had something far worse to prepare himself for.
His mother was coming to visit. He’d initially refused her request. Vanessa Hill was monstrous. That was a word whose weight he understood and he did not use it lightly. She had blighted his childhood, stolen his chances of knowing his father, attempted to steal his inheritance from him. The last time he’d seen her, he’d hoped it would be the last time.
But Vanessa was not so easily thwarted. She’d sent a message via his lawyer. ‘I’ve always known we were the same, you and me. Now you know it too. You owe me, and you know that too.’ She still knew how to push his buttons. He’d fallen for it in spite of himself.
Hook, line and sinker.
2
There’s a kind of mythology that’s sprung up around psychological profiling, not least because some of its early proponents were tremendous self-promoters. They wrote books, delivered lectures, gave interviews where they seemed almost godlike in their ability to read the minds of criminals. The truth is that profilers are only as good as the team they work with.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
The great conurbations of the north of England insist on their individuality. But they have one undeniable feature in common: none of them is far from achingly beautiful countryside. Those who work out that sort of thing assert that the Peak District National Park is within an hour’s drive of a quarter of the population of England. In normal circumstances, Detective Inspector Paula McIntyre would have relished a day in the woodland of the foothills of the Dark Peak, following twisting paths through what still felt close to a wilderness. Certainly on the high bleak moors above, it was easy to feel that civilisation was a lot further away than the far side of the next ridge.
But these were not normal circumstances. Paula struggled to pull her foot free from the grip of a boggy puddle. It emerged with a disgusting squelch. ‘Dear God, look at the state of that,’ she complained, glaring at her mud-covered walking boot.
Detective Constable Stacey Chen, who had managed to avoid the puddle thanks to Paula’s mishap, screwed up her face in disgust. ‘Has it gone inside your boot?’
Paula wiggled her toes. ‘I don’t think so.’ She set off again down the faint trail they’d been following. ‘Bloody fucking team-building exercises.’
‘At least you already had the gear for it. I’ve spent a fortune getting kitted out for this. Who knew going for a walk in the woods could cost so much?’ Stacey plodded after Paula, tired and glum.
Paula chuckled. ‘Most of us don’t splash out on a top-of-the-range outdoor wardrobe in a oner. Look at you.’ She half-turned and waved a hand at Stacey, clad from head to toe in technical wear. ‘Queen of merino and Gore-Tex.’
‘You can have it all after we get through today. I never want to wear it again.’ The trail ended in a T-junction with a wider path. ‘Which way do we go now?’
Paula pulled the map out of her pocket and traced their route with a finger. ‘We’re going north.’
‘That doesn’t help me.’
‘Look at the trees.’
‘They’re big tall wooden things. With needles. Which, unlike compass needles, are not helpfully magnetic.’
Paula shook her head in mock-despair. ‘Check out the moss. It grows more heavily on the north side of the trunk.’ She moved closer to one of the Scotch pines that grew in a clump by the junction. ‘Look. You can see the difference.’ She pointed to the left. ‘We go this way.’
‘How do you know this stuff?’
‘Same way you know all the intricacies of the Web. Need to know, plus experience. I probably started hillwalking around the time you got your first computer.’ Paula checked her watch. ‘We should get to the rendezvous with a bit to spare. You did well to end up with me, we’ll get brownie points for making good time.’
‘This is a crazy way to spend a day. All we hear is, there’s a budget crisis. Whole categories of crime aren’t being investigated at all because we don’t have the resources. And we’re wasting a day yomping through the woods instead of trying to solve crimes. I truly don’t see the point of this,’ Stacey complained as they set off again at what Paula clearly considered a reasonable pace. As far as Stacey was concerned, it was a route march.
‘Me neither. But we’re not in Kansas any more.’
‘I don’t think DCI Rutherford and Carol Jordan even went to the same police college. Carol would never have done this to us. We didn’t need to play at team building, we were a team.’
There was no arguing with that. ReMIT – the Regional Major Incident Team that DCI Carol Jordan had assembled – had been hand-picked for their skills and their individual approaches to the job. But more than that, they understood how to play nicely with others. As long as the others were inside the tent. But Carol was gone, and ReMIT had only now been resurrected after months of dormancy. According to the ugly sisters, Rumour and Gossip, there had been more than a little uncertainty about the value of a unit that straddled several diverse forces. Those who had originally been in favour had had their fingers burned, while those who had been more cautious were now, paradoxically, more enthusiastic. If there were going to be operational disasters, they thought, better to divert the blame.
So while they’d hummed and hawed, Paula had been transferred back to Bradfield, her home force. She’d been seconded to a long-running investigation into people trafficking and sexual exploitation, an operation that had been emotionally tougher than anything she’d previously encountered. The call back to ReMIT had felt like salvation.
Stacey had been sent on attachment to the Met to work on financial crimes. The hardest aspect of the job had been remembering not to show how much she could do. Working with Carol Jordan, first in Bradfield and then in ReMIT, had given Stacey absolute freedom to go where she wanted online and do whatever they needed her to do. She had become adept at the post hoc validation of things she really shouldn’t have been poking around in. As long as the end result looked clean, Carol had left her to it.
It had taken her three days to understand that doing things the straight way left her frustrated. Worse, it bored her. It had forced her to recognise that, in spite of her apparent adherence to convention, she was actually more in tune with the renegades than the hunters. ‘The only good thing about it is that I’ve got so much free headspace, I’ve developed a lovely little app for working out the calorific value of your keystrokes at the computer,’ she’d confided to Paula over a Chinese takeaway back in Bradfield.
‘Why would anybody want to know that?’ Bemused, Paula frowned at the wonton she’d just speared with a chopstick.
‘Exercise and diet freaks want to know everything. Trust me, they’ve elevated narcissism to a whole new level. Got to keep the business moving forward, Paula. It’s shark to the max out there. If you stop moving forward, you die.’ It was a stealthy reminder that Stacey’s police salary was only a fraction of her income. She’d developed her first commercial program when she was an undergraduate and had grown her business quietly and successfully ever since. It was the reason she could afford to be the best-dressed police officer in the North of England. Merino and Gore-tex was a flea bite on her bank account.