‘Happen I can. There’ll be stuff I can show an’ all.’
Carol considered. Everything here was under control. They were nowhere near arrest or interview on anything. Unless something very unusual happened at the post mortem, she could easily disappear for a couple of hours in the evening. ‘How are you fixed this evening?’ she asked.
‘This evening? Seven o’clock. Meet me outside Halifax station. I’ll be wearing a fawn anorak and a tweed cap.’
The line went dead. Carol glared at the phone, then saw the funny side and smiled to herself. If it took her further forward on her quest for Tony’s not-father, dealing with grumpy Alan Miles would be more than worth it.
When Ambrose arrived to take him to meet Jennifer Maidment’s parents, Tony could barely hide his relief. After the estate agent’s tour, he’d struggled to focus his thoughts on the crime scene he’d visited earlier. He knew something was nagging at him about this killer, but he wasn’t sure what it was, and the more he tried to think about it, the more his mind’s eye was invaded by images of Arthur Blythe’s home. Tony was seldom influenced by his immediate surroundings. The notion of interior design had never planted itself in his consciousness. So he was all the more bemused by the inescapable fact that he envied Arthur Blythe this house. It went beyond mere comfort. It felt like a home, a place that had grown organically round one man’s idea of what mattered to him. And although he hated to admit it, it pierced Tony that Arthur Blythe had cast him off and gone on to make a home that felt so complete in itself. Nobody would ever feel like that about his house. He certainly didn’t. He didn’t have that absolute sense of himself that had clearly invested the man he never got to call his father.
So Ambrose’s arrival felt like a liberation from his troublesome thoughts. It wasn’t a relief that lasted for long. ‘Did you bring the RigMarole print-outs?’ Tony asked as soon as he’d settled into the car. When he’d heard about ZZ, he’d asked Ambrose to bring copies of whatever they’d salvaged from the sessions so he could study them.
Ambrose stared straight ahead. ‘The boss doesn’t want them to leave the office. He’s happy for you to read them, but he wants you to do it in-house.’
‘What? He doesn’t trust me? What does he think I’m going to do with them?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what he said.’ Ambrose’s hands were tight on the steering wheel. His discomfort was like a vibration in the air.
‘It’s not because he’s worried I’m going to sell them to the
‘I get that,’ Ambrose said. ‘The DI isn’t used to working with somebody like you.’
‘Then he needs to get on the learning curve,’ Tony said. ‘It might help if he was keener to meet me face to face. Can you sort this out, or do I need to talk to him?’
‘Leave it with me,’ Ambrose muttered. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ They travelled the rest of the way in silence, Tony trying to bury everything that was standing between him and the next step of this process of discovery. Right now, all that mattered was drawing the Maidments out of their pain so they could tell him what he needed to know.
The man who opened the door held himself stiff and brittle as a dried reed. Ambrose introduced them and they followed Paul Maidment into the living room. Tony had often heard it said that people took grief differently. He wasn’t sure he agreed. They might outwardly react in different ways, but when you got right down to it, what grief did was tear your life in half. Life before your loss and life after your loss. There was always a disconnect. Some people let it all hang out, some people rammed it into a hole deep inside and rolled a heavy stone over it, some people pretended it wasn’t happening. But speak to them years later and they were always able to date memories in terms of their loss. ‘Your dad was still alive then,’ or ‘That was after our Margaret died.’ It was as precise as BC and AD. Come to think of it, that had been about grief and loss too, whatever your views on the authenticity of Jesus as the son of God.
In his role as a profiler, he mostly got to meet people when they were on the wrong side of the chasm of grief. He seldom knew what they’d been like before their lives had been torn in half. But he could often make an educated guess at what had existed on the other side of the gap. His consciousness of what had been lost formed a crucial part of his ability to empathise with where they were now, stranded in unfamiliar territory, trying to make sense of the map with part of the compass missing.
His first impression of Paul Maidment was of a man who had decided to draw a line under his daughter’s death and move on. It was a decision he was clearly struggling to stick to. At this point, Tony thought, he was close to going under for the third time.
‘My wife . . . she’ll be down in a minute,’ he said, looking around him with the air of someone who is seeing his environment for the first time and isn’t quite sure how he got there.
‘You went back to work today,’ Tony said.
Maidment looked startled. ‘Yes. I thought . . . There’s too much to be done, I can’t leave it to anyone else. Business . . . it’s really not good just now. And we don’t need to lose the business on top of . . .’ He tailed off, distracted and distressed.
‘It’s not your fault. This would have happened whether you’d been home or not,’ Tony said. ‘You and Tania, you’re not to blame for this.’
Maidment glared at Tony. ‘How can you say that? Everybody says the internet’s dangerous for teenagers. We should have taken better care of her.’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. Predators like this, they’re determined. Short of locking Jennifer up and never letting her communicate with anyone else, there was nothing you could have done to stop this.’ Tony leaned forward, drawing Paul Maidment into his space. ‘You need to forgive yourselves.’
‘Forgive ourselves?’ The woman’s voice came from behind him, slightly slurred from drink or drugs. ‘What the hell do you know about it? You’ve lost a child, have you?’
Maidment buried his head in his hands. His wife moved to the centre of the room with the exaggerated care of someone who is sufficiently in control to know they are slightly out of it. She looked at Tony. ‘You’ll be the shrink,
