Fever of the Bone

attack. Clearly no arrest had been made. Not entirely surprising, with no description of any value. Doubtless the usual suspects had been dragged in and slapped around a bit, but nothing had come of it. And Blythe himself had clearly been unwilling to discuss it. It seemed he’d sold up and left town almost immediately. It was all very sudden.

It was beginning to look as if Carol might have to pay another visit to Tony’s mother. Only this time, she wouldn’t be taking no for an answer. The only thing that stopped her heading straight back to Halifax and Vanessa’s lair was a text from Paula.

‘Oh shit,’ Carol said. Strictly speaking, she didn’t need to turn out on this one. But her sense of obligation was heightened by her earlier dereliction. I’ll be there within the half hour, she texted back to Paula. Hold the fort till then.

Niall Quantick hated his life. He hated his useless mother. He hated the scuzzy streets round their spazoid flat. He hated never having any money. He hated school, hated that he had to show up every day, thanks to his arsehole mother’s deal with the head teacher that, if he didn’t show, he wouldn’t get even his pitiful allowance from her. OK, so he planned to play the system to get away from her and her fucking hateful little life, but he didn’t want her to know that. He would have gone to school anyway, but his small rebellion against the machine last term had totally paid off. Pretty much the one thing he didn’t hate about his life was that he was clever enough to outsmart everybody who tried to get one over on him.

He took a toke off the joint he indulged in every day after school when he walked the stupid dog to get out of the flat so he could chill out in the crappy park with its used needles and scumbags and glue bags and dogshit. What a fucking life.

Most of all, he hated his fuckwit arsehole father for turning his life into this drudged-out hell. His life might not feel so shit if he couldn’t remember a time when it had been different. The other kids he hung out with didn’t seem as pissed off with their lives as he was and he thought that might be because they didn’t have anything better to contrast it with. Oh sure, they thought they knew what it would be like to have a flash car and a big gaff and holidays where the sun shone every day. But that was just fantasy footballer world to them. Not to Niall. Niall remembered what it was like to have all of those things.

Before this scummy flat in a part of Manchester so bad that jobseekers had to lie about their postcode, they’d lived in a detached house on the outskirts of Bradfield. Niall had had his own bedroom plus a playroom. He’d had a PS3 and an Xbox. There had been a room full of gym equipment with a plasma-screen TV at the end of the treadmill. His dad’s Mercedes had sat in the double garage next to his mum’s Audi. They’d had season tickets for Manchester United, they’d gone abroad on holiday three times a year and Niall couldn’t keep track of his Christmas and birthday presents.

Then three years ago, it had all come crashing down. His mum and dad had been fighting like EastEnders for months. He couldn’t figure out what the trouble was, just that they couldn’t seem to get through a day without being at each other’s throat. Finally, his dad had taken them on holiday to Florida, supposedly to patch things up. But he’d walked out of the rented villa on the third night after yet another row. His mum had said to hell with him, they were going to enjoy the rest of the holiday. They came home ten days later to find the house sold, the rooms stripped bare, the cars gone and the locks changed. He’d sold the house out from under them and taken their clothes in bin bags round to Niall’s mum’s parents’ house in Manchester.

It was breathtakingly evil. Niall had thought so at the time and he thought so still.

His mum got lawyered up, but it didn’t do her any good. It turned out that his dad’s company owned the house and everything else. On paper, his dad didn’t have a pot to piss in. And so now, neither did Niall or his useless mother.

He was amazed at his dad’s capacity for pure evil. His mother had dragged them both round to his car dealership one afternoon, trying to shame him into giving them more than the fifty quid a week he was shelling out for Niall. They’d shut Niall out of the room, leaving him with the clueless receptionist while they screamed at each other. But he could still hear every word. ‘He’s not even my kid,’ his dad had yelled at the height of the row.

His mum hadn’t said anything, but Niall heard a loud crack, like something glass being thrown at a wall. Then the door had opened and he’d seen a spider web of cracks where the big plate-glass window on to the showroom should have revealed gleaming rows of cars. ‘Come on,’ she’d said, grabbing his arm and making for the door. ‘We don’t want money off that despicable lying bastard anyway.’

Speak for yourself, Niall had thought. All the more reason for taking his money, him being a despicable lying bastard. Who the fuck did he think he was, making out that Niall’s mum was some sort of slut who’d have another man’s kid and pass it off as his? She might be a useless cow, but he knew she wasn’t a slag. Unlike his dad, who would do anything rather than put his hand in his pocket to support his wife and kid.

So thanks to him they were stuck in the shit, no way out till Niall could carve out his own possibilities. He’d keep his nose clean and turn his life around then show his dad what a man was.

But meanwhile, he was stuck in this shitty life that he hated. There was only one little flicker of light at the bottom of the mineshaft. He wanted to learn Russian because he wanted to work for some oligarch and learn how to get rich himself. Those guys didn’t give a shit whose toes they stood on. Hell, they’d break them just to pass the time. But none of the teachers at his poxy school could teach Russian. So he’d gone looking for some free Russian tuition locally. And then DD had turned up on his RigMarole page, offering to help out.

Niall didn’t know what DD stood for. Probably some Russian first name and patronymic. But DD was the real thing. He’d given Niall some basic lessons online, to make sure he was serious. And this week, they were going to meet up for the first time. They’d have their first lesson face to face, and Niall would be on the road to riches. And maybe even his own football team.

That’d show the despicable lying bastard a thing or two.

Posing the question was one thing. Finding the answer was another entirely. His difficulty was not that he was in a strange place; Tony felt paradoxically relaxed in Blythe’s home. It had the sort of tranquil, organic feel he’d have chosen himself, if he ever could have roused himself to take enough interest in his surroundings.

What bothered him was his inability to find a plausible reason for the attack on Jennifer Maidment. It was hard to imagine a personal motive against a fourteen-year-old girl that would lead to murder. If it had been a peer-group killing, it would have been a knife attack on the street or some back alley. There would almost certainly have been witnesses or, at the very least, other teenagers or family members who knew about it after the fact. But this was far too organised. Far too mature a killing method. And besides, the killer had to have had access to a vehicle. And there would have been no genital mutilation in a peer-group murder.

It was possible that Jennifer’s death was the most brutal of messages to either parent. Or both, perhaps. But on the surface, it was hard to see how the Maidments could intersect with the sort of person who would regard murdering and mutilating a teenager as a proportionate response to anything. He ran an engineering company, she was a part-time teacher of children with special needs. And again, if it was a message killing, it was a bloody strange way to go about it. The relatively peaceful death followed by the brutal mutilation. No, whatever this was about, it wasn’t about coercion or revenge or any other obvious message to the parents.