She turned and walked out of the door, Flash following close on her heels as if to make sure she was really going. The latch snicked into place. The car door shut with a heavy thunk. The rich grunt of a well-tuned engine starting, then its diminuendo as it headed back down the road. Then silence as thick as the darkness outside.
Carol picked up the envelope and carried it through to the kitchen, where she dropped it in the waste paper recycling box. Whatever was on TV that evening, it would be better than opening Bronwen Scott’s envelope. She stabbed the button on the Sonos system and Alison Moyet’s glorious voice filled the room. But even that couldn’t block out Tony’s voice in her head, repeating ‘Come on, Carol. You know you want to.’
15
This type of murder is the end of a process that can take anything from minutes to years. The first step is the identification of possible prey. The second step is not to throw caution to the wind.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
Mark Conway liked to take his time. His mother’s words echoed in his brain: ‘More haste, less speed.’ She’d had an unerring ability to find the perfect cliché. He couldn’t remember her ever expressing an original thought. As a child, he’d had no appreciation of how hackneyed her speech was, or how closely that mapped on to her thoughts. It had taken years for him to realise it was like living with a particularly well-trained parrot. It had taken even more years for him to retrain his own speech habits. He’d made the change a conscious choice because he wanted to free his own thoughts and plans from the preordained channels and patterns he’d absorbed from her and the Christian Brothers.
He liked to think he’d ended up with a nimble mind, with an agile grasp of possibilities, and flexible mental reactions. He’d built his business from the ground up in record time because he was quick to respond to changing circumstances. He employed people whose minds didn’t run in tramlines and he was always on the lookout for fresh talent. And because he’d had to break into business the hard way, he was willing to look in places as unconventional as his own starting point to find the next game-changer.
Urgent though that search was, he was going to have to put it on hold. That morning’s news had hit him with the force of a hand squeezing his heart. He’d actually felt physically stricken by the newsreader’s words. He’d staggered to a chair and fallen into it like a sack of sand till he’d processed the words. Human remains uncovered at the convent of the Blessed Pearl was his worst nightmare.
But as the ringing in his head subsided, he understood that this was nothing to do with him. The skeletal remains of children? That was down to the nuns.
All the same . . . why had Jezza not warned him? What the actual fuck was that about? He must have known the bulldozers were about to move in. Was he really too stupid to understand how this news would have sounded to his cousin?
A wave of nausea swept through him and he stumbled to the sink, barely making it before his orange juice and granola pebble-dashed the stainless steel. He gasped and retched till there was nothing more to come. Panting, he rinsed his mouth under the tap. Thank God Jezza hadn’t seen that. If they were going to make it through this, they’d do it because Conway was strong and smart and always one step ahead of the opposition.
He sat down again. He needed to think this through. Jezza had been adamant that he’d done nothing that would put Conway at risk of discovery. The narrow strip of land that held the raised beds and the vegetable patches had been let to Jezza on a fifty-year lease when the convent had closed down. Although there was no actual fence or wall, they weren’t part of the land that the developers had bought. Jezza had always been clear on that point. And he swore that none of the graves the nuns had instructed him to dig were anywhere near where he’d deposited Conway’s failed recruitments. Plus, he’d promised, they were buried much deeper. And even if they were unearthed? Well, he wasn’t the one the fingers would point to.
So really, there was no reason to panic. And clearly, for all his stupidity, Jezza wasn’t panicking either. Otherwise he’d have been ringing Conway’s phone off the hook. He’d see Jezza at the football. There was a game in a couple of days, Manchester City at the Etihad. They’d drive down together, as usual. Spend the evening at the game. Act normally. He’d find out what was going on and make sure Jezza was primed to give nothing away.
He just needed to stay away from the Blessed Pearl till everything died down.
More importantly, he had to curb his enthusiasm. No more trawling Temple Fields in search of the special boy he could mould into someone fit to follow his example, the successor who would cement his legacy. But it would be a pause, not a full stop. If Jezza was no longer the answer to his failures, he’d find another solution.
His was the nimble mind, after all.
16
When I trained as a clinical psychologist, I envisaged a life working in some therapeutic institution, helping people come to terms with what had afflicted their lives. I had no notion of where this career would take me, which is probably just as well.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
On the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, running a man like Mark Conway to ground would take another nimble mind. Once upon a time that would have been a task laid at Tony’s door, Carol looking over his shoulder, eager for any insights that
