Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

life.
    At first, he’d managed to keep track of her. Although her final weeks at Bradfield Metropolitan Police had been classified as compassionate leave, she was obliged to let her employers know where she was. And because Paula McIntyre knew better than most how close the bond between Carol and Tony had been, she’d kept him in the loop. Carol had rented a service apartment in Bradfield for a month, then she’d moved into her parents’ house.
    Then she stopped being a DCI with BMP and, according to Paula, within days she was no longer under her parents’ roof. ‘I called her mobile and it wasn’t working. So I rang her parents’ number and spoke to her dad. He wasn’t very forthcoming but he did admit she wasn’t living there any more. He either didn’t know or he wouldn’t say where she is,’ Paula had told him. Given the quality of Paula’s interrogation skills, Tony reckoned David Jordan probably didn’t know where his daughter was living.
    He couldn’t help wondering how that had happened. Going home to her parents, in the circumstances, wouldn’t have been his professional advice. Her brother was dead, murdered by a killer he and Carol had failed to catch soon enough. And grief generally imposed a need to distribute blame. Was it Carol’s guilt or her parents’ pain that had driven a wedge between them?
    However it had played out, it hadn’t ended well. Tony would have put money on that. And since Carol needed to hold him responsible for Michael and Lucy’s death because he had been too slow to realise what Vance had planned, then it followed that she would blame him for the rift with her parents. Insult to injury.
    Tony rubbed his eyes with a knuckle. Wherever Carol Jordan was hiding, he would be the last to know. Sooner or later he was going to have to man up and either do something about that or let it go for ever.

8

    G artonside was a district nobody had ever chosen to live in. Even when the narrow streets of basic brick terraces had been built back at the tail end of the nineteenth century, their original residents knew they were destined to be slums before the decade was out. Thin walls meant cold and damp were perennial problems. Cheap materials diminished privacy. Outside toilets and no bathrooms did nothing for the hygiene or health of the factory workers who filled the two-bedroom houses to bursting point. Gartonside became the cheerless port of call of the feckless, the hopeless and the city’s newest arrivals. Only the immigrants ever escaped its dead-end streets.
    Finally, in one of the last hurrahs of the twentieth century, Bradfield city council had decreed that Gartonside was to be bulldozed and replaced with a planned housing estate of more spacious houses with parking spaces at the front and tiny gardens at the rear. A decade later, the first phase – the emptying of existing residents and the demolition of their former homes – was not yet complete. There were still a handful of streets in the shadow of Bradfield Victoria’s vast stadium where residents lingered on. And beyond them, a huddle of houses were boarded up, waiting for the wrecking crews to reduce them to rubble.
    Paula’s satnav still believed in the streets of Gartonside, which made her even later to the crime scene. By the time she reached Rossiter Street, the perimeter was well established with festoons of crime-scene tape and stony-faced uniforms in high-vis jackets. She added her car to the impromptu parking lot at the end of the street and logged into the scene. ‘Where’s DCI Fielding?’
    The constable with the clipboard nodded towards a mobile incident room parked further down the street. ‘In the van, getting suited and booted for the scene.’
    That was a relief. Not quite as late as she feared. When she’d finally said goodbye to Torin and found her way to the CID squad room, Paula had been taken aback by the absence of bodies. Instead of the usual buzz of chat and phone conversations there was a preternatural quiet broken only by the mutter of laptop keys struck by a couple of heavy-fingered operatives.
    The one nearest the door looked up and raised his unruly eyebrows. ‘You must be the new skip, right? McIntyre, yeah?’
    Paula was tempted to slap him down with a quick Sergeant McIntyre to you , but she didn’t know the lay of the land yet so she settled for, ‘And you are?’
    He pushed a thick fringe of black hair back from his shiny forehead. ‘Detective Constable Pat Cody.’