Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

moors. ‘You might want to give Sergeant McIntyre a bell. She’s the one with her finger on the pulse.’
    Carol watched him leave. She didn’t believe there was a killer out there who was trying to put the fear of death into her by killing women who looked a bit like her. And until she did, there was no reason to put in a call to her old life. No reason at all.

37

    ‘I wish we could have waited until his auntie Rachel was here,’ Elinor said, buckling herself into her seat belt.
    ‘Me too. But Fielding’s got a point. It’s not like the olden days where information was safe till the next edition of the newspapers hit the street. Now, all it takes is one inadvertent slip or one idiot from West Yorkshire keen to make a bob or two by slipping something to the papers and suddenly it’s all over Twitter. Can you imagine what it would be like to find out your mother was a murder victim from your Twitter feed?’ Paula eased out of the hospital ambulance bay and into the stream of traffic.
    Elinor shuddered. ‘I take your point.’ She laid a hand on Paula’s thigh in a companionable gesture. ‘It must have been a horrible shock for you, being confronted with Bev like that.’
    Paula sighed. ‘To be honest, Elinor, it was almost a relief. Not seeing her like that, obviously, but for the uncertainty to be over. I’ve been pretty sure she was dead for the last twenty-four hours. She wouldn’t have walked away from her life. She loved her son. No matter how bad things had been for her – and we’ve found no evidence of anything amiss in her life – she would never have abandoned Torin without a word. She had to have been taken. And stranger abductions never end well.’
    ‘I couldn’t help hoping that she was being kept somewhere. That you’d somehow manage to find her alive. You read about these cases, where people have been kept captive for years and then they’re rescued. And Nadia was held prisoner for three weeks, according to this morning’s paper.’ She bit her lip. ‘I really wanted to believe.’
    Paula wished she had Elinor’s optimism. In spite of years of watching patients fail to recover, she still approached every case as if a good outcome were possible. ‘Those cases, though, they all involve very young women or young girls. They’re at an age where they’re compliant and impressionable. They can be bullied and manipulated. They haven’t learned how to stand up for themselves against an adult. It doesn’t work that way with women of our age. We’re too bloody stroppy.’
    ‘I suppose. What’s it like, working a major case with a new team?’
    Paula turned on to the main road that would take them to Kenton Vale School. It was clogged with traffic, cars and vans all doggedly trying to get from one side of the city centre to the other. Times like this, she wished she had a blue light to clamp on top of her anonymous little car. Put the fear of god in White Van Man and carve a path through traffic. ‘It doesn’t feel like a team yet. Fielding is keeping me close. I’ve not had the chance to bond with the rest of the squad. Plus there’s the baggage of coming from the MIT. That’s a red rag to a bull for some people. It’s a no-win. If you do something smart, it’s “Ooh, get you, who do you think you are?” and if you fall over your own feet, it’s “Not as clever as you think you are, are you?” I’m only trying to keep my head down and do my job. And that’s not easy in this case.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Partly because everybody knows I knew Bev, so they assume it’s going to be personal. And partly because…’ She momentarily lifted her hands from the wheel in a gesture of frustration. ‘I can’t really tell you. Just, something that’s… problematic about the evidence.’
    ‘Can you tell me how it’s problematic?’
    Paula blew out a puff of breath. ‘It’s a matter of interpretation. And I want to be clear about it before I lay it out for Fielding. It would have been a lot more straightforward with Carol. I could have counted on her and the rest of the team not to leap to the wrong conclusion. I don’t know that I can do that with Fielding. And it’s not the kind of thing I can keep to myself. Plus the only explanation for it is impossible. So I have to figure out a way through it.’
    ‘You will.’ Elinor’s confidence wasn’t rubbing off on her partner and she could tell. ‘If you take the next left, you can escape the traffic and circle