Seagram stares at him. ‘The girl, Ryan. I need you to remember everything Jimmy told you about her.’
‘He didn’t say much—’
‘Everything, Ryan.’
Ryan Breaker sighs. Seagram can almost hear the gears clanking in his thick skull. Then he looks up, and there is a light burning dimly behind his eyes.
‘The club where he met her; Jimmy was working on the door that night. That’s why he was so pleased with himself when she started chatting him up.’
‘I don’t understand, Ryan.’
There is a pause while Ryan assembles his thoughts. Then he licks his lips and nods. ‘The club was Aces High. Down on the Quayside.’
‘Yes, I know it,’ Seagram says.
‘The girl was – well, Jimmy never knew this, it was one of the other bouncers that told him afterwards.’
‘What about the girl, Ryan?’
Ryan looks at her in triumph. ‘It was her dad that owned it,’ he says.
Ptolemy is staring at the wall map of Northumberland when Vos finally emerges from his office. He’s been there all morning, hidden behind drawn blinds, and she can only imagine what sort of personal hell he must be going through as the minutes tick by with no word about Alex. Part of her wants to go in and see him, to offer him at the very least the consolation of human contact, but she knows that the best thing she can do for Vos now is to help find his son.
‘It’s a big place when you look at it like that,’ Vos says, nodding at the map.
‘Yes, sir,’ she says.
Vos goes across to Mayson Calvert’s desk. On it is a plastic sack marked EGROS WOOD PELLETS. He dips his hand in and scoops up a pile of cylindrical pellets no more than a centimetre in length.
‘So this is Mayson’s elusive wonder fuel, is it?’ he says, letting the pellets trickle through his fingers into the sack.
‘I’ve had the full rundown this morning,’ Ptolemy says. ‘Apparently their high-density, low-moisture content allows them to be burned with a far higher combustion efficiency than traditional fossil fuels. I can even tell you the chemical compound if you like, sir.’
‘No, thanks,’ Vos says. ‘Where’s Mayson now?’
‘He went out for a sandwich.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘You’ve got to eat.’
‘I kind of got sidetracked, sir.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘I was thinking about those pellets, and why the dust ended up on the victim and on the rope and in Jimmy Rafferty’s car. And then I saw them – and I remembered that when I was a kid I used to help with the mucking out at the stables down the road. The woman who ran the stables used pellets just like these as bedding for the horses. And then there’s the rope; I checked it out online and aramid rope is used for securing horses in transport boxes. It’s flexible, but it’s also incredibly strong.’
Vos frowns and sits on the edge of the desk. ‘So what are you getting at, Ptolemy?’
‘Jimmy Rafferty’s car was stolen from Morpeth. Okan Gul was killed at Stannington, just down the road. But Jimmy’s from North Shields. What’s he doing all the way out there? How come he knows the area so well? And then I thought about the horse connection and – oh, I don’t know, sir. It’s probably nothing.’
But Vos has now gone across to the map. He traces his finger north along the line of the A1 motorway first to Stannington, then to Morpeth. ‘Go on, Ptolemy.’
‘Stables, sir,’ she says. ‘Livery for horses.’
‘What about them?’
‘There are only three working stables within a twenty-mile radius of Morpeth,’ Ptolemy says, joining him at the map. ‘I rang them and none of them use wood pellets. But then there’s this one, sir.’ She puts her finger on an otherwise barren expanse of map midway between Morpeth and Stannington. ‘High Plains, on the outskirts of Tranwell Woods. It closed down five years ago.’
Vos stares at the map. The only features he can see are the rudimentary green tree symbols of the wood, and, bisecting them, a spidery road that meanders southeast for about five miles until it joins the more substantial B-road running parallel to the East Coast Main Line past Stannington.
‘Have you got directions to this place?’ he says.
‘The website’s still up, sir. There’s a map.’
‘Print it out, Ptolemy. I’ll meet you at the car.’
Severely hung over, Chris Jesperssen and the rest of Alex’s friends have nevertheless identified the mug shot of Jimmy Rafferty as the man from the pub the previous night.
‘Good work, men,’ Huggins says brightly, casting his eye over the four sorry teenagers sitting in the Jesperssens’ well-appointed front room. ‘You can go for a pint now. You look like you could use a hair of the dog.’
Chris looks at him with a wretched expression. ‘What’s the news on Alex?’ he says. ‘You think he’s had a run-in with this cage-fighter guy?’
‘We’re just making a few routine enquiries. Meanwhile, if Alex gets in touch with any of you boys, I want you to call me straight away, understand?’
There’s a general murmur of assent.
Fallow hurries in from the garden, where he’s been taking a call from Seagram. ‘One more thing,’ he says. ‘You know the girl you saw Alex with? The one with the blonde hair? Is this her?’
He hands his phone to Chris.
‘What are you doing, John?’ Huggins mutters out of the side of his mouth.
‘Seagram got something from Ma Breaker,’ Fallow whispers as the phone is ceremoniously passed from one boy to the next. ‘She got Una to send the pic through.’
Presently a consensus is reached.
‘Yeah,’ Chris says, ‘that’s her.’
‘You sure?’
‘She’s a babe,’ Chris says. ‘You don’t forget babes like that.’
‘Oh, she’s a babe all right,’ Fallow says, handing the phone to Huggins. ‘Don’t you think?’
Huggins stares at the face on the display.
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ he says.
EIGHTEEN
Jimmy Rafferty has always been a nasty bit of work. An in-built sadistic streak combined with a hair-trigger temper – never a good combination.
When he was a kid they’d put him on Ritalin and Dexedrine and Strattera and so many other drugs he used to rattle when he walked. But that was because they assumed, wrongly, that his violent tendencies were linked to hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder when in fact that was just the way he was hard-wired. Eventually they started giving him prescriptions for antidepressants – which was great news for his mother, Barbara, who had already developed a chronic addiction to them. With his mother doped out of her mind and his father – well, who knew where his father was – Jimmy was pretty much left to his own devices. These manifested themselves in truancy and petty theft and the occasional minor assault; but fortunately he had his Uncle Howard to vouch for him, which meant he stayed out of care. But Howard Iley wasn’t there the night he’d battered the kid in the park, which was why he ended up doing four years in Frankland.
These were the best years of his life. The years when he really got his shit together. Learned about life. About taking care of his body and his mind. Treating each as a vital component of a unified whole. When he went into prison at eighteen he was a skinny runt of a kid. When he came out at twenty-two, after four years of steroids and pumping iron, he was more like a god.
* * *
Like most sociopaths, Jimmy is highly intelligent. He is also a narcissist, and like most narcissists, what he craves most is attention. When he gets attention, Jimmy is a pussycat.
He will do anything.
Right now he’s got Alex Vos tied to a chair and he’s taking pictures with his phone to check the lighting levels and shooting angles. He knows that everything has got to be perfect and he is determined to make it so, even down to cleaning the puke off Alex’s shirt to make him look presentable for the camera.
She is waiting for me, he thinks, pausing to drain a can of Red Bull down in one, and the prospect makes his caffeinated blood flow even faster through his pounding heart. For a moment he feels light-headed and has to hold on to the wall until the sensation passes. When it does he catches sight of himself in the darkened glass of the phone and he pauses again, this time to flip the video viewer so that he can see himself on the screen.