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.
Yes, he thinks, pressing Record.
He moves across to the other side of the room, where the natural light spills in through the open window, and he props the phone against the brickwork so that it faces him. Slowly he peels off his T-shirt and the contrast between light and shade creates deep, scalloped shadows across the sculpted ridges of his chest and torso.
Yesss.
Eyes fixed on the screen, he tilts his head and draws a finger down from the point of his chin to the base of his throat, following the raised line of the ugly scar. The finger continues down, following the contours of his pectoral muscles, slowly circling the puckered areola around the nipple and then teasing the nipple itself. He wishes she could be here to see him now, because he knows this is what she likes. What she has always liked: his maleness, the animal within him. He is already hard, but when he thinks about her looking at his body he becomes harder still.
‘Uuuuuuhhhh.’
Jimmy stops. His head twitches with annoyance. He turns and glares at Alex Vos, who is moving slowly in the chair as consciousness returns. The cocktail of drugs they’d put in his drink last night is wearing off. Alex groans again and Jimmy swipes him across the face with the back of his hand, a blow of pure spite.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ he says, standing over Alex and wanting nothing more than to stamp his head to a pulp. But if he did that, he knows that she will not be pleased, because her instructions are very precise.
He reaches down and effortlessly straightens the toppled chair with one arm. He brushes the dust from Alex’s hair and shirt and he checks to ensure his hand has left no mark on the boy’s face. Satisfied, he retrieves the phone and begins the laborious process of calculating lighting and shooting angles once again.
NINETEEN
According to the ghost of its website, High Plains Stables is a high-class livery yard with custom-built Loddon boxes, an all-weather floodlit area, permanent round pen and year-round grazing on well-managed permanent pasture.
But that was five years ago.
The access road through Tranwell Woods is now a glorified single track that only sporadically changes to a metalled surface. Because of the rain, large sections of it are underwater; the potholes that lurk beneath the surface could be anything up to a foot deep, more than enough to crack the axle of Vos’s saloon. The two detectives are a quarter of a mile from the stables when Vos decides they will abandon the car. They leave the track and continue through the wood on foot until eventually the trees begin to thin and the track terminates at the remains of the stable complex itself.