Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid Read Free Book Online

somebody?’
    Ambrose shrugged. ‘You’ve got to wonder what would be important enough to make a teenage girl lie to her best mate. Generally, that comes down to a lad.’
    ‘You think she realised the gatecrasher on Rig was a bloke?’
    ‘I don’t know. I doubt she was that sophisticated. I think she went to learn more about this so-called “secret”.’
    Patterson sighed. ‘And until Gary works his magic, we don’t have a bloody clue what that might be.’
    ‘True. But in the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to have a chat with Mum and Dad. Find out if there were ever any plans for a cake.’
     
     
     
CHAPTER 5
     
     
    Daniel Morrison had been indulged from well before the moment he’d been born. It would have been hard to imagine a child more wanted than he had been and neither expense nor consideration had been spared in the effort to make his life the very best it could be. During her pregnancy, his mother Jessica had forsworn not only alcohol and saturated fat but also hairspray, dry cleaning, deodorant and insect repellent. Everything that had ever been accused of being potentially carcinogenic had been banned from Jessica’s environment. If Mike came home from the pub smelling of cigarette smoke, he had to strip off in the utility room then shower before he could come near his pregnant wife.
    When Daniel emerged from his elective caesarian section with a perfect Apgar score, Jessica felt justified in every preventative step she’d taken. She didn’t hesitate to share that belief with anyone who would listen and quite a few who wouldn’t.
    The drive to perfection didn’t end there. Daniel’s every stage of development was accompanied by the age-appropriate educational toys and other forms of stimulus. By four, he was enrolled in the best private prep school in Bradfield, encased in grey flannel shorts, shirt and tie, maroon blazer and a cap that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1950s.
    And so it continued. Designer clothes and fashionable hair-cuts; Chamonix in the winter, Chiantishire in the summer; cricket whites and rugby jerseys; Cirque du Soleil, classical concerts and theatre. Whatever Jessica thought Daniel needed, Daniel had. Another man might have put the brakes on. But Mike loved his wife - his son too, obviously, but not the way he adored Jessica - and so he chose the route that made her happiest. As she indulged Daniel, so he indulged her. He’d been lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of the mobile phone business back in the early nineties. There had been times when it had felt like the legendary licence to print money. That Jessica knew how to spend it had therefore never been an issue.
    What was slowly beginning to dawn on Mike Morrison was that his fourteen-year-old son was not a very nice person. In recent months, it had become clear that Daniel was no longer happy to accept whatever Jessica decided was best for him. He was developing his own ideas about what he wanted, and the sense of entitlement that Jessica had bred into him meant he wasn’t happy to settle for anything less than the prompt and total fulfilment of his desires. There had been some spectacular arguments, most of which had ended with Jessica in tears and Daniel in voluntary exile in his suite of rooms, sometimes refusing to emerge for days at a time.
    It wasn’t the arguments that bothered Mike, in spite of Jessica’s frustration and anger. He recalled similar rows in his own teens as he’d tried to assert himself in the teeth of parental opposition. What made him anxious was a suspicion that was hardening to a certainty that he didn’t have a clue what was going on in his son’s head.
    He remembered being fourteen. His concerns had been pretty simple. Football, both watching and playing; girls, both real and imagined; the relative merits of Cream and Blind Faith; and how long it would be before he could wangle himself into a party where there was alcohol and dope. He hadn’t been a goody