Gemma Fairstead.
Forty-three. Never married. Graduated with a degree in medicine, but never held down a job for long. Like she got itchy feet. Got bored.
A degree in medicine. Many psychopathic individuals have an interest in medicine or anatomy. Something to do with power, maybe. Many of them are highly intelligent. Power and knowledge. A good combination. So why did she never do anything with her education? Why not even an attempt at a normal life?
She had records from childhood. Sealed, of course. Could have been anything from shoplifting to assault. Clearly nothing serious enough to prevent her attempt at a medical career. But I had an idea what she’d been up to.
You can infer a lot about a person by the company they keep.
Pyromania starts early. There’s a list of warning signs developmental psychologists are asked to watch for. But, like all psychotics, the specifics of pyromania vary from case to case. There’s no age where you see the warning signs flashing on and off in neon. Taken on their own, several of the indicators are little more than normal adolescent angst. Sometimes, in figuring things out, kids can go a little crazy. A sealed record doesn’t have to mean anything.
Except, of course, when it does.
Her previous address was a front. But I knew that already. To all intents and purposes, Gemma had vanished. Leaving behind a mess of false leads and unverifiable information. Only natural considering what she did for a living, the kind of people she worked for. And, of course, the number that Teale had used to contact her was no longer in service. I didn’t have time to sweat the information out of him. Man like that would cave only so far and no further.
So how did I go about finding Gemma Fairstead? How did I find someone who didn’t want to be found?
On my business cards, one of the quoted specialities was ‘skip tracing’. Finding people who were deemed untraceable. Bad debts. Missing spouses. That kind of thing. If you covered your tracks, I could and would uncover them.
Officially, of course, it was all done through the correct legal channels. But sometimes you buck the system a little. In the name of expediency.
A good investigator requires a strong moral compass. You might bend the rules, but you have to know how not to break them completely. The News Group International trial brought that problem to the fore, when some of our number used the unofficial bag of tricks for investigations that were morally suspect. Just because you can do something doesn’t always mean that you should.
But there are times when you do bad – or at least legally grey – things for the right reasons. I needed to find Gemma Fairstead. Talk to her. I already knew why she’d set the bomb. But I needed to hear it from her. I needed detail. More than hearsay and guesswork.
In the back of my mind, I was asking questions:
Who do you need to know for?
Yourself?
Or the old man?
David Burns. A man I considered repellent, less than human. And now, having seen him broken and vulnerable, was I looking to help him? To gain revenge on those who had struck at his family?
I had never been much of a sleeper, but now, at night, I slept less and less. The hours growing shorter. Often, I’d just lie there and stare at the ceiling, lost in my own doubts.
Wondering how I would be judged.
I always claimed to be an atheist, or at the very least, agnostic. But something about the old Catholicism that had come down through my grandparents still stuck with me. That sense that I was being constantly judged. Whatever I did, I would be punished for it.
God is always watching. Waiting for you to slip up.
Heaven is for the pure. For those who repent. But how can you repent when you’re uncertain what your sins are? When you’ve done the wrong things for the right reasons?