Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid

further he goes from his heartlands, the more likely he is to be among people who are not sympathetic to his goals and the harder it is to hide. Island biogeographic theory is about choosing somewhere that has resources. So, if you were going to be stuck on an island, you’d rather it was the Isle of Wight than Rockall.’
    ‘I don’t understand where the satellites come in,’ Paula said, frowning.
    ‘They figured out the likely zone where Bin Laden might be, then they factored in what they know about him. His height, the fact that he needs regular dialysis so he has to be somewhere with electricity, his need for protection. And then they looked at the most detailed satellite imagery they could find and narrowed it down to three buildings in a particular town,’ Stacey said patiently.
    ‘So how come they’ve not found him yet?’ Kevin pointed out, not unreasonably.
    Stacey shrugged. ‘I only said they reckoned. Not that they’d actually succeeded. Yet. But the satellite imaging is getting more detailed all the time. Each image used to cover thirty metres by thirty metres. Now it’s more like half a metre. You wouldn’t believe the detail the experts analysts can pick up. It’s like having an overhead Google Street View of the whole world.’
    ‘Stop, Stacey. You’re making my head hurt. But if we can harness that, I will be eternally grateful. Have a word with the satellite bods,’ Carol said. ‘But let’s concentrate on getting the Cumbria team onside. Anything else?’ Glum looks round the table told her all she needed to know. She hated being in this position. What they needed was something big, something headline-grabbing, something spectacular. Only trouble was that what would be meat and drink to Carol and her team would be the worst kind of bad news for somebody else. She’d experienced too much of that sort of tribulation to want to visit it on anyone else.
    They were just going to have to grin and bear it.
     
     
     
CHAPTER 9
     
     
    Even the advent of his teens hadn’t broken Seth Viner’s habit of candour where his parents were concerned. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt he needed to keep secrets from either of his two mothers. OK, sometimes it was easier to talk to one rather than the other. Julia was more practical, more down to earth. Calmer in a crisis, more likely to listen all the way through to the end. But she’d weigh things up and she wouldn’t always come down on his side of the issue. Kathy was the emotional one, the one who rushed to judgement. Nevertheless, she’d always be in his corner - my kid, right or wrong. Still, she was the one who made him stick to things, the one who wouldn’t let him take the easy way out when things were difficult. But he’d never regretted telling either of them something, even things he was embarrassed about. They’d taught him that there was no place for secrecy with the people you love most in the world.
    The other side of the equation was that they’d always listened to his questions and done their best to answer them. Everything from ‘why’s the sky blue?’ to ‘what are they fighting about in Gaza?’ They never fobbed him off. It sometimes weirded out his teachers and made his friends give him the fish-eyed stare, but he knew all sorts of stuff just because it had occurred to him to ask and it had never occurred to Julia and Kathy not to answer. He reckoned it was something to do with their determination to be honest with him about how he’d ended up with two mothers.
    He couldn’t remember when it had dawned on him that it was pretty far out there to have two mothers instead of one of the more conventional arrangements like a mum and a dad or a step-dad, or a single mum and a bunch of grandparents, uncles and babysitters. Everybody starts out thinking their family is normal because they’ve no other experience to measure it against. But by the time he started school, he knew the family that embraced him was