Lethal Game, page 10
Nicola Jones’s tears were already flowing as she strode up the path to her mother’s house. Any moment now her mother would surely open the door to her, her arms out wide to sweep her up in an embrace, and the world and its worries would be filtered, even just for a moment. Because that’s what a mother’s hug could do.
But the door remained closed and there was no response when she knocked. The tears quickly gave way to anger.
‘Mum!’ she shouted at the door then stepped back to take in the windows. Both the ground floor and the upstairs had curtains pulled. She hadn’t answered her phone last night – Nicola had called the moment the police had left – nor this morning, first thing. Nicola turned to where her husband scowled in confusion and shrugged. She shouldn’t have let him talk her out of coming here last night when her mother hadn’t answered the phone. She always answered. But Stuart hadn’t wanted her driving in that state when he would have to stay home with their children.
Nicola had been forced to agree. She’d continued calling but stopped short of getting in the car until that morning, leaving as soon as she’d been able to get a neighbour to take the kids. No way her mother was out, not for this long. She didn’t go out at the best of times.
‘MUM!’ This time she bellowed at the top of her voice and she hammered her fists as hard as she could, making her hands sting. She stared back down the garden path, her eyes resting on the roof of her mother’s car that was poking up from behind the hedge.
‘Can I help you?’ A man had appeared to call out over a low fence, her mother’s neighbour.
‘Billy, have you seen my mum?’ she said.
‘Seen her? I was with her just last night. When … when she received some bad news.’
‘Tell me about it. The police came to me too. She’s in there, she must be.’
‘She left already. I’m not sure where.’
‘Left? It’s not even eight. Where can she go at this time in the morning?’
Billy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She took a taxi. Maybe she was going back to speak to the police … They were here a while to talk to her yesterday – about your sister. I’m so sorry.’
‘She’s not answering her phone,’ Nicola said. She could feel the tears pushing their way back. She was still just as angry. ‘She’s still got me, we need to be together.’
‘Of course. Maybe she was going to see you, to your house?’ Billy offered. ‘Have you thought of that?’
Nicola thought about it now. She couldn’t think where else her mother would go at this time of the day. Her only trips out were to the supermarket when she couldn’t get a delivery of groceries arranged or for regular social engagements – the last thing she would be attending at a time like this. She knew her mother didn’t like driving so the taxi was no surprise. Nicola hurried back along the path. ‘I should have left you there,’ she said to her husband, ‘she’s probably sat outside our house right now!’ Her shoes caught as she stopped and spun, a thought suddenly occurring to her. ‘Billy, could you take my number and give me a call if she makes it back? Or tell her to call me straightaway? Would that be OK?’
‘Sure.’ Billy took his own phone out from his pocket to record the number. ‘No problem.’ His face was heavy with wrinkles that were accentuated when he smiled. It was a kind face, however, like it was a lifetime of smiles that had condemned him to those wrinkles in the first place. He said again how sorry he was. Nicola was already striding back to her car. She needed to get moving. She couldn’t bear to think of her mum sitting outside her house, all on her own, desperate to see her daughter.
Her husband spun the wheels on the loose gravel of the country lane as they moved away.
Billy watched and waited. It took a while for them to be out of sight – the joys of living in a valley. Them he hammered on his neighbour’s door.
‘They’ve gone, Margaret, for GOD’S SAKE, IT’S JUST US!’ He was back to waiting, this time while standing at her door, his left ear and left hand flattened against it. When there was no answer he pushed off it to bark his frustration. ‘I don’t like LYING!’ he roared.
‘I’m sorry.’ Billy had started to walk away but Margaret’s voice stopped him dead. It was muffled and weak, and there was a scuffing sound that told him she was close against the door. He imagined her using it to hold herself up. ‘I just can’t talk to her, not right now, OK. Not her, not anyone. Not right now.’
Billy stared at the door a little longer, his mind running with replies, with options and worries, but right then none of them seemed to matter. Her message couldn’t be clearer.
She wanted to be left alone.
Chapter 15
‘Shannon Hendry.’ Sandra Allum almost sang the name through the speakers of Lucy Rose’s car.
‘Is that a name I should know?’ DS Rose said, caught out a little as she tried to negotiate a busy roundabout on Maidstone’s one-way system.
‘It’s the name you wanted to know. We got a full print lifted from your old lady’s bag. Shannon Hendry was once arrested for theft from an employee. Her prints were taken before it was found to be a load of old shit. She probably shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place from what I could see. We got lucky.’
‘The prints from the bag? I thought it was going to take days. That was an hour ago!’
‘Two actually. When the image came through I saw the quality was good enough for a quick search so I called the fingerprint bureau myself. I told them it was life and death and narrowed their search to Maidstone and Medway … Et voila!’ Sandra was still singing. Lucy didn’t think she had ever heard her so cheery.
‘That’s fantastic.’ Seems cheeriness could be contagious. This could be a huge moment.
‘I am, aren’t I? Where are you?’
‘Just leaving Maidstone town centre. I need to check back in with the boss. He’s going to be delighted.’
‘Leaving Maidstone town centre? So you’re not far from her address then?’
‘You have an address?’ Lucy took her eyes off the road to glance at her phone’s display.
‘I have a tongue in my head and an office full of CID just down the corridor who are terrified of me, so yeah, I have an address! Oh, and a full intel picture and a mugshot. She’s moved since she was arrested, it would seem. Someone did a check for me on Voter’s and she popped up. Lives with someone by the name of Jacob Barnes. I would guess at boyfriend but you never know these days. I can’t tell you much more about him.’
‘That’s really fantastic.’
‘I know I am. I’ve just pinged it to your email. It will be ready by the time you pick your boss up. You can take the credit by all means but I’ll be seeing him later to put him right.’
Lucy laughed. ‘I don’t need the credit. I might not need Joel either. I assume this Shannon Hendry still hasn’t made contact with the police – for any reason?’
‘She hasn’t. CID ran her details. No calls from her, none from her address, from Jacob Barnes, and none from any numbers linked to her.’
‘They were very thorough.’
‘They were. When I say they are scared of me, I mean terrified. I find it’s even more effective than being owed favours. And less work.’
Lucy was now only half-listening. A junction came into view on her left, signposted as a cul-de-sac, and it seemed to prompt a decision. She swung into it. She would open the email right now and see what she had. She knew Maidstone relatively well; certainly she knew the areas where she would need to be accompanied for a door knock. She could at least get an eye on the address, maybe call the boss in from there.
‘Well, I for one am glad that they’re so terrified. Thanks for this. I’ve pulled over to have a look now.’
‘You’re welcome. Be careful now, nothing too hasty. The one thing I know about coppers is that they always work better in twos.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
Lucy ended the call to open her email application. The attachment was quick to download. The address right at the top.
‘James Street?’ she said. She typed it into Google Maps then zoomed out to take in the area. It was just behind Maidstone prison. Less than half a mile from the bus station, which would make it walkable even with bare feet. It wasn’t a bad area of the city either.
She would just go take a look.
‘There’s a wet for you there, Guvnor.’
Joel hungrily swept up the tin cup from the dusty floor of the Police Incident Van. He thanked the uniform officer who had made it and turned away to gulp at the tea inside. It was searing hot and it slopped out over the sides as he pushed it away from his lips.
‘Don’t be wasting it though!’ the man who had made the tea now called after it.
‘Hotter than I thought. What did you use to boil the kettle, the sun itself?’ Joel tried to hide his embarrassment behind a joke.
The man patted a sealed urn. ‘The old faithful. She never lets us down.’
Joel continued his walk away. More officers were returning for their tea break and he felt a sudden tug of nostalgia, a yearning to be back with his old TSG team, tipping out on an all-day – or all-night – search, where the most important member of the team was always the one who had control of the ‘wets kit’. No police work ever got done without the support of boiling urns and cheap teabags.
In his previous life, he would be the one briefing his search pairs, and already with a feeling that the whole thing was a lost cause. A tick-box exercise by an SIO looking to avoid criticism at some major case review further down the line. Only now he knew first-hand that it was nothing of the sort. He knew the odds of finding anything were slim, but he had still started out with hope burning a little brighter. They were now a few hours into the search and already it was starting to fade.
He was tired. The search team that had arrived consisted of seven officers and a sergeant: nowhere near enough. Another team were promised for later in the day, but even after agreeing to come in earlier they wouldn’t be starting until midday, by which time they would only have eight hours of light left to assist the team who were already on site. Joel had stuck around with the intention of helping out with the first square mile but had ended up flitting around the areas on the map he had seen as most likely to be where those girls had come from. Their phone-box victim was dirty, but it wasn’t just mud. He didn’t need the CSI report to know that the layer of filth contained animal faeces and it had been present in her hair, on her legs and hands and under her fingernails. To Joel, that was someone who had been in close proximity with animals for a period of time, not someone walking through a field or stile. There must have been a source of water too. The filth would have been wet when it had been applied for it to stick – and it hadn’t rained for days.
Surely this meant a farm building. An outbuilding perhaps, a barn or a pen, but something that was primarily used to shelter animals. It was the only thing that made sense. So convinced was he that he had been moving between any buildings he could find in their search area to try and pick out anything obvious.
But an evidential search needs to be methodical. It is planned as such: areas are entered, searched properly and then ticked off as done. Something he knew better than anyone. It wasn’t until the PolSA had sent Joel back to the Incident Vehicle that he had stopped to think just how much of a pain in the arse he was being.
The PolSA appeared now: PS Maxine Jones. Joel hung back while she stripped off her load vest and belt to ditch them on the grass. Her black T-shirt was damp enough from sweat to cling to an athletic body. She undid her zip and was pulling at the clothing when she made eye contact with Joel.
‘You got a cup of tea then. There are biscuits in there somewhere too but you do have to ask Scotty nicely. He only gives them out to people he likes.’ Her cheeks were flushed with exertion and heat, her fringe swept across her forehead and stuck down by her perspiration. She still had a smile on her face, but it looked a little strained.
‘I’m not sure I deserve your biscuits. I was just thinking how pissed off I would be to have a Guvnor like me turn up to my search.’ She didn’t reply, just held her smile until it disappeared behind her own tin cup. Joel continued. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a pain. It’s just … This is all we have. I can’t stop thinking that somewhere out here there might be something I need. And when it gets dark I lose control of the area. Maybe someone comes back and the opportunity is gone for ever.’
‘You were TSG too, right? Some of the lads said they worked with your old team before,’ Maxine said.
‘I was.’
‘A bit of a legend by all accounts. More than a decade leading a team like this. I’m only a couple of months in but already I can see it’s quite the job.’
‘Legend!’ Joel laughed. ‘On a team like I had, the legend was the one who had moved on from using crayons. We got the job done though. I had a good bunch.’
‘I have the same. And yeah, you’re a pain in the arse but don’t worry about it. We get the easy job, turning up for the search, I mean. You know how these go for us, we use a map, start at the scene to pick out our reference points, divvy it up into sectors then send the troops in, ticking off areas as we go. The occasional cup of tea to keep them going. I’ve thought about it myself.’ She gestured towards Joel. ‘The detective role, I mean. Like today, if we do find something we’ll hand it over and off we go. I’ve often thought that maybe I want more than that. I like to see things through. But the flipside to that is the pressure. If we don’t find anything out here then we still get to roll onto the next job and without a second thought. I guess that’s the difference, that’s the pressure that comes with doing what you do.’
‘Bang on.’
‘If there is something out there then we will find it. But from the briefing I got, the victim was found at first light by a dog walker. When we were at the scene earlier, that street with the phone box is the only one I’ve seen where you might be able to guarantee a dog walker. She was always going to be found – and early. You talk about your man slipping back when we’re gone to clear anything up he mighta left behind, but I don’t think so. I think he already got his house in order before he left her there. If it were me, I wouldn’t want to have to come anywhere near this place again.’
Joel watched as, this time, her whole face was concealed by a tin cup knocked right back. ‘You’re right,’ he said.
She shook out the remnants and started back towards the van. ‘So don’t beat yourself up, that’s all I’m saying. If we don’t find anything out here it’s because this bastard was sure to take it with him.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to try and call Inspector Norris again?’ DS Rose could hear Eileen Holmans clucking down the phone line. She was not a woman who was comfortable with going off-script.
‘It’s OK, I’ll try him again if there’s anything to tell him. This might be nothing at all.’ Lucy hoped she sounded convincing and tutted as her pen pushed through the paper again. She was leaning on a wall, finishing writing down the key points from her conversation with Eileen. She had hesitated before calling her, knowing that she would instantly want to update Joel with a hit on fingerprints – the potential was very significant. But there was something off about this whole thing, about a potential survivor fleeing a scene and not reporting her ordeal to the police. Lucy could only think of two reasons – that she was still under an element of control and terrified that the killer would know if she attempted contact with the police; or she was the killer herself. And Lucy still couldn’t believe the latter.
‘I tell you what,’ Lucy said, ‘I’ll call you back in twenty minutes. If I don’t, you can get hold of Joel and tell him what I’m up to.’
‘Twenty minutes,’ Eileen said in a tone that suggested she had fifteen at best.
Lucy ended the call to take in the building in front of her. She took a moment to coach herself too. Joel was a little rough round the edges – brash even – and his muscular build and over-enthusiasm were not what she needed here. The girl she had seen on the CCTV had looked fragile. Dirty, bruised and scared and no doubt with a good reason to avoid the police. Lucy had a far better chance of speaking to her while she was on her own.
The communal door was heavy, the corridor behind almost empty, so the sound of her footsteps bounced back at her off the painted brick. She counted up to the third floor.
‘Door number twenty-two,’ she muttered just as it came into sight. But she stopped when she got to it, frozen to the spot. The door was open; there was the sound of something heavy falling over, a scraping, then cussing.
Lucy took out her Pava spray to hold it in one hand. With the other she pushed the door. And that was about the time she considered her mistake in not calling Joel.
Chapter 16
Lucy could hear two voices, both male, both out of sight at the other end of the flat. A long corridor would lead her down to them.
‘Hello! Police!’ Lucy called out, holding by the front door, not wanting to move past any of the closed internal doors in case anyone came out of them to block her exit. The only response was silence. Then she heard the mutterings of a conversation. Then footsteps towards her. Lucy now took out her asp and jerked it towards the ceiling; the steel sprang out to lock into a solid weapon. She rested the hitting end on her shoulder and adjusted her stance so she was ready to strike.
‘Is everything OK?’ A man appeared: thirtyish, broad, two-day old stubble and a slick haircut. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. His cheeks were flushed like someone who might have just shifted something heavy, and there was a plaster on his finger that was too small and was leaking blood from both ends. The left side of his neck was catching sunlight from a window she couldn’t see – it highlighted the tattoo rising from his collar to behind his ear.
‘Who are you?’ Lucy said.
He looked nervous. His eyes darted left, and a slight lift of his shoulders told her he was communicating with someone else who was out of her sight. ‘I’m Andy … I own the place, I don’t live here, mind. What’s going on? Why are the police here?’
