Someone Who Isn't Me, page 16
The click of a lighter.
She curled up with her arms over her face at the flash of heat as the rag was lit, then it was gone and she heard the whuff! of something igniting.
Something splashed over her face. Shit! Shit! He was pouring paraffin in her face, he was going to set her alight. Panic got her onto all fours and then she was dragging herself to her feet despite the stabbing pain in her ribs and pounding in her face where it had hit the bin.
Not the fire! Not the fire!
She heard laughter again and then the sound of feet moving away. The gate swung open. She turned, grabbing the wall for support and saw a figure, tall and thin, silhouetted in the light from the alleyway, then the gate swung shut leaving her in the darkness with the flicker of flames and the smell of paraffin in the air.
A bitter flavour filled her mouth and she spat and spat.
Chapter 25
Becca struggled to keep herself upright. Her face throbbed, her neck felt bruised and her ribs sent a stabbing pain through her side each time she took a breath.
She needed to… she needed to…
She lifted her arms to her face. She’d thought she was covered in paraffin, but she wasn’t. What had happened? She caught the whiff of a foul smell. She didn’t know what he’d poured over her, but it made her gag, and then she was throwing up, welcoming the heavy rain as it ran down her face and soaked through her clothes, washing her clean.
The paraffin bottle had been empty. He’d already used it.
On what?
A flickering light was illuminating the yard. The plastic bag under the fire escape, where it was protected from the rain, was burning. What had he been trying to do? Set fire to the building? The plastic bag was stuffed full of something – rags, cloths, she couldn’t tell. Even in her panic, she could see that it presented no threat.
She was missing something. She knew she was. Something inside her was shouting urgently to do something, do something!
In the light from the flames, she saw her torch, which she’d dropped when she fell, lying on the ground. She picked it up and shook it, and it came on.
The rain had soaked right through to her skin now. She was shaking partly from the shock and partly from the cold. She had to get inside, get warm, clean herself up. Then she could decide what to do.
Using the wall as support, she stumbled across to the flames. Best put them out, though what had been the point of setting the fire in the first place? A small bottle of paraffin, the rain, a fire on the wet ground in the yard – why?
Snitch bitch. A warning? This is what we’ll do if…
And then she realised. She knew what she’d missed.
The kitten.
She was on her knees at once, pulling the burning rubbish out of the bag, ignoring the pain in her hands where the melting plastic stuck as she grabbed at it, burning fabric, rags soaked in fuel.
And wrapped up tightly in the middle was a small, furry bundle.
They’d been trying to burn the kitten.
She pushed the smouldering cloths away and shook the hot ashes off her hands. She had the kitten now but it was lying wrong, as if its legs were in the wrong place.
Oh shit, what had they done to it?
But its mouth opened and it made a faint call.
It was alive.
Becca staggered to her feet, keeping her hands steady. Holding the kitten in one hand, she shone the torch on it, forcing herself to look.
She felt a rush of relief as she saw what the problem was. It looked all wrong because it was tangled up with something – someone had tied it up – her fingers struggled to sort out the tangle – some kind of tape. But it was alive, and as far as she could tell, it wasn’t damaged by the fire. She needed to get it into the warm.
She tucked it under her coat and hurried back up the stairs, ignoring the pain in her hands, the dull ache from where her face had hit the wheelie bin, the sharp pain in her ribs where he had kicked her.
She dumped her coat and shoes on the floor outside the flat, then took the kitten in. The overhead light was just a fluorescent tube, but it gave her what she needed, a bright, white light. She put the kitten down on the rug and looked at it. It lay there quietly, not struggling any more, and that alarmed her.
Someone had wrapped sticky tape round its legs and its neck. The roll of tape was still there – whatever was going on, Becca’s arrival had stopped it.
She got her scissors out and, working carefully, slit the tape so it began to tear. The kitten squeaked a couple of times as she pulled the tape off. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry,’ Becca said.
It was probably good that it squeaked, right?
Its fur was soaked and bedraggled. For a horrible moment, she thought her attacker must have poured paraffin over it – how did you get paraffin out of a cat’s coat? – but there was no smell of the oil, just a frizzled patch where the burning rag had been lying against it. Becca picked up the scissors, and cut that chunk of fur off. The skin underneath seemed fine, pink and healthy, not burned.
She put the little animal on a folded towel in the armchair which was, Becca knew from experience, the warmest place in the flat, then she heated up some milk and soaked the cat biscuits in it until they dissolved. She offered the mush to the kitten, who licked it off her finger, then struggled to its feet to crouch over the dish Becca put in front of it.
She felt a flood of relief. It was eating. It was OK.
And it was making an odd sound. She listened anxiously. It was a strange, rusty sort of sound. Then she realised. It was purring. All the tension she’d been holding inside her relaxed.
She’d done it.
The kitten had survived. It was going to be OK.
And now for her. Just about every bit of her hurt and her hands were really sore. She could see where the ground had torn her leggings, and the skin was grazed, blood showing through the dirt. In the mirror, she could see a bruise forming high on her cheek where it had hit the bin. There was a cut on her lip and the side of her face was scraped.
But more than that, she felt dirty, soiled. She needed to get under the shower and let the water wash her and wash her until she felt clean.
Snitch bitch.
Someone had come here to warn her off. But whoever it was can’t have planned to attack her. There was no way he would have expected her to come down again, so late, into the rain and darkness. She felt a cold disgust as she realised someone must have been watching her, and for longer than today. They must have seen her with the kitten, and they’d planned to leave a warning on the doorstep for her to find tomorrow morning – the kitten, burned.
She didn’t want to think about it, but it wouldn’t leave her mind – the flames and how it had been trussed up so it couldn’t escape. There was a really sick person out there, someone who knew where she lived, someone who’d seen her talking to Curwen.
Snitch bitch.
Dead right she was. She’d let herself be scared into silence once in her life, but never again. Never. And no one hurt the things she cared about. They’d hurt the kitten. They’d planned to hurt it worse.
The red mist that was rising in her head smothered the thoughts. All that was left was anger. And a sudden understanding of what Matt had meant when he’d told her not to waste her anger, but to use it. She wanted to smash broken glass into the face of whoever it was who hurt her kitten. But she wasn’t going to do that.
As she swallowed the last of her paracetamol, she made her decision. It didn’t matter that getting the cellar keys would be difficult – she’d do it. She’d find a way to get in there and then she was going to get some proper photographs and give them to Curwen.
Andy might have been a creep, but she was going to find out who had sent that text message – who had sent all of them because she knew now it wasn’t him. Someone had been watching them, someone knew what was going on, and they’d used it, used her to hurt Andy. She’d find out who it was, who had killed him, who had left his little girl without a dad. He’d lied to her, but that didn’t matter, not right now. What mattered was that now he was dead.
She’d get the answers, and then she’d make them sorry.
Chapter 26
Dinah had wasted no time the night before when she’d spotted the car leaving Sunk Island. It was long after her shift finished, but she couldn’t leave it. She’d called Dave Sykes.
‘Good work. I’ll let the boss know. Get onto the Manchester people and get them round there. Find that car, find out who’s been driving it and where it’s been. OK?’
But after that, it had been frustration. By the time she made contact with the Greater Manchester force it was after midnight, and now, the next morning, she still hadn’t heard anything.
The briefing was about to start – she couldn’t go in there with her job unfinished. She called the Manchester number again, but the man she’d talked to the night before was off duty, and it took several frustrating minutes to find someone who even knew what she was talking about.
‘It’s a car that’s involved in a murder enquiry,’ she kept saying. ‘A police officer was killed.’
Eventually, she found herself talking to someone who knew about it. ‘It isn’t your car,’ the man said briskly.
‘But it was there,’ Dinah insisted. ‘I saw it.’
‘Not this one. I’ll send the report through.’
She couldn’t wait. Someone offered to bring the report through to the briefing, and she ran down the corridor, arriving just as Hammond was about to start speaking. He waited, pointedly, she thought, until she found a vacant chair.
She sank into her seat, still trying to make sense of what she’d heard from Manchester.
The findings from other parts of the investigation were proving depressingly thin. There was no trace of Andy’s phone – it was almost certainly in the estuary and irretrievable. His car had been taken apart and every bit of it checked, but the search had come up with nothing, or nothing useful. ‘There was a chemical trace,’ Dave Sykes said. ‘Alpha PVP – that drug we’ve been having trouble with, the one that sends the kids crazy. At some point, Andy must have had some in his car.’
Dinah remembered what Curwen had said, about Andy being on some kind of mission, and how it could be misinterpreted. But Hammond had to be told. And he had to know about Becca at the pub.
As if he’d read her thoughts, Hammond turned to her. ‘Dinah, how are you getting on with the car searches? DS Sykes said you’d identified a car that might be of interest.’
‘I’m waiting for a report on that one, sir.’ She explained the focus of her searches and got an approving nod from Hammond. ‘Show us on the map, please.’
Dinah found herself standing at the front of the room. She regretted her hasty dressing that morning – trousers and a sweatshirt, rather than her smart trouser suit. Looking professional was important. She called up the map on the laptop and showed them the turn-offs and the different routes that might take a car into the heart of Sunk Island. ‘We don’t know where he was killed,’ she said, ‘but it’s reasonable to assume they came down close to the water.’
Her pointer followed the banks of the estuary. ‘Andy was found here – that’s the Spragger Drain sluice. There’s no road, but there are tracks. The closest you can get to the estuary by car is here, Old Hall Road. It actually crosses Spragger Drain. After that, it’s rough tracks. You’d need an off-roader or a bike.’
‘We talked to the people at the farm the day after we found him,’ Innes said. ‘They say no one went past that night, and that’s probably right. They’ve got cameras on their gates after all the thefts, and the dogs are out.’
‘You can bring a car down here to Stone Creek,’ Dinah went on. ‘It’s about three and a half kilometres from there to the sluice. So what I’m saying is that these roads here, here and here are the best way in to get down to Old Hall Road, or to Stone Creek. I looked at the other roads as well, but these were the ones I went to first.
‘This car is the one I think we need to focus on.’ She showed them the images, the red Fiesta turning onto Sunk Island road, followed by the bike that had slewed round.
‘A bike,’ someone said, linking it to what she’d said previously. ‘Have you got any more information on that?’
‘Not yet. But what I did find…’ She showed them the picture of the red Fiesta leaving Sunk island by a different road. ‘It turned west, towards Hull, but the owner lives near Manchester.’
Hammond was sitting forward, his gaze intent. ‘You’ve been on to Greater Manchester?’
‘Yes sir. I’m just waiting for their report. I was talking to them just before the briefing. They say this can’t be our car.’
As if on cue, the door of the briefing room opened, and a woman came in with a sheet of paper. ‘Report for DC Mason,’ she said.
Hammond took it and read it in silence. ‘It looks as though they’re right. This car belongs to an Elizabeth Bagnall, who lives in Stockport. She’s in her eighties and is a chronic invalid.’
‘So someone else is using the car,’ Dinah said.
‘No.’ Hammond gave her back the report. ‘They checked it and it’s in no condition to be driven. Mrs Bagnall has a live-in carer who says the car hasn’t left the drive for weeks. The Stockport people were able to confirm that.’
Dinah brought up the image on the screen again – a red Ford Fiesta with the correct number plate leaving Sunk Island and turning left along the main road. ‘I checked with the DVLA,’ she said. ‘It’s taxed and it’s got its MOT. Why pay that? Why keep the car if no one is using it?’
‘Cloned plates,’ Hammond said. ‘Cloned from a car identical to the one they’re using, so the ANPR won’t spot it.’
Dinah felt deflated. Her big lead, and all the time, the car was sitting in a garage in Greater Manchester. But as Hammond picked the topic up, she began to feel better. ‘Whoever cloned those plates might have known the original car wouldn’t be out and about. There could be a connection. Let’s get details of the owner’s family, friends, any other contacts who’d have that information. Let’s get ANPR sightings of that number over the past month and see what the car’s been up to. If they thought they had a safe number, they might have been using it for a while.’ And it was when people got careless that they made mistakes, and mistakes was what got them caught. He looked at Dinah. ‘Good work, DC Mason,’ he said.
So her big break was a big break after all. Now was the time to get in with her next bit of information. ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘I went into the Smokehouse the other evening, just… I mean, I got talking to the barman and he said—’
Hammond held up his hand. ‘Later, DC Mason. Right. You all know what you’ve got to do. How did the drug get into the car? Karen, check though his record of recent arrests, see who he picked up and what they were carrying. We need to find that car with the cloned plates, and we need to keep checking for any sign of his phone. Karen, bring me up to date later, will you?’
The team began to move on. Dinah hesitated, not sure whether she should go back to her desk, but Hammond indicated she should wait.
Once the team had dispersed, he looked at her. ‘My office,’ he said. Once they were in there, he closed to door and sat down at the desk, leaving her standing. ‘DC Mason, tell me why you decided to go to the Smokehouse. You do remember what I told you at the first briefing?’
Curwen’s casual, You’re allowed to drink where you want to suddenly seemed very thin.
‘You said there was no evidence of a link, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to—’
‘DC Mason. There are issues around that pub that you may not know about. It’s part of a serious complaint issued against this force. If there was any evidence linking Yeatson’s death to the place, we’d go after it. But there isn’t. Now, I’ll tell you this once, and I expect you to listen. This is a team. You want to look into something? You ask DS Sykes or you ask me. You don’t go off on your own. If you can’t follow that rule, then maybe you need to rethink your position. You were transferred – when?’
‘Just a few months ago, sir.’
‘Right, and the role carries responsibilities. I don’t want to be worrying about how you deal with those when I write your performance review.’
‘Sir, I—’
‘Did you get that, DC Mason?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right. Now get on with those car checks. We need to know where that Fiesta went.’
‘Yes, sir, but…’ He was about to interrupt her again, so she said quickly, ‘Andy was seeing someone in the pub. I think. The barmaid.’
‘DC Mason, how many times do I have to say this? That is not part of your job. I don’t want the team distracted from important work by this kind of speculation. Your job is to find that car, and find out who knows the Bagnall woman’s car is off the road. Now you’ve got that bit of gossip off your chest, do you feel ready to do that?’
He wasn’t just ignoring it. He was trying to shut her up, and trying to stop her from talking about what she’d found out to the others. She opened her mouth to protest, caught his eye and closed it again.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
Chapter 27
Curwen sat at his desk, looking at his phone impatiently. He was trying to think of his next move. He hadn’t given up on Becca the Barmaid. He’d issued a challenge, and she looked like the type who would respond to that. He hated to admit it to himself, but there was something about her he liked.
What else had he got? He went over everything she’d told him. There wasn’t much, except she’d seen Lavery with the holdalls more than once since that first time, and – hang on, hang on – she’d seen him with them coming out of… He sat very still as he tried to recall that conversation in his car. She’d said: I saw his car once on that street down from the main road. He came out of that café, you know? And he was carrying a couple of bags then.
That street that runs down from… He came out of that café… Something was ringing bells.
She curled up with her arms over her face at the flash of heat as the rag was lit, then it was gone and she heard the whuff! of something igniting.
Something splashed over her face. Shit! Shit! He was pouring paraffin in her face, he was going to set her alight. Panic got her onto all fours and then she was dragging herself to her feet despite the stabbing pain in her ribs and pounding in her face where it had hit the bin.
Not the fire! Not the fire!
She heard laughter again and then the sound of feet moving away. The gate swung open. She turned, grabbing the wall for support and saw a figure, tall and thin, silhouetted in the light from the alleyway, then the gate swung shut leaving her in the darkness with the flicker of flames and the smell of paraffin in the air.
A bitter flavour filled her mouth and she spat and spat.
Chapter 25
Becca struggled to keep herself upright. Her face throbbed, her neck felt bruised and her ribs sent a stabbing pain through her side each time she took a breath.
She needed to… she needed to…
She lifted her arms to her face. She’d thought she was covered in paraffin, but she wasn’t. What had happened? She caught the whiff of a foul smell. She didn’t know what he’d poured over her, but it made her gag, and then she was throwing up, welcoming the heavy rain as it ran down her face and soaked through her clothes, washing her clean.
The paraffin bottle had been empty. He’d already used it.
On what?
A flickering light was illuminating the yard. The plastic bag under the fire escape, where it was protected from the rain, was burning. What had he been trying to do? Set fire to the building? The plastic bag was stuffed full of something – rags, cloths, she couldn’t tell. Even in her panic, she could see that it presented no threat.
She was missing something. She knew she was. Something inside her was shouting urgently to do something, do something!
In the light from the flames, she saw her torch, which she’d dropped when she fell, lying on the ground. She picked it up and shook it, and it came on.
The rain had soaked right through to her skin now. She was shaking partly from the shock and partly from the cold. She had to get inside, get warm, clean herself up. Then she could decide what to do.
Using the wall as support, she stumbled across to the flames. Best put them out, though what had been the point of setting the fire in the first place? A small bottle of paraffin, the rain, a fire on the wet ground in the yard – why?
Snitch bitch. A warning? This is what we’ll do if…
And then she realised. She knew what she’d missed.
The kitten.
She was on her knees at once, pulling the burning rubbish out of the bag, ignoring the pain in her hands where the melting plastic stuck as she grabbed at it, burning fabric, rags soaked in fuel.
And wrapped up tightly in the middle was a small, furry bundle.
They’d been trying to burn the kitten.
She pushed the smouldering cloths away and shook the hot ashes off her hands. She had the kitten now but it was lying wrong, as if its legs were in the wrong place.
Oh shit, what had they done to it?
But its mouth opened and it made a faint call.
It was alive.
Becca staggered to her feet, keeping her hands steady. Holding the kitten in one hand, she shone the torch on it, forcing herself to look.
She felt a rush of relief as she saw what the problem was. It looked all wrong because it was tangled up with something – someone had tied it up – her fingers struggled to sort out the tangle – some kind of tape. But it was alive, and as far as she could tell, it wasn’t damaged by the fire. She needed to get it into the warm.
She tucked it under her coat and hurried back up the stairs, ignoring the pain in her hands, the dull ache from where her face had hit the wheelie bin, the sharp pain in her ribs where he had kicked her.
She dumped her coat and shoes on the floor outside the flat, then took the kitten in. The overhead light was just a fluorescent tube, but it gave her what she needed, a bright, white light. She put the kitten down on the rug and looked at it. It lay there quietly, not struggling any more, and that alarmed her.
Someone had wrapped sticky tape round its legs and its neck. The roll of tape was still there – whatever was going on, Becca’s arrival had stopped it.
She got her scissors out and, working carefully, slit the tape so it began to tear. The kitten squeaked a couple of times as she pulled the tape off. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry,’ Becca said.
It was probably good that it squeaked, right?
Its fur was soaked and bedraggled. For a horrible moment, she thought her attacker must have poured paraffin over it – how did you get paraffin out of a cat’s coat? – but there was no smell of the oil, just a frizzled patch where the burning rag had been lying against it. Becca picked up the scissors, and cut that chunk of fur off. The skin underneath seemed fine, pink and healthy, not burned.
She put the little animal on a folded towel in the armchair which was, Becca knew from experience, the warmest place in the flat, then she heated up some milk and soaked the cat biscuits in it until they dissolved. She offered the mush to the kitten, who licked it off her finger, then struggled to its feet to crouch over the dish Becca put in front of it.
She felt a flood of relief. It was eating. It was OK.
And it was making an odd sound. She listened anxiously. It was a strange, rusty sort of sound. Then she realised. It was purring. All the tension she’d been holding inside her relaxed.
She’d done it.
The kitten had survived. It was going to be OK.
And now for her. Just about every bit of her hurt and her hands were really sore. She could see where the ground had torn her leggings, and the skin was grazed, blood showing through the dirt. In the mirror, she could see a bruise forming high on her cheek where it had hit the bin. There was a cut on her lip and the side of her face was scraped.
But more than that, she felt dirty, soiled. She needed to get under the shower and let the water wash her and wash her until she felt clean.
Snitch bitch.
Someone had come here to warn her off. But whoever it was can’t have planned to attack her. There was no way he would have expected her to come down again, so late, into the rain and darkness. She felt a cold disgust as she realised someone must have been watching her, and for longer than today. They must have seen her with the kitten, and they’d planned to leave a warning on the doorstep for her to find tomorrow morning – the kitten, burned.
She didn’t want to think about it, but it wouldn’t leave her mind – the flames and how it had been trussed up so it couldn’t escape. There was a really sick person out there, someone who knew where she lived, someone who’d seen her talking to Curwen.
Snitch bitch.
Dead right she was. She’d let herself be scared into silence once in her life, but never again. Never. And no one hurt the things she cared about. They’d hurt the kitten. They’d planned to hurt it worse.
The red mist that was rising in her head smothered the thoughts. All that was left was anger. And a sudden understanding of what Matt had meant when he’d told her not to waste her anger, but to use it. She wanted to smash broken glass into the face of whoever it was who hurt her kitten. But she wasn’t going to do that.
As she swallowed the last of her paracetamol, she made her decision. It didn’t matter that getting the cellar keys would be difficult – she’d do it. She’d find a way to get in there and then she was going to get some proper photographs and give them to Curwen.
Andy might have been a creep, but she was going to find out who had sent that text message – who had sent all of them because she knew now it wasn’t him. Someone had been watching them, someone knew what was going on, and they’d used it, used her to hurt Andy. She’d find out who it was, who had killed him, who had left his little girl without a dad. He’d lied to her, but that didn’t matter, not right now. What mattered was that now he was dead.
She’d get the answers, and then she’d make them sorry.
Chapter 26
Dinah had wasted no time the night before when she’d spotted the car leaving Sunk Island. It was long after her shift finished, but she couldn’t leave it. She’d called Dave Sykes.
‘Good work. I’ll let the boss know. Get onto the Manchester people and get them round there. Find that car, find out who’s been driving it and where it’s been. OK?’
But after that, it had been frustration. By the time she made contact with the Greater Manchester force it was after midnight, and now, the next morning, she still hadn’t heard anything.
The briefing was about to start – she couldn’t go in there with her job unfinished. She called the Manchester number again, but the man she’d talked to the night before was off duty, and it took several frustrating minutes to find someone who even knew what she was talking about.
‘It’s a car that’s involved in a murder enquiry,’ she kept saying. ‘A police officer was killed.’
Eventually, she found herself talking to someone who knew about it. ‘It isn’t your car,’ the man said briskly.
‘But it was there,’ Dinah insisted. ‘I saw it.’
‘Not this one. I’ll send the report through.’
She couldn’t wait. Someone offered to bring the report through to the briefing, and she ran down the corridor, arriving just as Hammond was about to start speaking. He waited, pointedly, she thought, until she found a vacant chair.
She sank into her seat, still trying to make sense of what she’d heard from Manchester.
The findings from other parts of the investigation were proving depressingly thin. There was no trace of Andy’s phone – it was almost certainly in the estuary and irretrievable. His car had been taken apart and every bit of it checked, but the search had come up with nothing, or nothing useful. ‘There was a chemical trace,’ Dave Sykes said. ‘Alpha PVP – that drug we’ve been having trouble with, the one that sends the kids crazy. At some point, Andy must have had some in his car.’
Dinah remembered what Curwen had said, about Andy being on some kind of mission, and how it could be misinterpreted. But Hammond had to be told. And he had to know about Becca at the pub.
As if he’d read her thoughts, Hammond turned to her. ‘Dinah, how are you getting on with the car searches? DS Sykes said you’d identified a car that might be of interest.’
‘I’m waiting for a report on that one, sir.’ She explained the focus of her searches and got an approving nod from Hammond. ‘Show us on the map, please.’
Dinah found herself standing at the front of the room. She regretted her hasty dressing that morning – trousers and a sweatshirt, rather than her smart trouser suit. Looking professional was important. She called up the map on the laptop and showed them the turn-offs and the different routes that might take a car into the heart of Sunk Island. ‘We don’t know where he was killed,’ she said, ‘but it’s reasonable to assume they came down close to the water.’
Her pointer followed the banks of the estuary. ‘Andy was found here – that’s the Spragger Drain sluice. There’s no road, but there are tracks. The closest you can get to the estuary by car is here, Old Hall Road. It actually crosses Spragger Drain. After that, it’s rough tracks. You’d need an off-roader or a bike.’
‘We talked to the people at the farm the day after we found him,’ Innes said. ‘They say no one went past that night, and that’s probably right. They’ve got cameras on their gates after all the thefts, and the dogs are out.’
‘You can bring a car down here to Stone Creek,’ Dinah went on. ‘It’s about three and a half kilometres from there to the sluice. So what I’m saying is that these roads here, here and here are the best way in to get down to Old Hall Road, or to Stone Creek. I looked at the other roads as well, but these were the ones I went to first.
‘This car is the one I think we need to focus on.’ She showed them the images, the red Fiesta turning onto Sunk Island road, followed by the bike that had slewed round.
‘A bike,’ someone said, linking it to what she’d said previously. ‘Have you got any more information on that?’
‘Not yet. But what I did find…’ She showed them the picture of the red Fiesta leaving Sunk island by a different road. ‘It turned west, towards Hull, but the owner lives near Manchester.’
Hammond was sitting forward, his gaze intent. ‘You’ve been on to Greater Manchester?’
‘Yes sir. I’m just waiting for their report. I was talking to them just before the briefing. They say this can’t be our car.’
As if on cue, the door of the briefing room opened, and a woman came in with a sheet of paper. ‘Report for DC Mason,’ she said.
Hammond took it and read it in silence. ‘It looks as though they’re right. This car belongs to an Elizabeth Bagnall, who lives in Stockport. She’s in her eighties and is a chronic invalid.’
‘So someone else is using the car,’ Dinah said.
‘No.’ Hammond gave her back the report. ‘They checked it and it’s in no condition to be driven. Mrs Bagnall has a live-in carer who says the car hasn’t left the drive for weeks. The Stockport people were able to confirm that.’
Dinah brought up the image on the screen again – a red Ford Fiesta with the correct number plate leaving Sunk Island and turning left along the main road. ‘I checked with the DVLA,’ she said. ‘It’s taxed and it’s got its MOT. Why pay that? Why keep the car if no one is using it?’
‘Cloned plates,’ Hammond said. ‘Cloned from a car identical to the one they’re using, so the ANPR won’t spot it.’
Dinah felt deflated. Her big lead, and all the time, the car was sitting in a garage in Greater Manchester. But as Hammond picked the topic up, she began to feel better. ‘Whoever cloned those plates might have known the original car wouldn’t be out and about. There could be a connection. Let’s get details of the owner’s family, friends, any other contacts who’d have that information. Let’s get ANPR sightings of that number over the past month and see what the car’s been up to. If they thought they had a safe number, they might have been using it for a while.’ And it was when people got careless that they made mistakes, and mistakes was what got them caught. He looked at Dinah. ‘Good work, DC Mason,’ he said.
So her big break was a big break after all. Now was the time to get in with her next bit of information. ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘I went into the Smokehouse the other evening, just… I mean, I got talking to the barman and he said—’
Hammond held up his hand. ‘Later, DC Mason. Right. You all know what you’ve got to do. How did the drug get into the car? Karen, check though his record of recent arrests, see who he picked up and what they were carrying. We need to find that car with the cloned plates, and we need to keep checking for any sign of his phone. Karen, bring me up to date later, will you?’
The team began to move on. Dinah hesitated, not sure whether she should go back to her desk, but Hammond indicated she should wait.
Once the team had dispersed, he looked at her. ‘My office,’ he said. Once they were in there, he closed to door and sat down at the desk, leaving her standing. ‘DC Mason, tell me why you decided to go to the Smokehouse. You do remember what I told you at the first briefing?’
Curwen’s casual, You’re allowed to drink where you want to suddenly seemed very thin.
‘You said there was no evidence of a link, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to—’
‘DC Mason. There are issues around that pub that you may not know about. It’s part of a serious complaint issued against this force. If there was any evidence linking Yeatson’s death to the place, we’d go after it. But there isn’t. Now, I’ll tell you this once, and I expect you to listen. This is a team. You want to look into something? You ask DS Sykes or you ask me. You don’t go off on your own. If you can’t follow that rule, then maybe you need to rethink your position. You were transferred – when?’
‘Just a few months ago, sir.’
‘Right, and the role carries responsibilities. I don’t want to be worrying about how you deal with those when I write your performance review.’
‘Sir, I—’
‘Did you get that, DC Mason?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right. Now get on with those car checks. We need to know where that Fiesta went.’
‘Yes, sir, but…’ He was about to interrupt her again, so she said quickly, ‘Andy was seeing someone in the pub. I think. The barmaid.’
‘DC Mason, how many times do I have to say this? That is not part of your job. I don’t want the team distracted from important work by this kind of speculation. Your job is to find that car, and find out who knows the Bagnall woman’s car is off the road. Now you’ve got that bit of gossip off your chest, do you feel ready to do that?’
He wasn’t just ignoring it. He was trying to shut her up, and trying to stop her from talking about what she’d found out to the others. She opened her mouth to protest, caught his eye and closed it again.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
Chapter 27
Curwen sat at his desk, looking at his phone impatiently. He was trying to think of his next move. He hadn’t given up on Becca the Barmaid. He’d issued a challenge, and she looked like the type who would respond to that. He hated to admit it to himself, but there was something about her he liked.
What else had he got? He went over everything she’d told him. There wasn’t much, except she’d seen Lavery with the holdalls more than once since that first time, and – hang on, hang on – she’d seen him with them coming out of… He sat very still as he tried to recall that conversation in his car. She’d said: I saw his car once on that street down from the main road. He came out of that café, you know? And he was carrying a couple of bags then.
That street that runs down from… He came out of that café… Something was ringing bells.
