‘Rachel Hardcastle, the lady in the Mabgate skip, and Kelly Cross were both known prostitutes. Lots of prints at Kelly Cross’s murder scene, lots of DNA, all being processed. I’m sure the lab will have useful information for us tomorrow.
‘From the house-to-house we haven’t got much yet, not a lot in the way of CCTV in that area, car registrations haven’t turned up anything. Preliminary report back on the blood pattern . . .’
Barry tuned out. She was efficient, he’d give her that. Neat suit, neat hair, proper shoes, plenty of make-up, not like some of the butch lezzies you saw around. Strangely, the woman she reminded him most of was his wife. But then, all women did. Perhaps not Tracy. He’d been planning on making Gemma Holroyd SIO on the next big case anyway, even without Tracy’s prompting.
He had gone down to Kelly Cross’s squalid dump of a house, sat in the incident van, second time in twenty-four hours. Barry remembered Kelly Cross’s mother, couldn’t recall her name, something Irish. A real piece of work, but good for a quick knee-trembler up a dark alley. Those were the days. Different days, different Barry. He sometimes wondered if he had his time over again and lived his life like a saint – would it make a difference? No drinking, no smoking, no swearing, no dishonesty or immorality, no whores. He could join a public library, take Barbara out to dinner, buy her flowers. Change nappies, heat bottles and try and come home every night in time to read Amy a bedtime story. He would even try to give Barbara a hand with the housework. Then maybe, just maybe, he would clock up so many Brownie points that the universe would give him a pass and Amy wouldn’t climb into a little tin can of a two-door car with her drunken husband at the wheel and her baby in the back.
In fact, maybe it would just have been easier if he had ripped his chest open the day that his daughter was born and offered up his heart as a sacrifice on an altar somewhere. And then everything would be all right. Oh, and Carol Braithwaite. He would have to tell the truth about her as well. Just to make things right. You had to make everything right before you went.
Barry sucked in air through his mouth. Drowning in air. He was in his last days. The empire crumbling, the barbarians at the gate. Not barbarians, just shiny smart-arses with degrees in criminology.
‘Anything concrete to link the two murders?’ he’d asked the Holroyd girl.
‘Both women. Both dead, boss,’ she said. She obviously didn’t like him but then not many people did.
‘Do we know if there’s anything to connect your victim to the Mabgate whore?’ he asked. ‘Did they know each other?’
‘“The Mabgate whore”,’ she said. ‘Sounds like a character in a revenge tragedy.’
Barry knew bugger all about revenge tragedy. Never wanted to, thank you. He knew a lot about tragedy though. And revenge was coming, he could smell it on the wind. Carol Braithwaite ascending, a cloud of bone and ash, looking for justice. Risen from the grave,Tracy said.
‘Someone is asking questions,’ Linda Pallister had said on the phone. ‘What should I do?’
‘I’d keep my mouth shut if I were you,’ Barry said. Keep your mouth shut. That wasn’t the right answer, was it? Spill the beans, tell the truth. Silence for thirty-five years and now her name was on everyone’s lips.
‘. . . did she usually take punters back to her house?’ Gavin Archer asked. ‘Didn’t she work the streets?’ Archer was a DC. Lean and bespectacled, he came into work on a racing bike in the full Lycra scrotum-squeezing clobber, although he never raced, just commuted from the boxy, thin-walled house in Moortown that he shared with his pregnant wife. Another clever bugger.
‘We’re intending to . . .’
There’d been a lot of blood. Even watching the video in the incident van outside Barry could see that. Gemma whatshername had got everyone off the mark quickly. Inside the house there had been a photographer, two SOCOs, two forensic scientists, pathologist was ten minutes away. Two family liaison officers, looking for life antecedents. Good luck with that. Everyone in the house zipped and booted in bunny suits. All for a dead prostitute.
On the video screen Barry had watched the biologist tracing a blood pattern. When he first started in the police they used to wander all over crime scenes like they were out for a walk in the park.
‘Someone didn’t like her,’ Gemma said, standing next to him in the incident van.
‘That usually is at the root of murder,’ Barry said.
*
‘. . . so anyway if we can all be back here at seven a.m. sharp tomorrow for the briefing. Thanks, everyone.’
The incident room emptied, a stream of tired but eager people flowing past him. Barry felt ill, a heart attack walking. Needed a drink. He’d been needing a drink all day. All week. The last two years. The anniversary. You would think it would get better with time but it just got worse. Sam was still in his pushchair when he was killed, now he’d be toddling around, maybe having a stumbling game of kickabout with Barry. And his daughter, in limbo, because none of them could bear to talk about turning off the life support.
He should be coasting towards the end, clearing up paperwork, handing over to his successor, attending a valedictory bash or two. Had something been arranged? No sign of anything. Tracy had joked that there wasn’t one but it was unlikely. A surprise party perhaps. He couldn’t think of anything worse. Tracy’s farewell piss-up had already acquired legendary status. Everyone liked Tracy, although a lot of them had liked to pretend that they didn’t.
‘Detective Superintendent Crawford. Did you want something?’
‘Sorry, DI Hardcastle, I fell asleep there. Bedtime story too long, I guess.’
‘It’s Holroyd actually, boss, Gemma Holroyd. Rachel Hardcastle is the woman who was murdered on Wednesday night. The Mabgate whore,’ she added sarcastically for his benefit.
His phone rang. Strickland. No surprise there then. Carol Braithwaite in her rising pulling them all out of their hidey-holes.
‘Barry? How’s things?’ Ray Strickland said.
‘Things are things,’ Barry said.
‘Just phoning to see if you were coming to the golf club dinner dance tomorrow night.’
‘Golf club dinner-dance,’ Barry repeated, trying to make sense of the words. A vague memory of some fifty-quid-a-head fundraiser that he’d been press-ganged into buying a ticket for. Strickland, Lomax, they never stopped, Len Lomax the worst. They couldn’t hack being retired, losing their power, so they spent their time on charity boards, fundraising committees, magistrates’ panels, keeping their names alive in the press and the community. They weren’t doing good works, they were just denying their impotence. The nearest Barry intended to come to charity when he retired was buying a Remembrance poppy.
‘Yes,’ Strickland said patiently, ‘dinner-dance. Are you coming?’
He couldn’t sleep. Barbara, next to him in sponge rollers and greasy face, was snoring. He thought about taking some of her sleeping pills. Maybe all of them. Taking the easy way out rather than the hard way. He’d just managed to fall into an unsatisfactory doze when the phone rang. Barbara made a noise in her sleep, the low moan of a wounded animal. Bedside clock said five thirty. Wasn’t going to be good news, was it?
‘Another murder, boss,’ Gemma Holroyd said.
‘This one a working girl as well? And don’t tell me you’re all working girls.’
‘Are we? We don’t have a positive ID yet. She was found in the doorway of the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley. Head wounds, stabbed.’
‘Well, you know what they say. One’s unfortunate, two’s a coincidence, three’s a serial killer.’
‘I don’t think we should jump to conclusions, boss.’
‘Faster you jump to conclusions sooner you get to the end.’
‘Anyway if they are related sounds more like a spree.’
‘All just words, killing’s killing.’
He put the phone down and lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Leeds and dead prostitutes. Don’t use the ‘R’ word. He turne
d to Barbara and patted her back. ‘Want a cup of tea, love?’
He could do without a trio of dead women on his plate. If there were no women, men wouldn’t kill them. That would be one solution to the problem.
Carol Braithwaite. Wondered where that kiddy was. Locked in that flat for weeks with the mother’s body. Barry couldn’t remember his name. Tracy had banged on about him for months. Michael. That was it. Michael Braithwaite.
1975: 10 April
The next day on the kiddies’ ward. Uncomfortable place to be. Tracy touched the little hand, slack in sleep, with the back of hers. ‘Michael,’ she said softly.
Tracy had considered taking him a teddy bear but thought that perhaps he was too old for a soft toy. When they broke into the Lovell Park flat he had been clutching a blue-and-white police car as if his life depended on it, so she bought him a fire engine instead. Tucked it in beside him. He was hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked but he looked peaceful in repose. They reckoned he’d been in the flat with his mother’s body for nearly three weeks. He had been unable to unlock the front door. No one had seen him standing on a chair at the fifteenth-floor window, waving to attract attention. He had lived off what food there was in the house – Carol Braithwaite had been to the supermarket that afternoon, there were unpacked shopping bags in the kitchen. After that, he’d pulled packets of dry food from cupboards, drunk water from the tap. It was freezing in the flat. He’d fed the meter with coins from his mother’s purse until the coins ran out.
He’d pulled a blanket over his mother to keep her warm. Tracy supposed that at first he must have slept next to her. By the time they broke in he was sleeping in a den he had made from a nest of cushions and blankets in the living room. ‘Tough little bugger,’ Lomax said. Perhaps he was a boy used to fending for himself. All this reported to her third-hand by Arkwright.
Linda Pallister appeared suddenly at the opposite side of the hospital bed as if she’d been lurking nearby. ‘You again,’ she said to Tracy by way of greeting.
‘Want to get a cuppa?’ Tracy said. ‘In the canteen? Human being to human being?’
They drank weak, stewed tea. Tracy had picked up a large Kit Kat while Linda chose a sour-looking apple. Tea and apples didn’t go together, everyone knew that.
‘What’s going to happen to that poor kiddy now?’ Tracy asked, snapping her Kit Kat into four fingers and already lamenting their finish before she’d even begun eating them.
‘He’ll be discharged, eventually, and go to a foster home,’ Linda said, biting into her green apple. ‘There aren’t any relatives.’ Big horsey teeth, would have made a good herbivore.
‘What about his father?’ Tracy asked and Linda Pallister raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Isn’t one.’
‘Can I talk to someone about the kiddy?’ Tracy asked.
‘You are talking to someone,’ Linda said. ‘You’re talking to me.’
‘You know he witnessed his mother’s murder, don’t you?’ Chomp-chomp-chomp, mechanically eating her apple. ‘He told me his father killed his mother,’ Tracy persisted. ‘CID just dismissed it.’
‘He’s four years old,’ Linda said. ‘He doesn’t know what’s real and what’s a fairy tale. Kids lie, it’s just what they do.’ There was a pause while her – rather piggy – little eyes seemed to assess Tracy. ‘A man he thinks of as his father,’ she added, tapping a folder in front of her on the table. ‘Carol didn’t know who his father was.’
The manila folder had a label in one corner, the name ‘Carol Braithwaite’ typed on it.
‘She was already a client?’ Tracy asked, touching the folder. Linda slammed her hand down on it as if Tracy was about to prise it open with her eyes.
‘Miss Braithwaite was known to Social Services,’ she said primly.
‘What for?’
‘I can’t talk about individual clients.’ She stood up abruptly, clamping the manila folder to her chest.
‘You knew the kid was at risk?’ Tracy said, standing up as well, aware of how much taller than Linda Pallister she was. ‘Maybe if you’d visited you would have found Michael a bit sooner. Before he spent three weeks locked in a flat with his mother’s corpse.’
Tracy had a sudden flashback to Linda Pallister taking the boy off her in the flat to give to the ambulance men. She held him high on one hip so that he was facing over her shoulder and his eyes locked on to Tracy’s as he was being carried away. Tracy felt as if he had reached in and scooped something out of her soul. She shuddered at the memory.
‘I have a very heavy caseload,’ Linda Pallister said defensively. ‘Every case is assessed on its individual merits. And now, if you don’t mind, I have to go.’
‘Look,’Tracy said, taking out a Biro, ‘let me write down my phone number.’ She prised the folder from Linda Pallister’s grip and said, ‘Not going to look inside, honestly.’ She wrote ‘WPC Tracy Waterhouse’ on Carol Braithwaite’s file and her home phone number.
‘This is my phone number,’ Tracy said. ‘If you ring, my mum will probably answer, but just talk her down. OK?’ She added the date to make it seem more official. ‘Just, you know, to keep in touch.’
‘Keep in touch?’
‘About the kiddy. About Michael.’
‘I have to go,’ Linda said, snatching the manila folder back, her face as sour as her apple core.
‘Yeah, I know, heavy caseload,’ Tracy said.
After Linda left, Tracy returned to the children’s ward. Michael was still asleep but she sat by his bed and watched him until a doctor came round, a simpering, silent nurse by his side. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked, seeing Tracy’s uniform – she was due on shift in half an hour.
‘No, I just wondered how he was.’
‘You’re one of the people who found him?’ Tracy didn’t think of herself and Arkwright as people, she thought of them as police.
‘Yes,’ Tracy said. ‘Me and my partner.’
The nurse took the boy’s pulse, cast a dismissive glance in Tracy’s direction. Wrote something on the boy’s chart. ‘Thank you, Margaret,’ the doctor said. Well, that was a first, Tracy thought, a doctor thanking a nurse. First-name terms, a medical romance perhaps. Tracy’s mother, on the afternoons that she didn’t go to her bridge club, put her feet up on the sofa and read Mills and Boon novels.
‘Ian Winfield,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m the consultant paediatrician on the ward.’ Tracy thought he was going to shake her hand and have a chat about Michael’s condition but instead he said, ‘The boy’s doing fine, but he needs to rest now. It’s probably best if you leave.’ Dismissed. Tracy couldn’t see what harm there was in just sitting there. The nurse looked at her, ready for trouble.
As Tracy was leaving the hospital she caught sight of Linda Pallister again. So much for her heavy caseload. She was coming out of the Cemetery Tavern, deep in argument with Ray Strickland. The odd couple. He got hold of her by the elbow and pulled her close, said something angrily to her. She looked terrified. Then Ray let her go and she walked unsteadily off. No bike, Tracy noticed.
‘I went to the hospital yesterday, to see the kiddy,’ Tracy said to Ken Arkwright, over a pint of Tetley’s bitter.
‘How was he?’
‘Asleep. I bumped into that social worker. Linda Pallister.’ Ken Arkwright grunted.
‘Anything happening? Anyone being questioned?’
‘You’ve got to remember,’ Arkwright said, ‘that the police don’t have the resources for law enforcement, for old-fashioned policing. Best we can do is clean up after people’s mess.’ He ripped open a packet of salt and vinegar crisps as if it was a trial of strength and offered one to Tracy. She hesitated, as befitted a girl on a cottage cheese and grapefruit diet. The chip-shop smell of the salt and vinegar crisps made her nose twitch.
‘Well, make up your mind,’ Ken Arkwright said.
‘All right. Go on then,’ she said, succumbing finally and grabbing a handful.
‘People are their own worst enemy,’ Ken Arkwrig
ht sighed. ‘What can you do?’
‘I know,’Tracy said. They were in a pub on Eastgate frequented by refugees from the HQ in Brotherton House. That was just before they moved to the new HQ at Millgarth. A fug of cigarette smoke and the ripe smell of fresh and stale beer swilled together. Double Diamond works wonders. In 2008 Carlsberg would announce the closure of Tetley’s brewery and it would be ‘regenerated’ – restaurants, shops and apartments. ‘A sparkling destination on Leeds waterfront’. Ken Arkwright would have been dead for twenty years by then and in 2010 Tracy would be having a Mud ‘N’ Scrub Body Cleansing Massage in the Waterfall Spa, courtesy of the vouchers that were her leaving present from the force.
‘You haven’t seen Strickland or Lomax?’ Tracy asked through a mouthful of crisps. ‘They haven’t said anything more to you? About the investigation?’
‘To me? Eastman’s golden boys?’ Arkwright said. ‘No, lass.’
‘Thing is, Arkwright,’ Tracy said, ‘the flat was locked.’
‘So?’
‘I didn’t see a key anywhere, did you? We had a good look around, we had enough time, Lomax and Strickland took for ever getting there. Yale and a deadlock. Someone left and locked the door after them.’
‘What’s your point?’ Arkwright said.
‘It was locked from the outside. Don’t you see, it wasn’t just some random punter that she picked up. It was someone who had a key. Someone who locked that little boy in.’
Arkwright frowned into his pint. ‘Just leave it, lass, eh? CID know what they’re doing.’
‘Do they?’
Tracy went back to the hospital the next day. Kiddy’s bed was empty, she thought, oh no, not dead, please God. She found the nurse who had been on Ian Winfield’s round with him yesterday. ‘Michael Braithwaite,’ Tracy said, fear wringing her insides. ‘What’s happened to him?’
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