‘How many guards have you committed to the event?’ Lena asked, ignoring his correction.
‘Seven,’ he said without looking at her.
Kim knew that many police officers looked down on security companies; saw all their staff as being wannabe police officers. Many disagreed with their involvement at public events, but Kim saw their contribution as being able to free up police officers to do what they were paid to do. West Midlands Police Force had denied Dudley Council that level of manpower to the event, so the councilman had little choice but to outsource. No one wanted anything to happen to this celebrity on their watch.
Christopher Manley began to outline his staff positions as she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket.
Lena Wiley stifled a yawn. Kim listened to his plans. She didn’t need to consult the plan of the shopping centre with little marked crosses on it. She knew the area well and had been called to many an incident during her time as a constable.
Her phone stopped vibrating. Just give me a minute, she thought.
‘Well, thank you for that, Mr Manley. We’re all enlightened to know exactly where each of your guards will be standing and—’
‘What about staircase nine?’ Kim asked, cutting her off and speaking for the first time.
Lena now turned her annoyance Kim’s way.
Kim ignored her and continued her focus on Christopher Manley, who stifled a smile.
He consulted his plans again. ‘We don’t have a staircase nine on the drawings.’
‘Umm… excuse me,’ Lena said, ‘might this be something the two of you could discuss outside this—’
‘Right there,’ Kim said, ignoring the superintendent and leaning across the table. She stabbed an area of the plan that appeared to be a brick wall. ‘It was a service stairway to the upper level before the renovations. There’s still a door there that leads to an abandoned set of store rooms and a corridor that leads back to the new section.’
Kim knew because she’d got lost in that area when a suspect she’d been chasing for an ABH offence had suddenly disappeared from view.
Christopher smiled his thanks and placed a cross at the location. He looked to the councilman. ‘I guess that’s eight then.’
Bill Platt shook his head, indicating there would be no budget increase.
Christopher looked back at her as the phone once more vibrated in her pocket.
‘It’ll be covered,’ he assured.
‘As scintillating as that was,’ Lena said, ‘if we could move on to…’
Kim tuned out as she reached into her pocket for her phone. The people whose calls mattered the most knew she wasn’t to be disturbed. Woody had sent her, and Bryant was waiting outside.
That could only mean one person and he never rang to shoot the breeze.
Lena looked straight at her and stopped speaking for a second. Everyone looked her way.
Two missed calls from Keats.
‘Umm… officer, if you wouldn’t mind putting away your phone.’
Kim ignored her and pushed back her chair.
Lena Wiley’s face was colouring with rage. ‘Is there somewhere you need to be?’
Kim made no apology as she headed for the door, throwing the words back over her shoulder.
‘Oh yes, it appears there’s somewhere I’m needed way more than I’m needed here.’
Six
Stacey drummed her fingers on the desk as she waited for DS Michaels to answer the phone and tried to quieten her second thoughts. Maybe this wasn’t the case for her to get her teeth into if the team dealing with it had never even put the case to the CPS.
‘Michaels,’ said a low rumble of a voice at the other end.
‘DC Wood from Halesowen,’ she offered.
‘Sorry for the wait, love, I was taking a dump.’
Stacey shook her head. Some things never changed, and she didn’t have time to react to every old-school misogynistic officer on the force.
‘Yeah, thanks for that. Got a minute to talk about the sexual assault of Lesley Skipton?’
Silence.
‘You headed the case against—’
‘I know who she is, love. I’m wondering why you want to talk about her.’
But sometimes she did have time to react. ‘The name is Stacey, not love. I ain’t your daughter or your niece. I got the case in the shuffle.’
‘They sent you that one?’ he asked, so surprised that he didn’t even respond to her rebuke.
Now she was surprised that he was surprised.
Stacey knew that individual officers who had worked the cases didn’t choose which ones to shuffle. The decisions were made by the DCI or higher.
‘Why the surprise?’
‘I thought they only shuffled cases with a chance of changing the stats.’
Stacey felt that was a jaded view of the process. Of course the force wanted more solved cases on their books. It didn’t hurt when national statistics compared force against force like a score card, but she liked to think the priority was still about solving cases, finding bad people and protecting victims.
‘You don’t think the case is solvable?’
‘Oh, I think it’s solvable. I think we solved it. But it’ll never get to court.’
Stacey could feel her irritation growing. She hated defeatists. Her own earlier doubts dissolved. She was working this case regardless of what Michaels had to say.
‘So you’re convinced Sean Fellows raped Lesley Skipton?’ she asked.
‘Oh yeah. We’re sure he’s the person responsible for the attack on Lesley and thank God we got him for the rape of Gemma Hornley or the bastard would still be out there.’
‘I’m not getting it,’ Stacey said, trying to understand what he seemed to be unwilling to say.
‘Look, you know as well as I do that for a rape trial you need the victim. Doesn’t matter what else you’ve got cos, to a jury, unless you can show them a traumatised victim, any physical evidence is just sex.’
‘So?’
‘We couldn’t put Lesley on the stand.’
Stacey was shocked. She’d seen nothing in the files to say that Lesley had refused to testify.
‘She changed her mind?’
‘You’re not getting it, love. We couldn’t let her near the courtroom because of what she might say.’
‘Like what?’
He paused for a few seconds.
‘Go see her, Stacey,’ he said, using her actual name. ‘Talk through the assault with her and then you’ll get why we couldn’t put her on the stand.’
Seven
The first things Kim noticed once she arrived at the crime scene were the blue jacket and jeans: the only description given for the woman separated from her daughter earlier.
Once she’d escaped the INEPT meeting, she’d listened to the voicemail left by Keats on his second time of calling. The message had simply stated that he had a body and the location.
Fielder Road was a side street that branched off Brierley Hill High Street. It had once held a couple of butchers and greengrocer stores before the Asda Superstore had moved in. Six of the shops had been boarded up, and the end two had been demolished, and that’s where Keats had directed her to come.
It had taken her brain less than a second to calculate that the crime scene was under a hundred metres from the Shop N Save she’d been in earlier.
And right now, she was looking down at a fair-haired woman who bore a striking resemblance to the little girl whose mother had now been found.
A wave of sadness washed over her as she remembered the child clutching the teddy bear given to her by the shop staff, clinging to it in the absence of her mother who would never hold her tightly again. Just this morning, that little girl had been leading a normal life, out shopping with her mother like thousands of others. Kim was always amazed that such a normal day could turn into the worst day of your life. Where was the klaxon? Where was the warning that this day would, in the future, hold significance against all o
thers?
‘Has she been moved?’ Kim asked the pathologist.
Keats shook his head as he motioned towards the plain black handbag lying by her side.
‘Opened the flap to find ID. Her name is Katrina Nock, and this is her address,’ he said, handing a small piece of paper to Bryant. ‘Twenty-five years old.’
Kim was guessing he’d got the information from the driving licence, which would now be packaged up with the handbag and all its contents and sent off to the lab.
Kim walked around the body noting the position.
The woman’s torso was face forward; her front was pressing into the ground. Her legs were bent at the knee and the right side of her face flat against the earth amongst half-house bricks and clumps of grey plaster. Nail and screw debris littered the area. Kim felt the anger begin to build in her stomach; the woman had been killed and left amongst decay and rubbish – the guts of a building that no one wanted – in an area now abandoned and unused. That fact alone told her plenty about the person who had killed her.
‘Obvious injuries?’ she asked, pushing the thoughts away. They would not help her victim now. There were no stab wounds or pools of blood and no trauma that she could see. The woman looked as though she’d just lain down for a nap amongst the strewn building materials.
Keats shook his head. ‘I think her neck has been broken. I’ll be able to confirm once I get her back to the morgue.’
Kim looked again at the position of the body and visualised the woman kneeling, the murderer behind. One good, strong twist. Immediate death and then her lifeless form falling to the ground.
A quick, functional kill that lacked the frenzy of a crime of passion. There was no presence of multiple stab wounds or cuts and bruises. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The woman’s clothes appeared all in order.
Where was the feeling? Where was the emotion? Where was the motive for killing a young mother out shopping with her child?
‘I’d estimate two to five hours,’ Keats offered even though she hadn’t asked. She’d been able to work that out for herself.
As it was late afternoon, Kim guessed the post-mortem would take place the following day.
‘First thing,’ he said, reading her thoughts.
‘Oh, Jesus, I know that frown,’ Bryant said as they headed towards the car. ‘What’s up?’
‘She didn’t need to die,’ Kim said, and then wondered where those exact words had come from.
‘Well, someone wanted her dead cos she didn’t break her own—’
‘I can’t explain it,’ she said, turning to look back at the scene. ‘It’s all so throwaway, Bryant. There was no passion, no hate, no frenzy, no message, no statement and she was just left amongst all this shit. Unless Katrina Nock was leading some kind of double life away from being a wife and mother, I really have the feeling that this woman didn’t need to die.’
Kim’s thoughts returned once more to the small child whose life was now changed for ever. It was down to her to deliver the bad news.
Eight
Kate Sewell closed the car door and glanced at her Hermes handbag, bought courtesy of her commission on the book deal brokered between her client and one of the big five publishing houses.
Tyra Brooks was not her normal type of client, and the back of beyond in the Black Country was not where she’d seen herself in her late thirties, but needs must, she told herself.
The two of them had needed each other.
At twenty-eight years of age, Tyra’s glamour modelling days had been numbered. Waning interest in her physical attributes had led to her being dropped by the agency that had represented her for ten years. Right at the time Kate had lost her last high-paying client, who had been poached by a swanky agency, promising to take his mediocre acting talent to another level and make him a household name. Good luck with that, she thought. Ryan Hardwick was a handsome, arrogant man whose delusions far outweighed his ability. He was also a self-sabotager, scared of success and increased his alcohol intake at the first sign of a decent role. It hadn’t been her holding him back, it had been himself, but she’d let them discover that on their own.
Regardless of his shortcomings, Ryan’s piecemeal work had kept her business going, along with the other half-dozen clients she had left, and her hands were still full because Tyra was almost as delusional as Ryan had been.
The only person who hadn’t known Tyra’s career was on the decline was Tyra herself. Even though fuller lips and bigger boobs hadn’t reignited the interest, she still felt that it was only a matter of time before she was back on top. A blip. A dry spell. What Tyra hadn’t realised was that each surgery was making her look less like herself, and that the gigantic boobs had turned her into a novelty fixture. When approaching Tyra to represent her interests, Kate had envisaged a year or two of minor bookings, eking out the last dregs of the woman’s career, to help pay her mortgage until she secured a couple of high-paying clients.
That was until Tyra had revealed she’d accidentally slept with a well-known footballer after a drunken night in a Birmingham club. Kate had been unsure about the accidental part. How did one accidentally sleep with someone else, she had wondered, but she’d seen the financial opportunities straight away.
Together they’d devised a plan to maximise exposure and had started a marketing campaign of teasing out the information, dropping hints via social media and her YouTube channel. With the sniff of scandal in the air, Tyra’s followers on all platforms had tripled, and Kate had chosen the perfect moment for the identity of the footballer to be revealed. His denial had been met with photos from Tyra’s phone of the two of them, and social media had exploded. Hashtags placed carefully had kept the story trending for days. The offers had started rolling in: TV appearances, radio interviews, podcasts. An interview with a national newspaper had been followed by three publishing houses bidding for her tell-all, especially once Tyra alluded to the fact he wasn’t the only celebrity who had graced her bed. The deal had been secured, and Tyra’s memories had been turned into a book by a ghost writer Kate had used before.
It had been hard going. She’d worked seventeen-hour days for months. She’d spent many hours of that time massaging the ever-inflating ego of her client, who was relishing the limelight and eager to wring every last bit of drama from the situation.
But the tide had begun to turn. Kate could feel it. The dignified silence of the wife who had been wronged was damaging the campaign. An all-out bitch fight would have been better.
Oblivious to the change in tone to some of the messages, Tyra was milking the situation for every hour it had left in it, but more and more trolls were coming out of the woodwork and the name-calling had turned meaner. The idle death threats from the keyboard warriors were met with the same response: ignored and blocked. They were vague, vitriolic, violent and forgotten by the sender minutes later. It was par for the course. Anyone in the public eye was a magnet for the haters.
It wasn’t a situation she hadn’t been in before, but human nature dictated that hateful characters made more money.
In the meeting, she’d been asked if there was any direct threat to Tyra Brooks and she had said no.
She glanced towards her mobile phone sitting in the hands-free cradle.
She had lied.
Nine
Stacey paused before knocking on Lesley Skipton’s door. Was she really being fair to the woman raking it all up again if everyone felt there was no real hope of closure?
As a victim of rape, Lesley had already been subjected to enough. Not least the physical attack, but everything else that came afterwards.
Rape investigation had moved on in the last twenty years, but women still had to fight through the disbelief and doubt that came into the eyes of everyone to whom they told the story: police officers, medical staff, solicitors, a jury, in some cases even friends and family.
It was the only crime Stacey knew where everyone immediately looked for a loophole. Was she drunk? Was she bei
ng provocative? Was her skirt short? Did she invite it? No one accused a mugging victim of waving their wallet in the air or a burglary victim of advertising their worldly goods in the window. Only in cases of sexual assault was the victim made to feel like they had invited the crime. Stacey was yet to imagine any action at all that a woman could do to invite the horror of a sexual assault.
No, Stacey decided as she knocked the door, she wasn’t making a mistake in trying to get justice for a rape victim. And so what if the original investigating team thought it was a done deal? If she’d learned anything from her boss over the years, it was that you didn’t give up on something just because it was hard.
The door was opened a fraction by a fair-haired girl with the majority of her hair tied back in a ponytail. A few wisps had broken free and framed a pretty face reddened by activity. The sportswear indicated she’d been doing some kind of physical activity.
Stacey held up her ID above the second chain fixed to the door. ‘May I come in?’
Lesley frowned. ‘For what?’
Stacey would have liked to explain inside, but she could understand the woman’s reticence in allowing a stranger into her home.
‘I’m from Halesowen station and I’m taking another look at your case.’
‘It was handled by Brierley Hill,’ she said, narrowing her eyes as though she’d caught her out in a lie.
‘Please, ring Halesowen and check. I’ll wait,’ Stacey said, taking a step away from the door.
Lesley closed the door and locked it.
Stacey took another step back and noted the small CCTV camera looking down at her. The green wheelie bin to the left of the front door overflowed with broken-up delivery boxes. In front of that were two empty glass milk bottles.
Stacey heard the locks slide before the door opened for a second time, but wider.
Deadly Cry: An absolutely gripping crime thriller packed with suspense (Detective Kim Stone Crime Thiller Book 13) Page 3