Right to Kill

by John Barlow

  ‘So, how long’s he been gone? Tuesday, is that right?’

  ‘Aye. Tuesday.’

  ‘You’ve rung around the hospitals?’

  She nodded, then reached down to the floor for a can and took a drink. He didn’t recognize the brand.

  ‘Want one?’

  He smiled. ‘Depends what it is.’

  She took another gulp, almost grimacing.

  ‘Cider. Cheap stuff. I got a lager in the fridge.’

  ‘I’m all right, thanks.’

  She manoeuvred the can back down to the floor with the deliberateness of someone trying to stay on the right side of comatose.

  ‘Sure?’ she said, gesturing towards the floor. ‘This stuff’s cheap as shit.’

  You can’t argue with that, he thought, scanning the place for evidence of the missing son, and finding none. No photos, no games console, no men’s magazines, in fact nothing to read at all. There were the two sofas, the TV, and a boarded-up hearth with a gas fire, shelves on either side stacked with DVDs. There were a few odds and ends, a pile of opened envelopes, a decorative mug from somewhere he couldn’t make out, a huge red glass ashtray that looked like it’d been stolen from a pub several decades ago.

  ‘This your house, is it?’

  ‘Yeah, right! I rent it from Mr Azrim. He’s all right. Been here a while.’

  ‘How long’s a while?’

  ‘Four, five year.’

  ‘Do you work, Jane? Can I call you Jane?’

  ‘You can call me what you want, love. And no. I mean, yes and no.’

  Joe sighed.

  ‘I’m not here about your benefit claims. Could I have a straight answer?’

  ‘I’m on the social. I do a bit of cleaning. Cash in hand. Haven’t done it for a while. It’s not regular.’

  He nodded, considered Ms Shaw’s lot. Housing benefit for the rent. The cleaning money for cheap cider. Over the last twelve months he’d thought about doing something similar himself. Downsizing.

  ‘Craig’s dad? Is he worried?’

  She looked for her cigarettes, then took an age getting one to her lips and lighting it.

  ‘Never been a dad,’ she said, staring at the tip of her cigarette as it smouldered in her hand.

  ‘No one at all? Anyone Craig might have gone to, or contacted?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Doesn’t know who his dad is. Was.’

  ‘Dead?’

  She raised her head, keeping it as steady as she could.

  ‘Dunno. I never knew.’

  ‘And there’s no one else he might have gone to stay with? Family? Friends? Have there been any arguments recently, with you or anyone else?’

  She shook her head.

  He sat back, took a few breaths. The stink was getting bearable, and the sofa was pretty comfortable. Leather’s definitely the way to go. Pricey, though. You can’t afford it the moment, Joe…

  ‘Have you lived in Wortley long?’

  She took a long draw on her cigarette. He watched as she sucked the smoke in. There was something unnatural about it. Her shoulders actually lifted to expand her lungs, as if to get more smoke into them.

  ‘Leeds. Here and there.’

  He didn’t press the point. He sensed that Jane Shaw would be on file back at Elland Road.

  ‘I’m from round here as well,’ he said. ‘My grandma lived across from the Brick ’til the day she died. And my Uncle Frank started out as a clerk at Leeds Fireclay, just after the war.’

  He thought about his uncle for a second. Francesco Romano. Dead now. Didn’t stay a clerk for long. The Romanos? We’re not clerks.

  When he looked up, she was lost.

  ‘Fireclay?’

  ‘They made ceramics,’ he said. ‘Bricks, pots, plates, that kind of thing.’

  This wasn’t getting him very far.

  ‘OK. So, these cases normally resolve themselves. Does he drive? Has he got a vehicle at the moment?’

  ‘He’s got mine. He borrows it.’

  ‘Model, registration?’

  She coughed. A big loop of phlegm crackled in her throat. She swallowed it back down.

  ‘Toyota something. It’s purple.’

  ‘Number plate?’

  She came close to a smile, then looked for an ashtray. There was a saucer at her feet halfway under the sofa. She pulled it out and used that.

  ‘Never mind. I’ll find it,’ he said. ‘The car’s registered in your name, at this address?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And he uses it to do what? Does he have a job?’

  That semi-smile again.

  ‘You know what he does.’

  ‘Full-time, is it? He sells drugs, nothing else?’

  ‘Needs a car.’

  He was losing patience.

  ‘So, Jane Shaw, here’s the thing. Your son’s a grown man. And he’s only been gone two days. Tell me, why am I here on a Thursday evening, when I should be at home tucking into a Sainsbury’s cottage pie for one and cracking open a nice bottle of Côtes du Rhône?’

  She took the can and drank what remained of the cider.

  ‘’Cos he hasn’t paid his rent.’

  ‘That’s why you rang the police?’

  Her head was unsteady, but she was working to keep it stable. She was drunk, but there was a jumpiness to her, hidden somewhere beneath the languid movement of her body.

  ‘He’s not here, is he? I got the right.’

  ‘And does he supply you with anything? To pay his rent?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘So you’re drinking cheap cider as a substitute? What are we talking about? What do you use?’

  ‘Use? Owt. Owt I can get.’

  He shifted forward in his seat, considering a charge of wasting police time. But her son had been officially reported as missing. Call it a catch twenty-two. Call it bullshit. He had no choice.

  ‘When did he last answer his phone?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  She recited his number from memory with some difficulty. Joe dialled it into his own phone and called. Unavailable.

  ‘Got any recent photos?’

  She twisted on the sofa, pulled a phone from her pocket. Juggling her cigarette and the phone, she made an attempt to find the photos.

  ‘Here,’ she said, finally passing it across to him.

  Android, like he used to have. Easier to find stuff than on his bloody iPhone. He opened the image gallery and flicked through the most recent ones. There he was, Craig Shaw, ugly and unimpressive, a selfie with his mum in Nando’s. There were a few other shots taken in similar surroundings, Craig eating a burger, Craig drinking a beer, Craig pulling a stupid face and pointing at it with both index fingers, as if otherwise you might miss it.

  Joe flicked through a few dozen others. Mostly mother and son, a few images taken by mistake, blurred and indecipherable. Then a young woman. Just one shot, a portrait, the background dull, unfocused.

  ‘Who’s the girl?’

  She was young. Pretty, in a devious kind of way, willing the camera to find her unattractive, knowing that it couldn’t. Long black hair, single nose piercing, her make-up dark and severe.

  ‘What girl?’ she said, fussing with her empty can.

  He passed her the phone. She squinted at it briefly, then gave it back to him.

  ‘Dunno. He lost his phone a few weeks ago. Used mine for a while.’

  Joe stood up, took the phone from her.

  ‘Can I borrow this? I’ll have it back to you in the morning. What’s the password?’

  ‘One-nine-nine-six.’

  He wrote the code in his notebook. Addresses he could remember, passwords not so much. All his passwords were written down on a slip of paper in his wallet.

  ‘He turned out bad,’ she said, sensing that he was ready to go. ‘Didn’t deserve to.’

  ‘Craig? Why did he turn out bad?’

  She looked at him. For the first time her head was steady.

 
; ‘When he were a kid, his mother were a friggin’ junkie. His dad were friggin’ nowhere.’

  She paused, looked away, embarrassed at the description of herself, of the world into which she’d brought another human being.

  ‘Are you gonna find him?’

  ‘I’m going to try. If I call around tomorrow at ten o’clock will you be sober? We have to do a formal interview.’

  ‘Could you make it eleven?’

  ‘Half-ten. Get a good night’s sleep. I’ll find him.’

  5

  No assumptions should be made about the priority of police action until all the facts are ascertained… If in doubt, think the worst until the contrary is proved.

  GUIDANCE ON THE MANAGEMENT, RECORDING AND INVESTIGATION OF MISSING PERSONS

  Joe sat at his desk. It wasn’t unusual for him to be in the ops room this late in the evening, and no one on the night shift was surprised to see him there. When he was a young DC he’d been absurdly impressive, working all hours, so dogged and stubborn that cases seemed to get solved simply because he wouldn’t give up, always a new line of enquiry, a new way of looking at things. These days he was on mispers. Cool respect was about all he got. That plus a touch of schadenfreude, after his return from France, tail between his legs.

  He thought about giving Sam a ring. Too late? When did parents get so worried about invading their children’s privacy? Sam wasn’t a child, though. He was nineteen and in his first year of Medicine at Edinburgh. He was doing fine, that’s what he said whenever the two of them spoke. Everything’s fine, Dad.

  Text instead: Just checking in. All OK? Dad. Sam always poked fun at him for signing his messages. But he couldn’t help doing it. In fact, he didn’t want to stop, just like he didn’t want to stop doing lots of things: reading printed newspapers, buying stuff in shops, writing letters… The joys of browsing in a record store? Jeff Bezos deserved a good kicking for putting paid to that little pleasure in life.

  He was waiting for technical assistance to become available. Missing persons don’t get priority unless they’re high risk. Craig Shaw wasn’t in that category, not yet. Joe had the risk assessment form in front of him. But until he could get some straight answers from the victim’s mother, there was no point in making any kind of assessment.

  Remember, if in doubt, think the worst until the contrary is proved.

  He was ready to think the absolute worst. He had the rest of the paperwork in front of him too, including a National Missing Persons Database form and a SIRENE European Missing Persons form. But none of this could be done until Jane Shaw decided to sober up. Meanwhile, he’d have to wait his turn for technical assistance, and he was hard pushed to imagine who wouldn’t get ahead of him in the queue.

  Jane Shaw’s phone was on the desk, along with a number of print-outs that he’d assembled over the last hour or so. He picked up the phone and found the image gallery. Mother-and-son shots, nothing out of the ordinary. She was smiling in all of them. Her eyes were bright and clear. It made such a difference. Were they happy moments, or just posed? The happiness seemed natural. He saw the humanity in her face, the softness of her soul. It made him ache with sadness.

  That’s why he was still a DS at forty-four, working the cases no one else wanted. It wasn’t that everything had gone wrong in Lyon, the failed leap to greater things, then the humiliation of coming back. And it wasn’t because he was too soft for this job. He’d seen his share of horrors, more than a decade in plain clothes, the full gamut of criminal squalor.

  No, this was different. Things were out of kilter. He felt it every morning when he woke up. There was a kind of reticence in him. His former boldness was ebbing away, his instincts for a case, the sense that things would always get resolved. And the optimism. He used to have that in bucketloads. Not now.

  Whatever was happening to him, it was too late for a career change. He was just getting back on his feet after France, plus he was chipping in as much as he could with Sam’s course fees. Edinburgh University was expensive. Everything was bloody expensive. He was stuck in CID, and he couldn’t even afford a leather sofa.

  He thumbed through the images on the phone. Jane Shaw a junkie? He looked at those clear, bright eyes as he ran the story over in his mind. She reported her son as missing because she needed a fix. It just didn’t ring true. She seemed to be doing all right with the cider and the contract cleaning. Nah.

  He’d already checked Jane Shaw’s Toyota: it was a maroon Corolla, registered in her name. He also had the ANPR data on the car for the last couple of months, all sightings of the number plate traced onto a map of West Yorkshire. By the look of it, Craig didn’t work in Leeds. Most of the trips were a few miles south, in and around the old mill towns of Dewsbury, Batley and Cleckheaton.

  Cleckheaton. There’s a name to conjure with. Next to it on the map was Heckmondwike. Someone was having a laugh when they named those towns. Domesday Book scribes after a few jars of mead?

  He studied the map. The car’s journeys were indicated by red lines, the thicker the line the more frequent the trip. Along with the map there was a whole sheaf of print-outs, logs of journey times, plus a summary that flagged up obvious patterns for further investigation. All the analyses had been done with a computer application, of course. No hard-nosed detection necessary, human intelligence rendered obsolete.

  The car had been making regular trips to all these towns to the south of Leeds. One stop-off had been highlighted, an old mill in Batley, now converted into a shopping centre. The car never stopped there for more than a few minutes. Every Monday evening at almost exactly the same time, in and out of the car park. The pick-up point, perhaps? If so, it might be used for more pick-ups, more sellers, part of a bigger operation. He’d have to pass that on to Kirklees CID. It was outside the operating area of Leeds District.

  Other trips included longer stops, half an hour, an hour, sometimes more. They were logged for frequency and timings. Most were pretty regular. Craig appeared to have a fixed itinerary. Mondays were in and around Batley. Tuesdays were Cleckheaton, and so on, one weirdly named town after another.

  Craig Shaw had the mill-town run sewn up. That’s how it looked, a regular sales route, which implied regular customers, or a small-scale supply chain. This was a nice lead, a bit of potential, better than investigating some pusher working the streets. Something didn’t fit, though. Craig was living with his mum, borrowing her car and her phone. Nah. If you’re picking up a week’s gear every Monday, same place, somebody trusts you. It’s steady trade. You’re higher up the ladder. You wouldn’t be borrowing your mum’s phone. And what does a drug dealer do as soon as he has any cash? Buys a decent motor. He doesn’t drive around in his mum’s old Corolla. Yet no vehicle had ever been registered in Craig Shaw’s name on the DVLA database.

  He checked his watch. He’d already phoned Alex, head of Digital Forensics. Ring him again? No, best not rush him. Don’t make it sound like a favour. Not for a case like this. If it even was a case.

  He looked at the information he already had. Jane Shaw’s police record was limited to a few cautions for possession, the last one fifteen years ago. Nothing since then. He’d ordered her DWP file, but that wouldn’t be available until the morning. He rifled through the remaining papers. The rest of her story checked out. She had been at that address for nearly six years, and the car was legally hers.

  Think: her son went missing for a handful of hours and she rang the police? He repeated it to himself. She rang the police. Because Craig hadn’t paid his rent, in kind or otherwise? Bullshit. There was something she wasn’t telling him.

  Alex Ambler walked into the operations room. He was lanky and unshaven, and had the air of someone who’d just dragged himself away from a very long game of Dungeons and Dragons. Yet despite the bed-head and a permanent yawn, Dr Ambler was the best-qualified person in Leeds Police HQ. After a PhD in computing, he’d got bored with university life and applied for a job in Forensic IT. A few years later he was a demi
-god at Elland Road. A number of high-profile cases had gone to trial thanks to his expert intervention, and he’d even begun to publish articles in academic journals on cybercrime. He may have been a support worker, but Alex outshone the lot of ’em in CID.

  He was wearing faded black jeans and a Whitesnake T-shirt with holes in it. The effect was a touch rebellious, bordering disrespectful. But no one dared to mention it. They all needed Alex, right to the top. They needed him more than they needed the Chief Superintendent, who in fact no one needed at all.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’m here.’

  There was no small talk with the King of Tech.

  Joe held up the phone.

  ‘Is it possible to track the movements of this phone for the last couple of months? Also, is there a way to find out where the photos on it were taken?’

  Alex shot him a look of derision. Mock-derision? Hard to tell, but he and Joe had an understanding. Alex showed Joe nothing but contempt; Joe showed Alex nothing but subservience. They’d known each other for six or seven years, and Joe Romano was one of the few people that Alex genuinely got on with at Elland Road. The feeling was mutual.

  ‘Are you asking me because you really don’t know, or because you want me to do it for you and you’re being polite?’

  ‘Both, actually.’

  ‘Is that a witness’s phone? Why not just copy the photos across to yours?’

  Joe pulled the brand-new iPhone from his pocket.

  ‘Sam told me to get this. I hardly know how to turn the bloody thing on, never mind copy images to it.’

  With a massive sigh, Alex took Jane Shaw’s phone, flicking through a few of its features in as many seconds, as if it was a source of minor irritation.

  ‘You want locations for all the photos?’

  ‘No, just one of a young woman, portrait shot, dark hair, nose piercing.’

  ‘OK… Found it. Give me a few minutes,’ he said as he left. ‘There’s software for all this stuff.’

  Joe knew. They had software for everything these days. At some point in the future, data would simply be fed into a massive computer program. Vehicle tracking, phone tracking, social security payments, fingerprints, credit card transactions, CCTV face and gait recognition… Crimes would be solved instantly, just as soon as the data was in. The culprits could be taken straight to jail, and coppers would be downgraded to modern-day rat-catchers.