The Phoenix Series Box Set 2

by Ted Tayler

  They said their goodbyes and promised to keep in touch with regular reports on any progress. Phil told them not to worry. They’d do their utmost to trace their daughter and get her to at least make contact if she couldn’t be persuaded to come home. As they walked to the car, Wayne sighed.

  “What a bummer.”

  “You wanted us to take on ‘mispers’ to keep our heads above water financially,” Phil muttered.

  When they got back in the office, they began the laborious task of going through the contact numbers they had collected. Her so-called friends from the girl’s school seemed reticent to get involved. Former boyfriends were on the list and they swore blind they hadn’t heard from her, nor did they realise she was heavily into drugs.

  “Yeah, right,” said Wayne, “lying scrotes. One or all of them were probably her supplier. That’s not uncommon. I think we need to dig deeper.”

  “How do you mean?” Phil had asked.

  “Let’s look at their social media accounts. Those will give us a clearer picture; we can check out their friend's lists too, if we’re lucky, Carrie Ditchburn might be in there somewhere.”

  “Surely, they would tell her parents if they knew something?” Phil had asked.

  He had thought how Erica would react if Shaun or Tracey ever ran away. If kids who had been to their house, played in the garden, or always received an invitation to a birthday party, had held back information, she would have laid into them and their parents, something chronic.

  “They can be a close-knit bunch, teenagers,” said Wayne. “Someone around Redgrove Park knows at least a former address, or a contact number for Miss Ditchburn, I’ll bet.”

  “A lot of time has passed, Wayne,” Phil said. “I lost touch with nearly everyone I was at school with, by the time I finished my probationary period.”

  “Yeah, well you joined the police, boss; what did you expect?”

  “Fair point.”

  It took them a while to find a clue to Carrie’s whereabouts. Phil had been forced to send the Ditchburn family vague but positive reports. He imagined them reading what he had written and believed he too had ‘switched off.’

  Wayne found a girl who had been friends with Carrie at junior school. They met at the local Pony Club. Josie Dymond now worked at a busy livery yard. Horses were her life if the photographs on her Facebook and Instagram accounts were anything to go by. Josie had well over a thousand friends, across her social media accounts. Her posts suggested a well-adjusted, gregarious young woman, who worked hard at a job she loved and partied hard at weekends.

  “Here we are, boss,” Wayne cried. “I’ve found her.”

  Phil had scooted his chair across to where Wayne sat. He looked at the screen.

  “What a beautiful looking animal,” he said.

  “Fifteen hands, and eleven years old, it tells me in the comments underneath,” said Wayne. “Here are a few of Josie Dymond, out with friends and family. She’s got a friend called Carrie Redgrove. Her Facebook account only shows the female avatar, no personal photos. There’s no indication of age, relationships, nothing. She presents as being from London, and working at being unemployed.”

  “So, young Carrie changed her name to throw her family off the scent. I wonder why Josie Dymond didn’t appear on the list the family gave us?”

  “Everything about this young lady suggests a well-to-do upbringing; there won’t be a string of detentions, rehab sessions, and drug-dealing boyfriends in Josie’s background. Her parents probably distanced her from Carrie, once the trouble started, but you know what kids are. Josie and Carrie undoubtedly bonded at the Pony Club, and that bond was never broken. No matter how different the path their lives took in the following years.”

  “You’re a sentimental old bugger, aren’t you Wayne?” said Phil. “But like nearly every copper I’ve worked with over the years; a good judge of character.”

  “Stop it, boss,” said Wayne, still scrolling through the history he discovered on Josie Dymond’s Facebook page, “you’ll make me blush. Right, here we go. The first contact I can find is ten months ago, Josie had a wild weekend after the Cheltenham Festival. There was a photo posted showing Josie with a group of jockeys and grooms, at a club. Carrie sent a ‘like’, posted a few emoji’s, and then this comment.”

  “What are you like? Good to see you’re still riding, lol.” Phil read Carrie’s comment aloud.

  “Look at what Josie said in her reply, boss,” said Wayne, “she asked Carrie to direct message her so they could catch up. Josie had clearly not heard from Carrie for ages. We can’t access that side of things, so we’re going to need to have a word with Josie Dymond.”

  “When was the latest contact, that was out in the open, Wayne?”

  “I can’t find anything in the past five weeks, boss. That might not mean much. They could chat regularly, either online or by phone. Just because Carrie ditched her mobile when she left doesn’t mean she doesn’t own one now.”

  The following morning, the two men had driven up through the Gloucestershire countryside. They found Josie Dymond hard at work, grooming one of the dozen horses in her charge.

  The attractive, well-spoken young woman was wary of their questions at first; but Phil used his experience to persuade her that Carrie’s parents deserved to know the truth. He promised to keep Carrie’s whereabouts secret if that was what she wished. In the end, Josie agreed to meet them in the local inn at lunchtime.

  With a soft drink and a baguette on the table in front of her, Josie began her story. Wayne sat beside her with a pint of lager and tucked into a steak and ale pie, with chips and gravy. Phil sat opposite her. The slimline tonic, with ice, and a mushroom risotto grew less appetising with each sentence the young woman uttered.

  Within months of relocating to London, Carrie was smoking up to eight joints a day. She lost her job in a fast-food outlet because of her frequent no-shows. Most of her friends used cocaine and heroin, but Carrie resisted until a bitter break-up with a boyfriend left her depressed. Josie asked if Phil knew Carrie had tried to kill herself a couple of years ago; he nodded.

  “Carrie started taking cocaine,” Josie continued, “she convinced herself it would be okay, but it wasn't. She bought more and got into a routine of doing three-day weekend coke binges and then having four days off during the week to recover. Carrie wasn’t working. She had several boyfriends she mentioned, but I always got the impression they were doing her more harm than good.”

  “Did she mention any names?” Phil asked.

  “There was a Dwight she talked of until recently; he had an unusual surname. She only mentioned it once. I think he had just hit her, so when she messaged me, she referred to him by his surname alone.”

  “If you could remember it, it would be a great help,” Wayne told Josie.

  Josie picked at her food for a while. Wayne ordered another pint. Phil was driving back to Bath, so he sipped slowly from the slimline tonic. The ice had long gone.

  “Carrie was always trying to get me to lend her money,” Josie continued. She stared at a beer mat on the table in front of her. “She pretended she needed it for clothes for an interview. I felt guilty not giving in, but I knew she would use my money to buy drugs. We were close for a while until my parents kept us apart because she started being disruptive at school, always in trouble. I don’t have money to throw around, even though I work hard at a job I love. I manage, from month to month. Try to keep a bit back for a holiday abroad, you know how things are. I’m like other kids in their teens and early twenties these days. I just live for today.”

  “Did she get another job? Where did she work?” Phil asked.

  “Carrie never hung on to any work she got. She lost lots of different jobs. She was mostly waitressing. She was high all the time and wouldn't show up for work. It was after another place fired her that this Dwight hit her. I don’t think it was the first time or the last.”

  Wayne told Josie that it was odds on Dwight was her dealer. It wa
s only too common. A drug dealer finds a vulnerable girl needing a regular fix, and that’s the basis of their relationship. If she kept delivering the goods; everything stayed sweet. If her habit became so powerful that she started to become ‘clingy’ or demanding, it wasn’t long before the poor girl got a slap to keep her in line.

  Josie was almost out of time. She kept looking at her watch.

  “Even the domestic violence wasn't enough to persuade her to kick the habit, but at least she tried to escape the clutches of this odious Dwight character. Within days of leaving him, things got worse. Carrie found herself a new group of friends, who introduced her to mephedrone.”

  Phil had come across this Class B drug in his time in the police force. He knew it was cheaper than coke and gave users a better high.

  “So, what happened then, Josie?” he asked.

  “Carrie called me one weekend. She had been out of it for days, hardly sleeping or eating. She was in a nightclub with her new friends, and Dwight arrived. He dragged her to his car, and they drove back to his flat in Kilburn. He beat her and told her not to run away again. She said he threatened to kill her. She started using heroin again, more often. I begged her to come home; I was frightened for her.”

  “How did she respond to that?” Phil asked.

  “She laughed. Said there was nothing for her in Cheltenham anymore. The last time she messaged me, she reckoned she’d got a job in Forest Gate. Moved out of Kilburn and was in a flat with several students, desperately trying to get help with her addiction. It sounded as if, at least, she was serious about turning her life around. I haven’t heard from her since. Look, I need to get moving. My lunch break is practically over. If I remember Dwight’s surname, can I call you?”

  Wayne had produced an HSS business card and handed it over. Josie had run for the pub door and left the car park in her Ford Ka before Phil and Wayne left the bar.

  “Kilburn and Forest Gate, then boss,” Wayne said, as they sat in the car for a while, before heading back to Bath. “Twenty miles isn’t much distance to put between you and someone who threatened to kill you, though, is it?

  “At least we have names and places we can follow up on now,” Phil said. “We’ll take a trip up to London tomorrow and see what we can find.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The next day proved to be the first of several trips. Nathan Ditchburn hit the nail on the head; trying to find a missing person in the capital was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There were hundreds of flats containing students in Forest Gate and hundreds of food outlets that might have employed Carrie as a waitress.

  Phil pointed out to Wayne as they returned from their first visit, that the photograph they picked up from the girl’s mother was worse than useless. It was four years out of date, and her appearance would have altered dramatically, even if it hadn’t been ravaged by the effects of constant drug use.

  Wayne questioned whether they could even guarantee she was still calling herself Carrie. If Dwight was serious about following up on his threat, then a name change, as well as putting distance between them, would be a sensible precaution.

  “We’ll keep trying, Wayne,” Phil has said, “at least we’re in the right district. We’ll find a student, or a café owner, who recognises her description in the end. I’ll check up on the local support services too; charities and drop-in centres. Maybe Carrie was serious about getting clean. With luck, she could be in rehab; and that’s why we can’t find her. We’ll come back tomorrow, and after we’ve looked in those places, I reckon we should drive across the city to Kilburn. Find Dwight, and you can lean on him, get him to spill the beans on what he knows. Even if he hasn’t seen Carrie since she ran away from him, it will cheer me up to see him take a dose of his own medicine.”

  “It will be my pleasure, boss,” Wayne said.

  The next day followed a familiar routine. Doors were knocked; cafes and fast-food establishments visited. Nobody professed to be living with or employing a twenty-year-old girl from the West Country. None of the drug support services had ever heard of Carrie Anything. By mid-afternoon, Phil and Wayne transferred to Kilburn.

  Wayne went for a wander, alone. He visited a couple of cafes and bars, looking for likely customers of a toe rag such as Dwight. It took him thirty minutes. When he returned to the car, he told Phil he struck up a conversation with an ex-copper in a pub. Wayne told him Dwight Thacker could be found in a bar on the High Road in the afternoons.

  “Thacker? That’s the unusual surname Josie couldn’t recall. It has to be our guy,” Phil said.

  “I got background on our man, Dwight, too,” Wayne continued, “this guy was at the front desk over in Harlesden for years. He’s known Dwight since he was a teenager. He’s a former gang member. We’re looking for a pale-skinned black man of twenty-eight, with a goatee beard, dressed in designer clothes. By the age of fifteen, he had been arrested several times for street muggings. By sixteen he was earning up to two hundred pounds a day as a drug runner. He travelled across London by tube and taxi, and at eighteen he was firmly established as a street dealer. He moved away from the capital in his early twenties, when the police closed in, to avoid having his collar felt. This bloke heard reports of Dwight earning up to two grand a day selling crack cocaine and heroin in small towns across Essex for the next few years. Somehow, he always evaded the police. They could never pin anything on him. Around eighteen months ago, he slunk back to Kilburn and was dealing again on his old patch.”

  “So, he moved back to Kilburn. One of his newer customers was Carrie Ditchburn.” said Phil “This could be where we discover where she lived and worked before she tried to get away from Dwight’s clutches. I wonder why he returned to Kilburn? It sounds as if he made better money in the provinces.”

  “Evidently, he wasted the money he earned on the classic gangster lifestyle. Lots of bling, fast cars, and expensive clothes. He visited several nightclubs every week where he spent a small fortune on champagne. Dwight never took the highly addictive drugs he sold. He smoked weed, but nothing else. I guess the money ran out, and he went back to where he started. Scraping a living on losers like Carrie, dying for a fix, who slept with him, to keep getting supplied with the buzz they craved.”

  Phil and Wayne found the bar. But there was no Dwight.

  “We can come back tomorrow, boss?”

  “Yeah, let’s find a place to have a coffee, maybe grab a bite to eat. Then we’ll get off home.”

  The Irish café owner had kissed the Blarney Stone. Bridie Carragher never stopped talking from the moment Wayne opened the door to ‘The Wishing Well’ and stepped across the threshold. Phil had a sneaking suspicion she fancied Wayne. The toasted tea-cake his colleague got with his mug of coffee, was half as big again as the measly offering he received. She couldn’t walk past their table without placing an arm around Wayne’s wide shoulders, and asking if he needed anything else. When she collected their empty plates, Wayne was wiping the butter off his chin with a serviette. Bridie leant over, her top falling open, offering Wayne a close-up of her ample bosom.

  “Ooh, you’ve made a mess,” she gushed, “what will we do with you?”

  Phil decided Wayne was unlikely to answer for a while. His eyes were fixated on the Mountains of Mourne. Phil pulled Carrie’s photo out of his jacket pocket and nudged the lady proprietor.

  “Have you ever seen this young girl around here, by any chance?” he asked.

  “What’s it to you?” Bridie replied and turned back to check Wayne’s chin.

  “You would be doing me a big favour if you had seen her,” Wayne said, now recovering his composure.

  “That’s young Carrie if I’m not mistaken, but she’s thinner these days. She worked here for a while. Well, ‘worked’ is a generous description of what she did for me. I started her on, against my better judgement, after they fired her from the pizza place next door. She messed me around, borrowed money against her wages, then one day she left me without a word. She mixed with s
ome dodgy people; they were into everything. I hope she’s not your daughter, darling. A nice girl turned rotten, I’m afraid.”

  “No, she’s not family,” Wayne said, “we’re trying to trace for her parents. They’re desperate to find her. You don’t know where she is these days, by any chance?”

  “I might still have a mobile number for her, my love; but I can’t stop to hunt for it now, it’s coming up to my busy time. Drop by tomorrow. I’ll have something tasty to offer you. What do you say?”

  Phil decided it was time to drag Wayne away towards the relative safety of their car. As the cafe owner hovered by the door with her arm stretched out towards Wayne’s shoulder, Phil promised her they would both be back tomorrow.

  “Just wait until you taste my Guinness cake, darling,” she had cried, as Wayne was whisked away from her clutches.

  “Bloody hell, boss,” Wayne complained, “she was full-on, wasn’t she?”

  “You weren’t evening wearing the uniform, Wayne. Maybe, it’s your body that’s been attracting the women?”

  “I’m comfortably covered, that’s true, boss. Some women prefer that. If we can forget about her for the moment; be thankful we found someone who knew Carrie and might even put us in touch with her.”

  “It was a result, that’s for sure,” Phil said. They drove home to Bath in a far better mood than on previous evenings.

  The good mood didn’t last.

  After she closed ‘The Wishing Well’ for the night, Bridie climbed the stairs to her flat over the café. A strong coffee, with a shot of Jameson’s, was required. As she waited for the kettle to boil, she sorted out food for the cats. Then she wandered into her living room and turned on the TV. She wouldn’t watch much of it. When you’re faced with several hours alone, before falling into bed dog-tired after yet another fourteen-hour day, then it’s good to hear another human voice. The TV was a comforting background to her lonely drinking.

  Bridie nursed the mug of coffee and Irish whiskey as she made her way over to her sofa. Her thoughts returned to that customer she had served this afternoon. He was something to get excited about. Bridie sat and let the drink warm her. The fantasies she allowed herself would have got her into terrible trouble with the nuns at the convent school back home. There was something she promised to do for them; what had it been? Ah yes, a phone number for Miss Carrie Redgrove.