I rubbed my forehead with a sigh. Perhaps a brush with death like this would be the incentive Victor needed to straighten his life out, but he was thirty-three. I was realistic enough to know that when full-grown adults had been living a life like his for as long as he had, they often didn’t want to change. Or if they did, they didn’t know how to and struggled to see it through. We’d do what we could, but the system often failed these people by finding them too late. If Victor had received proper support and help when he was in his teens, fresh out of a foster home and picked up for smoking weed while driving, maybe things wouldn’t be as they were now.
We could only work with the present, though, and I refocused my attention back on the task at hand. Stephen turned up as I was finishing reading the report, and I filled him in as he was getting sat down.
“Plus, Adams sent over Louisa Lowe’s death certificate. It’s like Angela Rider said, Louisa died over ten years ago,” I finished up.
“What?” He lifted his eyebrows. “None of that makes any sense. Why wouldn’t Louisa’s husband know that?”
“They were separated, I think, but it doesn’t make much sense unless someone deliberately kept it from him. I suppose the Riders had no desire to get in touch with him if Louisa was no longer with him, but you would think Jackson would tell his own father unless he didn’t know either?”
“Jackson had to know, didn’t he?” Stephen said, his brow furrowed up in confusion. “He spent time with Max a lot, and the Riders clearly did know. Wasn’t there a funeral?”
“Must have been. Clearly, we need to talk to Max and his parents again about this. I have no clue if it’s relevant, but it’s certainly strange.” I paused. “And you know what else is strange?”
Stephen raised his eyebrows at me. “Don’t keep me in suspense,” he said dryly. I cracked a brief smile.
“The house, the one registered to Louisa Lowe’s name, it didn’t look deserted, did it?”
“It could’ve been sold on,” Stephen suggested.
“But it was still under her name, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know, mate.” Stephen blew out a breath and shook his head. “The whole thing makes about as much sense as that Inception movie.”
I chuckled at that. “Too right.”
Stephen grinned back at me for a moment before his gaze drifted back to my computer screen, and he rubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw.
“Was there anything in the DCs’ research to link Victor to Max and Jackson?”
“Annoyingly, no, and he didn’t seem to have any traceable family either. They say no man’s an island, but this Victor Roberts looks like he was.”
“He’ll have connections, even if we don’t know ‘em yet.”
“Aye, and looking over his house might give us those answers. I hope.”
I checked my watch before I headed off to fetch us both new cups of coffee. My stiff legs complained, and I stretched them out as I waited for the kettle to boil. We were heading over to Victor’s place with a couple of the DCs in a short while to scour his possessions for anything that might give us some useful information or was incriminating. By the time I’d made our drinks and twisted shut the travel cup lids, we were due to set off. I picked my phone and coat up from my desk, then Stephen and I headed down the stairs.
We drew up outside Victor’s property and found the DCs already there. The door had been rudimentarily boarded up after I had to force it open yesterday so that no one would slip in to steal anything or, more importantly, interfere with any evidence. The DCs had prised the cheap MDF off, and one of them was standing outside now, keeping an eye on things.
“Sirs,” he greeted us as we got out of the car and headed over to the door.
“How’s it looking? Everyone wearing gloves and booties?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Found anything useful?” I prompted when he didn’t say anything else.
“Uh, several disposable phones, sir. They’re packed up in the boot.” He nodded towards the patrol car he must have arrived in.
“Good work. Where did you find those?”
“In one of the bedside tables upstairs, sir. Wrapped up in an Aldi bag.”
I made a noise of acknowledgement before glancing over at Stephen. “We’ll have to ask Adams to look into them for us.”
“Man, she’s gonna love us,” he said snarkily.
“Yeah, no,” I chuckled. “We’ll definitely owe her some whisky, or she might blacklist us for good for bothering her.”
“Always a risk,” Stephen joked. We both knew that Keira was a consummate professional, but I did think a bottle of something nice wouldn’t hurt with keeping us on her good books.
The DC looked a little baffled by our conversation, and I hid a smile. We slipped on gloves and booties before we headed inside, and I patted my pocket to check for the evidence bags we’d hopefully be needing.
“Think they’ll be anything useful on those phones?” Stephen wondered aloud, calling through from the sitting room where he’d started searching. I was in the kitchen, grimacing at the sour smell of gone off food as I opened and closed the cupboards.
“I ruddy hope so,” I called back.
The DCs were working upstairs, and we settled into a rhythm of investigation, methodically checking over every inch of the modest house. It was tedious work that left my mind mostly free to wander, though I did try to keep myself focused. If I missed a subtle clue because I was daydreaming, I’d kick myself for it later.
“Hey, Mitch! Come see this,” Stephen called from the small laundry behind the kitchen. I’d been scoping out the garage but hadn’t found anything yet, and I was more than happy to step back into the laundry, which was warmer than the garage and significantly less dusty.
Stephen had pulled the cover off the boiler unit on the wall, and I stepped closer to get a good look. Inside, there were multiple baggies of unidentifiable powder. Sam would have a field day finding out what they were.
“Nice work,” I said with a low whistle. “I’m not sure I would’ve thought to take the boiler apart.”
“I wouldn’t normally, but the latch was dodgy.” He showed me how, when he tried to put the boiler cover back on, it didn’t lock in place properly.
“Opened and closed too much. Busted the latch,” I deduced, and Stephen gave a nod of agreement.
He started carefully transferring the drugs into our evidence bags, and I made myself useful by searching in the cupboards under the laundry sink. There was some half-dry, musty washing hanging up on an airer, and I checked the clothes pockets, coming up with nothing more interesting than a wet tissue.
“If those drugs match what Jackson and Max took, that could be crucial to the case.”
“Absolutely. It might help with treating Roberts in hospital, too.”
I winced, ashamed that I hadn’t thought of that first. “Aye, that too.”
Once we’d finished with the downstairs, Stephen left the baggies of drugs on the kitchen table, and we headed upstairs to see how the DCs were getting on. They looked over, startled, from where they’d been lifting up a mattress when we stuck our heads round the door.
“How’re you getting on?” I asked. One of them was holding up the mattress while the other had a poke around on the underside.
“We haven’t found anything other than the phones yet, sir,” one of them told me. She lowered the mattress after a minute when her partner concluded that there was nothing either under the bed or stitched into the mattress.
“Good work so far,” I said warmly and patted Stephen’s shoulder. “Huxley here found some baggies in the boiler downstairs, but otherwise, we’ve come up empty too. It all helps, though.”
They agreed, and one of them gave Stephen a nod of recognition. We got back to work on searching the house, with me setting to work on the upstairs bathroom whilst Stephen set up a rickety ladder so that he could climb up into the loft.
“Be careful up there,” I called to him from t
he bathroom as he climbed up. One of the DCs held the bottom of the ladder for him, but it still rattled about in a worrying way.
“Always am,” he called back before he disappeared up into the loft space.
He was coming back down the creaking ladder as I finished up with the bathroom, finding nothing more interesting than a dead moth. Stephen’s shoulders were coated with a thin layer of dust, and he sneezed as he reached the landing.
“Anything?” I asked hopefully.
“Lots of boxes, but nothing in any of them.” He gestured to the DC who’d been holding the ladder and who now had a box in her gloved hand. “I brought one down just in case. Thought we could get the lab to swab the inside.”
“They might’ve held drugs at some point, aye. Good idea,” I said.
We wrapped it up at Victor’s house and rolled out, leaving the DCs to patch the front door up with wood and nails again. It wasn’t a permanent solution, but the door was damaged enough that there was no point in bringing a locksmith to change the busted lock. A whole new door needed installing, and that was beyond what the police were willing to pay out for, especially when we were dealing with a criminal here. So I hoped Victor had house insurance.
We stopped off to grab lunch on the way back to Hewford since Stephen was complaining that he was starving hungry. Though the sky was threatening rain and had been all morning, it hadn’t started yet, so we ate outside on the wall. Sam came to join us after a few minutes, and I smiled when she sat down close to me and leaned against my side.
We didn’t talk much, passing only idle comments as we ate up. We were both busy, so there was no time to linger as much as I wanted to.
“Alright, what’s next?” Stephen asked as he returned from the breakroom. He set my coffee down on my desk, and I breathed in the sweet smell of unadulterated caffeine.
“Thanks, mate. Okay, I’ve been thinking about how these country lines operations have been moving the drugs around, right?”
“Right.”
“So Max was too young to have his own car. Either he took public transport, or he got a lift.”
“I read that trains are popular.”
“Aye, and that’d be my bet for him. But if Victor Roberts was involved in this same operation, then there’s no reason why he couldn’t have taken his car.”
“Has he even got one, though? I didn’t see one at his house.”
“I was just looking that up, and yeah, he does. I don’t know where he’s keeping it, but he has up-to-date tax and insurance for an old car on his records.”
“You want to search it?” Stephen guessed.
“I mean, that’d be good, but we don’t know where it is right now. I was planning to see whether the car would come up on the number plate automatic recognition tech. Rashford has said before that we should use it more often.”
“Sounds good to me, mate. Have you put it in yet?”
I pressed my lips together. “God, you’re impatient. I have actually, but it’s still processing.”
“You really can’t call me impatient, Mitch. Pot kettle black,” he chuckled. I grinned in return because he sure had a point, and then my computer flashed up with the results I’d been after.
“It’s loaded. Look here.”
Stephen pulled up his chair, and we scanned over the results. I hadn’t used this tech much in the past, so it took me a few moments to figure out what exactly I was looking for in the data it was giving us. Stephen was faster, and he tapped the screen.
“Look at this, York to Scarborough, York to Whitby, York to Darlington. He’s been all over the place.”
“Trips to Leeds too, to pick the stuff up, maybe.”
“I wonder why he didn’t switch out his number plates,” Stephen said.
“He didn’t have the right contacts? He didn’t think anyone would pay attention to his trips?” I shrugged. “A dodgy number plate is more likely to get you flagged these days than a real one, no matter how many trips you’re taking.”
“Yeah, true. I reckon we’re dealing with an amateur here, though.”
“Oh, aye, I agree. Roberts was clearly sampling the goods, and that’s probably the only reason he was involved with all this. Addiction, not greed.”
My phone gave a buzz in my pocket, and I looked away from the screen to pull it out. I wondered whether it would be my mum wanting me to come round at the weekend for Sunday dinner, or maybe Sam was texting to talk about how we were getting home today.
But the text was from an unknown number, and I stiffened up as I thumbed it open.
“What is it?”
I clenched my jaw. “Another message from whoever threatened my family before.”
You want to end up like Vic? Leave it alone.
I angled my phone towards Stephen so that he could see. He grimaced an expression of disgust.
“Jeez. What do you want to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted sourly. “Adams has said already that she can’t track disposal phones like the one these are being sent from. It’s a dead-end.”
“Dammit.”
“Aye.” I frowned down at the short message. “But, y’know what? They’ve given us a clue here without meaning to.”
“How’s that?”
“They call Victor ‘Vic’. They must know him personally, right? Maybe it’s someone who knows him well or cares about him even.”
“Or it’s whoever was feeding Roberts the drugs, and now they’re pissed they’ve lost another supplier.”
“If we hadn’t found him on the floor, they would’ve lost him for good,” I grumbled.
“When he wakes up, we can ask him about it all. See whether he knows anyone who specifically calls him Vic.”
I appreciated that Stephen used ‘when’ and not ‘if’, even though neither the doctors nor we were sure that Victor was going to pull through yet. The longer he was in a coma, the worse his odds looked. We could only cross our fingers and hope, trusting that the doctors and nurses were doing all they could.
Ten
My office phone rang as I was contemplating what to do next. I picked it up immediately, hoping that it’d be Sam or Keira with good news for us.
“DCI Mitchell speaking.”
“It’s me,” Sam said. Even in those two words, I could tell immediately that something wasn’t right, her voice too flat.
“What’s wrong?”
“Do you remember Emily? Emily Ulster? She was at my birthday party, bright blue dress?”
“Uh, aye, I think so? Is she okay?”
“Yeah, she’s alright. She gave me a call just now because she knows you’re in the police. I think it links to your case, too, love.”
“Okay, what’s happening?”
Sam explained clearly and concisely what her friend had relayed to her. Emily’s neighbour had multiple visits from a whole range of people every week, and the curtains had been kept almost continuously closed.
“She was very insistent about how before all this started, her neighbour always had the curtains open by seven every morning,” Sam added.
“It’s unusual behaviour for them, then. Who lives at the house?”
“The neighbour, who’s called Faith, and her little boy. Emily’s been over to babysit a couple of times, she told me, but she hasn’t seen the boy leave for school or go out of the house in over a week now. She’s really worried.”
“Has she tried knocking on the door?”
“Yeah, and calling her phone. She gets no answer.”
“Thanks for the heads up. We’ll look into it today. Can you send over her address? And is Emily home this afternoon?”
“I’m not sure. She was home when she called me a few minutes ago. I’m sending you the address now.”
My phone beeped as the incoming text was received. “Thanks, love. Could you do me a favour and give her a callback, let her know that we’re coming over but not to intervene, not to get involved?”
Sam gave a small huff. �
�Just for you, I will. But I’m texting you her number, so if you need to talk to her more, you can call her yourself.”
I gave a breath of laughter. “Understood.” I bid her goodbye, and we hung up.
Filling in Stephen was the work of minutes, and I gathered up my things as I talked.
“You think this is a case of cuckooing?” Stephen said as we were jogging down the stairs.
“Yep. Sounds like pretty classic warning signs to me.”
“So it could be directly connected to the case.”
I glanced over at him across the top of the car. “It sure could be,” I agreed as we climbed in.
Cuckooing happened when a person, often alone and unprotected, was blackmailed into holding drugs in their house, storing them under threat from the drug dealers. It was just another conniving method the dealers used to keep their hands clean, letting others do all the dirty work and take the fall for it when something went wrong. The real people in charge were always just out of reach, raking in the money but untouchable by the law, leaving them free to continue to exploit addicts and the vulnerable. It made my blood boil if I thought about it for too long.
Stephen took the wheel, as he often did when we were in something of a hurry. He had a tendency to be heavy-footed, but I’d got used to it after working with him for so long. I knew that he’d get us there safely, even if he did make my seatbelt do its job a couple of times.
I gave Rashford a quick call as we drove over to keep her updated about what we were doing. An email was all very good, but Rashford got hundreds of them a day, and sometimes an old-fashioned phone call got the job done quicker.
“She’s okay with it?” Stephen asked, glancing over at me. According to the SatNav, we were getting close to the house where Faith lived.
“She said we’ll probably need a warrant. Whoever’s at the house probably won’t let us in unless Faith’s there alone.”
Country Lines (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 8) Page 10