Country Lines (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 8)

by Oliver Davies

  I gave him a card with my number on it before I left and made him swear to give us a ring if he thought of anything else. He assured me that he would. He grasped my arm as I was about to move away, and I looked at him in surprise, not especially alarmed but certainly on the alert.

  “You promise me something too, eh, detective?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Catch ‘em for me, will you? Prove that I didn’t cough up my guts to you two for nothing. The boss could seriously screw me over if he finds out what I told you, y’hear me?”

  “I understand. We’ll do everything we can.”

  “Good.”

  He let go of my arm, and we saw ourselves out, walking down the long hospital corridors in silence. It was still too early for visitors, so the hospital was as quiet as it got, but there was still a continuous level of noise from the staff moving around and the patients. The place was never really silent.

  “Well,” Stephen said as he dropped into the passenger seat of the car.

  “Aye. Do you think he’s got it right? That Lucy Page was an accessory to attempted murder?”

  Even speaking the words aloud sounded unreal when I pictured Lucy in my head. She’d been timid and polite, and she’d answered our questions. I remembered then that I’d guessed she was hiding something, but I would never have expected it to be something as big as attempted murder.

  “I don’t know, Mitch. It feels wrong, but if Roberts’ evidence checks out, then it does fit together. We already knew that the drugs he took were far too strong.”

  “Aye, that’s true.” I opened my mouth, about to say that I just couldn’t imagine Lucy doing something like that, not after we’d met her and seen the sort of person we were.

  But then I remembered the fierce spark that lit up her eyes when she talked about protecting her sister, and I wondered whether there was more bite to her than first appeared. Maybe she’d never do something like this for her own sake, but to protect her little sister? I could see it.

  “Her boss… Pete, I presume… probably threatened her sister, Eva,” I said slowly.

  Stephen gave a thoughtful nod. “That might make her do it.”

  “Regardless, we need to get her in and talk to her again. That’s clear.”

  “Agreed.”

  He got on the phone whilst I drove us out of the labyrinth hospital car park and then back towards Hewford. My mind spun as I drove, thinking over the bombshells Victor had dropped and trying to decide whether they checked out or not.

  “What’s happening with her sister exactly?” I wondered aloud as we were walking into the station. “She can’t have been left in Lucy’s care?”

  “No, she’s been in a care home. They couldn’t track down any relatives for her.”

  “Damn, I hope Lucy hasn’t fled then. With her sister going to school in the area, she’d have to stay put, but if Eva was out of her hands-”

  “No worries about that, Mitch. They were just telling me that she’s been heckling social services to see her sister. She definitely hasn’t done a runner.”

  “That’s good, at least.”

  With the assurance that Lucy had stayed local, I asked a couple of the DCs to head over to Jackson’s old address to see whether she was still staying there. Unless she’d found a friend’s couch to camp on, I couldn’t imagine where else she would be since she had no money and no family.

  “She’s here,” Stephen said twenty minutes later, putting his office phone down. I took a deep breath.

  “Let’s go see what we can find out.”

  We took the stairs down to meet Lucy and the officers who’d picked her up in the lobby. My step faltered when I saw her, and I barely stopped myself from asking what the hell had happened to her. Her pale face was badly bruised around her right eye, which was bloodshot and swollen nearly shut. Her shoulders were hunched, and she looked clearly wary.

  I cleared my throat. “Do you want some tea or water before we get started?”

  “Water, please,” she said, her voice rough like she hadn’t spoken in a while.

  “Okay.” I nodded to the officers who’d brought her in, and they led her into an interview room. Stephen and I went together to the nearest side kitchen, where I filled up a glass of water for her.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked him. He looked as shocked as I had been, and he pressed his lips together.

  “If he wasn’t dead, I would guess Jackson, but he is. A new boyfriend? Or some drug dealer? She was in withdrawal last time we saw her. Maybe she’s been trying to access more.”

  “She doesn’t have any money,” I pointed out. Stephen just looked at me grimly, and I grimaced and looked away.

  “Let’s go see what she has to say, then,” I sighed.

  The officers filed out of the interview room when we turned up, and I thanked them for bringing Lucy over here. I put the cup of water down in front of her before Stephen and settled at the metal table to start the interview.

  “Talk to us about what happened to your face,” I asked her straight off.

  It was still early in the morning, and Lucy gave a yawn, wincing in pain at the pull on her bruises. She politely covered her mouth and apologised before she responded to my question.

  “I ran into some trouble, that’s all.”

  “Who did that?” I pressed.

  “Why do you need to know?” she challenged, frowning slightly even as she still wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Ms Page, I’m sorry to say, but we’ve received a very damning witness testimony about you this morning. If someone’s been threatening and hurting you, you need to be open with us about it.”

  “He’ll kill me if I snitch,” she murmured, twisting her slim hands together.

  I spotted another bruise on her wrist and felt faintly sick. I blew out a breath and decided to be blunt.

  “You’re a suspect for attempted murder right now, Ms Page. You won’t be seeing your sister again for years if you aren’t honest with us.”

  Lucy looked up sharply, staring at me with her lips parted. She looked horrified, and I met her gaze evenly, hoping that she finally understood how serious this was.

  “Attempted… murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who said that?”

  “We’re asking the questions here,” Stephen said, getting impatient. Lucy flinched at his tone, and I saw Stephen soften. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “Who gave you those bruises?”

  “Pete,” she whispered before breaking into tears. “You can’t take my sister away, you can’t!” she cried between sobs.

  “We need you to talk to us,” I said. I couldn’t make any promises about her seeing Eva again, even if Lucy was honest with us, and I didn’t want to lie to her, but we did need the information she could hopefully offer us.

  She sniffed and pulled herself together. The same spark I’d seen briefly the last time we interviewed her was back as she met my gaze.

  “I’ll tell you everything.”

  Seventeen

  Lucy tucked her hair behind her ear and tried to stop her heart from beating so fast. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever been so nervous in her life as she was now. Even when Pete had been laying into her, screaming at her, she’d not been as afraid. He hadn’t been threatening to stop her from ever seeing Eva again, but these police detectives were. She swallowed around the lump in her throat and resisted the urge to run her fingers over the throbbing bruise on her face. Touching it would only make the pain worse.

  “You talked to Vic, didn’t you?” she said, forcing herself to start talking.

  “Victor Roberts, yes. He woke up from his coma in the early hours of this morning,” the tall officer told her. He’d introduced himself as DCI Mitchell, and he had a mop of unruly curls and stern eyes.

  “Did he tell you… all of it?” she said, her voice faltering in the middle.

  The bulkier officer, the one called DI Huxley, tilted his head at her. He’d sc
ared her when he’d raised his voice earlier, but she didn’t think he would actually raise a hand to her.

  “That depends,” detective Mitchell said evenly, his voice low and steady. “What we want to know is the truth. What happened on the morning of last Tuesday?”

  Lucy closed her eyes briefly. So Victor had told them everything and damned her in the process. She was going to be locked away for years for what she’d done, and she deserved it too. But Eva didn’t deserve to grow up in care without a sister to watch out for her. Her only hope was that by cooperating with the officers, maybe they’d give her some leniency.

  “I went to Vic’s house,” she managed.

  “What time was that?”

  DCI Mitchell clicked his pen, which hovered expectantly above his notebook. It was a cheap one, the kind she could pick up in Sainsbury's for fifty pence, and she could see that the paper was thin. It was an unimportant detail, but focusing on it helped her to keep from panicking.

  The detectives took turns grilling her for every detail of what had happened with Victor. When she’d arrived and how she got there, what she and Victor had said, what she’d given him.

  “Where did those drugs come from, Ms Page?” DI Huxley asked for the second time after she failed to respond to DCI Mitchell.

  “Pete,” she said finally.

  It was futile now to hold anything back. She’d already said far too much, and she knew that if Pete had half a chance, he’d finish her off like he tried to do to Victor, though probably in a far less pleasant way. She shuddered.

  “Did you know that Jackson was dealing in child pornography?” DCI Mitchell asked her. It was barely there, but she could hear the edge of judgment in that question and knew that he’d hate her when she answered.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “N-not for long, only a few weeks. I heard Vic arguing about it with Jackson when we went round. I tried to make Jackson stop, but…” She trailed off, lifting a hand to her cheek. That had been the only time Jackson had ever raised a hand to her. But he’d done it in front of Eva, and she’d never forgiven him for it. She’d also never argued with him again.

  “So Pete decided that Victor was better off gone?”

  “He was threatening to go to the police, to you, about it.” She gave a small cough, trying to clear her sticky throat. “Jackson was supposed to do it, but he couldn’t.”

  “To do what?” DCI Mitchell asked ruthlessly. Lucy pleaded with him with her eyes not to make her say it, but he looked flatly back at her, and she looked away first.

  “To take them to Vic.”

  “Why couldn’t Jackson do it?” DI Huxley asked.

  “He was high, completely off his face.” She couldn’t stop her mouth from twisting in fury as she remembered it. Trust Jackson to get them into a mess like that and then leave her to deal with it, just like he’d done now.

  “You volunteered to do it in his place,” DCI Mitchell said, part statement and part challenge.

  “No,” Lucy snapped. “I didn’t volunteer. He made me. He said he knew where Eva went to school, that he’d hurt her. I had to do it.” She fixed the detective with an imploring look. “I didn’t want to do it, but I know what kind of man he is. You wouldn’t let a little girl get hurt, would you?”

  He didn’t answer that, and Lucy couldn’t read any sympathy in his face at all. Her shoulders slumped.

  “Did you know what you were giving to Victor Roberts?” he wanted to know.

  Lucy hesitated. Maybe she could claim she hadn’t known it would be lethal, that she’d thought it would knock Victor out for a bit, and that’s all. But she’d already paused for too long, and the moment for lying had passed.

  “Yes, Pete told me,” she croaked out.

  “What did he say it was?”

  “Strong stuff, I don’t know the specifics. He said that Vic wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  “And you were fine to do that, to lie to his face and hand over poison to him? Didn’t you sympathise with him? He wanted Jackson and Paul to stop trading in child pornography, and you say you didn’t agree with that either. You love your sister, surely you wanted them to stop that too, yet you helped to murder the man trying to stop it.”

  “I didn’t want to!” Lucy snapped, glaring at both of them. “I hated it! I hated it so much! How dare you judge me when you have n-no idea what it was like?!” She choked up and tried to suppress it, angry at herself for crying when she was furious at the officers.

  “Why didn’t you run away with Eva?” DI Huxley asked.

  She gritted her teeth. “And go where? I haven’t got anyone to help me.”

  “A women’s shelter?” DCI Mitchell asked, his voice more gentle than his partner’s.

  “Even if I could get into one of those places, he would’ve found me,” Lucy said, trying hard not to start crying again. She hated how these officers were making doubt whether she’d really tried hard to get away, whether she’d really done her best to protect Eva. “I had to keep Eva in school, so I had to do what he wanted. I couldn’t run away forever, I didn’t have any savings. Jackson kept them all.”

  “Okay, we believe you,” the curly-haired detective said, raising his hands.

  She realised that her voice had been getting higher with panic, and she gasped in a breath, putting her head in her hands as she tried to get herself back together. She didn’t want to fall apart in front of these serious-looking men any more than she already had. They must have already thought that she was weak-minded and hysterical.

  “I did want to get away,” she said, once she had her breath back and before they could ask any more damning questions. “I was trying to get a job on the other side of town so that Eva could stay at school and I could move away.”

  “But you didn’t get the chance,” DCI Mitchell filled in.

  She gave a shallow nod. “I couldn’t get a job, and things kept getting worse. He blocked me on his laptop, so I had to go to the library to look for jobs online.” She glanced at them and couldn’t tell whether they believed her or not. “You can ask the staff! I checked in, they saw me there.”

  Rather than respond to her, DCI Mitchell asked her another question that left her reeling. “How did you end up looking after Eva all on your own in York, Ms Page?”

  “What?”

  “Where are your parents? Your aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents?”

  “I don’t have any.” She looked away, swallowing down all the old hurts that threatened to arise.

  “They’re all dead?” The officer refused to relent, and Lucy hated him for it at that moment.

  “My mum’s in Dubai,” she spat out. “Eva’s my dad’s kid, my step-sister. He died after she was born, and her own mother didn’t want her.” Her lip curled as she remembered it. “My mum wanted to put her up for adoption, but I wouldn’t let that happen. Eva didn’t deserve that. I dropped out of school and ran away with Eva to live with Jackson. I thought he loved me back then.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “I see.”

  The two detectives shared a look between themselves, and Lucy wished she knew what they were thinking. Maybe they sympathised with her story, she thought, or maybe they thought she was a stupid teenager who’d got herself over her head.

  “You must have some relatives in the country?” DCI Mitchell asked. Lucy thought his tone was kinder than it had been previously, but she knew it was probably wishful thinking. “Someone who could look after Eva.”

  “I look after Eva,” she said immediately. The officers looked at her evenly, and she flushed and looked away. “My aunt agreed with my mum. I tried to go there first, but she said it was silly for me to want to look after a baby. She said Eva would ruin my life.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Lucy started shaking her head. “I haven’t talked to my cousins in years, but I guess you could ask them. They’ll probably just agree with their mum, though,” she said softly.

  “Th
at’s a place to start at least,” DI Huxley said almost to himself, leaning back and making his chair creak.

  They wanted to know everything she could tell them about her remaining family, and she mechanically told them what she could remember. She felt numb by this point, having bared her soul and yet knowing that it would probably do no good. She was going to go to prison, and Eva would grow up amongst strangers and forget that she’d ever had a sister at all.

  “Okay, we’ll finish there,” the senior detective said quietly, and Lucy realised she’d started crying again.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He passed a packet of tissues across the table, and she gratefully accepted them. He rounded up the interview, and Lucy took a drink of water, feeling better once she’d dried her eyes and blown her nose.

  “Thank you for talking to us,” DCI Mitchell said, apparently genuinely.

  Lucy just nodded silently.

  She knew that she’d most likely damned herself by what she’d told them today, but she couldn’t make herself regret. She’d been having nightmares ever since she’d given Vic the drugs, and she felt lighter now that she’d confessed everything. She also couldn’t pretend to herself that she wasn’t hugely relieved that Vic had woken from his coma, even as the first thing he’d done once he was awake was to nark on her. She deserved it.

  Her only regret was losing Eva, but she knew that she’d dug her own grave, and now she had to lie in it. Maybe when Eva was older, she’d find it in her heart to forgive her.

  It was the only hope Lucy had to hold on to now.

  Eighteen

  Stephen and I were both sombre after the interview with Lucy. I’d spoken to hundreds of people, guilty and innocent, in interview rooms over my career, and I felt like I was a fairly good judge of character by now. Lucy struck me as someone who’d done the best she could, and yet her desperate actions had nearly cost a man his life. That couldn’t be ignored.

  “That was heavy, huh?” Stephen sighed.