But, unwise as it might be, I’d already made up my mind to meet her, and so I only paused for a moment before picking up my phone again and sending a text off to Stephen to tell him where I was going. His reply came almost immediately and wasn’t particularly encouraging.
Are you nuts? He’d written, Tell her to come to the station!
She refused! I texted back. We need answers. I’ll text you when I get home again.
I turned my ringtone off after that and shoved my phone in my jeans pocket. As I headed out, I debated whether it would be better to back off on this one and insist that Mrs Wooding met me at the station. But I suspected she’d just disappear into thin air again rather than do that. She’d suggested meeting in a public place so, even though it was dark out now, I weighed the risks and decided that it was worth it. And if I didn’t check in with Stephen within an hour or two, hopefully, he’d send the calvary out to find me.
I parked up in the city and made my way towards the Minster which was lit up from below and rose tall and proud from the low, cramped shambles. The town was busier than I might’ve expected for a work night, but the streets were relatively abandoned as I made my way across the square and towards the café Ellie Wooding had told me to meet her at.
It was the only place that was lit up nearby and, as I got closer, I could hear the live music coming from inside. Even though it was spring, I was shivering by the time I reached the door and pushed it open, the warmth inside very welcome.
I recalled the pictures of Mrs Wooding that I’d seen online as I scanned the small crowd inside. There was a festive atmosphere amongst the patrons, most of whom were holding what looked like non-alcoholic drinks and seemed relaxed but not drunk.
Weaving between the small groups of people talking, I headed over to the counter. As I’d already guessed, they weren’t serving wine, so I sipped at a coke as I leaned against a wall and studied the room. The live music consisted of a female singer accompanied by two guys on guitar and keyboard. The songs they were doing were mostly ballads, and they were making a decent job of it. I decided that this would be a nice place to come on an evening off, if I ever got the time.
For now, though, I was still working, and so I stayed on the alert for Mrs Wooding. Half an hour in, I hoped she wouldn’t take too much longer to turn up, because the day was catching up with me and yawns kept creeping up on me.
“You look like you need a coffee.”
I turned sharply, finding a petite, brunette woman looking at me. For a minute, I couldn’t place her, before I realised that she was Ellie Wooding, despite the change in hair colour and how the make-up she was wearing cleverly changed the shape of her face.
“Mrs-”
She held up a hand. “Don’t use my name here.” She glanced down to the mostly empty drink in my hand. “Wait here for me.”
She walked away towards the counter, and bemused, I watched her go. I couldn’t help but be fiercely curious about where the heck this woman had been the last month and a half, and what she was doing wanting to talk to me now. But I also couldn’t quite rule out that her intentions weren’t pure, so I told myself not to relax just yet.
“There’s a table upstairs,” she told me as she handed me another coke, before she led the way up the stairs. I followed after her, finding a cosy, wood-panelled loft upstairs, filled with tightly packed tables and chairs, most of which were occupied. But there was an empty table in the back corner, so Mrs Wooding and I sat down there.
I cupped my hand around the cold, damp glass of my soda, taking a cool, sweet sip as I waited for Lawrence’s mum to tell me why she’d gotten in contact with me.
“How exactly did you get my phone number?” I asked, as the thought occurred to me.
She’d bought herself some kind of yellow fruit juice, and she dabbed her lips before answering. “I saw your card on the table in Lawrence’s room,” she said.
“And you stole it?” I said, my eyebrows raised.
She narrowed her eyes at me. Up close, her blue eyes were intense and faintly unsettling, despite being very pretty. Their pale colour and the firm set of her mouth made her look cold.
“I copied it down,” she said. “I thought it might come in handy, and it did.” She sat back in her chair and looked at me for a long moment, her gaze hard enough to make me uncomfortable.
“What exactly did you want to tell me?” I asked, an edge to my voice now. “And why couldn’t you come to the station to do it?”
“I told you,” she said, frowning slightly at me like I disappointed her. “They might follow me.”
“They?” I said tetchily.
She leaned forwards, and instinctively, I shifted backwards. “The people who kidnapped my son,” she hissed. “Do you think they only wanted Lawrence?” She shook her head. “They’re after me too.” She glanced around the room like they might walk in any moment, and I frowned at her. Something about her didn’t add, and I didn’t know whether it was this paranoia she seemed to have coming out, or just a strange vibe I was picking up.
“Where is your husband, Mrs Wooding?” I asked, eying her closely.
Her face passed through several expressions too fast for me to follow, before it crumpled and she lowered her head, her hand coming to her face.
“That’s why I have to be careful!” she said sharply, her voice low despite the buzz of other voices in the room. “He- he’s dead.”
“I see.” I didn’t know why I didn’t feel more sympathetic to her apparent upset, but it felt almost performative to me. Or maybe it was the fact that she’d abandoned her son after all he’d been through and seemed more worried about herself than she did him.
I was likely unfair to her, I reminded myself. She’d likely been present when Mr Wooding was killed, and I couldn’t think of anything more traumatic. I couldn’t honestly understand why there would be a threat against her personally, since the gang abandoned Lawrence and seemed done with the Wooding family entirely.
“What makes you so sure?” I asked.
She stared at me, her blue eyes wide and watery. “That my husband is dead?” she said quietly. “I heard them kill him! And I only just got away myself.”
She glanced around the room again, and I found myself doing the same. But no-one was looking at us, nor did anybody seem out of place in the little café.
“I’m glad you’re alright,” I said, once her attention was back on me. “What did you want to tell us?”
“Tell you,” she said pointedly. “My son said you were head of the case. This is important information and telling you is very dangerous for me.”
I nodded slowly. “Alright. If your safety is at risk, I’m capable of keeping things quiet-”
She waved her hand. “I’m not asking to keep it secret,” she said impatiently. “I want you to act on it. But you must be careful, understood?” She didn’t wait for my response but just nodded to herself. She had a bag hanging off one shoulder that I’d previously dismissed as unremarkable, but she reached for it now and dug out what looked like a folder. She looked around the room again before passing it under the table to me.
“What’s this?” I asked, unimpressed by all this secrecy. I put the folder flat on the table and flicked through it with a frown, before stilling. “This company, how do you know them?”
One of the sheets of paper she’d given me was stamped at the top with the name of the yacht shell company that the ransom money had been moved under.
“I have connections,” she told me, looking somewhat impressed with herself. “I’ve been investigating it all, and I know where they are.”
I looked up. “Really? Where?” I asked. My irritation was piqued that she’d apparently chosen to run off and investigate this all herself, rather than assisting us in our enquiries and trusting the police to keep her safe. All she’d done by keeping this to herself until now was slow things down, as far as I was concerned.
Her sharp eyes glittered as she looked at me. “A warehouse,�
� she said. “I’ll show you, but I want your promise that you won’t sit on this information. That you’ll make a move.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I can’t promise that,” I told her flatly. “That decision isn’t up to me alone. It’d be a team discussion.”
She pressed her lips together, looking annoyed. “But your recommendation carries weight,” she insisted.
“Tell me where this location is,” I said, “and I’ll consider it.”
She glared at me for a second before she relented. She dug around in her shoulder bag until she came up with a pen, leaning forwards across the table to write an address on one of the papers she’d given me.
“This is information I paid a lot to acquire,” she told me as she leaned back and tucked the pen away. She fixed me with a stern look. “I hope you won’t waste it.”
I thought for a second that she was about to up and leave, but she stayed put.
“There’s more,” she said.
I was skim reading the printouts she’d given me and wasn’t finding a whole lot written in them that we didn’t already know, or that was relevant. “What’s that then?” I said.
She leaned her elbows on the table, demanding my full attention. I looked up, waiting expectantly.
“You’ve got to move in on this place the night after tomorrow.”
I stared at her. “That’s not going to happen.”
Her fingers twitched, like she wanted to squeeze them into fists but stopped herself. “Why isn’t it?” she snapped, her refined accent taking on an edge like glass when she was frustrated.
“It’s too soon,” I said. “An operation like this, if we went ahead with it, will take more than two days of planning.”
She shook her head in disagreement, but paused to take a sip of her juice before she spoke again.
“They’re having a party that night,” she told me. “I have reliable sources telling me that they’ll be unguarded and probably drunk. Any other night and their resources will overwhelm yours. Do you understand?”
Peeved by her condescending tone, I took a moment to calm myself. “I do understand what you’re saying,” I said evenly. “But it’s not viable.” Even as I was saying it, I was thinking about the little girl who was still missing, and her parents’ desperation to have her returned to them.
“So you’ll just let them slip away? Can you live with that?” Mrs Wooding asked me, her words uncannily close to my own thoughts. I looked away, taking a swallow of my coke before I responded.
“I’ll need to get this verified,” I said finally, gathering up the papers she’d given me. Her face lit up with a look of triumph, and I gave her a firm look. “I’m not promising anything,” I cautioned her. “I’ll follow up this lead, but that’s all.”
She gave me a nod. “Very well.” Standing up, she held out her hand to me.
“Wait!” I said, startled by her abruptness. “Do you know where Lawrence is?” I asked. She’d not mentioned him being with her, but she’d never explicitly said that he wasn’t with her, either.
She frowned down at me. “No, why would I?”
I sighed, pressing my lips together. “We were hoping he’d left the hospital to join you.”
She scoffed. “Hardly. That boy doesn’t do what I ask even on the best day. Who knows why he decided to run off?” She shook her head, her expression growing more irritated than concerned. “I wish you luck,” she said, before she turned and walked away.
I sat back in my seat once she was gone and shook my head in disbelief. That had been a hell of a strange interaction, and I found myself hesitant to trust her, somehow. She seemed minimally concerned for her son and that, among other things, didn’t sit well with me.
Regardless, I would look into the information she’d given me, and ask Keira what she thought of it. If she and the tech team thought we could trust it, I would trust them.
Nineteen
Even by my standards, I’d drank far too much coffee so far today, and I was starting to get jittery. Stephen came back from the break room to find me staring off into space as my thoughts turned manically around my head.
“Alright, seriously, what’s up with you?” he asked, putting his cup of tea down on his desk. “You’ve been off all morning. Is this something to do with your secret meeting with Gaskell?”
I turned and raised my eyebrows at him. “Clearly it wasn’t that secret.”
He flashed me a grin. “Can’t keep anything from me, Mitchell. Now spit it out, I’m sick of you stressing.”
I exhaled heavily, rubbing a hand over my messy hair. “I’m waiting for Gaskell’s decision on something.”
“Wow, that really makes things clear, thanks for that.” Stephen’s tone was light, but he frowned, clearly irritated to be kept out of the loop.
I glanced around us, but there was no-one nearby. “Alright,” I said tightly. If I couldn’t trust Stephen, I couldn’t trust anyone round here. “You know Ellie Wooding contacted me last night?”
He nodded. “Yeah?”
“She gave us a location,” I explained. “An HQ for the gang.”
Stephen’s mouth shaped an ‘o’ of shock, and he stared at me. “Seriously? So we might have a location for Lydia?”
I grimaced. “I don’t know.” I hesitated. “I’m not sold on how reliable this information is, Steph,” I admitted. “We have no guarantee that they’re not stashing Lydia someplace else. And Wooding seemed… off.”
“Really? How?”
“Just, shifty,” I said with an apologetic shrug. I wish I had something more concrete to tell him, but I had nothing but my gut feeling. “She didn’t seem to give a damn about her missing son. Who’s not with her, by the way.”
“According to her,” Stephen said, frowning.
“Aye, according to her,” I agreed. “So, if he wasn’t following his mother, why the hell did he leave the hospital?”
“And where is he?” Stephen said, before he sighed. “Alright, so you’re not convinced. What does the boss think?”
“He’s talking to the tech team,” I paused as a pair of officers walked past, probably heading out to lunch. “Waiting for their verdict on it.”
Stephen nodded slowly. “That’s good,” he said, “I’m sure they know what they’re doing.”
“I know they do,” I agreed. “But it’s Wooding I don’t trust, not them.”
“You think she could have been deliberately misleading us?” Stephen asked, looking unconvinced. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe she’s being held hostage. Maybe someone is feeding her information. Maybe she does have some ulterior motive. I just don’t trust her. She seemed like someone who looked after number one before anyone else.”
Stephen looked like he was seriously considering what I was saying. “In her situation, it’d be no surprise if she did seem guarded,” he reminded me.
My shoulders slumped. “Aye, you’re right.” I couldn’t quite get rid of my gut feeling, though, and my uneasiness stayed with me into the afternoon, as we waited to hear Gaskell’s decision.
“You should eat something,” Stephen prompted, as we stood in Sainsbury's and I stared at the rows of sandwiches and felt nauseous.
“I feel the opposite of hungry,” I muttered, but picked up a packet of fruit and a cereal bar to placate Stephen. He was right that I would need to be on my best form, not lightheaded with hunger, if this raid went ahead, so I mechanically made my way through the box of fruit when we were back in the office. It didn’t sit well in my stomach, but it didn’t make me feel any worse either.
“Tea?” Stephen said in the break room. “Have you been replaced by aliens?”
I gave him a weak smile. “Actually had too much coffee today.”
“Huh.” Stephen raised his eyebrows. “I guess you found a limit for your daily caffeine consumption. What was it? Like, a whole jar?”
I snorted. “About that much,” I said, shaking my head at his teasing. I didn’
t know how he could be so cheery considering the tenseness I was feeling about all this, but I was glad that he wasn’t affected by my worrying.
Once back at our desks, it wasn’t long before Gaskell walked over to see us. I straightened up when I saw him and waited in the hope that he’d have news for us. His brows were furrowed with tension, and he looked between us seriously.
“Sir?” I couldn’t help but prompt him after a moment.
He looked at me. “We’re going ahead with the raid.”
I blinked, not sure if I was surprised or not. “When, sir?”
“The night after tomorrow.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Just like she said.”
He frowned down at me. “Yes. If we’re going to do this, why not give ourselves the best shot at achieving it?”
“If we can trust her information, sir.”
Gaskell looked at me. “Come to my office, Mitchell.”
He turned to lead the way, and I sighed before getting up to follow him.
“You clearly have concerns,” he said, as soon as we were both sitting down. He rested his elbows on the table and looked at me over his clasped hands. “What is it you’re worried about exactly?”
I hesitated, struggling to put into words precisely what had troubled me about Mrs Wooding.
“She refused to come to the station,” I started.
Gaskell cut me off. “She was worried about her safety, you told me.”
I nodded. “Aye, but we could’ve protected her. She doesn't trust us, or she has something she isn’t telling us.”
Gaskell raised his eyebrows. “So because she doesn’t trust us, we shouldn’t trust her?” I opened my mouth to respond, but Gaskell put up a finger. “I understood that you’re worried, Mitchell, but we’re careful. The tech team had looked over what she gave us. It’s not her we have to trust, it’s them. Alright?”
I released a breath. “Yeah, you’re right, sir.” Maybe I was paranoid, or I’d misread Mrs Wooding. Perhaps her shiftiness was nothing more than fear.
He gave me a nod. “Good. Thoroughness is a good quality in a police officer, especially a detective, but sometimes we have to act.”
DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thrillers: Book 1-3 Page 66