DON'T SCREAM an absolutely gripping killer thriller with a huge twist (Detective Jeff Rickman Book 3)

by MARGARET MURPHY

  The boxer aimed a kick at the man on the floor and Foster heard a grunt of pain. Still dazed, he moved forward and grabbed the boxer’s left shoulder. The boxer swung round, throwing a punch with his right. Foster blocked with his left and clamped his right hand over the boxer’s face, forestalling a headbutt. As the guy’s hands came up in panicky defence, Foster stepped in close, brought his right leg behind his opponent’s right knee and shoved, hard. The leg gave and the boxer fell backwards, crashing into the steel shutters.

  ‘Cuff him,’ Foster told the mad-eyed cop. He didn’t need to be told twice — seemed almost to enjoy the chaos around him.

  ‘Mark?’ Foster crouched next to the figure. He had curled into a ball, his skinny arms covering his head.

  ‘It’s all right.’ He touched the lad’s shoulder. ‘It’s me. Lee Foster.’

  The arms came down cautiously and the long limbs uncurled. The lad eased into a sitting position. There was blood on his shirt and trousers. His hair hung black and greasy, half-obscuring a gaunt face.

  It wasn’t Mark Davis.

  * * *

  The baby is quiet at last. Fed and changed a second time, she sleeps heavily, as if exhausted. Mark Davis has been on the move all day, circling and doubling back, resting for short spells in quiet side streets. He snatched an hour’s sleep in the multi-storey car park next to the Royal Hospital, after settling his nerves with another small sample from the stolen heroin.

  Now he has come home — the nearest to a home that he has known since early childhood. The air is cold, chilling further as the last glimmer of light fades. He pulls a loose fold of blanket over the baby’s head to keep her warm.

  The lamps along the driveway leading to Black Wood Children’s Home buzz and flicker, some glowing dull red, others a feeble orange. In the canopy above him, the leaves rustle and fall, spiralling softly to the mulchy ground.

  A sharp crack to his right.

  He spins round. Nothing to see.

  He moves left, off the tarmac driveway, into the deepening shadows under the trees, and listens. The faint hum of traffic on the main road. A flutter of wings high above him.

  Silence.

  Another faint sound, this time directly behind him. The hairs on his neck prickle and his heart begins to pump fast and thick. The lights of the big house are just visible through the trees. He breaks into a run, hearing the crackle of footsteps on leaf litter — multiple steps, chasing, bearing down on him, circling, surrounding. He catches his toe on a tree root, stumbles and falls.

  Chapter 17

  Thursday

  Lee Foster stumbled into the CID Room at eight a.m., coffee mug in hand.

  DC Hart was setting up a laptop and projector at the other end of the room. On her desk, a pile of phone messages — the lines of inquiry they hadn’t managed to finish the previous night, added to a new stack that had been forwarded by the night team. The briefing wasn’t due to start until nine, and they had the Incident Room to themselves.

  ‘Morning, Sarge,’ Hart said, then did a double take. ‘You all right, Sarge?’

  Hart looked fresh and bright-eyed, which only made Foster feel worse.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘I heard about the false alarm.’

  Foster shook his head in disgust. ‘Some poor sod who happened to have a nosebleed on his way to town for a night on the ale. It’s like I said yesterday — everyone wants to be the hero.’

  ‘Is the lad okay?’

  ‘He’ll live.’

  ‘Will he press charges?’

  ‘If he doesn’t,’ Foster said, ‘I will.’ Foster was barely marked by the scuffle, but the incident had pulled four units off the search for Bryony and wasted a lot of police hours.

  He noticed Hart appraising him coolly. ‘Did you seek solace with that Calls and Response operator you had your eye on?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’ He made his way to the tea table.

  ‘I’m “on about” Sally.’

  He saw the amusement in her eyes and took it in good part. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  Hart tilted her head, still assessing him. ‘You look all in.’

  ‘Half the night at a bloody jazz concert.’ He picked up a coffee jar and gave it a shake. It was empty.

  ‘You could spend the odd evening at home.’

  ‘Snuggle up with a hot water bottle and a good book? Do me a favour — I’m not dead below the neck just yet.’ He could see that stung, and he might have felt bad about it, had she not come straight back at him with an infuriating little smirk.

  ‘A night in doesn’t make you celibate,’ she said.

  His antennae started to twitch. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Just what I said.’

  Naomi was ferocious about keeping her private life out of canteen gossip. Understandable, since there were still a few men — the Daniel Casses on the force — who placed women into three categories: village bike, frigid man-hater or dyke. Foster’s interest was more personal: Hart had turned him down three times in the year since they’d met — so if he wasn’t her type, who was?

  He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Naomi — are you seeing someone?’

  ‘I see people all the time,’ she said. ‘I’ve got very good eyesight.’

  She maintained the Ice Queen coolness, but Foster saw she was regretting the remark, and he wasn’t quite ready to let it go. ‘I was an altar boy, Naomi. I know what celibate means — and what you just said makes me wonder what you get up to on your cosy nights in.’

  ‘You know, you shouldn’t think on the after-effects of a hangover,’ she said. ‘Not before you’ve had your coffee.’

  It was a good ploy. Hart was good at diversion. He should have been wise to it — hadn't he seen her in action enough times in the interview room? Yet he fell for it anyway. Foster forgot his curiosity for the moment, reminded of his need for a caffeine fix. The second coffee jar he picked up was also empty.

  ‘Didn’t you have fun?’ Naomi watched him over the top of her coffee mug.

  He continued rummaging instead in the desk drawer and found a third jar of coffee. ‘Some fat bloke on a saxophone,’ he said, spooning out a generous measure. ‘I mean, what’s that all about?’

  Hart took a breath, and for one horrible moment, he thought she might try to explain, but she gave a small shake of her head. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘It’d take too long.’

  He reached for the kettle. ‘After three hours of Mister Sax tootling on his horn, I’d forgotten what mine was for—’ A rasp of metal on metal, and the kettle jarred to a stop, mid-lift. ‘What the f—?’ He gave it another tug, and the table jittered, setting crockery and teaspoons jangling. It took him a moment to work out what was causing the problem. A narrow-gauge chain had been wound around the handle and then threaded through the cross bar and leg of the table. He followed the chain back to its lowest point. It was secured with a combination padlock. He turned to Hart. ‘Now what?’

  She was grinning widely. ‘Dwight’s crew nicked it again, so Tunstall did the only reasonable thing.’

  ‘Tunstall? Reasonable? Isn’t that a whatchamacallit, ending with moron?’

  ‘Oxymoron,’ she supplied, in her usual helpful manner. ‘And you shouldn’t underestimate him.’

  At that moment, Tunstall appeared, holding a plastic jug full of water. His hulking frame filled the doorway, and Foster couldn’t resist saying, ‘It’s the genie of the kettle. Do I get three wishes, now?’

  Tunstall looked offended. ‘No, but you do get a fresh brew, and judging by the way you’re hanging onto that kettle, you’re in desperate need of one.’

  Tunstall’s usual response to jibes was ‘Cheeky bugger!’ — this little speech was virtual repartee, and Foster was so astonished that he let the big man have the last word. He set down the kettle and stepped aside, allowing Tunstall to fill it.

  There was enough play in the chain to permit the safe transfer of boiling water to c
ups, and Foster raised his mug in tribute. ‘Got to hand it to you, mate,’ he said. ‘You’re persistent if nothing else.’

  ‘Oh, I’m a lot more besides,’ Tunstall said.

  Foster saw Hart smiling at him over the rim of her cup. ‘Am I losing my edge or what?’ he said. ‘Trounced by a bloody woollyback!’ In the eyes of a Scouser like Foster, anyone born outside Liverpool’s city boundaries was only one evolutionary step above a lactating ewe — so this was particularly hard to take. A few more had drifted in during the exchange, which only increased his chagrin.

  ‘Drink your coffee,’ Hart said, with mock solicitousness. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’

  ‘“Genie of the kettle”,’ Tunstall murmured. ‘I think I like that.’

  ‘Well, just don’t expect me to rub your spout,’ Foster said.

  Rickman strode into the room amid a burst of laughter. ‘Did I miss something?’ He dropped a pile of newspapers onto the nearest desk.

  ‘Only Tunstall, entertaining the troops,’ Hart said.

  Rickman raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment, nor did he remark on the fettered kettle when Tunstall made him a mug of coffee. That was Rickman all over, Foster thought: a team player, but with no hankering to be regarded as one of the lads.

  ‘What have we got?’ he asked.

  ‘You were right about Mark going looking for baby stuff, boss.’ Hart clicked the remote and an image filled the projector screen. ‘This is a CCTV recording from the twenty-four-hour pharmacy on Parliament Street.’

  The camera showed a black-and-white image of ten people in a ragged line. A tall, rangy man stood at the head of the queue. The timer in the bottom right of the frame read ‘14:27’.

  Foster leaned in for a closer look. ‘That’s Mark all right.’

  ‘He looks stoned,’ Hart commented.

  ‘And what’s that round his middle?’ Tunstall asked.

  ‘Baby’s blanket,’ Hart said. ‘Probably to hide the bloodstains on his trousers. He bought nappies and wipes, a baby’s bottle, Ribena and some bottled water.’

  ‘She’s barely a month old and he’s fed her on Ribena?’ Tunstall’s outrage was another revelation for Foster. He flashed to a mental image of the big man bottle-feeding an infant, the child nestled on one ham-hock forearm.

  ‘Is the timer accurate?’ Rickman asked.

  Hart nodded. ‘They’ve had to use the recordings for prosecutions a few times, so they’re very particular about making sure the time is set correctly.’

  A pall fell over the meeting, and Rickman spoke again. ‘At least we know that Bryony was alive and well at two thirty yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Well, that is good news,’ Foster said.

  Rickman looked at him. ‘Are you all right, Lee?’

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ he said with a guilty dip of his head. Rickman could do without his second-in-command undermining his efforts to boost morale. Foster glanced at Hart before adding, ‘I took a knock on the head during the scrum last night.’

  ‘The “citizens’ arrest”,’ Rickman said. ‘Have you been checked out by a paramedic?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Foster touched the slight bruise over his right eye. ‘I’m fine.’

  Hart rolled her eyes.

  ‘There’s got to’ve been a sighting since then?’ someone asked.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Hart said.

  ‘So either he went to ground, or he moved out of the city centre.’ Foster finished the last word on a croak and cleared his throat, wondering if it was the booze or yelling over the racket at the jazz club that made his larynx feel like someone had taken a pipe cleaner to it.

  Rickman glanced around the room. ‘Okay,’ he said, his tone brisk, assertive. ‘My turn. These are preliminary PM findings, to be confirmed by chemical analysis.’ Foster saw what he was doing — picking up the tempo before they began to despair, getting them thinking about possibilities instead of failures.

  ‘Jasmine died of shock and blood loss. Time of death difficult to establish — the blood loss causes hypothermia, I’m told. But some time between ten p.m. on Tuesday, when she made a call to her friend, Kim Lindermann, and eleven fifty a.m. on Wednesday, when she was discovered.’

  Foster glanced at the whiteboard to the left of Rickman. DC Hart had already added the ten-p.m. telephone conversation with Kim Lindermann to the timeline. The blank space between Kim’s call and the time of discovery was horribly long.

  Rickman seemed to catch the direction of his gaze and paused. When he went on, the brisk, businesslike tone had vanished. ‘We’re dealing with a sadist who tortured and raped Jasmine over a number of hours.’

  ‘Nobody heard a thing,’ Hart said. ‘Did anything show on the tox screen?’

  ‘There were hardly any bodily fluids left.’

  Rickman swallowed against some unpleasant memory and Foster felt his gorge rise in answer — he’d never got used to post-mortems, and remembering the fine mesh of cuts on Jasmine’s body, this one must have been messier than most.

  ‘Toxicology say they’ll get the results to us as soon as possible, but they’ve got to be highly selective and they won’t get a second chance at any test they do run.’

  They all seemed to hold their breath for a moment, then Tunstall said, ‘And now the cracked bastard’s got the babby.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Foster insisted. ‘We don’t know it was Mark.’

  ‘Mark’s bloody fingerprints are all over the house,’ Hart said.

  ‘That puts him at the scene,’ Foster said. ‘It doesn’t make him guilty. Mark was a tit, always taking the blame for others’ pranks — but he was never violent.’

  ‘Kate Nolan said he had another side to him,’ Hart reminded him.

  Foster had to concede that one.

  ‘And the sixteen-year-old boy you knew could be as different from the twenty-year-old drug addict as a puppy is to a scrapyard dog.’ Hart always had a way of ramming a point home.

  Foster began to shake his head, but she wasn’t finished.

  ‘Think about it, Sarge. He’s a junkie. His girlfriend ditches the life, ditches him, gets herself together. He finds out about the baby, tries to make her go back to him, she refuses. He kills her, takes Bryony.’

  Foster opened his mouth to protest, but Rickman spoke over him. ‘We’ll know more when the DNA results come through. I asked for premium service on the evidence collected at the scene, but even so, we won’t get it before the end of the day — and the killer wore a condom, so there’s nothing from the rape.’

  Foster furrowed his brow. ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense, does it? Why wear a condom and leave your fingerprints all over the place?’

  Hart tilted her head. ‘You said yourself, Mark’s a tit. And a junkie.’

  That hurt, chucking his words right back at him. He fixed his gaze on her, but she glanced away, taking a sip of coffee.

  Rickman stroked the scar that bisected his right eyebrow. ‘Kim Lindermann said Mark had been pestering Jasmine.’

  ‘She was convinced he’d done it,’ Hart said.

  Foster was ready to object, but Rickman held up a hand to stop him. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Until we get something better, Mark remains our prime suspect. But our main focus is to find Bryony before she comes to harm. Now, what else needs following up?’

  ‘This lot.’ Tunstall waved a handful of pink phone message slips in one hand and completed yellow task reports in the other. ‘If you ask me, we’re chasing our own tails.’

  ‘We’ll have more CID coming in before nine,’ Rickman said. ‘That’ll bring us up to full strength, and we should be able eliminate leads faster.’

  ‘About bloody time.’ Tunstall realised he said this aloud and flushed under Rickman’s close attention.

  ‘I’m gonna call Ed and Hilary Shepherd,’ Foster said. ‘See if Mark’s been in touch.’ He felt sure they would have called if he had, but this was something he felt he had to do.

  ‘I’d like to have a chat with Rob Maitl
and,’ Hart said. ‘See if he knows where Mark could have run to.’

  Foster glanced at Hart. ‘Didn’t Cass tell you that Mark had practically been booted out the door?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Hart’s face hardened. ‘“Bottom feeder,” he said.’

  ‘So why waste time on scum like Maitland?’

  Hart hesitated and Rickman silenced Foster with a look. ‘What makes you think Maitland’s a priority now?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know, boss. Cass did say Mark had been sidelined, but—’ She shrugged, unwilling, Foster guessed, to say anything that smacked of gut feeling or intuition.

  ‘Is there any proof he was still in Maitland’s pay?’ Rickman asked.

  ‘Oh!’ Tunstall’s hand shot up, one of the yellow task slips in his fist. He pulled it down almost as fast, blushing furiously. ‘Sorry, sir. I almost forgot — street canvass says the druggies who would talk all said Mark still worked for Maitland. They called him “The Weights and Measures Man”.’

  Rickman was too good a manager to comment, but Foster knew he’d taken note — Cass had fed them bad intel.

  ‘Naomi and Lee, talk to Maitland. Until I can draft in a few more CID personnel, we divvy up the lines of inquiry that came in overnight. And we reinterview the working girls and the addicts, anyone who might be harbouring Mark — anyone who might know where he’d hide.’

  He tapped the newspapers on the desk next to him and Foster saw strain in his friend’s face. ‘The press, the public and our bosses are demanding results,’ he said. ‘Common decency demands it. Bryony’s been out there all night. The sooner we find her, the more likely it is we’ll find her well.’

  Chapter 18

  Old Hall Street had been transformed since the Liverpool Daily Post & Echo offices were given a facelift. The gleaming tower of the Radisson Blu hotel dominated the lower end of the street, and the pavements were startlingly clean. This was business Liverpool, its face scrubbed, and minding its manners so as not to frighten the tourists. DS Foster and DC Hart strode towards Maitland’s office premises ahead of a torrent of wind blasting off the Irish Sea.