Bitter Edge

by Bitter Edge (retail) (epub)

  There were a few more questions, and then Sarah was allowed to go. The PC glanced at Kelly and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’m not sure that Faith’s choice of friends was to everyone’s taste,’ she said. ‘I think it’s important to explore this thread with the teaching staff and her year group. Make sure you do that.’

  He nodded.

  Chapter 30

  Kelly and Emma were shown to the maths department, where Sadie Rawlinson was in class. Kelly wasn’t taking any chances, given what Rob had told her. The sixth-former guiding them knocked on the door, and Kelly went inside and approached the teacher. He didn’t ask for ID, and seemed thankful to get rid of the student she’d asked for.

  ‘Sadie, get your things. You’re to follow the police detective right now.’

  Kelly glanced sideways at him, incredulous that he’d made such a meal out of his simple task, but she was quickly beginning to understand why. The students looked thoroughly entertained, and it was a small momentary pleasure for the teacher, as if he prayed for moments like this to punctuate his day. She walked to the doorway and waited while the girl packed her bag.

  Sadie Rawlinson was a surly creature. She was small, with pointed features and mousy hair. She rolled her eyes at the teacher, then at Kelly. Kelly stifled a smile and her incredulity at such brazen behaviour. The girl would be a nightmare on the witness stand, and her first thought was that the Tony Blackman case probably wouldn’t go to trial.

  ‘Hurry up!’ the teacher boomed. Sadie rolled her eyes again before following Kelly out. Kelly nodded her appreciation to the teacher, who looked more relaxed than he had when she’d first gone in.

  ‘This way, please, Sadie.’

  They made their way to the sixth-form block, where Justin Cain was waiting for his interview.

  ‘We’re not allowed in here, it’s sixth form only.’ Sadie stood in the doorway.

  ‘It’s your lucky day. Will you be staying on here to do your A levels, Sadie?’ Kelly beckoned her in and shut the door.

  The girl clocked Justin and stopped; he shifted position in his seat and looked bashful, despite his six-foot frame. There was no doubting that they knew each other.

  Kelly took Sadie into a side room. ‘Sit down,’ she said. Sadie sat, and Kelly studied her. It was no wonder that Rob had felt uneasy. Sadie was a disappointing example of a well-worn stereotype. She wore too much make-up, her skirt barely covered her thigh gap, her blouse was undone so her tie wouldn’t stay up, and she chewed gum. Kelly couldn’t really believe what she was seeing. She’d thought characters like this had died out with Trisha Yates in Grange Hill. The girl’s northern accent was thick and unfortunate, making her sound even rougher.

  ‘It’s good to meet you at last, Sadie. Well, we are in the middle of a few scrapes, aren’t we?’

  Sadie chewed her gum with her mouth wide open. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re the main witness in a assault case, and now you’re the last one to see Faith Shaw before she disappeared. Terrible coincidence.’

  Sadie blew a bubble. Kelly observed that she couldn’t sit still. She was either ADHD or desperate for a stimulant that the gum couldn’t provide. She sniffed a lot too.

  ‘So tell me in your own words exactly what you did on Sunday evening, Sadie. Please try not to miss anything out.’

  Sadie rolled her eyes again and began her story. It was told in a monotone manner, with few pauses, and delivered as though reading from a script. Kelly took notes and didn’t look at her; she found that it put some witnesses off, and she wanted Sadie to have no interruptions so the chances of her getting carried away would increase. The girl gave the same simple statement that she had on Sunday night in front of Colin and Maggie Shaw: Faith had said she was visiting the Portaloo, and they never saw her again. Today, though, she embellished it by mentioning some shady characters hanging around the rides, one of whom had taken a particular interest in Faith.

  Kelly scribbled, Late forties or fifties, white, scruffy, lechy … It could have described any one of twenty workers at the fair; she should know, she’d seen their photographs.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Bobby.’

  Kelly sat back. Sadie carried on chewing.

  ‘And why didn’t you mention him in your original statement?’

  ‘I didn’t want to scare Faith’s mum and dad, you know? They’re going through enough.’

  Compassionate wasn’t the first word Kelly would have used to describe the girl before her. The whole story stank, but as a lead, it threw more shit Bobby’s way. DI Lockwood was visiting the fair in Ulverston later today, or tomorrow morning, to speak to the man.

  After ten minutes of going round in circles and Sadie not changing her story, Kelly decided that she’d get Justin in.

  ‘Do you care that your friend is missing, Sadie?’

  The girl stopped chewing and changed her demeanour. It was as if she’d forgotten this bit: the part where she showed sorrow.

  ‘Yeah! Of course. I was closest to her.’ Her chin wobbled slightly and she wiped an eye. Kelly thought she might break into full-blown hysterics.

  ‘You can wait outside now.’

  Emma escorted her out and brought Justin Cain in. His story was delivered in the same fashion, centred on the toilet visit, and had also clearly been rehearsed; with whom, Kelly had no idea, but she guessed it was Luke, after she’d caught him out over Bobby. Sure enough, Justin also mentioned Bobby and described him in detail.

  ‘And why didn’t you tell us this before now, Justin?’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry Faith’s mum and dad. They’re going through enough.’

  Kelly recorded the words carefully. But Justin had more to say. He was a fidgeter and silences didn’t sit comfortably with him. This was always a bonus when interviewing a witness. He told her that in his opinion, Sadie was jealous of Faith. He looked to the door several times as he did so and Kelly said nothing, just listened. He didn’t strike her as the sharpest tool in the drawer, and was perhaps the weak link in the threesome. Perhaps he’d forgotten his brief. Either that or he had an axe to grind. She remained calm when he mentioned that on Sunday evening, Luke Miles had taken them all for a drive in his black Hyundai i20.

  Kelly dismissed the teenagers, and she and Emma walked back to the main hall.

  ‘Do we have CCTV for the town centre yet?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s going to take another few days. There are two cameras in the centre: one at the top end of town and the other outside the old corn exchange. They both cover the area of the fair quite well.’

  ‘What’s taking so long?’

  ‘They’re outdated systems. All the information is stored on discs, then sent away to head office. They haven’t been located yet.’

  ‘I think I want to check footage on the circular as well. If Luke took our little group for a spin, they might have left town.’

  Emma nodded. ‘That should be easier, guv. I’m sure the highways CCTV has all been updated, though I do remember that the bypass roundabout was having work done.’

  ‘Find out, will you?’

  Kelly’s phone rang. It was Kate Umshaw back at Eden House.

  ‘Kelly, can you talk?’

  Kate never called her boss by her first name. Kelly walked a distance away from her colleagues and pulled out a chair.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘The toddler, Dale Prentice, from the Greenside lead mine two years ago?’

  ‘Of course, I know who you mean.’

  ‘His foster parents reported him missing yesterday. He was taken from a car park in St Bees.’

  Chapter 31

  Craig Lockwood drove through Dalton-in-Furness on his way to the fair. The medieval town was one of the oldest in Furness. The castle keep on the market square was lit up brightly, and a huge Christmas tree bent gently under a mass of snow. The old stone houses had mostly gone now, but the facades of some of them could still be seen in the tiny heart of the town, whe
re the valley would have been hundreds of years ago. He could have taken the bypass from Barrow, but he wanted to take his time. It had been a long day, and the fair wouldn’t yet be open.

  He didn’t personally know Bobby Bailey, but he had his description, his photograph, and a few contacts to point him in the right direction. Kelly Porter was his counterpart in the North Lakes, and he was more than happy to work alongside her inquiries. Cumbria was like a vast mound of rock that you could penetrate either from the south or the north. Kelly’s patch was the north, from Carlisle down to about Coniston and Ambleside; his was everything between the southern tip of Barrow, on the Furness peninsula, to St Bees and across. Often they overlapped, and this was one such time. At Kelly’s request, he’d contacted a few old drug squad pals in Manchester and asked if there’d been any prior surveillance on Bailey for dealing.

  There hadn’t. He’d need to get his own evidence.

  Craig had enjoyed working with Kelly Porter the last time around, more than two years ago. He’d never expected to uncover something so vast, stretching from Workington Port, south to Barrow and then north to Penrith. The operation had been colossal, and that was just the beginning. What they subsequently unearthed abroad, and how far the money trail spread, was staggering. In the end, they uncovered people smuggling, prostitution and modern slavery resulting in several convictions. Unfortunately, one of the ring leaders was already dead but they nailed his accomplices. Generally, though, they each had their own patch to adhere to, and it meant that moments like these, which might always lead to something bigger, were something to relish. Like Kelly, he had spent time out of the Lakes; in his case, fifteen years in the Manchester Met. Stints like that changed an officer’s approach; made them less shockable and more resourceful. He wasn’t denigrating local officers at all; it was just that operations in the cities were slightly different and gave teeth to fledglings.

  And now there was the missing toddler. He’d agreed to get South Lakes on it, as Kelly had her hands well and truly full with stuff going on up in Keswick. They’d liaise regularly. Because of the age of the child, it was vital to get cracking straight away, and he had officers trawling CCTV in the area, interviews being carried out, descriptions logged. He was also following up a lead on the woman who’d spoken to the foster mother in the car park. Egremont police were working flat out collating everything, and a liaison team had been sent to the family address. Kelly had explained to him that Dale’s details had been discovered on the teacher’s computer – and that Nedzad Galic, the boy’s father, had never been found.

  Kelly was surrounded by a good team, but a few of them needed to spread their wings. He knew Kate Umshaw from a secondment he’d done in Keswick many moons ago, and she was going nowhere. Young Will Phillips had been promoted, and that was fantastic for him; Craig just hoped that now he’d take the next step and get out of Cumbria. Emma Hide had masses of potential, but Kelly called her a plodder; she was the type of officer who would soldier away in the detail and come up with an explosive little nugget every now and again that brought another dimension to an inquiry.

  He wasn’t wishing Kelly’s team away from her; it was just that he didn’t like to see talent stagnate. As for his own team, he encouraged fluidity wherever possible, and he’d lost some fine officers to the Met. He didn’t mind; he’d cut his own teeth years ago and was happy now to chug along at the pace that Barrow offered him. Mind, if Kelly Porter had anything to do with the progress of this particular inquiry, Craig suspected it was about to get punchy.

  This was the third time she’d called and asked about Bailey, and he knew she was on to something. The drugs angle came up each time, and he’d arranged for her to chat to his contact in Manchester. The city had long been the drugs conduit of mainland Britain, ever since the days of the Quality Street Gang and the Crazy Face Gang. Shipments couldn’t go straight to the provinces; there was too much money at stake, and the business was run by large groups of thugs who would have stood out in backwaters like Ulverston. Instead, they hired individuals who couriered the gear out from the city like a spider’s web. Perhaps Bobby Bailey was a runner, who happened to conduct a lucrative trade through the fairground.

  Ulverston was a twenty-minute drive from Barrow, and Craig had just added a pleasant ten minutes meandering through Dalton. He drove up the hill out of the valley, and carried on through Lindal and Swarthmoor. Cumbria slate and stone houses dotted the route; you were never far from the illustrious quarrying past of the golden county. Many a rich lord had made his millions from what lay underneath the glacial deposits, millions of years in the making. New industry was rare, and the old ones had all but gone, but Furness still had something that nowhere else had, whether it was the Duddon Estuary on a day like today, when you could see all the way to the Isle of Man; or the mountains to the north of Black Coomb, covered in snow.

  Bobby Bailey was from a travelling family, and had little in the form of a paper trail to his name. Craig had found virtually nothing on him in the archives, apart from the fact that he’d been employed as a mechanic for a few years in Askam-in-Furness; he’d also popped up on a credit search as owning a debit card registered to a bank in Newbury, near Reading. He’d got off with a caution for the indecent exposure, served a two-year suspended sentence for the indecent images, and the attempted rape charges had been dropped. They had his fingerprints and DNA, but they had no reason to arrest him. Kelly wanted him watched. Craig fully intended to put as much pressure on him as he could.

  He turned off to Canal Foot, where the fair was already set up, ready for its opening night, and looked for a place to park. In the daylight, fairs always looked like a sadly neglected toy: discarded, shabby round the edges and out of date, the colours faded and dirty. Only the cape of the dark and the accompanying neon bursts of light would clean the place up and turn it to magic once again, and that was when it became exotic and alluring.

  Even the fairground workers, who during the day looked mangy, unwashed, malnourished and up to no good, became inexplicably attractive to the hordes of girls waiting to be given a free ride. Nothing had changed since Craig had attended the fair thirty years ago, following the love of his life around from ride to ride, only to watch her be wooed by some oily nineteen-year-old with dirty fingernails and bad breath who promised her another go on the waltzers while he stood like Rambo on the rear of the carriage. Craig, in his clean shirt and pressed drainpipe jeans, money enough in his pocket for five such rides, was powerless to compete with such heady nonconformity.

  Bobby Bailey was unlikely to conjure any of this allure, day or night. He was a misfit. Craig’s first impression was of a boy wandering through life and suddenly finding that one day he had to go out and get a job. His demeanour was that of a teenager, and a shifty one at that. Craig could tell by his clothes that they were probably slept in every night, and he’d bet his life that the guy didn’t wash. He fitted the classic stereotype of a pervert: a man trapped in a child’s world. But – and there was a sizeable but – there was something about him that meant he had successfully evaded the law, and there was always a reason for that. Either Bobby Bailey was lucky, or he wasn’t the down-and-out dimwit he looked.

  He’d been easy to spot.

  Craig recognised him straight away from the photo he’d shared with Kelly over the Dalton incident, and now he watched Bobby yawn and scratch his head as he listened to another man saying something. It could have been instructions, or it could have been a bet on this afternoon’s horses; it didn’t really matter. Bobby Bailey was a yes man. Ostensibly.

  Craig spent the next hour in his car, watching Bobby come and go. One thing was for sure: the guy wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t a man on the run, and he didn’t seem to be nervous or expecting trouble. He wasn’t looking around like someone might if they had something to hide, so he was either arrogant or stupid. He did very little apart from follow people around and carry the occasional box.

  But as the sky darkened, and the lights w
ere switched on, and the first paying punters arrived on the scene, all that changed. It wasn’t just the way the shadows fell, or the fact that more people were now crowding into the small space on the edge of the sea; it was that Bobby Bailey had morphed into a different character entirely. His shoulders lifted, his eyes were alert, his swagger was purposeful; he had intent, and he had an agenda.

  Craig got out of the car.

  Chapter 32

  Luke Miles sauntered into the station with his father, who wore a suit and carried a briefcase. He was clearly affronted at having to accompany his son to a place frequented by the criminal underclass, and he glanced around the place like a lord surveying his land. Kelly had learned that both Luke’s mother and father were governors at Derwent Academy, and huge influencers in the town. Philanthropists. She had come across plenty of those in her time, and never fell for the holier-than-thou facade.

  They were escorted to an interview room and Will Phillips operated the recording equipment.

  ‘Good afternoon, Luke. Mr Miles. Please take a seat. We’ve called you in for formal interview as there are several inconsistencies in your original statement.’ Mr Miles went to intervene, but Kelly shot him a sharp look.

  ‘Mr Miles, you’re here as the responsible adult for your son, but I must gain answers only from him. Thank you. Let’s get straight to it, shall we? For the purposes of the recording: DI Porter and DS Phillips interviewing. Luke, please recap for me exactly what happened on Sunday evening after eight o’clock.’

  Kelly’s shoulder blades ached from sitting hunched over notes. She watched the boy as he took a breath and prepared to begin his speech. It was well rehearsed, and a word-for-word regurgitation of what Sadie and Justin had said. She showed him a photograph of Bobby Bailey.

  ‘That’s him. He was watching her.’

  Kelly sighed. Luke had already admitted knowing Bailey, but now he was changing the story again.