by Paul Gitsham
‘We’ve been trying for a baby.’ His voice was thick, and he cleared his throat.
Grayson said nothing.
‘It hasn’t been easy, but a couple of months ago Susan finally fell pregnant.’
Warren continued to look out the window. Beside him, Grayson maintained his silence.
‘Twins.’
The car was silent.
‘Last week, Susan …’ His voice petered out.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Grayson quietly.
‘It’s OK. It’s just one of those things. That early in the pregnancy it’s a lottery still.’ He rubbed his eyes, still staring out at the trees beyond.
‘That doesn’t make it easier,’ said Grayson. There was a slight catch in his voice. ‘Refilwe and I … we had a couple of false starts before the boys came along,’ He paused. ‘You assume that when it finally works the pain will go away. You have your family now. Those first losses were just a bump on the road. You think that it’ll be like winning the World Cup; nobody ever remembers that you lost your first couple of games in the group matches.’ He sighed. ‘But it’s not. You’ll always wonder “what if?” What would they have been like? Would you have continued trying if you’d been successful the first time? Would you have had the kids you have now? How would life have been different?’
Warren turned in his seat. The sun had long since disappeared behind the trees, but he could see that Grayson’s eyes were shining in the shadows.
‘Have you been to see a counsellor about it yet?’ Grayson asked.
Warren shook his head. The doctors had given them leaflets about charities and support groups, but he’d been too busy.
‘You should.’ Grayson raised his hand to forestall any argument. ‘I didn’t want to go. I didn’t think I needed to, but Refilwe insisted.’ He smiled. ‘As always, she was right, and I was too stubborn to admit I was wrong. I’ll authorize any time that you need.’
‘Thank you,’ said Warren, meaning it.
After a short pause, Grayson cleared his throat.
‘We need to decide what to do with your caseload. I can arrange for someone else to take over the team, to give you and Susan some time.’
Warren shook his head again. ‘That won’t be necessary. At the moment, I want to keep on working.’ Even to Warren’s ears, his voice sounded weak and uncertain. It was true that his workload was mounting exponentially, with four unexplained deaths to deal with, at least two of them murders, but then that was what he had his team for.
The fact was, Warren’s instincts were telling him that all of the deaths were connected in some way. It looked as though Stevie Cullen’s murder was all but solved, given Annie’s confession, but he still wasn’t convinced that he had the full story. Yet again, Ray Dorridge had reared his ugly head. Today’s find again lay on ground adjacent to his land. It was too much of a coincidence, and Warren couldn’t let that drop until he was satisfied. He couldn’t just hand it over to someone else. He had to see this through to the end.
Grayson was silent for a few moments, before finally conceding. ‘Have a sleep on it. Tell me your decision tomorrow.’
Warren already knew what his decision would be.
Despite Warren’s protests, Grayson eventually pulled rank and sent him home for the day. Warren’s team needed to expand, and quickly. It would take some hours for the new personnel, based both in Middlesbury and down at Welwyn to be brought up to speed. Grayson would oversee that. Warren had until the following morning to decide if he wanted to remain as the SIO on the various investigations.
‘Go home and sleep on it,’ the Superintendent had advised.
Sleep on it. Not a chance.
Susan was still out, attending a school concert, when he arrived home. After cleaning his teeth to get rid of the taste of vomit, he’d taken a long, hot shower. Towelling himself off, he’d been dismayed to find that smell of death still lingered. Cleaning his teeth a second time, he got back in the shower, turning the temperature up still further and covering himself with liberal amounts of strongly scented lemon body wash.
The smell was still there when he emerged.
The clothes would have to go, he decided.
Placing his shirt and trousers in a black bin bag, he debated about whether to throw away his tie as well. It was a cheap one that had come pre-packed with the shirt, so he decided to ditch that also. After a moment, his socks and underwear joined it.
Slipping on a T-shirt, shorts and dressing gown, he walked outside to the bins, wincing at the sharp gravel under his bare feet.
On his way back inside, he spied his shoes by the front door.
He’d worn plastic booties over them at the scene, but the thin nylon had snagged and torn as he’d walked through the thick vegetation. Mud covered the soles and vomit splatted the leather uppers.
The shoes were only three months old; even after a hefty sales discount, they’d cost almost a hundred pounds. A scrub with a brush and some polish would have them looking as good as new.
They joined his clothes in the bin.
His third shower drained the hot water tank.
Susan had arrived home from the concert and tried to talk to him about his day, but Warren had avoided the conversation. How could he tell her what he’d seen? After all they’d been through, he couldn’t do that to her. He’d forced himself to eat the curry that she’d picked up from the garage on the way home, but he’d hardly tasted it.
Eventually, frustrated, she’d gone to bed. Warren had stayed downstairs flicking sightlessly through the TV channels, until he knew she’d be asleep. Or at least pretending.
The bedroom was pitch black; the blackout blind that they’d recently bought perfectly blocking the streetlight outside. Even the annoying red LED on his phone charger had been blotted out by a strategically placed T-shirt.
He’d cleaned his teeth again before climbing into bed, the strong mint mingling with the residual flavour of the curry, and the Belgian beer he’d finished in front of the TV.
Lying there, he tried to force his mind away from that brief glimpse of what lay beneath the leaves, trying to conjure up positive memories to replace the image seared into his brain. Nothing worked.
After what seemed like hours, he heard the tempo of Susan’s breathing change, as she finally fell asleep. Turning, he touched his phone. The screen lit up, painfully bright even on the night setting. A quarter past one.
Susan murmured something in her sleep, but otherwise didn’t stir.
Carefully opening the bedside drawer, he rummaged for his headphones. Loading up the BBC iPlayer radio app, he navigated to the list of archived ‘In Our Time’ episodes. Susan jokingly referred to the program as the insomnia killer. It was true; whilst the weekly show examined some fascinating topics, it also discussed some desperately dull and esoteric subjects that were all but guaranteed to grant Warren and Susan sleep when it eluded them.
Two hours later, Warren knew far more about a poet he’d never heard of, and an obscure battle that few remembered, but was no closer to sleep than when he’d started.
By three-thirty he gave up.
Moving as quietly as possible, he went to the bathroom, before heading downstairs, treading carefully in the dark.
Making himself a cup of coffee, he headed into the living room and sat on the sofa with his laptop, resolving to at least do something useful. It was becoming clear to him that he couldn’t work the case. He’d tell Grayson first thing.
Opening his email, he saw that he’d received another nagging missive from finance about last month’s expenditure. He sighed and opened up the attached spreadsheet.
‘Warren. Warren. WARREN!’
Susan’s voice jerked him awake. His laptop lay on the floor, the spreadsheet having finally done what Melvyn Bragg and guests had been unable to accomplish.
Susan looked down at him with concern. Her hair was tousled, and she was clad only in the T-shirt that she’d worn to bed. The living room clock read five-
thirty.
‘You were having a nightmare. I could hear you shouting from upstairs.’
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. His mouth tasted of copper and stomach acid again.
She sat next to him, forcing him to look at her.
‘What happened yesterday? You have to tell me,’ she pleaded. ‘You haven’t said a word since you came back. The bathroom looks like a steam room, and that brand-new tube of toothpaste is half used. Why is there a bag of your clothes and that pair of nearly new shoes in the wheelie bin?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, resisting the urge to hold his sleeve against his nose, the smell of his dream lingering in the air.
She took his hand.
‘Tell me,’ she said softly. ‘Tell me about yesterday.’
But he couldn’t.
‘It was nothing. Just a bad day.’
‘Then what about the dream? Was it the usual one?’
Warren shook his head. The dream about his father – the dream he’d had since he was thirteen years old – rarely plagued him these days. Those demons had been largely exorcized after he’d learnt the truth about his father’s death; how he hadn’t killed himself through shame, leaving his family behind to deal with the fall-out.
‘Then what?’
‘I can’t remember,’ he lied. Even as he said it, fragments came back to him. He closed his eyes, but that just made them clearer.
The pile of leaves. The smell in the air, and the taste in his mouth were just as he’d remembered before he’d passed out the day before. It was as if he was watching a movie. But this time, the cast was different. The dog handler was gone; in her place stood Susan, staring down at the pile of leaves.
Despite his best efforts, he found himself joining her, looking down into the depression. A sudden gust of wind and the leaves were blown away, this time revealing not one tiny form, but two.
He clapped his hand over his mouth, trying not to vomit.
‘Warren, what is it?’ Susan’s voice dragged him back to reality.
He took a few deep breaths. ‘Serves me right for eating curry and watching late-night TV before bed.’ The lie sounded weak even to his ears.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t go in today,’ she suggested, squeezing his hand.
Warren shook his head. ‘No, I’ll be fine.’
At some point over the past couple of hours, he’d changed his mind again.
He couldn’t hand the investigation over to someone else.
Something tragic had taken place in those woods, and there was no way he could rest until he knew what had happened.
Wednesday 18 November
Chapter 49
DCI Ian Bergen had a somewhat distracting habit of twisting the ends of his moustache as he spoke. A rather impressive affair that clearly required a lot of care and attention, it made Warren want to go downstairs and buy him a cup of the foamiest latte they served, just to see what it would look like coated in milk. That was probably why Bergen stuck to plain, black coffee.
It had taken Warren several minutes to convince Grayson that he was fit to continue the case. In the end, the DSI had relented, probably from practical necessity as much as anything. Nevertheless, Warren had felt the man’s eyes boring into his back as he left his office.
‘This white van that you have been tracking is a potential goldmine for us, Warren,’ the man gushed. ‘It doesn’t appear anywhere on our database.’
He passed over his laptop, a paper-thin machine that doubled as an extra-large tablet. Judging from the quality of their hardware, it was plain to see that Organized Crime enjoyed a more generous equipment budget than Warren’s own department; his laptop was so old the latest version of Windows had slowed it to the point that he could now make a cup of coffee whilst he waited for it to boot up in the morning.
Bergen’s enthusiasm was in stark contrast to Warren, who had been deeply disappointed when Jorge Martinez had returned from Welwyn with the news that Organized Crime were unable to shed any light on the ownership of the vehicle they now believed delivered the missing nail technicians to the massage parlour every morning.
Bergen continued. ‘These confirmed sightings of the van each day are consistent with our belief that there is a gangmaster supplying illegal workers to businesses in and around Middlesbury.’
He pointed to a location on the map displayed on the computer’s screen. ‘This camera here is within two hundred metres of a hand car wash we’ve had our eye on for some time.’
Warren was familiar with the car wash, although he’d never used it himself. He said as much.
‘They’re dodgy as anything. Next time you drive past, look at the prices they’re charging, then look at the length of the queues, the number of workers that work on each car, and the time it takes them to do the job. Then do the maths and tell me how they can afford to pay minimum wage? And that’s not taking into account the business’s overheads. The only way the owners can make any profit is by paying illegal workers two-thirds of fuck-all.’
For the first time since meeting the man, Warren saw a flash of something other than cheerful enthusiasm.
‘So why don’t you shut them down?’ asked Warren.
Bergen sighed. ‘If only it was that simple. The buggers always seem to be one step ahead of us. Whenever we swoop in and do a raid, there are only a couple of workers there – all legal and swearing blind that they’re paid minimum wage. We just don’t have the resources to mount the surveillance necessary to gather the evidence we need to prosecute.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Unfortunately, this sort of thing doesn’t even make the top ten of my priority list.’ He swept his arm in a vague, encompassing arc. ‘The sad fact is that out there, in this pretty little market town, there are young women – girls – being forced to turn tricks for the bastards who trafficked them into the country. There are vulnerable people that have had their homes taken over by teenage drug dealers from London so they can set up a local supply point. Car washes and nail bars are the least of our worries.
‘And even, just suppose, we did try to take them to court, they’d simply pack up and disappear. Two months down the line, another business will set up in their place, supposedly run by somebody different, and we’ll be back to square one.
‘The only way we’ll ever be able to justify mounting an operation to gather enough evidence to satisfy the CPS, is if one of the workers comes forward as a whistle-blower.’
‘How likely is that?’
It was a rhetorical question; nevertheless, Bergen answered.
‘Why would they? They’d be biting the hand that feeds them – and probably houses them. The gangmasters aren’t stupid; they pick their workers very carefully. There’s a reason they employ illegal workers who don’t speak English. They take their passports if they have one, fool them into signing a “contract” that means they think they owe the bosses outrageous sums for housing them five to a room in some flea-infested hovel, and tell them if they come to the attention of the authorities, they’ll spend six months in Yarl’s Wood awaiting deportation back to whatever country they escaped from. Mrs May’s “hostile environment” is hardly helping matters.’
‘So, you think these nail technicians are part of the same group as these car wash workers?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. Car washers, nail technicians, private cleaners, farmhands, you name it. Wherever there are low-skilled workers working cash in hand, there are exploited people.’
He pointed to the laptop screen.
‘There’s little point raiding these places; it’s just a mopping-up exercise. What I really want, are the people in charge.’
‘Such as Northern Man,’ supplied Warren.
‘Exactly. From what your witness has told you, at the very least he’s some form of fixer. If we can track him down, we might be able to bring some sort of prosecution.’
‘And I might get access to these two nail technicians, who are potential witnesses to Stevie Cullen’s murderer,’ responded Warren. ‘We’
ll pass over everything we’ve got, but I warn you now that the van hasn’t been seen since McGhee gave his statement, and he’s now dead. I suspect that it’s been disposed of. I doubt we’ll see it again.’
‘Do you have any idea where it is coming in from each day?’
‘Not really,’ admitted Warren, ‘we pick it up on a fixed ANPR camera coming in from the north of the town via the A506, and it leaves the same way, but once it’s left the town’s limits there’s not much we can do to track it. There are a couple of safety cameras on the way out to Cambridge, but it hasn’t been caught speeding. It’s semi-rural out there, with lots of small roads and tiny villages. They could be going anywhere.’
‘Perhaps Mrs Wilson and her two nieces can shed some light on the situation. Perhaps the threat of a fine and some jail time for employing illegal workers might loosen Mrs Wilson’s tongue some more?’
Warren doubted it. Wilson was looking at a lengthy spell for perverting the course of justice, and her two nieces had been charged with murder. He couldn’t imagine Bergen could threaten them with anything more than they were already facing.
Still, it couldn’t hurt.
Chapter 50
‘They’ve located the dealer who sold Joey McGhee his heroin,’ said Rachel Pymm, as soon as Warren left Bergen.
‘How did they manage that?’ asked Warren.
‘Forensics found some partial fingerprints on the drug paraphernalia found with McGhee. They ran it through the system and got a match. I wouldn’t rely on it in court, but it’s a hell of a coincidence.’
‘Good work – where is he?’
‘It’s a she, and uniform have her downstairs. They picked her up first thing.’
Warren remembered a conversation he’d had with Pymm some months ago about her role within the team.
‘Fancy a bit of good cop, bad cop?’
She pushed back her chair. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’
Leaving her stick behind, she took Warren’s arm as they walked towards the lift.
‘Just one thing,’ she said. ‘I want to be the bad cop.’