Crooked Street

by Priscilla Masters

  ‘They’re moving down here, aren’t they?’

  He nodded and she was thoughtful. She and Matthew had had an affair while he was still married to Jane. Things had got messy, as they do, and Matthew’s parents had naturally taken their daughter-in-law’s side and been very hostile towards Joanna. She’d been surprised they’d come to the wedding but they had, sitting frosty and quiet in the front row, obviously holding her responsible, adoring him but resenting her, loving their granddaughter. To them she was the scarlet woman. A temptress Matthew had not been able to resist. Evil to the core, and that stung Joanna as being a very lopsided view. But Matthew really loved his parents and, as he was with his daughter, Eloise, he fiercely defended them, even to her cost. Which made the situation rankle even more.

  His father was a retired GP and they would spend hours discussing medical breakthroughs and cases. Father and son – and granddaughter – were close.

  ‘They want to be near me …’ he paused before finishing the sentence, ‘… and any grandchildren we might have?’

  He was watching her anxiously. ‘If – when – we do have a child they want to help.’ He gave her a sly glance. ‘It’ll be useful for us – if we both want to continue with our careers.’

  He’d thought this one right through, tying her hands behind her. She couldn’t explain how trapped this made her feel.

  ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’ he asked nervously.

  She couldn’t answer. It was the next step in their lives, a step right out there into the unknown.

  FOURTEEN

  Thursday, 13 March, 8.30 a.m.

  Rush hour in the moorlands was two cars – one heading towards Buxton and the other in the opposite direction towards Leek. After that there was silence. As the sun climbed up the sky the moors were illuminated, the sunshine reaching even the darkest corners. The cottage sat, motionless, a few sheep venturing timidly into the yard, munching their way through the spring grass, their bleating sounding like complaints. A buzzard flew overhead searching for his breakfast, a kestrel hovered and swooped and two hares gambolled, paws up ready for a boxing match. The ivy almost covering the door shivered in a chilly breeze but all else was still.

  Joanna was standing in the driveway of a large, detached Victorian house looking up at the bedroom windows. So far so good. Briarswood looked in reasonable condition and she liked the name. She slipped her hand in Matthew’s and gave him an encouraging grin.

  They were let in by an elderly gentleman with a shock of white hair and a lovely, polite manner. ‘Doctor and Mrs Levin,’ he said formally. ‘Welcome.’

  Joanna smiled as she crossed the threshold. Mrs Levin sounded nothing like Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy. And in some ways they were two different people.

  11 a.m.

  Across the other side of Leek Fred Whalley was preparing to meet his wife and son again. They had done shorter terms ‘inside’ than he so they had had time to get the celebrations under way. It was funny, he reflected. It had been a family business yet Hayley and Tommy had got four years, he seven and Kath nine. But for once his daughter had learned to behave herself so she would be out sooner.

  For now he would be content with a few friends, a bottle or two of wine, some lagers and crisps. Then they’d have to have a family meeting – without Kath, of course, who was due for parole in a couple of months. Fred drew in a deep breath. Kath. Now there was the problem. Kath had a tendency towards violence or extreme violence depending on her mood or what she’d had for breakfast, how much she’d had to drink the night before or even whether her victim was wearing red or blue. Unpredictable was her middle name and that was why she’d got the longer sentence. The judge and jury had all sensed it. Fred was a happy-go-lucky sort of guy who went with the flow and was more than content to continue in the same sort of line he’d been in before. A ‘stretch’ or two was just an occupational hazard – a bit like getting asbestos lung damage if you were a builder, falling and breaking a leg if you were a steeplejack or getting a chair thrown at you if you were a teacher. Most careers, in his opinion, carried some sort of danger. Sometimes when he wondered about what he would have done if he hadn’t been a thief he’d consider the alternatives and quickly got stuck. He couldn’t imagine being anything else. In fact, being inside wasn’t so much of a problem. It wasn’t so bad really – not if you kept your head down. You got used to it. The only thing he really missed when he was inside was his family. He was devoted to Hayley and Tommy. OK, Tommy wasn’t exactly the brightest button in the box but he was a lovely boy. But Kath … Fred wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone but deep down inside he was frightened of his daughter. His own daughter! Once or twice she’d turned on him and it had been him who’d backed down. She had a nasty streak in her, that one. She’d come to a bad end one day.

  So he wasn’t sure about having Kath along on his future little jaunts. It had been the violence that had got them the custodial sentence instead of a rap on the knuckles and a bit of community service again from the judge. After all, they hadn’t made it a habit to get caught; neither had they kicked their victims in the head until they lost consciousness. That had been Kath’s contribution.

  So as his mate dropped him off outside the modest front door of their small semi, Fred was anxious. Until the door opened and Hayley threw her arms around him. ‘Surprise,’ she said.

  The room was full.

  Half an hour later Fred, happy as anything, lager in one hand, fag in the other, was talking to two of his oldest mates, his eyes wide open. But the same problem: what to do about Kath.

  ‘She’s sworn vengeance, you know,’ Fred said, troubled. ‘She’s said she’ll ’ave that policewoman that put her inside.’

  Chad Newick looked troubled. ‘Piercy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Newick scooped in a deep breath. ‘That’s not a good idea, mate,’ he said.

  ‘So, you going to tell her?’

  Newick dropped his eyes.

  ‘Or you, Angus?’

  And then Fred knew that it wasn’t only him who was nervous about Kath. They all were.

  Newick finally spoke. ‘She gets us in too much trouble, mate,’ he said.

  Fred looked thoughtful. ‘She don’t care about that.’ Then, almost with a hint of pride, he followed it with, ‘She ain’t frightened of anything. Not the law. Not Piercy. Not anything.’

  Angus spoke up then. ‘Sort it,’ he said, ‘before we go back into business.’

  Fred looked even more troubled. ‘Easier said than done, mate.’

  11.15 a.m.

  Now they had excluded Big Mill from being a crime scene the team was spreading out to further interview the inhabitants of the five streets which had been on Glover’s Wednesday night hit list. Now it was time for Joanna to explore the area herself. While officers interviewed the players, Joanna and Mike made their way to the small area bordered by low metal bars and surfaced with damp bark on which stood a slide and two swings and passed as the children’s playground. The gardens of the terraced houses were small so it was somewhere for the children living in the cramped streets and small houses to let off steam, meet and play. The day was grey and cold, the play area uninviting – even less so surrounded by police tape. Spring had retreated back into its fleece jacket and hardly even peeped out from behind it. The ‘fun’ area didn’t look much like fun today.

  The floor consisted of bark chips – not the easiest surface on which to conduct a fingertip search. The officers moved forward in a line, picking up debris: a couple of condoms, a few cigarette butts, sweet papers and the ubiquitous polystyrene fast-food boxes. Joanna watched. They couldn’t test it all for Jadon’s DNA. She turned to Mike. ‘Does Jadon Glover smoke?’

  ‘We’ll soon find out.’ He moved away from her to speak to, presumably, Eve, and was back with her in minutes, grinning. ‘He wasn’t supposed to but she’d smell it on him and found a packet of fags in his glove compartment.’

  ‘What brand?’


  ‘Silk Cut.’ He’d anticipated the question. These days they both knew the routine well enough to foresee each other’s moves and decisions which meant that many cases progressed in preordained moves as classic as a game of professional chess.

  ‘OK.’ She stepped forward to speak to Baxter Cornell, one of the new breed of civilian SOCOs. They would begin with any Silk Cut cigarette butts found and DNA test them. Take it from there.

  ‘Do we know if this area is cleared on a regular basis?’

  ‘Tuesdays,’ he said. ‘Same day as the bins are emptied. But not this Tuesday,’ he said with a grin. ‘We asked them not to. Just as a precaution.’

  ‘Good.’

  She cast her eyes over the swings, dripping from the heavy rain, then at the bag which now held a sodden, half-smoked cigarette butt. The ground would have been cleaned the day before Jadon disappeared. If it showed Jadon Glover’s DNA it would probably confirm the CCTV sighting, though they hadn’t seen their person either smoking or throwing away a butt. At least it could fix him up to here, confirm the time and place and allow them to focus on the debtors from the two other streets, Barngate and Nab Hill Avenue. The CCTV footage had shown only one figure cross the area. No one had come forward to say it was them. So if the cigarette butt could be linked to Glover they could assume he had been heading towards Barngate Street unless he had changed his order and visited Nab Hill Avenue first. Always assuming, that is, that the council cleaners did a thorough job and the cigarette butt had only been there since last Wednesday.

  Too many variables. But then, that was police work, and at least it narrowed their search area.

  ‘Have you found anything else?’

  Cornell shook his head. ‘Not so far.’

  It was now heading towards early afternoon. Joanna and Mike decided it was time to speak to the clients on Jadon’s round for themselves. Junior detectives and the uniformed boys often did very well but there was nothing like seeing it for yourself.

  For now they left the six families on Mill Street. Too many people had seen Jadon after he’d left. They knew where he’d been right up to 8.30 p.m. so they had decided to focus their investigations on the four streets beyond Big Mill. According to Astrid Jenkins, who had been the last person on Mill Street to admit to having seen the debt collector, she had seen Glover cross the road towards Big Mill at around 7.25 p.m. Big Mill had been cleared as a crime scene. So assuming the figure crossing the playground was him they could shadow his movements up until then.

  Following in Glover’s footsteps, they parked in Sainsbury’s car park, sure the two-hour rule would be waived for a squad car. As Mike and Joanna retraced Glover’s steps Joanna was aware of how many stories lay behind each and every one of his debtors. All of them different and yet tragically the same. Desperate people. Desperate measures.

  They started with Wellington Place and number eight. Carly Johnson proved to be a slim, anaemic-looking young woman with dyed blue hair and a tired expression. Even opening the door seemed an effort to her, her shoulder straining to prop it open. She raised drooping eyelids and sussed them out straight away. ‘I suppose you’re here about Jadon?’

  Joanna nodded while Mike kept his eyes on her. Carly kept them on the doorstep and made a mild protest. ‘I’ve already been interviewed.’

  Mike stepped forward then, charm at the ready. ‘We just wanted to know,’ he said, ‘how he responded when you said you didn’t have the money.’

  ‘As always, Sergeant,’ she said wearily. ‘None too pleased.’

  Joanna had an impression of extreme lassitude.

  She continued, ‘But he just wanted his money so when I said I’d bring it to the office—’

  Joanna jumped in. ‘And did you?’

  Carly frowned, not understanding. ‘Did I what?’

  Then she got it – a split second too late. She gasped and her face went red then deathly pale. Her hand reached out for the doorpost to steady herself.

  ‘Did you ask your mum for the money?’

  That was when Carly gave up. ‘I couldn’t face it,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t ask mum for money again.’

  ‘You’d had to do it before?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So what was your plan, Carly?’

  Her response was so quiet it didn’t even qualify as a whisper. ‘I didn’t have one.’

  Joanna shrugged her shoulders and glanced at Mike. This was a woman who had given up. Giving up implied there was nothing to lose. Someone who has nothing to lose takes risks. Her mind was threading it all together like a string of seashells. Carly was on her list of suspects. You couldn’t hide from these people. You couldn’t just wipe out your debt with a lame excuse. Joanna knew that and so did Carly Johnson.

  ‘Where did Jadon go after you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t look. It was a shitty night. I just shut the door on him.’

  As I’d like to do on you.

  From inside the house, someone was calling. ‘Carly?’

  ‘Carly.’ The voice was male, petulant.

  Joanna looked at Mike, her eyebrows raised. Mr Madeley, I presume. ‘I take it that’s your partner?’

  The blue eyes rested on her. Carly nodded, a curve of cynicism at last giving her face some animation.

  ‘That’s him all right,’ she said.

  Joanna smiled and they left.

  They visited the two families Jason and Dawn had deemed to be of no interest and agreed with the assessment. They seemed kosher, each one telling their story without emotion or self-pity and verifying the facts surrounding Jadon Glover’s final visit. Joanna found their mixture of optimism, that they would one day finally get out of debt and pessimism that they never would, touching. ‘Get out of debt?’ Fay Langton in number seven said, her face twisted. ‘Rob the boys of their easy regular income? That’s not the name of the game, love. No, this is a millstone which will hang around my neck until after I’m dead. I’ll never get out of debt, Inspector Piercy. I just don’t have the means. Income too low, expenses too high. Get it? Maybe it’ll even be inherited by my children like my blue eyes and dark hair or if you’d rather just like some terrible genetic disease.’ Her face was challenging Joanna to disagree. Joanna didn’t even dare ask her how much she’d initially borrowed, what for or how much she still owed.

  The Ginster family at number sixteen were typical but had something extra to add when she asked him how the situation had begun.

  ‘My best friend at work,’ Paul Ginster said, a thin man with a worried face, the lines creasing his forehead scored too deeply to ever be erased. ‘It was him who recommended I take out a loan. We worked in the same place, a little engineering company on the Ashbourne road. It went through bad times in 2008 with the recession and that and we was all put on short time. At the same time Christine was expecting.’ His face looked even older. What should have been a happy time in their lives had turned into a nightmare. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’ His anger burst then like a boil, sudden, hot, infected, painful. ‘We couldn’t afford a fucking thing for the baby. Not a pram or a cot. None of the essentials.’ And then the bitterness melted. It was as though the sun had come out from behind a cloud.

  ‘Scarlet’s two now – child care’s expensive so we still haven’t paid off the two grand we borrowed for stuff even though I’m working all the hours God sends. And you know what? I don’t think we ever will. That’s their plan. They know we’ll give them money for life. There’s only one way to break free of it.’

  His face changed again. The wind had blown something else in. Gritty, determined and unutterably sad. ‘Frank – the guy who told me about them.’ He drew in a deep breath. ‘He hanged himself last year. He left a note for his widow. You know what it said?’

  They could guess.

  ‘It’s the only way I’ll ever get free.’

  Joanna knew then. Silken threads, sticky as a spider’s, were beginning to form a recognizable pattern. Here was a connection. Frank Widnes, who h
ad hanged himself a year ago, had borrowed money from Glover and his cronies. He had worked with Paul Ginster and Ginster had borrowed money too. She looked at Mike and knew from his expression that he too was seeing the pattern emerging.

  ‘Just remind me,’ she said. ‘What’s Frank’s widow’s name?’

  ‘Marty.’ Another glimpse of a smile, of the sun emerging from behind a cloud. ‘Think it’s a sort of substitute for Mildred?’

  Even Joanna failed to suppress a smile. ‘Mrs Widnes is still in debt?’

  Paul Ginster nodded. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, almost casually. ‘Death doesn’t wipe it out.’

  Something crossed Joanna’s mind then. If these debtors were connected not only by common debt but other threads – being neighbours, loyalty, friendship – was it possible this was not a single assault but a collective one? Had they all plotted this? Was it possible that they, the police, were being fed a tissue of lies constructed by a network of debtors?

  She affected innocence. ‘Does Mrs Widnes still live in the town?’

  ‘Yeah. Still lives in the same place. Just round the corner. Britannia Avenue.’ There was no guile behind his response. ‘Paid off part of the debt with his life insurance.’ His face was set now. ‘Even that didn’t cover it all.’

  ‘You must have felt very bitter against the firm.’

  Slowly, Paul Ginster nodded. ‘Every time that bastard knocked on our door,’ he said, ‘I wanted to fucking well kill him.’

  Joanna cleared her throat. Considering the fact that Glover was currently missing these were not wise words.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he’s disappeared now.’

  ‘He’ll turn up,’ Ginster said pessimistically. ‘Bad pennies don’t just vanish. They turn up.’

  No. They don’t – at least, not alive, not unharmed. Not always.

  ‘So where do you think he is?’ Joanna asked curiously, affecting complete stupidity now.