Death Row

by Mark Pearson

  ‘Just you tread carefully, Delaney!’ Duncton called after him as they walked out of the kitchen.

  *

  A few moments later and Delaney was adjusting the heat setting in Sally’s car. ‘It’s colder than a witch’s tit in a brass brassiere in here,’ he said as the constable fired up the engine and threw him a reproving look. ‘What?’ he said defensively.

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ she said, with a resigned sigh.

  ‘Good. Take us down to Roy Boy’s. I need to think and nothing helps me do that better than a fat bacon sandwich.’

  ‘What you said back there to the inspector …’

  ‘Spit it out, Sally.’

  Sally turned the engine back off. ‘About the old man killing himself because he thought his grandson had been killed and it was all his fault.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, what if it was his fault?’

  ‘The boy we found was killed fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Delaney looked at her. ‘Do you ever do the crossword, constable?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Well, let’s not turn this into twenty bloody cryptic questions. What’s your point?’

  ‘Well, you said it yourself, sir. Why Graham Harper? Why was his grandson abducted, why his allotment? Maybe he was involved fifteen years ago in the murder of those two children. You always said Garnier had an accomplice. What if it was Graham Harper? Maybe that was what he meant by the note: I’m sorry, it’s all my fault.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But he didn’t take his own grandchild, did he?’

  Delaney shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Sally shrugged. ‘Maybe he did just kill himself for the guilt he felt about his grandson being taken when he was supposed to be looking after him, like you said.’ She turned the key again and Delaney put his hand on her arm.

  ‘Hold on a minute. Let me think.’ He put a cigarette in his mouth, pulled it out again and looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, then put it on the dashboard. He took out his mobile, hit the speed dial and spoke urgently as it was answered.

  ‘Diane, it’s Jack. Can you pull up the scene-of-crime report from Graham Hall’s allotment and shed?’ He nodded. ‘The inventory from the shed, Look down it. Is there any mention of cigarettes?’ He listened for a while longer. ‘Okay, thanks, Diane. I’ll get back to you.’

  Delaney closed the phone and looked at Sally, an excited gleam in his eye.

  ‘What is it, sir?’

  ‘Graham Harper said he went for a cigarette in his shed while the boy waited outside, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, there were no cigarettes in the shed. And he didn’t have any on him – he said as much when he asked if he could have one of mine.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So where are the cigarettes?’

  Sally shook her head, puzzled. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He didn’t just say he had cigarettes in the shed. He said he had them stashed there.’

  ‘Okay …’ said Sally, clearly still puzzled.

  Delaney pointed out of the window. ‘Let’s go back there.’

  *

  Back at the allotment the SOCO unit was dismantling the forensic tent. The ground had been dug up and examined and no further bodies had been discovered. Delaney nodded to the crew as he walked up to the shed and ripped down the tape sealing it, ignoring the protests coming from the SOCO unit, who were shouting that they hadn’t processed the shed yet. Delaney waved their complaints aside and stepped through the door followed by the detective constable.

  Even though it was bright outside, it was still dark in the shed and he sent Sally back to get a torch. It was pretty much as Delaney remembered it, the usual clutter of a gardening shed. No heavy-bladed instruments. Not that he reckoned Graham Harper would have had the strength to cut off a woman’s head, but it wouldn’t have been the first time he had been wrong on a case.

  A short while later Sally returned with the torch. ‘They’re not too happy us being here, sir. They’ve put a call in to Duncton. He’s on his way over.’

  ‘Great,’ grunted Delaney and scanned the floor. The floorboards were old and covered with the kind of ingrained dirt that takes years to build up. He moved the boxes around, paying little heed to the fact that he was disturbing a crime scene.

  Nothing.

  Frustrated, Delaney let his gaze travel around the room. He looked at the battered armchair, crossed to it and snatched up the cushion. Nothing. He threw it back in place and then shoved the armchair out of the way. The floor was as it was everywhere else, black with dust and dirt. Except there was a small knothole in one floorboard. Delaney bent down and put his finger in it. He gripped under and pulled upwards. The plank came loose. Delaney put it to one side and put his arm through the aperture. ‘Bingo,’ he said quietly and pulled his hand back up, bringing with it a pack of cigarettes. He reached down with his arm again and felt around. There was nothing there. ‘That’s it,’ he said, disappointed, nodding to the cigarettes. ‘At least we know he wasn’t lying about those.’

  ‘Let me have a go, sir,’ said Sally. ‘My arm is thinner than yours.’

  Sally knelt down and put her arm through the hole, reaching in almost up to her shoulder as she groped on the floor under the shed. ‘Hang on – I think I’ve got something,’ she said excitedly as she forced her arm further in. She reached again and then pulled her arm slowly out. She held in her hand an A4 brown paper envelope, filthy with dust and covered with spider webs and mouse droppings.

  She handed it to Delaney, who took it and opened it, sliding out a series of photographs. He took one look at the top photo before sliding the rest back into the envelope and dropping it on the armchair. Then, holding his hand to his mouth, he dashed out of the shed. Sally picked up the envelope and looked inside it.

  Delaney put his hand on the side of the shed, leaning against it, and threw up. The bitter acid taste of the Bushmills he had been drinking the night before filled his mouth and he retched again, a dry, heaving retch. A short while later he became aware of Sally standing beside him.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Were they all of her?’ asked Delaney.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And the men …?’

  ‘There were no faces.’ Sally’s face was ashen too. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

  *

  Delaney stood beside Sally’s car. He was aware of people moving around him, could hear voices but had no idea what anyone was saying. It was just sound. Meaningless.

  Ahead of him the news vultures had gathered again behind the yellow tape. Melanie Jones’s assistant fluffing her hair and touching up her make-up. The glamorous face of the news. News that was hitting home to Delaney fifteen years too late. Hitting home like a sledgehammer in his gut.

  He fumbled a cigarette into his mouth, grateful at least that the rain that had been falling for days on end seemed finally to have let up. He scratched a match and lit up, drawing deep and holding the smoke in his lungs till they burned.

  It was cold but the sky was clear, pale streaks of salmon pink threading through it like coral in a cobalt ocean. Delaney looked at the street lamp that stood at the entrance to the alleyway, but it certainly didn’t lead to Narnia. He remembered the posters of the children that had been plastered all over the area. He remembered the hundreds of hours he’d wasted walking the area. He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. He took another pull on his cigarette as Sally Cartwright approached.

  ‘What do you reckon, Sally?’ He said. ‘Too early for a pint?’

  Sally looked at him sympathetically for a moment and then shook her head. ‘No, sir,’ she said simply. ‘The Crawfish is just around the corner. If it’s still open.’

  ‘That used to be the best boozer in the area back in the day.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  Delaney nodded sadly. ‘No. Not any more.’ He sto
od up straight. ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘What is it, sir?’

  ‘Something Bob Wilkinson said. About never mind the church, it’s the pub that is at the heart of the community.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s the locus. Things happening round here. All those years ago and now happening all over again.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘The landlord back then had the pub as a sort of nerve centre for the search for the missing children. Organised teams of locals as well as the police who were combing the area. Ellie Peters used to work there now and again, I remember her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She was a part-time hooker, an alcoholic, a drug addict. It was a fairly well-known secret that the landlord was giving her more than just three pounds an hour. And she was giving the customers more than a bitter shandy.’

  ‘I still don’t follow, sir.’

  ‘The landlord was due to marry his chef who worked there at the time.’

  Sally nodded, remembering. ‘The woman who cooked the best seafood platter south of your Aunty Noreen?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And she’s important because …’

  ‘Because of her maiden name, detective constable.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Her name was Emily, Sally. Emily Harper!’

  *

  Delaney sat the bar with a pint of lager in front of him as a horde of SOCOs and uniforms headed down to the cellar. Duncton, red-faced as ever, panted as he came up the stairs and into the bar, followed by the red-haired barman, Terry Blaylock. He was clearly less than pleased as he stood aside to let the SOCO get down into the cellar.

  ‘I’m telling you it’s a waste of time. There’s nothing down there.’

  ‘Anything, sir?’ Sally asked Duncton, who shook his head and looked across disgusted at Delaney, who raised his glass back at him as in a toast.

  ‘Your boss is a disgrace, detective constable. Anybody ever tell him that?’

  Sally nodded, with a small smile. ‘Everyone does, sir – he takes it as a compliment.’

  Sergeant Emma Halliday walked in from outside, her mobile phone held to her ear. She finished the call and crossed to Duncton and the red-haired barman. ‘They’ve searched the house.’ She shrugged, disappointed. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What I told you,’ said Blaylock aggressively.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us you’re related to the boy?’ asked Delaney from the bar.

  Duncton swung round at Delaney, annoyed. ‘We’ll do this properly down at the station, thank you very much.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. My old man died fifteen years ago and my mum hasn’t spoken to her brother for twenty years. And neither have I.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The man glared, his voice growing more belligerent by the minute. ‘I don’t know and quite frankly I couldn’t give a fuck. Ask her.’

  ‘We’re asking you, sunshine, and we’ll do it properly,’ said Duncton, every bit as bellicose. He nodded to his tall assistant. ‘Take him in, sergeant.’

  Delaney finished his pint and stood up, gesturing to Sally to follow him as he walked behind Emma Halliday, who was steering Blaylock to the exit.

  ‘Get back to White City and process some parking tickets or whatever it is you’re good at, Delaney,’ Duncton called after him.

  Delaney smiled coldly to himself but carried on walking. Outside, a uniform was holding the back door of a police car open and Sergeant Halliday was about to guide Blaylock in when Delaney called out to her.

  ‘Hold up, sergeant, I know your boss might object, but can I have a word with him?’

  Halliday grunted dismissively. ‘What Duncton objects to is no longer my problem. I found out this morning that I passed my inspector’s exam.’

  Delaney smiled. ‘Good for you!’ Then the smile died as he turned to the overweight barman. ‘Where’s your lock-up, Mister Blaylock?’

  Blaylock shook his head, shuffling his feet slightly. ‘I don’t know what you’re taking about.’

  ‘Yeah, you do. Where is it?’

  ‘Look, I’ve told you. I had nothing to do with that boy’s disappearance. I’ve never even spoken to the kid.’

  ‘Where’s the lock-up?’ said Delaney again, pointedly stepping in close to him, getting in his face.

  ‘All right, all right. It’s round the corner.’

  Halliday nodded. ‘We’ll take my car.’

  Blaylock shook his head, resigned. ‘There’s no need. Like I said, it’s only round the corner.’

  Halliday looked back at the pub for a moment and then gestured to the barman. ‘Lead on, McDuff.’

  As they walked away from the pub Sally fell into step beside Delaney and asked quietly, ‘How did you know he had a lock-up?’

  ‘Remember those boxes he had stashed when we were last here?’

  Sally nodded.

  ‘Half of them were filled with booze. I think he’s been depleting the stock before handing over the keys.’

  A short while later Blaylock veered into a small yard that had twenty lock-up garages. Ten on each side, facing each other across a cracked and pitted drive, overgrown with weeds, that looked like it had been laid in the early 1970s and left to rot ever since.

  Blaylock walked up to the last garage on the right and reached into his pockets to pull out a key. He put it in the lock in the handle on the centre of the door, twisted it and lifted the door up and in. He gestured with his hand and stood back, his arms folded. ‘Knock yourselves out.’

  Delaney walked in with Sally and looked around the garage. It was small, piled high with cardboard boxes and packing crates – a lot of them filled, as Delaney had rightly surmised, with bottles of spirits liberated from the pub. There was no sign of an eight-year-old boy. Delaney moved a few of the boxes aside but a couple of minutes later they had to concede there was no evidence of the boy’s presence.

  Delaney walked out and looked at Blaylock. ‘Stocking up early for Christmas, are we?’

  Blaylock’s already red face flushed an even deeper hue. ‘I can explain about that.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Delaney brusquely. ‘Frankly, we’ve got more important fish to fry.’ He gestured for Blaylock to shut the door and watched as he pulled it down again.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Delaney said as the door was closing. ‘Open it up again.’

  Blaylock shrugged, puzzled, and did as Delaney asked. The detective strode forward and went to a box near the front of the garage. It was the one that Blaylock had been loading up when he and Sally had been in the pub a few days earlier. He moved a couple of items aside and pulled out a photo. He looked at it for a moment. ‘Delaney, you absolute feckin’ idiot!’ he said softly.

  ‘What is it, sir?’ asked Sally.

  Delaney handed her the photo and, puzzled, Sally looked at it for a moment.

  ‘Look at the man on the left, Sally. Picture him without the beard and the moustache and the full head of quiffed hair. Picture that and then look who is standing next to him.’

  Sally peered a bit more closely at the photo. ‘Oh my God!’ she said in a low whisper as recognition dawned on her.

  *

  Jennifer Hickling came out of the HSBC bank on Camden High Street in a foul mood. She had planned to withdraw her savings that morning, get her sister from school at lunchtime, take the Tube to Liverpool Street and take a mainline train out of London for good. She had an older friend called Kelly who had just turned sixteen and had a one-year-old baby. Kelly lived with her boyfriend, a nineteen-year-old apprentice car mechanic called Lloyd who absolutely doted on her. They had a house on a council estate in a small town just outside Norwich. But it was an estate as different from the Waterhill where Jenny lived that it might as well have been in another country. In a lot of ways it was.

  The only trouble was that because of her age Jenny had opened the account with some false ID, including a driving licence which she had left back at the flat.
Due to the large amount of money she was withdrawing – five thousand pounds – the manager had asked to see the driving licence again. Jenny had arranged an appointment with the woman for two o’clock. It meant an hour or so’s delay but her train tickets were valid up to four o’clock and it was only a two-hour journey to Norwich, where her friend and her friend’s partner had agreed to meet them.

  She ran up the road to catch her bus, showing her real ID to a sceptical bus driver who reckoned she was at least three years older than she claimed but didn’t have the energy to argue the matter.

  Jenny walked down the length of the bus to sit on her own on the back seat by the window.

  She looked out of the grimy window at the brilliant blue sky, the streaks of pale red trailing through it like ink in water. She pulled her coat tighter around her and snuggled into the corner. She put her hand in her pocket, pulled out the two one-way tickets to Norwich and smiled to herself. Time to make a new life for herself and her sister. Time to start again. Time to heal.

  Way past time.

  She never did make the train.

  *

  It was a small lounge and Jack Delaney, Sergeant Halliday and Terry Blaylock pretty much filled it. Sally Cartwright stood by the door.

  Delaney looked at the woman sitting on the sofa. She seemed to be overwhelmed by their presence. He remembered her as a larger-than-life woman. Big in every sense of the word. The years since he had last seen her had seemed to diminish her somehow. He guessed she was probably in her sixties, with grey hair that had once been a magnificent auburn. She looked up at him quizzically and then smiled.

  ‘I remember you. You were the Irish copper, weren’t you?’

  ‘I still am, ma’am,’ said Delaney.

  ‘You used to come into the pub for your lunch back in that dreadful time.’

  ‘I did.’

  She clicked her fingers. ‘The fisherman’s platter. Better than your Aunty Nora’s, you used to say.’

  ‘You have a good memory, Mrs Blaylock.’

  ‘Only thing I do have nowadays,’ she grunted.

  ‘But it was me Aunty Noreen.’

  ‘We don’t do food any more.’