Where the Silence Calls

by M J Lee

  ‘I’ll take a look at it this evening. Do we have the incident report yet?’

  She shook her head, checking the document. ‘The Senior Investigating Officer is a Detective Sergeant Jones…’

  ‘Ted Jones? Not the smartest tool in the woodshed, but at least he’s thorough. His boss makes sure he is. I’ll follow up. Can you get me details of the Bakewell death too?’

  ‘I’ll ask David Smail to send them over.’

  ‘I’ll take a look at the scene this evening, but I don’t think I’ll find anything. People dying on the streets don’t normally leave much…’

  He didn’t finish his sentence. ‘Thank you.’

  Ridpath nodded.

  Mrs Challinor pulled a file from her in tray and began to read through it.

  The meeting was definitely over.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  After Ridpath left her office, a wave of tiredness swept over Margaret Challinor. It had been a long week. She had just finished a case that day involving the death of an alcoholic woman in hospital. The woman had somehow fallen through the cracks in the system, despite having a long history of alcohol abuse.

  Everybody had followed the correct procedures in the case. The doctor had referred her to an alcohol treatment centre but not followed up. The centre had put a plan down on paper but not implemented it. Her social worker had visited her once and then resigned with the post left unfilled. A hospital case worker had made a note about the urgency of her case and then done nothing.

  The woman, Elsie Richards, had collapsed in the street one Saturday morning, was taken to hospital immediately but died from liver failure the next day.

  Since the 2013 Coronial Act, Mrs Challinor no longer passed a verdict at the end of an inquest. Instead she now made a ‘finding of fact’. And the facts in this case were that nobody had got off their arses and done something. They had all filled in their forms, ticked their boxes, made sure their bums were covered and, in effect, achieved nothing.

  It made her furious that not one person had stopped for a second to actually help this woman suffering from the sad disease of alcoholism. She began to draft a letter to the Director of Social Services, the head of the local NHS trust and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, to ensure this never happened again.

  Not on her watch.

  It would make her even more unpopular than she already was, but she didn’t care. People mattered, not the fragile ego of some pen-pushing bureaucrat.

  She rubbed her eyes, pushing the half-written letter away from her. It could wait until tomorrow when she was in a less caustic, more considered frame of mind. What she wanted was to see change, not force people into justifying their behaviour or the actions of their department. She should write something more helpful and less accusatory.

  Ridpath popped into her mind. Should she ask him to use his contacts to help find Robert? Would it be an imposition on him? Even worse, would it be a misuse of her authority asking for a personal favour? She would have to think it over.

  A knock on the door.

  ‘Come,’ she called out.

  Jenny Oldfield, the office manager, appeared at the door. ‘Just a few requisitions for you to sign before I go. We need paper, folders, and the upstairs hall light fixing.’

  The usual council stuff, forms in triplicate, and boxes ticked for even the smallest expenditure. The coroner’s court was not funded by central government or the Ministry of Justice. Instead, her office was paid for by the local council. And, like every other local authority in England, austerity had bitten into her funding. She had managed to find an assistant for Ridpath by asking Claire Trent to continue to pay his salary. Not the best solution, but it had worked so far.

  ‘Can you ask Ridpath to see me before he goes?’

  ‘He’s already left, Mrs Challinor. A death in central Manchester. You asked him to look at it this evening.’

  She was becoming forgetful in her old age. For a second, her mind flashed to her younger brother living on the streets, his hand held out for money, his fingers grubby with dirt, and a bottle of cheap wine by his side.

  Should she look for him this weekend?

  She had done it before. Walking the streets on a Sunday night in Manchester, checking on the places the homeless gathered to drink and gossip and fight. She had been shocked by the feral nature of their lives; the dirt, the poverty, the way in which drugs or alcohol dominated every waking moment.

  She hadn’t found him then and she doubted if she could find him now. She thought again about asking Ridpath to help find Robert. But no, it would not be ethical, she decided. This was a personal matter, not a case for the coroner’s court.

  Another image flashed into her mind. This time of her and Robert on the hills in the Peak District one winter long ago. Snow painting the hillsides a bright white, their mother helping them carry an old sled to the top of the hill. Her brother, six years old at most, sitting between her legs as they set off down the hill. His squeals of joy, the wind in her hair, the rush of speed as they slid down, overturning at the bottom, both ending up covered in white, wet, cold Derbyshire snow.

  A perfect day.

  Before he lost his life to alcohol and drugs.

  Before he lost his wife.

  Before he lost his kids.

  Before he lost himself.

  ‘I’ll be going, Mrs Challinor.’

  She shook her head and was immediately brought back to the present day. ‘Fine, Jenny, see you tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m off to my swing class tonight, the teacher moves like a dream.’ Jenny batted her green-painted eyes. ‘Don’t work too late.’

  ‘I won’t. I’m going soon myself.’

  ‘You have the Rafferty case tomorrow morning. I’ve left the brief and the notes on your desk.’

  Mrs Challinor glanced down at the beige folder that was the life and death of Nora Rafferty, a pensioner who had died of hypothermia. How could such a thing happen in this day and age? ‘I’ll read them this evening.’

  ‘Good night,’ Jenny said breezily, closing the door.

  Mrs Challinor was left alone in her office. A faint hum from the central heating system the only noise. Outside her sash window, the wind whistled through the trees. Her thoughts drifted once more to her brother.

  What was he doing on this cold night?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ridpath parked the car at Piccadilly Basin. Four pounds fifty for two bloody hours on a derelict piece of land. A rip-off and everybody knew it. But parking in the city centre always was.

  He walked across the cobbles, exiting through an old crenellated gateway, a strange entrance for a car park, probably all that was left of some grand Victorian building.

  This case was probably a waste of time, but in the time they had worked together, Ridpath had come to respect Mrs Challinor’s instincts. She had an almost hyper awareness of possible anomalies in the deaths in Manchester. A function of Harold Shipman and his murders, he guessed.

  Pulling his overcoat around him, he checked the address where the body had been found against Google Maps on his phone. The wind hustled off the Pennines and whistled through the open streets. Across the road, an old woman was pushing an empty trolley down the street. Ridpath wondered where she was going, there was nowhere to shop around here. After five o’clock, this whole area shut down, becoming a ghost town full of memories from a different era.

  He tucked the scarf Polly had given him around his neck and turned right down Dale Street, past blocks of red-brick Victorian buildings, relics from the days when Manchester was the trading centre of the North.

  Left along China Lane. It was dark now and there were no street lamps to mark his way. But there was enough ambient light to see what was going on. Ambient light that had an orange tinge to it, like looking through a bottle of Lucozade.

  An afternoon shower had coated the road with a sheen of dirty water. Puddles pooled in the potholes and in the gaps in the flagstones. Ridpath picked his way carefully. T
he last thing he needed at that moment was wet feet.

  He had already phoned Polly to tell her he would be back late that evening. She hadn’t been happy but had said nothing. He was keeping to his promise of always letting her know where he was and she was managing (just) to avoid being too hard on him. It had worked for the last six months and the truce seemed to be holding. You had to work at a marriage, and he was determined not to make the same mistakes he had made before. Polly and Eve were far too precious for such stupidity.

  He stepped over a pile of old clothes next to a large puddle. One of the homeless had staked his claim to a recess in the brick wall, placing an old sleeping bag and some rags on top of a flattened cardboard box. The man was nowhere to be seen, though. Was this the John Doe’s stuff? Or did it belong to somebody else?

  The windows of the building were bricked up but a large metal gate suggested that life existed in its padlocked interior. It was strange to think that just two hundred yards away was the beating heart of Manchester in Piccadilly Gardens: shops, department stores, fast-food restaurants, bookies, amusement arcades and coffee shops. All the retail outlets of a modern city.

  A large rat ran across the road in front of him, jumping from the interior of a large blue and yellow bin. He shuddered. He didn’t like rats. In fact, he hated them. It was their tails – long, scaly, alien.

  Keep going, Ridpath, do your job.

  He reached the corner of Back Piccadilly and China Lane. The building site described in the report was on the left. But calling it a building site was a bit of an exaggeration. There was no actual building going on. Just a derelict piece of ground surrounded by hoardings covered in graffiti and posters advertising bands coming to Manchester.

  He noticed one advertising The Specials. Were they still going? They must all be over sixty. ‘I wonder if Rudy’s received the message by now,’ he muttered to himself.

  The whole area was as quiet as a cemetery. No passers-by walking along the alley. No workers leaving the buildings after putting in a shift. No lights anywhere.

  Another shudder travelled down Ridpath’s spine. ‘Check it out and go straight home,’ he said out loud, hearing his voice echo off the empty brick walls.

  He strode to the gate. It was still open and there was no police tape preventing entry. Why would they put any up? This wasn’t a crime scene, just a place where somebody had died recently.

  He poked his head round the gate.

  It was darker here, the ambient light didn’t penetrate this far into the nether reaches of Piccadilly. He took out a torch from his pocket, shining the light on the bin on his right.

  ‘Greater Manchester Police,’ he shouted, hearing the tentative tones of his own voice.

  A pair of bright, shining eyes stared at him before scuttling off into the undergrowth. He shone the light across the other bins.

  No other movement.

  Was this where the body had been discovered?

  He shuffled slowly forward, letting the light play all around him, encouraging the rats, if there were any, to make a run for it.

  He stepped in front of a bin.

  At the edge of his vision, he saw something raised and then coming down towards his head. He twisted his body at the last moment, feeling the strike on the side of his neck where it met the skull.

  One minute he had been awake and conscious of everything around him, the next his legs gave way and he saw himself falling in slow motion towards the rain-soaked ground.

  His head hit the surface and his last thought before he lost consciousness was that was a bloody big rat.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ridpath didn’t know how long he had been out cold.

  He pushed himself up into a sitting position and wiped his face with his coat sleeve. He touched the back of his head where it met the neck. There was a bump the size of Mount Everest. Luckily the skin wasn’t broken, but he could already feel the headache creeping through his brain towards the temples.

  Two feet away, the torch shone uselessly on the wet ground. He reached forward to pick it up and a sharp pain shot through his elbow. He must have hurt it when he fell. He grasped the torch and shone it all around.

  Nobody there.

  Moving gingerly, he got up from the ground, wiping down his coat and his suit trousers with his right hand. Black, wet gunk clung to it.

  Shit. This is what you get for searching a crime scene in the dark: a sore head and a filthy suit.

  He walked slowly back to the gate, rubbing his head the whole time. Back Piccadilly was quiet, not a soul to be seen. China Lane was empty too. His attacker had vanished into thin air.

  Should he call it in?

  No point. There was little chance of any police responding quickly enough to catch somebody. He wouldn’t recognise whoever did it again. He didn’t even have an idea of their age or height. He had only caught a glimpse of a raised arm before he had been hit over the head. If he was asked for a description, what could he say? A dark arm had attacked him.

  He would be a laughing stock.

  Ridpath shone his spotlight on the old building opposite. A CCTV camera pointed straight down on him. If the bloody thing was working and not a dummy, it would have filmed the perp as he left the scene.

  Not for the first time, Ridpath thanked the gods for CCTV, the best thing to happen in crime enforcement in the UK for the last twenty years. And it had happened almost by accident.

  He would check the footage tomorrow. With a bit of luck, he would see the person who attacked him.

  What had they been doing at the building site?

  Was it related to the death that afternoon or something completely different? Maybe it was just somebody looking for somewhere to doss down for the night. But if that were true, why hit him? He had identified himself as a police officer. They must have heard him.

  He went back into the building site to check that nothing had dropped from his pockets when he fell over.

  There was a patch of scorched ground to one side. That must have been where the John Doe had burned. But there was nothing else to be seen. Not a single indicator that a human being had died here today.

  Ridpath turned to go. As he did, the torch played on the inside of the hoardings surrounding the site.

  In bright orange letters, somebody had spray-painted PLAY THE GAME.

  Ridpath stepped forward and touched the bottom of the last letter.

  An orange smudge appeared on his fingers.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was past eight o’clock when Ridpath reached home. As soon as he walked in the door, Polly stood up from her lesson planning and rushed to his side.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I fell over.’

  She leant in and sniffed him. ‘In a sewer? You’d better give me the coat, I’ll take it to the dry-cleaner’s tomorrow. Talking about dry-cleaning, did you pick up my dress?’

  He slapped his forehead with his palm. ‘Sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘No worries, I’ll pick it up tomorrow during my lunchtime and drop off this… thing.’ She held the coat at arm’s length. ‘You’d better give me your suit too. The trousers look like they’ve been swimming in mud.’

  ‘Where’s Eve?’

  ‘Upstairs, supposedly reading, but I bet she’s on YouTube again.’

  ‘Watching BTS.’

  ‘Right first time.’

  ‘I thought this Korean boy band stuff was just a phase she was going through.’

  ‘You mean like me and Take That?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘My “phase” went on for five years. And I definitely want to go to their reunion tour when it hits Liverpool. So, by my reckoning, it’s lasted twenty-four years and counting…’

  ‘We have to put up with another twenty years of girly glee about V, J-Hope and Jungkook?’

  ‘If we’re lucky. Did you book the tickets for the concert in London?’

  Ridpath stayed silent.

  ‘You forgot
that too, didn’t you?’

  He smiled sheepishly. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow. Hopefully there’ll be some left.’ He pointed upstairs. ‘I’ll go and say hello.’

  ‘Don’t stay too long, I’ll reheat the fish cakes. There’s still a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge too, if you want a glass or three.’

  He kissed her on the lips. ‘Sounds delicious. I’ll just pop up to see the monster. And sorry about the tickets and the dry-cleaning.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  He thought about telling Polly the truth about the attack but decided not to. She would only worry and that wouldn’t be good for either of them. ‘Me, I’m right as rain, never felt better,’ he lied and ran up the stairs to see his daughter.

  Ridpath stopped for a moment outside the door with a picture of BTS and a sign saying ‘Keep out on pain of death’, listening for movement inside.

  Nothing.

  He tapped on the door.

  No answer.

  He pushed it open. His daughter was sitting in front of her computer with her back to him, the Christmas present of purple Beats headphones clamped to her ears. He crept forward and pinched her just below her ribs. She jumped six inches into the air.

  ‘Dad,’ she shouted, whipping off her headphones, ‘don’t do that!’

  ‘Do what?’ he said, holding his hands up in the air as if to say it’s a fair cop.

  ‘Don’t creep up on me like a perv.’

  ‘A perv? Where did you learn that?’

  ‘Sex education. Mum teaches it.’

  ‘And she taught you to call people pervs, did she?’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but she said to watch out for inappropriate behaviour from adults.’

  He glanced over her shoulder, deciding to change the subject. ‘What are you watching?’

  She clicked the laptop and the screen went to black. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be doing your homework, not watching BTS?’

  ‘Who said I was watching BTS?’

  Ridpath reached over her shoulder and tapped another key. The latest video from the Korean boy band was playing.