by David Hodges
Street was not a very picturesque village and it had never been one of Kate’s favourite places – except for the huge commercial outlet site, with its wall to wall shopping opportunities. But the Toliver factory was some distance from the village centre, accessed by a nondescript tarmac cul-de-sac, boasting a prize collection of potholes.
Toliver’s was one of several similar abandoned properties and the previous owners of the one-time packaging company had not even bothered to secure the rusted metal gates with a padlock before they had left the building to rot.
Kate arrived in fragile sunlight a couple of minutes before the appointed time and, parking up on some waste-ground just before the entrance, she squeezed between the partially open gates into a large rubbish-strewn yard beyond.
The broken windows of the factory seemed to gape at her in surprise as she made her away across the yard to the yawning gash at one end of the building, which looked as though it had once been a loading bay, and a mangy tortoiseshell cat paused in the process of inspecting a clump of tall weeds erupting from the concrete apron to give her a wary once-over before streaking ahead of her into the opening.
She had remembered to bring a torch with her from the car, but there turned out to be just enough light penetrating the loading bay to enable her to see where she was going and she made her way among a litter of broken packing cases to some double doors at the far end. The doors opened with a protesting groan and she was presented with shards of light tracing a pattern of square window frames across a vast concrete floor from skylights thirty feet or so above her head.
‘Hello?’ she called a little self-consciously. ‘Anyone here?’
A low wind breathed temporary life into the building, rattling window frames and stirring timbers, but that was the only response she received, for otherwise, the place appeared to be completely dead.
The tortoiseshell cat put in another brief appearance, emerging from behind some rusted wheeled bins a few yards away to stand there staring at her again for a few moments then it too was gone, strutting away back into the shadows behind the bins.
Turning around a full circle, she checked as much of the building’s interior as she could make out in the grey gloom, using her torch to probe areas cloaked in shadow, but there was no sign of anyone and, clearing her throat and feeling more than a little silly, she called out again, ‘Anyone here? If you don’t show yourself, I’m leaving.’
But there was still no response – not even a single ‘mew’ from the cat, which appeared to have gone into hiding for good – and she frowned. Maybe the call had been a hoax after all and she was simply talking to herself. ‘You’ve been had, my girl,’ she murmured ruefully, and turned back towards the doors leading out to the loading bay. ‘Time to go.’
She heard the loud bang almost at the same moment and swung in the direction of the sound. She hadn’t noticed the side door some twenty feet away and the young woman had entered the factory through it, apparently deliberately slamming it behind her to attract her attention.
Kate walked slowly over to her, stopping some two to three yards short, when the other woman tensed and held up both hands in an arresting gesture, warning, ‘No closer or I’m out of here.’
Kate studied her curiously. Even in the gloom she could see that she was no more than nineteen or twenty, with purple-streaked, shoulder-length blonde hair and a couple of brass rings through her lower lip and one in a nostril. She was wearing threadbare blue jeans, Doc Martin style boots and a heavy fawn–coloured fleece. Almost certainly a dosser, maybe also a user.
‘Were you the person who rang me?’ Kate queried.
The woman snorted. ‘No, it was me twin sister – what do you think?’
Kate smiled faintly. The familiar sneering bravado, the usual attempt to appear hard and cynical. She had seen it all so many times before. Outwardly tough and confident, but inside nervous and vulnerable. This was damaged goods, but hopefully, not too badly damaged to be of value.
‘What’s your name?’
The other shook her head. ‘No names.’
‘So what shall I call you?’
‘OK, Polly – you can call me Polly.’
‘Is that your real name?’
‘It’ll do.’
‘So, Polly what?’
‘Polygon – the bleedin’ dead parrot – I said no names.’
‘And what have you got to tell me?’
‘Depends what it’s worth.’
Kate sighed. ‘Look, love, I’m not here to play games with you. I told you that before. If you’ve got some information for me, let’s have it and then we’ll talk about how much it’s worth.’
A harsh humourless laugh and the young woman lit a cigarette, choking for a moment on the smoke. Kate noticed that the hand holding the cigarette was shaking. Drugs? Probably coke or Big H, she thought. ‘Think I’m stupid, love? A ton is what I want for this.’
It was Kate’s turn to snort her derision. ‘You have to be joking. We don’t pay that sort of money.’
‘Fifty then.’
‘Give me something good and I can let you have a pony right now.’
‘Twenty-five quid? You’re having a laugh.’
Kate shrugged, hoping her bluff would work. ‘OK, then I keep my money and you forfeit your next fix.’
Silence for a moment, then the woman dropped her cigarette and trod on it. ‘If he finds me, I’m dead, and it’ll be all down to you.’
Kate was unmoved. ‘If who finds you?’
‘Bread first.’ A gloved hand shot out almost with the speed of a lizard’s tongue.
Kate shook her head. ‘No way. You’ll just have to trust me.’
A brief pause and then the woman blurted, ‘They call him the Sandman.’
For some unaccountable reason, Kate felt a chill run down her spine. ‘Why Sandman?’ she said, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice.
A further harsh laugh, but again there was no humour in it. ‘’Cause he puts people to sleep, that’s why – just like in the kids’ story. You savvy?’
‘Did he put the reporter to sleep?’
There was a muffled curse. ‘I told her to watch out for herself, but the stupid cow wouldn’t listen. She must’ve got too close.’
‘So you’re saying the Sandman stiffed her?’
The sneer was back on the woman’s face. ‘No, I’m saying they went for a romantic dip together – are you stupid or what?’
Kate resisted the urge to slap her across the face and tried instead to count to ten, getting as far as five. ‘So, who is he, this Sandman?’
‘Dunno. No one knows. But he seems to have loads of stuff – whatever anyone wants, if they got enough bread.’
Kate’s eyes narrowed. ‘What sort of stuff?’
Another shrug. ‘PCP, crack, you name it.’
‘How do you know about him?’
‘How’d you think I know? I ain’t shivering ’cause I’m cold. I gets my stuff from one of his pushers. The guy’s real flash and he’s got a big mouth.’
‘Who’s the guy?’
Polly hesitated, then shrugged with a sort of desperate resignation. ‘Leroy – Leroy Joseph. We’ve all been getting our stuff through him.’
‘So why turn grass and bite the hand that feeds?’
‘’Cause the hand won’t feed no more, that’s why. I blabbed to that bleedin’ reporter, when she come snoopin’ around, didn’t I? She must’ve said what I told her before she copped it, ’cause word on the street is that Leroy is out looking for me. I got to split before he finds me, maybe disappear to the Smoke, but I need some bread for the road.’
‘For your next fix, you mean?’
‘For the next few fixes, more like. I know another guy where I can get some stuff but I got to move fast.’
There was a loud ‘crack’ from somewhere else in the building and Polly noticeably stiffened, glancing quickly towards the loading bay area. ‘I got to go. Give me the bread now.’
&n
bsp; Kate thought about Roscoe as she produced her wallet and counted out twenty-five pounds in notes, wondering whether the crusty old sod would be prepared to grant the necessary retrospective authority for payment out of the CID informants’ fund to enable her to claim the money back.
‘You need to tell me a lot more than you’ve told me so far before I can give you anything,’ she said. ‘But I have it here if you want it.’
There was an angry snarl and the woman stepped forward a couple of paces, her fists clenched. ‘You slag, I’ve told you too much already.’
Kate stood her ground. ‘How will I find this Sandman?’ she persisted.
Polly abruptly sagged back against the door through which she had entered the place. ‘Maybe he’ll find you first,’ she grated, clutching at her stomach with both hands. ‘Look, I need that fix. Please… .’
Kate counted out a further twenty-five. ‘Fifty if you give me what I need.’
The woman’s gaze fastened on the money in her hand with a greedy intensity. ‘Ask for Leroy at the Sapphire Club,’ she blurted. ‘They call him “the Spliff”.’
Kate smiled grimly, knowing only too well that a spliff was a cannabis joint. ‘Appropriate,’ she commented.
Polly nodded quickly. ‘He does most of the legwork for the Sandman,’ she finished. ‘But I reckon he’s been dealing on the side and the Sandman won’t like that one little bit if he finds out.’
Another loud crack from somewhere close by and Polly came off the door in a rush, one hand still clutching at her stomach, but with her gaze now riveted on the loading bay doors.
‘I got to get out of here,’ she whispered. ‘I could’ve been followed. Sandman has eyes everywhere.’
Before Kate realized what she was intending to do, the terrified woman suddenly lunged forward and snatched the money from her hand. Then, wrenching open the door behind her, she was gone, her footsteps ringing away on a concrete floor as she disappeared into what turned out to be a labyrinth of corridors and offices on the other side.
‘Damn, damn, damn!’ Kate snarled for the second time that day.
DI Roscoe was in a foul mood. ‘So let me get this straight,’ he rasped, staring Kate straight in the eye. ‘You fixed up a meet with some bleedin’ hophead without telling a soul about it, parted with fifty quid in exchange for some bullshit fairy-tale and then, to cap it all, let the conniving little bitch have it away on her toes?’ He stabbed a finger forcefully in her direction, his head thrust forward aggressively. ‘And now – and now you expect me to pay you the money back out of the informants’ fund? Is that about right – have I covered everything?’
His voice couldn’t have been any louder and, despite the fact that the confrontation was taking place in his office behind a closed door, Kate was quite sure that Hayden and her other colleagues sitting in the main CID office were able to hear every word and her toes almost curled up in embarrassment.
‘Sorry, Guv,’ she said limply. ‘But I had no time to tell anyone where I was going and I am convinced Polly was telling me the truth.’
He snorted. ‘Oh, Polly, is it? You’re even on first-name terms, are you? Did she by any chance give you her telephone number and bust measurement as well?’
Kate winced, but thought it best not to say anything in reply.
‘Polly!’ Roscoe snarled derisively and shook his head in disgust. ‘You’ve done this before on other jobs, if I remember rightly, haven’t you, Miss? Gone off on your own like the flamin’ Lone Ranger? You never learn, do you? Have you any idea what could have happened to you in that factory? It might have been a junkies’ shooting gallery, full of dirty needles and lid-off crazies and you just walked in there like soddin’ Alice In Wonderland!’
‘Sorry, Guv,’ she said again, then added, ‘I suppose my fifty quid is down the drain now, is it?’
For a moment Kate thought Roscoe’s eyes were going to erupt from their sockets, but he controlled himself with an effort. ‘Get out of my sight, Sergeant,’ he breathed and nodded towards the main office. ‘And take that dipstick of a husband with you. We’ll talk again tomorrow morning – by which time I might have cooled down.’
‘By the sound of it, that was another job well done, old girl,’ Hayden murmured to her as they quit the building.
‘Shut it!’ Kate retorted savagely. ‘Or you can get your own bloody dinner!’
CHAPTER 7
The Sapphire Night Club was well known in police circles. Its much publicized events, referred to as ‘club nights’, were a popular haunt of dispossessed youngsters, from as far afield as Bristol and Exeter, looking for a hedonistic night out, fuelled by illegal drugs and cheap alcohol; the place had been raided twice in the first six months of its opening. More recently, however, under new management, it had ostensibly smartened itself up, presenting a more acceptable image and earning itself some respite from the attentions of the police and local authority who had seemed willing to adopt a more flexible policy of co-existence with their noisy decadent ‘tenant’ in a new spirit of tolerance.
Kate hadn’t told Roscoe that Leroy ‘the Spliff’ operated from the Sapphire Club. Somehow she hadn’t felt that he would have been too receptive to the plan she had devised and she had decided, despite the obvious risk to her career, to go ahead with it, minus his blessing.
Hayden could have been a big stumbling block, for there was no way he would have agreed to what she was contemplating, but then fate had intervened; poor old Hayden had been called out from dinner to attend a complaint of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, leaving her free to pursue her plan with impunity.
She smiled as she parked her Mazda MX5 in the shadows of the night club’s car park at just after eight in the evening, wondering what her colleagues would have said to see her striding towards the front doors in her very brief sequinned top and black trousers, with the cold night air brushing her bare midriff and her auburn hair brushed out over her shoulders.
The burly bouncer treated her to a lascivious grin as she flounced past him, her silver coloured shoulder bag bouncing on her hip, and, despite the club rule of ‘no singles’, he made no attempt to stop her, his gaze focused instead on her pierced navel as a second man sitting at a strategically placed table just inside the door accepted her twenty-five pounds entrance fee with an extravagant wink and issued her with a ticket.
The music – if it could be termed that – had greeted Kate from the car park itself, but in the foyer of the building she was conscious of the very floor beneath her feet trembling to the cacophonous challenge erupting from the other side of the pair of heavy wooden doors at the far end of the room and when she hauled open the right-hand door, brushing past another thug-like doorman on the other side, she stepped into a mayhem of mind-blasting rock music and writhing bodies, illuminated by brilliant flashing lights that threatened to turn her eyes inside-out.
For a few moments she stood by the wall, studying the faces constantly emerging, disappearing then re-emerging in the surrealistic glare of the flashing spotlights, trying to gauge the average age of the shaking, twisting, whirling figures. It had been her one concern that – at thirty – she might stand out like a sore thumb in a predominantly teens and early twenties crowd. But she was relieved to see several more mature men and women on the floor – some of whom looked even older than she was, and, relaxing a little now, she skirted the dancers and approached the red leather-clad bar with a smile and her purse in her hand.
There seemed to be an army of bar staff, men and women, flitting like wraiths among the on-off shadows, dispensing a variety of drinks to the crush of customers, many of whom she suspected were well under age. But in addition to stamina, the male bar staff also seemed to have excellent eyesight, and she was spotted almost immediately by a tubby thirty-something barman with oily black hair and a strong Southern Irish accent.
‘Sure, an angel’s just walked into my life,’ he charmed, his voice raised to enable him to compete with the noise. ‘What’ll ye have, me da
rlin’?’
Kate smiled back. ‘Any red wine?’ she mouthed, leaning across the bar towards him, and in the next spotlight flash, she saw him start back from the bar in feigned shock. ‘Red wine?’ he echoed. ‘Holy Mother, ’tis a terrible thing for a wee angel, like yourself, to be askin’ a true Irishman for red wine.’
He produced a bottle of Bushmills whiskey and poured her a stiff measure. ‘There y’are, me darlin’. A dram to be proud of. This one’s on the house too, so it is.’
It was not the time or the place to argue the point and she nodded her thanks, picked up the glass and took a sip. He grinned at her, ignoring the sharp critical comments of his overworked colleagues, who plainly felt he should be getting on with the job instead of chatting up a pretty customer, and nodded towards the far end of the bar, inviting her to join him there.
‘Sure, you must be from the old country with hair like that?’ he shouted again, and this time he leaned across the bar towards her, stripping her clothes off with his eyes.
She shook her head, taking another sip of her drink to play for time as her mind raced. This could be a very profitable accident. If he was one of the regular barmen, he should know Leroy, the Spliff and that could short circuit a lot of otherwise dodgy inquiries.
‘No, English through and through,’ she shouted back, giving him another encouraging smile.
He affected an idiotic gaping expression – a proper comedian, this one, she mused grimly. ‘English?’ he exclaimed. ‘’Tis a real tragedy, that is. An’ there’s me thinkin’ what a quare cracker this wee Irish colleen is.’