He leaned forward and threw up on the ground at his brother’s feet.
‘Oi!’ Mikey yelled and Josh heard him step forward. ‘Mikey.’ Greg spoke quietly, but the menace in that one word was enough to make Mikey back off.
The black-clad man was gibbering, begging to be let go.
‘Who is he?’ Greg said, disgust written all over his face.
‘I told you,’ Josh said. ‘A killer. He kidnapped a mother and her little girl in Manchester. The mother’s dead – a journalist as well.’
‘Can’t be all bad then, eh?’ Mikey again.
This time a look from Greg was enough to silence him.
Josh still hadn’t seen the third occupant of the BMW, and he began to turn again to look. Greg punched him, hard, in the left temple. His head whipped right. The fog descended once more and Josh began to shake; he slumped forward, saving himself with this hands, feeling grit and dirt scrape his palms.
Then Greg’s hand snaked forward and gripped a handful of his hair; his head snapped back and he was looking into his brother’s eyes. Josh had forgotten how fast his brother could move; age hadn’t changed that in him.
‘He do this to you?’ Greg asked, tracing the line of the plastic garrotte around his throat, and not too gently.
Josh winced, despite himself. ‘Yeah,’ he managed on an out-breath.
Something flickered in Greg’s eyes; Mikey moved in and aimed a kick at his attacker’s side. Josh heard a crunch, a grunt of pain, then the gimp was begging:
‘Pleasepleasepleasedon’t’, as Mikey brought his foot back for a second swing.
‘Don’t,’ Josh said, his voice sounding dull and far away.
‘You really have got a thing for him, haven’t you, Sean?’ Mikey said, finishing the kick almost as an afterthought.
‘The girl is still missing,’ Josh said, his voice hoarse. ‘He knows where she is.’
‘What’s that to me?’
‘She’s six, Greg.’
Greg had raised three daughters of his own. He let go of Josh’s hair and Josh swayed uncertainly for a moment before finding his balance again.
‘Where’s the girl?’ Greg said, addressing the man cowering on the ground.
‘Fuck off,’ the man said, but there was no force behind the words.
Greg’s lips curled in a snarl of disgust. Out of nowhere, he had a gun in his hand. He screwed a suppressor to the muzzle, taking his time, then raised the pistol, pointing it at the grovelling man’s head.
‘Greg, no, please.’
His brother’s eyes slid slowly from the wiry man spitting blood on to the tarmac, to Josh. ‘I never thought I’d hear you beg, Sean.’ He sounded disappointed.
‘The little girl – her name is Lauren, lives in Manchester. Her mother took her out for a birthday treat and this piece of shit took them. He killed the mother, but there’s a chance Lauren is still alive. She’s been gone over a week; we know it’s an old building, because they found mould under her fingernails. But we got nothing else—’
‘We? You know how much it offends me, you working with the cops?’ Greg said.
‘I’m just trying to find a little girl, Greg. Remember when Kim was six and she was scared of the dark?’ Josh remembered a time – he was no more than eight – staying at his big brother’s house after a family party, sleeping on a camp bed in Kim’s room, Kim waking up screaming. Greg scooped her up in his strong arms and scared the demons away, banishing them from troubling her ever again.
The muzzle of the pistol lowered a fraction, but his brother’s eyes remained hard. ‘Not my concern,’ he said. The muzzle came up again and the man who had remained hidden stepped sharply in front of Josh’s abductor.
‘She’s just a kid, Greg.’
Josh felt a killing pain grip his heart. Damon? During this entire ordeal, he had been afraid and angry and desperate. Until now, he had not experienced despair.
‘What d’you have to bring Damon for?’ he said, choked with emotion.
‘This is family,’ Greg said. ‘Family cleans up its own messes.’
‘He’s sixteen, Greg.’
His little brother spoke up: ‘You got no say in this,’ he said. ‘You relinquished all rights when you grassed up your own brothers.’
There was hate in his brother’s eyes and in the twist of his mouth, but Josh knew that half of it was bravado. He’d done it himself often enough – covering fear with rage. He latched on to that word, and in spite of everything going on around him, he felt a swell of pride. From the age of seven, Damon had used words like relinquished. All of them ragged him about it, called him the kid who swallowed a dictionary, but Damon said just because he was a gangster didn’t mean he had to be ignorant. Gangster. Damon was the only one in the family could get away with using that word in front of their mother.
Damon held his gaze a second longer, but when Josh’s eyes began to tear up, he looked away with a disgusted shake of the head.
‘C’mon, Greg,’ Damon said. ‘Save a kid’s life.’
‘We can’t stay here all night,’ Greg said. ‘It may be the arsehole of nowhere, but someone’s bound to come through soon.’
‘It’s the work of a minute,’ Damon said. ‘And think how virtuous you’ll feel after.’
There was a warning in Greg’s eyes, but Josh saw amusement and affection, too. ‘How’re we supposed to get the message out?’ Greg said. ‘’Cos I am not calling the cops.’
‘Professor Fennimore,’ Josh said. ‘I got his number.’
‘You ditched your phone in Essex,’ Greg said.
‘It’s in here.’ Josh tapped the side of his head, wished he hadn’t.
‘Yeah,’ Greg said, and a look of regret crossed his face. ‘You was always good with numbers.’
The killer’s babbling had become background noise, but now Greg seemed to notice it again. ‘Step aside,’ he told Damon.
The youngest brother hesitated.
‘Don’t make me tell you twice.’
Damon moved, and Greg raised his pistol and fired. It sounded like a sneeze, but the effect on the abductor was devastating.
He howled. Clamping both hands to his shattered knee, he twitched on the ground, his functioning leg scraping at the tarmac, sending him in a small arc.
Josh held down a wave of nausea.
‘Where’s the kid?’ Greg said. ‘No-oooooooh,’ the man howled. ‘Fu—uck you!’
Greg raised the pistol again and aimed.
The man screamed: ‘Okayokay. I tell you, just don’t—’
Greg fired the second bullet into the flesh of the man’s thigh.
‘I haven’t got time to piss about,’ he said. ‘Talk.’
The man gave them an address in Salford, just north of Manchester.
Greg nodded to Damon. ‘Text it,’ he said. ‘Sign it from “Josh”. Use a burner. Wipe it, ditch it.’
Josh gave him Fennimore’s mobile number and Damon produced a cheap mobile phone from his jacket pocket.
‘Done.’ He switched off the phone, and removed the battery and sim card.
Greg looked at the man on the ground, whimpering and wheezing as he bled to death. ‘Anything else you got to tell me?’
The man shook his head, tears mingling with the snot running down his face. ‘I told you everything. Tell them I never touched her. I never did nothing to that g—’
Another sneeze of sound from Greg’s pistol. Josh felt wet warmth on his face, a burst of blood spatter like hard rain on his jacket, and the man was silenced for good. A pool of blood fanned out on the tarmac beneath his head.
‘Your turn,’ Greg said.
In the scramble of thoughts that went through Josh’s mind in that instant, he realized that he never did discover the abductor’s name. In that moment of clarity, he knew it didn’t matter. The man was nothing; a nobody who tried to be somebody by taking lives he had no right to. Anyway, Josh thought, names don’t mean a thing. It’s how you carry the name that matters. A nam
e was just a label for people to remember you by.
42
Manchester, Thursday Evening
The Myers investigation team crammed into the Major Incident Room for a briefing at 7:05 p.m.
This time, at the chief constable’s request, Kate Simms was invited. She relayed the message Fennimore had received.
‘Do we know it’s genuine?’ someone asked.
DCI Ingrams looked to Simms. ‘Josh Brown is missing and the number he used is not his usual mobile phone number,’ she said. ‘But Professor Fennimore confirms that Josh disabled his phone earlier today for …’ she hesitated, not wanting to give away any more than she had to, ‘… unrelated reasons.’
‘The message was sent from a burner phone,’ DCI Ingrams said. ‘This could be a trap set by the abductor – or just a crank, wanting their fifteen minutes of fame.’
‘That being the case, it’s unlikely they would use Josh’s name,’ Simms countered. ‘Early afternoon, Josh was in Aberdeen. He was seen by a member of staff at Robert Gordon University. She said a man had enquired after Josh earlier in the day – she identified that man as our suspect, Vic Tremain.’
Simms herself had spoken to Joan, the departmental office manager, and heard the woman’s anxiety as she described the ‘funny-looking fellow’ who had come looking for Josh.
Kate glanced around the room. A good number of them seemed persuaded by her argument.
‘What did the text say?’
A short, stocky police sergeant in full body armour asked the question. Like Simms, he wore a service pistol, holstered at his hip: the Tactical Firearms Unit had been deployed.
‘That Josh had been attacked by the Myerses’ abductor – and there are reasons why he would be a target,’ she said, letting her gaze travel from one end of the room to the other. ‘The attacker was described as male, masked, dressed in black.’
The sergeant gazed at her thoughtfully, as though listening to something far off, an echo maybe, or a distant conversation.
‘It stated that Lauren could be found in a cotton mill near the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, two miles from where Julie Myers’s car was last seen,’ she went on. ‘It said that the abductor is now dead.’
This provoked a murmur of consternation: if the location was fake and Tremain really was dead, their chances of finding Lauren alive just dropped to zero.
‘There is an old mill complex that fits the description and matches the location,’ she said.
A few people started gathering up pens and pocketing notebooks. She saw one of the firearms officers adjust her body armour and touch the back strap of her Glock 17. If Ingrams remained sceptical, he was on his own – the rest of the team were collectively holding their breath, waiting for the order to act.
‘Sergeant Unwin,’ Ingrams said.
The short firearms officer walked to the front of the room and Simms stood to the side while he took them through the plan of action.
Five minutes later, the room emptied. Simms gathered her Kevlar vest and strapped it on while she waited for the exit to clear.
Sergeant Unwin hung back until Ingrams was out the door.
‘Who sent the text?’ he asked, keeping his voice low.
‘I told you.’
‘No. You didn’t.’ He looked into her face and his grey eyes held that same thoughtfulness; the sense that there was something he hadn’t quite heard right. ‘You said, “The attacker was described”.’
Simms’s heart beat slow and hard in her chest, and the straps of her vest seemed suddenly overcomplicated and difficult to manipulate. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at,’ she said.
‘You know who says things like that? A truthful person who doesn’t want to tell a direct lie.’
She held his gaze. ‘I believe the text is genuine.’
‘But you don’t believe Josh sent it.’
‘We’re wasting time,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and find Lauren.’ She made a move, but he placed a hand on her arm. Simms glanced down at it, then into his face. ‘Take your hand off me, Sergeant,’ she said quietly.
He waited a fraction of a second before complying. ‘I won’t send my crew in to a situation blind,’ he said.
‘Tremain is dead,’ Simms said. ‘There is no risk.’
‘And you know this because …?’
He stood six inches shorter than Simms, but the sergeant carried an authority that she could not deny and she respected him for having voiced his suspicions in private.
She took a breath, still undecided if she should come clean – she hadn’t even told Fennimore any of this. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘If Josh had been able, he would have telephoned. He didn’t. Someone else sent the text.’
‘Tremain maybe?’
She gave a curt shake of her head. ‘I considered it, but I don’t think Tremain has either the conscience or the compassion.’
Unwin listened with his face turned up to hers, head slightly on one side, still striving for the truth behind her words. She lowered her eyes, finding his steady scrutiny unsettling.
‘If not Tremain – who?’ he said.
‘I can’t say—’
He began to object, but she spoke over him: ‘It means trouble for Josh, but it has no bearing on the Myers case.’
One of the firearms unit poked his head around the door. ‘Sarge? We’re ready to roll.’
Simms was right behind him. They took the stairs down to the walled compound where a gunmetal grey Land Rover Defender stood on the tarmac. The officer who had come to find Sergeant Unwin clambered through the rear doors and Simms took a step towards the vehicle.
Unwin blocked her. ‘No,’ he said, gesturing for the officer to close the door. ‘Sorry, ma’am – if you can’t trust me, why should I trust you?’
‘I’m an Authorized Firearms Officer,’ Simms said. ‘I’ve been practising for the past month on a police firing range with St Louis PD homicide detectives.’
His eyebrow twitched. ‘Well, I can’t argue with your credentials, but that still doesn’t give me a reason to trust you.’ He waited, but Simms remained silent. ‘Find your own transport.’ He turned on his heel, making for the passenger door.
Simms could pull rank, but she wouldn’t. She shrugged and headed to a marked car.
43
Outskirts of Manchester, Thursday, 8 p.m.
The police convoy made an orderly approach to their target, passing recently built light-industrial units, on to 1970s concrete prefabs at the low-cost end of the market, heading fast down the commercial property scale past recycling businesses – black hills of used tyres, protected behind spiked aluminium fencing and crushed cars stacked as high as houses. This was the city’s hinterland, good only for scrap metal dealers and fly-tippers.
They drove with no lights or sirens, along roads that got progressively narrower and increasingly potholed. They bumped over ragged cobblestones and pitted tarmac, finally turning left at a T-junction into what was unimaginatively named Mill Road. Per instructions, two marked units blocked the junction, while the rest drove on, pulling up outside the mill.
The building must have been imposing in its day, looming large – literally and metaphorically – over the landscape and the lives of its hundreds of workers. Now it was little more than a shell. A fire had damaged a large part of the roof and burned rafters were visible in patches where slate tiles had fallen or been blown away. The windows accounted for more of the structure than the walls; scores of them, mullioned and high. The clouds that had hung low over the city for much of the day had finally burned off and the lowering sun glinted dully off the few remaining windows, but most were rotted or burned, their glass blackened or gone.
The firearms officers went in first, piling out of the Land Rover swiftly and quietly, four of them making straight for the front door of the building, two more pairs peeling off to stand guard over two possible exits. One officer carried an Enforcer – a battering ram of tubular steel capable of exertin
g three tonnes of force in a single swing. They stayed low, moving fast over the ruined terrain. Unwin relented, pointing at Simms and sending her with another officer to the furthest wing of the building which stood at a right angle to the rest. They crouched either side of a rotten doorway, about seventy yards down one long stretch of the outer wall.
She heard a dull boom: the Enforcer breaching the entrance door. Shouts of ‘Armed Police!’ and the thud of heavy boots followed as six armed officers stormed inside the building. Simms’s partner carried an H&K G36 assault rifle with optical sight. He checked around the corner of the building while she scanned the weedy ground and scouted out the windows, alert to any movement.
The roar of traffic on the A6 was just audible to the west and, intermittently, the clatter of trains traversing the two rail lines they had crossed on their journey. It was punishingly hot under her layers of clothing; her Kevlar vest and helmet, both black, seemed intent on absorbing every photon of light, and Simms wiped sweat from her brow with the knuckle of one thumb.
‘All right, ma’am?’ her partner asked.
‘Fine – but I’m developing a strong empathy with my favourite seafood,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Boiled lobster.’
He snorted, but didn’t speak again.
The nervous excitement that had jittered in her chest on the drive over stilled as she waited. It didn’t feel right. Tremain was no genius, but he had managed to stay below the police radar for nearly a decade – why would he choose somewhere so risky? The place was open to the elements. The fire must have burned fiercely, because the brickwork around many of the upper windows was soot-blackened. She imagined the internal floor covered in charred debris, yet there had been no mention of soot in the swabs taken at Julia Myers’s post-mortem.
Sergeant Unwin re-emerged after ten minutes and gave the order to stand down. Simms joined him as he approached DCI Ingrams.
‘The place is empty,’ he said, perching his safety goggles above the rim of his helmet. ‘Completely derelict, no locks, nothing.’
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