by Roberta Kray
DS Swann was the first to notice her. He lifted the tape as she approached and gave her a nod.
‘Guv.’
Kieran Swann was a bull-necked, stocky guy, a few years older and a couple of inches shorter than herself. Today he did what he always did when she was wearing heels, tilting his head and peering up at her in that false exaggerated way, as if her greater height was some kind of slight on his masculinity. There had been a time when she had thought they would never work effectively together, but things had mellowed since then. Swann was still annoying, but you couldn’t hate a man who had once saved your life.
‘So, what have we got?’ she asked.
He started walking with her towards the door. ‘Her name’s Becky Hibbert, twenty-four years old. She lives … lived … here in Haslow House, tenth floor. The ME’s been and gone. He reckons she was killed sometime late last night, early this morning. Can’t say more accurately than that at the moment. She was strangled with the scarf she was wearing.’
‘Who found her?’
‘A couple of fourteen-year-olds,’ Swann said. He flipped open his notebook. ‘Josh White and Adam Pearse. It was Pearse who recognised her. He lives on the same landing. They’re down at the station now, but I don’t reckon they had anything to do with it. This was just somewhere they liked to hang out.’
Valerie wrinkled her nose. ‘Nice taste in locations.’
‘Yeah, but a good place to go and smoke dope, especially if you don’t want anyone seeing you.’
‘What about the victim’s family?’ she asked.
‘The mother’s called Carol Hibbert. She’s been informed. Becky had two kids and Carol was taking care of them overnight. She lives here too, a couple of floors down. No current boyfriend that the mother is aware of.’
‘What about the father of the kids?’
‘Dan Livesey. They split up about six months ago. He’s a doorman apparently, but we’ve got no current address. We’re trying to track him down at the moment.’
‘So, do we know where Becky went last night?’
‘She said she was meeting up at the Fox with the girls from work – that’s the Asda on the high street – but we haven’t been able to confirm anything yet. I’ve sent Lister and Franks to see what they can find out.’
Valerie couldn’t fault Swann’s efficiency. In the time it had taken for her to get here from the court, he had set all the necessary wheels in motion. They stopped at the entrance to the building and she took off her shoes and slipped one of the protective jumpsuits over her clothes. She could see the scene-of-crime officers swarming around inside, hoping to pick up some essential DNA evidence. She tried to prepare herself mentally, to cut herself off from all emotional responses. The only thing she could do for Becky Hibbert now was to try to find her killer.
‘Okay, let’s go,’ she said, nodding at Swann.
Inside, to the left, were the graffiti-covered lifts. To the right lay a flight of grey stone steps and beneath the steps was a space – usually dark and dank, she imagined, but now illuminated by the harsh police lights – that was set back and invisible from the foyer. It was here that the body was lying. A couple of members of the SOCO team stood up and drew back to give her a clearer view.
Becky Hibbert was lying sprawled on her side, her bulging eyes still open, her face tinged with blue. She was an overweight girl dressed in a short black miniskirt and a low-cut glittery top. The long pink scarf she’d been strangled with was still wrapped tightly around her neck.
‘Any sign of a handbag?’ Valerie asked Swann.
He shook his head. ‘Still missing, along with her phone. We got a description of the bag from the mother. She reckons she had about thirty quid on her when she went out.’
‘So probably a lot less by the time she got back. Mind, there are some lowlifes around here who’d kill their grannies for a fiver.’
‘True enough.’
Valerie continued to gaze down at the body, at the large fleshy legs and freckled arms. ‘Do we know if there was any kind of sexual assault?’
‘Nothing obvious, her underwear’s still on, but we’ll find out for sure later. And no signs of a struggle. It looks like she was taken by surprise.’
‘If it was a robbery, why kill her, though? Why not just threaten her with a knife or hit her over the head? It takes a lot of effort to strangle someone.’
‘Well, there are some right shitbags on this estate. But like you said, there are easier ways to relieve a girl of her cash.’
Valerie left orders for the body to be removed and then headed out of the door with Swann. ‘She could have met her attacker at the pub and brought him back here.’
‘A bit risky for him. The girls she was with would be able to give a description.’
‘He might not have been intending to kill her at that point.’ She glanced back at the flats. ‘They could have come back here and had some kind of argument. It gets out of hand and before you know it …’ She stripped off the jumpsuit and squeezed her feet back into her shoes. ‘Have we run a check on her?’
‘Two charges of shoplifting. That was a couple of years back. She’s been clean since then.’
‘Nothing else? No soliciting?’
Swann clicked his tongue. ‘You think she might have been on the game?’
Valerie gave a light shrug. There had been a lot of cleavage on show, but that was hardly unusual these days. She wasn’t making presumptions – just because you wore a miniskirt, were short of a few bob and lived on a lousy estate didn’t mean that you’d resort to selling your body – but she had to keep an open mind and consider every possibility. ‘Well, she wouldn’t be the first woman to try and raise some extra cash. She had two kids to support and I doubt she earned much at the supermarket.’
Glancing over his shoulder, Swann gave an indelicate snigger. ‘Wouldn’t exactly have been queuing up, would they?’
Valerie threw him a look but didn’t pull him up about it. Coppers dealt with violent death in different ways, not all of them tasteful or politically correct. She thought of the Whisperer, a man with a pathological hatred of prostitutes, and felt a clammy shiver run the length of her spine. As if he was still out there, still waiting to pounce, an irrational fear rose up from her gut. Before it could take hold, she quickly swallowed it back down.
‘Right,’ she said briskly. ‘Let’s go and check out the flat, and then we’ll talk to the mother.’
Becky Hibbert’s flat wasn’t the cleanest Valerie had ever come across. It smelled bad too, almost as bad as the lift they’d come up in. She left Swann to search the kitchen, strewn with used plates, dirty nappies and takeaway boxes, and made a start on the living room. It wasn’t much better in there. With kids’ toys littered all over the floor, she had to be careful not to trip and turn an ankle. There was grime on every surface, a stickiness that was a combination of spilled drinks, dust and God alone knew what else. She puckered her lips, not wanting to think about it.
After pulling on a pair of gloves, she started with the coffee table, sifting through magazines, old copies of the Sun and a few unpaid bills. Nothing of any interest. She moved on to a mock-mahogany cupboard in the corner. The bottom part was stuffed with even more toys – teddy bears, cars and brightly coloured trains – along with three packs of unopened nappies, a heap of baby clothes and a pile of DVDs. She had a quick flick through the latter. They were romantic comedies mainly, with a few action movies thrown in.
There were two drawers at the top of the cupboard. She opened the left one first and found it jammed full of paperwork. Old bills, receipts and payslips by the looks of it, but there could be something useful hidden there. Not wanting to go through them one by one, she bagged the lot to be perused more carefully back at the station. The right-hand drawer yielded a similar amount of chaos, this of a more general variety – buttons and elastic bands, bits of ribbon and string, a pair of scissors, four half-empty bottles of congealed nail polish and a couple of combs.
Within fifteen minutes she’d finished the search and had moved on to Becky Hibbert’s bedroom. It was at this point that Swann appeared at the door, waving a bagged wad of cash in her direction.
‘Under the tea bags,’ he said. ‘Not very original, but there you go.’
‘How much?’
‘Five hundred and twenty. So either our victim was a very careful saver, or she’s been making a bundle on the side. Maybe your hunch was spot-on. Maybe she was a tom.’
‘It wasn’t a hunch exactly. I was simply covering all the possibilities.’
‘Yeah, guv,’ Swann said, grinning slyly, as if amused by the correction. ‘Still, you could be right.’
Valerie stared at the money for a moment before shaking her head. If Becky had picked up a punter, she could have brought him back to the flats. Perhaps she had changed her mind at the last moment, or perhaps she had just chosen the wrong guy. ‘Okay, let’s finish off here and we’ll see if the mother can shed any light on it.’
It was only five minutes before Swann appeared again. ‘Something else,’ he said, holding out another clear bag. ‘It was under all that mess on the table.’
Valerie reached out and took the bag from him. Inside was a small white business card. She frowned. Jessica Vaughan. It was a name that was familiar to her. ‘A reporter,’ she said. ‘What the hell would she want with Becky Hibbert?’
‘There’s more, guv. Look on the other side.’
Valerie flipped the card over and her heart instantly sank. There, scrawled in blue biro, was Harry Lind’s name and phone number. Oh great, this was all she needed. She now had not only a murder victim on her hands, but also a boyfriend – if she could still call him that – who might be involved in some way. Today was just getting better and better.
28
By the time they got back to the station, Valerie was feeling drained. It was always the worst part of the job, dealing with bereaved relatives, and this occasion had been no different. Carol Hibbert had been in a state of shock, her mouth opening and closing, her hands constantly wrestling in her lap. ‘I don’t understand,’ she had kept on repeating, over and over again.
They had not been able to learn anything new. Carol, an overweight woman in her late forties, had been taking care of the kids in her own flat and hadn’t expected Becky to pick them up until the morning. She hadn’t reported her missing because she hadn’t known that she was. So far as she was concerned, her daughter had gone out to meet some friends the night before and was probably still sleeping off the effects of too many drinks.
Valerie had enquired about Dan Livesey, but Carol had no address or phone number for him. ‘She ain’t seen him in weeks. He’s a bloody waste of space.’
Carol Hibbert hadn’t been able to enlighten them as to where the money had come from either. There was no good way of asking a mother whether her daughter might have been on the game, but Valerie had tried to do it as subtly as she could. ‘Do you have any idea where she might have got this amount of cash? I mean, could she have won it, or borrowed it off someone? A loan perhaps?’
‘She didn’t have no cash,’ Carol had said insistently. ‘Who’s gonna loan my Becky a sum like that?’ And then, as if the knowledge that her daughter was gone for ever had finally sunk in, her face had crumpled and the tears had started to flow down her cheeks.
Valerie had tried hard not to look at the children, at the baby in the cot and the toddler playing on the floor. Two kids who no longer had a mother. Leaning forward, she had laid her hand gently on the other woman’s arm. ‘I’m so sorry. We’ll do everything we can to find out who did this.’
She and Swann had left shortly after and returned to Cowan Road. Now Valerie was sitting at her desk, reviewing the information to date. The news on the forensic front wasn’t promising. The ground surrounding the body had been littered with used needles, dead reefers, cigarette stubs, burnt foil, empty cans and the accumulated debris of what could have been years. Finding a trace of their killer was going to be hard. The postmortem, however, might yield more useful results. It would, with luck, be carried out this afternoon.
Door-to-door enquiries were currently taking place at Haslow House, but Valerie didn’t hold out much hope on that front. The residents of the estate were always tight-lipped when it came to talking to the police. Even the murder of a young woman wouldn’t be enough to shake them out of their reticence. It was common knowledge on the Mansfield that the only way to survive was to keep your head down and your mouth shut.
DC Joanne Lister and DC David Franks knocked on the door to her tiny office and came in with their notebooks at the ready. Lister was a small, pale-faced girl in her mid-twenties with a mop of curly red hair. David Franks, who played in the Police Rugby League, was a couple of years older and at least a foot taller. The two of them were often partnered up together – they made a good team – and the difference in their physical appearance usually made Valerie smile. Today, however, her lips didn’t even twitch.
‘So, what have we got?’ she asked.
It was Lister who answered. ‘We talked to the other girls at the supermarket. There were five of them who met up at the Fox at seven thirty. It was one of the girls’ birthdays, Kara Dean, and it was a fairly boozy evening from the sound of it. However, none of them remember Becky Hibbert talking to a bloke – or to anyone other than themselves. They don’t remember her making or receiving any calls either. She left at the same time as the others, at around twenty past eleven, and walked up the high street with Kara Dean and …’ Lister glanced down at her notebook. ‘Yes, Kara Dean and Chelsea Williams. They both live on the Mansfield, but not in the same block. Dean and Williams live in Carlton House. They separated from Becky at the fork in the path and that was the last time they saw her. That would have been at about a quarter to twelve.’
‘And they didn’t hear anything? Didn’t see anyone hanging about?’
‘Only a few of the local youths. Four or five, they think. But they didn’t speak to them.’
‘Do we have any names, addresses?’ Valerie asked.
Lister shook her head. ‘They claim they’ve seen the lads around but don’t know who they are or where they live.’
Valerie wondered if the two girls were telling the truth. Even with their friend murdered, they could still be reluctant to cause any trouble for the locals – trouble that could well come back to haunt them. ‘Anything else?’
DC Franks said, ‘The landlady of the Fox, Maggie McConnell, remembers the group but nothing about Becky in particular. They’re regulars apparently, always lively but never any trouble. She backs up their story as regards the time they left.’
Valerie gave a nod. ‘Did any of the girls know if Becky Hibbert had a boyfriend?’
Franks shook his head. ‘She hadn’t mentioned anyone new. But the relationship with the ex sounds like it was pretty stormy. Constant rows over child support, or rather the lack of it.’
‘Okay, thanks,’ Valerie said. ‘Look, I brought back a load of paperwork from Becky Hibbert’s flat. One of you start going through it, will you? There may be an address or a phone number for Livesey in there somewhere.’
She saw the look on their faces and felt their disappointment. A murder inquiry and they were stuck with the boring task of searching through a heap of utility bills. ‘Problem?’ Valerie asked.
‘No, guv,’ Franks said with an air of resignation. ‘No problem at all. I’ll get straight on to it.’
Valerie nodded at Lister. ‘And you can chase up any CCTV coverage there may be of the area.’
The two officers left the room and Valerie sat back in her chair. Could this have been a domestic? The first direction the police usually looked in a murder inquiry was towards the nearest and dearest. Perhaps Dan Livesey had grown tired of his parental obligations or of Becky’s complaints and decided to have it out with her once and for all. Rows could easily escalate into something more violent. They would need to find him quickly, if for no other reas
on than to rule him out as a suspect.
Becky might have received or made a call before she’d gone out, perhaps arranging to meet someone after the evening with her friends was over. Swann was currently chasing up the phone records, but she knew from past experience that it could take a while for the results to come through. And where had that money come from? Not from Livesey, if his past record was anything to go by.
Of course, the killer wasn’t necessarily male. She couldn’t rule out the possibility of a woman being responsible. But on balance she was more inclined towards it being a man. Strangulation was a relatively slow and brutal way to kill, involving a particular kind of strength and perseverance. The perpetrator had to hold their nerve – and their grip – while the life of the victim gradually ebbed away.
Valerie leaned forward and picked up the small plastic bag with Jessica Vaughan’s card inside. Her mouth slid into a thin, tight line. This was the second murder victim that Vaughan had been connected to. The first had been several years back at Ray Stagg’s old club in Shoreditch, when she’d discovered the body of a barman in the car park. Harry had been working with Vaughan on that occasion and it looked like he had got himself involved with her again. So how come he hadn’t mentioned it when they’d had a drink together on Sunday night? Or when she’d talked to him on the phone only last night? His silence on the subject resurrected old suspicions.
Valerie had been convinced that something was going on between the two of them back then, although she’d never been able to prove it. It had been at the time when she and Harry were on the verge of splitting up, when their relationship was gradually disintegrating, every day a trial, every conversation rapidly descending into an argument. Had he cheated on her, slept with another woman? It might be old history, but somehow it still mattered.
She stared down at the card. Who should she call first – Vaughan or Harry? She decided on the latter. Reporters were hardly renowned for their openness or cooperation. And Vaughan especially was adept at the art of evasion. At least he, as an ex-cop, might give her some straight answers. Yes, she would start with Harry and see what he had to say for himself. But first she was going to get herself a strong cup of coffee. She was probably going to need it.