by Jack Gatland
‘We know that Angela Martin knew Macca and Harrison Fennel from the photo in her bedroom,’ she said. ‘But it looks like she was with him under another identity.’
Declan leaned back in his chair.
‘Gabrielle Chapman. Daughter of a man who worked for George Byrne.’
‘And the daughter of a man who worked for The Twins, both of which weren’t likely to be fans of George Byrne after they poached Craig Chapman,’ Anjli muttered. ‘Angels.’
Declan looked back to her. ‘Sorry?’
‘Gabrielle is the feminised version of Gabriel,’ Anjli explained. ‘Angela is the feminised version of Angel. It’s been weighing on my mind. Seemed odd, coincidental.’
‘Not if the nuns named them,’ Billy suggested.
‘Then we need to speak to these nuns as well,’ Declan rose from his chair. ‘But first, we need to find that priest.’
Anjli rose first. ‘Perhaps I should do it?’ she asked. ‘You do after all have a very well-known past with the Catholic Church.’
Declan deflated a little. It was well known that one reason he'd been suspended in the first place was because he’d punched a dog-trafficking Catholic priest in the face on live television.
‘Yeah, maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s time for someone to go chat with the Sisters, anyway. Let Monroe know what you found as well.’ Declan was already walking to the door. ‘He might be able to ask around while he’s up in Birmingham. I have to go see my daughter first, so I’ll go find the Delcourts later. Keep me updated.’
‘Jessica?’ Anjli asked. ‘Is she okay?’
Declan frowned at the question. ‘She’s going on her first date.’
Anjli and Billy looked to each other and, knowing they were thinking the same thing that Kendis had said earlier that day, that his innocent fifteen-year-old daughter might not be that innocent, Declan left the Crime Unit and walked to his car, his mind buzzing. There was no way that Angela's gravitating towards gang leaders in two distinct identities was a coincidence. Especially being the daughter of the right hand man of the largest East End firm since the Krays. And if it was Angela taking on two identities, how did the real Gabrielle Chapman gain the same tattoos and injuries?
And why were they both killed?
The question that burned in Declan’s mind the brightest though, was a simple one.
Why was the daughter of an East-End enforcer not only dating the heir apparent of the North London crew but also seemingly the son of the largest criminal power in Birmingham?
That was a question for another time, though. Declan had a bigger task ahead.
He had to be a Dad.
14
Double Trouble
‘I hate that bloody woman.’ Monroe sat on a bench and glared at Doctor Marcos. ‘How dare she tell us to wait? I have seniority on her!’
‘She’s West Midlands police. You’re City of London police. I don’t think that works the same way up here,’ Doctor Marcos leaned back on the bench, using the wall behind to rest against. ‘But sure, Alexander. Argue with her again. I’m pretty convinced that will help us immensely.’
Monroe sighed loudly, a forced act for the Desk Sergeant watching them.
‘Did you at least find out anything in the morgue?’ he asked. Doctor Marcos nodded.
‘We need to requisition more things for ours,’ she replied. ‘This place has a ton of new toys that I’m just itching to get hold of.’
‘I meant with the case.’
‘Oh. In that case, no. They caught me before I could examine anything.’
Monroe looked to his phone, reading an email. ‘The office has been busy,’ he said. ‘Seems we have a lot of additional information on this second body.’
‘Like?’
‘Like it shouldn’t exist.’
Doctor Marcos grinned. ‘Well, duh.’
The door opened, and Monroe glanced up at DCI Bullman as she emerged into the reception.
‘Okay, your credentials match,’ she said, passing two warrant cards back to Monroe and Doctor Marcos. ‘But she’s banned from crime scenes for another five months.’
‘We’re not at a crime scene,’ Monroe rose now, facing Bullman. ‘And she’s here to see how you have an identical victim to ours.’
‘That’s easy,’ Bullman opened the door, waving Monroe and Doctor Marcos through. ‘You got it wrong.’
Doctor Marcos went to reply, but Monroe placed a hand gently on her shoulder to pause her most likely expletive-ridden rant. ‘How about we let the forensic experts look at that before coming to any conclusions?’
Bullman shrugged and pointed down a corridor. ‘Third left. Touch nothing.’
Doctor Marcos nodded to Monroe and left the two DCIs in the hallway.
‘Look, I think we got off on a poor footing,’ Monroe said to Bullman, trying his hardest to give his best ‘charming’ expression.
‘You think?’ Bullman folded her arms as she glared at Monroe. There wasn’t more than a year or two between them. ‘What gave it away? I think it was when you entered my police station demanding to see the idiot that screwed up your case.’
Monroe tried to smile. ‘In fairness, we still don’t know what’s happened here.’
‘That’s not an apology.’
‘No, it’s not.’ Giving up on the charm offensive, Monroe walked into the CID office, noting that the computers were definitely newer than the ones at Temple Inn. He understood now why Doctor Marcos had been like a child in a sweetshop. ‘Is that the board?’
He pointed to a whiteboard leaning against a glass window, with a photo of the body of Gabrielle Chapman taped upon it.
‘Wow. You’re a super detective, I can tell,’ Bullman was already walking towards it.
‘We have a plasma screen,’ Monroe replied, mentally scoring a point.
‘Plasma screens are for people who don’t know how to do proper police work,’ Bullman mocked. Monroe twitched silently.
He really hated this woman.
Over the next half an hour, however, his impression of Bullman changed as she went through the status of her case; how a drugs bust had turned into a homicide investigation, and how a teenage informant had given them the lead.
‘How was the kid involved?’ he asked.
‘He wasn’t,’ Bullman replied. ‘Apparently his parents would fight a lot, so Alfie Mullville would hide out in woodlands for a few days. They were also serious heroin addicts, so the home life was probably not the best for him, anyway.’
‘What would he do in the woods?’
‘Live there,’ Bullman said simply. ‘The Lickey Hills cover over five hundred acres. A good square mile of woodland that a small boy can lose himself in. He says he did some kind of bushman survival course in school, so he knew how to make a little den, stay alive. And there’s a forest centre nearby with a shop and café; he’d raid the bins at night.’
‘A real Bear Grylls.’
Bullman actually smiled at this. ‘I’m more a fan of Ed Stafford,’ she said.
‘So what, Alfie was in the woods and came across the burial?’
‘It’s possible,’ Bullman pointed at a map of the Lickey Hills on the wall. ‘As I said, it’s only a square mile or so. We’re not talking Sherwood Forest here. And Alfie would have been alone in the dark, with maybe a small fire. He’d have seen anyone drive in.’
‘Did he say who the killer was?’
‘Killers, plural. There were two, apparently. He said he didn’t recognise them, but he was happy to look through mugshots. Found three suspects out of that.’
‘Can I see them?’ Monroe followed Bullman’s finger once more to the side where three photos were pinned to the board. Three young men, all Indian, all dark-haired.
‘And you think he was telling the truth?’ Monroe asked.
‘Christ no,’ Bullman replied. ‘He was making a deal to get his parents out of custody. I know he saw the killers, and probably even knew the killers. You could see it on
his face. The fact that he picked these three men quickly while claiming he didn’t get an unobstructed view means that we should look for the complete opposite. Blond Caucasians, most likely.’
Monroe moved across the crime board, examining it. ‘Who does Alfie hang out with?’
‘He’s a loner, according to his teachers. That said, we have informants who claim he’s part of Macca Byrne’s group.’
She saw Monroe’s expression.
‘So you’ve heard of him?’
‘In passing,’ Monroe nodded at this. ‘And it connects to our case.’
Quickly and without embellishment, Monroe explained to Bullman all that he knew about the Angela Martin case, leaving out the part where Derek Salmon claimed that the Seven Sisters had effectively hired him to take the blame. He talked about Moses Delcourt, and how there was a distinct chance that both bodies were sisters, but currently this was still in the realms of fantasy. And as he finished. Doctor Marcos and another forensics officer, a tall, slim Asian with a pony tail entered the room.
‘This is DS Mistry,’ Bullman introduced the forensics officer. ‘Well?’
DS Mistry shrugged.
‘Same person,’ she said. ‘But not. DNA is exact, the injuries and identifying marks are as close as dammit, but dental is slightly out and fingerprints are completely different. And, more importantly, don’t match the ones we have on record for her.’
Bullman looked to the floor, avoiding Monroe’s gaze, just knowing that it would be mocking.
‘How did we not check the fingerprints before this?’ she asked.
‘Because we had the DNA match,’ DS Mistry replied. ‘DNA usually trumps fingerprints.’
‘Usually,’ Monroe couldn’t help himself, and there was a slight touch of smugness in his tone. He could see Bullman biting back a reply, and that amused him greatly.
‘They’re twins,’ Doctor Marcos said, breaking the atmosphere. ‘Killed within the same timeframe as each other, give or take a couple of days. And with what looks like the same weapon. A garotte of some kind.’
Monroe looked to Bullman. ‘What do you have on Gabrielle Chapman?’ he asked.
Bullman shrugged.
‘Recently? Tons of stuff. Before she was about fifteen? Nothing. She was a ghost. Dad worked for George Byrne, died in a house fire a few years back. Byrne always claimed it was an attack, that it was arson, but nobody claimed it. After that, Gabrielle disappeared into the system. It’s more common than you’d expect, but it means that we have no records of where she lived or what she did until she’s arrested with Byrne at sixteen.’
‘Actually, you mean the body that we have did,’ Doctor Marcos added.
‘What?’ Bullman now looked to Monroe, expecting some prank to have been played, but he seemed as confused as she was.
‘As we said, Gabrielle Chapman’s police custody fingerprints don’t match her fingers,’ Doctor Marcos explained. ‘But they do match those of Angela Martin.’
Monroe stared at the board, making the same connections that Anjli, Billy and Declan had, back in Temple Inn.
‘If we ignore your body for a moment,’ he muttered, ‘I think this was simple identity theft. Angela came to Birmingham and needed to be someone else. Either to run away from something, or to run towards it.’
‘Were they both devout Catholics? Her parents?’ Bullman asked. Monroe looked to her.
‘Cheryl Martin, Angela’s mother was, and I can check if Danny was too, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was. Why?’
Bullman placed her hands together in a praying motion.
‘Because Gabrielle Chapman was,’ she said. ‘From what the records state, she was constantly taking confession in a Catholic Church, Saint Wilfred’s Church in Saltley before she died.’
Monroe looked back to the board. ‘We should chat to someone there. Any chance of talking to the kiddie before we leave?’
Bullman shook her head.
‘My men took him to school this morning,’ she replied. ‘You’ll have to wait until after school finishes.’
Monroe grimaced. It looked like he'd be staying in Birmingham for a while longer than he wanted.
‘That’d be great,’ he said through clenched teeth.
Stripe hadn’t gone to school, even though he’d told the police he needed to. He claimed that his mock exams were coming, and the woman that they’d assigned to look after him dutifully took him back home, allowed him to get changed into his school uniform and then walked him to the gates of the school, informing him that if his parents weren’t processed and released in time, she’d be there to wait for him.
But Stripe wouldn’t be there for her to meet after school, for the moment she climbed back into her car and left, Stripe slipped out of the building through a side entrance and made his way back onto the street. School was a place that people could easily find him, and currently he needed a hiding place where Macca Byrne wouldn’t.
He knew the moment that he’d made the deal, he’d done a stupid, terrible thing. You don’t snitch on Macca Byrne’s crew, and Harrison, no matter what he did, was definitely a part of the crew. All that Stripe could do right now was to lie low and pretend that this was nothing to do with him.
A mile north of Birmingham, and right beside the M6 motorway, was Star City, an entertainment complex that held restaurants, cinemas and bars. There were also places for kids to play, too; mini golf, bowling, lots of areas that a teenage boy could blend in with. If he could somehow break into the Vue Cinema, he could hide out in the back rows of the auditoriums for the entire day; the workers there were often students themselves and didn’t care what was going on as long as it didn’t bother the other people in the cinema. And so Stripe sneaked in through the main entrance by asking to use the toilet, found a seat near the back and to the side of one of the larger screens, and settled in, hoping to hide out until it was dark.
The problem was that Stripe was a little noticeable. For a start, he was wearing a school uniform and was in a cinema during school time. Secondly, the visible white streak in his hair was very recognisable. He’d hoped that by coming here he’d avoid any problems, but he’d forgotten the fact that many of the junior staff who were employed here also bought drugs from Macca’s people. He didn’t know that since the night before, they had put the word out on the streets to find Stripe Mullville. And therefore it was only a matter of hours, in fact as the current film was ending and Stripe was about to sneak into another of the auditoriums until one of Macca’s boys, informed that Stripe was in the cinema somewhere cornered him and politely suggested that Stripe follow him. Realising that there was nothing that he could do, and deciding to try somehow to bluff it out, Stripe agreed.
Macca was in the bowling alley next door, laughing with his crew in the furthest lane from the entrance when Stripe arrived. He could see that Harrison and three others were playing with Macca, but they didn’t seem to concentrate on it.
They were concentrating on him.
Seeing Stripe being brought over, Macca walked away from the others, waving for the young boy to join him at the American-style diner that backed onto the lanes. Sitting in a booth, he motioned for Stripe to sit opposite.
‘You hungry?’ he asked. Stripe had been, but now he found that his appetite had completely disappeared, replaced by a gnawing terror as to what would happen next.
Stripe shook his head.
‘Milkshake then,’ Macca nodded to one of his crew. ‘Two milkshakes.’ He turned his attention back to Stripe. ‘You hiding from me?’
Stripe had been working out his excuse since the previous night; he knew that eventually he’d have to confront Macca, but he had hoped for more time.
‘Me? No!’ he exclaimed with a fake indignance. ‘I’m hiding from the police.’
‘You done something wrong?’ Macca’s voice was calm, collected.
‘Nah man, I just don’t wanna be seen with them while they arrest my parents, right?’ Stripe continued to try to look tough,
to bluff this out, but all that emerged was a whisper.
‘I heard they were arrested,’ Macca replied. ‘Tough break. Do you know what their brief told them to do?’
‘Don’t matter. They’ll keep quiet, so don’t you worry about them, Mister Byrne,’ Stripe said, looking over to the lane. He could see Harrison watching them intently. He forced his eyes to carry on past, as if simply looking about. ‘The police got nothing, the stuff was gone, you know?’
‘Clever,’ Macca nodded. ‘So they’ll be out soon.’
‘Yeah. I mean, I hope so,’
Macca took a milkshake passed to him, sipping at it. Stripe stared at the one in front of him, taking a sip for appearance’s sake. It was vanilla.
‘Problem is, I need to know if they spoke to anyone,’ Macca continued. ‘I heard that an hour after arresting your parents, the Fed in charge of the arrest dug up a body in the Lickeys.’
Stripe was ready for this. ‘You think they told the police about a body?’
Macca shook his head. ‘Nah, I don’t think they ever met Gabby. You met Gabby though, right?’
‘Once or twice,’ Stripe whispered. ‘I’ve not seen the news. Is she dead?’
‘Yeah, she’s dead.’ Macca’s tone darkened. ‘And I want to know if your parents…’ he looked at Stripe now, observing him. ‘… If whoever told the police about the body being buried saw who did it. If they did, I’d want to know. You understand?’
Stripe nodded.
‘Was it you?’ Macca asked.
Stripe desperately wanted to say yes, to apologise for not saying earlier, but while in the cinema a thought had crossed his mind.
He knew that Harrison, Macca’s right-hand man had been one of the two people that buried the body that night, as he’d seen him. But that didn’t prove that Harrison had been the one that killed her.
What if it had been Macca?
And because of this one thought, Stripe kept his mouth shut.