Landslide

by David Menon

  ‘We have nothing on him’ said Adrian.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Well nothing of any criminal nature’ said Adrian as he cast his eyes over the file on Carpenter that was of a fairly penurious nature in that it told them fuck all. ‘Apart from the fact that he’s never held a job for more than a few months since he left school fourteen years ago without any qualifications at all and he cares for his ailing mother’.

  ‘So what you’re saying is that our Mr. Carpenter is your average sad fucker who nobody really notices but who may have jumped at the chance to become a cold blooded killer of children to make him feel like he’s living?’

  Adrian couldn’t help smiling. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself’.

  ‘I’ll bet you could’

  ‘Well, maybe spending all this time with you is rubbing off on me, Joe’ said Adrian who was still reeling from his night with Tim the builder. It had been a great night. A really great night and a lot better than it might have been given Tim’s apparent lack of experience. Which had made Adrian wonder about all that and whether it was actually true.

  ‘He’s probably a sexual deviant too’.

  ‘Well I’m trying to keep an open mind until we’ve met the sad fucker’ said Adrian. ‘But it is hard not to be totally unprofessional and put two and two together and walk into a situation with an already made up mind’.

  ‘Well it’s never stopped you before’.

  The local uniformed officers who Barton had sent ahead weren’t able to get any response from first knocking and then banging on the door of 6, Rosebud Street, and just as they were informing Barton and DCI Ollie Wright of that, a woman of indeterminable age came running towards them. She was wearing a thin light blue zip-up jacket over a white jumper and a pair of jeans. Her soft blond hair was cut just above her shoulders and the lines on her face matched with her demeanour made it impossible to put her in her forties, fifties, or even sixties. This was a woman who hadn’t really taken care of herself for years and maybe she never had. She was so typical, Barton thought, of women throughout areas like this who’d never really turned their face to the sun. Probably never had a passport or been anywhere that didn’t hold a raffle of prizes from pound shops. And when it came to gentlemen callers she probably didn’t know what one of those was. He might be wrong but somehow he didn’t think so especially since she stopped briefly when she first clapped eyes on him and Ollie as if she would flirt if she knew how. So much of the basics of life seem to pass by so many people. Barton didn’t think it was fair and he sees so much of it in his line of work.

  ‘It’s no good banging on the door like that!’ she cried. ‘Our Wayne isn’t at home and Sheila is bed ridden upstairs on six different lots of tablets, plus her injections twice a week’.

  Barton introduced himself and DCI Ollie Wright and then asked the woman who she was.

  ‘I’m Margaret. Margaret Reynolds. I’m Sheila’s sister and Wayne’s aunt’ Margaret declared as if they should know. ‘I’m here to sit with Sheila until Wayne gets back. He rang to say he didn’t know how long he’d be but I’ve to make my own tea here if need be. I don’t know what with. He’s one of these who only shops on a day to day basis. I’ve been begging him for years to do a proper weekly shop on a Friday like I do and then just do a bit of topping up the rest of the week when you need to. But he won’t listen. That’s why I’ve come prepared. Soft white barms with some ham and best butter. And it’s proper ham. Off the bone from the butchers. You’ll find no tins of spam in my pantry’.

  Barton thought he was going to lose the will to live.

  ‘Margaret, we need to speak to your nephew urgently’ said Barton. ‘Now where is he?’

  ‘What do you need to speak to him for?’

  ‘Just tell us where he is, Margaret’.

  ‘How do you know I know where he is?’

  ‘Just an educated guess’ said Barton. ‘Just tell us where he is, Margaret’.

  ‘I told him not to get involved’.

  ‘Get involved with what, Margaret?’

  Margaret looked away and paused. ‘You see, they offered him a sense of belonging that he’d never had before. His father pissed off out of it when he was a baby and there’s never been any contact since. Oh my sister didn’t do a bad job of bringing him up but Wayne once said to me himself that he always felt like there was something missing in his life and that there was never anyone to push him into getting good exam results and all that. After his father left Sheila seemed to just lose interest in life and her health went on a downward spiral. We’re the kind of people who can’t cope unless there’s a happy ending. You meet a man and you think that’s it forever. When you lose him it’s as if life really has finished even if you’ve got children and need to carry on living. Women like me and my sister don’t really know how to pick things up by the scruff of the neck and move on. So it was hard for Wayne when he was growing up with Sheila being the depressive that she was. Then there was the over-eating, the diabetes, the kidneys that aren’t working properly, the weight gain that means she can’t even get out of bed now and the bed has had to be reinforced. Wayne had friends when he was growing up but they’ve all got on with their lives. They got married, had kids, moved away, one is even living abroad somewhere. The ones that stayed round here are all family men and don’t have time for the mate they all grew up with who hasn’t been so lucky in life’.

  ‘Margaret, with all due respect, I don’t have a violin to hand at the moment, so if you know where Wayne is will you please tell us because we’re in the middle of a very serious investigation and we think he might be able to help us with it’.

  ‘But he can’t have done anything against the law’ Margaret emphasised, anxiously. ‘Not unless they put him up to it’.

  ‘You say you don’t know where he is, Margaret?’ asked DCI Ollie Wright.

  ‘I’ve an idea where he might be’.

  ‘Then why don’t you call him on his mobile?’ asked Wright who was thinking that Margaret might know something about what might have happened to her nephew’s mobile phone even if she might not know how it fell into the hands of a vulnerable little girl.

  ‘He hasn’t been picking up on his mobile these past few days’ Margaret revealed.

  ‘Right, well I’ve heard enough’ said Barton. ‘Now Margaret, either tell us where you think Wayne is or I’ll have to consider charging you with obstruction’.

  Margaret blushed crimson. ‘He’ll be down at that church’.

  ‘What church?’

  ‘The evangelical lot’ said Margaret. ‘The happy, clappy holy Joe’s! He’s fallen under the influence of the church of John the Baptist just down there on Hatton Road. He spends all his time down there and now he’s always banging on about God and Jesus and all the bloody souls that have to be saved. He right upset his mother last week by implying that her predicament was God’s punishment for having done wrong in her past life. Then he said it was okay because he’d been sent to save her. What kind of bloody carry-on is that? She sobbed her heart out that night but he’s never away from the place. I’d put money on that’s where he is right now’.

  ‘Just one thing’ said Barton. ‘You implied that they might’ve put Wayne up to do something against the law? They being the church, I presume?’

  ‘Yes’ said Margaret. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past that lot and I’ve had my suspicions for a while’.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You know what it’s like with these religious cults’ said Margaret. ‘They’re not a proper church in the proper English Christian sense. I didn’t say anything before because it’s a load of darkies who run it and I didn’t want to get accused of being a racist’.

  When DS Adrian Bradshaw and DC Joe Alexander arrived at Rosebud Street Barton briefed them on the conversation he and DCI Wright had been having with Margaret Reynolds and told them that he and Wright were off to the Church of John the Baptist to look for Wayne Carpenter. He left B
radshaw and Alexander in charge of the warrant authorised searching of each of the houses on Rosebud Street. There were a dozen uniformed officers from the local Stockport squad doing all the dirty work as far as the searches were concerned, going in first, dealing with complaints and reporting their findings to Bradshaw and Alexander.

  This was the first known drama the street and the extended neighbourhood had ever seen. People were coming out from all the streets around and gawping at the presence of so many police officers. Some of them were pointing at this and shouting at that. Bradshaw was trying not to take any notice and the residents of Rosebud Street itself were being remarkably compliant about what was happening. It surprised Bradshaw that these tiny little people leading their tiny little lives weren’t objecting more to the long arm of the law reaching into their inner sanctums. They would no doubt find something wrong with it all if they could find a voice that screamed loud enough.

  ‘Sir!’ called the uniformed officer standing in the doorway of number ten, Rosebud Street. ‘I think you’d better see this’.

  Bradshaw went in first and he was initially confronted by a long hallway with stairs leading up from the right and a continuation of the hallway to the left that led down to the kitchen. There were four African women standing together in their bright and garish traditional long flocks and matching turban like head gear. He couldn’t work out if they were looking defiant or disappointed that they’d been caught out in whatever they’d been involved in, but they were being interviewed by the uniformed officers and no doubt they would call Bradshaw and Joe Alexander in shortly.

  Before that they were led upstairs by the uniformed officer who’d called them over Sergeant Brad Cooper who warned Bradshaw and Alexander that they weren’t in for a very pretty sight.

  And he was right.

  There were sharp intakes of breath all round when they went into the small bedroom at the back of the house. The window had been boarded up. She was lying on the bed that took up most of the space in the room. She’d been dressed up in a pretty white dress that was etched in lace. Her hair had been braided and each one was covered with little beads in the same shade of red as the blood that was pouring out of her. It was fresh blood. Her eyes were wide open but her soul had passed.

  Her feet had been cut off.

  They must’ve acted pretty quickly.

  She must’ve died almost instantly from the shock. Or maybe the pathologist would take something from the bruises they could clearly see on her neck.

  DS Joe Alexander bent down and closed her eyes with the end of his thumb. Then he covered her face with a blanket.

  ‘Time to give this little girl her dignity back’ said Joe, softly.

  Bradshaw stepped back onto the upstairs landing and called Barton. ‘Boss? We’ve found her. We’ve found Manal or at least we’ve found a body that answers the description ... that’s right, sir, I’m afraid we were too late. The pathologist is on his way’.

  LANDSLIDE TEN

  Barton received the news from Bradshaw about the child’s body they’d found and although it saddened him and frustrated him that they hadn’t been able to get to her in time, it also made him even more determined to get to the bottom of whatever was happening here and root out the evil that had caught two little innocent girls in its purpose.

  The Church of John the Baptist was housed in a very nondescript red brick single story building set back a little from the main Hatton Road. There was a giant gold coloured crucifix in front of it and a car park that started up the side of the church and carried on round the back. It all looked pretty quiet at just after eleven on a Thursday morning but Barton assumed it got pretty busy on a Sunday. Perhaps there were a lot of souls that needed saving in Stockport. Or perhaps it was the church itself that was corrupting those souls in the first place? Barton’s jury was out.

  They were accompanied by a car load of uniformed officers whom Barton told to secure the area and identify any means of escape that Carpenter may have used if he’d seen them coming. The plan was to arrest him on suspicion of murder and take him in for questioning. But if the plan was going to work they had to track down their suspect.

  They knocked at the large green door at the front but there was no reply. On the wall next to it was a large board advertising service times on Sundays plus various other activities like bible study classes. There was a phone number to be called for further information and an assurance that ‘everyone who comes into God’s house will be welcomed with his almighty love’.

  ‘They must’ve seen Wayne Carpenter coming’ said DCI Ollie Wright. ‘He’d be a sitting duck for their bullshit. Bring me your huddled masses and I’ll turn them into fodder to carry out the purposes of the church and make them docile and obedient enough for them not to ask any real and pertinent questions about why their lives are so shit’.

  ‘So you’re as cynical as me about religion, Ollie?’

  ‘I was dragged to church every Sunday when I was a kid, sir. Let’s say I rebelled against it which in an Afro-Caribbean church going family isn’t easy to do’.

  ‘So, Wayne Carpenter had enough time to carry out the brutal murder of a little girl and then leg it down here before the local boys got to his place?’

  ‘Well yes, I’d say so, sir’ said Ollie. ‘It only took us less than two minutes and although we were in a car, and we’re assuming he wasn’t, he’d have been able to take a more direct route on foot and he grew up in this area so he must know it like the back of his hand. He’d know where the short cuts were’.

  ‘So where the fuck is the little shit now?’

  Just as Barton was about to knock on the large green door again, a tall and very distinguished looking black man dressed in a dark blue shirt, dog collar, and grey trousers came round the corner of the building to confront Barton and Wright.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m detective superintendent Barton and this is detective chief inspector Wright’ Barton declared as they both held up their warrant cards. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Pastor Gabriel’ he said. ‘And this is my church. Now what is going on?’

  ‘Pastor, do you know a Wayne Carpenter?’

  ‘Yes of course I do’ said Gabriel. ‘He’s a regular member of the congregation here. What is it you want with him? All he does is God’s work. You won’t have any business with him’.

  ‘He’s wanted for questioning in connection with a very serious crime, I’m afraid’.

  ‘Then you’re wasting your time because he wouldn’t be involved in anything other than God’s work’.

  ‘Well then you don’t need to be concerned about handing him over to us, Pastor Gabriel’ said Barton.

  ‘How can I hand him over to you if I don’t know where he is?’

  ‘So you’re saying you haven’t seen him today?’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen him today’.

  ‘And are you saying he isn’t anywhere here on the premises?’

  ‘No, he isn’t’.

  ‘Okay, so when was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe yesterday’.

  ‘Oh Pastor, very convincing to some I’m sure but not to me’ said Barton. ‘Now open the door to this building so we can go inside’.

  ‘This building is a house that belongs to God!’

  ‘I’m well aware of that but we need to gain entry and you’re the only thing that’s stopping us’ Barton countered. ‘So if you don’t mind? Before we have to force the door open’

  ‘Do you have a warrant, officer?’

  ‘Not yet but it’s on its way’ said Barton. ‘In the meantime we’ll maintain a presence here to watch any comings and goings’.

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  ‘No. What gave you that idea?’

  ‘Look, this church is a place of worship but it is also a place of sanctuary for the vulnerable and the needy. If they see police all over the place it may put them off seeking help’.
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  ‘Then they’ll have to go somewhere else’ said Barton with a heavy sigh. ‘Pastor Gabriel, my patience is wearing thin and this door will be unlocked when the warrant arrives so you may as well save yourself the bother then and do as I ask you now’.

  The two men faced off for a moment before Pastor Gabriel took his keys out of his pocket and let them in.

  Once it was clear that Wayne Carpenter wasn’t on the premises of the church Barton and DCI Wright got back into their car to drive back to Rosebud Street. Just as Wright, who was driving, was about to drive out of the front gate he stopped and reversed back a little to let an incoming vehicle through. It was a very long metallic blue Mercedes and it positively glistened in the spring sunshine.

  ‘Nice work if you can get it’ said Wright. ‘And she didn’t even acknowledge me a thank you. Bloody typical of people who drive cars like that’. He was about to put the car into gear when Barton held up his hand to signal to stop him.

  ‘Wait a second there, Ollie’ as he strained his neck to see behind them. He got a clear view of the driver as she got out. She was a tall and very elegant looking black woman who was carrying a clutch bag and wearing a trouser suit that Barton took to be designer. Her hair was cut very short to her head and she put on large black sunglasses. She struck Barton as a very attractive woman with obvious poise and confidence. He watched her walk up to Pastor Gabriel and they kissed.

  ‘His wife?’ Wright wondered.

  ‘Well if she is then why is she driving a flash car like that with a diplomatic number plate? But that can wait. I’ll take a note of it and check it out. Meanwhile, let’s get back to Rosebud Street and the body of that little girl’.

  The crime scene was upstairs and the pathologist Marcus Walters was getting to work. He was wearing a particularly colourful bow tie which made Barton wonder if he was going to audition to be the next Doctor Who. Covering everything though was the plastic suit, gloves, and shoes of his job.