by Neil White
‘Who was your accomplice, Mr Grant?’ Charlotte said, her voice firmer. ‘Ronnie Bagley?’
‘Betrayal, remember,’ Grant said, his eyes narrowed. ‘That’s what it was about.’
Sam shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. Who betrayed you?’
Grant folded his arms. The silence grew until it became obvious that they were not going to get anything else out of him.
‘I’ll be back, Grant,’ Sam said.
Grant kept his eyes on Charlotte. ‘What, when the body count goes up?’ He smiled. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
Fifty-Five
Joe looked up at the house where Ronnie’s mother lived. A small stone house with thick stone windowsills and a door that was too small for Joe to fit through whilst standing straight. Ronnie had been bailed to live there and he wasn’t answering his phone.
He banged on the door and then paced back and forth as he waited. He needed to find Ronnie. Ruby was in danger and Ronnie was at the centre of it all. Ronnie had wanted Joe all along, but he blamed Joe for something Joe didn’t understand.
The house was in the lower part of Marton, nearer the railway line, the town divided by the large hill that created the valley side. The part of the town at the top of the hill had the views and the grand old houses, which was where Ronnie and Carrie had lived. The lower part, along the valley floor, was where all the workers’ cottages were, so their occupants were the ones who choked on the smoke in the days when mills and factories clogged up the town.
The door opened and Ronnie’s mother stood there.
‘Mrs Bagley, is Ronnie in?’
She looked up and down the street and then shook her head. ‘He hasn’t really been living here,’ she said, her voice quiet and shaky.
‘What do you mean? He has to live here. That’s what the judge ordered.’
‘That’s between Ronnie and the judge.’
‘So where does he go?’
‘I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me anything.’
‘We need to talk,’ Joe said.
She paused and then turned to go into the house.
Joe followed, squinting in the murkiness of the hallway as the door closed behind him. The house seemed brown throughout. The carpet, the light brown of the wallpaper, the paintwork yellowed through age. When he went into the living room, he spotted the silver cardboard of a cigarette packet and realised that the colouring wasn’t just through ageing.
As he sat down, she took a cigarette out of the packet, and the air became murkier still as she lit it and blew smoke into the room.
‘You must have some idea where he goes?’ Joe said.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t ask. He doesn’t tell me.’ When Joe frowned, she said, ‘I didn’t ask for him to come here. This was your idea, or that girl who called me. She said Ronnie would stay in prison if I didn’t help. What could I do?’
‘He’s your son. We ask the family in cases like this. Why, do you have a problem with him?’
She took a long pull on her cigarette, before saying, ‘He’s not right. He is… how can I say it? He’s unnatural.’
‘What do you mean, “unnatural”?’
‘That he has unnatural instincts. Didn’t he tell you about them? How I’ve had to put up with people at my door, shouting about how he upsets people, young women, because he follows them around? Stroking their hair on buses, in shops, watching them outside their houses. He isn’t right. Never has been. Ever since, well,’ and she paused, before saying, ‘well, things have happened.’
Joe looked around the room, small, cluttered with cheap ornaments and photograph frames. Ronnie wasn’t in any of them. There was a young woman though. Pretty, long-haired, smiling.
‘Who’s the girl?’ Joe said, pointing at the frames, remembering Sam’s words from before.
Mrs Bagley looked over and Joe noticed the clench of her jaw. ‘That’s Ronnie’s sister.’ She took another long drag. ‘That was part of Ronnie’s unnatural behaviour.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You need to know what sort of man you’re helping,’ she said, jabbing her cigarette fingers at Joe, making ash tumble to the floor. ‘He isn’t right.’
Joe felt his unease gnaw at him a little harder. What sort of person had he helped to put back on the street? ‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Ronnie used to watch her. His own sister? She caught him, playing with himself, the dirty little pervert. Can you imagine how we felt? My Frank, well, he couldn’t cope, so he left, couldn’t stand to be in the same house as him.’
‘Where is she? Will Ronnie be with her?’
She shook her head slowly, her eyes misted over. She crossed herself. ‘I wish he was,’ she said. There was a crack to her voice when she added, ‘Sally, that was her name. She died. Slipped and fell in the bath.’
Fifty-Six
Sam saw that he had a missed call when the prison guard returned his phone. Even the police had to hand them in. It was DI Evans. He stalled before he made the call.
‘That was more than a taunt, about an accomplice,’ Sam said to Charlotte. ‘And why does it all come back to betrayal?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Let him have his small victory, because at least we know where he is, locked up and safe.’ That brought a smile from Sam, until she asked, ‘Was he right though, that someone else was there when you caught him?’
Sam hesitated, just for a second, but it was enough for Charlotte to look surprised. ‘So he is right?’
He clenched his jaw. ‘No, he’s not right,’ he said, and then exhaled loudly. ‘I don’t know, is the truthful answer. I didn’t lie in court. I was asked whether I had seen anyone else there. I hadn’t. Whether I had heard anyone. I hadn’t. Whether I knew anyone else was there. I didn’t.’
‘So what part did he get right then?’
‘The part where I can’t rule it out.’
She stopped walking. ‘Talk to me, Sam.’
He didn’t answer for a few seconds, and then said, ‘It was just a feeling. There were some rustles, and the sensation that we weren’t alone. And Grant had acted like I had to keep my whole attention on him, coming forward, talking, kneeling in front of me.’
‘To give someone else time to get away?’
‘Possibly.’
‘So Grant did have an accomplice?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Did you ever tell anyone at the time?’
‘I told the inspector in charge of the case, but he told me not to write it down. They had their man, and if the murders stopped because Grant had been caught, what good would it do to speculate? And he was right, because what good would it do? I hadn’t seen anything. It was a feeling, nothing more. Why give the defence a get-out, someone else they could blame it on?’
‘This job is too hard sometimes,’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s supposed to be about truth, but the truth makes you look over your shoulder and wonder what someone else will make of it. It’s almost as though the truth becomes about how you present it and nothing more.’
‘So these missing girls could be down to an apprentice,’ Sam said. ‘Which means that my silence back then led to all of this.’
‘Ronnie Bagley is the key,’ Charlotte said. ‘He’s the link we do have. He murdered Grant’s most frequent visitor, and he’s the one with the hair fetish, just like Grant talked about yesterday. If Grant was playing the part, describing someone else, was that person Ronnie?’
Then something occurred to Sam. ‘And how do we know that Grant wasn’t just the apprentice, taking the fall for someone else?’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘Because he was in awe of the person, or because he knew he was caught and so opted for glory instead? Look at him. A pathetic man who gets off on being a somebody. What was he before he was caught? He worked in a factory, just some nobody on a production line. Now? The world knows who he is. The bars keep him in, but they’ve given him something else too: notoriety.’
‘He talked about betrayal,’ Sam said. ‘Does he feel betrayed in some way, because he’s copped the life sentence and yet his accomplice, or apprentice, or teacher, or whatever, carries on as before? He wants to give him up but can’t quite resist teasing us because, for all the betrayal he feels, he still craves the attention.’
‘So we need to work out the identity of the apprentice, then we might find out who is behind these missing girls.’
‘Ronnie Bagley,’ Sam said. ‘Who else can it be? Is that why Carrie was drawn to Ronnie, because he was the next best thing to Grant? Now he is supposed to have killed Carrie and their baby. Was she going to betray him? Is that why he killed them, to silence her?’ When Charlotte didn’t respond, trying to work it out for herself, Sam said, ‘I’ve got to tell Evans where we are.’
Sam called DI Evans and told her about the meeting and what they had found out about Ronnie’s grooming, and he heard the urgency in her voice as his tale unfolded.
‘We need to find Ronnie Bagley now,’ Evans said.
‘Where do you want us to start?’ Sam said.
‘You don’t start anywhere,’ Evans said. ‘We’ll do it. You go to Terry Day’s house, get that statement,’ and then she hung up.
Sam looked at his phone, angry.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘We’ve been demoted to runners and statement-takers,’ Sam said.
The long drive to Terry Day’s house was made in silence, both of them annoyed about being sidelined, until Sam realised something as he drove. He got to the traffic lights that would take them to Terry’s house, but rather than turning left, Sam looked higher up the hill and then drove straight on.
‘Where are we going?’ Charlotte said. ‘The turning was back there.’
‘Bear with me,’ he said, driving straight on and then turning a sharp left a quarter of a mile further along. He drove on in silence until they arrived at the end of a terraced street, the stone houses made black by a century of grime.
He stepped out of the car.
‘What are you doing?’ Charlotte asked, as she joined him on the pavement.
He pointed at the long row of houses running steeply downhill, where it seemed to run out, the end of it being just blue sky. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
Their footsteps echoed between the two sides of the street as they walked, his shoes as loud leather scrapes, hers as regular clicks. The houses were two-storey, with white stone doorframes and a step in front of the doors, where a few decades earlier they would have been cleaned and polished by tough northern women, their skin made old by hard times and factory smoke.
When they got to the end of the road, Sam stopped. He pointed into the valley that had opened out in front of them, the street coming to an end by a steep verge of scrappy grass. There was a small factory, the sound of a forklift truck loud as it reversed and pulled forward in jerks and sweeping arcs.
‘That’s where Ben Grant worked,’ he said. ‘It all came back to me, driving up here, because I haven’t worked around here for a while.’ He turned to point at a small stone terraced house, the walls dark grey and fashioned out of large pieces of the Pennines. ‘That’s Ben Grant’s house, where he killed his victims, before he dumped them.’
Charlotte paused and put her hands on her waist. ‘It looks so ordinary,’ she said, her voice quiet.
‘That’s how they always look,’ he said. ‘It’s been empty since Ben Grant was arrested. Grant owns it but won’t sell it. It used to get vandalised, but the neighbours started looking after it, washing off the paint and repairing windows, because seeing it smashed up just reminded them of what had happened. They hope that it’ll change hands one day if they look after it, and so they can all move on.’
‘Why is this important?’ she said.
Sam looked at Charlotte. ‘I’ve been getting phone calls for a couple of months now. I couldn’t work them out, because I’m not on the Murder Squad. I was on the financial unit. Ben Grant was a long time ago.’
‘What are these calls?’
‘Someone screaming, like they’re scared, or in pain, but it’s muffled. I thought it was from a film, someone playing around with me, because I’d locked them up or something, taken their assets. Now, I think it’s connected to this, to Ben Grant.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because there’s a noise in it. I’ve downloaded it to my computer, and I’ve tried to play around with it. It’s a beeping noise, like the warning beep of a lorry reversing.’ He pointed down to the factory again. ‘Like a lorry reversing into that factory yard. It’s faint, but it’s got the same echo, as if it’s far away, but with nothing else to interfere with the sound. No other traffic noise. Somewhere quiet, like here.’ He pointed at Ben Grant’s old house.
Charlotte was surprised. ‘Have you still got a copy?’
Sam pulled out his phone and scrolled through his answer machine until he found the file he wanted. He pressed play and passed it to Charlotte.
He turned away as she listened. She was quiet as she passed the phone back to him.
‘It’s real, isn’t it?’ she said quietly.
‘Now I think it is. Ben Grant would only speak to me. Not just any copper, but me. And I’ve been getting these calls. He can’t have been making them from prison.’
‘The accomplice,’ Charlotte said, nodding as realisation hit her.
‘I think it’s worse than that,’ Sam said. ‘If Ben Grant was behind this, and the sound was recorded over there, he must have recorded his victims, and so somewhere there must be footage of what he did. Can you imagine how their parents will feel if they find out?’
‘So who is the accomplice?’
Sam pointed towards a narrow path that ran alongside Ben Grant’s house. ‘Follow me.’
They walked until the narrow path turned into a mud track, with a drop on one side, towards the factory in the valley. They crossed two streets like that, just long stretches of housing that fanned out like spokes on a wheel, so that the gardens were smallest at the factory end, the hub of the wheel. Sam stopped and pointed to the house in front of them, a taller three-storey house, with cobwebs and dirt on the windows.
‘That’s Terry Day’s house,’ he said. ‘Where Ronnie lived.’
Charlotte looked up at the house, and then back along the track they had come down. ‘They’re close by.’
‘Two streets away, except they seem further from the top road, because of the way the streets spread out. It’s just a short walk though.’
‘So the connection gets stronger,’ she said.
‘Everything comes back to Ben Grant and Ronnie Bagley. The missing girls. The location of Carrie’s murder, Grant’s regular visitor. Ronnie has the hair fetish, which is what Grant described to me. He was trying to tell me about Ronnie Bagley, to tease me.’
‘And Ronnie wanted to stay close to where he helped Grant,’ Charlotte said.
‘If he was going to live off the fantasies, he needed to stay close, so he felt closer to them.’
Charlotte turned back to Terry Day’s house. ‘It looks a dismal sort of a place. What sort of person lives somewhere like that? Perhaps Ged was right to discount Terry’s sighting?’
‘You watch him when we get his statement, see if you think he’s being truthful. Ged was stupid, but I understand why he did it. The first question Terry Day will be asked by the defence is: “Have you seen Carrie Smith since she was supposedly murdered?” The answer will be “Yes”. That will be bad enough, but add in the cover-up, and Ronnie Bagley is smiling all the way to his not guilty verdict.’
‘So we’ve been given the job of undoing everything we’ve done in this case,’ Charlotte said. ‘As soon as we knock on that door and he tries to convince us that he saw Ronnie’s dead
girlfriend, it’s all over before we ever really got started.’
‘Ignoring it won’t change that,’ Sam said. ‘Do the right thing. That’s all we can do.’
They went up the stone steps to the door. Sam rang the top doorbell. They both looked around as they waited for the rumble of feet on the stairs, but there was just silence.
‘Perhaps it’s broken,’ Charlotte said, and banged on the wooden door. It swung open as her fist connected.
They exchanged glances. They were going in but something wasn’t right.
The hallway was empty. He shouted. No response, except that something told him that they weren’t alone. It was a presence, something he couldn’t explain.
‘Mr Day?’ he shouted. ‘It’s the police.’
The hallway they were in was dim, the only light coming from the street. Ahead of them, the stairs rose upwards, towards the shadows of the first floor. There was a door to their right that was sealed by crime scene tape.
‘Ronnie’s flat,’ Charlotte whispered, following his gaze.
‘Do we go up?’ he said.
Charlotte made the decision and went towards the stairs. ‘Mr Day?’ she shouted. No response.
They jumped. There was movement above. Footsteps, light and quick, creaks on the floor.
The solid wooden door closed behind them with a loud click, blocking any light coming in. Sam groped along the wall, feeling for a light switch. When he found one, he clicked it on, but nothing happened. He pulled out his phone and found the flashlight app, which shone a bright square of light. He held it towards the stairs, and as he glanced upwards, he saw the slow swing of an empty bulb socket.
‘We have to go up,’ he said.
Charlotte took a deep breath, and then nodded her approval.
Sam went towards the stairs, his phone held out in front of him.
Fifty-Seven