Strangers

by Paul Finch

‘He’s well gone by now, but we need to trace him.’ Nehwal tapped in a number.

  ‘A male suspect after all, ma’am?’

  ‘Unlikely. Unless he had his own clever reasons for pointing us in the right direction.’

  ‘A dogger then? Looking for some fun.’

  ‘Probably. Doesn’t know how lucky he is he didn’t get it, does he? But he’s a witness … so we need him. Blast it … can’t get a signal.’

  ‘Lowest part of town. Reception’s always poor down here. Ma’am … this body looks very fresh.’ Though it broke all the rules, Lucy couldn’t resist placing a knuckle against the corpse’s neck. The banging of her heart steadily increased. ‘He’s still warm.’

  Before Nehwal could respond, there was a clatter of woodwork from inside the pump-house. They swung around together, gazing at the gloomy structure.

  Instinctively, Nehwal pocketed the phone so that both her hands were free.

  They waited, their smoky breath furling around them.

  Aside from a renewed popping and fizzing of distant fireworks, there was silence. Nehwal switched her torch on, its cone of light embossing the mossy, red-brick exterior of the old industrial outbuilding, yet intensifying the blackness behind its apertures. Lucy couldn’t help glancing back at the mutilated form slumped in the car. An OAP yes, but the seventh in line, and the others hadn’t been even close to that age. One of them had weighed twenty-five stone, for God’s sake! Two of them got chopped together at the same time!

  Just how physically powerful was this killer? What kind of chance would they realistically stand in a full-on confrontation, even the pair of them together?

  ‘Go round the back,’ Nehwal said quietly. ‘Cover the rear exit.’ Lucy nodded and made to move, only for Nehwal to grip her wrist. ‘Go armed.’

  ‘Ma’am, I’ve been plain clothes all day, I’ve got no …’

  ‘Find something.’

  Lucy was initially bewildered by this, but then spotted the way Nehwal was wielding the torch – now like a baton rather than a flashlight. She leaned down and picked up a broken half-brick, before proceeding warily around the exterior, stepping with difficulty through clumps of desiccated weeds and thorns. At the rear, she halted in front of a single narrow doorway, the door itself broken off and lying to one side.

  Various stagnant odours leaked through the gap: oil, mildew, rotted rags.

  She listened again. Something creaked inside, very faintly – but that could have been Nehwal progressing in from the front.

  Unable to believe she was doing this while wearing a skirt, heels and a heavy old coat that wasn’t hers, and with a jagged lump of brick in her hand, Lucy edged forward into the darkness – and almost immediately came to another bare brick wall.

  From here, she could go either left or right. Theoretically she should have held this point, to ensure no one slipped past. But there was no conceivable way she could allow her boss, who was no more than five-five and in her early fifties, to enter the building alone.

  Heart thumping, Lucy went left, turning a corner into open space. Nothing stirred in the inky blackness in front of her. Instinctively, she reached for the phone in her pocket, to switch its light on, only to remember that it was in the pocket of the other coat. Not that she was completely blinded; after so long at the bottom of Dedman Delph, her eyes were readjusting quickly. She spied a row of broken windows further to her left, all covered in wire netting. It gave sufficient illumination to show a floor strewn with boxes and piles of old newspapers, and what looked like masses of wood and timber piled against the walls.

  Still there was no movement, neither from Nehwal nor anyone hiding out in here. Even so, Lucy only shuffled forward with caution. ‘Ma’am?’

  There was no reply. Until a fierce red light seared through the windows, a loud series of rat-a-tat bangs accompanying it.

  More fireworks … but even so Lucy froze.

  In that fleeting instant, she’d seen a figure standing in a corner.

  Indistinct but tall – taller than she was – and wearing dark clothing, including some kind of hat pulled partly down over its face. It stood very still between an old wardrobe and an upright roll of carpet.

  Lucy pivoted slowly towards it. As the firework flashes diminished again, only its outline remained visible – its outline and its face, which, though it was partially concealed, glinted palely, and, she now saw, was garish in the extreme; grotesquely made-up with bright slashes of what in proper lighting would no doubt be lurid colour.

  An icy barb went through her as she realised that the figure was wearing a mask.

  It could even be a clown mask.

  And yet still it didn’t move. Its build was difficult to distinguish, but there was something slightly “off” about it, she now thought: it seemed to sag a little.

  Injured maybe? Tired? Or playacting?

  Lucy hadn’t glimpsed any kind of weapon, neither a blunt instrument nor a blade, but the hunk of brick in her hand suddenly felt ungainly and inadequate.

  She faced the figure full on. There was about six yards between them. At any second, she expected it to lurch forward in a blur of speed, maybe silently, maybe screaming.

  She lofted the brick as though to throw it.

  ‘Listen …’ She spoke quietly, calmly. ‘I am a police officer, and I am armed … and you are going to have to show me both your hands.’

  The figure made no move to comply.

  ‘I will tell you one more time …’

  ‘Relax,’ a voice interrupted.

  Lucy jumped as the room filled with brilliant white torchlight.

  Nehwal stepped in through a connecting door, which in the dimness Lucy hadn’t previously noticed. The DSU’s beam focused itself on the shape in the corner.

  It wasn’t a living person at all, but a mannequin, an effigy suspended between two corroded bolts in the wall by loops of string tied under its armpits, which explained the odd posture. It was made from an old dark suit and a tatty brown sweater. Its head was a crumpled football, with a plastic mask attached to the front, the latter not depicting the face of a clown but the face of a grinning male with a sharp moustache and pointed beard. The broad-brimmed Guy Fawkes hat looked like a fancy dress shop reject.

  Nehwal glanced around. ‘Lots more firewood in the room next door. Plus several cans of petrol. Someone was planning a big party for Thursday.’

  Lucy walked over to the figure anyway, just to be sure. Up close, it smelled like a pile of unwashed laundry. When she pressed the ragged jersey, it yielded, newspaper crackling underneath. She turned back. ‘Ma’am … we both heard something.’

  Nehwal pointed upward. When Lucy looked, she saw a mass of crisscrossing pipework dangling with cobwebs and crammed with birds’ nests. Disturbed by the torchlight, pigeons fluttered back and forth among it.

  ‘There’re more of them next door,’ Nehwal said. ‘Roosting in the firewood, which is all loose. A few bits shifted even while I was poking around.’

  Lucy glanced again at the Guy. It sagged on the two bolts, its head cocked to one side as it regarded her with the empty holes of its eyes.

  ‘Ma’am, if you tell anyone about this, well … let’s just say I’ll never live it down …’

  ‘PC Clayburn, we’ve just walked together into what we thought was a murderer’s den.’ Nehwal scanned the rest of the room. ‘We’ve got a bloke outside who looks more like a pile of dog-meat than a human being. Trust me, I’m not in the mood to be telling funny stories.’

  They searched the rest of the place together, but it wasn’t large and there was nobody else concealed in there. Eventually, they went outside, where a faint scent of cordite was noticeable, along with traces of smoke settling in the valley from high overhead.

  ‘Going to have to call this in one way or the other.’ Nehwal fiddled irritably with her phone. ‘And the only way to do that is by finding higher ground. In the meantime … I need that perimeter.’

  Lucy followed her to th
e Lexus, though they steered clear of the Fiesta to avoid compromising any telltale footprints or tyre-tracks. Nehwal opened her boot, and handed Lucy a roll of incident tape and several plastic pegs, along with the torch.

  ‘You going to be all right?’ she asked. Fleetingly, she looked to be having second thoughts about leaving Lucy here alone. ‘I’ll be ten minutes max.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Lucy replied, though in truth she didn’t know which to be more unnerved by: the prospect of waiting down here in the blackness of Dedman Delph for ten minutes (or, more likely, half an hour), with a mangled corpse not five or six yards away, or the thought of that eerie, grinning figure inside the pump-house.

  Nehwal nodded, and opened the driver’s door. ‘Whoever our girl is, I’d imagine she’s far from here by now.’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘If she isn’t, ma’am … well, I can always arrest her.’

  Chapter 15

  Lucy arrived at Robber’s Row late-morning to find that, despite a foul autumn drizzle, the station was under siege. The main road was all but barricaded by press vehicles, their drivers arguing with traffic wardens and uniformed bobbies. Cables snaked everywhere, cameras hovered overhead on cranes, while higher still, a news chopper lofted through the air. Half a dozen live broadcasts were occurring right at this moment, delivered from the station’s doorstep.

  Word of the latest atrocity had spread like wildfire. Lucy had only got home around midnight, having spent at least three hours getting her statement right, and by then it had already broken across the news networks.

  Only because she was on her Ducati was she able to thread her way through this chaos to the personnel car park. It was bedlam indoors as well. Phones trilled, while staff, both police and civilian, dashed along corridors, carting essential paperwork from one office to the next. There seemed to be extra bodies everywhere, more TSGs having been called in to assist with fingertip searches, door-to-door enquiries and so forth.

  From what Lucy could gather from the conversations she earwigged as she ascended the stairways, Jim Cavill and Priya Nehwal had already given two interviews that day, but the Assistant Chief Constable and the Crime Commissioner were now here to hold a conference themselves, so the press room on the ground floor was the main hub of activity. Conversely though, the MIR was largely deserted, the bulk of the team, Cavill and Nehwal included, back at Dedman Delph, assessing the new crime scene. One or two stalwart individuals remained to field communications, and that alone was keeping them busy. They didn’t look twice at Lucy, even though she’d been one of the two who’d discovered the new body; not even after she’d come back downstairs having fixed her hair and make-up in the locker-room, and changed from her motorbike leathers into a denim mini-skirt, high heeled shoes, and a sensible but attractive short-sleeved blouse in order to make the correct impression on her debut night at Sugababes.

  When the Ripper Chicks had first started appearing in Robber’s Row dressed as tarts, there’d been the usual good-natured ribbing, wolf-whistling and ribald cheering. Lucy wasn’t exactly tarted up today, but she’d still dressed to eye-catch. However, it made no difference here. It wasn’t that the last vestige of good humour had drained out of the taskforce, it was just that those here didn’t even have time to notice her – apart from Slater, who showed up a minute later.

  ‘Hell of a bloody morning, this,’ he said, yanking at his tie-knot, which was clearly irritating him because he hadn’t yet shaved. He spotted her outfit. ‘You ready then?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Okay … upstairs first. Let’s have a quick chat.’

  Lucy followed him up.

  ‘That dickhead who fled the scene last night turned himself in first thing,’ he said as they climbed the stairs. ‘Name’s Gordon Worthing. Total plank, but he’s out of the frame. He was working overseas when two of the other murders were committed. Reckons he goes dogging down Dedman Delph every chance he gets. Says he never thought there’d be any danger … thought Jill the Ripper only whacks blokes who pay for it. Like psycho killers probably make that kind of distinction all the time. Worthing’s also given us a name for the old geezer. Mack Reynoldson. He owned the Fiesta. Real member of the dirty raincoat brigade. He’s been going down Dedman Delph longer than Worthing.’

  ‘What about the Bonfire Night stuff?’ Lucy wondered.

  ‘No sus circs there either.’ Slater walked into the Ripper Chicks’ office, Lucy following. ‘Belongs to the local Scout and Brownie troop, St Bede’s. They were only going to build their bommy on Thursday morning in case it rained before then.’ He glanced at the droplets streaming down the outside of the window and the turgid grey skies beyond. ‘Somewhat prophetic. But it seems they didn’t have the first clue about the normal nocturnal activities down there … not that I suspect there’ll be any more after this. Anyway, fuck all that. Whatever needs doing’s being done. We’ve got other fish to fry today.’

  Slater had looked flustered as soon as he’d entered the building, which was hardly surprising. With each new death, the pressure on the team increased tenfold, and it didn’t ease one iota as they ran through the plan for that afternoon. There wasn’t much that Slater could do other than sit there and listen while Lucy outlined the way she expected it to go and her proposed solutions if problems arose, but at no stage did he look relaxed about it. Even though an undercover unit would park up as close to the SugaBabes Club as feasibly possible, its response capability was going to be limited, especially as Lucy would most likely have her phone taken off her while she was working there. There was no point pretending otherwise; from the moment she left the station today she was going to be alone.

  Slater’s brow furrowed as the full import of this dawned on him. It was almost as if, in the hectic aftermath of the latest slaying, he hadn’t had a chance to seriously contemplate today’s operation.

  ‘I need some air,’ he said when they’d wrapped up.

  He left the office and walked down the passage to a fire-door at the far end, which the smokers in the team usually kept wedged open so that they could nip out for a drag on the top deck of the fire-escape. Thanks to the cold and the wet, there was no one else outside at present, so Slater and Lucy stood there alone.

  ‘I have to tell you, Lucy …’ He gazed distantly. ‘This is one of the most dangerous undercover ops that any officer in a team of mine has ever embarked on. You’re going to encounter an awesome degree of villainy.’

  ‘I’m just checking coats, sir … I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You see someone who might recognise you in that place, anyone at all … and you leave at the first opportunity, okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I know you’re not a central Manchester native, Lucy. I know you’ve mainly worked in Crowley, but people travel. There are some scumbags who range all across this city. It’s not impossible that someone may spot you.’

  ‘I’ll only be there long enough to get to know the girls, sir. Just like on the East Lancs. Get them talking, see if I can identify this Lotta. By all accounts, I won’t be able to miss her.’

  ‘Don’t ask too many probing questions,’ he advised.

  ‘I won’t ask any questions. I’ll let the conversation take me where it does.’

  ‘Seriously, Lucy … the Crew are no joke. We’ve gone extra deep into the backgrounds of the Ripper victims so far, and none of them had any kind of connection with organised crime, not even those two goons fly-tipping. So our best guess is the Crew are not behind these murders – that was always unlikely anyway, to be honest. Like Priya said, these deaths aren’t their style. But SugaBabes is very much on their radar. They don’t just take their cut, two or three of their top men go there for recreation. Now these are bad guys by any standards. If they sense there’s a threat to them … any at all, they’ll rub you out without a qualm.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  He looked round at her. ‘What time are you meeting Jayne McIvar?’

  ‘Three this afternoon.’
r />   He glanced at his watch. ‘Suppose you’d better get going.’

  They walked down through the nick. Each floor was a scene of mayhem. Again, despite Lucy’s glammed-up look, she didn’t draw so much as a furtive glance.

  ‘Jayne McIvar’s an unknown quantity to a certain extent,’ Slater said. ‘She’s the brains behind the firm. She’s never been in half as much trouble as her sister. But she’s still a brothel-keeper, so she’s a lowlife despite her flash clothes and urbane attitude. But the point is, she’s clever. Much more than Suzy. Suzy’s the obvious one to be wary of, but watch Jayne too. I’ve a feeling she can be a whole lot of trouble.’

  Lucy nodded. There was nothing more to be said as they left the building by the personnel door. They exchanged a terse ‘speak later’, and she walked away around the front of the nick, sidling unnoticed through the press pack and strolling to the nearest bus stop.

  By early afternoon she was on board a tram, again bound for Queens Road. The weather had cleared a little, bright but cool sunlight filtering through breaking cloud. Commuters climbed on and off. Those with newspapers were dwelling on Jill the Ripper, perhaps unavoidably as it covered page after page. A succession of ghoulish headlines jumped out.

  Madwoman still on prowl

  Man-killer going for the record

  Jill doesn’t just rip; she hacks, slashes, cuts

  As before, Lucy walked north from Queens Road, circling around Queens Park to the coffee shop opposite the Victorian-era graveyard, arriving just around three o’clock. The Audi R8 was parked there again, but this time there was no bruiser inside it. Instead, Jayne McIvar sat behind the wheel. She flashed her headlights as Lucy approached, and leaned across to open the front passenger door.

  ‘You’re punctual,’ she said, as Lucy climbed in. ‘That’s good.’

  She put the car in gear and hit the gas, heading north towards Crumpsall, which if Lucy’s recollection was correct, was not the direction in which SugaBabes lay.

  ‘So who are you, Hayley?’ Jayne asked. ‘What’s your background?’