Strangers

by Paul Finch

  ‘Speaking,’ she replied. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Okay, erm …’ The caller seemed surprised to have reached her so quickly. ‘Erm … you don’t know me, right?’

  Lucy hit the record-and-trace switch, at the same time deducing what she could from his accent, which, though he was clearly holding a cloth over his mouth, told her that he was a native Mancunian. ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘I understand you’re trying to find this Jill the Ripper?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Well … it’s a bit embarrassing, this, but I think I can help.’

  ‘Why’s that embarrassing?

  ‘Because she tried to kill me too … but I managed to get away.’

  Lucy straightened up. ‘Who are you please?’

  ‘I can’t … can’t tell you that.’ The voice was suddenly hurried, panicky. But then it calmed a little. ‘I’m not saying it over the phone. I’ll meet you in private though.’

  ‘Whoa, wait …’ Lucy glanced round, but no one else had come into the room. ‘Are you saying you know who the murderer is?’

  ‘No. I can give you a good description though. And … I’ve got a photo.’

  Lucy’s spine tingled. ‘A photo?’

  ‘Snapped a shot of her on my phone, just before she attacked me. I don’t think she realised. Otherwise I’m sure she’d have finished me off.’

  ‘Were you injured, sir?’

  ‘No. As I say, I got away.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Look, I can give you all the details if you’ll meet me. But I need you to come alone.’

  Which suddenly sounded a little bit fishy.

  ‘Why’s that?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I need assurances this’ll be kept quiet.’

  ‘Sir … we’re not concerned about the morality or immorality of men who use prostitutes. All we’re interested in …’

  ‘You’re not listening!’ Abruptly, he’d turned aggressive. ‘I want to make sure my name’s kept out of it. I mean totally out of it … even if you catch her because of what I tell you.’

  ‘That’s okay. We use confidential informants all the time.’

  ‘I don’t even want to be classified as an informant. I want this meeting never to have happened. Okay?’

  ‘I’m sure we can come an arrangement.’

  He paused, breathing hard. ‘Okay, here’s the deal …’

  ‘Before we discuss anything,’ Lucy interrupted, not ready to let this unknown person make all the running. ‘I’ve got one question for you … which you’re going to have to answer.’

  Another pause. More heavy breathing. ‘Go on …?’

  ‘Why’ve you called me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why did you ask for me by name? Do we know each other?’

  More silence. And then a thud and a click, and the line went dead.

  ‘Shit!’ she hissed. ‘Damn it to sodding, bloody hell!’

  When Des Barton finally dared to poke his head in, Lucy had pulled her combat jacket on and was now poring with biro in hand over a Greater Manchester A-Z.

  ‘Hiya, chuck,’ he said, approaching.

  She glanced up. ‘Des, just the man …’

  ‘You alright?’

  ‘What? Oh yeah, sure.’ She flipped another page of the map-book, tracing across it with the nib of her pen.

  ‘Thought you’d have gone round the corner for a couple of cold ones?’ he said.

  ‘Thought you would have.’

  ‘Yeah … first chance I’ve had in yonks to get home in time for tea. That’d go down well.’ He paused. ‘Why I’m really here is to say sorry about what happened. I know you wanted to stay on.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she replied.

  ‘It is?’ He looked puzzled, but shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Anyway, there is some news … I chased the VRMs of all the red sports cars clocked at that roundabout near the scene of the Ronnie Ford murder, like I promised. Not too many of them. Five in total.’

  Lucy glanced up again. ‘Five? Over the whole period?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve had one of our researchers check ’em, and none of their owners have form.’

  ‘Well … we tried.’

  ‘However, in an effort to be thorough – because we only had that chippie bloke’s word that it was a sports car – I’ve now had them extend the search a little wider. To all red cars.’

  ‘Cool.’ Preoccupied, she flipped another page.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘So … what’re you doing now?’

  She tapped her teeth with her pen, then slammed the book closed, shoved it into her jacket pocket and headed for the door. ‘I’ll tell you on the way.’

  ‘Hang about!’ Des didn’t follow. ‘On the way where?’

  She glanced back. ‘A lead’s just come in, and I could really use a wing man.’

  He folded his arms. ‘I’ll bet you could, but first … out of due consideration for the fact I’m just about to go off duty, you’re going to tell me what it is, aren’t you?’

  Lucy glanced at her watch. It was six-thirty. Time was running out, but Des was right; if she wanted his cooperation the very least she could do was cooperate back. So she explained, telling him about the call she’d just received, how it had been directed to her personally, how the caller had claimed to have a photographic image of Jill the Ripper, and how she’d now traced his call to a public phone-box on St Clement’s Avenue over on the east side of town.

  Des rubbed his jaw. ‘You’re going to log it obviously? You’re going to tell the boss?’

  ‘I want to make sure it’s kosher first.’

  ‘Any idea who this guy is?’

  ‘None. He wouldn’t give a name. He’s not even arranged to meet me. But I want to look the call-box over. See what’s what before I cordon it off.’

  ‘Most likely there’ll be nothing.’

  She shrugged. ‘I can also check if there’s a camera in the area that might’ve filmed him. Or ask around, see if someone was looking out of a bedroom window or something. I just need someone riding shotgun. Make sure I don’t get jumped.’

  ‘I don’t know, Lucy. I promised Yvonne I’d be home on time tonight.’

  ‘We’ll be ten minutes tops.’

  ‘Erm, we won’t be ten minutes,’ he stated. ‘St. Clement’s Avenue’s the other side of the borough. And if we start asking around …’

  ‘There won’t be any of that,’ she promised him. ‘If there’s anything that spikes my interest, I’ll call it in straight away. But I don’t want to go live on this yet in case it turns out to be nothing. Look Des, you’ve probably guessed from what Slater said that I’m the one who got rumbled. I’m already on the verge of looking a plonker … so I want to get this right.’

  Though clearly torn with indecision, Des finally, reluctantly, nodded.

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ll take my bike; you take your car. Then you can shoot straight off after if there’s nothing in it. You won’t even need to come back here.’

  ‘This had better not turn out to be a ball-acher,’ he said, following her from the room.

  ‘As if I’d do that to you.’

  Chapter 25

  Lucy rode ahead of Des’s juddery old Beetle, crossing the benighted centre of Crowley, which, with rush hour behind them, was rapidly emptying of traffic and pedestrians.

  St Clement’s Avenue was towards the eastern end of the borough, on one of its old industrial parks. They reached it by taking Adolphus Road, which dipped down under a couple of railway bridges and then passed through several hundred acres of derelict land. Once there’d been lines of terraced streets here and, no doubt, sometime in the future, car showrooms and warehouse DIY stores would spring up to replace them, but at present it was disused. Beyond it stood Penrose Mill, a square-shouldered Victorian colossus whose chimneys hadn’t smoked in decades and whose parallel rows of oblong wind
ows looked in on dust-filled emptiness.

  Lucy circled around the Gothic structure via a series of cobbled side-streets, eventually swerving into St Clement’s Avenue and proceeding along it at pace. The phone-box from which the call had been made sat in the glow of a single streetlight at the junction with Sawberry Lane, another identically bleak and underused thoroughfare.

  Lucy parked up some twenty yards away, Des slowing to a halt behind her. She took her helmet off and walked warily forward. The box was empty, but already she could see a white envelope lying on top of the telephone. She glanced around before entering. The crossroads was hemmed in by tall fences of corrugated metal, but no one else was in sight.

  There wasn’t a sound, until Des slammed the door to his Beetle, the impact of which echoed across the decrepit neighbourhood.

  Glaring back at him, to which he mouthed a bewildered ‘What?’, Lucy dug a pair of disposable gloves from her pocket and snapped them in place before entering the phone-box.

  The envelope, which had been neatly sealed, was typewritten:

  PC CLAYBURN

  Holding it by its corner, she took it outside, where she opened it, going in from the bottom end rather than the top so as not to disturb any DNA-loaded saliva. She extricated a single typewritten sheet:

  YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE

  MEET ME AT 8

  THE PLAYGROUND, MULBERRY CRES

  COME ALONE

  NOBODY ELSE OR WE DON’T TALK

  ‘What do you think this is?’ Lucy wondered, slipping the note into a sterile evidence sack.

  ‘A bollocking,’ Des replied. ‘If you don’t take it straight to the boss.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s addressed to me.’

  ‘And who are you? No disrespect, Lucy … but you’re no one.’ He set off back to his car. ‘That makes this a bit too weird.’

  ‘Whoa … Des, we have to go over there now. We’ve got twenty minutes or this deal’s off.’

  He glanced back, clearly unhappy. ‘At the very least we should call it in.’

  ‘He said I have to go alone. The fact he’s taking me across town means he’s probably going to be watching me. If the whole taskforce turns up, we’ll not see him for dust.’

  ‘He’s typewritten this note, chuck. You know what that means? This is pre-planned.’

  ‘Yeah, I get that, but like I say … we do nothing and we lose it all. We’ve now got less than twenty minutes.’

  Des dallied by his car. ‘You seriously want to go over there?’

  ‘What choice have we got?’

  ‘But if I follow you … which someone has to, he might leg it then too.’

  ‘Not if you stay back a little and try to keep out of sight.’

  ‘You’d better not be glory-hunting here, Lucy.’

  ‘Des, I didn’t ask for this.’

  ‘Look …’ He tried to sound sympathetic. ‘I don’t know why you’re not part of the team anymore. You say you’re the one who got rumbled. But it was always likely to happen, you being an old hand – there was always more chance you’d get clocked than most of the other girls. But whatever it was, even if it was your fault, this is not going to make up for it.’

  ‘Des …’ Lucy held her ground. ‘We need to check this lead before it fizzles out. So are you coming or not? We haven’t got time for you to think about it, to go asking for permission, to hang fire till we get some back-up … we’ve got to act on it now!’

  He glanced again at the plastic-wrapped note. ‘You know there’ll probably be another one of these when we get there, sending you somewhere else. It’s the oldest trick in the book.’

  ‘All the more reason for us to play it canny.’ She stowed the evidence in the inside pocket of her combat jacket, boarded her bike and hefted her helmet. ‘So don’t crowd me.’

  ‘And I really wanted to get home for tea tonight.’

  She pulled her helmet on and lifted its visor. ‘Do you want to get your tea, or do you want to be the guy who turns in a photograph of Jill the Ripper?’

  ‘Just get going!’ Des opened his car. ‘And don’t hit the gas. I know I’m supposed to be hanging back, but in this donkey-wagon that won’t be a problem at all.’

  The second location was somewhat less intimidating than the first: a middle-class housing estate on the edge of Crowley Golf Course. Though it was only mid-evening, plunging temperatures and November damp was keeping the locals indoors. Light still showed through most downstairs windows, but only via drawn curtains. All was quiet.

  Mulberry Crescent was in the very centre, and near enough identical to all the other roads on the estate, distinctive only for the fenced-off kiddies’ sandpit and playground at the south end of it. Lucy and Des had agreed beforehand that he wouldn’t actually follow her there, but would park in Dunwood Avenue, which stood adjacent, and sit with his headlights turned off but his engine running. As they were both officially off-duty and not equipped with radios, they’d agreed to maintain an open line to each other via their mobiles. Des had expressed dissatisfaction with the idea when he’d realised it meant she’d be out of his sight. That seemed to defeat the point of the whole exercise, but as Lucy argued, it was surely a mistake to risk calling this guy’s bluff when they hadn’t gleaned anything useful from him yet.

  Subsequently, Lucy cruised down Mulberry Crescent alone. She constantly checked over her shoulder. No one was ever in sight, but there were countless parked cars, low walls and shadowy places concealed amid suburban shrubbery, where someone could hide while they watched her. And given the quirkiness of this whole situation it seemed highly likely that someone would be.

  She drew to a halt at the kerb beside the gate to the playground. Beyond its waist-high mesh fence lay the sandpit, and beyond that a row of benches facing the swings. Though obscured by dimness, a lone figure looked to be seated on one of those benches.

  Whoever it was, his back was towards Lucy, and he was hunched forward so that she couldn’t determine any distinguishing features.

  She dismounted, removed her helmet and tucked it under her arm, and quietly explained the situation to Des as she approached the playground gate. His tinny response, which she could barely hear because she couldn’t risk taking the phone from her pocket, went something like: ‘Take it slow and easy.’

  Lucy did so, opting to cross the sandpit rather than follow the flagged path around it, as that would hush her footsteps – though of course, on reflection it felt like a pointless safeguard. Whoever this guy was, he’d know that a motorbike had pulled up behind him.

  Lucy halted when she reached the grass again. The slumped figure was ten yards in front.

  ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Can I ask what you’re doing here?’

  The figure didn’t move, let alone reply.

  Lucy advanced, warily. ‘I should advise you I’m a police officer.’

  Still no response.

  ‘Careful chuck!’ came Des’s tinny voice.

  ‘I’m actually the police officer,’ Lucy said. ‘The one you’ve been wanting to speak to.’

  The figure was now only five yards away, yet in the absence of light he was still only vaguely discernible. She recalled that disguised voice on the phone. Was it possible … was it conceivable that he was actually a she?

  Wild thoughts flashed through her mind: crime scene photos of mutilated male faces; healthy skulls hammered out of shape; hair matted with blood and bone fragments.

  ‘I don’t appreciate the way you’ve gone about this,’ she said, every muscle tightening. ‘But given that this is a serious issue I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt …’

  She was three yards short of him when a motion-sensitive arc-light at the top of a pole in the middle of the playground exploded to life. Lucy jumped, and spun halfway around.

  Belatedly, she glanced back to the bench.

  What she’d thought had been someone sitting there was nothing more than a bin-liner tied at the neck with twine and, by the looks of it, packed wit
h rubbish.

  ‘Shit!’ she said under her breath.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Des asked from her pocket.

  ‘Nothing.’ Inadvertently, she spoke aloud. ‘Misidentification.’

  ‘Where are you, chuck?’

  She lowered her voice again. ‘Where I’m supposed to be. On the playground.’

  ‘I’m coming round there.’

  ‘Negative, Des. Stand by … he may not be done with me yet.’

  She pivoted three hundred and sixty degrees, but thanks to the safety light saw nobody else there. However, as she walked back towards the gate, her eyes fell on the pillar box across the road – and the white envelope lying on top of it.

  She hurried over there.

  As before, the front of the envelope was inscribed:

  PC CLAYBURN

  When she opened it, it contained a single sheet, printed:

  8.30

  EMPORIA SUBWAYS

  COME ALONE OR NO DICE

  Again, this gave her approximately twenty minutes to get back to the town centre. She could only imagine what Des’s view would be, and she received it with both barrels when they next had a conflab, though as before they had to do this under a pretence of not knowing each other, Lucy sitting astride her bike alongside his open driver’s window while they waited at a red light.

  ‘So it’s back across the borough again,’ he said in a tone of deep dissatisfaction.

  ‘He obviously wants to make certain I’m coming alone,’ she replied.

  ‘Lucy … he’s a witness who doesn’t want his name in the papers. This is a hell of a lot of trouble to go to for that.’

  ‘Well, what do you think he’s up to?’

  ‘Either he’s got a bit more in mind than giving you a statement. Or …’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or it’s someone ripping the piss.’

  She almost glanced round. ‘Why would someone do that?’

  ‘You tell me … you’re the one who’s made enemies in CID in the past.’

  She was stunned. ‘You don’t mean one of our lot?’

  ‘Who else knows you’re on the taskforce?’

  ‘Someone would send me all the way round town to even a score for something that happened four years ago?’ she said. ‘Seriously?’