Strangers

by Paul Finch

  But really, seriously … Darla Maycroft, who drove a pricey motor and now lived in the middle-class suburb of Lostock, was the Lay-by Murderer?

  Lucy had to be kidding herself. These psychopathic freaks usually demonstrated a pattern of antisocial behaviour and violent offending long before they switched to killing. Plus they tended to come from the most abusive backgrounds. All that said, just because there was no such detail on Darla’s sheet, that didn’t mean she hadn’t had issues.

  The printout was frustratingly sketchy, but Lucy scanned it again for anything that might help persuade her she wasn’t barking up the wrong tree. Her eyes finally fell on a physical description of the subject. This had been taken at the time of her last arrest, which was in 2012, when she’d been thirty-two years old.

  One passage in particular caught Lucy’s attention:

  Blue eyes. Natural blonde hair. Sturdy, athletic build.

  And more important still:

  5ft11ins tall.

  Chapter 33

  Grantwood Gardens in Lostock wasn’t the epitome of middle-class Greater Manchester, but it was a good approximation for that. A grid-work of orderly, tree-lined suburban streets, it boasted detached and semi-detached houses, front lawns with pruned shrubbery, and drives with more than one car on them. It was neither as grand nor as showy as the swanky corner of Didsbury where Frank McCracken lived, but it was prosperous all the same in a quieter, more down-to-earth fashion.

  No cop would ever argue that prosperity was a reason for crime not to happen, though most would agree that in suburbia it tended to lie behind closed doors. Not that such knowledge made this place seem any the less sinister to Lucy as she rode slowly along its affluent avenues. It was now 4.30 in the afternoon, so though occasional clusters of school kids were still sauntering home, their mothers and fathers mostly hadn’t returned yet. House lights were coming on as dusk deepened, but only here and there. At least the rain had eased off, but it was a typical late afternoon in November: very cold, very damp, very misty.

  As a rule, Lucy enjoyed plain-clothes work. That was one of the things that attracted her to CID. She understood the power and authority of the police uniform, and she appreciated the reassurance it gave to those in need. But if what you really wanted to do as a copper was snag criminals, you couldn’t beat a pair of jeans and a scruffy old anorak. That enabled you to get right into their faces before they even knew you were there. But on this occasion, especially as she banked left onto Moorhill Close, she felt more than a little bit self-conscious. The combination of scruffs and motorbike would undoubtedly make her stand out here.

  Moorhill Close was a cul-de-sac, so when she coasted to a halt a couple of houses down from number 16, she wasn’t far from the turning-zone at its far end. She switched her engine off, lowered her kickstand and sat astride the Ducati for several seconds, flexing her left hand. The plaster cast only encased her up to the knuckles, allowing sufficient dexterity in her fingers to manipulate the bike’s clutch, but it hadn’t been easy – there’d been a lot of stiffness there, and while the whole of her lower arm, the hand included, had previously felt numb, the sheer effort of handling the powerful machine, even at relatively low speeds, had created a throbbing ache just below her elbow.

  But there was no point dwelling on this when she had other stuff to attend to.

  She removed her helmet and regarded the house in question.

  It was pretty well identical to all those around it, with a front wall that came to about waist-height, a small front lawn, and slatted fencing separating it from the neighbours on either side. The house wasn’t exactly a new-build, but it wasn’t far off, constructed in the attractive cottage style from off-brown brick, with diamond-paned front windows and a bright yellow front door with a black, wrought iron knocker and hanging plants on either side. Again, Lucy found it difficult to imagine that this could really be the place where a degenerate killer lived. So often those creatures had been dragged up in vileness and hate, and knew no emotion other than the joy they derived from inflicting on others the same misery they themselves had suffered. It was the ever-downward spiral of violence, dirt and degradation. But of course there had been other culprits too, who, as part of their darker purpose, had managed to overcome this, at least superficially; who had affected a front of wholesome normality in order to hunt more effectively.

  So thinking, Lucy dismounted and walked towards the foot of the drive to no. 16, which currently was empty. No car was present on it, nor under the lean-to carport on the left side of the house. However, a red Volkswagen CC was parked on the road at the front.

  This still didn’t mean anything. She already knew that the owner of this property possessed a Volkswagen CC; it was a hardly a smoking gun. She threw another glance up the drive. Despite the presence of the vehicle, all the lights inside the house were switched off, its windows like blank eyes in the evening gloom.

  She looked back towards the cul-de-sac entrance. No one was in sight, either out on the street or standing at an open door. The issue now was whether anything she did from this point on could be construed an illegal search. She certainly couldn’t justify a warrant as yet. It was all too circumstantial. Even to sniff around the exterior of the house might be deemed questionable, and anything she uncovered inadmissible.

  But the CC was on the road – and that was a public place.

  As casually as she could, she circled the car. Nothing noteworthy caught her eye inside it: a dog-eared map-book jammed beside the driver’s seat; a tin of cola in the circular drinks-holder attached to the dash. But then on the back seat – a black beret. A black knitted beret, very similar to the type the chief suspect had been wearing when filmed climbing into Ronnie Ford’s car near the petrol station in Atherton.

  It was several seconds before Lucy realised that the heavy breathing she could hear was her own. She leaned as close as she could to the window, dug out her mobile, activated its light and shone it through the glass.

  There was no question about what she was seeing.

  She backed away, glancing along the cul-de-sac again and then at the house. Its windows remained dark – which was good. It meant she could poke around a little more. She knew that she shouldn’t, of course. Possibly she could justify a warrant now, but the way the brass would respond if they learned that she was still on the case, she needed to be one hundred per cent sure of her facts.

  She walked up the drive, the silent façade of the property looming towards her. From what she could see, there was plenty of access to its rear. On the right side, a narrow passage, only barred by a wooden gate with a latch, led round to the back, while the carport on the left was wide open at the front, empty inside, and then opened again at the other end via a normal-sized doorway. She opted for the carport.

  Once under its slanted roof, she halted, activating her phone light again to scan the darkened interior, though there wasn’t much to see: a floor of oily concrete, a few scruffy boxes in the corners. The left-hand wall was lined with shelves bearing cobweb-covered tools, bottles of weed-killer and such, while overhead the ceiling was underhung by a few rotted rafters laden with planks, fence-posts and the like. It was all very mundane.

  She prowled on, passing through the open door at the back and into the rear garden, where, as before, nothing untoward met her eyes.

  It was encircled by clipped hedges, and consisted of a patio, a lawn, a rockery and a flowerbed, all of it littered with autumn leaves. A few non-seasonal bits and pieces were also scattered around: a hosepipe on a reel, a couple of sun-loungers. Four colour-coded wheelie bins were lined neatly under the kitchen window.

  Lucy ventured past these to the larger French window. When she shone her light through it, it revealed a tidy little lounge containing armchairs, a settee, a flat-screen TV and ornaments on the mantel. Absolutely nothing in any way mysterious. When she glanced up, she saw two bedroom windows, a satellite dish and a burglar alarm box.

  Standard suburbia. It could no
t have been less suspicious.

  But the trail of clues that had led her here was not fanciful, with the beret in the car the strongest evidence yet – though even that was to change half a second later, when Lucy spotted something else.

  Beyond the French window, drawn up against the wall of the house, was a garden table made from wrought iron and with a glass top; the sort of thing you ate your barbecues off on summer bank holiday afternoons. But it was not the table as much as what was underneath it: a pair of black wellingtons. And it was not the wellingtons as much as what they were coated with. Lucy approached and squatted down. Again, she shone her light close-up.

  Lumps of dry, reddish grit were clustered all over the boots’ lower parts.

  She knew exactly what this was.

  Clay.

  She also knew where it came from, because she’d had to scour the same gummy material from that non-too-cheap pair of stiletto court shoes she’d bought for her undercover op.

  Dedman Delph.

  ‘Well, girl,’ she muttered, vaguely dazed. ‘You wanted a smoking gun …’

  But there was a problem here. As she remained crouched, she was increasingly convinced that she was missing something. Something obvious perhaps.

  So obvious that abruptly, without any real prompting, it struck her.

  These wellingtons were rather large; she estimated size eleven at least. And yet the high-heeled footprint they’d found close to Ronnie Ford’s corpse had been no more than a size seven. Lucy rose slowly to her feet, flesh tingling.

  She thought about the CC parked on the road in front of the house, rather than on the drive – that was the sort of thing you did when you had another car. She glanced over her shoulder onto the lawn – there were two sun-loungers.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she breathed.

  The ‘tag-team from Hell’ theory held good after all.

  Suddenly it didn’t feel like a cool idea to be hanging around here.

  She walked quickly back across the garden, all the way telling herself that this should be no surprise. That big lorry driver, Larry Pupper, had been dragged a hundred yards; much easier with two of you than with one. While so many of the other killings had been ambush attacks, the victims lured to secluded spots where, no doubt, the second murderer was lying in wait. She entered the carport through its rear entrance, fiddling with her phone. Nehwal was the obvious person to call, or, failing her, anyone at the MIR.

  But halfway through the interior, she slid to a halt.

  Through the carport’s open front, she saw that a vehicle, a silver Mondeo, had pulled onto the drive. It could only have arrived in the last minute or so, but already it was parked. Its headlights were switched off and there was nobody inside.

  The blood thumped in Lucy’s ears as she stared bewilderedly out at it. She hadn’t heard anything: no voices, no thudding of car doors. And no lights had come on inside the house. As her eyes roved across the Mondeo, she noted what looked like several bulging shopping bags sitting on the drive on its nearside. So they’d come home all innocent-like; another average day. And then they’d spotted her Ducati …

  Lucy stayed exactly where she was, raising the phone to key in the number – at which point, in a black blur, something swept down from the darkness on her right, something heavy, made both from wood and steel. It smacked the mobile phone from her grasp, and sent it skittering across the floor of the carport. Lucy’s fingers were only struck a glancing blow, but even so the pain of that was blinding.

  Yelping in agony, she tottered backwards.

  Her assailant stepped into view in front of her, blocking all access to the drive. At first the figure was silhouetted. No details were distinguishable, except that whoever this was, they were tall and athletically built, and wearing what looked like a hooded running top and jeans. A split-second later, they adjusted their position and Lucy saw two additional things: street-light glinting on blonde locks hanging out from under a woolly hat, and the weapon with which she’d been attacked, which was a garden fork.

  She held her ground, breathing hard.

  ‘I should warn you that I’m a police officer,’ she said, ‘and that you will only make this situation a lot worse for yourself by resisting arrest.’

  The blonde woman said nothing, merely lowered the fork the way a soldier would a bayonet, and advanced.

  Lucy turned to run, thinking that if she could get back into the rear garden, she could circle the house via the passage on its other side. But this escape route was also blocked, a second figure, a male, now standing in the rear doorway. In the dim moonlight, she glimpsed an anorak, dark hair, a pencil-thin moustache. He didn’t appear to be armed and wasn’t much taller than the woman, but he was of broader, stockier build, and the chances were he’d be the stronger of the two.

  She twirled back to face her former opponent.

  The prongs of the fork were perhaps two feet away when Lucy jumped upwards, reaching with her right hand for one of those decayed wooden rafters and yanking down on it, using all her weight. With a shuddering CRACK, the rafter collapsed and a mass of planks and fence slats followed, cascading down between them in a cacophonous, splintering deluge, partially covering the woman. Crying out, she raised her arms to protect herself, dropping to her knees in the process, almost losing her grip on the garden fork. But before Lucy could take advantage and scramble forward, the man had jumped onto her from behind.

  He was as strong as she’d suspected, his arms like iron bands as they wrapped around her.

  ‘Meddling bitch!’ he hissed into her ear. ‘You just made the biggest fucking mistake of your …’

  Lucy lashed up and back with her plaster-encased left arm. It clunked on his temple with what had to be the force of a hammer-blow.

  He grunted in shock, his bear hug grip slackening.

  The jolt of pain lanced not just the full length of Lucy’s arm, but through her shoulder and deep into her torso. But this was life or death. She struck again with her cast, hitting him a second time in exactly the same place.

  This time the grip was broken, and he staggered sideways.

  Lucy lunged forward, kicking through the wreckage. The woman was halfway back to her feet, coughing, wafting at dust. Lucy dodged around her, only for her own feet to catch in the clutter, which sent her sprawling – though this turned out to be a good thing as she landed alongside her phone. Snatching it and jumping back up, she sensed the woman coming at her from the left. More by instinct than design, she ducked – just managing to evade a massive, two-handed blow from the garden fork.

  This set the woman off-balance, and allowed Lucy to scamper out onto the drive. As she did, she speed-dialled the Comms Suite at Robber’s Row. The call was answered by PC Adam Martindale, normally one of the operators when her own shift was on duty.

  ‘Adam, it’s Lucy Clayburn!’ she jabbered as she stumbled away. ‘Urgent need of assistance. PC under attack outside 16 Moorhill Close in Lostock, on the Kilo Division. Two suspects, one male, one female, both connected to the Jill the Ripper enq …’

  Before she could say more, a hefty weight struck her in the middle of the back, clobbering her spine and kidneys. She staggered forward, gagging, dropping the phone and falling to her knees beside the Mondeo’s front nearside corner. The garden fork landed next to her with a clatter. Winded and sickened, but at least conscious, she clambered over the shopping bags and crawled on, following the car’s nearside. From behind came a gabble of semi-hysteria.

  ‘Get up, you useless shit!’ the woman shrieked. ‘Do the fucking bitch!’

  ‘You stupid cow!’ the man replied. ‘She’s made a call. I fucking heard her!’

  ‘Shit … we can still do her!’

  ‘Just fucking move it!’

  Two pairs of feet came hammering down the drive. Lucy curled into a ball next to the wheel-arch, in an effort to protect her head – but the twosome bypassed her, circling around the Mondeo’s offside. A split-second later, she heard car doors slam o
pen and closed, and then an engine rumble to life. She climbed shakily to her feet as the red Volkswagen CC spun through a manic three-point turn and sped away along the cul-de-sac.

  Exhausted and wracked with pain, Lucy searched around for her mobile, finally locating it by the foot of the nearby fence. It was dented and scuffed, its screen cracked, but still functioning even if the earlier call had been cut. As she stood up with it, an elderly man in shirtsleeves appeared at the front door of the house beyond the fence. Evidently having heard the commotion, he looked both curious and alarmed.

  ‘Police officer, sir,’ Lucy called to him. ‘Go inside please. Lock your door.’

  She hit re-dial as she limped down the drive.

  ‘Adam, it’s Lucy,’ she said, climbing astride her bike.

  ‘Lucy!’ He sounded relieved. ‘Local units are en route, but what’s going on?’

  ‘I was sitting on a couple of suspects in the Jill the Ripper case, and I repeat a couple, as in two of them, not one. The female is Darla Maycroft, IC1, blonde … of the address I gave you before. She’s already known to us. The male, who’s also IC1, is unknown to me, but probably her live-in boyfriend. As well as divisional support, I need you to message Operation Clearway. Tell them exactly what I’ve just told you. Advise them we need a search-warrant and CSIs.’

  ‘Lucy, aren’t you supposed to be off sick?’

  ‘Adam, listen … both suspects are now mobile, driving a red Volkswagen CC, index Bravo-Foxtrot-six something or other. Any Bolton patrols to stop on sight and detain. Listen, mate … I’ve no radio and have a fractured left wrist. In other words, I’m not going to be able to give you a running commentary. In pursuit, nevertheless. Over and out.’

  Chapter 34

  If it had been testing enough at an easy pace using one hand to steer her powerful 900cc sports bike across Crowley and Bolton, Lucy knew that pursuing a pair of suspects at high speed would be much more of a challenge, especially as that one good hand was still smarting from where she’d been hit across the fingers.