by Lisa Cutts
He sat in his car, engine idling, and wondered, not for the first time, if the back of an out-of-town industrial estate was really the best place for him to meet anyone, let alone two people he despised.
A couple of minutes went by until he saw car headlights bouncing their way along the rutted, potholed tarmac of the track that led from the main road to the rear of the wholesaler’s.
He fought the urge to drive away but knew that the enquiry was a necessary evil. He would do almost anything to detect a murder.
This crossed a line.
The car pulled up next to him. As he looked across to his right, he was aware of a movement to his left. A dark figure appeared at the passenger window and tugged at the door handle. Harry had had the foresight to lock the doors. He also had his personal protective equipment, complete with PAVA spray and ASP, under his seat. He glanced across at the face at the window, hesitating for only a second before reaching for the button to let the glass drop a few centimetres so he could be heard by the crouching individual, desperate to be let inside his car.
‘Didn’t have you down for the nervous type, Harry,’ said the man, mouth now to the gap between the pane and door frame.
‘You’re such a slippery bastard, Greg, I wasn’t sure if I was about to be mugged.’
‘Are you going to let me in?’
Harry jerked his thumb in the direction of the VW Golf. ‘What about her? I assume it’s your trusty sidekick Martha Lipton.’
‘She’ll join us in a second. That’s if you ever open the door.’
Against his better judgement, Harry unlocked the doors and watched Greg Webster as he nodded towards the car and gave a thumbs-up to the driver.
He waited for him to get inside, and tried not to think of his acceptance of Webster’s company, or the idea of Martha Lipton climbing onto the back seat. He was grateful he’d brought a police car and not his own. It would be bad enough being in the same space as the two of them, never mind having to drive his family around on the same upholstery.
‘Well then,’ said Greg. ‘It’s been a while.’
Harry nodded slowly, reminding himself that he might need the help of these two and he was the one who’d initiated the contact.
He watched the woman as she got out of the car, the interior light briefly showing off her curves. Her tight leggings and sky-blue jumper were snug against her slim body. The fact that Martha was one of the most attractive women he had ever set eyes on made the situation all the more miserable. Harry gave an involuntary shudder of shame.
‘You getting a chill there, old man?’ laughed Greg.
‘It’s the cold air you two bring with you.’ He kept his eyes facing in front as he heard the sound of the car door behind him opening and its soft click shut.
He felt a hand touch him on the left shoulder, out of the corner of his eye glimpsed long painted fingernails and the sparkle of a diamond ring.
‘Good to see you, Harry,’ said Martha.
The fingers squeezed his shoulder. He kept his breathing calm, fought the urge to get out of the car and walk away from what he was about to do.
‘Martha.’ He nodded, confident of his attempt at measured congeniality.
She removed her hand and snuggled back against the seat. ‘Before Greg got your call, I said to him I knew it wouldn’t be long before our old friend, Detective Inspector Powell, was on the blower, wanting a favour and to know everything we know about Albert Woodville.’
Harry’s hand went up to the rearview mirror. He adjusted it so he could watch her face, unlined, beautiful, cold. ‘I didn’t say anything about Albert Woodville. I just said I wanted to meet up.’
She laughed and looked out of the window into the gloom. ‘Except it was on the news that a man was murdered, the TV showed the block of flats where it happened, and we know that Woodville was a paedophile, on the register, visited regularly by your lot.’
‘You’d know all about that,’ said Harry.
She shot forward in her seat, an action so quick her breath was on the side of his face before he could react.
‘Don’t fucking come it, Harry. You want our help or not?’
It was Greg’s turn to speak up. ‘It was you who contacted us. I never thought I’d see the day that you sought out the Volunteer Army.’
Harry closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘The Volunteer Army. That’s what you’re calling yourselves, is it? Aren’t you worried that people will confuse you with the Salvation Army and wonder where the brass band is at Christmas?’
‘Your piss-taking is all very well,’ said Martha, ‘but we’ve got better places to be on a Friday night than sitting here in a police car at the back of Wholesale King, being asked to grass up a murderer.’
The sound of the door opening behind him forced Harry to turn round and face Martha straight on. She was not only the brightest of the pair by far, but for reasons that he had never fully grasped, she was the one in charge. She might have been the one who had driven them to the meeting point, but it had been Greg who had been sent out into the cold November night to sneak around the industrial estate on foot, creeping through the shadows to appear at Harry’s window as her car pulled up, checking out the enemy in the dead of night.
One day, he would find out exactly what hold she had over Greg. The important thing for now was that Harry had something on Martha, and it was probably the only reason they were all huddled inside the ageing Skoda with over one hundred thousand miles on the clock.
‘Close the door, Martha,’ Harry said. ‘This is important. If someone’s going around killing paedophiles, it impacts on you too.’
They stared at each other for several seconds, Harry safe in the knowledge that she wouldn’t get out of the car and drive off into the night, all the while willing her to tell him what she knew.
‘OK,’ she said.
He let out a breath.
‘Despite your mickey taking,’ she said as he held up his hands, ‘we’re trying to make people feel as safe as they can about living with sex offenders around them, and we want to work with the police.’
Martha gripped the back of the headrest of Harry’s seat. ‘We have meetings, open meetings, so anyone can see what it is we’re doing. We have a website and a newsletter, but most of all, when we find someone online grooming children, we turn them in to the police. We’re not taking the law into our own hands, you know that. We’re trying to do our bit to help.’
He mulled this over for a moment before he said, ‘You, Martha, I get why, in a twisted way, why you do it. What I don’t understand is your involvement, Greg.’
Harry turned to Greg as he spoke, catching him unawares. The look of complete adoration on his acne-marked face as he gazed at his fellow vigilante gave Harry some sort of insight into how Martha Lipton had the ability to lead grown men astray.
‘Because it’s the right thing to do,’ said Greg, not taking his eyes off her.
‘Greg,’ she said, ‘why don’t you wait in our car for me?’
He opened his mouth to say something. Martha made a pre-emptive strike by thrusting the car keys at him.
He took them, glared at them for a moment and then threw a similar look in Harry’s direction before he got out of the police car and into the driver’s seat of the VW Golf.
‘Nice lad,’ said Harry when Greg was out of earshot. ‘You’ve got him well trained.’
‘You too,’ she replied. ‘Thought you might tell him then for a moment.’
‘What would be the fun in that? It wouldn’t give me any leverage, would it?’
‘No,’ she said, head on one side, ‘although it would move us off your area. I wouldn’t be able to stay in the gorgeous seaside town of East Rise if Greg knew the truth. I think that you like having me around.’
‘I’m talking to you now simply because you may be able to help me, as much as it grieves me to say it. You have the ear of the part of the community I can’t always get to, and as things currently stand, they trust yo
u.’
She chewed her bottom lip.
‘I’ll pass back to you what I find out,’ she said, ‘on the condition that no one knows about my past.’
Harry sensed this was the end of the conversation for the time being, confirmed by Martha’s hand pushing open the door. A cold gust of air invaded the car. Up until this point, Harry hadn’t noticed the raindrops hitting the window.
‘Do I have your guarantee on that?’ she said, one foot on the tarmac, the other still inside the Skoda.
‘Of course you do. And you’re right: as things currently stand, your band of merry men trust you. They find out the truth, we all lose.’
Chapter 15
‘Oh great,’ said DC Tom Delayhoyde. ‘To finish our very long night at work off nicely, it’s teeming down.’
Sophia, sitting beside him in the driver’s seat of the unmarked Skoda, zipped up her jacket and peered through the windscreen.
‘My favourite,’ she said, ‘house-to-house enquiries in the rain, and only a stone’s throw away from the home of a murdered paedophile.’
She switched the engine off and scrambled behind her for her handbag and worn leather file.
No sooner had she turned off the wipers than the inside glass began to mist as the rain pelted down on the car.
‘Someone’s already calling at the flats in Pleasure Lane,’ said Tom. ‘That’s typical of my luck to get the houses with the big driveways along from the bloody crime scene.’
‘Stop moaning,’ she said as she leafed through her paperwork to pluck a handful of forms and place them on top of all the others within the file.
‘I’ve got the house-to-house forms and the questionnaires ready so you don’t have to worry that your hair’ll get wet and make all that gel run down from your boyband foppish hair to your pretty choirboy face and get in your eyes.’
‘And you won’t have to worry that the rain will wash out the dye in yours and show all of your grey.’
She turned sideways to face him as fully as the seats would allow.
‘Tom, can I ask you something?’
‘Yeah, Soph. At your age, I think you’re a natural brunette. Honest.’
‘No, not that. It’s about Gabrielle.’
‘Go on.’
She listened for a few seconds to the sound of the rain as it drummed on the car roof. Eventually she said, ‘Do you get the impression that she’s a bit odd?’
Tom rubbed his chin and thought about the question before he said, ‘Ye-es. But I think it’s only that – she’s a bit odd and possibly aloof. Maybe she’s got personal problems at the moment, stuff that’s nothing to do with work. What exactly is your concern about her?’
‘It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on. I watched her tonight when she was looking at the CSI photos of the scene and Albie Woodville’s body. She reminded me of what was in that sick sod’s spare room too. Not that I needed telling again.’
Her colleague shifted in his seat, let out a slow breath and said, ‘I get little joy myself from working all hours to find the murderers of a man who spent most of his adult life sexually abusing children, especially one who thought it was perfectly acceptable to fill a room with dolls and mannequins of children, dress them in hospital gowns and have his own children’s ward for kids with sexually transmitted diseases. He was a sick bastard, but Soph, murder is murder.’
She sat and thought about Tom’s words for a moment.
She hated to criticize a colleague, even in the confines of a tatty police Skoda on a rainy Friday night with only Tom for company. Frequently tempers were raised on enquiries and within the team. They’d sound off at each other, or behind each others’ backs, say their piece and move on. Each others’ integrity was never an issue, which meant that Sophia recognized when she was speaking out of turn.
‘Well,’ she continued, ‘I know you won’t tell anyone what I’m about to say, but the reason I’m reluctant to get this off my chest is because it involves her suitability to be on this enquiry.’
‘OK,’ said Tom after a minute, and waited for Sophia to say more.
‘You don’t think that she’d deliberately do anything to mess up the investigation, do you? Such as not feeding information back that could point towards a suspect? No one likes a sex offender, probably not even other sex offenders, but we can’t live in a society that thinks it’s OK to kill them off without so much as a trial.’
‘Albert Woodville was a paedophile but you’re absolutely right. What if whoever killed him thinks they’ve got away with it? Who do they murder next? An innocent person maybe. It means if you’ve any concerns about Gabrielle, you have to do something about it. I get that you don’t want to seem to bitch about her but you’re not saying that she shouldn’t be on the department, are you? All you’re saying is that she shouldn’t be investigating the murder of Albie Woodville.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said after weighing up his words for a second or two. ‘Shall we get out of the car now? We’ve managed to steam up every window and the rain’s easing off a bit.’
‘If you’re worried, at least talk to her.’
Tom twisted back round in his seat. With one hand on the door release, he said, ‘And let’s be honest, it’s all hands to the pump on this one, but there’s always another murder around the corner that Gabrielle can get her teeth into. I worked on three different murders in as many days. I keep track of the jobs I work on. In the last two months, I’ve been on two rapes, an attempted rape, three murders, a kidnap, a blackmail and Greenpeace taking over a power plant. Never a dull moment.’
Chapter 16
Following burgers and chips to line their stomachs, Leon Edwards and Toby Carvell made their way to a pub several streets away, each pausing to get money out from a different cash point along the route.
Toby chose a bank he didn’t have an account with because it had a cash machine within its foyer. The foyer had a camera and he was keen to be on its footage.
‘Dilly,’ he said as he turned from taking his beer tokens from the slot in the wall, ‘the booze is on me tonight.’ He fanned the twenty-pound notes out and waved them at his friend. ‘Give me a minute though; I need to ring the wife. It’ll save the moaning later.’
He took his phone from his jeans pocket and made a point of waving it in his hand at Leon. Toby had his reasons for using his mobile on camera. He wasn’t the brains of the outfit for nothing.
Leon took his cue and waited in the street outside, pacing up and down as they had planned, well within the town centre’s CCTV capture.
He was joined a couple of minutes later by Toby, whose face showed only the signs of someone with no cares in the world, about to enjoy many libations with his best mate.
‘Where are we starting, Tobe?’ said Leon as they strolled along the High Street past its many pound and discount stores, charity shops and fast-food outlets.
‘I thought we’d try the Blue Bar to begin with.’
‘Bit wanky in there, isn’t it?’
‘Wanky but quiet this time of the night. We can sit at the bar and you can stare at that barmaid with the big tits.’
‘She thinks I’m creepy.’
‘You are creepy. You keep staring at her chest. Once she gets to know you, she’ll change her mind and be putty in your hands.’
Toby carried on walking, feeling as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, before he realized that Leon was not beside him. He slowed and looked back over his shoulder to see that his friend had drawn to a stop and was being swallowed up by a hen party wearing little except for pink-fur-trimmed cowboy hats and their underwear on a chilly November evening.
Toby stood rooted to the spot, worried that he had underestimated the toughest, most resilient person he knew. Leon’s expression was a blank, although that was usually the first sign of trouble.
He gave the twenty or so scantily clad women time to walk past as they whooped and shouted before he made his way back to his station
ary friend.
‘Something is definitely wrong,’ Toby said. ‘You didn’t even glance at those girls and most of them weren’t wearing skirts.’
Leon looked down at his feet, or in that direction as his eyes probably only got as far as his burger-sauce-stained belly.
‘That’s the problem, you see,’ he mumbled.
‘What’s the problem? No skirts?’
‘No, no, you don’t get it, do you?’ he said, looking up. ‘You’ve got a wife and two fantastic kids. I don’t have anyone.’
It had been a difficult day and Toby usually had time for his friend’s maudlin attitude towards being single, but tonight should be the night of all nights that they let their hair down and didn’t get depressed about anything.
Toby stopped short of sighing and put a reassuring hand on his friend’s arm.
‘There’ll be someone for you one day, Dill. I promise.’
‘It’s not that,’ Leon said, shaking his head. ‘You’ve got a wife who will probably forgive you for just about anything. How do I ever meet someone who’ll understand and accept everything that’s happened to me?’
‘I don’t know, mate, I’m sorry. I really don’t know but let’s at least go and get a drink and talk inside.’
Toby watched Leon lumber towards the Blue Bar, worried more than ever about his friend and how life would be for him from now on.
Chapter 17
One thing Harry knew only too well was that with every year that passed it was more of a struggle to recover from a missed night’s sleep. Even though he enjoyed what he did, arriving at a crime scene, a dead body, sometimes more than one, trying to fit the pieces together and work out who thought they had the God-given right to take another’s life, it took its toll. If he was honest, the groundwork was all done by the detective constables and civilian investigators anyway. Now that he’d been promoted, he managed and oversaw the investigation. He was more than capable of nicking someone, but beyond that he only had a basic idea of how to put the paperwork together and get the investigation towards the court system. He always left that bit to the DCs. Most of the time, it was for the best.