Risk of Harm

by Lucie Whitehouse

  When they’d moved in, she’d given Lennie a budget and free rein to design the room how she wanted. A major project ensued, involving hours on Etsy (the denim rag-rug and two framed posters with bold blue and white prints, one each of the London and Birmingham skylines) and eBay (a brushed-steel Anglepoise lamp that to Robin looked like something from a 1950s dentist’s office). Miniature potted succulents from Tesco lined the top of the packed bookshelf at the foot of the bed.

  It looked good but the room made Robin sad. Having an EQ in the minus numbers, it had taken her a while to understand why. Bar the wicker chair in the far corner occupied by the core contingent of Len’s old stuffed animals, Zed and Fred the Teds and Wala, a super-plush koala her parents had given her, there was nothing childish about it. If she’d had the opportunity at the same age, she would have designed something similar (though not half as good) and she recognized it for what it was: all aspiration and self-definition, a vision of the future. In three years’ time, Len would be off to university, out of here. Robin quailed to imagine loading the rag-rug and Anglepoise into the car and unpacking them in some room a hundred miles down the motorway, driving off.

  A ping as another text arrived and then, five seconds later, another. Len slipped out of bed and patted the jacket until she found the phone. ‘Kev,’ she said, looking at the screen. ‘All three of them.’ She frowned.

  Shit, what had he put? ‘Hey, private!’ she said. ‘Hand it over.’

  She grabbed it and skim-read the messages.

  Hiya, thanks for the thanks. No problem – any time.

  How’s your bro – any word?

  Did you tell your Ma?

  Lennie didn’t get back in but perched on the edge, feet still on the rug. ‘Why’s he asking about Uncle Luke?’ she demanded. ‘Tell Gran what?’

  Christ on a bike. She told the story yet again, this time modifying it to exclude any hint Luke might actually have wanted to fall. ‘Kev came with me because I asked him to,’ she said, making a display of locking the phone as an excuse to avoid eye contact. ‘Partly so he could drive Uncle Luke’s car back, partly for some moral support, if I’m honest.’

  Lennie hesitated. ‘Are you seeing him, Mum?’

  ‘What, Kev?’ No lies to Lennie …

  ‘Why not? You could. He’s a nice guy and the two of you have been seeing more and more of each other lately.’ She shot her an Olympic-standard bit of side-eye.

  ‘Well, I’ve got no other mates here, have I?’

  For a moment, the memory of Corinna hung between them.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Lennie said. ‘And even if you haven’t, he has.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Technically, sunrise had been 4.43 but a little after five o’clock, the sky over Sparkbrook was still a deep royal blue, and Amit Kapoor’s shop door cast a long yellow rectangle across the pavement. The street was quiet but at the far end they could see a short length of Stratford Road, where the traffic headed into the city centre was already starting to thicken.

  They were tucked in at the kerb about twenty yards back. Kapoor had opened the shop at five on the dot, and they’d watched him load the day’s papers into the display cases outside with a degree of self-consciousness probably last witnessed at a school disco. Their fault for telling him to act naturally.

  The dashboard clock read 5.05. Beside her, Varan shifted and she guessed he was thinking the same: their guy hadn’t come yesterday. Or, at least, he hadn’t come into the shop: they’d checked the CCTV. But the tape had shown him on Monday, just as Kapoor had described. At two minutes past five, he’d appeared on camera wearing the same baseball cap and dark anorak which, with the closer-range picture, they’d now identified as Adidas. He’d gone to the fridge at the back, where he’d chosen a chocolate milk and a yogurt that he’d brought straight to the counter. A few words with Kapoor, twenty-two seconds in total, and he was gone.

  ‘I hope we’re right about the day off,’ Varan murmured.

  Because unless there was something really wacky going on, they’d discussed at the briefing last night, the van had to be his work, surely, more than likely part of the shadowy off-the-books economy that provided so much of Maggie’s surveillance work. Casual day labour on building sites, house-painting, farm work – cash-in-hand, no paperwork, no questions asked. Perfect for someone who wanted to fly beneath the radar for whatever reason.

  Movement at the top of the street. They both tensed but it was a young woman in a salwar kameez. She let herself out of a door that opened directly on to the street, locked it behind her, then hitched her handbag on to her shoulder and started walking towards Stratford Road. A car passed on their right, a young couple in the front. Clunk, clunk went the manhole cover.

  5.08.

  ‘If it is the same guy for both,’ said Varan under his breath, ‘what’s he getting out of it? If it’s not sexual?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure yet that it wasn’t with Lara,’ Robin muttered back. Olly had scheduled the post mortem for nine o’clock. ‘And even if he didn’t actually touch them, doesn’t mean it wasn’t sexually motivated.’

  She and Malia had discussed it in her office last night, shortly before Samir’s got-a-minute email. ‘Maybe the violence is his thing,’ she’d said. ‘The blood excites him? Or maybe he takes their personal belongings as mementoes.’ Those were the people who really gave her the creeps, the ones who got their kicks by toying with apparently innocuous items in plain sight, glorying in their secret knowledge. ‘Or maybe when we get him, we’ll find hundreds of photographs.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s supposed to be sexual,’ Malia had said, ‘that’s the plan, but he panics for whatever reason and kills them. Maybe that’s why two so close together.’

  ‘Tried and failed so tried again.’ Which didn’t bode well, given the same result the second time around.

  ‘But if it isn’t sexual, then what?’ Malia had asked. ‘Revenge? They both crossed him somehow – dumped him, humiliated him? He killed them to punish them? Make himself feel powerful?’

  It was all still on the table – a hundred questions, zero answers.

  At 5.10 both pavements remained empty. Now she was seriously beginning to doubt he was coming. If Malia was right and the Gisborne Girl and Lara had been particular targets, maybe his work here was done and he’d got the hell out of Dodge.

  The light on the pavement outside the shop flickered, changed shape. They stiffened again then saw Kapoor looking out. He soon disappeared; Robin imagined the guys inside hissing at him to get back. Well, if their man was a no-show, at least he’d have a story to tell about the day he was part of a police stake-out. Otherwise, it would have been a complete waste of public money. There were eight officers in total, all of them armed – another four were stationed at points down the street, two inside an unmarked van parked further up on the other side. Basically, it was the whole shebang – Kilmartin would throw a fit.

  The sun was visible now, throwing its light over their side of the street and evaporating the shadows they’d been relying on to make them less conspicuous. The LED screen of the dashboard clock had switched from luminous green to dull daytime grey.

  5.12. 5.13.

  And then, in the rear-view mirror, a white Ford Transit van appeared. It was in decent nick, not brand-new but not ancient, either, exactly as Kapoor had described. It swept past them, sounding the manhole cover again, and barrelled on towards Stratford Road. For a second, she thought it wasn’t stopping but then, yards before the end of the street, it swooped in at the kerb and hovered, brake-lights on.

  Robin scanned the pavement: still empty. No one else got in the van here, Kapoor said, so either he was mistaken about that or – rightly or wrongly – the van was waiting for their guy.

  5.14.

  Abruptly, at a level invisible to anyone outside the car, Varan’s hand shot across the console to bat her arm. ‘Sorry, guv,’ he whispered.

  A man had turned in at the end of the street
– baseball cap, navy anorak. Running. Yes, he was heading for the Ford. The walkie-talkie crackled and almost instantaneously, two of their guys came piling out of the mouth of an alley further up. Another two sprang from the back of the unmarked van.

  Their guy reached the Ford, his hand was raised to open the door, but at the sound of their feet, he spun around. Even with the windows closed, they heard his shout of alarm. He spun back again, frantically pulling at the handle which opened just as the officers got to him, causing him to stumble backwards, balance lost. Another shout then they had him on the ground and he disappeared from view.

  Varan nodded. ‘Gotcha.’

  He was in his early thirties, Robin guessed, but his hair was already receding sharply, making his square forehead look very high. The lower half of his face was a similar shape and as a result, his head as a whole had an oddly rectangular appearance. The squareness round the jaw wasn’t bone structure but the result of a heaviness in his lower cheeks, like a bulldog. His eyes were bulldog-like, too, pouchy, with two or three rings apiece that looked grey against his skin. Despite the morning chill, his face shone with sweat and his eyes darted this way and that as if he were actually still hoping to escape. She’d seen a few edgy people in her time but he was top ten.

  They’d need an approved translator for the interview, that was the law, but Varan spoke Hindi so he’d done the arrest and read the man his rights. As he’d heard what he was being arrested for – or what Robin thought was that bit – a look of horrified incredulity had passed across his face but, asked if he understood, he’d given a single nod. Beyond that, he wouldn’t say a word, even his name.

  ‘Do you know?’ Robin turned to the tall man in jumper and jeans who’d sprung from the Ford’s driver’s seat. He was white, early twenties, with blond-brown hair and a blithe, boyish face. Given the situation, he was remarkably relaxed. He’d told her his own name, Tom Peterson, without hesitation, and when she’d asked him a minute ago to stop texting, he’d affably dropped his phone into his pocket – ‘Right you are’ – then waited with no sign of unease at all.

  The same could not be said for the two rows of Indian or Pakistani men visible through the open doors of the van. Packed on to wooden benches fitted either side, they looked out of the gloom with wide eyes or else down at the plastic bags and knapsacks held between their feet on the muddy cardboard that covered the floor.

  ‘He’s called Dhanesh,’ Tom Peterson told her, and the Indian man flinched. ‘That’s what they call him, anyway. Not sure of his surname, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Does he work for you?’

  ‘For me?’ Peterson looked flattered but shook his head. ‘No. They’re working out at Lissom’s Farm, near Evesham. Picking – early strawberries at the moment but up until a couple of weeks ago it was asparagus. Wait, you thought I was some sort of gang-master, didn’t you?’

  Robin felt an urge to slap the grin off his face. ‘Does that strike you as a ridiculous idea, in the circumstances? Or funny in some way?’ She indicated the van full of frightened men.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just the idea. A gang-master! I’m more like a bus driver.’ A cloud passed over his face as if a thought were only now occurring to him. ‘I probably need some sort of special licence for that, don’t I?’

  ‘Probably,’ she agreed.

  ‘It’s a summer gig, that’s all, during the holidays – we’re at the agricultural college, we haven’t quite finished for the year but pretty much, so … Andrew Lissom’s my best mate’s dad and we’re both doing it, me and George – he does the south-west lot, I do south-east. We take the vans and come into Brum to pick these guys up in the morning and then we drop them off at night again. There’s a massive labour shortage for this kind of work – all the Brexit stuff, you know? You can’t get the workers.’

  ‘Do you pick, Mr Peterson?’ She couldn’t resist.

  ‘No way.’ He shook his head again, apparently oblivious. ‘Back-breaking. That’s why we do the vans, George and me. I mean, yeah, it’s an early start, but then basically you’re off all day until six when you bring them back. This way, we’ll earn a bit of money and get to mess around for most of the summer. And we can still be back for the pub at eight.’

  ‘What time do they start?’

  ‘In the fields? Six. Dhanesh here’s my last pick-up, then we’re off.’

  ‘Six till six – so they’re picking for twelve hours a day,’ Varan said.

  ‘I know, yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Like I said, back-breaking.’

  They watched Dhanesh get safely into a car bound for Harborne then went to thank Kapoor for his help. Robin picked up copies of the Sun and the Herald from the piles at the foot of the magazine wall and carried them over to him, feeling in her jacket pocket for her fold of notes. He was buzzing with the excitement, a ball of energy bouncing squash-style round the narrow space behind the counter, waiting for them to go so that he could get on the phone. His wife would be ready to strangle him by the thirtieth time she heard the story.

  A basket of soggy-looking plastic-wrapped muffins sat next to the till; Robin picked one up – blueberry, possibly; hard to say – and added it to her pile.

  ‘Do you think it’ll be in the papers, all this?’ Kapoor asked, gesturing out the window.

  ‘I hope not.’ She gave him a warning look. ‘At the moment we only need to speak to him. Under no circumstances talk to any journalists, okay? Not a word.’

  ‘But it’s in there today,’ he said, tapping the cover of the Herald. ‘About the girls, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, hence my buying it. Not my usual reading matter.’

  ‘Do you think that’s really him – the guy who killed them? I mean, if it is, I helped catch a serial killer, didn’t I?’

  There were no prizes for guessing how he’d reached that conclusion. In the Sun, the story took up two thirds of page five, much of the space occupied by the blaring headline:

  MIDLANDS MURDER CAPITAL:

  THREE SLAIN IN FOUR DAYS

  ‘Slain?’ said Varan. ‘With what? Samurai swords?’

  ‘Cutlasses, I expect.’ She skimmed the text. Kieran Clarke was in there – they needed him for their headline, after all – but strangely (ha) they hadn’t printed his photograph. Instead, they’d used the e-fit of the Gisborne Girl and the most winsome natural-haired photo on Lara Meikle’s Facebook page.

  The factual but unexciting news that they’d arrested Kieran’s classmate was paid lip service but the focus of the piece, of course, was the young white women, their killer (or killers, it grudgingly allowed) at large.

  Both girls were killed in the small hours of the morning by repeated and brutal stab wounds to the chest and neck. ‘There was blood everywhere,’ said Manda Pryce, 47, whose dog, Leon, found Lara Meikle’s body in a litter-strewn alleyway opposite her block. ‘It was like something out of a horror movie. It’s terrible what’s happening round here – we’re all terrified to go out at night.’

  If the looks of the current victims were anything to go by, Robin couldn’t help thinking, she doubted Manda had much to worry about.

  ‘The police are too busy for us,’ said Graham Lineham, who lives in the same block. ‘It’s one thing when it’s burglaries but murder … That poor girl in the factory and now another one right across the road two days later. If there’s a killer out there, our womenfolk have to be protected. If they won’t do it, we’ll have to do it ourselves.’

  Womenfolk? What was this, 1640? Her eye snagged on her own name in the paragraph below.

  At time of going to press, West Midlands are yet to arrest a SINGLE SUSPECT in connection with EITHER case. Detective Chief Inspector Robin Lyons of Force Homicide, leading both, refused to say whether her team even HAD a suspect in their sights, commenting only that enquiries were ‘urgent and ongoing’.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was still only half past six when they reached Harborne but Samir’s black VW saloon was already there, provo
king an echo of last night’s annoyance. Why did he think he could get all up in her personal business like that? Her love life – okay, sex life – had had nothing to do with him for eighteen years.

  And that was his fault. It was all well and good blaming Luke – and yes, of course Luke was to blame – but it might have been nice if he’d had thought to ask her whether their relationship would mean her losing her family before he sacked her off as if she’d caught leprosy in one of the grimier youth hostels they’d stayed in (likely not impossible, given the state of some of the bathrooms).

  ‘Everything all right, guv?’ Varan asked as they crossed the car park.

  ‘What? Yes, just thinking.’ She took a deep breath and tried to put it out of her mind. No time for that today – she’d have to find a way to say sorry for stomping off while also reinforcing the point that it was none of his bloody business, and then they could sweep the whole thing back under the carpet.

  When they came through the door to the incident room, however, he was standing in front of the boards, coffee in hand. ‘Morning,’ he said.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ said Varan.

  ‘You’re in early,’ Robin said. In his shoes, she’d probably have made some sarky comment about whether she’d heard there was a serial killer on the loose but of course, she thought, even if he wasn’t the boss and there weren’t other people around, he was better than that. He was irritatingly mature at times.

  ‘I guessed you’d come straight over from Sparkbrook,’ he said. ‘He’s here?’

  ‘Downstairs now.’

  ‘Good. Robin, can we …?’ He indicated her office.

  He let her go first then followed. All of a sudden she got the fear – he was the boss. Yes, they were friends now, in their strange way, but the fact remained, she reported to him in an extremely hierarchical organization, one of whose overlords had the knives out for her. What if he was really pissed off about the Warwickshire cop and he’d decided overnight that it wasn’t worth the risk of having her on this?