Bad to the Bone

by Tony J. Forder

  ‘Didn’t you have a pimp?’

  ‘Yeah, but in name only. He took his cut, but did fuck all for us.’

  ‘I’ll need that name.’

  ‘Don’t bother, he’s long dead. Got glassed one night in a club fight and bled out on the floor before the ambulance got to him. Can’t say any of us were disappointed on hearing that news. It was then that we all went our separate ways.’

  Bliss thought it through. There were really only a couple more avenues to explore. ‘Did Jodie have a boyfriend?’ he asked.

  ‘No. She was disgusted by herself and what she did. She once told me no one would ever love her. I tried convincing her she was wrong, that if she got herself cleaned up… But those bastard drugs had her completely fucked up.’

  ‘How about regular punters, Connie? Did Jodie ever speak about, or can you think of anyone, who might have wanted to harm her?’

  He caught a familiar eye movement. Evasive. Bliss leaned forward, forcing her to meet his gaze. ‘Connie, did you know she was pregnant?’

  ‘Jodie?’ She shook her head. As she moved, her breasts jiggled beneath her gown. ‘I had no idea. How far gone was she?’

  ‘We’re not certain. Enough to show, I would’ve thought.’

  ‘I didn’t notice. Honestly, Inspector. She might have bound herself up. Some girls did that when they were in the early stages. Didn’t want to put the punters off, you know?’

  Nodding, Bliss said, ‘Thing is, if she had unprotected sex with a regular punter, and maybe then told the punter about the baby…’ He let her fill in the blanks for herself.

  Connie sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘There were a lot of regulars. Jodie had a fabulous body, even with her habit. Plus she didn’t mind letting them do it without a condom. A lot of blokes got off on that, with AIDS still being seen mostly as the “gay plague” in them days. But there was a man, someone she mentioned more than most. See, he gave her a false name, of course, but she saw his photo one day in a free magazine that came with the ET. Turned out he was a top bloke at Jenkins Engineering.’

  The engineering company was one of Peterborough’s biggest employers, doing business with countries all over the world. Anything stamped with the Jenkins Engineering logo was a respected sign of quality. Someone with such a high profile might well have some sway with one or two influential people.

  ‘Do you remember his name?’ Bliss asked, careful not to show his eagerness.

  ‘Yeah. Palmer. Simon, I think. Maybe Stephen. But definitely Palmer. I remember me and Jodie making jokes about it, you know, sort of a play on him jerking off.’ Her face clouded over at the memory.

  ‘Okay. We’ll look into it. How was Jodie in the days leading up to her disappearance? Did she seem scared, anxious? Was there anything bothering her? Anything on her mind?’

  Rawlings barked a harsh laugh. ‘You just described the way every prostitute out on the streets feels every hour of every day. I know what you’re asking, Inspector, but I didn’t even know she was pregnant and I was the closest thing she had to a friend.’

  Bliss heard the sadness in her voice. If this woman lacked anything, it certainly wasn’t compassion. ‘Is there anything else you can think of that might help us, Connie? Anything at all that sticks in your mind about Jodie, her punters, the time she went missing?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. It was such a long time ago.’

  For a moment Bliss thought he saw that earlier evasiveness reappear, but when he looked harder her eyes revealed nothing. If there had been a glimmer, they were cold, hard blanks again now.

  ‘Did you know the name of Jodie’s dealer?’

  ‘You think she might’ve fallen out with him?’

  It had only just occurred to him, but it seemed like a decent enough theory. ‘It’s a possibility,’ Bliss admitted. ‘Any ideas? Could be important.’

  ‘I can’t be certain, but I did see her a couple of times with a pusher who was known on the streets as Snake. I don’t know if that was coincidence, see Jodie never wanted to talk about that side of her life, but I did see them together.’

  The name was unfamiliar to Bliss. ‘You still see him around? I know you’re not on the streets anymore, but I guess you still go into town shopping occasionally.’

  But this time Rawlings shook her head. ‘Haven’t laid eyes on him for a good few years now.’

  It wasn’t a problem. He’d run the name past the drugs squad back at HQ. Bliss thanked the woman for her time and got to his feet. There was nothing else he could think of asking. Nothing relevant to the inquiry, at least.

  ‘How young is the teenager, Connie?’ he asked as they moved back into the short and narrow hallway, recalling the call she had taken.

  ‘She’s twenty-three, but looks eighteen. I’m not into pervs, Inspector Bliss.’

  ‘Aren’t they all pervs?’

  She frowned. Her disappointment in him obvious. ‘I’m surprised at you.’

  He held up a hand. ‘Sorry. You’re right, I do know better. I have nothing against what you do, Connie. Nor the men who visit you.’

  ‘Really?’ She folded her arms beneath her breasts, pushing them up, exposing some cleavage. ‘Have you ever visited one of us?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d rather use your hand?’

  Bliss grinned and waggled his left hand before her eyes, showing her his wedding ring.

  ‘Married men have more need than most,’ she said, scoffing at him. ‘Twenty years humping the same woman? Some men are looking for something younger, firmer, bigger tits maybe, or even just different. I’ve had more than one punter tell me that after years of trying to please the wife by making love to her, all they really wanted to do was fuck. To just please themselves. Anyway, Inspector, I think that ring is just camouflage.’

  Bliss squinted at her, stunned by her perception. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘You just don’t strike me as a man who has a wife to take care of him. I can’t put my finger on it, but you have that air about you.’

  He turned the latch and pulled the front door open. ‘Well, anyway. I’m sorry if I came across just like all the other arseholes. I really don’t have a problem with what you do.’

  Connie Rawlings winked at him and smiled. ‘I should hope not. And do you really think I didn’t notice you shift your legs back in the living room?’ She stared blatantly at his crotch. ‘Getting a bit perky, was he?’

  Bliss had to grin. ‘You’re a fine-looking woman, Connie. Sue me for being human.’

  ‘Well, give me a bell if you’re ever at a loose end, sweetie. I might be nearing my sell-by date, but I’m still better than your own hand any day.’

  The heavens had opened up during the past twenty minutes or so, and on a stiff breeze the rain clattered into the house. On the doorstep, Connie Rawlings grew serious. ‘I hope you find the bastard who killed Jodie, Inspector. Don’t matter what she was or what she did. She didn’t deserve that.’

  ‘No.’ Bliss took a deep breath. Shook his head. ‘I don’t suppose she did.’

  Chapter 19

  While Jimmy Bliss was thinking lustful thoughts about Connie Rawlings, DC Chandler and DS Dunne were interviewing Jodie Maybanks’s mother. Now in her late fifties, the woman lived in Norfolk with a man some ten years her junior. The couple worked for a businessman who travelled all over the world, though he had never resided anywhere other than the tiny village of Denver. Nora Maybanks took care of the household, while her partner drove the boss to and from airports and his company’s HQ in London’s Docklands. They appeared to have an unexacting life in a beautiful setting.

  Seated in the main house’s grand hand-crafted oak kitchen, Mrs Maybanks dabbed at her eyes with a balled-up tissue and tried to stem the flow of tears. ‘I suppose a part of me wondered whether Jodie might be dead,’ she admitted, sniffing and wiping her nose with the same wad of Kleenex. ‘It was awful when she first left, not knowing what had become of her, but after a while you just
accept the fact that she’s gone and is hopefully out there somewhere, getting on with the new life she’s made for herself.’

  Chandler gave her best sympathetic smile. It was well practised, but in this case genuine. ‘I realise this must be difficult for you, Mrs Maybanks. I’m sorry to have brought you such bad news.’

  And it’s just about to get worse, she thought, not relishing having to tell this proud woman that her only daughter had been both a junkie and a prostitute.

  As it turned out, she didn’t have to.

  ‘Me and her dad did our best for Jodie,’ Mrs Maybanks insisted. More tear mopping. ‘But she went off the rails when she turned sixteen. It was as if someone flicked a switch inside her head. I mean, she went through the usual teenage troubles, but she was never a bad kid. I think she took up with the wrong sort. Before we knew it, our little Jodie was out of her head on drugs and selling her body to pay for it.’

  ‘Did you force Jodie to leave home, or did she run away?’ Bobby Dunne asked.

  The woman looked at him defensively. ‘Derek, my husband, couldn’t live with what she’d become. We both found it very difficult to cope with. There were a lot of arguments, obviously. It was a terrible, terrible time. Derek gave her an ultimatum, and then one day when we got home from work, Jodes was gone. Instead of leaving her friends and kicking her bad habits, she packed up all that she could stuff into a bag and left our lives for good. I think that was the beginning of the end for Derek and me.’

  ‘You say your daughter left your lives for good, Mrs Maybanks,’ Chandler said, wondering about this aspect. ‘Did you really never hear from her again? No phone call? Not even a letter or postcard?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ She put back her head and shook it, a tiny grief-laden breath escaping her lips. ‘It was as if she’d vanished off the face of the earth.’

  Dunne checked his notes. ‘Your husband reported your daughter missing. Did he, or you for that matter, have any idea where Jodie might have gone at that time?’

  ‘All her friends were local to where we lived. Few of them were willing to talk to us, but those who wanted to help thought she’d probably gone down to London.’

  Chandler nodded. Many teenage runaways headed for the bright lights of the capital, looking for a life in more exotic surroundings. Mostly what they found was dirt and squalor, pain and misery. She and Dunne spent another twenty minutes covering the basics, but it was clear that when Jodie Maybanks walked out on her parents, she had cut herself off from them completely.

  ‘What happens now?’ Mrs Maybanks asked when Chandler told her they were done.

  ‘We need to hold on to Jodie for a while longer. The coroner will eventually make an official announcement and then her remains will be released to you.’

  The woman nodded. Dabbed her puffy eyes. ‘I hope it’s soon. I’d like to bury my daughter.’

  I think she’s had more than enough of that, Chandler thought but did not say.

  When they were through in Denver, Dunne and Chandler visited Jodie’s father, who now ran his own mini-cab firm in King’s Lynn. Having taken the news of his daughter’s murder in stoical fashion, he pretty much related the same tale of woe to them. Had the same answers to the same questions. It was only at the end, as the two detectives were walking out of the tiny office from which Derek Maybanks ran his business empire, that the man broke down.

  ‘I knew it would end this way for her,’ he said through a terrible wail, mucus streaming from his nose. ‘These fucking wankers who want to legalise drugs should be made to experience something like this, I tell you.’

  Thinking of the life Jodie Maybanks had endured, Chandler couldn’t bring herself to argue.

  On his way back to Thorpe Wood from Stanground, Bliss’s mind was caught in a whirl he found impossible to control. The information Connie Rawlings had provided was useful, but as his Vectra fought its way through traffic, Bliss found his thoughts wandering from the crime itself.

  Nineteen ninety was the year he had met Hazel. On their second date he’d taken her to see Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, a chick flick he’d not been looking forward to yet had enjoyed despite himself. The only other movie he recalled from that year was The Krays, a bizarre attempt to dramatise the lives of the violent gangsters by using the Kemp brothers from Spandau Ballet to play the lead roles. When looking at the cinema screen the eyes saw sharp suits and attitude, but the mind could not veer from silk blouses and mullets. As for the portrayal of the vicious thugs and East End gangland life in general, Bliss had seen more violent things splattered on pub toilet floors.

  As the decade began finding its feet, the B52s were extolling the virtues of a ‘Love Shack’, while Del Amitri were bemoaning the fact that ‘Nothing Ever Happens’. In Bliss’s mind, the Scottish band were both completely wrong and absolutely spot on at the same time. Hazel had mocked his liking for reflective lyrics, while her love for B52s’ version of paradise had simply washed over him. They were compatible in so many ways, but their taste in music had not started off that way.

  Nudging the Vauxhall off the parkway and taking the first left off the roundabout, Bliss now shook his head at the clear memories. It was almost as if his life had truly begun that year, that unlike the tortured soul in the U2 song, he had found what he was looking for. The eighties had fixated on people finding their inner selves, but Bliss hadn’t needed to find himself at all; he’d needed to find someone else, someone with whom he could share his life. Within a month of meeting Hazel, he’d known she was the one.

  Back then the cynical Bliss had wondered how no one else saw the irony of celebrating Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in the same year that the slaying of Tory MP Ian Gow by an IRA bomb was so roundly condemned. Were acts of terrorism acceptable if your cause was just, Bliss had asked his colleagues at work. Now, he reflected, we have a peace agreement keeping the Irish bombers at bay, while radical Muslims seek to blow the entire western world to pieces. Del Amitri could never have known how right they were.

  As Bliss approached HQ, he suddenly smiled at another fleeting glimpse of the past. In his mind he saw his wife’s beaming face, in his ears he could hear her laughter as the two of them had almost wet themselves upon learning that Glasgow had become the cultural city of Europe. They’d reflected on the notion that in years to come, Parisians would be seen sitting outside cafés tucking into deep-fried Mars bars, Romans knocking back can after can of Special Brew, and the Swiss swapping their army knives for cut-throat razors.

  The swirling mass of his mind turning to darker thoughts, Bliss recalled Hazel’s horror at Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, her assertion that Armageddon’s origins would be from the Middle East. While politicians applied trade embargos, there were deep rumblings concerning a Gulf war.

  Bliss’s final thought before pulling into the Thorpe Wood car park was: God, those Del Amitri people were good.

  The Major Incident Room was thrumming with excitement. While he waited for everyone to assemble, Bliss listened to the sounds, the textures of conversation, ran a studious gaze over faces and, in particular, eyes. There was a moment in every major investigation when something clicked into gear, something that gave the team a pulse all of its own. A single vision, one heart. And here it was again, he thought. Every breath we take from this point on is unified.

  ‘Let’s do it then, ladies and gents,’ he said, rapping a hand on the desk that sat closest to the incident board. ‘We’ll begin by presenting everything we know so far. DC Strong?’

  Mia was leaning casually against the electronic whiteboard, to which she now referred. ‘Just to confirm for those of you on late shift, Jane Doe has now officially been identified as Jodie Maybanks, just twenty years old when she was murdered. A MisPer report from June nineteen ninety was pulled from archives. The report listed Jodie as a street prostitute, who ran away from home when she was sixteen. Subsequent national MisPer requests were made and we came up with a report made by Jodie’s parents back in eighty-six. To co
nfirm that Jane Doe and Jodie Maybanks were one and the same, we put some pressure on hospital records and they came up trumps. The rod discovered in Jane Doe’s leg was identified as the one inserted into Jodie Maybanks’s leg following a serious road accident when she was fifteen.’

  ‘Thanks, Mia,’ Bliss said, trying to match her own exuberant smile. ‘DS Dunne, what do you have for us?’

  Dunne coughed into his hand before speaking. Uneasy in front of an audience, the sergeant nonetheless took it in his stride.

  ‘Mrs Maybanks confirmed information acquired from the boss’s source that Jodie ran away from home when she was sixteen and never set foot back there again. Never once contacted her parents, either. Mrs Maybanks puts a lot of blame on her husband for the way he was constantly getting on at Jodie, but did admit that her daughter was out of control. Drugs, drink, boys, stealing. Though obviously distressed, I got the impression she’d been expecting our visit for the past few years. Jodie’s parents are now separated, but for my money they’re both out of the picture regarding the murder of their daughter. I don’t think either parent can take us further with this.’

  Bliss nodded. ‘Okay. Cheers, Bobby. Now it’s my turn. The nineteen ninety MisPer was reported by a Connie Rawlings, street brass, and mother hen to our Jodie. Connie is still plying her trade, though in the far more salubrious surroundings of her own home. According to her, Jodie Maybanks did what she had to do in order to survive the life she’d become accustomed to. That is, getting a fix on a regular basis. Rawlings claims not to have known that Jodie was pregnant, and I believed her.

  ‘Now, we do have a couple of potential leads. Firstly, Connie Rawlings believes Jodie used a pusher who went by the street name Snake. There’s no obvious motive here, but as we all know, the drugs business can be fractious. I want this man traced and interviewed. According to Rawlings, Jodie did not have a boyfriend. So, it’s not much of a reach to imagine a punter being responsible for the bun in Jodie’s oven. This brings us to the second potential lead: Jodie had several regulars by all accounts, but only one name that really stuck and came through. Simon Palmer, then a high-flying manager at Jenkins Engineering. I checked him out. He’s now a director at the same company.’