Rock, Paper, Scissors

by B Baskerville

  * * *

  Like puppies abandoned by their mother, the girls huddled together for warmth. They whimpered and whined. Annoying little bitches. He was sick of them. Especially the Irish one. She was nineteen according to her ID. Older than his boss would have liked but luckily she looked younger. Her eyes were big for her head, giving a baby-like appearance that would fetch some big bucks. The driver had done well picking her out of the crowd, and the lure knew what she was doing, knew how to get them to trust her. It was a shame the Irish girl was so noisy. Where she was going, they didn’t like noise and backchat.

  “Please,” she begged, her voice loud but quivering. “Please.” Her wrists were secured in front of her with cable ties and she held her palms together as if praying. “Please, I need my medicine.”

  “I told you to pipe down,” he replied, pushing her away so she fell into the others. She needed to be quiet. Their location wasn’t as isolated as he would prefer but his bosses had picked it out and he had to make do. If she kept making this racket she could blow the whole operation.

  “Please,” she tried again, louder this time. Snot streamed from her nose and tears ran from under the blindfold and into her mouth. “I need insulin. If I don’t get it—”

  He cut her off with a swift kick to her ribs. “Quiet.”

  She curled up in the foetal position and squeezed her upper arms to her sides, trying to protect herself from further blows. He stood watching her for a second and relaxed in the blissful silence that followed. His violence has worked. He’d have preferred to punch her in her pretty little mouth, it would have given him more satisfaction, but it would have split her lip or knocked a tooth out. His boss would be furious. He liked them young, beautiful and unmarked.

  He crouched down and could smell sweetness on her breath, brought on by high blood glucose levels. “Listen,” he whispered, “I’ll get you some fucking insulin, all right? But you need to keep your gob shut. Understand?”

  She cowered further into the other girls. As if those skinny bitches could protect her. They were bound and blindfolded just as she was.

  “Understand?” he asked again. Growling this time because he didn’t like to repeat himself.

  She nodded and wiped her tears.

  “Good.” He placed a bottle in her shaking hands. “Drink some water. It’ll help. I’ll be back with food and insulin later. But I swear, if the guard tells me you’ve made so much as a peep, I’ll flush the insulin down the bog and you’ll be tossed in the fucking sea.”

  - Chapter 5 -

  “How did you manage to burn porridge?” Tina Cooper furrowed her dark brows as she stared into the pot on the hob. What should have been creamy porridge oats was now a brown, dried-out mess.

  “Sorry, T,” said Cooper with an apologetic smile. “I got distracted reading the news. I’ll make some toast instead. So what are your plans for today? And what in God’s name are the seagulls so worked up about?”

  There was an almighty racket coming from the roof of Cooper’s home. Seagull squawks were part and parcel of living near the coast, but the family of herring gulls that had made Cooper’s chimney stack their home seemed especially agitated today.

  “They’ve been like that since dawn,” yawned Tina. “And yeah, I’ve got a metric tonne of homework to do. The Easter holidays are hardly going to be a holiday at all. I’m going to hang out at Dad’s this morning while I finish up a biology assignment and an English essay, then I’m going to Josh’s this afternoon. We’re going to do maths together then take a walk down Longsands.”

  “Nice,” said Cooper. “The beach bit, anyway, not the homework.” Truth be told, Cooper knew Tina was just playing a part; saying the words she thought she ought to say. If she knew her daughter, and she believed she did, Tina would be far more excited about ploughing into a maths paper than getting sand between her toes.

  The toast popped out of the toaster and Tina slathered a healthy amount of chocolate spread on two slices and began to devour them. “Here,” she said, handing Cooper two slices and a jar of ginger jam.

  “Don’t worry about me, you have them. I’ll eat at the station.”

  Tina rolled her eyes and gave her mother the no you won’t stare. She was probably right. When Cooper was worried about a case her appetite seemed to disappear, and she was extremely worried about Macey Gallagher. The longer it took to find her the more danger she would be in.

  The doorbell chimed at ten past eight and Tina opened the door for Kenny. He greeted Tina with a kiss on the top of her head and Cooper with a clumsy hug. “Got you a present,” he smiled.

  Cooper was sure he meant Tina so she busied her herself by making a flask of tea to take with her, but when Kenny dragged an A1-sized framed poster from a Metallica gig through the door, with a grin worthy of the Cheshire Cat on his face and proudly declared “Ta-dah,” she knew the gift was for her.

  “Recognise it?” he asked.

  Cooper grabbed the frame in both hands and held it up at eye height. “Is this what I think it is?” Memories flooded back to Cooper. Her mind conjured images of cheap lager in plastic cups, bodies bouncing off one another, and music so loud your ears hummed for days. “Our first date.”

  Technically, it wasn’t a first date. Cooper had met Kenny at the concert when she’d crowd surfed over a tide of head-banging moshers and had landed in his big, strong arms.

  “Where did you find this?” asked Cooper. She could smell Kenny’s aftershave from that night and could feel her best friend, Cindy, squeezing her arm in excitement as they waited for James Hetfield to take to the stage.

  “On an eBay auction,” replied Kenny. “I thought you’d like it. Got the frame at a charity shop. Thought it was quirky.”

  “It is.” The frame was made up of pin badges and buttons of all sorts of shapes and sizes. The classic yellow smiley face badge - synonymous with the nineties rave scene - stood out the most.

  “I brought my tool kit. Thought I’d hang it for you before I whisk young Tina away for a morning of studying.”

  Tina was still nibbling on her crusts. She grunted, “Fun times,” as crumbs fell from her mouth to the kitchen floor.

  Kenny didn’t wait for approval; he lifted the poster from Cooper’s hands, heaved it upstairs and looked around Cooper’s room. It felt odd, having him in her room. It took her back to being a teenager and enjoying stolen kisses and naughty moments under the sheets when her parents were at work and she was supposed to be at school. She hoped this wouldn’t take too long. She didn’t want the smell of Kenny’s aftershave to linger until Atkinson came back from Germany. Not that she’d done anything to feel guilty about.

  “Above the fireplace?” asked Kenny. He extracted the correct drill bit from his tool bag and held it between his teeth while he found a corresponding wall plug. Cooper nodded; the poster would look great there.

  Kenny was finished in less than a minute. Impressive work. It would have taken her three hours of measuring, double-checking and working out how to use the damn drill to achieve the same result, and it would still be wonky.

  Kenny’s hands rested on his hips as he admired his handiwork, then his eyes flickered to the dresser where Justin’s spare glasses were resting on a Yuval Noah Harari book.

  “Does the Science Man like Metallica?”

  Over the last few months, Kenny had stopped referring to Justin as Justin and had instead started calling him the Science Man. It didn’t bother Cooper; the name was pretty apt.

  “He doesn’t dislike them.”

  Kenny shrugged his large shoulders and left the room. Cooper followed him downstairs where she found Tina balancing a pile of textbooks in her arms.

  “Ready to go, sweetheart?”

  Tina nodded and gave her mother the briefest of goodbye hugs. Cooper grabbed a leather jacket and her keys and followed Tina and Kenny out the front door, only for her ears to be assaulted by a chorus of caws. Whatever was bugging the winged-rats, Cooper hoped they’d get it out o
f their system by the time she got home. Before her backside had a chance to reach the driver’s seat, her phone buzzed. Cooper glanced at the screen and saw that it was Detective Chief Superintendent Howard Nixon.

  Oh, bloody hell. What had she done now? “Sir?”

  “Cooper, I have the results of the phone trace for your missing-presumed-dead girl.”

  Relieved that she hadn’t done anything to warrant one of Nixon’s notorious bollockings, Cooper braved correcting her superior. “She’s not presumed dead, sir.”

  “Diabetic lass, out drinking alcohol till the wee hours, wearing next to nothing and no one’s seen hide nor hair from her since? If she turns up alive I’ll eat my hat.”

  “How about, if I find her alive, you give me a raise?”

  Nixon chortled. “That’s a big if, but like my ma used to say: Shy bairns get nowt. Right, note this down. The phone’s been switched off since Monday lunchtime but its last triangulation point was fifty-four degrees, fifty-eight point four minutes north, one degree, twenty-seven point three minutes west.”

  Cooper keyed the coordinates into her sat-nav and found they led to Bede Industrial Estate in an area called Jarrow. “Thanks, sir. I’ll be in touch.”

  Cooper hung up and collected Tennessee from the corner of Front Street and Percy Park Road in Tynemouth.

  “Get in,” she yelled over the noise of car horns from the traffic building up behind her. “And I hope your tetanus is up to date. We’re headed for darkest Jarrow.”

  “Christ. What did we do to deserve that?”

  Jarrow, on the south bank of the Tyne, had been a powerhouse of the shipbuilding industry. When the local shipyard closed in the 1930s, over eighty per cent of the working-age men found themselves unemployed. Without investment in the area, the local population continued to suffer more than their fair share of crime and unemployment.

  “It’s the last known location for Macey Gallagher’s phone. Thought we should check it out. You sleep better last night?”

  The detective sergeant picked some sleep from the corner of his eye and flicked it out the Mazda’s window. “Got a whopping three and a half hours.”

  Cooper turned her Mazda onto the A19 and headed for the Tyne Tunnel. It didn’t take long for them to reach their destination. Tennessee emerged from the car and scanned the road back and forth. “There’s nowt here.”

  “There’s a bus stop,” said Cooper. She approached the stop and studied the timetable. “Only one route stops here. The number twenty-seven. Goes to South Shields.”

  “You think she got a bus from here?”

  Cooper pulled a face. “I’m not sure she was even here, but her phone definitely was and phones hold secrets. Photos, emails, private messages.”

  Tennessee shuffled along the road’s edge, checking under shrubs and kicking his feet into long blades of grass.

  “Here.” Cooper pulled a pair of gloves from her field kit and handed them to Tennessee. “Make yourself useful,” she said, pointing to a rubbish bin that stood next to the bus shelter.

  Tennessee’s face wrinkled as he approached the bin and stared down into it. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  The DS didn’t argue. Piece by piece he pulled items of litter from the bin and laid them on the ground.

  “Anything interesting?” asked Cooper.

  “Crisp packets, cans of Monster energy drink and something that resembles a dead mouse. Oh, shit, it is a dead mouse. Gross.”

  Tennessee held the creature by the tail, at arm’s length, before dropping it next to a soggy copy of The Sun.

  “But no phone?”

  “No phone.”

  Cooper sighed. She wanted the phone. CID would have Macey’s call and text history soon enough but there were other things that her records wouldn’t show and those were the items Cooper was most interested in. Besides, any prints could be run through the system. If they matched with someone who had a record, they could pay him or her a visit. She pulled her own mobile out and called the operator.

  “Hello? Yes, put me through to South Tyneside council, please. Environmental services.” She watched Tennessee place each item of rubbish back in the bin, peel off his gloves and chuck them in the bin as well. “Hi, this is DCI Erica Cooper from Northumbria CID. There’s a bus stop on Jarrow Road. I need to know when its bin was emptied.”

  A woman with a high-pitched Geordie accent conducted a quick check on her system. “It would have been collected on Tuesday. Could have been anytime between six a.m. and five p.m. I can contact the team and try to narrow it down for you.”

  “No, that won’t be necessary. Where did they take it? Great. Thank you.”

  Cooper hung up and winked at Tennessee before dialling DC Oliver Martin, the youngest and most image-conscious member of her team, and putting him on speakerphone.

  “Oliver, it’s Cooper.” She spoke quickly as to not give him a chance to protest. “I need you to get a team together, don a fetching white coverall and get yourself down to the tip at Boldon. Ask the site manager where the refuse collections from Jarrow Road were dumped on Tuesday and sift through the landfill until you find me Macey Gallagher’s mobile. A Huawei Y7 in a red case. Cheers.”

  She pictured the young man’s face as she pocketed her phone.

  “You know he’s losing his shit right now?” said Tennessee, suppressing a grin.

  “Well, he keeps saying he wants us to let him get his hands dirty. It’s not my fault if I interpret that literally.”

  - Chapter 6 -

  It took fifteen minutes to drive to Heaton, during which time Tennessee told Cooper about the gurgles baby Alfie had been making at two in the morning and how he was convinced he was trying to sing along to Tennessee’s rendition of Fog on the Tyne.

  Aaron Quinn, Macey Gallagher’s boyfriend, lived in a student let above a betting shop. Tennessee knocked on the door and was greeted by a young man with bloodshot eyes, a stubble-covered jaw and joggers worn so low on his hips that at least three inches of his boxer shorts were visible. Cooper had to restrain herself from going into Mum-mode and yanking his trousers back up to his waist where they belonged.

  “Aaron Quinn? I’m DCI Cooper, we spoke on the phone. This is DS Daniel.”

  Aaron led the pair up the stairs and into his living room. Cooper did a quick scan of the room; it hadn’t seen a duster or a vacuum cleaner is at least two months. Empty beer bottles and energy drink cans littered the dining and coffee tables, Playstation controllers lay on the sofa, a game of FIFA had been paused, and an ashtray overflowed with cigarette ends. On the arm of the sofa was a bundle of the same posters they had seen in Macey and Pearl’s flat.

  Aaron hastily cleared some space for the detectives and invited them to sit.

  “Erm, you want a coffee or something?”

  Cooper couldn’t see the kitchen from where she sat but judging by the living room’s standards of hygiene, she decided to decline his offer.

  “No, thank you. Aaron, can you tell me when you last saw Macey?”

  “That was the morning of the eighth,” he answered. “She’d spent the night on the seventh and we had breakfast together. Then I drove her to her flat, it’s not far but it was raining.”

  “And how would you describe her mood that day?”

  His nose wrinkled as he considered the question. “Just normal really. She was looking forward to going out that night.”

  “Aaron, I’m sorry to ask you this, I know it’s difficult for you right now, but did Macey ever give you reason to think she may harm herself?”

  Aaron’s eyes widened as his gaze met Cooper’s. “God no. I appreciate you have to check, but Jeez, no, not Macey. She wasn’t depressed or suicidal if that’s what you mean.”

  Cooper watched Aaron pace back and forth while she asked her next question. “Did you hear from Macey again once you dropped her off at her flat?”

  He shook his head. “No. I told her to text me if she wanted to meet up later on, o
r if she wanted to crash here.”

  “But she didn’t text you?” asked Tennessee.

  “No. Not until the next morning, but I don’t think that was really her. Did Pearl tell you we don’t think the messages are from her?” He stopped pacing and checked his mobile.

  “She did,” Cooper assured him. “What did you do for the rest of the day, Aaron, after you dropped Macey at her place?”

  “Erm, God, let’s see. I played some footy in the park then came home and did a bit of uni work.”

  “You said it was raining.” Tennessee looked up from his notepad.

  “It was. The rain doesn’t bother us. Getting covered in mud’s half the fun.”

  “And what did you do in the evening?”

  Aaron stared at Tennessee for a moment. “Why do you want to know so much about what I was doing that night? Seems like a waste of time. Shouldn’t you be finding out what Macey was doing?”

  Cooper gave him a supportive smile. “We are, Aaron. This is all part of the process. We want to establish what everyone in Macey’s circle did that day so we can piece together exactly where Macey was and when.”

  “Ah, okay then. Well…” He started to pace again and played with something in his pocket as he spoke. “Me and Mikey, he’s my flatmate, we went to the Blue Bell on the other side of the park with the lads in the flat next door and played some pool and had a few beers. Then we walked back, stopped in The Chillingham for a few more and got an Indian on the way home. I played some FIFA but when I hadn’t heard from Macey by two I decided to go to bed.”

  “Thank you, Aaron,” said Cooper. The man seemed nervous and agitated. Not surprising given his girlfriend had disappeared. “This is helpful. You’re doing a good job. Can you tell me when you first became worried about Macey?”

  Aaron seemed to relax a little. He sat down at his dining table and rubbed his jaw. “I wasn’t worried at first because she was texting me. But she seemed pissed off like I was bothering her or being a pest or something. Her answers were just one word. I thought she was being short with me. I was more worried that she was upset with me for some reason, or—” his voice cracked with emotion. “Well, I can be a bit insecure when it comes to Macey. She’s so gorgeous and I’m just a daft scruff. I was worried she’d met someone else. I got a bit panicky. I’ve never met anyone like Macey before. She’s amazing.” Aaron’s eyes turned glassy. No doubt his mind was frantic; going over everything he’d said or done and hoping to God he wasn’t the reason she’d disappeared.