by Iain Cameron
‘Perhaps it’s women she knows from a club or perhaps some protest group.’
‘Could be, but what they all have in common is they’re young, slim and pretty. You’d be hard pressed to find that many in a knitting circle or at an anti-fracking protest.’
She laughed. ‘You’re right.’
‘What if it’s something a bit more insidious: women rescued from a life of domestic abuse, drugs or prostitution, say?’
‘I don’t think they’re drug users. They look too healthy. A few are showing their bare arms and I don’t see any scars or track marks.’
‘Good point. These pictures are posing more questions than answers, but I certainly think it’s a major step forward.’ Henderson stood and stretched. ‘I’d better get back and talk to the team. Sally, send the pictures over to the High-Tech unit as we discussed, and brief the other members of your little group in the office about what you’ve discovered and what they now should be looking for.’
‘Will do.’
‘Also, reinforce the ‘no leaks’ rule. I don’t want to see any of these pictures leaked to The Argus. I’ll remove anyone from this investigation who does.’
‘No problem.’
Henderson’s phone rang.
‘The more pictures we find, the better,’ he said to her. He lifted his phone. ‘Henderson.’
‘Afternoon gov.’
‘Afternoon Carol. Sally’s found some great stuff over here at the studio. Pictures of our second victim are on one of Cindy’s back-up drives. I’m coming back to the office to brief everyone.’
‘Fantastic news. I’ve just heard something else that should help us too.’
‘Excellent. What is it?’
‘Are you sitting down?’
‘Yes.’
‘Liar, I bet you’re not. I’ve just taken a call from the ballistics lab. The slug extracted from Cindy Longhurst’s skull matches the one found in Castle Hill Girl.’
TWENTY-TWO
The pub was busy for a Monday night. Liam McKinney finished the dregs in his glass and walked to the bar to buy another. He nudged a guy out of the way, too engrossed in something on his phone and leaned on the bar.
‘A pint of lager when you get a minute Barry,’ he called to the barman as he poured drinks for a gorgeous looking blonde. She looked about thirty with a fabulous figure, squeezed into a tight blue dress. At twenty-four, McKinney imagined she was too old for him, but if this was an example of how older women looked after themselves, perhaps it was time to lower his expectations.
Barry did as he was told, emitting a few tuts from a couple of geezers beside him, but the barman knew on which side his bread was buttered. McKinney came in here three, four nights a week and not only did he drink there, he transacted business there, so Barry also benefitted from the largesse of McKinney’s customers.
McKinney retook his seat in the corner. He was waiting for his customer, a guy called Rick who said he wanted to buy fifty grams of coke. His antenna rose when he first heard: a big sale, lots of dough, but why so much? Was he trying to set himself up as a rival dealer? Rick said he lived in Crawley and wanted it for himself and the football supporters’ club where he was a member. This was cool as McKinney operated only in the Brighton area. If in the future he wanted to expand into Crawley, it wouldn’t do any harm to cultivate some contacts and maybe move into partnership later. If Rick didn’t fancy a joint-operation, McKinney would bring up some mates and force him out.
The alcohol was warming his cockles, as his father used to say, and making him think shite thoughts, as the young McKinney would say. He didn’t do partners, he’d taken a knife to the last two and preferred being on his own. Charlie McQueen was a sort of partner, he sourced the goods while McKinney worked the streets, pubs and clubs, selling to the next level down in the food chain.
He’d been avoiding McQueen for the last few weeks and refused to answer his phone after the man screamed and shouted into his ear the last time he called. He’d gone ballistic when he heard McKinney had stuck a knife into the gut of his fat bastard friend, Ted Mathieson. McQueen had told him that Mathieson wouldn’t like his money being cut and McKinney had been instructed to ‘take no shit’, as the Russians were hitting the business hard and impacting cash flow. McKinney did as he was told, so why was McQueen so mad?
His ruminations, disguised to the other punters in the pub as a man reading The Argus, had agitated him. When he felt this way, he drank, and if he indulged too much, his agitation would turn to aggression and someone would pay the price. He reached for his pint and discovered the glass empty. He looked around at the table on the left and the one on the right, but no one was stealing his beer. He was about to go up for another when a bloke came into the pub. He knew at once this was his guy, the voice on the phone said he would be wearing a black leather jacket.
The man walked towards him. ‘Liam?’
‘Sure. You Rick?’
He nodded and stuck out his hand which Liam shook.
‘You wanna drink?’ Rick asked.
‘Sure. Pint of Heineken,’ he said holding up his empty glass.
‘Coming up.’
Rick headed to the bar to buy McKinney a pint; number five or could it be six? It was more than he usually drank when making a sale as he liked to keep a clear head, at least until the deal was done. He didn’t know this guy, but the set-up felt good. Rick looked the way he sounded on the phone, a big fella, but soft around the edges, with a bit of a beer gut, jowls on the face and flecks of grey in his hair. Someone he could take easy if the exchange went sour.
Rick came back with the beers and sat down. He lifted his glass and nodded to McKinney, ‘Cheers,’ he said.
‘Cheers,’ he replied.
‘Do you follow football?’ Rick said, nodding at the copy of The Argus lying on the seat, the football pages uppermost.
‘Sure, the Albion, got a season ticket.’
‘Me too. Where do you sit?’
‘East stand.’
‘You’re opposite me.’
‘You don’t support…what’s their name?’
‘Crawley Town? Nah, I’m not from there. More Haywards Heath, me. I’ve always followed Brighton.’
He felt a prat. He knew what they were called, every footie fan in the south east knew the names of all the clubs in the area. The booze was playing tricks with his memory.
They chit-chatted for another five minutes before Rick picked up his glass and finished it. ‘Wanna make the trade?’
The cogs inside Liam’s head did a little spin. Trade? What bloody trade? Christ, for a minute he thought they were two old mates having a bit of a get-together. He needed to get a grip.
He finished his drink and they walked outside. McKinney took a right into Montreal Road. ‘The car’s right up here, the gear’s in the boot. You got the dough?’
‘Yep,’ he said tapping his jacket pocket.
Some drug dealers, when faced with large sums of money, like the fifty big ones Rick had with him, would try to roll the punter and keep the cash and hold on to the drugs. They were the penny-pinchers, hand-to-mouth sort of guys who took drugs themselves and needed a steady supply. McKinney was a wholesaler, and it didn’t make sense to steal from his customers when trying to build a business, and Charlie McQueen would cut his ears off if he ever found out he was doing so.
McKinney had got rid of his Camaro after the Mathieson incident and while awaiting the delivery of a new Porsche 911 Carrera from a dealer in Burgess Hill, he’d bought a little run-around, a BMW 3 Series with lowered suspension, black alloys and a thick yellow stripe down both sides: class.
He beeped the alarm and reached for the boot release lever.
‘Leave it, McKinney,’ Rick said as he jabbed something hard into his side. ‘I’m holding a Beretta 92 fitted with soft tip ammunition. If you don’t want your guts plastered all over the paintwork of your pretty motor, you’ll do as I tell you.’
Another geezer appeared from nowhe
re, blocking his intended escape route through the gap in the parked cars.
‘Nice and easy Liam,’ the other guy said. ‘Get into the back seat of the car.’
‘What’s this about? Is it money you want? I got money.’
‘Shut the fuck up and get in the car.’
He climbed into the car and the new guy got in beside him. He also had a gun which he poked into McKinney’s ribs. Rick drove. He headed down Southover Road to the Lewes Road and on reaching The Level, turned into St Peter’s Place and joined the A23 heading north.
‘Where are we going?’ McKinney asked.
Both men ignored him.
They cruised past Preston Park, dark and empty at this hour of the night. What he wouldn’t give to get out of this car, run across the grass and hide in the trees at the far side. A few minutes later at the roundabout marking the junction between the A27 and the A23, they turned left up Mill Road, the place where Albion fans used to park when the team didn’t have a ground of their own and were forced to play matches at nearby Withdean athletics stadium.
‘What do you want?’
No response.
He needed time to think, but the beer in the pub, a couple of whisky chasers and the snort of coke he’d taken before coming out to steady his trembling hands, were messing with his brain. He was armed like those two clowns, but with a knife. No matter that he always kept it sharp, a knife was no match for two Berettas.
They turned up Devil’s Dyke Road, heading in the direction of the place where he and Ted Mathieson fell out. It suddenly came to him. McQueen would be waiting in the car park, trademark baseball bat in hand. He’d seen him do it in the past but he wouldn’t try and beat his brains out, would he? They’d worked together for nearly three years and by virtue of McKinney’s contacts and his tireless pounding of Brighton streets, together they’d made millions.
The car didn’t turn up the little road that led towards the car park but continued to follow the road past The Dyke Golf Club, and he practically wet his pants with relief. If these chancers weren’t McQueen’s men, who the hell were they?’
‘Who are you guys? Where are we going?’ McKinney asked.
‘You’ll see soon.’
Halleluiah, the gunmen did have voices. A minute or so later the car pulled into a layby and came to a halt. Rick switched off the engine.
‘Why are we stopping?’
‘Shut the fuck up and get out the car.’
He did as he was told and was tempted to make a run for it, but before the idea fully formed in his head, both men appeared at his side and blocked the escape route.
‘This way,’ Rick said, nodding in the direction of the trees beside the lay-by. The thicket looked dark and foreboding in the pale, yellow light of the moon, but he walked towards it and soon found they were tramping along a path.
Few people had used it since autumn as it was partly overgrown with weeds and he could feel branches of overhanging trees combing through his hair. He couldn’t stop to push them out of the way or rub his leg after a branch whacked it, because if he did he received a jab in the back from the barrel of a gun.
He raised his one arm as if about to scratch an itch, but instead intending to reach for his knife, when a whack in the back stopped him. ‘Hands where I can see them, McKinney. Any fancy tricks, mate, and all I do is pull the trigger.’
They walked for a couple of minutes and came to a small clearing no bigger than could accommodate five or six people.
‘Stop here.’
‘What’s this?’ McKinney said, his voice higher than normal. ‘No meeting with Charlie, no chance to state my side of the story?’
He grabbed Rick’s arm, not in an attempt to wrestle his weapon away but trying to plead his case. Rick pushed him back with ease and smacked him in the face with the butt of the gun, knocking him to the ground.
In the moonlight, he saw Rick look over at his mate, who nodded. Rick pointed the gun at McKinney and before he realised what was happening, the gun spat its venom.
TWENTY-THREE
Henderson returned home late, a meeting with the team to discuss the connections between Castle Hill Girl and Cindy Longhurst had kept him at the office. The facts were irrefutable: the two women had been killed by the same gun, and pictures of the latest victim appeared on Cindy’s computer.
The same gun suggested the same shooter and the similar state of the two victims’ bodies, both beaten and kept in similar dirty conditions, implied they were both kept in the same place. The team had also bandied about motives for the killings; drugs and prostitution, as discussed with Sally Graham, plus money laundering, blackmail and all the rest of the headings from the serious crimes handbook.
The exercise wasn’t such a waste of time because not knowing the name of the shooter, if they could find out the activity he or she was involved in, the team would be half-way towards discovering their identity. Alas, one main motive did not present itself. They didn’t know if Cindy and their new victim were killed for the same reasons, or if Cindy was killed for photographing something and Castle Hill Girl for being involved in something else.
They needed more and he now focused the investigation on two fronts. One, a team would continue looking through the photographs in Cindy’s studio, trying to find some unguarded pictures of their second victim and her companions, something to try and identify their location. In essence, trying to uncover the revealing photographs they believed the kidnappers were trying to find when they kidnapped Cindy.
The second focus of the investigation was on trying to discover the identity of their new victim. Fingerprint analysis had uncovered nothing on the database so, at great expense, and bringing a frown to the face of CI Edwards, she authorised the victim’s DNA to be fast-tracked. If it didn’t trigger recognition by the PNC, they would circulate her details to European police forces as PC Phil Bentley, the team’s expert on the female form, believed she looked East European.
‘What time do you call this?’ Rachel said as he stopped in the hall to take off his jacket.
‘I was delayed. We’ve had a new development in the case and the team meeting went on longer than expected.’
‘I was expecting you home hours ago, your dinner will be stone cold.’
‘I’ll stick it in the microwave.’
‘Do what the hell you like,’ she said walking back into the lounge.
He headed into the kitchen. It looked clean and tidy as if nothing had ever been cooked there, his plate of whatever it was sitting beneath the protection of a sheet of kitchen paper. He lifted it to find a large helping of chicken in a tomato sauce with a pile of penne beside it. Heating a dish of pasta in the microwave hadn’t worked for him in the past as it usually came out too hard, but he was too tired to think of a better solution.
While waiting for it to heat, he took a seat at the table and reached for a copy of The Argus lying there. It was the evening edition, time for journalists and editors to digest the details of this morning’s press conference. The main part of the article quoted verbatim large sections of the press release and he knew if he went on the web now and looked at the same story in another half-dozen newspaper websites, it would be the same.
To their credit they didn’t say they believed both women were killed by the same person, but reiterated their previous warning, that with two victims dead, women should refrain from going out or if they needed to, they should be accompanied. It was the usual knee-jerk scare tactics of newspapers. They had no evidence the streets were any more dangerous than before. Cindy had been kidnapped in her studio, in reality her home, and the latest victim, from God-knows-where, but not the same place as Cindy.
The microwave pinged. He grabbed a tea towel, removed the steaming plate, and set it down on the table. He picked up a fork and tried eating a piece to see if was hot and decided it would do. The pasta didn’t taste too bad either.
They didn’t often eat in the lounge and he wouldn’t do so with this sort of meal. One f
alse move and the whole lot would slither off the plate on to the carpet like a jellyfish on a fishmonger’s slab. Rachel knew he wouldn’t come in to the lounge and if she couldn’t be bothered walking into the kitchen to talk to him, he wouldn’t force the issue.
It was the same problem annoying Rachel now that broke up his marriage to Laura in Glasgow. His ex was a stoic individual but her legendary patience frayed to breaking point when he didn’t turn up for a friend’s birthday party, her parent’s silver wedding anniversary and at least two Christmas celebrations. The icing on the cake, or more accurately, the straw that broke the camel’s back, came when he arrived home at midnight to find the house had been full of friends, a surprise party laid on for him after receiving his promotion to Detective Inspector.
He opened the newspaper looking for other news, trying to free his mind from the Cindy Longhurst case and the troubles at home. A fifteen-year-old lad had gone missing from his house in Bevendean, an off-licence had been robbed on Preston Road and someone was sounding off about refuse collections, this time because the crews were being noisy and had left a mess on the pavement.
He was about to chuck the paper away in disgust when he noticed the name of the journalist who penned it: Rachel Jones. He smiled. Perhaps her editor, Gary Richardson, miffed at Henderson departing his dinner party early, had got his own back by assigning Rachel a bum assignment like reporting on refuse collections. No wonder she was walking around at the moment with a face like a baby with colic.
In order not to soil the spotless kitchen, he put his plate and cutlery in the dishwasher and closed the door. He reached for a short glass and after pulling out the bottle of Glenmorangie from the cupboard, poured a generous measure. He stood for a moment and took a swig, before walking towards the lounge.
‘What are you watching?’ he said, taking a seat in the armchair.
‘Quiet, this is a key bit.’
He watched the screen for several moments and inwardly groaned, yet another cop drama. He understood why television programmes needed to be action-orientated. The times he had to sit for hours filling in forms, disciplining a rookie DC for some stupid error of judgement or waiting for the results of a forensic test wouldn’t interest anyone.