She wouldn’t ask him now, she would wait to see if he said anything about where he was staying. She didn’t want to make him feel unwelcome in her home. Even though he was.
* * *
He watched them go, they were obviously police. The woman who had walked past the burned-out unit didn’t need a uniform to declare her profession.
He could go after the group of street scum, offer them money, wine, a greasy meal from one of the disgusting cafes, find out what had been said but you couldn’t trust these people. They operated in a different reality. They were like the whore, saying one thing and then doing something else. They didn’t know anything, they couldn’t. He had taken care of everything. But maybe it was time to move. Time to put his plans into action. Sooner than he had meant but no matter, it was all in place. A few loose ends and then he would go.
He turned away, pulled the collar of his long overcoat tighter around his throat and walked into the darkness.
Chapter 44
The house was warm and welcoming. Charlie insisted on carrying her bag from the car. He dumped it down beside three others already in the hall.
“I’ve nearly finished getting my stuff together. I meant to stick the sheets in the washing machine, but I didn’t have time. I’ll do that now if you like,” he said.
Tanya felt the warm wrap around her. She thought about him turning out into the foul night, heading towards a cold, empty house. He was the nearest thing she had to a best friend. For God’s sake, she probably wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for him fighting off a deranged killer intent on choking the life out of her.
“Stay if you like, Charlie. Why don’t you just stay until this is over? It’ll make things easier. You can do the driving, I reckon. It’s tricky with this.” She moved her arm gingerly.
“Are you sure? I mean, I know how you like your own space.”
“Yeah. Mind you. I’m not cooking for you and stuff though.”
He laughed. “No, but I could cook for you, I enjoy it. I’d be grateful Tanya; my place is sad and empty. I could pay you something.”
For a moment she was tempted, extra money – he didn’t have any idea how much she needed it. But she shook her head. “Don’t be stupid. We’ll go halves on the grub though, okay?”
“Brilliant. Look, why don’t you go and get yourself sorted and I’ll make us something to eat. I really do appreciate this.”
She stood in the shower, the water – as hot as she could bear – beating on her tense and knotted shoulders. The dressing on her arm was stained with blood. They’d told her that it might leak if she did too much with it. Well, it looked as though they were right. They’d given her spare dressings and told her to try and keep it dry. Right now, keeping it dry wasn’t an option as the steam billowed around her and the thunder of water in the cubicle drowned out all the niggles and worries clamouring for attention. So, there was someone in the kitchen, sorting through her cupboards, using her utensils. What the hell did it matter?
* * *
It was still dark when Tanya woke but she’d slept the sleep of the dead. After stuffing herself with Charlie’s jerk chicken – his granny had taught him well –they had finished with a pretty hefty glass of whisky each. She had dragged herself up the stairs and fallen onto the mattress, pulling the duvet over her face and breathing in the smell of home. She couldn’t remember what they had talked about, but it had been easy and quiet. This was going to be okay. It was only for a short while anyway and he was good to have around. Carol was a lucky woman.
It was just after six and she was first downstairs and started the coffee maker. There was bread in the box and she made toast. With her laptop on the kitchen table she reviewed again, for what seemed the hundredth time, all they had. It wasn’t much.
Charlie was dressed and ready to go when he came into the kitchen and she was suddenly very aware of her dressing gown and slippers. “Grab some coffee, Charlie, I don’t know what you want…” She stopped, she wasn’t going to do that – he wasn’t her guest. Anyway, he was already reaching in the fridge for a bowl of fruit and a yoghurt.
“We’re missing something, Charlie. None of it hangs together. It’s as if it’s bits and pieces with no common denominator.”
She’d jotted notes on a pad in front of her. “We’ve got a dead prostitute. A burned-out storage unit with two high-performance cars. A dead homeless guy. Basically, that’s it. No reasons, no connections. There are no answers, just why this and why that. I think we need to go back to the very beginning. Let’s find out more about Suzanne Roper – everything. We still need to find where she was living. Have we found any bank accounts for her? We need to know whether she was still on the game or if she’d maybe managed to move on. We need more. I want to speak to Alan Parker. Then there’s Colin, why kill him? He had to have known something. Not much to go on, is it?”
“Kate is already on to the bank account search and we’ve had the guys on the ground interviewing Roper’s friends. Nobody seems to know much except that she hadn’t been on the same patch for quite a while,” Charlie said.
“Great, we need to do that ourselves, I reckon. Let’s start to bring some of them in.”
“I’ll get on to that now, before they all disappear. You know, Freddy Stone is the only connection with Colin, it was his comment that started us looking for him.”
“That’s true. He keeps getting more and more interesting. There’s something fishy about him. We’ve got him to interview this morning. Sit in with me. Right, let’s get on with it.”
Chapter 45
The girls were not happy. When the patrols on the ground were instructed to pick up any of the streetwalkers that were still around, they only found a few stragglers: women who had worked all night and were waiting for pimps to collect them and take them home, or the few who hung around during the day on the off chance there was a man with time to kill and an itch that needed scratching.
Tanya had asked that they were treated well, as much as possible, given something to eat and held in interview suites rather than banged up in the cells. She didn’t need a pile of hacked off prostitutes to prosecute on top of everything else. Dan, Kate, Sue, and Paul did the preliminary chats.
Eventually Kate called up to the office. “Ellie Clarke. In interview room three. Knew Suzanne a while ago. She hadn’t heard about her death and was pretty cut up about it. I think it might be worth your while having a word, ma’am.”
The woman was skinny, dressed in a short leather skirt and a tight jumper. She looked tired and angry.
“Have you had something to eat, Ellie?” Tanya asked. The woman nodded.
“Had a bacon bap.”
“Do you want anything else, more tea or coffee?”
“Nah. I’m good. Just want to get off home.”
“I know. You’ve had a caution, I think?”
“Yeah, yeah, done all that crap. You’d think there’d be better things for you to do. What with all this terrorism and stuff. Knife crime, bloody kids on scooters robbing people, and you pick on us.”
“I’m sorry about that. We have no real choice, you are breaking the law. Mind you, we could make that go away. If we could say you came in just to help us out. Because you’re right, we do have other things that we are trying to do. I’m trying to find out about Suzanne Roper. Detective Constable Lewis says you knew her?”
“You can do that, fix it about the caution?”
Tanya nodded. “I can. So, Suzanne, you knew her?”
“Well, only for a bit you know, and I hadn’t seen her for ages. I didn’t know she was dead though; I heard somebody was, but I never thought it could be her. Bit of a shocker. She didn’t deserve that.”
“No, nobody deserves that,” Tanya said. “We’re doing our best to find out what happened to her, but we need help.” As the woman raised her eyebrows and pushed the chair away from the table, Tanya held up a hand. “It’s okay. I’m not asking you to do anything you’d be uncomfortable with. I ju
st need to know more about her life, more about where she’d been living, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know. I know she used to live in a shared house with a couple of other girls, for a bit anyway, but I reckon they’ve all moved off. I don’t know where she’d been lately. She was a bit of a snob in a way, thought she was a bit above the rest of us. She wasn’t though, was she? Not really. Just a girl on the game. Still, I’m sorry she’s the one who got killed.”
“Did she have a pimp? We’ve been asking around and we heard she might have had someone.”
“She was straightening out, I know she was trying hard,” Ellie said.
“Yes, we’d heard that as well. It’s a shame. Trying to sort herself out and then this happened. Anything at all you can tell us might help. Even if you think it’s not important. We’re a bit stuck here. If it had been you, wouldn’t you want her to help us?” Tanya wondered if that had been a mistake, but Ellie Clark nodded her head slowly.
“I don’t know much. Big Mikey Malone ran her for a while. When she started to sort herself out, you know. I don’t know if she was with someone before that, she never told me. I met her after she’d been had up the first time. Anyway, you guys put him out the picture. Mikey.”
“Nobody took over his girls?” Charlie asked.
“You’re joking. Somebody shopped him for GBH, he’ll get out in a few years and nobody wants him looking at them, he’s bad news. Knows some nasty people. No – they were left to fend for themselves. She hung about for a bit, stopped turning out so often, and then she just faded away. Haven’t seen her for ages.”
“Did she have no particular friends?”
“Ha – it’s not like some bloody film out there, you know. We’re not all mates. I suppose I was the closest thing and it was only because we’re both from up north.”
“So, you’ve no idea where she lived recently?”
“No, I already said. You haven’t got a clue, have you? She’s dead and you haven’t any idea who did it. Poor bitch. Burned up I heard, and you lot, you’re just flapping about like blue-arsed flies.”
Bracelets jangled as Ellie bent to pick up her huge tote bag. She pointed a scarlet nail at Tanya. “You promised to fix this for me. Don’t forget, yeah?”
With a disgusted glance in their direction, she strode out leaving the door to slam shut behind her. It was depressing to acknowledge that she was right. They still didn’t have a clue.
Back in the incident room, they wrote the new names on the noticeboard. “Kate, can you find out about this Malone bloke?” Tanya glanced at her watch. “Charlie and me are seeing Freddy Stone in about ten minutes and then we’ll have a conference this afternoon, four o’clock. I’m not sure what we’ve got since yesterday but we need to have a session. In the meantime, Sue, can you get on to Moira and find out what time they are going to post-mortem Colin? Paul, Dan get back out on the streets, see if we can find out any more about where Colin was and why he’d run. Was he running because of guilt or because of fear or, well, I don’t know, something else entirely?
“Otherwise get your bloody thinking caps on people. We need to come up with something to move this on. Go over everything we’ve got so far and try and find me some bloody links. Charlie, we’re still looking for Colin’s trolley, can you make sure the street patrols are aware?”
She glanced at her watch. “You should be able to catch the briefing before they start their patrol. Kate, go through the reports from the search at the river, see if there’s anything there I should know about. I should think if his stuff had been in the water we would have heard by now.”
Tanya went into her office, read through the overnight reports and saw that someone had pencilled in an appointment with the detective chief inspector in the afternoon. She lifted the receiver to call his secretary and try to put it off for a while. She really needed to have something to tell him by the time she met him.
Chapter 46
Kate knocked once and pushed open the office door. “Have you got a minute, ma’am?”
Tanya glanced at her watch. “Charlie, can you ring down to the desk, ask them to show Freddy Stone into an interview room. Let him stew a bit. He’s due in at ten. We’ll go down there about half-past I reckon. Yes, come in, Kate, what have you got?”
Kate Lewis was carrying a couple of sheets of paper, she had a pen tucked behind her ear, tangled in her hair. She pulled at it and grimaced. “Shit. I really shouldn’t do that. Habit. If you put a pen down at our house it’s gone. Anyway...” She spread the papers in front of Tanya. “First off, Mickey Malone. Don’t think that’s going to tell us anything much. He’s banged up in Long Lartin, causing trouble now and then. The word is that nobody will have anything to do with his ‘girls’ because of the repercussions when he comes out. Of course, it’s impossible to know what’s happening with his ‘outside interests’. As far as they know he hasn’t had a visit from Suzanne Roper, not under her own name anyway and if he’d phoned her, it must have been on an illegal mobile. Do you want to go and see him?”
“I don’t think there’s much point, is there? Not unless his name comes up again. I mean, if he left her to her own devices and she drifted away.” Tanya shrugged. “Put that on the back burner for now. Is there anything else?”
“Yes, there is. Right. So, another thing I’ve been working on. The officers up in Leeds. The ones who went to break the news to our victim’s aunt,” Kate said.
Tanya nodded.
“I’ve printed out the report.” Kate pointed to one of the papers. “Apparently she was less than devastated. Didn’t want to know about her ‘bloody niece’.” Kate made quote marks in the air. “‘Brought shame on the family. Running off to be a whore’ and so on. Quite a rant. Anyway, she is refusing to have anything to do with claiming the body. ‘Let them stick her in a pauper’s grave like her poor mother’ were the exact words I believe. She told them Suzanne had been asked to contribute to funeral costs and been unable or maybe unwilling. In the end, the council had arranged disposal of the body. Contact between the aunt and Suzanne had been by mobile phone, turned out to be a pay-as-you-go, long defunct now so that’s no help.
“Anyway, I looked into it more. I contacted the local council. Of course, they were helpful because they thought maybe they could reclaim some funeral expenses. They have three years to claw it back, so they’d be pretty chuffed to find someone with some cash. I might have led them on a bit.” She grinned. “Bloody local councils. Anyway, the mother died just over eighteen months ago. She wasn’t married, divorced years ago, and the ex is dead. The aunt, only other living relative apart from the estranged daughter, is on benefits and disability. Broke, in other words. No insurance obviously. So, as we have seen, the body was cremated at a pauper’s funeral.
“However, a while later someone paid for an entry in the book of remembrance and a memorial rose tree. It was done anonymously. This set the council’s back up a bit as you can imagine, but when they tried to find the mystery person they drew a blank. They tried to trace the bank account, it was an online current account and by the time they got around to it, the account holder had closed it. Of course, the banks were a bit stroppy about giving out information. The woman I spoke to was a bit on her high horse about it all. However, she gave me what details they had, and I have a mate in the Financial Intelligence Unit, we do Zumba together.”
“You do what?” Charlie said.
“Zumba, you know, the keep fit dance thing.” Kate did a jiggle of her hips and grinned at him. “Anyway, the point is she did a bit of digging, they have more clout with the banks and it looks like it could very well be our victim. The address is a rental flat. I’ve been on to the agent, but they won’t give out any much without a visit. They gave me the data protection spiel, but I’m on it. It’s not that far away, I thought I’d get down there right now if that’s okay, boss.”
Tanya picked up the sheet of paper. “Oh yes, Kate, this is brilliant. At last a move in the right direction
. Take Sue with you, get everything you can. They must have seen some ID. See if there’s someone who remembers her. It looks like a breakthrough.”
The other woman beamed back across the desk.
Chapter 47
Freddy Stone was irritated. He paced back and forth in the small room glaring at the constable who had been left to supervise. He spun around as Tanya and Charlie walked in.
“About bloody time. I was just about to leave. I don’t know what’s the matter with you people. I’ve answered your questions, I’ve told you all there is to tell you and yet…” He swept his hand in a half circle, taking in the room, the constable, all of it. “Here I am again, wasting my bloody time.”
“Thank you very much for agreeing to see us again,” Tanya said. “We won’t keep you much longer.” She was calm, quiet. It took the wind out of his sails. “Would you like to take a seat. Can we get you a cup of coffee, tea, water?”
“Christ sake. No. Look I just want to get off. What do you want to know?”
“I would like to go over a couple of points, please sit down. You don’t mind if I record this, do you?”
“Do I have any bloody choice?” He threw himself onto the small plastic chair and propped his elbows on the table. “Get on with it then.” His trainers drummed a tattoo on the floor tiles.
Tanya leaned over to look at his knee which juddered up and down. He shifted on the seat, leaned back with a muttered expletive, and folded his arms across his chest. Charlie set up the recording equipment. They went through the preliminaries; Freddy Stone mumbling his name in a sulky low voice.
“Mr Stone,” Tanya began, “you have already told my colleagues that you turned into the alley off Crowell Road in order to relieve yourself. Is that correct?”
“Yes, no law against it.” He snarled back.
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