Angel: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 4)

by LJ Ross

  “Hello,” MacKenzie entered the office without bothering to knock. She recognised the man sitting behind the grimy Perspex safety window instantly from her time spent working in Tyneside Area Command, before she transferred to Northumbria CID.

  The security guard turned in his chair but didn’t bother to turn off the pornographic movie playing on a tiny portable television set wedged between the six other CCTV screens.

  “Sorry to interrupt you,” MacKenzie added, with disdain.

  He scowled at both of them, from his good eye.

  “Now, don’t fucking start on me today n’all,” he said belligerently, heaving his wide bulk out of the chair. Lowerson regarded him with a flinty stare, shifting his feet so that they were shoulder-width apart and ready to square off, if necessary. “You buggers already dragged me inside last night—”

  “Been brawling again, Mick?”

  The big man turned from his suspicious inspection of the young poser wearing a shiny suit towards the attractive, conservatively-dressed redhead with bright green eyes.

  “Non’ a’ your business,” he said, gruffly.

  “Howay, Mick,” MacKenzie said amiably. “You’d think after thirty years of picking fights, you’d be bored of it by now.”

  “Aye, well we can’t all ponce about like you,” the other returned, once again sliding his eyes over Lowerson’s suit and tie. He would have given his right arm for a suit like that, instead of the scratchy black two-piece which came as part of his uniform.

  “You’ve had your chances,” MacKenzie’s tone didn’t change, but Lowerson detected the note of warning.

  “After the Falklands—” Jobes tried another tack.

  “There were a lot of lads who struggled,” she snapped. “Nobody’s saying it wasn’t hard, Mick.”

  Jobes started to say something else but thought better of it. He recognised the redheaded copper now and remembered that she’d always been decent, as far as pigs went.

  “If you’re not here to bang on about being drunk and disorderly, then what do you want?”

  “Actually, we’re here in connection with the death of a woman. We’re trying to piece together her last movements,” Lowerson supplied, flashing his warrant card.

  “Haven’t found any dead women around here,” Mick shrugged his enormous shoulders. The dingy yellow light from the single bulb shone directly overhead, illuminating the shiny bald patch on top of his shaven head.

  “You should check over the cemeteries,” he tagged on, and wheezed out a laugh at his own joke.

  Behind him, the volume suddenly increased on the television set and Lowerson stabbed the ‘off’ button to silence the offensive sound.

  “She didn’t die here,” MacKenzie took out the picture of Barbara Hewitt and showed it to Jobes. “Do you recognise her?”

  The man screwed up his bulldog face and then let out a raspberry sound.

  “I see hundreds o’ women passing through here every day, looking just like her,” he said, a bit unkindly. “You’d have more luck asking me if I’d seen her car.”

  “Alright,” MacKenzie shrugged a shoulder. “She drove an electric blue Citroen C1, with a 2014 registration plate.”

  “When am I s’posed to have seen her?”

  “Try last Friday.”

  Mick scratched inside his ear with a thick finger.

  “Nah, not a car like that. If you’d said she drove an Aston or a Jag…”

  “She liked a bit of a moan,” Lowerson interjected. “You could say she was a woman who liked to make complaints. Ring any bells?”

  Mick’s eyes lit up briefly.

  “Hang on,” he reached onto a shelf for a tatty cardboard file marked ‘COMPLAINTS’. After thumbing through the paperwork for a minute or two, he retrieved three sheets of paper.

  “Aye, here we are,” he said. “Some woman called Barbara Hewitt made two complaints in two months and she drove a Citroen C1, registration LH14 SNJ. Is that her?”

  “Maybe,” MacKenzie held out a patient hand for the documents.

  “Ah, wait a minute, aren’t you supposed to have a warrant or something?”

  “Balls to that, man,” Lowerson flicked the papers out of Jobes’ hand and scanned through them. “She says she found scratches on her car.”

  “Aye, and the reason for that is because she always parked closest to the pillar on the second level, right in the corner. Same bloody parking space every time. She jammed her car between the outer wall and the pillar and that made it hard for her to get out of the driver’s side, so she always scratched the car door. Then she tried to say it was kids who did it.”

  “Did she come and make a complaint to the office, here?”

  Jobes looked cagily between them.

  “Must’ve done, I can’t remember.”

  MacKenzie nodded towards the CCTV screens, which were all blank.

  “Is there a fault?”

  Mick didn’t bother to turn around. The cameras hadn’t worked properly for nearly two years but the management didn’t want that getting about and they had issued strict instructions about what to say, if anybody should ask.

  “Aye, a fault was registered just this morning,” he said, affably. “They’re sending a technician out later on.”

  MacKenzie searched his face.

  “We’ll need a copy of the footage for last Friday and the Friday before that. I presume that won’t be a problem?”

  He blinked a few times and looked into the space over MacKenzie’s right shoulder.

  “’Course,” he said eventually. “I’ll—ah—I’ll get in touch when the system’s back up and running.”

  “Mick, I have to ask. What times were you on duty last Friday and Saturday?”

  The big man slowly turned a shade of red.

  ‘You better not be trying to pin owt on me!”

  “Calm down. It’s standard procedure, you should know that by now. We will ask the same question of any other security guards working in the building, if you’d be kind enough to let us have their names.”

  “There’s two of us,” the other replied, anger subsiding. Quick to flare up and quick to die down again. “We do two weeks on, two weeks off the night shift. The last week, I’ve been on the day shift and Jamil was doing the nights.”

  “So the last couple of weeks you were working between—what? Eight a.m. and six p.m.?”

  “Eight and eight.”

  Lowerson made a note.

  “What happens when somebody makes multiple complaints, Mick?”

  “Management sticks their oar in.”

  “Did they give you some grief about this?” She held out the pages listing Barbara’s complaints and gave Jobes a level, uncompromising look.

  After some sort of internal struggle, Jobes bobbed his head.

  “Aye, you could say as much,” he muttered, then jabbed a blunt finger at Lowerson’s chest. MacKenzie noted idly that it bore an old tattoo in the shape of a tiny crucifix, repeated on each of the four fingers of his right hand. “But I wouldn’t kill some old bitch for that. As if I give two shits about this place!” He gestured at the office, which carried an odour of petrol fumes and leftover kebab.

  He might not care about it, they thought, but it was the only job he had.

  They left him to enjoy the rest of his film in peace and, after a brief visit to the second level to see where Barbara had preferred to park, the two detectives headed slowly back towards the city centre.

  “What’s your feeling on Jobes?” Lowerson asked. “Is something like killing Barbara Hewitt his style?”

  MacKenzie sighed.

  “He’s a scrapper, there’s no denying that. He spends more of his time in trouble than out of it. But strangling Barbara Hewitt?” MacKenzie shook her head disbelievingly. “I can’t see him going all the way up there to kill some old woman simply for making a complaint. I might have stretched to a botched burglary because he’s got form for that, but there’s no evidence that anything was stolen fro
m her house.”

  “No, that doesn’t seem to have been the motivation,” Lowerson said. “Mick seems hard as nails, though. You’re sure he wouldn’t get the idea in his head and drive up to Rothbury, anyway?”

  MacKenzie turned her face up to the spring sunshine and took her time before answering.

  “When I was working down here, I booked him for all kinds of assault and battery, drunk and disorderly, possession, that sort of thing. I know a bit about Jobes’ background: he grew up in the care system and then went into the army, where he was medically discharged for post-traumatic stress. Apparently, he used to hallucinate that the people he’d killed whilst fighting had come back from the dead,” she explained, with a trace of sympathy. “So, yeah, he’s troubled, but I still don’t think he’d kill in cold blood. Not without a good reason, anyway.”

  Lowerson nodded but cast another searching look back over his shoulder at the towering concrete car park and wondered about the man sitting inside.

  * * *

  Lewis Pinks was a poor excuse for a human being. Everybody knew it, including him. Sometimes, after he’d watched one of those true crime documentaries, he’d reflect on his own psyche and consider whether he might have been a better man if he’d been born to different parents or if he’d had a ‘normal’ childhood.

  Then he’d look out of the window at his brand new white Range Rover with its shiny silver alloys and bespoke leather interior, reminding him that life was too good to mourn his lack of human empathy. Besides, it wasn’t as if he didn’t keep in touch with the little man. On Saturdays, he did his regular rounds collecting payments, issuing warnings for those in arrears and generally checking what he considered to be his livestock.

  The next stop on his list was Karen Dobbs.

  He drove slowly through the streets of Daisy Hill, feeling like a king. Lewis had been born in one of these poky little houses and he’d learned his trade from the dealers who visited his mother. He’d held her head over the manky toilet seat and cleaned up the slop afterwards. He’d stolen bread and milk from the corner shop to feed himself when she’d been too paralytic to notice that he was starving. He supposed that’s where he had learned, first hand, the true meaning of supply and demand.

  Lewis pulled up outside Karen’s narrow house as the digital clock on his space-age dashboard flashed 13:41. He jumped down from his elevated seat onto the pavement and swore as his new high tops squelched into a fresh pile of dog shit. He wiped his shoe on the tiny patch of dried-out grass outside the house and eyed the street kids who emerged from the shadows to cast hungry eyes over his car.

  “Oi! Touch my car and I’ll find you, you little pricks!”

  They scattered as he walked the rest of the way to Karen’s front door, curling his lip at the peeling paint. He raised his fist to bang a few times.

  Nothing.

  She was probably off her face, he thought.

  He banged on the door again and shifted his feet impatiently, flicking a glance at the heavy gold watch which hung from his skinny wrist.

  “Karen! Fuck’s sake! Answer the door!”

  If she was trying to get off for another week without coughing up what she owed him, then she’d be sorry. He raised his foot to the door and gave it a couple of good kicks until it swung open to reveal the dim hallway beyond.

  He tugged at his new jacket and stepped inside, careful to avoid brushing against the doorframe. You never knew what you might catch.

  “Karen!”

  His nose wrinkled delicately as he entered the hallway. The place was always a stinking mess but today it was especially bad. The walls were scarred and stained and the ancient carpet stuck to the soles of his shoes as he padded towards what could loosely be called the living room.

  “I haven’t got time for this…”

  Lewis poked his head through the doorways and saw the usual dilapidation but no sign of Karen. He knew that she preferred to jack up in her bedroom so he traipsed up the narrow staircase to find her. He only hoped she hadn’t taken an overdose; he couldn’t be bothered with the aggravation.

  Lewis emerged onto the street a couple of minutes later feeling worried. Nobody was more surprised than he, but that was undoubtedly the emotion he was experiencing. He warred with himself and tried brushing it off but the feeling wouldn’t be quelled.

  He knew what he had to do.

  * * *

  Less than an hour later, Ryan and Phillips received word that an anonymous call had come in to report a missing woman by the name of Karen Dobbs. The caller had given a brief physical description and stated Karen’s address in Daisy Hill before ringing off. It hadn’t taken much for a bright-eyed telephone operative to connect the dots between a missing redhead and the woman they had found at Heaton Cemetery that very morning.

  A simple cross-check against Criminal Records had elicited a match between their second victim and Karen Marie Dobbs, a thirty-two-year-old woman with a long history of drug abuse and solicitation.

  “Sad business,” Phillips said gruffly.

  “Yes.”

  There was nothing more that Ryan could say. He didn’t need to climb onto a soap box and lecture Frank about the evils and degradations of drug addiction; he didn’t need to tell him about the perpetual cycle of despair that led people to use, to forget their responsibilities and their personal safety.

  “It’s the same man,” was all he did say, while they walked through Karen’s tiny house. One of Faulkner’s CSIs accompanied them as they made their way from room to room—Faulkner himself was fully occupied trying to record the smallest details from both major crime scenes. The forecast for Easter Sunday was ‘scattered showers’, which for the north of England was an almost certain indicator of monsoon rainfall. That being the case, Faulkner was racing against the weather as well as the mounting fear that another body might be found before his work was done.

  They moved upstairs, where Ryan committed the details of Karen’s bedroom to memory since it appeared to be where she had spent the majority of her time. Not that there was much in the way of furniture; just a rickety futon which served as a bed and a cheap pine chair. A pile of dirty clothes had been slung into a corner and the debris of a well-established user was strewn across the floor.

  “I’ll speak to the neighbours,” Phillips said. “They might have seen something.”

  Ryan had already considered the possibilities.

  “She must have had a regular patch. Speak to social services and the vice team, recall her case files and we’ll go through them with a fine toothed comb. I want to know how she was selected.”

  Phillips made a rumbling sound of agreement.

  “He was either known to her or a pick-up. It’s the most likely explanation.”

  Ryan dipped down to his knees and looked under the futon but found nothing except old needles and a lot of dust. Standing upright again, he moved across to the chair and carefully lifted the clothes to check underneath. As he did, a small leaflet fell to the floor, which he bent down to retrieve.

  “Narcotics anonymous,” he murmured, slipping it inside a plastic evidence wallet. “St Andrew’s RC Church on Friday nights at seven o’clock. There’s a Catholic connection, Frank. We’ll check to see if she went along—could be that our killer followed her from there.”

  Ryan cast a final look around the room and his eye caught on a cheap wooden photo frame which sat on the window ledge. He moved across to take a closer look and his heart plummeted. Inside the frame was a picture of a small boy of around three with bright red hair and dimples.

  “Ah, God,” he muttered.

  * * *

  Over in the city centre, the final stop on MacKenzie and Lowerson’s whirlwind tour of ‘A Day in the Life of Barbara Hewitt’ ended at The Lobster Pot, a classy, brasserie-style restaurant located a short walk away from the Tyneside Cinema on Grey Street. All around them, the city was bustling with people taking advantage of the bank holiday weekend. Mothers with young children dragged t
hem into shops and promised milkshakes as a reward for good behaviour. Young couples strolled along the Quayside hand in hand, tracing the path of the river which glimmered steel grey in the midday sun. Teenagers granted a reprieve from school spent their pocket money on fast food and packs of girls moved between the window displays, swinging their glossy carrier bags as they went. MacKenzie and Lowerson paused beside the towering monument to Earl Grey and watched them pass by in whirlwind of colour and sound.

  “It’s a good place, isn’t it?” Lowerson blurted out.

  He didn’t know why the thought had popped into his mind or why he’d said it aloud. He supposed that he had grown accustomed to the area, having spent all of his life in Newcastle. He kept telling himself that one day he’d move down south and join the Met. Ryan had told him a few stories about the time he’d spent working in London and it sounded exciting to someone who had only visited the capital twice before—and one of those times on a school trip.

  But standing here amongst the crowds he found himself looking at his hometown afresh and, to his surprise, he didn’t find it lacking. There was a solidarity to the place; a jovial atmosphere which was reflected in its people and it made him feel protective.

  “Come on, let’s get going,” he said suddenly and MacKenzie parodied a salute.

  “Yessir!”

  They weaved through the throng of shoppers until they reached the top of Grey Street, which was an architectural dream with its Georgian terraces curving gently downhill towards the Quayside. The Theatre Royal stood proudly to their left, with its classic columns and large boards touting performances of The Marriage of Figaro and South Pacific. They strolled down the pavement until they reached the large glass-fronted doors of the restaurant and Lowerson pulled an expressive face at the red carpeted entranceway flanked by two small conifers. A fancy gold sign hung above the door with a tasteful depiction of a lobster sitting beside it. Inside, they were immediately met by the scent of delicious food and Lowerson’s stomach rumbled loudly.

  “Hungry?” MacKenzie grinned.

  “Just a bit. I don’t suppose…?”