by Chris Simms
NINE
Janet Blake flicked the little hammer of the bicycle bell. She’d asked Sean to mount it on the armrest of her motorized wheelchair because the noise was less offensive than the thing’s buzzer. Children, she’d noticed, always reacted. She suspected because it bore a resemblance to a sleigh bell, which meant Christmas, which meant presents.
But adults and teenagers, especially those engrossed in their phones, were often oblivious. Janet could tell she’d be in for a long wait before the four young men blocking the walkway heard her.
So she went to her back-up tactic.
She’d spotted the brass horn in a charity shop window and immediately knew it would be perfect. Squeezing the bulb of rubber at the end created a comical hoo-hee sound. Janet had heard every response, multiple times.
Watch your backs, Coco’s coming through!
Selling tickets for the circus, love?
Bloody hell, thought you were the Keystone Cops.
She’d learned during her time on the force that a bit of humour made people far more cooperative.
The four lads were now looking down at her with a mixture of surprise and amusement.
‘Didn’t want to catch any of your ankles there!’
Taking their time, they stepped out of her way.
She proceeded towards the far side of Piccadilly Gardens. The area had been extensively redeveloped. Groupings of shiny benches, raised grassy areas and an elaborate water feature that never worked. The plan had been for it to form a pleasant open-air space in the centre of the city.
That plan had fallen flat.
At 9.25 on a Friday morning, the area had become a congregating point for those who didn’t work regular hours. Or for those who didn’t work at all. Her practiced eye observed the choreographed movements of various young men. The subtle nods and the slouching gaits. Little packages that slipped from one hand into another. The purchaser of drugs peeling away, suddenly keen to be gone, the seller immediately scanning for his next customer.
Janet steered her wheelchair round the corner of the building beside the tram tracks. The front office of Transport For Greater Manchester consisted mainly of ticket counters and information desks. Racks laden with timetables and price schemes for the city’s interconnected network of buses, trains and trams. Ridesocial cycling routes. Leaflets suggesting day trip destinations: Bury Market, Stockport Hat Museum, the Thomas & Friends Experience on the East Lancashire Railway.
She always appreciated the return to a smooth surface of carpet. Steering round some members of the public, she glided over to the far door, where she pressed her pass against a touchpad. The door swung back and she continued down a corridor and into the large office. ‘Morning, Stella!’
The woman at the first desk glanced up. ‘Hello there.’
Janet’s desk was set apart from the others. This gave her enough room to swing the wheelchair in. Her computer and keyboard were on a hydraulic arm that she could extend and lower to the required height.
‘It’s that meeting at quarter to,’ Stella stated.
The organization was in the middle of its quarterly customer survey – an exercise that entailed trying to coax harassed, time-pressed or just plain exhausted passengers into accepting forms that they could complete and return from the comfort of their own home. A response rate of well under half a per cent was considered excellent.
‘Whoop-di-do,’ Janet replied.
Stella smiled knowingly.
Ten minutes later, they were all gathered in the ground floor’s main meeting room. Len Benson had been put in charge of the survey. Prior to starting in the office, he’d driven buses for over twenty years. His paunch formed a doughy fold over the front of his trousers and the blubber that had built up around his face and neck permanently gleamed. The whiteboard behind him displayed a map of the city’s transport system. A click of the mouse caused everything to fade but the bus routes.
‘OK,’ Len panted. ‘Last day for focusing on the south-west section of the city. Janet, I’ve allocated you the wheelchair friendly routes going out to Parr’s Wood and Heaton Mersey. That all right?’
Another day sitting in the special bay up by the driver, pressing forms, complete with prepaid envelopes, into the reluctant hands of passengers. ‘Fine with me, Len, thanks.’
TEN
The afternoon briefing took place at five, once the team was back from the third victim’s flat.
Victoria Walker was a twenty-one-year-old from Urmston. She worked as a customer service representative for an Audi garage. The office where she worked was in Trafford Park, a vast and soulless industrial estate to the east of Manchester United’s football ground.
Her body had been discovered by her father, who had a spare set of keys to the tiny flat that Victoria, with assistance from a government scheme aimed at first-time buyers, had just put a deposit down for.
It appeared she had been dead for at least three days.
The apartment was on the ground floor and formed part of a modern-looking development designed to give its occupants the illusion of not living in what was, essentially, a large block of flats.
Small balconies jutted out on the skewed upper floors, each one angled and screened so adjacent ones weren’t in view. Victoria’s apartment had its own walkway up to the front door which was set back in a deep recess created, in part, by the overhanging balcony of the flat directly above.
DCI Ransford pinned Victoria’s photo to the board and stepped aside. She was, by several years, the youngest victim so far. And also very pretty, Sean thought, despite the hackneyed selfie-pout, fake eyelashes and hair in a carefully arranged tumble down one side of her face. The shoulder strap of her halter neck top had a silvery sheen.
Sean tried to stop himself from making assumptions: party girl, socializer, pre-loading with drinks before a big night out.
Ransford crossed his arms and surveyed the room. ‘What links this woman to Ian Cahill? We need to know. Was her contact with him direct or through an intermediary? We know Victoria wasn’t single: she’d been seeing a Ryan Hewitt for almost five years. They got engaged in February, on Valentine’s Day.’
Sean found himself adjusting the party girl persona.
‘Is it Ryan Hewitt who’s had dealings with Cahill? Has Victoria Walker’s dad?’
He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the section of board devoted to Cahill.
‘We know he’s got priors for a range of offences, most of them money-related. Credit card fraud, handling stolen goods, knocking on elderly folk’s doors offering to fix their drives or clean their gutters. The search of the property he fled from has turned up some interesting paperwork. Seems his current thing is a crash-for-cash racket.’
Sean’s gaze shifted to Ian Cahill’s mug shot. It was the sort of thing he could see someone like Cahill being involved in; there’d been plenty of media reports on how vehicle collisions were being staged at roundabouts in order to then make massive insurance claims.
‘Could he have set something up with Victoria Walker to defraud the Audi dealership?’ Ransford asked, taking another step along to Pamela Flood’s photo.
‘We know of Flood’s involvement with Cahill’s previous scams. Obviously, the two had recently fallen out. So how heavily involved was she with this latest one? Could she have been the one who originally approached Victoria, perhaps proposing some kind of sting on Audi? Any records of Cahill or Walker contacting the dealership for a test drive or similar?’
He came to a stop and crossed his arms.
‘If we’re working on the basis Cahill needed to stop them all talking – or that he was punishing then for having talked – who the hell were they talking with? Not us, certainly. Another criminal gang? If the murders are serving as a warning, who is the warning for? Could there be any others on his list? All this is going to need some substantial rejigging of allocated actions. Inspector Troughton.’
The office manager got to his feet. ‘So, we’ll be mapping
the latest victim’s last twenty-four hours. We’re already obtaining all her financial and telecoms records. The laptop recovered from her flat has already gone to …’
As Troughton continued to outline the workload ahead, Sean let his eyes wander across the rest of the board. He studied Victoria Walker’s and Francesca Pinto’s pictures. Two women, in full-time jobs, hard-working and clearly ambitious. Both on the property ladder, planning for the long-term. What had either of them to gain from an association with someone like Cahill?
The mention of Mark Wheeler’s name plunged Sean back into the room.
Ransford’s head had dropped. ‘No change, as far as we know. I gather the plan is to keep him sedated until he’s stabilized, then start to explore if there’s any long-term consequences. It’s very likely he’s suffered nerve damage that will severely affect his mobility, but that’s not definite.’ He looked up. ‘His family, by the way, said anyone is welcome to drop by. I’ll email the details of where you can find him in the hospital. Questions?’
‘What’s the situation with the press?’
DCI nodded. ‘Good point. Tina?’
The head of media relations had been observing proceedings from the open doorway of the DCI’s office. Pushing a pair of square lens glasses with turquoise frames up into a shock of auburn hair, she stepped fully out. ‘Probably the one break we’ve had so far is with the news cycle. The Manchester Evening Chronicle has all but signed off the main stories for their Saturday edition. At the moment, editorial are aware of Pamela Flood’s and Francesca Pinto’s murders, but – as far as we know – not Victoria Walker’s.’
She raised a finger for emphasis.
‘The advantage we currently have is that Sunday editions are more features- and less news-focused. As a result, they are planned well ahead. If we can keep Victoria Walker’s death quiet for the next, say, ten hours, they won’t be able to shunt aside the Sunday features they currently have in place. What they will do, however, is make major amounts of space ready for Monday morning. I’m anticipating front pages.’
‘So, with luck, we’re spared all the extra fuss until then?’ Ransford asked.
She nodded. ‘Online is a different matter, but I’ve been keeping back a great story about a pensioner’s lost wedding ring. It was found last week during a search of a known burglar’s address. Tomorrow, the ring gets handed back to a Joyce and Walter Clayton of Harpurhey. Married for over fifty years, still in the same terraced house. I’ll get them to go over their wedding photos, grandkids sitting alongside them if we’re lucky. It’s the perfect feel-good police story. Granada have already confirmed they’ll use it as their anchor story. Online will lap it up, too.’
Sean hadn’t realized the part media considerations played in a high-profile murder case. What the woman had been talking about was employing a news item solely to deflect attention from another. Spin.
There was something sad about the way Ransford cleared his throat. ‘So, what that means for us is this: we have the weekend to find Cahill. I want this man locked up before Monday. Anything else?’
No one spoke up.
‘OK. It’s a quarter past five. I know it’s a Friday night, but we have been given the green light on overtime. Anyone looking to head home in the next three hours, make Inspector Troughton aware of your intention before you leave. I don’t want anything that could have been resolved this evening left hanging: eight o’clock tomorrow morning, I’ll be upstairs with whichever assistant chief is on duty. I want the progress report I’ll be giving him absolutely watertight.’
ELEVEN
It was almost ten o’clock by the time Sean felt he could do no more with Francesca Pinto’s statements.
By laboriously combing through the internet, he’d been able to establish who or what was behind most of the transactions not linked to recognizable companies and organizations.
The one that had interested him most was a series of minor payments to Grey Lane Enterprises. Most weeks, at least one transaction took place. None exceeded twenty pounds. It was, he knew, the kind of amount that characterized low-level blackmail – something Cahill was more than capable of.
Eventually, he’d established that Grey Lane Enterprises was the trading name of a Mrs Kate Lawrence, who lived on a Grey Lane, in Denton. From there, he’d worked out that the woman had purchased the franchise for a Wine Store outlet the previous year. The shop was situated on Ashfield Road. A check on Google revealed that was two streets away from Francesca’s home address near Deansgate. Seemed Francesca had quite a taste for Gavi or Viognier or whatever was currently popular with well-off solicitors.
He scanned the room and counted just seven other heads, including DCI Ransford’s. After filing his report on the system with a comment stating that the six remaining unidentified transactions would be followed up first thing the next day, Sean slid his coat from the back of his chair and wandered towards the doors.
‘Night,’ he called over to the remaining detectives, a hand half raised.
‘See you,’ one replied without looking up.
In the car park, he paused beside his car. Ransford had mentioned that Mark Wheeler’s family were fine with anyone visiting their son at the hospital. He checked his watch: ten thirteen. Surely, no one would be there this late?
When he produced his warrant card at the nurse’s station for the MRI’s Intensive Care Unit, it occurred to him that, since becoming a detective constable, this was the first time he’d actually needed it.
As the lift took him up to the ICU a growing sense of anxiety began to eat away at him. He focused on his breathing, trying to keep it slow and steady. Memories of immediately after Mum’s accident were popping up. Being kept back after school, waiting outside the head teacher’s office because there were no relatives who could come and collect him. Being driven to one of his mum’s friend’s houses, not his own. She’d given him spaghetti hoops on toast for tea. He couldn’t stand them, but didn’t dare say. Then the hospital visit. Police officers in the corridor gently ruffling his hair, a female officer turning away with tears on her face. His mum propped up in bed, trying to act like she wasn’t in pain.
Sean stepped out of the lift and looked down the corridor. The ceiling lights were so muted, shadows formed dark pools at regular intervals along the floor. The tepid air was stratified by smells: the cloying fog of sickness occasionally lanced by the scent of cleaning fluid. He remembered it so clearly. Within each bay of beds, a mass of lights shone in the darkness. They blinked with the rhythmic monotony of planes in a night sky.
The car that had mown down his mum had been driven by a thirty-eight-year-old man who had created so much noise while battering his partner, neighbours had rung the police.
Janet had been in the second patrol car to arrive at the scene. The first officers to attend had found a badly injured female lying amid the splintered remains of a kitchen table and chairs. The perpetrator seemed to have left the scene.
As Janet pulled up, he appeared from behind the row of wheelie bins in a neighbour’s front yard. He jumped into a Renault Scenic. Janet’s mistake had been to try and block his escape by standing in the road.
Sean reached the end of the corridor. The last room on the right was number fourteen. He took a couple of steps back and turned to the window. By not looking at the mass of lights, he was able to make out a white expanse below them. Bed covers. The bed was facing sideways to him. His eyes travelled left, towards the wall. Mark’s head and shoulders were shrouded in darkness. All around him, motionless bursts of colour hung in the air.
Bouquets of flowers, he realized, suddenly aware he’d come empty-handed. All the lights winked out, temporarily obscured as a shadow crossed before them. The door opened silently and a tall, stooped man looked out.
‘Have you come to see Mark?’
The resemblance was clear. In fact, the only difference was how a couple of decades had pressed the man’s skin against the bones of his face.
‘I
’m Roger Wheeler, his dad. Please, come in.’
Sean couldn’t move. He wanted to speak, but his lips refused to part. ‘No,’ he croaked then cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, no, I was just popping by.’
The man emerged into the corridor and the door slowly closed itself behind him. ‘That’s very kind. How do you know Mark?’ His hand was outstretched, waiting for Sean’s.
‘We … it was the first day. For both of us.’
The man’s tentative smile faltered. ‘You are …?’
‘Sean … Detective Constable Blake.’
The man’s hand dropped as his face filled with dismay. ‘Why have you come? Why?’ He turned to the window, forlorn as he looked through the glass. ‘Why did you do nothing to help my boy?’ He looked back, rims of his eyes dancing with tears. ‘Why?’
Sean tried to gesture. His arms felt like pendulums. ‘I did. I was about to.’
The man’s head shook. ‘No. You shouldn’t be here.’
‘Mr Wheeler? I don’t know what you’ve been told, but people—’
‘Just go!’ His voice reverberated down the empty corridor.
Sean stepped back.
‘Go,’ he whispered, turning away.
Sean looked at the expanse of glass as the door opened. Light fell across the bed. Mark lay there, a respiratory tube curling from his slack lips.
Aside from Cahill, he was the only person who knew what had really happened in that garden. As the door swung shut, the wedge of light first narrowed then slid off the bed.
To his surprise, the television was still on in the front room. As he made for the kitchen, he heard her stir.
‘Sean?’
Her voice was heavy with sleep. He knew why she wasn’t in bed; she’d been waiting up for him. Just like she did on the very few occasions he went out as a teenager. ‘Yeah, it’s me.’
‘It’s late.’
He opened the fridge and poured himself some milk, automatically making a mental note of what they were running low on. He’d need to do a big shop soon. ‘It is.’