“I don’t think he’s dead.” Miller was staring up at the map. The DCI had everybody’s attention as he stood in front of it. “If he wanted to avoid jail time by topping himself, he was in one of the best locations to do it after he’d sent that tweet. What’s above McDonalds?” Miller patted the map. “Here.”
On the map there was a shopping centre logo. It said “Ladysmith Centre” in bold text. “This place would be an ideal location to top yourself. Just go up onto the multi-story car park and jump off. Job done. But he’s not done that Keith, has he? He’s walked two miles in the direction of Manchester, past the flipping police station, before we’ve lost track of him. But, to give you the benefit of the doubt, let’s look at the other suicide opportunities he passes on his walk to Guide Bridge. He crosses the M60 motorway bridge – but no sign of him jumping. Then he’s crossed the railway junction at Guide Bridge station. Again, no suicides reported by Transport Police. So, unless he’s drowned himself in the canal Keith, I think you’re totally wrong.”
“How could you do that?” asked Chapman.
“Fill a backpack with rocks and stones and jump in,” said Rudovsky, who was the department’s resident expert on canal deaths thanks to her extensive work on the “Lancashire Dipper” enquiry the previous year.
“Has he got a back-pack?” asked Chapman.
“Yes, he has,” replied Saunders. “Look.” Saunders began flicking through his pile of A4 pictures that had been printed from various CCTV shots along the walk from Ashton town centre.
“Oh, God!” said Rudovsky. That’ll be containing his tool kit for…”
“De-cocking Sergeant Knight?” suggested Worthington.
“Right guys! Okay, so he’s got a rucksack on him. Let’s dredge the waterways based on this overwhelming evidence.” Miller seemed very short tempered. “Carry on Keith.”
“I just… I’ve got a feeling that he’s done himself in. There’s no other evidence to contradict this. There was no urgency about him, no stress on his face as he posted the photo of Knight with his penis on his forehead.”
“But that’s illogical in itself!” suggested Miller. “Surely this would be a stressful time – a lot rests on him sending that twitter out before he gets arrested, and he’s in a very exposed location. Logically, he should be stressed, panicking, nervous that something will go wrong.”
“My point precisely!” said Saunders, with a hint of smugness. “But he’s not, he looked to me as though he was very relaxed.” Saunders turned around and started looking at the map, trying to get his bearings. Being stood so close to the map, it was a little disorientating. “Right, so, the CCTV coverage continues all the way up this section of road, right up until he reaches Guide Bridge junction. He quite literally disappears into thin air at this point.” Saunders pointed at the busy looking junction that was being projected onto the wall. It made up the meeting point of three major roads, a railway and a canal.
“My guess,” said Miller, walking in front of the map and causing a large black shadow to cover half of the district, “is that he has jumped a wall around here,” Miller patted the map, “and has joined the canal towpath. It’s the Ashton canal, it goes into Manchester city centre that way, or it goes across the Pennines to Huddersfield in the east. There is also Portland Basin junction half a mile along from here, where the canal splits off into the Peak Forest canal, that one goes off to Stoke-On-Trent. We all know that the canal offers a fantastic amount of options for a criminal on the run – it’s
isolated, especially in the middle of the night. It’s dark, it’s not got any CCTV. It’s the perfect place to slip away.”
“So to sum up, he could be dead. Or he could be anywhere along a canal that has no CCTV.” DC Jo Rudovsky didn’t think that there was any point in this conversation. It was more than forty eight hours since Meyer had been seen in Guide Bridge. This map exercise seemed pointless, a totally fruitless exercise that was going nowhere, and she wasn’t afraid to air her view. “Basically, we haven’t got a Scooby-doo.”
“Any better suggestions, Jo?” Saunders seemed a bit prickly.
“Yes. How about, he’s headed back towards that area because that’s where he’s from? Maybe he wanted to see his dad, but when he got to the flats, he got spooked and carried on walking past. Perhaps a police car was there, do we know if CSI would still have had a presence in the flats?”
“Good point,” said Miller encouragingly. “Very good point Jo. I’ll try and find out if there was still police activity there at that time.”
“And another question is this – how many mates has he got around there, childhood pals, school friends. There will be several addresses around this part of Ashton that he could be staying.”
“True!” said Rudovsky’s partner DC Peter Kenyon. “Have we ID’ed all of his phone contacts yet? We need to see his mobile records, identify all numbers on there and we need to eliminate every single person, every single address that might be harbouring him.”
Miller smiled. Finally, he was seeing a little bit of enthusiasm, and a little bit of initiative. Saunders had tried to get them going, but his suicide theory was just a bit too flimsy for Miller and the team to latch on to. But Kenyon was barking up the right tree, it just felt right, and the rest of them were feeling the energy. Miller suddenly looked like he was becoming interested in this man-hunt for the first time since the meeting began.
“Brilliant!” Miller clapped his hands together. “That’s a really good call Jo, Peter. Makes sense. He’ll know this area like the back of his hand. He’ll know every rat run and hide-out. He’s disappeared into thin air at Guide Bridge, onto the canal path, to resurface somewhere else, without a trail.” Miller stood back and stared hard at the map. “Okay, I’m going to go and find out what we know from his phone records, and to see what else Tameside CID have managed to uncover. While I’m doing that, I want you lot to go there and have a look around. See if you get a scent, see if being in the location, on the canal, or in the area around it gives you an idea or some inspiration. Try and suss out where he’s got onto the canal, and check if surrounding businesses, properties have got any CCTV pointing over the canal. You never know.”
“Nice one,” said Rudovsky, as she stood, beaming. She hated sitting in meetings, she was much more of a walker than a talker.
“And listen,” shouted Miller to his team. “If you see Mr Meyer’s corpse bobbing up and down in the canal, we all owe DI Saunders a pint!”
*****
The SCIU members set off to Guide Bridge, the once small, industrialised village that had been made up of red bricked terraced houses and red bricked mills with red bricked chimney stacks, all clustered around the red bricked railway station. Guide Bridge was now just the suburb that connected Ashton with Audenshaw, much of the industry was gone now, but the heritage was still visible all around, in the form of millions of red bricks, sky-scraping chimneys and the huge, disused railway sidings that nestled silently beside the equally abandoned canal. The detectives had a look around the district as instructed. Saunders, Rudovsky, Chapman, Kenyon and Worthington got a sense of the area, having a good nosey around the surrounding industrial estates, streets and neighbourhoods, before eventually arriving on the canal towpath. There was no dead body in the water.
Miller wasn’t very far away from his team, he was just up the road, parking his car outside Ashton police station. It was just yards away from West End flats, the place where Meyer had visited his dad in the white van just two days earlier. Miller winced at the thought of Sergeant Knight’s injuries, remembering what a shocking state the man was left in. It gave Miller a cold shudder, and reminded him that Meyer was a very dangerous man, capable of doing unthinkable things to another person.
Miller finally began to feel a surge of energy for this task, and the realisation made him feel a little happier than he had been feeling, as he entered the police station and asked to speak to the detective in charge of finding Peter Meyer.
Just a few minutes later, Miller was in the CID department, and DCI Darren Campbell was talking him through the various aspects of their investigation. Miller was impressed, the Tameside detectives had done a great job, and there was plenty to look at. They were well ahead of Miller, and had practically eliminated all family, friends and acquaintances from a list of potential hide-outs.
“You’ve done a really good job. This is incredible.”
“Cheers. It’s a bit of a stab in the back for my guys, you know,” said Campbell, looking across at the incident room wall.
“What is?” asked Miller, turning away from the investigation paraphernalia to look at the younger man. Campbell was well built, muscular with piercing blue eyes and close cropped ginger hair. He dressed smartly, and spoke gently, and he smelled as though he spent a lot of his excellent salary on expensive after-shave. Campbell was a very fresh-faced looking DCI, and he was certainly good at his work. Miller remembered hearing that Campbell was a bit of a heart-throb amongst male, and female colleagues on the police circuit a number of times. It was nice to finally meet him at last.
“Well, being suspended from this investigation. All this work, shit loads of overtime, all for nowt.” Campbell waved his hand at the sheer volume of work that lay before the two men.
“I’m not surprised. It’d piss me off as well,” said Miller. “But the new Chief did it, not me.”
“Yeah, I know, I know… I’m just saying.”
“Well, cheer up. I’m un-suspending you. So tell your team to carry on, as you were. You’re doing an absolutely first-class job, and if it’s alright, I’ll ask a couple of my team to work with you, keeping an eye on the investigation, and maybe learning a few new tricks from your lot.”
Campbell was stunned at what Miller was saying. The news lit the younger DCI up, he was grinning from ear to ear. “Oh, right. Nice one. I thought all this was going in a van, over to your offices?”
“Na. The new Chief just wanted me to oversee everything. Too many chiefs syndrome, it was all getting a bit too messy. I need to go round and see what each division is doing. She wants to avoid duplication, she wants every hour we spend looking for Meyer to be spent productively – so I’ll go around, visit the other divisions, and if they are duplicating anything that you’re doing, I’ll get them to stop and work on something else.”
“Brilliant! Aw, seriously, that’s so good.” Campbell couldn’t hide his pleasure at the news, and Miller was buzzing to see the level of enthusiasm that was beaming from his colleague.
“Keep on with that line of enquiry, eliminating all people on his phone records from the past twelve months. Go back further if you run out of contacts. The Facebook friends list is looking very positive too – so just keep on, and take ownership of everybody in the Tameside borough. I’ll instruct other divisions to look after their own geographical areas as far as Meyer’s Facebook friends are concerned. If you need uniform to go and visit addresses, just go for it. If you get any jip from Inspectors, tell them to ring the new Acting Chief Constable, Marie Clydesdale if they’re not happy. That’ll shut them up.”
“Now that will be my pleasure.”
“Nice to meet you anyway, Darren.”
“You too. Thanks a lot.” The two men shook hands, and Miller left the meeting feeling highly motivated. Enthused in fact. As he drove away from Ashton, he decided to head across to Salford Division and see how far their CID team had got up to with their search for Meyer. It was frustrating that each division had been left to their own devices until now, but none the less, Tameside had made an exemplary job of it. Miller hoped that Salford would be as on-the-ball. These were the two divisions that had the most connection to the wanted man. Salford Division covers the area where Meyer lives now, in Eccles, and Tameside Division covered the place that he grew up, and still had a number of connections.
It was to be a busy day, and it was a good job that the SCIU boss was beginning to feel motivated for the challenge that lay ahead. Miller’s next priority, after visiting Salford CID, was to head over to Irlam, where Mel Meyer was staying with her sister. He wanted to have a quick chat, see how she was doing, see if she had been in contact, or was foolishly protecting Peter. Ultimately, Miller wanted to maybe try and convince her to take part in a press conference. If anybody had the ability to make Meyer do something that might reveal his location, it was his wife, the mother of his children, the woman whose interaction with Sergeant Knight had created this extraordinary case.
But all of that would have to wait for the time being. First priority was to get some chips and gravy.
Chapter Forty-Four
Dan was in a terrible mood by the time he’d made his way back to the Gameshawe Estate. He pulled his hand brake on loudly as he parked up on the car park outside Maureen’s block of flats, Ian Curtis Court. He wanted to get this off his chest, and hoped that Rachel’s mum would be in, and would able to explain why her daughter was such an ungrateful arsehole. But he’d better think of a nicer way of phrasing it, he thought, as he pressed the intercom button for Maureen’s flat. Dan was kicking his foot repeatedly against the wall as he waited for a reply.
“Hello?” Maureen’s normally friendly voice sounded a little annoyed, as though she wasn’t expecting a visitor. Maybe she’d been asleep? He wondered.
“Maureen, it’s Dan.”
“Oh, alright. Hiya Dan. I’ll buzz you up.” The door made a loud, fizzing noise and Dan pulled on the handle. These handles always made him feel grubby. When he was a housing officer, he’d always carried a small bottle of anti-bac gel for such encounters. Today, a rub of his hand against the back of his pants would have to do. Dan headed straight to the stairs and began the ascent, having to touch three more handles before finally arriving at Maureen’s front door. The anti-bac thing had only started recently, in the past year or two. It began after Dan had watched a resident pick up a cigarette box that was swimming in a puddle of jellifying urine. The resident shook it to check if there were any cigs inside, then tossed it back in the puddle. That had been gross enough, but straight after doing that, the man grabbed the door handle and pulled it open and disappeared through it. It was in that moment, while Dan stared at the handle that he would then have to touch himself, that Dan began wondering what other hygiene issues these door handles might present. Since leaving his employment with the council’s housing department, Dan had made a deliberate effort to stop obsessing about sanitation and anti-bac hand gel, but today he knew that he’d need to wash his hands as soon as he got into Maureen’s flat.
“Hiya Dan, alright love, do you want a brew?” Maureen was standing at the door, waiting for her visitor. She thought the world of Dan, and all of the lovely things he was doing to help get the appeal through.
“Yeah, I’d love one, thanks. Can I nip to your lav, just to wash my hands?”
“Course you can. It’s just through there – well, you know where the toilet is don’t you love, you used to rent these flats out to folk!”
Maureen was a little surprised by how aloof Dan was being, and remembered him phoning the other night. That’s what will be up with him, she thought. She had been a bit sharp with him on the telephone, but it was late. He shouldn’t have phoned up that late at night, she thought to herself as she filled the kettle. Maureen was getting it all straight in her head, so she could apologise but also make it clear that nobody rings up after the soaps. Not even the bloody sales callers.
“Cheers. I just needed to wash my hands. I’ve got a bit of that OCD I think.”
“What’s that?” asked Maureen, as Dan leant against the kitchen door frame.
“It’s a disorder where you get obsessed with things, like wondering if you locked your car, and you go back outside to check, even though you know you did!”
“Oh right. Well, anyway, what are you having?”
“Yes, tea-two please, Maureen.”
“I’ve put the kettle on. Go through, I’ll bring it in when it’s done. Take a seat.”
“I’ve got something to say actually Maureen,” Dan’s voice sounded a bit agitated and Maureen looked across at him, guessing that she was about to get told off for being a bit huffy the other night. Just before she could say anything, Dan continued to speak. “I’ve been to see Rachel today.”
“No way! Was that today? Blinking Norah. I thought it would take a bit longer than that to arrange?”
“No I did it online, it’s dead fast. I only put the request in a few days ago. Anyway…”
“So how’s she doing? How did she look?”
“Well, she looked exactly how you described. She’s aged a lot, hasn’t she? And I don’t think she’ll be much more than seven stone, wet through.”
“I know.” The colour drained from Maureen’s face very suddenly, and her eyes began to well up with water. Her hand dropped to her side, the teaspoon pointed down at the floor. “I told you. She’s not in good shape.”
“Anyway, apart from the shock of seeing her, she was her usual self, making sarcastic remarks and what-have-you. She seemed a lot better than I expected to be honest.” Dan was trying to lift Maureen’s spirits, and he could see that she was brightening up a tiny little bit. “But, she asked me to give you a message.”
“Oh?” Maureen looked lost, and it was clear that she’d completely forgotten about the brew that she was supposed to be making.
“Do you want me to brew up? Go on, you go and sit in there.”
Maureen walked slowly into the living room. The stress, the anxiety that Rachel stirred up inside her had all just come flooding to the front of Maureen’s mind, in one horrible burst. “Just do yourself one Dan. I don’t want one, love.”
Dan made the drink and then headed through into the small living room, sitting down on the settee opposite Maureen’s chair. “Anyway, she’s told me to stop the campaign.”
“You what?” Now, the colour was suddenly coming back into Maureen’s face. Her eyes were sticking out of her head as well.
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