by Neil White
All the activity was taking place in a small patch of trees between some houses, the police in the shadows, talking in small clusters. Some flowers had already arrived and been placed by a lamppost, although the identity of the body hadn’t been released yet.
Jack approached the crime scene tape, hoping to overhear the police talking, but as he got near, a female officer put her hand up.
‘You need to move away,’ she said, the light tremble in her voice telling him that she was new to the force.
‘I’m a reporter,’ he said, and then he pointed to where the body had been found. ‘Do we have a name?’
She shook her head and repeated, ‘You need to move away.’
‘I don’t want to get closer. I just want to find out who she is. Do you know yet?’
She was about to shake her head, but she stopped herself and put up her hand. ‘Please, move away.’
‘Can you tell me anything?’ Jack persisted. ‘How did she die? When did she die?’
‘No, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything,’ she said, her voice firmer now. Jack could tell that he had annoyed her.
He smiled an apology and then turned away as he realised that he wasn’t going to get anything else from the scene. He checked his watch. No information would be released for a few hours, and so it was time to go to court, the crime reporter’s fallback, low-life tales of shame from the grim streets of Blackley. That was how Jack made his living, writing up court stories. He would have to speak to Dolby about the Whitcroft article later, because he got the sense that it wasn’t going to amount to much, despite the shopkeeper’s views. Perhaps he would go back later, when the sun had gone down.
Jack watched the crowd for a few seconds more, as they waited for a glimpse of something they didn’t really want to see, like knitters at the guillotine, but it felt grubby, like he wasn’t really that different to them. He had just found a way to make money from the excitement, that’s all.
He turned to walk towards his car. No one really noticed him going, and so he turned his thoughts to what might lie ahead at the courthouse.
The police van drove slowly past the crime scene. He couldn’t help but look, but as he glanced over, he could hear a ticking sound. Not loud. Just like a scratching noise on the inside of his skull. It wasn’t enough to distract him or make him close his eyes.
He allowed himself a smile. Now was the time. It had taken longer than he’d expected for her body to be found, considering that the path nearby was used by joggers and dog-walkers. He must have concealed it well.
He turned away when he saw people look over. The gaggle of the crowd. Someone taking photographs. Like fucking sheep heading for the pen. The first stretch of the crime scene tape and they all shuffle forward. All of that thrill could have been theirs, but they’re spineless, like leeches, second-hand thrill-seekers.
And then the images came back to him in flashes, bright snapshots of her clothes, of her walking, the cloth moving against her soft skin, young and unblemished. Not knowing. Just another night. Then that look in her eyes. The flash of fear replaced by anger, and then back to fear when she knew that her time had come.
Then it came, like always, the sharp focus, where he could see everything more clearly than ever before, in more detail than is possible with the naked eye. Her pupils, black saucers, but he could see the other colours in them too, swirls of dark green and deep blue, the clear view broken only by the flecks of spittle that bubbled up when she first went to the floor. And the coughs of mud. He could see the soil turning in the air in front of him as she spluttered, tumbling in the fading sunlight. Just tiny specks, but he could see their form, uneven and dirty. He remembered the whites of her eyes. He had seen the veins in them and how they were broken by the small explosions of red, just pinpricks, like splashes as the blood came to the surface.
He grinned as he felt the familiar tremble in his groin as he thought of her struggling, the fight under his hand. He knew it would come. He was waiting for it. He liked to feel it, to control it. He could do that, control it, so that it was a present for later, something he had to touch, to feel in his hand as he thought of her struggling and then slowly giving up the fight, her body limp.
He gave the crowd a salute but no one was watching as he slipped away.
Chapter Five
Laura leaned against her car and peeled off her forensic suit. The hood had made a mess of her hair, dark and long, and so she used the wing mirror to tease it back to life. The body had been taken away, rolled onto plastic sheeting and then wrapped up in a bag, and was on its way to the mortuary. Now it was time for the fingertip search of the undergrowth, and she could see the line of police in blue boiler suits waiting to crawl their way through the small patch of woodland. Joe was looking back towards where the body had been found, his hood pulled from his head. Carson was in his car, talking into his phone.
‘What is it, Joe?’ Laura said, reaching into her car for her suit jacket.
He didn’t answer at first, his gaze trained on where the stream headed under the estate. Then he turned round, chewing his lip.
‘Something about this isn’t right,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The location. It doesn’t make any sense. Why here?’
‘That occurred to me too,’ she said, and looked again at the houses that backed onto the crime scene, a line of wooden fence panels forming the boundary on both sides.
‘It isn’t secluded at all,’ Joe continued. ‘One scream from her and all of those lights are going to flicker on, and what escape route is there? There is only one way to the street, because the other way is down that path, into the woods, but he couldn’t get a car down there. So if he drove to the location, he would have had to leave his car on the street, and so he would be blocked in and easy to catch.’
‘Perhaps she was just walking past?’ Laura said. ‘You know, the wrong place at the wrong time, and he was hiding in there, waiting to pull someone in.’
‘Same thing applies,’ Joe said. ‘Too many houses. What if she fought back? If she ran or screamed? There is a whole community to wake. And you saw how the body was concealed, just left on the ground and covered in leaves and bark. She was always going to be discovered.’ He sighed. ‘It just doesn’t feel right.’
‘You’re giving the killer too much credit,’ Laura said. ‘How many people do we catch because they do dumb things?’ She checked her hair in the mirror again, and then pulled away when the sun glinted off some grey strands. ‘So what do you think?’
Joe looked around again. ‘It must have been the victim he was after, not someone random. He wouldn’t have chosen this location unless it was the only place he could get to her, and this is all about the victims, not the killer. We need to know about her.’
They both turned as they heard a noise behind them, and they saw it was Carson, grunting as he climbed out of his car.
‘We’ve got a possible name for her,’ Carson said. ‘Jane Roberts.’
‘Don’t know it,’ Laura said.
‘No, me neither,’ Carson responded. ‘But I know her father. Don Roberts.’
Laura shrugged, the name didn’t mean anything to her, but she saw the look of surprise on Joe’s face.
‘The Don Roberts?’ Joe said.
Carson nodded. ‘It was called in yesterday, when she didn’t return home at the weekend.’
‘How sure can we be?’ Joe said.
‘The description matches, and she doesn’t live too far away.’
‘It’s Wednesday today. Why would Don leave it so long?’ Laura asked.
Joe turned to her. ‘Because it involves calling us,’ he said. ‘Don Roberts will not want us digging into his life. He’s a long-time thug, Blackley’s most violent doorman before he started to run his own gang of bouncers, leasing them out to the clubs. He’s turned to clamping as well, and trust me, you were wise to pay rather than contest it.’
‘But why would that make him want
to keep away from us?’
‘Because he makes a lot of money, and that cannot all come from fixing metal clamps to car wheels. However he makes his cash, he won’t be happy to see us looking into his life, and I can tell you one thing: we’ve got trouble now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Because this is one of two things: targeted or bad luck. We need to look into the last murder again, see if there is any link with Don Roberts, and if there is, we can expect the revenge killings to start.’
‘And if it is just coincidence?’ Laura asked.
Carson almost smiled at that. ‘The killer just has to hope that we catch him first, because if Roberts gets to him, he will die, but it won’t be quick and it won’t be pleasant.’
Chapter Six
Jack was smiling by the time he reached the court, even though the shadow of the court building took away the warmth of the sun.
The drive into Blackley had done its job, with the wind in his hair and the roof down on his Stag, and so the ghoulishness of the murder scene began to seem a little more distant. He had driven as quick as he dared through the terraced back streets, avoiding the traffic lights and relishing the echo of the engine as he shot between the rows of parked cars, hemmed in between the solid line of brickwork dotted by windows and door frames. The car was his father’s legacy when he died, and so Jack liked to give it a good run out when he could, the feel of the wheel his link to those childhood Saturday mornings spent with his father.
He looked up to the four storeys of millstone with tall windows and deep sills, decorative pillars built into the walls on the upper floors. The police station had once been next door, the prisoners’ journey into court through a heavy metal door at the end of the cell corridor and then up some stone steps, the light of the courtroom making them blink as they arrived in the dock. The police station had moved out to an office complex by the motorway, but the court had survived redevelopment, if survival was measured by draughty courtrooms and bad acoustics. The prisoners arrived at court in a van now, the subterranean journey through the tiled cell complex replaced by a short walk across the town centre pavement in handcuffs.
Jack had no expectations as he approached the entrance. He always kept an eye out for the unusual cases, and so he listened in to the chatter of the lawyers, especially the prosecutors, because they always relished the chance to tell a good story. Something amusing or with low-shock value usually worked nicely, but the best cases rarely ended on the first hearing, so he kept a diary, just to make sure that he didn’t miss the hearings. The best cases attracted the internet spies though – those who looked at his reports and then turned up for the sentencing hearings – and so he preferred the unexpected.
He strode up the court steps and noticed how quiet it was. He was used to striding through the haze of old tobacco mingled with nervous sweat and last night’s booze, but there was none of that today. His feet echoed against the long tiled corridor cast in yellow lighting with interview rooms to one side. It was almost deserted, apart from three people waiting, staring into space. He glanced at the clock. It was just after eleven. It seemed too early to have cleared the morning list.
It should have been busier. He’d been attracted to crime reporting by the mayhem, the excitement he’d felt for the stories of bad men doing wicked things. It had always been crime that had interested him, from the television thrillers of his childhood to the Johnny Cash prison concerts that his father played constantly. His father had been a policeman, and Jack remembered the pride he’d felt when his father left each morning, his trousers dark and pressed, his boots shined, ready to take on the bad guys. Jack grew more distant from his father as he grew older, when they both retreated into themselves after the death of Jack’s mother, but when he was smaller, his father felt like his own private superhero.
He looked back at the security guards by the entrance, old men in crisp white shirts, security wands in their hands. They were already counting the minutes until lunch. So this was it? Jack Garrett, hotshot reporter. He sighed. A quiet court meant nothing to report.
The duty solicitor room – a small square room designed for client interviews usually filled with bored lawyers moaning about how they couldn’t make a fortune anymore – was slightly busier.
He put his head in to ask if anyone had a case worth writing up. There was a general shake of the head and then it went quiet. They spoke to him when they wanted publicity or an audience for their wit, but Jack would never be part of the lawyer-clique, he knew that. His old denims and long blue shirt didn’t fit in with the dark pinstripes. Some were doing crosswords, photocopies from the national papers that got passed around at court. Sam Nixon was there, one of the main players, who practised from a small office over a copy shop, where tattered sofas and plastic plants served as a reception waiting area.
‘Nothing at all for you, Sam?’
He shook his head. ‘Times are lean, Jack.’
‘I’ve just been up to a murder scene,’ Jack said. ‘They’ve found another girl.’ Everyone looked up at that. ‘Maybe you’ll get a slice of that when they catch the killer?’
‘You see, us lawyers are not that bad,’ Sam said, waving his hand at the others in the room. ‘We want the killer to be caught, not stay free.’
‘That bad?’
Sam smiled. ‘It might keep me in business for another few months.’
‘You’re all heart,’ Jack said, and then nodded at the prosecutor, who was playing with a touchscreen phone. ‘And it might generate some excitement from him.’
‘I doubt it. I had to blow the dust from him before,’ Sam said.
The prosecutor looked up and raised his eyebrows, just greying on the fringes, to match the silver streaks along his temples. ‘My activity is all deep,’ he said, grinning. ‘That’s the trouble with defence lawyers: they’re all show and no substance.’ Then he pointed towards the door as the sound of bold footsteps clicking rhythmically on the tiles got louder and louder. ‘Just to prove my point.’
Jack put his head back out of the door and knew who it was before he even saw him: David Hoyle.
He was different from the rest of the defence lawyers. Most of the lawyers in Blackley were sons of old names, the firms passed through the generations, sometimes split up and married off to other firms. Hoyle was an outsider. He had been sent to Blackley to head up the new branch of Freshwaters, a Manchester firm trying to establish a foothold away from the big city. No one had expected it, and Hoyle had just arrived at court one day, in a suit with broad pinstripes and a swagger that no one seemed to think he had earned.
The other lawyers didn’t like him, because he made bold promises that made clients shift loyalties. Low-level crooks usually wanted nothing more than someone to shout on their behalf, and David Hoyle did that. And he didn’t work out of an office. Freshwaters had premises, but it was really just somewhere for Hoyle to park his Mercedes. He ran his files from home, did his own typing, and visited his clients on their own turf.
His client trotted behind him, a red-faced man in a grey suit, his stomach pushing out the buttons, his shoes shiny underneath the pressed hems of his trousers. He wasn’t the usual court customer. Suddenly, Hoyle turned to smile and shake hands with his client, but from the look of regret Hoyle gave, Jack guessed that things hadn’t gone his way.
There was the scent of a story, a disgraced professional always gets a column, and so he checked his pocket for his camera; get the picture first, the story later, because the shame sold better if there was a face a neighbour might recognise. It was the part of the job that used to make Jack most uncomfortable, but he’d learned a long time ago that he had to write stories that people wanted to read, and having a troubled conscience didn’t help sell a newspaper.
Jack watched them walk past and then headed after them as they made their way to the steps and then outside.
Hoyle had stopped at the bottom to straighten his tie and fix his hair, using the glass panel in a door as
a mirror, before lighting a cigarette.
‘I’m too good for this place,’ he said to his reflection, and then turned round and blew smoke towards Jack, who had appeared over his shoulder. ‘Mr Journo, you’re looking twitchy.’
‘Where’s your client?’ Jack said.
Hoyle took another long pull on his cigarette. ‘Now, what do you want with that poor man?’ he said, wagging a finger.
‘When there isn’t much going on, I have to chase what I can.’
‘Didn’t you have bigger ambition than that when you first started out?’ Hoyle said. ‘Dreams of travel, interviewing presidents, uncovering conspiracies?’
‘What do you mean?’
He grinned, smoke seeping out between his teeth. ‘This?’ he said, and he pointed up the stairs. ‘Was this your plan when you left reporting school, or wherever you people graduate from, trying to shame people for stepping on the wrong side of the line sometimes?’
‘It’s not like that,’ Jack said, bristling.
‘So what is it like?’
‘It’s the freedom of the press,’ Jack said. ‘It’s about letting the wider community know what is going on around them, where the threats lie. Over the years, it paints the town’s history.’
Hoyle raised his eyebrows. ‘If that makes you feel better.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You flatter yourself, cover yourself in glory talk,’ Hoyle said. ‘It’s all bullshit, this freedom of the press stuff.’
‘And this was your life plan?’ Jack retorted. ‘Did you always dream of giving speeches to a bench of bored greengrocers in a backwater Lancashire town? Why are you here? Did it not work out in the big city?’