‘Sure you must’ve known that we wanted justice for the little one by the very fact that we brought it to the station in the first place. We just didn’t want to get mixed up with the police.’
Olivia made a show of consulting with Lauren, muttering nonsense under her breath, and Lauren got the gist of what was going on and nodded her head in pantomime agreement.
‘My sergeant and I have come to a decision,’ announced Olivia, leaving a gap just long enough to put the travellers on edge, before concluding, ‘and we’ve decided to ignore any footage that shows you actually at the tip.’ How lucky that they hadn’t had the wit to work out that no cameras except infra-red would have been able to pick up anything before sunup. ‘Provided you tell us who found the baby’s body and what you know about it being there, we’ll forget all about your unlicensed scavenging and leave you with a warning to desist from this activity forthwith, or we will be forced to take sterner measures.’
As Mr O’Reilly drew himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest, Olivia let out her breath and uncrossed her fingers. This was the best chance they had of discovering anything about the black bag and its horrific contents before it reached the station car park. Lauren got out a notebook and stood there, pencil at the ready as the leader prepared to speak.
‘The bag was found by one of the passers-through, and he lost his breakfast when he opened it to see what treasure was inside such a good quality bag.’
‘Is he here to speak for himself?’ interrupted Olivia, only to be given a scornful look.
‘Did you not listen to a word I said, woman? I said he was a passer-through, and once we’d delivered his unfortunate find to the station car park, he passed through, on to somewhere else.’
‘So, what happened when he found it?’
‘Well, he knows I’m the leader, so he sought me out and showed me what he’d come across. It was me decided that it should go to you coppers. No one should get away with killing a little one, and if it hadn’t survived birth, then there should have been a doctor to take care of it, respectful-like.’
‘So, no one on this encampment knows anything about how it got here?’ asked Olivia as Lauren scribbled furiously.
‘That’s right, missus, but we’ve got our suspicions, even though we haven’t followed them up. We don’t poke our noses in where they’re not wanted in case we get a clobbering. We keep ourselves to ourselves.’
‘Can you tell me about your suspicions?’ At least they seemed to be getting somewhere.
‘It were Big Tam that saw them first; dim lights in them woods over yonder. There were several of them, and sometimes they’d be visible when we went off just before first light. Always in the same place. Don’t know of any actual dwellings over there, but there might be people that we don’t know about.
‘And sometimes, when I’ve been out in the woods with Scruffy here’ – he indicated a ragged lurcher that had collapsed at his feet with a contented sigh – ‘I’ve thought I’ve heard voices, but I can’t make head or tail of what they’re talking about. Reckon they must be foreigners. We’ve just kept our noses out because we believe in live and let live.’
‘Mr O’Reilly, I appreciate your honesty with us, and we’ll look into the matter, but I feel honour-bound to warn you that, as we speak, the Council is probably seeking to obtain an eviction order against your vehicles. Just a word to the wise.’
‘Fair dos. We’d more or less decided to move on in a day or so. We think that tip’s cursed, and we don’t want anything more to do with it. There are richer pickings elsewhere, anyway, I reckon. That place was a lost cause.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking you to come in and make a statement backing up what you’ve just told me, sir?’
‘None whatsoever, my duck. I’ve said my piece, and that’s the end of it.’
‘Thank you for the information about the lights. I’ll get somebody to look into it.’
‘And now, we’ll get on with the business of deciding where to go next.’ Mr O’Reilly tipped his cap at the two detectives and walked away towards a beaten-up old caravan.
‘Come on, Sergeant, let’s get back to the office and see if we can unearth a large-scale Ordnance Survey map of the area to check if there are any suspect buildings hiding in those woods that could do with investigating. After we’ve checked with the up-to-date one on the office wall, first, that is. Maybe there’s something there that we’ve all missed so far.’
Out and about at a similarly early hour that morning were DCs Oh and Desai, who had made an arrangement to meet the landlord of Kharboub’s seafront flat to inspect its contents. Consequently, a small man with a wispy beard and a bald head was standing on the steps up to the ground floor entrance when they arrived.
He greeted them, announced that he had to be somewhere else for an inspection, shoved a keyring into Desai’s hand and beetled off about his other business. ‘Just leave the key in the flat when you’ve finished,’ he called over his shoulder.
‘Couldn’t be better,’ said Oh, with satisfaction. ‘Now we can go through things at our own pace without a landlord looking over our shoulders asking us what we’re looking for and what we’ve already come across.’
‘Let’s get on with it then. It’s flat G2, which I assume is the basement jobbie – what some people have the brass neck to refer to as a “garden flat” when usually it’s so dark that it’s fit only for a holiday burrow for stray Wombles.’
‘Don’t judge before you’ve seen,’ Leo admonished him, and they went down a flight of stairs through an open doorway right next to the party wall. There were, indeed, two flats down there, and G2 did prove to be at the back. As Desai looked out of a window that gave a view from eye-level out to the rear of the premises, he commented that there was a pathway through the small garden. By standing on a wooden chair he was able to discern that there was a rear wall to the property, in which was placed a convenient gate.
‘I’ll just nip out there and see where that gate leads,’ volunteered Leo, already heading to the rear exit and out on to a small cemented area which had a few steps to bring it up to garden level. He jogged back a couple of minutes later to report that it led directly on to an alleyway which ran between the small rear areas of the Georgian terrace and a row of nineteen thirties houses just behind.
‘What a great way of leaving the flat with no one noticing that you’ve left the building,’ was Desai’s reply. ‘He could come and go as he pleased and none of the other tenants would have been any the wiser. He could be as secret as a rat in his hole, with no one noticing his comings and goings.’
‘Clever choice of accommodation. Now, let’s see if we can turn up anything that could be used as evidence.’
Leo was already engaged in breaking the lock on a desk drawer, and when he finally managed to slide it opened, whistled under his breath. ‘Look at this,’ he called, holding up two or three small notebooks. Inside were pages and pages of what looked just like a series of very small but neat squiggles, which they immediately identified as Kharboub’s native tongue. ‘We’ll have to get an interpreter in on these.’
‘Are you any good at French?’ asked Desai, from in front of a small filing cabinet. ‘There are a lot of what look like receipts and correspondence in here, but they’re all in French, and I can barely say merci and s’il vous plait.’
‘Make that two interpreters,’ batted back Leo, ‘or a French Moroccan who can cope with both. We’ll have to get this little lot back to the office in individual plastic folders, get it translated, then moved on to Forensics for fingerprints.’
Their padded envelopes were just about stuffed full when Leo noticed a small oak single-drawer filing cupboard resting on the floor under a table. ‘What have we here?’ he asked, lifting it up and putting it on the table under which he had espied it. ‘Have you got something I can force the lock with? I thought I saw you with a knife.’
‘Here,’ said Desai, handing over a normal
dinner knife. ‘I got it from a drawer in the kitchenette when you were outside recceing the garden.’
There was a splintering sound and the drawer opened to reveal, not a card index system, but bundles and bundles of currency, both sterling and euros. ‘Whew! Well, will you just look at that? There must be several thousand pounds here at first glance. And what’s this?’ he asked, as he caught sight of a piece of paper sticking out from under the notes.
He carefully slid it out with one gloved hand and opened the piece of paper, which proved to be A4-sized. ‘Somebody didn’t like to get rid of anything that might prove useful in the future.’ It was a letter on headed paper for Littleton Salad Nurseries, confirming the receipt of four ‘parcels’ and noting that all monies were paid to date. The typed name under the signature was one Abdul Amir, Manager.
‘I don’t know what this means exactly, but it looks mighty interesting,’ commented Leo, slipping it into an evidence bag while Desai bundled the money into yet another padded envelope and sealed it. ‘Right, one more look around, and then we’ll get out of here.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Desai said as he had a last rummage through the paperwork on the desk. ‘I’ve just come across the papers for a vehicle. It’s listed as a white Luton van. Wasn’t there one parked outside? All we need now are the keys.’
‘Here!’ called Leo in triumph, as he pulled them out of the pocket of a jacket hanging on a hook on the back of the door from the communal hall. ‘I think we’re cooking with gas now. Let’s put all this stuff in our car and then give the van a going over. You never know what could be in that.’
It was Desai who opened the driver’s door when they had finished stuffing the boot with paperwork liberated from the flat and. as he swung it back, he backed away in disgust. ‘Bloody hell!’ he yelled, then turned away and retched.
‘What is it, Ali?’ asked Leo, approaching and taking his colleagues place at the open door. ‘Shit!’ he said, putting a hand over his mouth. ‘We’d better call this one in. But I think we ought to just check the back of the van first, to make sure we’ve found everything there is to find. I’ll do it,’ he volunteered, as Desai was looking very pasty, and then wished that he had not been so hasty.
As the large rear doors of the rusty van swung open, the light revealed the body of what had probably once been a woman, but now beaten beyond recognition, particularly the face and hands, and she looked like she’d been laid out as if for a funeral. There was even a lone flower on her body. ‘And we’ve got one in here, also,’ he said in a strange, high voice that was nothing like his usual conversational tones. ‘Can you call this one in, too?’ he asked, still sounding unlike himself, as he lowered his body on to one of the steps of the small flight leading up to the communal front door of the building, joining his partner.
‘Let me see,’ said Desai in curiosity, perking up a bit at the thought of another discovery, but still a bit nervy.
‘You might regret it.’ Leo advised him, still feeling dizzy with the sight that had assaulted his eyes when he had looked into the back of that Luton.
When Olivia and Lauren got back to the office, Buller was on his phone, but strangely silent, his mouth hanging open and his eyes as round as saucers. As he ended the call, instead of asking how his two colleagues had got on, he merely bellowed at them. ‘Get a Forensics team down to Ali Baba’s place on the seafront. I’ve got to go.’
‘Go where?’ asked Olivia.
‘There’ve been two more bodies found. Desai just called it in. Oh, and get me interpreters in both French and Moroccan. I think we’ve made a huge breakthrough.’
‘Hang on a minute, boss. If there are two more bodies, they won’t be any more dead if you take a minute or two now just to keep us up to date.’
‘Kharboub’s flat, absolutely stuffed with what look like records of his activities in Arabic and French, and in his van – which, if you remember, I said had a marker on it from HMRC – two more stiffs. Some guy stretched out across the two front seats with his nose and ears missing, and his tongue cut out, all of the bits laid out on his chest like obscene decorations on a human cake, and the body of a woman in the back, battered beyond recognition, and got a fucking flower on top of her as if for more decoration. I don’t know who we’re dealing with, but they’re definitely big boys.’
‘Bugger!’ exclaimed Olivia.
‘Gosh!’ ejaculated Lauren, clearly showing the difference in their backgrounds.
‘I’ve got to get down there to see what’s going on.’ Buller was almost out of the door in his anxiety to get to the scene.
‘Aren’t you going to ask how we two delicate ladies are getting on with our enquires concerning the dead babies?’ asked Olivia sarcastically.
Buller was so caught off guard that he instinctively said, ‘How?’ before he’d had time to think that now he’d need to wait for an answer.
‘We’ve got a confession of murder on the six-week-old, and we’ve just picked up what my instincts tell me is a good lead in the newborn case,’ he was informed triumphantly.
‘Good,’ was his curt reply, before he flew off as if pursued by hellhounds.
‘Charming!’ said Olivia, before asking Lenny if he could go off in search of an Ordnance Survey in large scale of the town and its immediate environs. Lenny knew that the only person who could lay his hands on such an article was Monty Fairbanks, and it didn’t take him long to come back, like an obedient dog, with what he had been requested to supply, finding both of the officers inspecting the up-to-date map pinned to the wall.
‘There you go, ladies,’ he said, putting it down on Olivia’s desk. That should keep you two happy, although I can’t think why you need it with that newbie up there for all to see.’
‘It’s a secret, Lenny,’ said Olivia, before Lauren could get her mouth open, ‘but it’s one that we’ll share with you if we find what we’re looking for.’
‘Very mysterious,’ was DC Franklin’s comment as Olivia began to open out the map, and then fold it to show just the area they wanted to examine.
‘Goodness, this is old,’ exclaimed Lauren. ‘Look at all that open land at the north of the town. What’s the date on this map?’
‘1969,’ Olivia informed her, flipping over a corner to check. ‘Look at this, there’s a chicken farm just beyond the cemetery.’
When this map had been printed, Olivia had only been a toddler, but the lack of housing certainly took her mind back to what the town had been like when she was little, and one of the things that it wasn’t, was big.
On mature reflection, she realised that there had been very little housing erected during the sixties; her first memories were of a relatively small town. Then the seventies had arrived, and with them, the brand new police station, a partial but substantial rebuilding of the secondary school, as comprehensive education took over, and a much larger number of residential developments.
In the eighties and nineties, the buildings had spread out like a rapidly spreading cancer, but the planners lacked the foresight to provide sufficient facilities to support such large tracts of cheaply built housing, and all previous problems had simply been magnified under these conditions.
There had been a recession, and a lot of the wrong people had relocated to the area due to the price of the housing and the promise of building jobs to go with these new homes being thrown up, in the creation of the next phase or estate, only to find that their jobs were lost due to the next financial crisis. Schools were selling their playing fields and public open spaces were disappearing.
Olivia mused that waste land was no longer waste land, but had become a ‘valuable development opportunity’ but even this had withered and died, making petty crime the order of the day, along with the worship of the benefits payment and the swindling of ‘the sick’. I’m on ‘the sick; or ‘the disability’ was a constant claim of people with whom the uniformed officers came into contact. It was the ultimate defence of the work-shy and shady, she thought.
Ever since a road had been constructed to allow free access at all times, the carbuncles and sores of sprawling ‘affordable’ housing had crept in, the town now the reserve of the cowboy developer with his chipboard and low-quality materials. This was not a town for executive housing: this was now just ‘Anytown’.
‘And there’s a dense ring of nurseries and other agricultural buildings.’ Lauren’s wonder at how much Littleton had changed in such a few decades finally released Olivia from her reverie, and she fought her attention back to the subject at hand.
‘What we need to look at is these remaining woods just beyond the growing businesses. If we can locate where we think the travellers were parked, we should be able to make out the piece of woodland that hasn’t yet been cut down.’
‘Look at this,’ crowed Lauren, pointing at an indication of a building just within the confines of the map and, all those years ago, buried deep in the woods. ‘Get me a magnifying glass. I can’t quite read what it says it is.’
‘We should have old Mrs Belcher here for little jobs like this. Let me have a look. I’ll put on my reading glasses.’
‘Reading glasses? I didn’t know you needed them.’
Olivia blushed, having kept this a secret for a few months now, and tried never to wear them when there was anyone else around – but her secret was out now, and she’d just have to live with it … as long as her other and more shaming secret didn’t reach the light of day.
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