by Neil White
‘What happened to her?’ Sheldon said.
‘She was always going missing, although she was never really going missing, if you know what I mean. She was just hanging out with adults. They would get what they wanted, and they would keep her in booze and fags. It was just the local men at first, the deadbeats who hang around the parks with beer cans, but then other people started calling round for her. They thought of themselves as artists, anarchists, squatters, people like that, but they were just people who had opted out. She would go missing for days at a time, and we called the police, but then one day she never returned.’
‘Don’t you worry about them, the ones who end up like that?’
Marian thought about that, and then said, ‘Some I do. It’s the ones who are weak that I worry about, because they will give in to whatever pressure is put on them. Drugs, crime, prostitution, and so just about any bad thing that can happen to a person will happen to them. They are the ones who end up hanging themselves in jail when they get to thirty and realise that their sorry little life was going to stay sorry. The strong ones I don’t worry about. They’ll manage somehow. Lucy was one of the strong ones, in her own way.’
Marian was lost in her memories for a while, before she said, ‘So what did she have to do with Billy Privett? I saw on the news that he had been killed.’
‘There was a young woman who was at his house the morning after his body was discovered, and we think it might have been Lucy, which if it was, I’m suspicious, because it means that she lied about who she was. Do you have any photographs of her?’
‘We don’t keep mug shots,’ Marian said, scorn in her voice, and then she paused, looking unsure, as if something had occurred to her. ‘Wait there.’
She bustled out of the room. Ted raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you think?’
‘It sounds like the same kind of person, but it’s all based upon one officer’s memory jolted from a police station CCTV still.’
‘She has probably been in trouble,’ Ted said. ‘Won’t you have mug shots?’
‘I’m on sick leave, remember.’
‘That isn’t the same as suspended though, is it?’ Ted said. ‘You could still go in and look at the computers.’
Before Sheldon could answer, Marian brought in a photograph album.
‘This is from four years ago,’ she said. ‘We went on a weekend in the Lakes. Rafting, adventures in the woods, that kind of thing.’
Marian put the album on the breakfast bar and started to flick through the pages. Cellophane-covered photographs went past in a blur, children in red lifejackets by water and boats. Marian stopped occasionally, and then she stepped back. ‘There,’ she said, and tapped a photograph at the top of a page.
Sheldon got closer to have a look, and then he started to nod to himself.
The picture was of a teenage girl, laughing, her blonde hair in a ponytail, but it was wet, with strands across her face, the top of a bright red lifejacket visible. It was Christina. The cheeks were less defined, but the smile was the same, and that confidence he remembered in her eyes.
‘That’s her,’ Sheldon said. He moved to one side to let Ted Kenyon have a look, but when Ted got close, he put his hand over his mouth.
‘What is it?’ Sheldon said.
‘I know her,’ Ted said, and he headed for the door.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Charlie was in Donia’s bathroom when he heard something. It was a knock on the door to her flat, loud and urgent.
He had been washing his face, just watching the clock move on until it was dark so that he could go back to his office, the cold water waking him up. The police would have searched some of the office, but they were limited in how far they could go, because most of the things worth looking at were in confidential files. They would get a warrant eventually, but Charlie wanted to find out first whether the original video was in the safe. If he knew what was on it, he could go to the police confident that he wasn’t a suspect.
The water dripped from his face as he stayed quiet, praying that Donia wouldn’t answer it. Then he heard her footsteps, skipping along the hall.
There were muffled voices, and then heavy footsteps.
The bathroom went into Donia’s bedroom, and so his hand went to the door handle, ready to rush through. If it was the police, it was time to surrender. He knew he hadn’t done anything. He just needed to convince them.
He paused when he heard the shouting. That wasn’t the police. Too many expletives, the words hissed out.
He opened the door slowly, taking a deep breath, wanting to see who was there. The light from the bedroom illuminated his face, and as he stepped out, he was wary of creaks from the floorboards, the carpets too thin to muffle anything.
The voices got louder. He got to the bedroom door and saw that the hallway was dark. He tried to stop his breathing and listen above the tick of the clock on the wall. His shadow grew in the fan of light from the bedroom door. He stepped back and listened out. There was a male voice, and he was talking. Had Donia let the police in? Or perhaps the two men he had seen at Amelia’s house.
He peered around the doorway and towards the living room. He could see black clothes and movement. There was no sign of Donia though.
Charlie flattened himself against the wall. He was trying to keep himself free, but he didn’t know where Donia was, and he felt responsible for her. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before he stepped out again, further this time. There was the rustle of paper, excited chatter. They’d found Billy Privett’s file on the table. It confirmed what he knew, that it was information about Billy Privett that was behind everything.
His foot made a creak on the floor as he felt his way across the carpet. He looked down. His silhouette spread across the hallway and against the wall on the other side. His skin shot up in goose pimples.
Charlie took one more step out, and this time he could see who was there. It was the kids who had been hanging around outside the office, dressed all in black. They had followed Donia.
His eyes looked back into the bedroom for another escape route or somewhere to hide, but there was nothing. The bed was a box frame that went all the way to the floor and any hanging space for clothes was just an open rail. There was a window held by a clasp, not much by way of security, but he was three floors up. It didn’t need to be locked tight. The next thing on the way down was the concrete yard.
Where was Donia?
Charlie moved further out, keeping watch on the main door, knowing that if he had to run for it, he had an exit. His heart was beating hard, and he was trying to calm his breathing, certain that they would hear. Then he remembered Amelia’s body. He knew he couldn’t leave Donia, but he wouldn’t be able to handle them on his own. He would have to get help for her. It was no good if they both died.
He started to back away down the hallway, leaving them to read the file, hoping they would be distracted, but as his footsteps moved backwards, his spine went cold when he bumped into something. Or rather, someone.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Ted was silent until they were back in the car, ignoring the shouts of the kids on the steps, Marian watching them go.
As Ted looked at his lap, his jaw set, Sheldon asked, ‘Who is she?’ his key poised in the ignition, not willing to go until he had an answer.
Ted turned to him, and there was still confusion in his eyes. ‘She was the girl in the car, the one who leaped on me when the camera was there. That was her, Lucy Crane.’
Sheldon was surprised. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I am,’ Ted said, exasperated. ‘I was talking with her in the car for five minutes, before she jumped on me. And now I found out that she is connected to Billy Privett, and so maybe she did know something.’
‘She was always connected to Billy Privett, because she told you she had information,’ Sheldon said. ‘Perhaps she did at first, but then decided that she could just sell you out instead. Or maybe she got scared. She must hav
e had the photographer waiting, and was hoping she could trap you in a blackmail plot, or just sell you out to the papers. But you weren’t interested, and so she had to jump on you and hope the pictures told a different story.’
‘I wouldn’t have been interested,’ Ted said. ‘I just wanted to know about Alice, and I still love my wife. We are more distant now, I know that, but I wouldn’t do that to her. She has suffered enough.’
‘Lucy is still a link to the case though, but how? She was Billy’s housekeeper. Why didn’t you see her when you went up there?’
‘She would keep out of my way, wouldn’t she, if she knew I was on the way,’ Ted said. ‘Do you think she was really his housekeeper? She might have been Billy’s girlfriend, trying to protect him?’
Sheldon shook his head. ‘No, she was more than that. She’d have no reason to lie to us if she was his girlfriend, and she wouldn’t have disappeared.’
‘You’ve still got your identification,’ Ted said. ‘There is a police station just up the road. Can’t you find out something about her?’
Sheldon thought about that, and then remembered his moment on the church tower earlier that day, and the promise he had made to himself that he would find out the truth.
He started the engine and drove the short distance to the police station, a one-storey L-shaped block on the verge of being closed down as it waited for a buyer. There was no public reception and so no frosty civilian officer to get past.
‘Wait in the car,’ Sheldon said, and then swiped his pass card along the reader. It worked for all the Lancashire stations, and so he found himself at the meeting point of two corridors, the floors tiled, the walls painted in cold light blue. Fire doors intersected the corridors at intervals. It was Sheldon’s first time in the Penwortham station, and so all he could was walk and look for a computer terminal.
He turned left and when he got to the room at the end, there were three rows of desks filled with computer screens. There were no cells at Penwortham, and so Sheldon realised that it was a hideaway, somewhere for the officers to get their files together without getting landed with an urgent custody investigation, the only risk being a call-out to chase some kids on the Kingsfold estate, the main source of aggravation for the Penwortham force.
There was only one other person in the room, a young female officer in uniform. She looked up once, curious at first, but didn’t investigate further, satisfied by the identification swinging from Sheldon’s neck.
Sheldon jiggled the mouse to clear the screensaver and sat down. Once he had logged in, he brought up the intelligence system and typed in Lucy’s name. The pale screen of grids and boxes threw up three people, but the dates of birth narrowed it down pretty quickly. When he clicked on her details, he leaned forward to get a better view.
Christina was really Lucy Crane, he saw that straight away, except that some of her flirt was missing. It was a picture taken after she was arrested, with rings under her eyes and her hair dishevelled. There was no smile, just a tired and sullen glare at the camera, another kid caught doing something bad.
When Sheldon clicked on her personal details, her address was still listed as the children’s home they had just visited. It looked like she had kept out of trouble since she left.
He scrolled down to the intelligence file, and saw that it ended a couple of years earlier, when she turned seventeen. The entries before then were just as Marian described. Calls to the police from the home to report her missing, and then an entry to report that she had been found. A few men had been issued with Child Abduction Notices, where it was noted officially that the care home did not approve of her being with them, and one more time would mean a court appearance and a reputation as a paedophile. Apart from that, it was quiet.
Sheldon frowned and clicked on her antecedents, the list of her convictions and cautions. Lucy was only nineteen, and it was as Sheldon expected, filled with her route to a court appearance. A youth reprimand for theft, and then a final warning for criminal damage, followed by her climb up the ladder of youth sentences. A referral order for an assault, then an action plan order, followed by a supervision order. It was the usual trail of one more last chance, another failed attempt to reform a troubled youth. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t, and often it was the child who decided that there were better things to do.
It seemed like Lucy had got into scrapes when she was at the home, and then she stopped. The Youth Offending Team would call her a success. Or perhaps she had just learned that it was more fun to get other people into trouble. Leering men maybe, an outlet for her new-found power, tinged by anger from her earlier life experiences.
Sheldon was about to click off and admit defeat when he scrolled through to the non-conviction disposals, the list that was made up of acquittals or fixed penalty notices, sometimes cases that were investigated but never got as far as a charge. For Lucy, there was just one entry.
Six months earlier, Lucy had been arrested for shoplifting some booze from a late night grocery shop in Oulton. At least that put her in the right area. Penwortham was more than twenty miles away. The case was dropped before she got to court though.
Sheldon clicked on the related case file, which would consist of an incident log and a crime report, along with a record of the outcome. The witness statements would be held over in Oulton.
It was nothing remarkable. Lucy had been caught trying to leave the shop with a bottle of whisky hidden in her coat. Sheldon scrolled through the crime report, and as he got to the bottom, he saw an entry that said RNC, no public interest.
Released No Charge? Why was that?
He made a note of the custody number and searched the database for it. It wasn’t a long record. She was brought in and booked in, but she didn’t even get as far as an interview. There was an entry forty minutes after her arrival. A visit from CI Dixon, who spoke to Lucy in her cell.
Why was a chief inspector talking to a shoplifter in her cell?
The custody sergeant had done his job well. He had noted when Dixon went in and when she came out. He was looking after himself, making sure that if anything went wrong, it wasn’t going to come back to him. Dixon was in there for thirty minutes. Five minutes after that, Lucy was released, no charge.
Sheldon sat back and stared at the screen. Sometimes senior officers did interfere with suspects, particularly for minor things. It might be a deal, an exchange for information, or because the suspect was being looked at for something bigger. A sergeant would be used to that, but why Dixon? She didn’t work on a team dealing with informants or undercover work. Her job was to run the Oulton station, to argue her case for a bigger budget at headquarters and to allocate resources.
But it was the timing that bothered Sheldon, and he remembered how Dixon had been earlier. The way she had almost dropped her cigarettes when she saw Christina in the corridor. Or Lucy Crane, as Sheldon now knew her. There was something else going on. Something more personal.
He clicked off the computer and headed for the door. When he got to the car, he asked Ted, ‘How long ago was it that you were caught in the car with Lucy?’
Ted did some quick calculations in his head. ‘Just over five months ago.’
Not long after Lucy was released by Dixon, Sheldon thought.
He climbed into the driver seat. ‘We need to get back to Oulton.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Charlie turned around in the hallway. There were sounds behind him, people in the living room, everyone suddenly aware that he was there. The way out was blocked by the shadow of a man, large and threatening. It wasn’t just his size that told Charlie that he was in trouble. It was his readiness. Charlie hadn’t had a fight since he was at school, and the spread of the man’s arms and the gleam of his teeth as he grinned told Charlie that he would enjoy whatever came next.
There was movement from the living room. Charlie looked round and saw the man he had spoken to the day before, with the wild black hair surrounded by teenagers.
‘Charlie Barker,’ he said, laughter in his voice.
‘Who are you?’ Charlie said, trying to watch the man in the hallway at the same time.
The man with the wild hair stepped closer. ‘I thought you’d lost interest in us?’
Charlie looked past the man and into the living room. Donia was there, kneeling down, a young woman holding on to her hair, making Donia grimace. ‘What are you doing to her?’
‘Don’t worry about her. She looks like she could give us some fun. She’s safe, for the moment.’
Charlie got the smell of cannabis and unwashed clothes as the man stood in front of him.
‘Fun? What do you mean?’ Charlie said, and then looked down. There was a knife in the man’s hand, the blade protruding from his clenched fist. The shock was like a kick to his stomach. ‘You killed Amelia and Billy.’
The man tilted his head, amused. ‘They wrote their own destinies, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘Now you can write yours.’
Charlie closed his eyes. He swallowed when he felt the prick of the blade in his neck. When he opened them slowly, the large man had his arm stretched out, and Charlie could feel moisture on his skin. He didn’t know if it was blood or sweat.