by Jane Casey
‘So what?’ My coffee had cooled down enough so that I could gulp it. The caffeine was beginning to kick in. I wanted to be ready when they let us talk to the girl. I wanted to be on my toes. I wanted to get the answers we needed and bring them to my boss, Charles Godley, like a cat bringing in a dead bird as a loving present for its owner. I didn’t mind the long hours, the total commitment that he demanded from his team. I knew how lucky I was to be in the inner circle. Sixty officers on Operation Mandrake, and most of them would never get to speak to Godley face-to-face. He had his system: orders cascaded down from the top, delivered by the police he trusted to their fellow officers who were allocated tasks and the manpower to achieve them and turned loose, not to return until they’d done it. He was running the investigation that had become the media story of the year, if not the decade, and he spent far too much of his time dealing with reporters to be able to manage every aspect of the case himself. He’d picked me out of the borough and added me to his squad, and I still didn’t know why, but I was determined not to let him down.
‘So nothing.’ Rob had lost interest in teasing me. He took out his phone and started scrolling through messages, yawning as he did so. I left him to it, happy to sit in silence for a minute or two. Waiting for a break in the case had been agonising, heart-scalding. Now that it was here, I could afford to be patient.
But I couldn’t help fidgeting, all the same.
I didn’t have to wait too long, because after a couple of minutes, one of the big double doors that led to the ICU opened. Rob and I both turned to see a nurse leaning out. She was young, with honey-coloured highlights through her hair and fake-tanned skin. I had to admire her commitment to glamour at that hour of the morning. She ignored me after one quick, assessing look that took in my damp hair and make-up-free face, then smiled warmly at Rob. Here’s one you charmed earlier …
‘Your boss wants you.’
We both stood at the same time. Rob was a shade above average height and I was tall in my heels; we were eye-to-eye. Rob frowned.
‘He wants to talk to me, not you.’
‘He doesn’t know I’m here,’ I said sweetly. ‘He’d want to speak to me if he did.’
‘I’ll tell him you’re waiting.’
‘I’ll tell him myself.’
There it was. No matter how much I liked Rob, no matter how well we got on, when it came to competing for the attention of our boss, we were as mature and reasonable as children fighting over a favourite toy.
‘Suit yourself.’ He slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked past me, pushing through the swing doors with a bang. He didn’t wait to see if I was following him or hold the door open for me; not that I expected special treatment – it wasn’t as if I made a fuss about needing to be treated like a lady – but I didn’t expect outright rudeness. I abandoned my coffee cup on the chair and hurried through the door after him, practically clipping his heels. It wasn’t my imagination that he sped up, determined to get there first. If I’d known where ‘there’ was, I might have been tempted to compete, but as I didn’t, I contented myself with being one step behind as he threaded his way through the ICU.
I somehow wasn’t surprised to find that Chief Superintendent Godley had taken over one of the waiting rooms and made it his own. There were files open on the table, and a laptop that hummed quietly. Hunched over the screen was a thin, dark man with glasses and a pinched expression: DI Thomas Judd. That was no surprise: where Charlie Godley went, Tom Judd followed, and if I didn’t like him much, I had to respect the way he’d organised the admin for the investigation so far. Godley was leaning back in a low chair, his arms behind his head, shirtsleeves rolled up, looking tired but focused. He had gone grey early – his hair was almost white – but it didn’t make him look old: quite the opposite. The combination of silver hair and blue eyes was a bit of a winner, especially when Godley was also tall and broad-shouldered and altogether too photogenic for the media to be able to resist him. He was pale, though, and his eyes looked red and tired. I had to resist the urge to cluck sympathetically. Worship of the boss was not encouraged. He had no interest in commanding a cult following.
Rob tapped on the doorframe. ‘You wanted me, sir?’
Godley looked up, his eyes unfocused. ‘Yes. Good. And Maeve, you’re here too. Excellent.’
‘Rob phoned me,’ I said from over his shoulder. I knew it would make him happy to get the credit. It might even take the sting out of the fact that Godley had smiled at me. But Rob didn’t really need any help from me. He was carving out a reputation for himself quite competently.
Godley had snapped back to alertness by now. ‘Did you fill her in?’
Rob nodded.
‘So you know we’ve got a suspect. And a witness.’
There wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d get within sniffing distance of the suspect. I had schooled myself not to want what I couldn’t have. It would be the bigwigs who spoke to him, when he could talk to them. But the witness was mine. Smoothly, I said, ‘I’d like to interview her. The girl, I mean. Probably easier for me to gain her trust.’
‘We’ve been waiting for her to be willing to provide a statement, and to sober up. I’m sure you’ll have a great rapport with her.’ Judd was still bent over his screen, tapping furiously, but he was never likely to miss an opportunity to put someone down. Particularly me. And just like that, the slight nerviness I always felt in the presence of the boss changed to outright anger directed at the inspector. I hadn’t inherited my father’s red hair, but there was no question that I’d got the temper that was popularly supposed to go with it.
‘What’s that supposed to mean, sir?’
‘Exactly what I said.’ His tone was bland but there was a glint behind the glasses; he knew as well as I did – as well as everyone in the room did – that he had pretty much just called me a drunk. The same old rubbish all over again: of course I was a drinker, I was Irish. ‘Mine’s a pint of Guinness – no, make that two pints with a whiskey chaser.’ Never mind the fact that my parents were both teetotal, that I hadn’t tasted alcohol until I was twenty and that when I drank, I preferred red wine.
‘You’ll do fine,’ Godley said, ignoring the tension that was crackling through the stifling little room. ‘You can take Rob with you when you speak to her. I want to know what happened up to the point where she stabbed him. I want to know how he picked her up and how he got her into the car. What he did that made her panic. I’m working on the assumption that he did or said something that made her sure she was sitting in the car with our murderer, but I don’t know what it was, and I don’t want to talk to him without having her side of the story.’
‘Right.’ It wasn’t rocket science. It should be straightforward.
Should be.
‘This is an important witness,’ Godley said. ‘I don’t want anyone putting her back up. Treat her with respect.’
I was fairly sure this last comment wasn’t directed at me. I didn’t need to be told that and I hoped Godley knew it. Judd was a different story.
‘When can we see her?’
‘Straightaway. She’s keen to leave. She’s agreed to give us a statement, but my guess is she’s halfway out the door. Don’t hang about.’
I turned to go, but stopped when Rob spoke. ‘Any news on the car, sir? Did they find anything?’
Judd answered, his lips thin. ‘Not so far.’
‘What?’ I was genuinely confused.
‘The car is clean. No evidence of any of the things we might have expected. No knife or weapon of any kind. No accelerant.’
‘Could he have dumped it? Done a Sutcliffe and hid the evidence when he knew he was going to be arrested? He was there for a while before they found him.’ It wasn’t the first time the Yorkshire Ripper had been invoked in connection with our killer, but I was surprised at Rob for mentioning him. If there was one thing that annoyed Godley more than anything else, it was the comparisons between his investigation and the unwieldy, disorgani
sed and ultimately futile hunt for Peter Sutcliffe, who was caught more or less by chance. And here was another parallel. It wasn’t police work that had brought us Vic Blackstaff, and the media would be all over it. Godley’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t speak, letting Judd do the talking.
‘We’ve been searching the alley and surrounding areas. But the doctors don’t think he would have been able to move easily. He was unconscious when the paramedics arrived.’
‘So …’ I said slowly.
‘So you need to find out what really happened,’ Judd finished for me. ‘Because at the moment, we don’t have the first idea.’
It was the pretty nurse who showed us to Kelly Staples’ room, or rather showed Rob, who was flirting pretty much non-stop. I followed along behind, mind whirling. This was a big moment for me. Ask the right questions. Get the right answers. Don’t irritate her. Gain her trust. Don’t assume you know what she’s going to tell you. Listen. And listen to the things she doesn’t say too.
Easy.
I pulled Rob to one side when the nurse had brought us to the door of the hospital room and wiggled off. ‘You’re taking notes, OK? No hijacking. I want to do the talking.’
‘She’s all yours, love. Like Judd said, I’m sure you’ll have a lot in common.’
‘That’s not what he said.’ I couldn’t help sounding defensive. Not you too, Rob …
‘What’s he got against you?’
‘He’s a racist, misogynist pig – didn’t you realise? He’s always making snide remarks about me.’
‘Seems like a good bloke to me.’
I thumped him, then took a second to shake my head, as if that would clear my mind, rearrange the thoughts that were swirling in my mind into some sort of coherent pattern. ‘Got your notebook?’
‘Always,’ he said, holding it up. ‘And a pen. And a spare pen, in case that one runs out.’
‘That’s my little boy scout.’ Time to go. I rearranged my face into what I hoped was a calm and non-threatening expression, then pushed open the door.
The first thing I noticed about Kelly Staples was that she had been crying, the second that she was very young. She was sitting by the bed, wearing a patterned hospital gown. Her feet were bare, plump and pale, with scarlet marks where her boots had rubbed her toes and heels. She looked washed-out, her fair hair lank around her face. Her eyes were red and piggy with tiredness. She was overweight and uneasy in her flimsy hospital gown, pulling the hem down over her knees to try to make it longer. Her mouth looked raw, as if she had been chewing her lips.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, trying to look unthreatening, and smiled.
‘Kelly? I’m Detective Constable Kerrigan. You can call me Maeve. And this is my colleague, DC Langton, who’s going to take some notes for me.’
Rob had folded himself unobtrusively into a hard chair in the corner of the room. She looked over at him, then up at me blankly. ‘Do you know when my mum is going to get here?’
‘No. I’m sorry. I’m sure she’s on her way.’
‘She’s bringing my clothes. I ain’t got no clothes. They took them.’
‘They’ll need to do a forensic examination of your clothes,’ I explained. Never mind the fact that they would have been unwearable, covered in Vic Blackstaff’s blood.
‘I want to go home.’
‘Very soon.’ My voice was gentle, as if I was speaking to a child. Which was a good point, actually. ‘How old are you, Kelly?’
‘Twenty.’
Good. No need to wait for a responsible adult to be present. ‘And are you a student? Or working?’
‘Student. Catering college.’ She looked a little brighter. ‘I’m in my last year.’
‘Do you want to be a chef when you’re finished?’
She shrugged, looking baffled. ‘Dunno.’
Enough friendliness. Back to the reason for talking to her in the first place.
‘I’d like to talk to you about what happened earlier. We have a few questions, and then we’ll let you go home.’
She rolled her eyes and said nothing.
‘Firstly, I’d just like to reassure you that you aren’t in any kind of trouble. We’re interviewing you as a witness, not a suspect, so please don’t feel that you need to watch what you say. We just want to know what happened before you – er, escaped.’ Somehow, ‘escaped’ sounded better than ‘stabbed a man in the stomach several times’.
She stirred. ‘Is he dead, then?’
‘No. He’s in intensive care. But he’s alive.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’ She lifted her chin defiantly, and I thought she was hoping to see shock in my eyes. If so, she was disappointed.
‘Right. In your own words, then, can you tell me what happened? Start from the beginning. What time did you head out to the pub?’
I can’t say that Kelly Staples was an easy interview. Fear made her bolshie. She battled me for the first few minutes, barely answering the questions I asked. But as the story of her night wore on, something seemed to take hold of her, and the monosyllables became sentences, and the sentences became paragraphs, and soon she was talking freely, the words running on like water into a gutter. I hoped Rob could keep up.
‘So of course, I’m thinking a minicab will be cheap and I’ll get home quicker. I mean, he was old. He was like my dad or something. Quiet, like. Just … helpful. I thought maybe I reminded him of his daughter and he wanted to see me get back safe. What an idiot. Total idiot. I should have run a mile, not that I could in my boots. I could barely walk.’
‘What happened when you got into the car?’
The words flowed on. His car, and what she’d noticed about it – a faint smell of petrol that had worried her, the more she thought about it. His refusal to take her home the way she knew. The alley he’d found, where he’d promised to turn the car. How dark it had been. How he’d stalled her, telling her the door wouldn’t open from the inside. How he’d sweated. How it was wrong, and what he’d said was wrong, and she’d just known it was him, the Burning Man, so she’d got in before he could do her the way he’d done those other girls.
‘I had this knife, see, in my boot. For protection. You can’t be too careful these days, my little brother said.’ She gave a laugh, high-pitched with nerves. ‘Well, this just goes to show, doesn’t it? I mean, if I hadn’t had it, who knows where I’d be? On a slab, maybe.’
Maybe, maybe not. I was beginning to feel edgy. ‘Go back to before you took out the knife, Kelly. What did he say or do to make you sure that he was a killer?’
‘He stopped the car, and he said he’d let me out.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. As soon as he stopped the car, I just knew.’
I waited. The only sound in the room was Rob’s pen scratching across the paper. When it stopped, I said gently, ‘What did you know, Kelly?’
‘That he was a killer. That killer. You know, the burning one.’
I made myself look blandly understanding. But my mind was blank apart from one word repeating monotonously, over and over again. Fuck … fuck … fuck …
She finished off her story, telling us that she’d got to him before he could make a move on her, that he hadn’t seen her coming, finishing up with, ‘And I’ve been stuck in this room for two hours and I haven’t had a ciggie, so if you wouldn’t mind, can I go now?’
‘You’ll have to hang on for a little while,’ I said, trying to sound pleasant. ‘You’ll probably have to give another statement, I’m afraid. And the doctors haven’t signed you out yet.’
She looked as if she was going to cry. ‘I just want to go home.’
‘I know.’ I stood up, suddenly uncomfortable. I couldn’t lie and say she’d be leaving soon; if I wasn’t much mistaken, she would be arrested before too long. From her account of events, there was an obvious charge of Section 18, wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm.
Kelly was rubbing her eyes, smearing moisture and the remains of her make-up a
cross her pale cheeks. From behind her hands came, ‘I just want my mum.’
I had got to the door and I yanked it open, pushing Rob out in front of me. ‘Thanks for your help, Kelly. We’ll be in touch.’
The sound of sobbing was cut off by the door swinging shut. Annoyingly, it was the kind of door you couldn’t slam. I looked around for something to kick instead. Anything to vent my feelings.
‘What a lovely girl.’
‘Don’t be mean about her.’ I felt protective of poor, unlucky Kelly, even though I was furious with her as well.
‘Who’s being mean?’
‘You are and you know it.’
‘I just said she was lovely.’ Rob blinked at me innocently. ‘Not the kind of girl you want to make a move on without fair warning, but sweet all the same.’
‘Blackstaff was up to something naughty. What was he planning to do with her?’
‘We’ll never know. And what we do know doesn’t justify what she did to him, does it?’
I had to admit he was right. ‘By her account, he didn’t do a thing. OK, he was a bit creepy – I’m sure she was right to be suspicious. Maybe he thought she was too drunk to know what she was doing and he could take advantage. But she completely overreacted. There isn’t a shred of evidence linking him to the other murders, not one concrete thing that would confirm her story that he’s the killer. And let’s be honest, her story isn’t going to stand up in court, is it?’
‘She might have been right. Maybe he got rid of the stuff before we got there.’
‘What, a container of petrol and at least one blunt instrument? The stun gun? There wasn’t any of that in the car, was there? Or around it. We’re screwed. Completely screwed.’
‘Yep. And you’re the one who’s going to have to tell Godley.’
‘Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.’ I looked at him. ‘You don’t give a stuff, do you? This is a total disaster and you’re just not bothered.’
He shrugged. ‘Nothing we can do about it now. Bad luck for Mr Blackstaff. But we’re no worse off than we were before.’
‘Oh yeah, we’re doing great. Four women dead and no leads. You’re right, this is just a minor blip. Otherwise, we’re gold.’ I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, sighing.