That evening he was on duty at the Doncaster Rovers Community Fireworks display. It was supposed to be a perk to be rostered for events like that, but as his feet turned numb, he longed for the boredom of his first job, night-time shelf-stacking at Pets At Home. At least that had been warm.
He had a surprise at the Keepmoat Stadium. Up in the VIP box, a familiar face was looking down at him, although it took him a moment to recognise her, fully made-up and with the collar of an expensive camel coat pulled up to her ears. It was Lizzie Morrison and she actually waved. Later, as the spectators were leaving, milling around in front of the ground, she detached herself from a group and came over.
‘Fancy meeting you here!’ She smiled broadly and Sean was taken aback. Maybe she’d been on the champagne.
‘I bet you were a sight warmer up there than we were down on the pitch,’ he said, taking in how pretty her face looked with a spot of lipstick. ‘How did you wangle a ticket?’
‘My dad,’ she nodded over her shoulder to a cluster of men with Doncaster Rovers scarves tucked into their dark coats. ‘He’s on the board.’
‘Fancy that.’ Sean thought he might have frostbite in his toes.
Back home in front of the gas fire, his rubbed his feet in his hands. He’d been planning to drop into the pub for a game of snooker on the way, but didn’t think he’d stop shivering enough to hit the ball straight. His nan had waited up for him. Maureen, his mum’s mum, had looked after him since he was twelve and still hadn’t got used to the fact he’d grown up. She offered to run him a bath, but he settled for a can of lager and a packet of crisps.
He stared at the telly, a nice flatscreen he’d got on instalments when he started the job, trying to make out the flavour on his tongue. Worcester Sauce, maybe. He washed it back with a mouthful of lager, cold and fizzing in his throat.
‘Carole popped round with them. A whole box was only three pound. They’re a bit too spicy for me, but I thought you might like them.’
‘Carole?’
‘From bingo. She gets them wholesale.’
He didn’t know why she bothered with bingo. A bunch of old women staring at a set of numbers. She’d be seventy next year and she said it kept her young, said he ought to give it a go, but he wasn’t tempted.
The living room table was covered in home decoration magazines and she’d marked several pages on wallpapers. That was going to be their next project together. She directed; he did the labouring. She entered competitions on TV makeover programmes, but she hadn’t won yet.
‘Any trouble at the fireworks?’ she said and passed him another packet of crisps. The writing on the back looked foreign. Arabic or something.
‘Not really. Had to ask a feller to put his sparklers out, but he wasn’t too fussed.’
‘It’s been like World War One round here, some of these bangers they’ve got now, sound like they could take your head off.’ The cat jumped up on to her lap, turned a few times before he settled. ‘He’s been right funny all night, but at least he’s indoors. Better when they do it properly, organised, much less bother for everyone.’
The feeling was coming back into his feet. A thousand pinpricks of returning blood made his eyes water and he wished he’d been less distracted when he spoke to Lizzie Morrison. He should have asked her how the SOCO got on taking prints at the trailer. On his bedroom wall, above the chest of drawers, was a sheet of flipchart paper that he’d taken from one of the conference rooms at the station. He’d helped himself to a set of marker pens too. It wasn’t stealing; it was just bringing work home. The bosses did it all the time. In the centre of the sheet of paper was a photograph. It wasn’t very good quality. Sean had taken it on his mobile, not at the scene, he hadn’t thought of it then, but later, when the girl’s picture was on the incident board. He’d given her a name, Su-Mai, which sounded sort of Chinese, and written it underneath in green. Then he’d used different colours to draw lines out from the picture in a clock pattern. At the end of each line he was going to write all the information gathered so far. Right now, all the lines were empty.
The following morning, Sean was glad of a late start. At the station he went straight to the canteen for a cup of coffee. Standing in the queue, he was aware of an argument going on at one of the tables. DCI Barry ‘Burger’ King was tucking in to his lunch, or possibly his second breakfast, when a middle-aged man in a navy boiler suit, carrying a heavy, black case, approached him. The man’s epaulets said Scene of Crime Officer.
‘Donald mate!’ Burger waved him over. ‘Donald the Duck. How did you get on, any good prints?’
‘Next time, give me the right bloody address. I’ve been up and down that stretch of road all morning and there’s no snack bar van or catering trailer, or whatever you want to call it. Not there, not anywhere. No trailer means no prints.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ a gobbet of something flew out of King’s mouth across the table in front of him. He studied a map that was thrust under his nose and jabbed at it with a ketchup-covered fork. ‘Right there, bit of a hedge, broken fence, just inside the field. You’d have to slow down to see it. What speed were you doing?’
‘Very funny. I pulled up at every single lay-by along a three-mile stretch. There are six in case you’re interested. Then I went back and checked them all again. There’s nothing.’
King caught sight of Sean and beckoned to him.
‘Here, take Percy with you. He knows it. He’s a native.’
The SOCO looked less than impressed when Sean asked if he could go and transfer his coffee into a disposable cup.
As they pulled out of the car park, the SOCO broke the silence.
‘Chaplin, Donald. No jokes about the name if you don’t mind.’
Sean wasn’t about to make one. ‘Denton, Sean. Not Percy.’
Chaplin flicked on the radio. Classic FM. It was loud, but he turned it up louder.
‘Helps the stress,’ Chaplin shouted. ‘Blood pressure, you know. Not helped by arseholes like our friend King.’
‘How come you didn’t go yesterday?’
‘What?’
‘Lizzie Morrison said you were going yesterday.’
‘Violent burglary in a house at Bessacar!’ Donald shouted back. ‘And a nasty knife crime the day you found the body. Stretched resources, mate, it’s a sign of the times. Smack ODs just don’t cut it.’
Not a priority. Poor Su-Mai. They drove the rest of the way without speaking, listening to some tune like a film score blasting out of the speakers. Sean showed Chaplin where to stop and they pulled up on to the gravel of the lay-by. Sean twisted round in his seat and stared back through the gap in the fence. There was nothing there, just a space where only three days ago there’d been a mucky old snack bar trailer with the word Refreshments peeling off its side. He got out of the car.
‘So it was definitely here?’ Donald followed him.
‘You can check my notes, if you can read my writing.’
The same break in the fence, the trodden grass, even a shred of incident tape caught in the hedge, told Sean he hadn’t imagined it. There was a rectangle of yellow-brown grass and four matching dents where the stands had been. If the soft tyres had left a smudge, last night’s hard frost had covered it over.
Back at the station Barry King shrugged it off.
‘The farmer probably moved it. I‘ll get someone to ring him. He won’t have been too pleased about having a mobile brothel on his land.’
‘We’ll have to find it,’ Sean realised he’d spoken out of turn as soon as King fixed him with a pointed stare.
‘Oh, we will, will we? Well sunshine, I think you’ll find it’s not in your job description to tell me how to allocate this department’s meagre resources. We had a major burglary last night, violence to the person and kiddies in th
e house. No, I’m not putting any more manpower into a dead junkie. Let’s get on with protecting the public from real criminals.’
After work, Sean walked up through the estate as it was going dark. He stood and looked across the ring road. The air was heavy with exhaust fumes and the scent of frying onions was coming from one of the blocks behind him. Eventually there was a long enough gap in the rush-hour traffic to risk crossing. There was still no trailer, just a flicker of blue and white tape from the hedgerow. It had been a crime scene, his crime scene, and now some idiot had moved the evidence and nothing more was going to be done about it. Su-Mai was dead and nobody except Sean gave a tinker’s cuss.
Bonfire Night: 6.45am
Phil rammed the van into gear and pulled away. The engine ground against itself, then roared with the effort. When Mackenzie told him the van had seen better days, he hadn’t been wrong. But it still had a cassette player and Phil reckoned he had time to stop off and grab some sounds. The light was on in the bedroom and the dog greeted him with a thud of his tail against his legs. Upstairs, Stacey was sitting up in bed with Holly curled around her.
‘Sorry, did I wake you?’
‘No. This one did. Said you’ve gone a-hunting. Don’t squash me, Holly,’ Stacey shifted her daughter off her legs.
‘Johnny Mac’s got a job for me.’
‘Good. He’s going places, you know?’
‘Yeah?’ Phil rummaged in a box on the top shelf of the wardrobe.
‘He might have something permanent soon. He’ll need someone to run the office full-time.’
‘Here it is. I knew I put these tapes somewhere.’
‘Are you listening, Phil?’
‘I can hear you.’ He turned and looked at her. Stacey was prettier when she didn’t frown, but it seemed to be her default expression these days. ‘I can’t see how answering the phone for Mackenzie is a fantastic career move.’
‘The bills don’t pay themselves,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should apply for it.’
‘Maybe you should.’ He bent down and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I need to go. I should be back before you have to be at the pub. Bye, little chicken.’ But Holly rolled away and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
As he left Moorsby-on-Humber, the sky was growing lighter. Phil reached over to the passenger seat and grabbed a tape from the carrier bag. The delicate percussive opening of Betty LaVette’s ‘Let Me Down Easy’ made him smile. Any second now the vocal would kick in with a swift boot to his guts. It was one of those tunes that landed him back at another time in his life, over a decade ago. A girl called Katie, kissing him goodbye at the airport on Ibiza, the salt still on her lips from her morning swim. She said she’d wait for him, wished she could come with him, but he was on his way home for a funeral. His mother was dead and he had to face it on his own.
He hit eject and failed to catch the tape. It skittered across the floor under the pedals. He grabbed another. The call and response of Chris Kenner’s ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’ shuddered through the speakers. Rewind to six months before his mum died. Chuck Everett’s Soul Bar in Playa d’en Bossa. Chuck made him some of these tapes so he could get a decent band together for the bar. For a blissful few months they’d played in paradise to packed houses, Phil on trombone bigging up the brass sound. But when Phil got back from that wet, English funeral he found that his so-called mate had moved in with Katie. No. Chris Kenner had to go too. Phil managed to get the action right this time and caught the tape. He dug a little deeper in the bag, finally settling with Beverley Knight. Good driving music, ‘Moving On Up (On The Right Side)’. Phil laughed, the van wasn’t moving up on anyone. A few bars in to the song, he was overtaken by a hearse. When the Humber Bridge came into view, his heart lifted. You really felt like you were going somewhere on that bridge, even if it was only Hull on the other side. People knocked Hull, but Phil liked it. A port was always full of possibilities; it was a way in and a way out.
He had the instructions in Mackenzie’s wobbly handwriting: pick up the stock from a warehouse on the industrial estate and take it to an address in Doncaster. Easy money. He thought Stacey would be happy for once that he’d got some work. But somehow it was never enough. She didn’t seem to understand that he needed to be flexible in case any bookings came in. And whatever else Johnny Mackenzie was, he was certainly flexible. He always had something on the go and was good for a bit of cash in hand.
Phil sang along, drumming the wheel with his index fingers. Driving jobs were all right. Even in this old heap of junk he could get into the music, be with his thoughts and get paid for it. He’d done his fair share of bar work but he hated it, it was all too rushed. That was how he met Stacey. He’d come back from playing a stint with an Abba cover band on the Hull-Rotterdam ferry. He’d been trying to hitch south; thought he might stay with the old man until he got straightened out. The ferry company had fired him for smoking spliffs in the staff rest room, but he was ready to leave anyway. The playlist was driving him nuts. He’d hitched a lift with a Dutchman in a refrigerated tulip truck. Just the other side of the Humber Bridge, the driver decided he needed a pie and a pint. The Volunteer Arms in Moorsby-on-Humber was warm and the jukebox played Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. As the Dutchman was coming to the end of his third pint, Phil saw the sign above the bar: Staff Wanted. The barmaid had a wide smile and a great laugh. Her name was Stacey. He decided to stay.
Chapter Four
The RAMA office was one floor up above a doll shop in an uneven row of buildings just outside York’s city wall. As Karen came round the corner, with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and a carton of orange juice in the other, a man was looking at the dolls in the shop window. She let herself in at the office door and he turned round.
‘Is your boss in?’ he said.
Her mouth was full of dry chicken and granary bread.
‘Well, is he in? Your boss? Jasvinder Kumar? My name’s Moon. DCI Charlie Moon. Human Trafficking Service.’
He was very tall. Long arms hung from wide shoulders, the rest of his body hidden under a black puffa jacket. He held a police ID card out to her.
She swallowed the last of her mouthful. ‘He’s getting some lunch. Do you want to come up?’ He nodded and followed her up the wooden stairs. ‘He won’t be long. Take a seat.’
DCI Moon crossed the room and sat down on the rattan garden chair that usually had Jaz’s coat slung over it. One big hand ran through his hair, leaving it just as messy as when he’d come in.
‘Nice place.’ He looked around, taking in the beamed ceiling. ‘Small, but perfectly formed.’
She wondered about sending him into the boardroom, to sit at the oval table where they’d interviewed the Moyos in the morning, but she felt like keeping an eye on him. Watching the detective. He looked like he was prepared to wait; took out his Blackberry and checked his messages. Even sitting down he gave the impression of height.
‘Charlie!’ Jaz bounded into the room, his coat half off, looked for a place to put it and decided the floor would do. The two men shook hands then pulled together in a backslapping, man-hug. Jaz seemed to disappear into DCI Moon’s arms. ‘Has Karen given you a coffee?’
She hadn’t. Somewhere between curiosity and a lingering irritation at having her lunch break interrupted she’d forgotten that part of her job description. She asked Moon how he liked it.
‘Strong, and a tiny bit of milk.’
There was an upward inflection in his voice. Not local. Welsh maybe. Another ‘blow-in’. The city was full of them, people like her and Max and Jaz. He looked like he’d want the good stuff, so she went into the boardroom where they kept the coffee machine. There was an old photograph above the fireplace. Nineteenth century slum housing for Irish railway workers, just inside the city walls. Two muddy-faced children were staring, hollow-eyed, at the photographer. Part of an earlier w
ave of immigration to York, it must have been even harder for them.
When she brought the coffee through, they were reminiscing about a case they’d worked on. It sounded like Jaz had been defending someone Moon had arrested.
‘I still can’t believe you thought he was legit.’ Moon was saying.
‘I thought he had a reasonable asylum claim. My job was to make sure the law was applied fairly.’ Jaz interlaced his fingers and tried to hide a smile.
‘He was a pimp for God’s sake!’ DCI Moon took the coffee and thanked her.
‘Well at least you can be sure I’m on the side of the angels now,’ Jaz replied. ‘You were saying…?’
‘We need to track down anyone connected to a haulage firm in Grimsby belonging to a guy called Xhoui Li, or anyone who could have come in on one of his trucks.’
‘There’s a girl at HMP Moreton Hall.’ Jaz said. ‘She was picked up in a Chinese restaurant by Immigration. Her solicitor approached me about her grounds for appeal. The dates fit and if I remember rightly, she named Grimsby as her port of entry. Karen could you…?’
She was already crossing the sloping wooden floor to get the file from the boardroom. The sound of her mobile stopped her. It hardly ever rang during the day. The two men watched as she fumbled to silence it. The name on the screen said Dad. In her haste, she hit the screen and realised she hadn’t stopped the call but answered it on speakerphone. The sound of her father’s voice saying, ‘Hello, hello, Karen’ filled the room. She looked helplessly at Jaz, mouthed, ‘It’s on the table, middle stack’, and slipped out through the other door on to the landing at the top of the stairs.
‘I’ll call you back, Dad. I’m at work.’
‘Wait, no, listen. Karen, please.’
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