Problems with Girls (DI Sloane Book 2)

by Kelly Creighton

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Hewitt, ‘I’ll be sure to tell Ms. Ward that it was your push that got the ball rolling again.’

  ‘Really?’

  Hewitt shrugged. ‘I think it’s a good time to look again and Greg agrees. I couldn’t give Janet a date there and then, but I will. I don’t want to get her hopes up until we get a budget allocation. It costs hundreds of thousands. It could take a year too.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  Hewitt nodded. ‘I’m not doing this for you, Ms. Harriet Sloane.’

  ‘I know that, too.’

  It was still a thorn in my side that she had the post and I did not. But I had a heap of responsibility already. Almost too much.

  *

  At noon Paul texted me:

  Your dad was just here.

  Where, in the hospital?

  Yes. He was looking for me.

  Why?

  I got paged to go and see him, thought something had happened to one of the boys, or you.

  No, I’m fine. They are too … I hope.

  He wanted the lowdown on my job. Talk about timing!

  Do you want to just call me?

  I’m about to go into theatre.

  Why was he there in the first place?

  Says he was seeing a friend

  He doesn’t have any

  Like father like daughter!

  FU!

  Could he have been here for an appointment he doesn’t want to worry you about? Dementia?

  Not his style, not worrying people. He would say, believe me!

  He was saying he hasn’t seen you

  That’s a joke, no one comes near when I’m on maternity for a year, suddenly he wants to talk now I’m back to work. He was a right grump last time

  Okay, I am finished my break now. Kiss the kids from me.

  I’m gonna stay on late and catch up.

  Okay, I’ll give the kids a kiss from you then xx

  Thanks, mate!

  Chapter 20

  That afternoon we waited for Thomas but he didn’t show. Then we tried to call him to no reply, so we called at his house.

  ‘I haven’t seen him, he didn’t come home last night,’ said Jackie.

  ‘Where could he be?’ I asked him.

  ‘He fucken better be okay,’ said his father, ‘after that shite in the papers. He’s sensitive.’

  ‘Has he stayed out before?’

  ‘He’s stayed at a mate’s a couple of times without saying. I’m hoping that’s what it is. He’s not a kid.’

  ‘Are you worried about him?’ I asked.

  ‘I swear, if I get my hands on the person who put that shite in the paper.’ Jackie clenched his fists.

  I couldn’t tell Jackie about Lucinda there and then, not when he was threatening her like that. And neither did Fleur. We’d tell him later, when he seemed to calm down.

  ‘How is Thomas’ mental health?’ I asked Jackie.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  I knew Jackie had not dealt with Chloe’s mental health issues well, or Glynis’, and I didn’t know how honest he was being now.

  ‘Has Thomas ever been to the doctor’s or the hospital about anxiety or depression, or self-harm?’

  ‘No. Don’t start going down that line. He’ll be at a mate’s.’

  ‘Do you have the numbers for any of them?’

  ‘No,’ Jackie said. He did not want to help us, I suspected Thomas had been at home and Jackie was covering for him, and had to make it look convincing. Concerning enough, but not overly so. Jackie had to stop us calling a search party.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘while we have you here, Mr. Taylor, we want to speak to you about Chloe.’

  ‘What else would you want to speak to me about?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Lewis talked about Chloe taking a gap year and travelling. He said she went to France, Spain, and that region of Europe.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘We have spoken …’ I looked at Fleur. ‘Well, Sergeant Higgins and I, we spoke to peers of Chloe’s who said she didn’t go to Europe.’

  Jackie’s nose scrunched up. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Mr. Taylor, we have good reason to believe that Chloe was working for Amnesty International for a few months, from August 2016 to March of last year.’

  ‘Where are you going to tell me she was doing this?’

  ‘Pakistan.’

  ‘Get the hell out of here. Are you fucken mad! As if she would be in Pakistan and not tell me.’

  ‘We’ve heard it a few times now, Mr. Taylor,’ I said.

  ‘Why would she have been there?’

  ‘Helping girls, getting them away from gender mutilation, and that kind of danger,’ said Fleur, ‘helping them be safe.’

  Jackie refused to believe it. ‘She called me from her mobile, not all the time, but every now and then.’

  ‘There are ways to find out if it’s true,’ said Hewitt.

  Jackie phoned Thomas. This time he answered his phone right away.

  ‘Did you know that Chloe went to Pakistan? The police are here saying that.’ There was a pause. ‘Are you lying to me, boy?’ Jackie hung up on him. ‘There you go, he’s fine and answering his phone now.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ said Hewitt.

  Jackie took off into the kitchen and took a red box out of the cupboard, it was full of tapes and letters, certificates, medical cards and passports. He took Chloe’s red passport out and skimmed the pages, and there it was, a stamp from Pakistan.

  ‘Now, this!’ He jabbed his finger at the stamp. ‘This here, it looks like she didn’t trust me.’ Jackie searched my face, then Hewitt’s.

  ‘What young woman, or man, doesn’t have secrets from their parents?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’d never let her go there,’ shouted Jackie. ‘And Chloe knew that, surely. I know she did when she lied about it. How dangerous would that have been? What must she’ve seen out there?’

  ‘Chloe did it for the right reasons, Jackie,’ said Hewitt, ‘she was an activist. Must have had a strong calling.’

  ‘Well, let people who have some life behind them be the activists and let them fight wars too,’ he snapped.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ I asked.

  ‘You can take off, please, and leave me to digest this.’

  *

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have told him,’ I said to Hewitt, fanning myself in the car. It was a pleasant day, weather-wise, not too humid, but Jackie’s anger had got me hot under the collar.

  ‘I wonder what it was really like out there. She probably kept a diary,’ said Hewitt.

  ‘Why would she?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you want some sort of account?’

  ‘Do you think someone from over there did this?’ I asked. ‘That’s what Jackie will be thinking now, that his girl got involved in something over in Pakistan and it followed her back to Belfast.’

  ‘No,’ said Fleur, ‘that would have happened in Pakistan; Chloe Taylor wouldn’t have been deemed important enough to follow to a wee office on the Newtownards Road, and certainly not a year later. She was only a wee girl.’

  ‘Look at Malala Yousafzai,’ I said, ‘she was shot for blogging, for wanting an education.’

  Hewitt shrugged. ‘I’m thinking Chloe will have written about this.’

  ‘Why? She wasn’t much of a writer that I could see.’

  ‘Wasn’t she? What about Facebook? What is that, if not a diary? Making an account of a life and being read.’

  ‘Never looked at it that way,’ I admitted.

  ‘We’re going to have to start looking at everything differently. This is not our usual day-to-day.’

  Chapter 21

  Late afternoon Greg called me into his office.

  ‘Yes, Chief, just a minute,’ I said. It was the most he had acknowledged me one-on-one since I’d returned to work. By the time I went into his room he was standing by a filing cabinet looking at papers. �
�Everything going well?’ he asked.

  I wondered if Jocelyn had mentioned seeing me in the Centra.

  ‘We have a few leads,’ I said, ‘the brother, Thomas Taylor, didn’t show today. We need to track him down. We’ve left messages but he hasn’t replied to us. Though he spoke to his dad, and we know he’s alright. I’ll get him into a tight corner.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘And you? Personally. Everything okay with you, Sloane?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said and stopped holding my breath, allowed myself to properly look at him. ‘Everything okay with you?’ I asked in return.

  He ignored my question, watching the door. Greg Dunne is one of these people who make you think they are not entirely interested in you but always waiting to hear from someone else, always having to leave rooms urgently, like a bodyguard protecting a president under threat.

  Or something equally ridiculous.

  No: correction!

  Making you feel that you are the something ridiculous. And by you, of course, I mean, me.

  ‘Good, I’m glad to hear that,’ he finally said. ‘Harriet, I wonder if you would kindly relieve me of something.’ His eyes were still on the door.

  Sounds ominous, I thought. ‘What would that be, Chief?’

  He looked surprised at me addressing him this way. He coughed, unearthed a thick brown jiffy bag and handed it to me. I held it, turning it over. It had no markings.

  ‘Do me favour,’ he said, ‘if you can, and take that.’

  ‘What for?’

  I watched him look at it, then he finally made eye contact with me. I peeled the side back and saw that it was full of money. ‘This looks suspect,’ I said.

  ‘Believe me, it’s legitimate. We sold the villa in Portugal. All the kids got the same amount.’

  ‘What is …’

  ‘It’s for you and …’

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  I should have set it on the table and walked out, acted offended, but some rude curiosity got the better of me. I went into an empty office, locked the door behind me and counted it out. Forty grand for the twins. Twenty each. I closed the jiffy bag again and went to my locker but I’d forgotten my key. Hadn’t needed it in so long. God only knew where it was.

  ‘We’re going to Lizzie Donegan-Moat’s,’ said Hewitt, coming up behind me. ‘She’s remembered something she thinks will be helpful.’

  ‘Again with LDM?’ I asked. ‘I thought we could try to corner Thomas, preferably away from Jackie.’

  ‘Leave Tommy boy for now,’ said Hewitt. ‘And I’ll be with you in a minute.’ She eyed me dubiously.

  Outside I stuffed the jiffy bag into a plastic bag. The glove box was full, so I put it on the backseat of the service car and waited for her to join me.

  ‘Mind if I drive?’ Hewitt said. ‘I get car sick.’

  I got out and into the passenger seat.

  ‘And you’re a dreadful driver,’ she added.

  ‘You better be an excellent one,’ I said, ‘after a remark like that.’

  ‘Ah, Harriet, lighten up,’ she said, ‘I told you, you don’t get my humour.’

  On the Newtownards Road someone passed by in a Boxster just like Paul had until the kids came along. He sold it to prove he was serious, came home with a people carrier for us. I thought about Greg’s money in the back seat: the boys’ money. They were well provided for. Disney holidays. Every toy under the sun. I thought I might surprise Paul with a fun little Boxster instead. Was forty grand enough? Probably not. But he deserved something nice.

  We arrived at Lizzie’s house and parked at the bottom of her driveway, she was standing on her doorstep as we walked up towards her. ‘Sorry to have you coming out again,’ she said.

  ‘We were in the neighbourhood,’ said Hewitt. ‘It’s no trouble.’

  ‘Did you look at the papers?’ she asked us.

  ‘Yes.’ We tailed her indoors.

  ‘And they’ve been sending hate mail?’ she said.

  ‘How do you know about that?’ I asked her.

  ‘I work with someone whose partner works with Jackie.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘They sent Mike Birch hate mail?’

  ‘It was for Chloe,’ said Hewitt.

  ‘How sick!’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Hewitt. ‘Sick is the word.’

  Lizzie got her laptop and set it on her knee and unlocked the screen. One screen was Chloe’s Facebook page. We looked at it together.

  Lizzie went into the message and scrolled back to ages ago, April 2016.

  ‘Two years ago,’ Lizzie said.

  I saw you on TV, who do you think you are asking world leaders stupid questions. Bit cheeky if you ask me, and with that mad green hair! Someone above everyone else, that’s who you think you are. But you are nothing. A wannabe. Take my advice: forget feminism and get back to femininity. Bumptious little bitch. Nobody likes you.

  ‘Well, I liked her,’ said Lizzie. ‘And who uses the word bumptious! I don’t think it’s a word I’ve ever heard anyone say in real life.’

  ‘Who sent that?’ I asked.

  ‘It was an account just set up to send those messages. It isn’t linked to an email address.’

  I took a note of it. ‘May I see?’ I stood and moved to the table, asked if it was better to sit there. Lizzie agreed it was. So there we sat as I scrolled through the messages. ‘There are no messages from Lewis,’ I noted.

  ‘There were. Tonnes of them. Chloe deleted them.’

  ‘How do you have access to this account?’ asked Hewitt.

  ‘Chloe signed over custody of Facebook to me in case of her death. I did the same to her. We were having a drink one night – a smoke for her – and talking shit, as you do.’

  ‘As you do,’ said Hewitt dryly.

  ‘We agreed that’s what we would do.’

  Lizzie walked across the parquet wood block floor, her flip flops clopping at her heels, she looked out of the window and said, ‘There is the newspaper now. I’ll be right back.’

  ‘Don’t you already have it?’

  ‘No, my colleague just told me. I get the afternoon edition delivered.’

  Lizzie went outside, I could hear her talking and then a man’s voice.

  I looked into Lizzie’s messages to Chloe, they seemed caring, supportive. The most recent were: Haven’t heard from you in a few days, and; Everything okay, hun?

  Then I clicked on Lizzie’s ‘wall’, only slightly wary of her looking at the search history afterwards. Her page was full of inspirational memes and quotes. One meme that said: We only fight because we love each other. And another: Only passionate relationships have ups and downs, mainly in the bedroom. She had tagged Justin in these.

  ‘Did you have a visitor?’ Hewitt asked Lizzie, to alert me to go back into Chloe’s account.

  ‘Chatting to the paperboy,’ Lizzie said, flushed. ‘Our delivery boy is a man, and he drives a car. You couldn’t make it up!’

  ‘Can I have the details of Chloe’s account, to have a better look at the station?’ said Hewitt.

  Lizzie wrote them down. ‘Did you see the photo on Facebook?’ she asked.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked.

  ‘The psychiatrist.’

  ‘No.’

  She showed it to us, Chloe with her arms around him, and his arm around her. He was not very tall and had short, tidy brown hair.

  ‘This looks like they are socialising together.’

  ‘She was in love with him,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘He looks older than her,’ I said.

  ‘He is. A lot.’

  ‘Married?’ Hewitt asked.

  ‘I think so,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Do you know that she was having an affair and are afraid to break your friend’s confidence?’ I asked.

  ‘What can I say to that.’

  ‘So, they were in a relationship?’

  ‘Chloe was harbouring a secret in the last while,’ said Lizzie. ‘At the very least
she had a huge crush on Martin, was always talking about him.’

  Lizzie held the newspaper out. The front cover featured Lucinda Press. Grandmother of seven still trolling dead girl activist.

  ‘Wow!’ said Lizzie. ‘You knew and you didn’t say?’

  ‘Don’t worry about the hate mail, we have our person for that,’ said Hewitt.

  Chapter 22

  In the car, in a panic, Hewitt called Jackie and explained that we had our person for the hate mail.

  ‘A woman,’ she said, ‘an older woman, harmless, just not quite right, has some funny ideas.’

  He had already heard and wasn’t happy. I could hear him reply. But to be honest, I’d heard him angrier.

  Around five we stopped at the garage to buy our own copy.

  ‘It says that we have been getting taunting letters too,’ I told Hewitt.

  ‘We?’ she asked.

  ‘We at the service.’

  ‘Have we? I don’t think so, or I’d know about it.’

  ‘Ha,’ I said, ‘and the paper has been getting mail of their own.’

  ‘What?’ She pulled the newspaper toward her.

  We, here at the paper, have been getting taunting letters saying that our coverage is ‘rubbish’ and that the PSNI is doing a ‘pathetic job’.

  ‘True enough.’ Hewitt laughed. ‘Their coverage has been rubbish … compared to the ink they spilled over Erica McClelland.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I just wanted to hear Fleur say it.

  ‘They loved Erica and her nightclub photos, showing plenty of tit. And leg.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ I said.

  ‘Awful but true. Admit it.’

  I couldn’t, even though Fleur Hewitt was one hundred percent correct. Even the paper’s Nights Out section was as bad.

  There was never a bunch of lads snapped or an average-looking girl. It was just tit, fake tan and more tit.

  Page 3 may have been done, lonely old lads of Belfast had the Nights Out section.

  ‘Who is doing this?’ I mused. ‘Probably Lucinda Press.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Hewitt. ‘Everyone has an opinion on everything these days.’

  *

  At Strandtown there was mail addressed to Chief Dunne. He read it out to us.

  This is a confession: I drowned Erica McClelland.