Problems with Girls (DI Sloane Book 2)

by Kelly Creighton

  ‘I’m going to hit the hay,’ he said.

  ‘Are you not happy to see me dressed up?’ I was flirting, or so I thought, but his response worried me. We were never very physical and now when I wanted to be he was shrugging me off. I noticed his face was grey. ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘you look unwell.’

  ‘The kids have probably picked something up from the day nursery and given it to me.’

  My first thought was, please no, what would I do with the boys without his help, what if he was to get sick? Really sick. For the first time Paul’s old battle with cancer seemed real.

  He went to bed and I followed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I pushed.

  ‘It’s stress. There’s an audit at the hospital.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, relieved it was only a mental thing; a worry about work.

  ‘There’s an investigation,’ he said. ‘It will be fine, I’m sure.’

  ‘It will. You’re great at your job.’

  ‘Go to sleep,’ he said but I couldn’t. The faces of five girls shuffled in and out of my head all night. The words, ‘Your daughter?’ going through my head too. I was a tiny bit glad I was a mother of sons.

  Chapter 27

  The next morning was warm but cloudy. It was also Chloe’s funeral. The first funeral I’d been to that the rain stayed away. Being that the family were humanists there was no church involvement. They had a service in the house, which I stood outside for.

  There were readings and everyone had been asked to wear bright colours. And after, when the traffic moved again, I went inside.

  Drew and Roxy were not brightly dressed. Upholding tradition, she wore a black dress and he wore a black suit. She kept her children there for a while, who were dressed in dark blues.

  ‘Not contagious anymore, not now there are scabs,’ I heard her say when people commented on the little ones’ spotty faces. But soon she put them in the double buggy that was stacked upright by the door and left.

  Everyone else was dressed as if they were going to a rave: girls from Feminist Complex, Belfast; Mike Birch; Prof. Lundy; and a sea of young people, possibly old school friends, possibly friends of Thomas’.

  The door to the dining room was open, there Lizzie chatted with Thomas, they were dressed brightly too, him in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, she in capri pants and a red top with bright orange flowers on the front that I saw when she turned to see us and gave me a little wave.

  They were looking at photos on the far wall.

  Out of nowhere Jackie appeared between us.

  ‘Sorry, Mr. Taylor, do you want us to leave?’ I said when I saw his face catch me and falter.

  ‘No, it’s okay.’ He sighed.

  I walked over to look at the photos on the wall, they were of both Taylor kids together.

  The posture and face in the top photo was that of the street kid in the trailer as depicted in Thomas’ art piece, Fridge.

  He walked off to grab a sandwich from the table behind him and I followed, despite Lizzie trying to talk to me.

  ‘Chloe never posed for you, did she, Thomas?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I used these photos of Chloe … at different ages.’

  I looked over at the other photos, they were either of both siblings together, Thomas on his own, or Chloe alone. I felt like I recognised every expression from his exhibition. Thomas had simply looked at that wall for inspiration while he worked at the dining table.

  ‘I took her photos from there,’ he said, ‘well, what I mean is I copied them from there, and I only did it so I wouldn’t have to ask anyone to pose. I know it sounds soft but it’s embarrassing to ask in case people say no.’

  ‘I totally get that, Thomas,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t ask her either because it was going to be a surprise. If anyone would get what I was trying to do, it would be Chloe.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘From what I’ve learnt about her. It’s clever, your art work. Your dad has two very socially conscious kids. If my children grow up to be as good as you and Chloe, I’ll be proud. I can see that Jackie’s as proud of you both as he is protective.’

  But I could sense the divide between them, and I reckoned it came from Chloe’s secret travels and Thomas knowing about them.

  ‘You don’t think I have anything to do with Chloe’s murder, do you?’ Thomas asked me.

  ‘If we thought that you’d be in custody. And you’re not, are you?’

  He gave me a goofy smile. ‘Chloe was my inspiration for my art project. I thought, if she can be brave like that … when she travelled, you know?’

  ‘I do,’ I said and touched his arm.

  What was happening to me? First Lewis, then Thomas. I just wanted to wrap my arms around them and give them a hug. I had to walk away before I did something stupid like that.

  Superintendent Hewitt came in the door looking for me, she found me and beckoned me into the utility room. ‘Look what came for me.’ She took a letter from a pocket in her bag.

  You keep being pathetic at your job, Fleur Hewitt, while Chloe doesn’t rest in peace.

  ‘They’ve taken Lucinda’s phrase from the paper,’ I said. ‘After the letter was sent to Belfast Met they showed it in the media.’

  ‘Could have been Mike Birch,’ said Hewitt. ‘He got that letter and it said the same thing.’

  Hewitt was rattled. She didn’t like that her name was on there. So much for her dismissiveness over so-called trolls. It didn’t feel as painless as Fleur had thought, I could tell by her face.

  ‘So, it’s not Lucinda,’ I said.

  ‘Was it ever, though?’ asked Hewitt. ‘Maybe she was taking the fall for someone. That son who was at home … He seemed proper weird.’

  ‘Then why suicide?’

  ‘It’s her funeral today, too,’ Hewitt told me.

  ‘I hope she rests in peace,’ I said and it jarred for me. Apparently that’s a Protestant thing, but I don’t know, it’s not an expression I have ever used. I just hate the acronym. R.I.P. Rip.

  We snuck out of the utility room and found Jackie crying in the kitchen, trying to take a moment to himself. He didn’t acknowledge us but Lizzie was watching him from the living room dabbing at her eyes, she couldn’t stop looking at Jackie trying to hold it together. Lizzie didn’t try to talk to me now, probably to look loyal to the family and not to us.

  ‘That is killing me,’ she said to the woman beside her. ‘I have to go.’

  Lizzie thumbed at her phone then brought it to her ear, then thumbed again and looked at the screen, then turned her phone off and popped it into her bag.

  Drew hobbled over to her. ‘What’s up with your bake?’ I heard him ask her.

  ‘I need to get out of here. I can’t …’ She gestured at Jackie who was now hugging Thomas and crying, while Thomas was standing there with a blank broken expression, holding his father up. ‘Justin isn’t picking up,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Come on and I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to the crematorium?’

  ‘No,’ Drew said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Can you drive with your leg like that?’ said Lizzie.

  ‘It’s automatic,’ said Drew. ‘So, yes.’

  ‘Your leg’s automatic,’ she said smiling and dabbing her eyes.

  ‘You want a lift or not?’ he asked her, not unkindly.

  ‘Yeah. I do. Thanks, Drew.’

  They left together and that old friend of mine reared its ugly head. Envy. Does she like him? I thought. Does he like her? Is that what this show is all about? Him slagging her and her slagging him, so we don’t add up the equation and see that he would visit her house under the pretence of seeing Chloe. But he timed it for when Justin was out training a client. And Drew seemed jealous of him too.

  I imagined all this passion and envy and lust I hadn’t had since Greg, and I was sorry Paul and I had never had that chance. We didn’t have years of it in the bank before babies. We were just straight into
babies. In fact, they were there first. It was like they all came as a package deal, the three of them.

  Even Drew and Roxanne had breakfast dates, Lizzie and Justin had date nights, Martin and Bill had candlelit dinners. Martin and Rebecca had long drives alone to talk over their problems. Paul and I were a family straight away. I knew I should have been grateful.

  I watched Lizzie and Drew leave in his car and I should have been thinking about Chloe but I was thinking about myself.

  Chapter 28

  By lunchtime, and with the Taylors gone to say goodbye to Chloe their own way, we were at a loose end, when Hewitt said, ‘Let’s do this the proper way.’

  We went to the Woodstock Road and to Rocky Place: a ‘working man’s’ pub with wine-coloured walls and dodgy boys in corners. There was a beer garden out the back and a rowdy game of darts going on as we arrived.

  There were plaques on the wall for Best Kept Pub, only it had a different name: Speedy’s. Where Darleen Boyle had been drinking back in 1994, before she was stabbed to death by Dan Hamilton further down the road.

  Wilson Morrow, the manager, was in the office eating his lunch. He came out and spoke to us at a corner table.

  ‘Yes, I know Kayley,’ Wilson said. ‘She’s a regular here.’

  ‘Are you aware that she was drinking here when she woke up somewhere else?’ I asked him.

  ‘I bet I know the night that was,’ he said. ‘She was comatose, Kayley. I saw this woman and told her to keep an eye while I got a bucket … in case she was sick.’

  ‘Had she been sick?’

  ‘It was only a matter of time,’ said Wilson.

  ‘And the woman?’ I said.

  ‘You see, thing is, when I came back with the bucket they were both gone.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said flatly.

  ‘But I went looking, and she was helping Kayley into her car. Shouted over to me to say she knew how to get her home.’

  ‘Did you get the impression she knew Kayley?’

  ‘She didn’t say. But there wasn’t much time for talking. I presumed she looked at Kayley’s ID for an address.’

  ‘So you believed that Kayley was being looked after?’

  ‘Yes. Only, when they drove off I noticed there was a someone in the driver’s seat. I’ve thought about that a bit since.’

  ‘Do you have a description of that someone?’

  ‘No, it was just a shadow. But I think it was a man.’

  ‘And the woman? What else can you tell us about her?’

  ‘Young. Long dark hair.’

  ‘What kind of car?’ I asked Wilson.

  ‘I didn’t take that in.’ He kissed his teeth. ‘A wee boxy number. I was busy. Have you spoken to Kayley?’

  ‘She has given a statement already,’ I said.

  *

  Kayley’s foster mother welcomed us into her home. Kayley was getting ready to go to work. Her face was orange-brown and her hands pale and freckled. What a shame, I thought, she was probably covering a face full of beautiful freckles.

  ‘I remember a game of darts and having a drink but it’s all hazy to me,’ Kayley said.

  ‘The manager at Rocky Place said you left with a woman,’ said Hewitt, ‘he had left her with you while he went to get a bucket. He thought you were about to be unwell. And then you left with her.’

  ‘I don’t remember any of this,’ Kayley said, pushing her silver hairband back and forth, raking her hair into a quiff. ‘I don’t even think the police went there to ask anything after I reported this. I thought no one was taking me serious, that they thought I was just pissed, and what? Removing my own pants to take a piss, or something? And waking up embarrassed? I’m not embarrassed.’

  ‘We are taking it seriously, Kayley,’ said Hewitt. ‘And we suspect that the person, or people, who did this to you, have done it to others.’

  ‘Who?’ she asked.

  ‘Other young women have reported similar things,’ I said. ‘We know that one of them had her drink spiked.’

  Kayley drew her arms around herself.

  ‘Wilson from Rocky Place told us that the woman said she knew how to get you home.’

  ‘I can’t remember any of this. I can’t remember anyone.’

  ‘He thought that she’d checked your ID for your address.’

  ‘I didn’t have ID on me that night, never for the Rocky Place. I don’t need it because they know me there. They know I’m not underage. And they’re strict, like. I can’t understand that remark about ID,’ Kayley said. ‘I can only think that I said ‘‘Holywood’’, or she thought I said Holywood and that I wandered off. That’s all I can think. I have no idea when my underwear was removed or who removed it. It makes me feel sick.’

  Her foster mother rubbed Kayley’s shoulder. ‘I just want to see Kayley out and about, being social again,’ she said. ‘She hasn’t been herself since.’

  *

  We visited Maisie, the young woman who had been at the SSE Arena. She told us all she could remember, and she noted a man with dark hair in Optimo who kept smiling at her down the bar.

  ‘And that’s all I can think,’ she said, ‘next thing I go into the toilets and then, I don’t know. Lights out.’

  ‘Is there a chance your drink was spiked when you went into the toilets?’

  ‘I brought it in and set it beside the sink when I was in the cubicle. That’s what I always do. Terrible you have to think like that, but it’s a habit I have.’

  ‘Did you talk to anyone in the toilet?’ I asked her.

  ‘Girls always chat in the toilets, don’t they?’

  ‘Can you remember anyone that night?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘And you had broken up with your boyfriend?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had a boyfriend.’

  I wondered how this boyfriend breakup myth had made it into her statement.

  ‘How much did you have to drink, Maisie?’ asked Hewitt.

  ‘Two drinks, one shot. Nothing, hardly,’ she said pushing her veil of brown hair from her face. You do look like me, a younger me, I thought. ‘I’m glad someone is finally speaking to me about this,’ she said. ‘I thought I was being laughed at when I reported it.’

  ‘I don’t want you to worry,’ I told her, ‘but there seems to be a spate of such things.’

  ‘I’s not just me?’

  ‘It’s not just you.’

  ‘That means I was drugged?’

  ‘You weren’t tested at the time?’

  ‘No,’ said Maisie. ‘No one suggested that I should. It wasn’t really an option. I was so embarrassed; my sister came and collected me after I went into a shop and asked to use their phone, because my phone had gone missing. I’ve tried using the Find my iPhone app since and it says it’s at the SSE.

  ‘So I went there but no one had handed it in. Anyway, when my sister brought me home, she said, “This is totally out of character for you,” and she phoned the police and they came out, but they didn’t say a lot.

  ‘I knew they were looking at me as if I was lying, like, I don’t know … I was doing something I shouldn’t have been. I mean, it was humiliating, so I saw them to the door and said, “Forget about it,” but then one nice one, he said, “I’m filing this so it’s in the system.”

  ‘I suppose if he hadn’t done that you wouldn’t have been able to contact me.’

  Good old Higgins!

  I texted him to thank him for the names of the girls when I got back to my desk. I was about to call Victoria Black, the woman who had been tested and had definitely been drugged while drinking at The Bell. I wanted to arrange to go and see her, but Chief Dunne came crashing out of his office.

  ‘Complete carnage in Dundonald,’ he said. ‘We’re sending support.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘There has been a mass shooting,’ he said. ‘It looks like there are a few fatalities.’

  Chapter 29

  It happened on a
Thursday at two-thirty p.m. On the most beautiful day you’re likely to encounter in Belfast. Half way along Comber Road, as Chief Dunne said, was ‘complete carnage’.

  A man in a car had been shot twice and, unbelted, had fallen face first onto the shoulder of the woman in the driver’s seat. Whose seatbelt could not save her from the bullet in the centre of her forehead.

  She was still there, slumped back in her seat, eyes open, mouth too, still in shock as the sun shone down on her, and onto the kerb, where she must have parked up before the attack.

  Now she was shaded from the sun while men and women worked in white coats, with powders and cameras and cordons. The overgrown grass beside the kerb shook in the light breeze. The air was thick with pollen. Everything swelled, every fibre, every lash, every drop of blood.

  Blood had wept from both their heads where the bullets entered. It smeared the headrest behind the woman. The exit wound.

  More blood – his – had run down her shoulder. An iPhone lay in the footwell.

  Up the road lay another body. Up the road that took you to the central crossroads, that took you to Belfast or Comber, or to the hills that sat over the village, or to the hospital, where the man from the car, whose light breathing was almost missed, had been rushed.

  Up from that lay the body of a boy.

  He could not have been more than twelve. He received one bullet in the back of his head. He lay now in his school uniform, in among the dandelions and overgrown grass.

  The sun was moving slowly away from him and the traffic lights still arrogantly changed in sequence. Traffic was diverted. White tents were put up over the car and over the boy. And his mother, at the traffic lights, cried hysterically about being kept away from the body of her boy.

  Chapter 30

  Two private ambulances took the bodies away: the woman from the car, and the boy from the street. Brian Quinn came over to me in his white suit.

  ‘Male vic in the front seat was lucky this happened so close to the hospital,’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They were shot through the car window, from the path.’