Problems with Girls (DI Sloane Book 2)

by Kelly Creighton

  In more recent messages were real estate ads for the same house. A derelict house. Going by the address, it was right outside that they were shot. The love shack, they call it via text. He named it, My Blue Heaven. She talked about cutting back the forest and he talked about painting the whole house blue. She said she was happy to do the door and the window sills, but the rest of the house, nope! Then there was talk about what they would do with the rooms. How they would decorate. They had even been talking about leaving their partners; Molly said Craig would forgive her in time; Justin said Lizzie would cut his balls off.

  More recently, Justin texted Molly to say:

  and after the appointment on Wednesday I’ve made another one for 11.30 with Moore’s in Ballyhack.

  That appointment was for the day Chloe died. Around the same time someone inflicted those three stab wounds on her.

  ‘This can’t be right,’ I said. ‘We need to know if he kept that appointment at Moore’s.’

  ‘You can. Look, I have some things I need to catch up on,’ said Fleur.

  ‘Now?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it doesn’t take the both of us. Or do you need me to hold your hand?’ She put her hand out and I swatted it away.

  Chapter 40

  The only Moore’s in Ballyhackamore was the estate agents. When I got there it was closed, shutter down, so I phoned Strandtown to get the owner’s contact details. Then I called Dom Moore pretending we’d had complaints about his security alarm going off.

  It’s an old trick. Tends to get a quicker response.

  ‘Your alarm has stopped,’ I said when he arrived, ‘but do you mind if we go inside and have a word?’

  Eyeing the alarm Dom opened up the shutter to expose a blue tiled façade and large windows perfect for property brochures. ‘The alarm was definitely going off?’ he asked.

  ‘It was. But I’m here to speak with you about something else, so don’t worry about the alarm.’

  Dom went behind his curved MDF desk and large black monitors. He sat on a leather swivelling chair. ‘Well, I’m glad it’s stopped,’ he said. ‘It’s my experiment to live life with no technological knowledge whatsoever.’ He gestured for me to take a seat at the other side of the desk on one of the non-swivelling thin black seats. ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘The old house you have for sale on the Comber Road,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your thoughts on it.’

  ‘Honestly?’ he asked.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It’s a dive. Little bungalow. Overgrown with trees, can’t even see it from the road anymore. I’ve had a hard time shifting it. £73,000 for three beds, two receptions en suite, etc. Here’s the brochure.’

  Dom wheeled his way to a wall display and lifted a brochure. He wheeled his way back and pushed it across the desk toward me. The love shack.

  Woodchip, net curtains or garishly patterned ones, seventies style. The carpets were just as bad.

  ‘Mature shrubbery, we said.’

  ‘Enclosed rear garden,’ I said thinking, sex en plein air.

  ‘And now it’s been the scene of a crime; thank god it’s already sold.’

  ‘It’s sold? When did that happen?’

  ‘Just this week. Is there a problem?’

  ‘Who bought it?’ I asked.

  ‘This loved-up young pair, in their early thirties,’ said Dom. ‘I can get their names, if you need them.’

  ‘Please do.’

  He rattled around and found a big red lined book.

  ‘Mary Heaney and Justin Nicholson.’

  ‘Mr. Moore,’ I said, ‘they are the people who were shot outside the house. Along with that little boy, Ince Ross.’

  ‘Wow, what are the odds. Heard the names, but I didn’t register.’

  ‘Mary Heaney was a married woman. Nicholson was in a long-term relationship. Perhaps they were having a look at it when the incident happened.’

  ‘So the sale has fallen through, technically,’ Dom Moore said.

  I was shocked at his callousness.

  ‘Mr. Moore, I’m investigating another homicide, the murder of a young woman by the name of Chloe Taylor.’

  ‘She was stabbed in the PACT office, Upper Newtownards Road, yes?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘This place has gone fucken mad, we have a couple of units for sale there too, that’s bad for business.’

  ‘And at the time of Ms. Taylor’s death you would have had an appointment to see Ms. Heaney and Mr. Nicholson. Mr. Moore, we have their phone records and can see they were planning to come here that morning Chloe was killed.’

  ‘Ah, they must be connected. You must think they are. Some gangland thing?’

  ‘We aren’t sure yet,’ I said. ‘But we’re getting closer.’

  ‘Good. Yes, they were here but remind me of the date.’

  ‘Wednesday 18th.’

  He leafed through a diary. ‘Eleven-thirty a.m., they were here, together. I said it needs a lot of work and they brushed me off, all over each other, they were.’

  ‘And so, they put an offer in?’

  ‘Sure did. Then he put down the deposit two days ago.’

  ‘How much was the deposit?’

  ‘Forty grand, in cash.’

  I almost stopped breathing. The exact amount of money I had lost from the back of the service car.

  ‘He was so eager,’ said Dom Moore, ‘standing there waiting for us to open up on Wednesday with all his cash. Now it turns out they were doing one from their partners. Changes things, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Changes everything,’ I said, absolutely seething.

  Chapter 41

  By seven I’d clocked off. I took a spin to Lizzie’s to update her. Her earlier attitude had been ripping my knitting all day. I wanted to let her know that Justin had been sleeping with Molly Heaney.

  Perhaps they had already stolen my money out of the back seat of the service car by the time we saw them out running the evening we called with Rebecca. Maybe they were rubbing my nose in it by passing through again, and chatting like they had nothing to hide.

  I looked forward to news of his death.

  ‘I have some bad news,’ I said when Lizzie opened the door. ‘Some more bad news.’

  She turned the TV off and turned on her CD player instead. She looked like she was in for the night. A glass of white wine sat on a little round table beside her seat, and a bottle of chardonnay, more than halfway done.

  ‘Please sit down, Lizzie.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘this doesn’t sound good. Is he dead?’

  She sat down and I sat in a seat facing hers.

  ‘No. Not that I’ve heard. Justin, it turns out,’ I said, ‘was having a relationship with the woman he was in the car with; Mary Heaney.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Lizzie, she lifted a remote control from the coffee table and raised the volume on her CDs.

  Michael Bublé played. I found myself gritting my teeth.

  ‘She was not his type. He only likes blondes.’

  ‘They’ve been having a relationship since the start of the year.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lizzie.

  She was looking toward the window and into the distance as if someone was coming but no one was when I followed her gaze.

  ‘I can picture her now; Molly,’ Lizzie said. ‘She has that big forehead, right? Maybe they’ll cut a fringe for her to cover up that hole in her head for an open casket. Sorry … did you say you wanted a drink, or not? You hardly want a glass of vino, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Coffee?’ She smacked her lips.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said. I supposed she had a right to be angry. I’ve never rated fidelity myself.

  Lizzie stood. She looked at the book at the sideboard long enough to draw my attention to it, the same as she had done the last time. She might as well have said, ‘Here, come and look in here,’ and then she was gone into the kitchen for long enough for me t
o walk over to it, facing the door. I was listening to the kettle starting and cupboards opening, and her cutlery drawer blowing a raspberry as she pushed it shut.

  I lifted the book and saw it was not a book at all but a holder of some sort, a box. Inside were photos of Lizzie in her underwear.

  I knew she was playing with me. So I played with her in return. Took the photos out and quietly closed the ‘book’ and returned it to its spot. I put the photos on the sideboard and splayed them out, but not fully. There were eleven in total, but I hadn’t had the chance to count them all yet.

  I lifted them, one at a time:

  In the first one Lizzie was wearing a gold thong and had her hair pulled over her shoulder.

  The second one she was wearing huge beige pants.

  In the third she had on pink pants.

  In the fourth Lizzie wore grey ‘boy’ shorts and a long dark wig. Long dark hair like the woman who looked after Kayley Molineux at Rocky Place?

  These were Kayley’s grey underwear. They were token panties. I skipped back to look at the photo before; those pink pants that were probably Maisie’s.

  The two before, I had no idea.

  I looked again at the door. I could hear Lizzie pouring our drinks.

  The fifth photo was of her again, this time she had on a blue pair. No takers for those.

  The sixth: white pants with a gold heart on the front. Victoria Black’s!

  Every photo was modelled by Lizzie herself, she had the exact same pose in each, bare up top and holding her breasts with one arm, with the other hand her thumbnail rested between her front two teeth as she smiled coyly. It seemed like the most unnatural pose I had ever seen in my life, she had been programmed to do it from watching rom-coms and skimming old copies of FHM. You know, dressed as a milk maid sucking on a rib of straw, dumbing herself down for her ‘babe’. The psycho.

  I could hear Lizzie returning but I would not hide the photos when she’d meant for me to find them. She came in with two drinks regardless of me saying I didn’t want one.

  ‘Oh,’ she said reaching a cup toward me.

  ‘You poor, poor thing,’ I said coldly and slowly, trying to muster every drop of sympathy in me and not in me. ‘I can’t believe he did this to you.’ I saw the change, confusion in her eyes. ‘Justin,’ I said.

  She sipped her coffee.

  ‘You won’t know about this, Lizzie,’ I said, ‘but these pants are tokens from crimes. There has been this man drugging women and removing their underwear. It’s Justin.

  He has brought them home to you, got you to wear them. Sick bastard.’ My face registered surprise I did not feel. ‘Lizzie, you weren’t to know, but Justin was a bad person. In England he tortured this young girl.’

  ‘You look like you need a drink,’ she said without emotion.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in a minute.’

  It was still whirling with froth where she’d stirred something into the drink. Then I knew: the coffees! The perpetrator of Chloe Taylor’s murder had done this, brought the coffees with them to the PACT office with something in one. They had not bought them in Wee Buns after all. And Chloe Taylor had not touched hers. We found lukewarm cups. So, there had been violence. She had been stabbed in the back and now, I could not turn mine on this other psychopath before me.

  ‘These pants.’ I set the cup down and turned a photo to show her. ‘They belong to a girl who was found on Dee Street, no one believed she hadn’t just drunk too much. I mean, she wasn’t physically assaulted.’

  ‘What about Erica?’ Lizzie asked.

  ‘Erica who?’ I asked. I wanted to let her give it all to me.

  ‘Erica McClelland,’ Lizzie said. ‘The girl found dead in Ballyholme.’

  ‘What about Erica?’

  ‘Where were her knickers?’ Lizzie sipped her coffee.

  I shook my head. ‘Completely unrelated. That person is still out there. God knows. None of us can be careful enough.’

  ‘What about the next photo?’ she asked me.

  ‘I’ve said enough. I’ll have to take these … you don’t mind. I know they are revealing, they’ll just be used for evidence. No one else will see them.’

  ‘Oh, show them to whoever you have to show them to.’

  You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Lizzie? I thought.

  ‘But I have to say,’ I said, ‘sadly, Craig Heaney, Molly’s husband, widower – Justin’s mistress’s husband – he showed me a secret phone his wife had hidden in her possession. It was full of photos like these.’

  A lie; actually, there were body parts, orifices and appendages. Connections that were biological looking. They were pornographic in nature, just like Craig said, not ‘glamour’ shots like these ones of Lizzie.

  Then I thought, maybe I should be telling Lizzie this instead. Let’s see her angry, let’s see her real side for once. But I had a better idea.

  ‘I have to say, Lizzie, the texts were very lovey-dovey. Justin was planning to leave you.’

  Then I saw her face drop. ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘They were planning to move away.’

  ‘Where?’ She looked at me with snarky disbelief.

  ‘Five minutes away.’ That had to smart.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Comber Road. You know the house where they were shot outside of?’

  Lizzie laughed but I knew then that she had not known.

  ‘The love shack,’ I said for good measure. ‘They called it that in their texts. It didn’t look like much of a home, yet.’

  ‘They were shot outside waste land,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘No,’ I took great pleasure in saying, ‘there is a lot of shrubbery but behind it is a house, a little bungalow, it needs a lot of work doing to it, and they were going to fix it up together. Paint it blue.’

  ‘No!’ she shouted. I gripped the photos tighter and looked at them, which seemed to remind her that they existed.

  ‘They’re not revealing,’ she said. ‘I think, they’re tasteful.’ She took them from me. Looked at them in turn, handed them to me one at a time, same pose, sometimes with a brunette wig, sometimes with a red one, but similar clothing, and more underwear. Ones at the start that I didn’t recognise, that were maybe never reported missing.

  My stomach dropped to think of all the girls they had drugged, ones who maybe doubted anything had happened. Or blamed themselves.

  ‘And what about those girls, were they abused by Justin?’ I asked her. ‘Who did the beige pants belong to? Or the thong?’

  Lizzie relaxed. She looked at me and then glanced at herself in the mirror on the wall. She wanted to be seen. All this time, these questions, these vague implications, she wanted to be seen. She said that Justin was bad to her, but what I’d seen was all I’d been shown, but what was real was what I had learned.

  She was as bad as him. Or worse.

  ‘Justin and Molly put down a deposit for their love shack, but where did they get the money?’ I asked.

  ‘What money?’

  ‘Forty grand.’

  Lizzie ran up the stairs and I followed her, putting the photos in my pocket. She pulled a box out from behind her bed, there were children’s toys in it, rattles, dummies, a camcorder tape, no wads of cash like she was looking for.

  ‘It was mine,’ she snapped. ‘I had savings and he stole them, didn’t he?’

  ‘Where did you get it?’ I asked.

  She sat on the floor for a moment in shock. Now I believed Lizzie took that cash from the service car. I suddenly remembered how she had gone outside to get the newspaper and had spent some time out there.

  ‘Our delivery boy is a man, and he drives a car. You couldn’t make it up!’

  But had she? All I heard was another engine and a male voice. It could have been Justin. They could have been working together, opportunistically.

  ‘I was given money from my son’s grandparents to stay away,’ she said, ‘isn’t that nice of them!’

  ‘Forty thousand pounds?’
I asked her.

  Lizzie got up and ran downstairs and I followed her, trying to keep up but not trying to let her know I was. If there was one thing I learned about Lizzie, was that you had to act relaxed and dumb yourself down at every turn while in her presence. I resented it. It reminded me of January 2015.

  I was a hostage again.

  Lizzie threw herself on the sofa and ran her hands through her hair. She was quiet for a while, then she looked at me and exhaled slowly.

  ‘Even though I’ve been through so much,’ she said, ‘there’s only one person I feel sorry for. Do you know who that is?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Jackie, lovely Jackie.’ She gathered her hair into a ponytail and fastening it with a band she had on her wrist. ‘Chloe had a good dad. Must be nice to have a good dad. My dad was a cop too, like yours. I mean, everyone knows your dad.’

  My heartbeat thumped again.

  ‘He was always a hit at the nursing home. He liked me.’

  ‘Really?’ I said flatly.

  ‘I’ve worked in them all, Harry. Can I call you Harry, like he does?’

  ‘It’s a hard job to work in a nursing home,’ I said discretely bringing my thumb to my pager.

  ‘Oh, that’s a tangible thought for a selfish person,’ she said. ‘For someone who was given everything. But I like caring for people. Entertaining them.’

  ‘Some are good at it,’ I said.

  ‘I cared for Chloe. She found me entertaining. We laughed and we cried. We both needed that. And I miss it.’

  I couldn’t act false any longer, my face dropped and Lizzie noticed.

  ‘This is what happens, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘One person dies and it’s oh so important, then it’s really not. There’s someone else. Then people remember that we’re all going to die, sooner or later, so they think about themselves again.’

  ‘We can talk about Chloe,’ I said. ‘We don’t have to talk about Justin if it upsets you. We can talk about you. Just you.’

  ‘I was about to tell you how I had to be good at caring, but there you were interrupting me again,’ she said. ‘You’re always doing that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lizzie,’ I said surprising myself by how weak I sounded. ‘Go on,’ I said. Scenes of my kidnapping screeched through my head, I wanted to curl up and cry, but I couldn’t. I would have to wait for that, but I sensed I would not leave this house in any normal manner. I knew I wouldn’t.