Northern Roulette (DCI Cooper Book 4)

by B Baskerville

  A skinny girl with dark blonde hair ran past the window, squealing at the top of her lungs and waving her arms above her head.

  Two seconds later, a herd of panicked sheep thundered by.

  “Oh, for crying out loud.” Mona got to her feet and left the house, almost bumping into Denise and her tray of coffees.

  “I assume that’s her daughter?” asked Tennessee.

  “Yip. That’s Laura.”

  - Chapter 25 -

  Tennessee turned left off the A19. Two right turns later and he was in the car park of a MacDonald’s restaurant. Oliver Martin was hungry and Tennessee never turned down the chance to eat fast food.

  “I’ll go in and get it,” Tennessee said. The drive-thru would be quicker, but his stomach had been playing silly buggers for almost two hours and he was sick of clenching. There was no way he’d do what he needed to do in the home of a murder victim’s daughter, and he’d never live it down if he stank out HQ. So the McDonald’s at Silverlink would have to do.

  Once he’d made his deposit at the porcelain bank, Tennessee ordered two Big Mac meals and hoped that was the end of the matter. Vegan food was bad for you. He swore it was.

  “What took so long?” asked Martin.

  “There was a queue,” he lied. “Now fill your pie hole.”

  When they returned to the incident room, three new faces greeted him. All three were studiously scrolling through photographs taken after the Tynemouth murder. Eyes squinting, chins propped in hands as they clicked from one image to the next.

  “You’re a star,” he told Keaton. She was updating the murder board and had blue ink smudged over her jaw. “I owe you one for sorting the extra help, that’s for sure.”

  “One? You owe me like twenty-five. And how come your breath smells of Maccy D’s? I could do with a portion of fries.”

  “I thought your body was a temple?”

  “Hey, I don’t care where I get my calories, as long as I get them.”

  Tennessee looked around the incident room and was pleased to see everyone getting on with their various tasks. Fingers fluttered over keyboards as HOLMES2 was updated and cross-referenced. The soundtrack to the office featured the rhythmic hum of photocopiers and printers. Phones rang, chairs scraped, feet shuffled.

  “Don’t get used to it,” Keaton told him.

  “Used to what?”

  She swept a bulky arm in an arc to indicate the incident room in its entirety.

  “All these people knuckling down on the case. I reckon we’re going to lose some manpower to the Summer Holt investigation.”

  “That the missing girl?”

  Keaton nodded. “Playing in her back garden one minute, gone the next. Her mum’s Portia Holt, the romance writer.”

  The skin tightened around Tennessee’s eyes. Even he’d heard of Portia Holt; Pat was a voracious reader of her novels. Her books could always be found on the coffee table in his living room: a bronzed Adonis, a swooning woman, the words bestseller, and three million copies sold. “Have they made a ransom demand?”

  She pulled a face. “That’s all I know. Fuller’s SIO for now, but I doubt that’ll last. They’ll have some high profile negotiator come in if this is a hostage for ransom case.”

  Tennessee felt sick that people could be so cruel as to take a child to exploit their parents. Still, he’d seen worse. Much worse. “Has Whyte come up for breath yet?”

  “Barely.”

  Keaton put the lid back on a dry marker and stored it in a drawer. Whyte, she told Tennessee, has been looking at door cam footage for the past three hours but had nipped out to interview someone. A Tynemouth resident had heard a suspicious noise at two a.m. on the morning of Eve Lynch’s murder. Spirits were raised but quickly dashed when it turned out there was nothing more to the intel. The witness – if they could be called that – didn’t see anything. Nor could he describe the noise in any more detail than “a dragging noise that lasted about five seconds.”

  “Never mind,” Tennessee said with a sigh. He had somewhere else to be. “Fancy a drive out? I’m headed south of the water.”

  Armed with enhanced copies of the photographs he’d taken from Charles Pennington’s house, Tennessee and Keaton parked at King George’s School. The school retained its red brick exterior from the turn of the century. A large glass atrium had been added to the front, increasing the square footage and allowing more light into the old building.

  After being buzzed into the atrium, they were met by a lady with tight white curls and a stern expression.

  “Yes? How can I help you?”

  “Mrs Annabelle Jones? I’m DS Jack Daniel, this is DS Paula Keaton. You spoke to my colleague DC Martin earlier today. I wanted to thank you for the information you provided about the school uniform. It was useful. DC Martin mentioned that you’d worked here a long time?”

  “Almost forty years,” she said. “When Thatcher was the PM, and the radio was all Bucks Fizz and Culture Club. I miss music you can actually understand the lyrics to. These days it’s all slang and nonsense.”

  Tennessee changed the subject. “I need to discuss a former member of staff. I don’t know if you saw the news, but there was an incident on Holy Island in the early hours of Wednesday morning. I’m afraid a former member of staff has died in suspicious circumstances. You may remember him.”

  Her face scrunched up into several lines as if her skin were made of crêpe paper.

  “You don’t need to sugarcoat anything, DS Daniel. If suspicious circumstances means murder, then just say it. Who was it? You can say their name?”

  “Charles Pennington.”

  Her eyes closed as if it took more effort to hold her lids open after the news.

  “You knew him?”

  “I remember Charles; he was a lovely man. Do you want to step into the office? The bell will sound soon, and then the world and his mother will be traipsing through here.”

  She showed them through to what must be command central. A bank of computers was monitored by admin assistants who fielded calls, counted dinner money, checked this and ticked that.

  Presumably reading Tennessee’s mind, she added. “It used to just be me in here. Well, not here exactly. I had a pokey little room with a hatch for dealing with parents. It’s a storeroom now. Every year there’s more paperwork. The number of students stays the same, but the admin seems to increase exponentially. Lots of it’s done on computers now. I couldn’t stand the darn things back then. I’m not too bad these days, though. I set up the year group Twitter accounts, and we have Spotify in the staff room. I’ve made some great playlists.”

  “Can you tell us about Mr Pennington?” Keaton asked. “What he was like? Was there anyone he didn’t get on with?”

  Annabelle Jones moved some papers and parked her rear on the edge of the desk. “He was a quiet man. Very polite. Old fashioned, even for those days. Always held the door. A ladies first sort of gentleman.”

  “So he was well-liked?

  “He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The more – how should I say this? – the more testosterone-fuelled amongst us thought he was a bit effeminate. Different times,” she said by way of explanation. “But overall, yes, he was liked. He wasn’t a pushover, but he wasn’t as strict as some other teachers. I think that’s why the children liked him; he didn’t talk down to them.”

  “The men you referred to,” started Keaton. “You wouldn’t remember their names would you?”

  “There were two of them. Bullies to the staff and bullies to the children. If you ask me, they bullied their wives too. Hmm, there was Mr Francis. He taught French. Made us all call him Monsieur Francis. Used to think he was so sophisticated. He’d jet off to the continent every Easter holiday. Then when the summer term started, he’d waffle on about this wine and that food. Laughed at me, actually laughed at me, because I’d never heard of whatever vineyard he was drooling over.” Her eyes narrowed as she picked a small scab on the side of her thumb. “Prick,” she added un
der her breath. “The other one taught PE and games. Oh, what was he called? Henry something. Petts. Henry Petts. The kids used to call him Sweaty Petty.”

  Annabelle let out a tiny chuckle, as did Keaton.

  “He did have a certain aroma,” she said with a tilt of her head and a raise of her eyebrow. “Big man he was. Not muscly like you, dear, just big. You’d think a PE teacher would spend a lot of time playing sport. Pretty sure the only time he ran was when he had to get to the bar before last orders. He had diabetes when he retired,” she said, her eyes drifting upwards and to the side as she recalled the memory. “My niece has diabetes, but she was born with it. It’s not the same.”

  Tennessee hoped Annabelle would have contact details for Pennington’s former colleagues.

  “Monsieur Francis died in a car accident. Silly sod was using his phone at the wheel. Idiot. And to think we talk about kids being addicted to their phones and driving too fast. You ask me, some of us elders are just as bad. At least no one else was hurt when he drove into that ditch. Do you know what he was doing with his phone?”

  Annabelle leant closer to Tennessee.

  “He was watching porn,” she said in a whisper. “Now what people do in the privacy of their own homes is their own damn business, but Mr Sophisticated watching that filth while driving home to his family? It’s disgusting, isn’t it?”

  “And dangerous,” said Tennessee. “What about Mr Petts?”

  “Oh, no idea. It’s not like I wanted to keep in touch with him after he left here. I think he moved to the West End.”

  Tennessee decided to take a different tack. If they thought that Mr Petts was a credible lead, they’d be able to track him down one way or another.

  “Could you take a look at these photographs?” He asked, spreading them out over the desk next to Annabelle. She hopped down from her perch, crossed her arms and pursed her lips as she perused the images of smartly dressed pupils sitting in neat rows around Charles Pennington.

  “Oh my. Look at some of those haircuts.”

  “We’d like class registers for all the form groups Charles Pennington taught.”

  Annabelle picked up a photograph, gave a nostalgic smile and placed it back down. She looked up at Tennessee. “Charles worked here for ten years.”

  “We know. It will be a long list, but it would really help our investigation.”

  “I’m not sure I can tell you their names. Child protection and all that. Though I suppose none of them are children anymore, are they? But our records don’t go that far back, I’m afraid. Sorry.”

  Tennessee sighed.

  “Those computers can do amazing things but they’re constantly running out of memory. I have to keep deleting old newsletters and the like to make more space on the hard drive. I keep saying we should use the cloud. I know we couldn’t store sensitive information there, but the boring stuff we could. It would free up space.”

  “Paper records?” he asked hopefully.

  She shook her head. “That was all moved to the council offices when we refitted the admin suite. They’re on Westoe Road on South Shields.”

  Tennessee thanked Annabelle Jones for her time. He and Keaton stepped out from the school building into the bright June afternoon. “Looks like we’re off to see the Sand-dancers.”

  Keaton rolled up her sleeve to check her watch. “It’s ten to five on a Friday afternoon. I’d be surprised if anyone from the council is still there.”

  She was right. Most of the staff would be out the door by now. “Coffee?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  They walked for a few minutes, crossing the Metro line and passing an Aldi, a Post Office and a social club. They reached a large cuboid building covered in panels the same rusty hue as the Angel of the North. At first glance they caused Tennessee to think of shipwrecks on white-sand beaches, but after sirens sounded in the distance, they reminded him of burnt-out Corsas.

  Hebburn Central housed the local gym and swimming pool, as well as the library and a café. It was a modern building and had clearly cost a small fortune. Outside, trees and shrubs were arranged in a neat row in front of the entrance.

  “In here,” Tennessee said, nodding to the sliding doors. As soon as he set foot inside the building he was hit by the smell of the pool.

  Keaton took a deep breath in. “I love the smell of swimming pools.”

  “Me too. Alfie’s started swimming classes. I missed the first one but can’t wait to take him. It’s nuts how you can take babies swimming before they can even walk. Did you know all mammals can swim?”

  Keaton pointed towards the café. “Not true,” she said. “Porcupines can’t swim.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Porcupines, rhinos and my April.” She placed the photographs from King George’s on the counter and ordered two cappuccinos. “The woman can cook for England and has the biggest heart in the world, but she swims like a brick.”

  Keaton paid by card and thanked the barista. She was handing one of the hot drinks to Tennessee when a wrinkled finger appeared over the pile of photographs and hovered over the chest of a cheeky-looking boy.

  “Little Jimmy Webster.”

  The detectives turned to face a tiny woman with oversized glasses and pearl earrings. Despite the warm weather outside and the heat from the pool inside, she wore a fur coat.

  “Right tinker he was.”

  “You know this boy?” Tennessee asked.

  The woman cradled a pile of Mills and Boon books in one arm. She was either heading to or from the library.

  “I know all those little boys. Might not remember all their names mind you. Memory’s not what it was. I’ve lived here gone eighty years now. If someone lived on this estate and I didn’t know them, they weren’t worth knowing.”

  Keaton quickly bought the lady a tea and ushered her to a round table to join them.

  After introducing themselves as Jack and Paula, they let the small woman sip her tea and tell them stories from her youth. She’d never heard of Charles Pennington or Eve Lynch, but she could name a good number of the children.

  “Davey Smith,” she said with a nod. “He was a wrong’un. Lovely parents, but they never disciplined him. Grew up not knowing the meaning of the word no. Got some poor lass pregnant at fifteen, said he’d get a job and support her, but by the time she went into labour he’d got some other girl pregnant. Course, he did a runner and didn’t support either of them.”

  She moved her finger to a slim, blonde girl in the front row. “That’s Donna Tucker. She still lives here. Has a little deli on the main road. She had the most gorgeous blonde hair, then she dyed it black when she was thirteen and started wearing thick eyeliner. Still does. Oh, I can’t tell you what they used to call her.”

  “You can,” Keaton said. “I’m not easily shocked.”

  She didn’t need much persuasion. The woman flashed a wicked look from Tennessee to Keaton, tightened her fur coat, covered her mouth and whispered as if it were all one word, “Donna-Tucker-goth-cock-sucker.”

  Cappuccino sprayed over the table as Keaton snorted. She grabbed some serviettes to clean up after herself.

  “See this boy here; he’s Joe Joseph. He married this girl, Josefine Rudd, and she became Josefine Joseph. Can’t make this stuff up.”

  Tennessee smiled, writing every name down as the lady talked.

  “They had three kids: Jonny, Jenny and Jacky.” She lowered her glasses and rolled her eyes at Keaton. “Mind you, that’s not so ridiculous by today’s standards, is it? They’re all Dakotas, Armanis and Chardonnays.”

  By the time their tea-drinking friend had finished, it was gone half five and they had at least seventy names on a list. Keaton had added asterisks to any children who’d been called wrong’uns, toerags or little shits. It was time to TIE. They’d trace, interview and eliminate as many as they could. If they got lucky, someone would own up to knowing both victims. If they found who connected them, they’d be a step
closer to discovering who killed Eve and Charles.

  - Chapter 26 -

  Julie Cooper looked surprisingly well put together. She’d ditched black mourning clothes in favour of a yellow dress. She’d washed and blow-dried her hair and coloured her lips in a garish shade of pink.

  “Evening, Mum. You look nice.” In contrast to her mother, Cooper wore flip-flops, denim shorts and a grey t-shirt; she had sweat patches under her armpits.

  Julie kissed Cooper on the cheek and took a seat opposite her outside Benji’s Bar. “Thank you, dear. Well, your father wouldn’t want me to sit around crying all day, would he? I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Elizabeth Taylor’s book. It’s time to pour myself a drink, put some lipstick on and pull myself together.”

  Cooper lifted a chilled bottle of Dorada and toasted her mother. “Good for you.”

  Smoothing her dress over her knees, Julie said, “Thank you for the trip out last night. It was lovely to be on the water. I haven’t seen dolphins in ages, and there’s something about them that just makes you smile, don’t you think? Happy, chirpy, energetic things. And...” She paused, an embarrassed look on her face. “Thank you for all your help this morning. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “It must have been hard.”

  “It was, dear.”

  Cooper’s morning had been spent chasing plumbers after the bar’s hot water had gone kaput. She’d then driven Atkinson to the airport and returned to find her mum crying in a pile of Ben’s clothes. I can’t stand seeing them in the wardrobe every morning, she’d sobbed. Copper helped her sort the clothes into two piles. One was for the charity shop and one for the bin. It took hours. Naturally, Julie had a story to go with every item of clothing. He wore this shirt on our day trip to Corralejo. I don’t know why he kept these shorts; they’re covered in turmeric stains. Half the stories set off fresh waves of tears. It was uncomfortable to watch and Cooper felt helpless, unable to offer more than an ear and a tissue. Once finished, Cooper took bin liners full of her father’s old clothes to a shop that raised money for the local animal shelter.