Cold Blood
Jane Heafield
Copyright © 2021 Jane Heafield
The right of Jane Heafield to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Bloodhound Books.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
Print ISBN 978-1-913942-58-8
Contents
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Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part II
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
A note from the publisher
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Also by Jane Heafield
Dead Cold
Don’t Believe Her
Part I
1
Elvis Presley’s ghost aside, the very last person Bennet expected a call from was the mother of his child.
‘Liam, hi, how are you? How are things? How’s work? Are you still a sergeant?’
A blizzard of questions that made his head spin. Ten years. It had been ten years since their last contact, not an ounce of animosity lost on his part, yet she talked as if they were old friends on an annual gossip catch-up. ‘Anyway, I know it’s been a long time, but I need to talk to you. I’ll call you tomorrow night about eight. Bye.’
And that was it. The event flashed into existence and winked out again so fast he almost wondered if he’d imagined it. The call had come just before midnight last night, but he’d been fast asleep and the landline answering machine had taken it. Bennet deleted the voicemail and planted his ear against the living-room door. No sound of feet thumping down the stairs: Joe hadn’t heard the message from the mother he couldn’t remember.
Still in his coat and shoes, ready for another working Friday, Bennet stood at the window, looking out at the dark garden, and tried to calm his nerves. Ten years. Ten years since Lorraine had walked out, abandoning her baby son and his father like a crappy motel room.
But Bennet hadn’t been able to so easily scrub Lorraine from his mind. Joe had been a baby and unable to compute what just happened, but that wouldn’t last. One day he’d understand what a mother was, and that his wasn’t around, and he’d want answers. One day, he’d have the urge and the muscles to go out and find her. Until that day, Bennet had to make sure she was alive and well and able to answer her grown boy’s knock at the door.
This had been a simple case of keeping secret tabs on her, made easier in a world with social media and the internet. True to prediction, as Joe had grown, he’d come to understand that the old lady neighbour who often looked after him wasn’t his mother. Then the questions had started. That had been a tricky first conversation, and it had lost no sting by repetition over the years. Bennet had had all the answers Joe could have wanted, and the kid could have watched her life progress almost real time. Joe could have learned what his mother looked like, her hobbies, everything. But there were some things Liam didn’t want him to discover just yet.
But Bennet hadn’t provided those answers. Instead, he’d claimed no knowledge except that she was alive, somewhere. His father-of-the-year award was probably in the post.
He’d always wondered if Lorraine had mirrored his interest, but now he knew she had paid scant attention to her son and his father. Still a detective sergeant? Minimal research would have informed her that Bennet was now a chief inspector working with Barnsley’s Major Investigation Team 2, one of four covering the four boroughs of South Yorkshire. Worse, that brief one-sided conversation hadn’t contained a single mention of her son.
But she’d called, and it had to be about Joe, didn’t it? No other theory made sense, leading him to assume that Lorraine had finally reached that point, be it the product of curiosity or guilt, where she desired to get to know the son she had abandoned when he was small enough to hold in one hand. He’d always suspected the day would come. And planned for it.
But, here it was, and he wasn’t sure how he felt, or what he should do. He hit 1471, the last-call return number, but Lorraine had withheld hers.
Now came the footsteps bounding down the stairs. Joe bounced into the room, full of energy. Full of oblivion.
‘Dad, yo. What’s new?’
The question was nothing but their form of hello, but Bennet felt spotlighted, under pressure to make a snap, possibly life-changing decision.
‘Nothing, son. Nothing at all.’
2
In the chilly incident room at Barnsley’s Churchfield police station, Bennet’s murder squad was working a stabbing at Buttery Park. At this morning’s briefing, one of his team was outlining the results of a phone call trace, but Bennet was having trouble concentrating. His mind was a loose kite, sailing away.
Fifteen days ago, on the second day of the new year, a group of six teenagers had come across another group of six who were kicking a ball in Buttery Park in the early evening. A witness walking her dog said a game blossomed, then wilted when one kid slide-tackled another. The two fought like alley cats, which she found somewhat amusing until a blade appeared. Twenty seconds later, all but one of the tearaways scattered to the winds. Eighteen minute
s after that, the remaining boy, Mick Turton, was in an ambulance, bleeding from two holes in his chest. He bellowed for revenge as the ambulance zipped out of the park, cried for his mother as it blasted down the road, and gave up inhaling as it turned into the hospital grounds. Major Investigation Team 3’s hotline buzzed soon after.
But for four days, they had nothing, until a lucky break.
Twelve teenagers, one clear witness, a wide, open park, but the team hit a brick wall, and stayed there with their noses pressed against it for ten days, until a blind piece of luck dropped in their laps. A mile from Buttery Park, an old man hit triple nine because a neighbour’s kid had busted his window with a football. When the old guy refused to hand back the ball, the kid’s dad took a corn-on-the-cob fork to his car tyres. While mediating between the two men, one of the police officers saw blood on the football and remembered the Buttery Park incident.
Off went the blood for testing. Back it came as Mick Turton’s. The ball went next and gave up a fingerprint. It belonged to a sixteen-year-old petty drug dealer known as Don The Man. Don The Man had been arrested many times, so high respect for the police’s investigative powers must have been the reason why he reported his ball stolen on the same day a kid got knifed. In his garden one moment, gone the next. But Don was all for helping the police and the stabbed boy’s family get justice: ‘Killer must have lobbed the ball into someone’s garden when he legged it. You can keep it for more tests and shit.’
Because they weren’t born yesterday, Bennet’s team had obtained records of Don’s contract phone’s whereabouts on the night of the stabbing. At the important time, the device was in the vicinity of Buttery Park. Don The Man’s explanation: ‘Shit, man, I was so pissed about my ball, I forgot to report my phone got nicked as well.’ His alibi for the time of the attack? At his girl’s house, watching news about the ongoing Australian bushfires. He even quoted lines from the newscasters, as if that was proof (‘Shows I didn’t just watch some earlier news programme, eh?’). The girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Erica Smith, had backed him up (‘So, what, you peelers saying I’m lying as well?’). The Man’s abrasive mother moaned that her son had asked his girlfriend to marry him a couple of weeks ago, and why would someone who’s planning a wedding go out and kill someone? (‘He’d have to be mad, wouldn’t he? You saying my son is mad?’)
But in terms of real evidence, they had nothing. Don’s mother and Erica and all his cronies remembered the ball and the phone getting stolen, and would swear it in court. The only decent piece of CCTV showed a figure in what appeared to be bloodstained clothing and carrying a football running past a shop near the park, but a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer who’d viewed it said the ball might not be a ball, the bloodstains might not be blood, and the figure looked too fat to be Don The Man. Many had witnessed teenagers fleeing along streets and down alleys, but no one had managed to identify anyone, so none had been traced. No DNA or other fingerprints had been found at vital spots at the scene or on Mick Turton’s clothing or body.
Bennet’s team talked to Don The Man’s crew, but they knew nothing about a football game: they’d all been hanging out in a friend’s house, miles away from Buttery Park. By weird coincidence, on that very evening they’d given all their phones to a pal to carry in a bag, and hadn’t the idiot gone and left it on top of his car. All missing and now dead. And none of them could supply phone numbers, so tracing these unregistered devices was looking like a bust. Likewise, Erica, the girlfriend, had an unregistered phone and apparently broke and tossed it on the same night, and, lo and behold, not a single one of her friends or family knew that number or had it stored in their own devices. A highly unlikely set of circumstances, but CPS lawyers only gambled on dead certs.
Yesterday had almost provided a breakthrough. A female with a voice disguised by helium, believe it or not, had called to say she had proof of who killed the boy in the park, and would call back. She hadn’t yet. The call had been traced to a phone box in Darnall, but it was on a busy main road, which meant anyone could have used it. No CCTV covered the phone box. Witnesses were being traced.
Don The Man’s custody clock had expired and he’d been released, and for almost two weeks the case had vented heat like a joint of cooked beef left out in December wind. The team was disheartened. Losing a suspect was worse than never finding one in the first place.
The detective up front of the incident room finished his outline of the Darnall phone call trace and took his seat. Someone else stood to give her updates. Bennet found himself restless, but not because of the stale smell of the investigation.
He was still thinking about Joe’s mother, Lorraine.
3
Later that night, asleep on the sofa, Bennet woke to find his son rooting through his coat, which was hanging on the back of the nearby armchair. In the light from the TV’s screen saver, he watched the ten-year-old slip out his wallet with a scary skill. The detective in him assumed something more sinister than a kid needing money for sweets, so he said nothing and pretended to sleep. Wallet in hand, Joe crept out and back upstairs. Bennet checked his phone and saw it was just past midnight.
He gave it a minute, then did his own creeping. Liam’s bedroom door was ajar, so he put an eye to the crack. The room was dark except for the light from a laptop screen on Joe’s lap. He was sitting in bed with his back to the door, and his dad’s debit card was in his hand. Bennet pushed the door open slowly and stepped inside so he could get a better look at the screen. Again, his detective suspicion told him this wasn’t a kid sneakily trying to buy the new UFC game on Xbox that he’d been begging his dad to buy for a week now. And he was right.
The website was called XODeepRichessOX.net, but it wasn’t an online store. According to the tag line, it was a forum for people eager to make money on the dark web. The dark web? That was a portion of the World Wide Web hidden from the normal internet-surfacing community, using encrypted data accessible only through certain browsers. You didn’t get there riding Google. Some of it was legitimate, hosting intranet systems such as those of the military and big businesses, but it was also a territory of criminals. He didn’t know much about the dark web, but he was damned certain a ten-year-old boy shouldn’t be crawling about down there.
There was a chat screen open. Joe – username GuestLBoe – was conversing with someone called KingHack555. He saw a mention of the Department for Work and Pensions.
A hacker on the screen and a bank card in Joe’s hand? Bennet snatched the laptop away.
Horrified, Joe almost jumped out of his skin. But he said nothing as his dad scrolled through the conversation. Joe and KingHack555 had been talking for three days, with all entries taking place at night. At night for Joe, that was. Who knew what time it was in whatever country this bastard was plying his scam from. Bennet typed MY DAD IS A COPPER AND YOU’RE IN TROUBLE NOW, closed the chat box, exited the forum, and shut the laptop.
‘Joe, what are you doing?’
‘You won’t find her, that’s why I did it,’ Joe snapped, his face now one of anger instead of fear and embarrassment.
Liam had hoped he was wrong, but now couldn’t shut his eyes on the truth. ‘You wanted to pay a hacker to find your mother? Joe, you can’t trust people like this.’
‘So who do I trust? The police, like you? Oh, sure, you can find her, but you won’t, will you? So I had to do it this way.’
Bennet’s heart went out to the boy. Ten years old, and smart enough to sink into the dark web and find someone who could sneak into government computers for information. It also showed his level of desire and reminded Liam that Joe wouldn’t have had to employ such drastic measures to find his mother if his father hadn’t been such a barrier.
‘Joe, I think–’
‘Why won’t you, Dad? Why won’t you use your police people to contact her?’
He wasn’t even sure, not fully. But he gave Joe a reason that was easy to admit: ‘It’s against the law, Joe. Police resources aren’t for person
al use.’
Crying, Joe flung himself back onto his pillow in outrage, and nearly cracked his skull against the headboard. The smart, mature kid was once again just that – a kid. ‘But it’s my mum. I don’t remember her.’
‘Joe, I–’
Joe told him to go away, then turned over and buried his face in the pillow, even pressing its edges over his ears. Liam didn’t want to leave him upset, but this wasn’t a conversation for past midnight. He left, but halfway down the stairs felt guilt become a heavy ball in his gut. Back he went.
‘I know where she is, Joe.’
Joe sat up. ‘How? When? Where is she?’
The ‘when’ wasn’t going to be part of this: I’ve known since the year she left was an answer that might put an eternal wedge between father and son. ‘She’s living in Birmingham. It’s about a hundred miles away. I found her using the electoral register and Facebook. Her surname’s Cross now. Lorraine Cross. That’s why you couldn’t find her. But I did.’
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