It had taken her less than ten minutes to find the smoking spot just outside the school gates, evidenced by the collection of nub ends smoked and dumped before heading into school.
Oh, how she remembered this spot at her own high school. All the cool girls had gathered each lunchtime to either smoke or pretend to in order to be in with the popular girls. She would have liked to say she cared nothing for such social acceptance, but she had indeed stood amongst them, holding a cigarette and copying the other girls. One taste had been enough and she hadn’t gone back again.
As expected she saw Emma Weston heading towards her.
Stacey watched carefully the fifteen-year-old girl that hadn’t yet learned to master her face. And the first emotion Stacey saw was fear.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, taking a pack of smokes from her pocket.
‘Just wanted a word about Jessie,’ Stacey said, moving a few feet away as more kids began to congregate and light cigarettes. A sudden mushroom cloud of smoke rose from the group.
‘So, you lied to me yesterday,’ Stacey said.
‘Nah, I never,’ Emma said, narrowing her eyes.
‘Yeah, you did. You told me Jessie left your house normal time, alone, and that was the last time you saw her.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, stubbornly.
‘Emma, you were lying. You both left the house around eight thirty.’
‘Nah, we never,’ she said, drawing on the cigarette.
Stacey could see the girl was going to need more detail to freshen her memory.
‘You were arguing, Emma,’ Stacey said.
Emma shook her head as she blew out a stream of smoke. ‘Nah, we don’t argue. She’s my bestie. Whoever told you that is lying.’
‘I saw you,’ Stacey said.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said, a vein of doubt creeping into her voice.
‘That really how you talk to a police officer and an adult?’ Stacey snapped, tiring of the girl’s attitude. ‘Wind it back a notch or we’ll be doing this down the station, got it?’
Emma offered her a face puckered with annoyance but she nodded.
‘So, I saw you walk down the path together and you were arguing. Jessie said something you didn’t like and you slapped her.’
Emma’s face reddened, but she said nothing.
‘What was it about, Emma?’
The girl shrugged and looked away. ‘Don’t remember. We’re mates. We argue.’
‘You slap all your friends?’ Stacey asked.
‘Only the ones who won’t listen,’ Emma bit back, giving herself away.
‘And what wouldn’t Jessie listen to?’ Stacey asked, realising she’d hit a nerve.
‘Can’t remember,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘Emma, try harder. It could be important. Your bestie has now been missing for more than forty-eight hours and you don’t seem all that fussed, which is beginning to annoy the hell out of me not to mention making me suspicious of your—’
‘She said she wanted to go to Dale’s house, and I didn’t want her to go. That’s it. Happy now?’
‘Ecstatic. Is Dale her boyfriend?’ Stacey asked.
Emma nodded. ‘S’posed to be.’
‘Do her parents know?’ Stacey asked. Her mother had insisted there was no boyfriend.
‘You’re kidding. They’d throw her in a tower or dungeon or something.’
‘And you never thought to mention this Dale kid to anyone until now?’ Stacey asked, trying to keep hold of her temper. The girl had been spoken to twice and this was the first time she’d heard his name. ‘Or that she was headed to his house the last time she was seen?’
She shrugged and looked away.
Stacey shook her head in wonder and counted to ten. She had to remember she was questioning a minor without consent of an adult. She couldn’t go in hard. What she really wanted to do was grab the kid by the shoulders and shake some understanding into her.
‘Emma, you do get the gravity of this situation, don’t you?’
‘’Course I do. She’s my buddy.’
‘So, why didn’t you want her to go to Dale’s house?’ Stacey asked.
‘Just didn’t,’ she said, kicking at something on the floor.
‘You went after her?’ Stacey asked.
‘Yeah, to tell her I was sorry, but she wouldn’t listen, so I let her go and do whatever she wanted, and that was the last time I saw her. I swear.’
Thirty-Nine
Thankfully, younger Mancini had decided his dad could be left alone now he’d decided to talk and had finally left for work.
Kim could feel the release of tension that left the house with him. She had given Bryant the signal to offer to make coffee, feeling that Mancini senior would open up more one-on-one.
‘Your son is a very angry young man,’ Kim observed, as the front door closed behind him.
‘Protective of me as I am of him. It’s only ever been the two of us. His mother died when he was only a year old. He doesn’t remember her.’
‘I get it,’ she said, wondering why there had been no second wife. Single-parent families often tended to become a small team depending primarily on each other, especially when no step-parent had entered the picture. If you hurt one, you hurt the other.
‘So, Cordell accused you of theft and humiliated you?’ Kim asked.
He nodded but waved it away.
‘He thought I was going to say something.’
‘About what?’
‘What I saw in Theatre 3,’ he said.
‘That’s the place he accused you of stealing medical equipment from. He said he walked in on you,’ she clarified as her phone began to ring.
She took it from her pocket. It was Keats. She pressed ignore. Any lab results could wait.
‘He didn’t walk in on me, officer. I walked in on him.’
‘In Theatre 3?’ she asked as her phone rang again.
‘Yes,’ Angelo answered.
‘And what was he doing?’ she asked, silencing the phone once more.
‘Sex, Inspector. Doctor Cordell and a nurse were having sex.’
Kim held up her hand to pause Mancini, even though she was desperate to hear more of Mancini’s counter-accusation.
She moved into the hallway as Bryant popped his head out of the kitchen doorway.
‘Damn it, Keats, what’s up?’ she snapped when her phone rang for the third time.
‘Cedars Retirement Home, now,’ he said, before the line went dead.
Forty
Dale Jones answered the door with a game controller in his hand.
Stacey had to wonder at the level of addiction that meant he couldn’t allow it out of his grasp for the time it took him to scowl at anyone who knocked the door. As he was doing to her right now.
‘Dale Jones?’ she asked, holding up her warrant card.
His eyes widened in surprise. ‘Jeez, what’s the five-o want with me?’
Objectively Stacey could see what Jessie might see in this kid. Already sixteen and out of school, she must have been flattered by the attention of a boy one year older. A year counted for a lot when you were fifteen.
His lower half was clad in skintight jeans, and his black tee shirt was a multicoloured skull. His fair hair was clean but untidy. No piercings or body mods she could see.
‘I’m here to talk about Jessie,’ she said.
‘You find her?’
She shook her head.
‘What time did she get here on Sunday night?’
He looked from side to side as though playing to an audience. ‘She didn’t come here.’
Stacey felt her gut begin to react. It was a ten-minute walk from Emma’s house to Dale’s place.
‘I swear,’ he said.
‘She didn’t text, phone, anything to say she was coming over?’
‘Nada. Saw her a few days before. We went to Maccie’s and she was a bit off. Wouldn’t say why, and that was the last time I seen her.�
��
‘You don’t seem very bothered by her disappearance,’ Stacey observed.
He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t serious or anything. She was only fifteen. Not even old enough to…’
‘You didn’t have sex with her?’ Stacey asked before she realised how personal a question that was.
He smirked. ‘Nah, had a mate done for statutory rape. I’ll learn from his mistakes. Look, she was a nice girl and all but we’d only been hanging out a few weeks, so…’
His words trailed away as though he had nothing else to give.
‘Do you have any idea where Jessie may have gone, because Emma is convinced Jessie was on her way to see you.’
His face darkened. ‘Don’t believe a word that little bitch says.’
Stacey was taken aback by the venom in his voice.
‘You don’t like her?’
‘She’s a lying, nasty slut and I wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire,’ he spat. ‘Now, sorry but I gotta get back.’
Stacey stood there, stunned, as he closed the door in her face.
She had a sudden wave of sympathy for Jessie Ryan. She seemed to have been stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Two of the most important people in her life appeared to hate each other’s guts. And yet neither of them seemed to care that she hadn’t been seen in days.
Forty-One
‘So, what are you thinking about our Italian stallions?’ Bryant asked.
‘Not sure,’ she answered as he took a shortcut to bypass Brierley Hill High Street. The lunchtime traffic would slow them down on their way to Cedars Retirement Home and Keats had been clear. Short and sharp but definitely clear.
She had tried to call him back, but the call had gone straight to voicemail, so she had no clue what they were heading towards or what connection it had to their current case. It was a retirement home; people died.
‘You think he did it?’
She shrugged. ‘Junior is angry on his dad’s behalf, and yet Angelo is surprisingly calm. He doesn’t know the name of the nurse, and we have no way of proving or disproving his story.’
‘You think Angelo made it up?’ Bryant asked.
‘Could have, just to deflect the attention of the initial complaint. Vanessa made no mention of a counter complaint, and if there are no other witnesses we may never know. What I do know is that we have two members of the same family involved in horrific incidents in the space of twenty-four hours, and one person who issued a direct threat. Let’s be honest, Angelo Mancini wouldn’t be the first person to try and steal stuff from a hospital.’
‘But he’d never done anything before,’ Bryant offered.
‘That they know of,’ she said. ‘He may not have been caught.’
‘Well, his colleagues seem to support him. That was a good-looking weed in that plant pot,’ he observed, drily.
‘Yeah, no expense spared to bring him a token of their affection. Who’d he piss off to receive that?’
‘You did seem to take an instant dislike to Angelo Mancini,’ Bryant said.
‘Did you just get here?’ she queried. ‘I take an instant dislike to everyone I meet.’
‘True. Okay, let’s rephrase and say you seem to be unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt.’
Kim opened her mouth and closed it again. Yes, she had to admit there was something about the man she didn’t like. He was too calm about the situation, showing no emotion at all, and yet she knew him to be capable of high emotion after issuing a direct threat in the first place.
She put it out of her mind as Bryant pulled into the grounds of Cedars Retirement Home in Tividale, an area at the north-west corner of Rowley Regis, nestled between Oldbury and Dudley.
The facility was a purpose-built red-brick building not far from Rattlechain Lagoon. Kim remembered asking Keith and Erica to take her to Rattlechain Lagoon after hearing mention of it at school. It had sounded so exotic and adventurous.
Keith had explained to her that the nickname came from the Rattlechain Brickworks, where in the 1890s, a marl hole, a clay pit, was created which had subsequently been used as a disposal site by local factories. For thirty-two years, industrial waste like white phosphorus and other toxic chemicals had been tipped unregulated and unrecorded into the lagoon, leading to its status as a hazardous waste site.
Kim hadn’t wanted to visit after that, and she guessed Sandwell Council had snapped up the land for the care home at a very reasonable price, enabling them to erect a brand new building.
Kim idly observed that the yards of net curtain negated the point of having such expansive windows. Surely designed for the residents to look out.
Inside the front door was a square space with a glass partition on the right-hand side.
Kim held up her badge to the young, flustered woman behind the desk.
The buzzing of the door lock sounded, and she pushed through.
A green-clad carer was waiting on the other side.
‘Follow me, please,’ she said, quietly walking through a large, bright, airy room to the left and passing a dining room that was being set for lunch. The aroma of tomato and garlic wafted through towards her, and a short line of eager diners was already forming.
The chatter stopped as they traversed the distance. Even the less interested residents appeared to be following their every move. And if they knew nothing they knew as much as she did. She still had no clue what she was doing here.
The carer stood at the patio doors and pointed.
‘I’ve been told not to step—’
‘It’s okay,’ Kim said, opening the door. Whatever it was, Keats wouldn’t want unnecessary people in the area.
The garden stretched the entire length of the building and was a mixture of patio areas, trees, shrubs, planters and a brick path.
Kim followed the path around a raised vegetable garden and saw Keats standing behind a bench that looked onto a collection of bird feeders.
‘Keats,’ she said from a few feet away.
He didn’t turn.
‘Keats,’ she repeated.
No response, even though he wasn’t currently engaged in conversation with anyone else.
‘Keats, what the hell is going?…’
‘Oh, sorry, Stone, I thought we were only answering each other on the third time of trying,’ he said, referring to his attempts to call her.
‘I was interviewing a witness,’ she snapped.
‘Who I presume is alive and well, unlike this poor soul who is not and requires your urgent attention.’
Kim walked to the front of the bench and placed her hands on her hips.
The woman appeared to be mid- to late-seventies, average build, wearing a flower-covered dress and a cardigan. Her left wrist held a delicate gold watch, and a locket hung around her neck. She wore tan-coloured tights in flat comfortable shoes.
Her head lolled to the side, and her eyes stared out straight in front of her.
‘Okay, Keats, give me a clue why I’m here,’ she said.
‘Her name is Phyllis Mansell. She’s seventy-six years old. She rises at 7 a.m. every day to swim for half an hour in the on-site pool. She spends most of her day chatting to other residents and makes cups of tea for the staff. She organises coach trips to the seaside and calls the bingo numbers on a Saturday night. She’s never smoked, is not a heavy drinker and comes outside every day at 12 to feed and watch the birds.’
‘Blimey, Keats, you her pen pal or something?’ Kim asked, still unsure why he’d called them.
‘This lady had no serious health issues, was fit and sprightly and yet here she is. Dead.’
‘But you’ve not even examined her yet to determine cause of death,’ Kim noted.
‘I know, are you impressed right now?’
‘Not sure impressed sums up how I’m feeling about you right this—’
‘Oh, and these little blighters here might have given me a clue,’ he said, taking an evidence bag from his jacket pocket.
; She took what appeared to be an empty bag from his hand.
‘Looks like they got away,’ she said, turning it over.
He passed her his glasses. ‘Look closer.’
She put them on and held the bag up to the light.
‘Fibres?’ she asked.
‘At least half a dozen of them, found on her lips.’
Kim glanced back at the body. The fibres on her lips were blue, matching nothing on her person but potentially similar to the ones found around the neck wound of Cordell.
Kim now understood the reason for the call and the absence of staff outside.
‘You think she was murdered and that it was someone here? That this is linked to the murder of Doctor Cordell?’
‘That’s your job, not mine but the gardens appear to be enclosed.’
‘Okay, Bryant, tell the manager no one leaves and we want access to their CCTV. Now.’
Forty-Two
Stacey stepped back into the office just after 2 p.m. carrying a large cup of diet Coke.
‘Hey, I’d have got you one but didn’t know what you liked,’ Stacey said, although to be fair she hadn’t given him a thought at all.
‘No probs, fairy cake?’ he asked, offering her the Tupperware container.
Stacey shook her head. ‘You trying out for Bake Off or something?’
He shrugged and put the tub behind him next to the printer.
‘So, what we working on?’ Stacey asked. She’d devoted enough time to Jessie Ryan for one day, and although she’d have liked more time, she’d promised the boss this case would come first.
‘Boss wants some background on these guys,’ he said, pushing a yellow Post-it note towards her.
She read the names. ‘I’m guessing Italian.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, deadpan.
‘What’s the boss after?’ she asked. ‘Unless it’s some kind of secret.’
‘Father and son. Senior is Angelo. Works at the hospital. Cordell made a complaint against Angelo for trying to steal stuff. Angelo threatened Cordell, and now Angelo says he caught Cordell having sex with a nurse and the surgeon was trying to silence him. Hence, the reason for the complaint.’
Fatal Promise: A totally gripping and heart-stopping serial-killer thriller Page 12