Audrey turned and focussed red, stricken eyes on them.
‘You have to be mistaken. You have it all wrong. This is not Kelly you’re talking about. You obviously have the wrong girl.’
Kim thought back a few hours to when she’d opened Kelly’s bag and inspected the contents properly.
‘Mrs Rowe, the three of you recently went to see Santa at the safari park?’
‘Yes, but how could you…’
Her words trailed away.
‘The photo was in Kelly’s handbag,’ Kim said, gently.
Audrey folded to the ground. A keening sound came from between her lips.
Bryant immediately knelt to comfort her.
Kim stepped into the kitchen.
ELEVEN
It was almost lunchtime when Stacey followed Dawson out of Sedgley police station. So far it had not differed from a normal working day. She’d been sitting in a room, staring at a computer screen.
They had shared out the possible cameras that might have offered them a lead and trawled through them in virtual silence.
They had agreed to break for lunch after a potential sighting had been obscured from view by a gritting lorry.
Stacey was unsure how this worked out in the field. Normally she either ate a sandwich at her desk or snuck down to the cafeteria for a portion of guilty chips. Did they separate for a while or stick together and discuss what they’d learned or, in their case, what they hadn’t? She was just about to ask when a blonde woman in high heels stepped right in front of Dawson, blocking his path.
Although she’d never met the woman, it didn’t take Stacey long to work out who it was.
‘What do you want, Frost?’ Dawson asked, attempting to step around her.
‘Hear you had a new recruit at the station last night. Bit young for active duty, eh?’
‘How’d you know about that?’
She shrugged as she took a last draw on the cigarette she was smoking.
‘I have sources,’ she said, discarding the cigarette and thrusting her hand at Stacey.
She had no choice but to take it.
‘Nice to meet you,’ she said, with a smile that wasn’t really a smile. More an automatic expression change that accompanied the handshake.
‘Not now, Frost,’ Dawson said wearily.
‘Wanna do an appeal?’ she asked.
He offered her a derisive look. ‘I’ll pass on that.’
They all knew what had happened the last time Dawson had appealed for information. He had been played by a trainee reporter and had gone against the direct instruction of the boss. His mistake had led to hours of sifting through and eliminating piles of useless information.
‘It’s going live on the website in less than an hour and will be in the afternoon edition of the paper.’
‘Then you don’t really need anything from me, do you?’ he said, finally stepping around her.
‘Jesus, that bloody woman…’
‘Hey, Dawson. Cute little bugger, isn’t he?’
Dawson stopped dead and turned.
‘How the hell do you know?’
She smirked. ‘Got a photo as social services were heaving him out of the car.’
Dawson took a step towards her. ‘You dare use that photo and I swear…’
‘Untwist your knickers, Dawson, I was just saying.’
Stacey saw the amusement in her eyes. Clearly the reporter knew how to wind up her colleague.
‘Fuck off and get your information from the press office like everyone else,’ he growled, walking away.
‘And where’s the fun in that?’ she called after him.
Stacey followed her colleague to the end of the car park.
‘Oh, and Dawson,’ Frost called from beside her car, ‘if I didn’t bug you I’d never get to find out all your terrible secrets.’
Frost looked at her, smirked and walked away.
Stacey glanced at her colleague expecting his expression to be one of weary toleration but it appeared this woman had a knack of crawling under his skin like no one she’d met before. His gaze followed her as she tottered away, his face full of murderous thunder.
TWELVE
‘Everything okay?’ Kim asked the liaison officer over the top of Lindy’s head.
The child was busy beating a bowl of batter into submission for a cake that no one would eat.
‘She’s asking when?’
Kim understood. Lindy was beginning to realise that her mummy wasn’t home yet. It was not their place to explain to the child that her mummy would never be coming back again. And for that she was truly thankful.
‘Anything to note?’
Louise shook her head as she lined up mugs and dropped in teabags.
Kim thought it took a special kind of person to be a family liaison officer. This woman was never going to be called to a family about to embark on a celebration. When Louise answered the phone in the middle of the night it was a request to immerse herself in the grief of a family.
‘Nothing yet. She made one call to her sister in Glasgow stating there’d been an accident, so I think she’ll be here later today.’
‘This okay?’ Lindy asked of the gloop in the mixing bowl.
Kim marvelled at how quickly children could adapt to new situations. And very shortly she would need to. The finality of death would be lost on Lindy. Four-year-olds didn’t understand the concept of for ever.
For a while Lindy would be a bystander to the imminent events. Strangers would pass through the house. There would be tears, anger, denial. There would be a funeral and Lindy would attend the burial and still she would wonder when her mummy was coming back.
And through it all Louise would grow closer and closer to the child. And then she would have to leave.
‘How do you do it?’ Kim asked, nodding towards the child.
Although not specific Louise understood the question.
‘Bonds form, especially with small people. I have a feeling we’ll be cooking a lot,’ she said as Lindy tried to squash a lump of flour against the side of the bowl.
‘Good girl, you keep getting those lumps out for me.’
Lindy nodded again and stirred some more.
‘But how do you keep distance?’ Kim asked.
Louise smiled. ‘You don’t in cases like this. I know that the people I’m around were not responsible, so I don’t have to listen for any inconsistency or mistake. I don’t have to watch the family dynamics looking for nuances. In this case my role is to offer support.’
‘And when it’s over?’
‘I’ll go home, hug my kids hard, cry and then move onto the next family that needs me.’
It was a world that Kim could not comprehend.
‘It’s no different for you,’ Louise said, pouring hot water into the row of mugs. ‘You put everything you have into each case and then it ends. And you move on to the next.’ She looked saddened for a second. ‘And, unfortunately for both of us, there will always be a next.’
‘No lumps,’ Lindy cried, pointing to the globs of flour mashed against the side of the glass mixing bowl.
Well, Kim reasoned, that was one way of removing the lumps.
Louise put her arm around the child’s shoulders. ‘Well done, Lindy. That’s excellent work.’
As Lindy smiled up into the police officer’s face Kim caught Louise’s eye.
‘No, it’s not really the same at all.’
‘All right, guv,’ Bryant said, entering the small kitchen. Immediately it felt cramped. ‘We can go take a look around.’
Kim looked to Louise who nodded her understanding that she would need to try and keep both the child and the grandmother downstairs. They had no idea what they might find and watching strangers examine her daughter’s possessions would not be a positive experience for Audrey.
‘On the left, guv,’ Bryant said, as she neared the top of the stairs.
The room was at the front of the house and was the larger of the bedrooms. Two win
dows offered a light and airy space. Beneath the left window was a three-quarter-sized bed covered by a quilt with the Manhattan skyline. Beneath the other window was a small single bed with a pink, flowery bed set.
A picture of the two of them late at night shushing each other formed in Kim’s mind. She pushed it away. It wouldn’t help the investigation.
‘I’ll start this side, guv,’ Bryant said, indicating the back wall that was occupied by two wardrobes and a dressing table.
Kim nodded and opened the top drawer of the dressing table.
They worked in silence until Bryant called her over.
On the left-hand side of the wardrobe, beneath a pile of jumpers, was a carrier bag, half filled with packets of condoms.
‘Bag ’em,’ Kim instructed.
Although they would not help further the investigation it was not something Audrey needed to find when sorting through her daughter’s possessions. It would put pictures into her mind that would do her no good.
Bryant took evidence bags from his jacket pocket and a black marker pen.
‘Bloody hell,’ Kim breathed as her eyes moved across the wardrobe rail. The far left held a selection of workwear from her previous job. Two navy skirts and two pairs of smart black trousers. Long-sleeved shirts and two suit jackets suitable for her previous office job. That they were still in her wardrobe told Kim she had hope of changing her own future.
Next were furry pyjamas and a dressing gown. Kim could easily imagine Kelly snuggled up on the single bed reading a story to four-year-old Lindy. Beside those were jogging bottoms, jumpers and jeans.
And finally, right at the end of the rail, was another short skirt and three tops similar to the one Kim had seen on her dead body.
‘What?’ Bryant asked.
‘The entire gamut of her personalities on one bloody rail.’
She was a good girl, Kim thought, as she returned to the bed and looked beneath it. Only a few pairs of shoes and a couple of handbags met her gaze.
She lifted up the mattress and found a small book. Kim took it out and leafed through it. It was a red pocket-sized book used for household budgets.
At the front of the book was an initial amount of £1,000 as a brought forward balance, followed by an entry of almost two thousand pounds marked up as interest and fees.
Kim sat on the edge of the bed and studied the dates and amounts. Payments were made weekly for the first month of eighty to a hundred pounds. As each payment was registered on the left-hand side an amount was entered on the right. She continued through the book and saw that six months before the weekly payment had increased to an average of two hundred pounds. Kim did a quick calculation to find that £2,750 had been paid with a balance still outstanding of over eight hundred pounds.
She whistled. What an interest rate.
Kelly Rowe had owed somebody a lot of money and Kim had a good idea who it was.
THIRTEEN
‘Nothing so far,’ Dawson said, ending the call to social services.
‘Calls have been placed to local GP surgeries and walk-in centres but they don’t hold out much hope. Normally only works if the mother has given birth very recently. The baby is still in hospital being checked over but no bruises and no obvious injuries.’
‘And no helpful clues,’ Stacey offered.
Dawson agreed. The child appeared well-nourished, healthy and well taken care of. Right up until he was abandoned outside a police station on a freezing cold night. There was just no getting away from that fact.
His gaze passed over every female on the screen of the time-lapse video running from outside the petrol station a mile away from the police station. The child could belong to any of the women passing by. She could be any age, any circumstance, any income bracket. Working, not working. He had no clue how they were going to narrow it down.
He heard Stacey’s loud sigh as his phone began to ring.
‘Yo,’ he answered, seeing it was the station.
‘Dawson?’
‘Hey, Phil, what’s up?’ he asked the custody sergeant.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘We’re just at Sedgley checking—’
‘Yeah, it doesn’t really matter,’ Phil said, cutting him off. ‘Wherever you are I need you back here, right now.’
‘Can’t it wait until—?’
‘Dawson, I need you to come back to the station, right now. I have three women in my reception yammering away about that abandoned child…’
Dawson frowned. ‘Well, just take details and we’ll—’
‘No chance. They’re not leaving. Every one of them is saying she’s his mother.’
FOURTEEN
Kim stamped the snow from her boots on the mat inside the coffee shop. The seating area was not highly populated and her eyes found their target immediately.
‘Go on, then, Bryant, you’ve twisted my arm,’ she said, nodding towards the counter.
Bryant rolled his eyes as she headed for the window table. She pulled out a chair and sat.
‘Mr Lord, I hope I’m not disturbing you.’
He glanced up from his phone and fixed her with a cold stare.
Kim smiled in the face of his irritation. Any inconvenience to this man was a job well done in her view.
Kai Lord was now twenty-seven years of age and had taken over as boss of the Hollytree multiracial gang two years earlier following the imprisonment of the previous leader for attempted murder.
His dress sense had elevated from his early days as the boss. Gone were the low-slung jeans and hoodies favoured by his minions. Kai Lord now dressed with style in plain black trousers and a crisp white shirt. No jewellery adorned his body except for an expensive-looking watch on his left wrist.
His rise to power had been calculated and shrewd, building on loyalty of gang members until the perfect moment presented itself and he became the natural successor.
In his two-year reign he had clamped down on the gang’s involvement in violent crime and focussed his attentions on the real money: drugs and prostitution.
Seven months earlier she had been called to the bedside of a fourteen-year-old boy from Hollytree who had fallen into a comatose state after being given a freebie drugs sample from Lord’s supply chain. She had learned that the gang was offering freebies to kids to hook them young.
She had eventually persuaded two witnesses to testify against Lord when one of his underlings had stepped into the station and admitted to feeding the kid a free dose. The Crown Prosecution Service had happily ripped the confession from the kid’s hand knowing that her two witnesses against Kai Lord himself would probably never make it to court. She had fought them on it, wanting to get the real drug pusher behind bars until fourteen-year-old Jackson Booth had died and then she had accepted that someone needed to pay for his death.
So while twenty-one-year-old Lewis Harte spent the next seven years inside for manslaughter the real killer sat here eating his lunch.
He had also been responsible for Dawson being badly beaten by four of his underlings. It was safe to say she wanted this particular low life residing at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
‘And you is?’ he asked, in a voice that was as deep as the colour of his skin.
‘We is Detective Inspector Stone and that is my colleague at the counter, Detective Sergeant Bryant, as you well know. May we get you another coffee?’
‘Nah, blud,’ he said, placing his phone on the table.
‘I’m not your blud, Mr Lord,’ she said, calmly. ‘So, please don’t call me that. And I’m pleased to see that the death of Kelly Rowe hasn’t interrupted your appetite too badly.’ She looked pointedly at the large plate with an egg stain and a dollop of tomato ketchup.
He smirked. ‘Gotta keep up my strength, officer,’ he said, emphasising the last word.
Kim waited for Bryant to place the drinks and sit before she continued.
‘So, Kelly Rowe was one of your girls?’ she asked.
‘We was colleagues
,’ he said.
‘And how did Kelly become one of your “colleagues”, Mr Lord?’
He shrugged. ‘My colleagues come to me for many reasons. And I take very good care of them all.’
‘Except she’s dead,’ Kim stated.
He cared about his ‘colleagues’ so much they were out on the streets in sub-zero temperatures trying to reduce a debt that would never be paid off. A real contender for Employer of the Year.
He shrugged.
Kim took the payment book from her pocket and held it aloft.
‘And I can see your generosity right here.’
Kai reached for his cup and took a sip. There was no tremble to his hand, and Kim didn’t expect any.
‘She came to me, officer. She needed dollar to help feed her child. Would you have me turn her away?’
‘Mr Lord, I would hate to doubt your genuine intention of philanthropy but not at an interest rate of 59 per cent APR.’
Amusement passed through the expressionless eyes. ‘I have expenses,’ he said with a lazy smile.
And those expenses included kitting himself out from head to toe in Ralph Lauren designer clothing.
She sat back, and smiled in his direction.
‘You know, you can dress a pig in Prada but at the end of the day it’s still a pig.’
‘But a very wealthy pig,’ he replied, taking another sip, and dropping the gangster speak all at the same time.
‘How did you meet Kelly?’ she shot at him.
‘I don’t recall.’
‘When did you meet her?’
He shrugged. ‘My apologies but I don’t recall.’
‘Have you so many “colleagues” that you recall so little about them, Mr Lord?’
‘Not at all, officer,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘I know everything, and I mean, everything, about my girls but I’m just not very good with dates.’
Kim sat forward and took a sip of her latte. And like him, there was no tremble to her hand either.
‘I note that you charged Kelly a weekly management fee. Could you explain that?’
‘My time is chargeable and I make no apologies for that.’
Broken Bones: A gripping serial killer thriller (Detective Kim Stone Crime Thriller Series Book 7) Page 4