He groaned and tried to push her away.
‘Bitch, get off me now,’ he growled.
‘Sorry, I thought I knew her,’ Kim said, wrestling him back down.
‘Bitch, I ain’t kidding. Get the fuck off me now or you is gonna regret it.’
Kim moved to the side. ‘Hey, you ran into me,’ she said, standing up and dusting herself down.
The male looked past her but the young girl was long gone.
He shook his head. ‘Fucking crazy bitch,’ he said, walking past her.
Kim looked along the strip, searching for the woman who had given her the tip. A few faces smiled begrudgingly in her direction but Sal was already busy getting into a car at the other end of the street.
TWENTY-TWO
Andrei tried to ignore the shiver that vibrated through his body. They were becoming much more frequent and violent. It was like a rumble of thunder that began at his core and reverberated through every fragment of his body.
Each one left him more exhausted than the last.
At first he had tried to hunch his back against the biting wind, to form himself into a smaller being but his broken leg prevented him bringing up his knees. He had tried to turn his face away from the snow when it had turned to hailstones in the early hours of the morning. The pellets of ice had left the skin on his cheeks reddened and sore before falling onto his trousers and melting into the wet fabric sticking to his skin.
He couldn’t count the hours he’d sat in the weeds. He knew that darkness had come and gone and snuck up on him again. He thought it was only once but could no longer be sure.
The snow had continued to fall heavily bringing a lonely stillness to the world. The distant hum of traffic at the bridge had died down a long time ago and had never returned. He could not hear life or movement anywhere.
He had wondered if the heavy snowfall had stopped the man from coming back for him. But he knew he was just fooling himself.
He had already tried to move along the bank twice and each three foot distance had exhausted him. He had tried to move away from the bridge as he knew he would never be able to get up the steep slope that led back to the road but trying to shuffle along without moving his leg had been futile.
And he knew he didn’t have the energy to try again.
He had tried to spit the gag out by working at it, widening his mouth and then closing it again. The constant movement had caused it to slacken slightly which had almost choked him and no amount of effort from his tongue could push it out.
His hardest fight right now was exhaustion.
Oh, how he wanted to give into it and yet something stopped him. He had a sense that he was not being pulled towards sleep, that there was a finality just waiting to grab him as he closed his eyes.
Any hope of being saved had gone. He had not seen or heard a soul since he’d been dumped here and yet he still felt the need to hang on.
The pain was excruciating and yet somehow reassuring because it told him he was still alive. But his mind was playing tricks on him. He kept remembering a night in a lorry many years ago. He wanted to reach into the crook of his arms even though he knew there was no one there, sleeping beside him.
Strangely, he kept forgetting where his hands were. He looked down thinking they were in his lap but he couldn’t see them. Of course, they were behind his back. Tied.
He could feel the pull of his eyes. Every muscle reached out towards the beckoning darkness. The pain in his broken leg made him groan out loud.
Suddenly the tears spilled out from his eyes. In a moment of clarity he realised that he was going to die.
Panic surged through his mind. He didn’t want to die. There were things he needed to say, should have said, should have explained to the only person that mattered. He knew that moments of consciousness were now as precious as his only child.
The emotion gathered in his throat and it tasted like regret.
I don’t want to leave you, my love, his mind screamed as the cloth absorbed his tears.
His last conscious thought was whispered into the gag.
‘Who will care for you now?’
TWENTY-THREE
It was eleven thirty when Kim opened her front door.
Following her scuffle with the minder and armed with a page full of registration numbers, Bryant had dropped her off at the station.
‘Hey, you, come here,’ she said, as Barney sashayed towards her. His black-and-white head was tipped slightly to the left as he rubbed against her. His tail thumped against the door frame.
‘If I had a tail it would be wagging right now too,’ she said, rubbing his thick fur all over. No matter what the day had held, Barney’s welcome was enough to put a smile on her face.
She glanced towards the fireplace, as she always did, as though checking that the photo was still there. The two of them, her and Mikey, sitting side-on and turned forward to the camera. It was the last remaining copy of their only school photograph taken when they were six years old, their dark heads close together. She could almost feel the sensation of his hair against her cheek.
She remembered that she’d had to tickle him to make him smile for the camera but he’d not had a lot to smile about. When not at school they had both spent every waking moment trying to protect him from their mother whose paranoid schizophrenia had convinced her that he was the devil.
And two months after the photograph was taken the bitch had got her wish and Mikey had died of starvation in her arms.
And yet, this photograph didn’t remind her of the bad times. It served to remind her that they had laughed as kids and had had each other. It helped her recall how much she had loved him. It meant she would never forget the tarry blackness of his hair or the amber colour of his eyes or what his face had looked like in laughter.
It reminded her that he had lived.
She removed her jacket and put on a pot of coffee. Despite the time she knew it wouldn’t be wasted.
She turned to the dog and patted her chest. ‘Up,’ she said.
His front paws landed gently and she felt between the pads. There was a slight dampness to the protruding fur which told her Charlie hadn’t long delivered him back from an afternoon two doors down finished off with a gentle stroll around the block.
She grabbed his eager face in her hands and planted kisses on the top of his warm head. ‘Wanna go again?’ she asked.
His behind started to move from side to side making it unclear if the dog was wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog.
‘Okay, half a cup and we’re off,’ she said, pouring a small amount of coffee into a mug.
He sat and patiently watched her. She would swear that he understood.
She loved their late-night walks. There would be few people around right now, which suited them both perfectly. The inclement weather conditions didn’t bother either of them and there was nothing to keep her here.
For the first time in years the only motorcycle in her garage was the Kawasaki Ninja that had been benched due to the snow. Her last project had been sold and the proceeds donated to the PDSA, so right now her garage floor was swept and tidy, the work surfaces were free of motorbike parts and every oily rag was folded neatly in a drawer. And she bloody well hated it.
She hoped the walk would deplete her remaining energy levels and help make her ready for bed. The normal process of sleep often eluded her.
Normal people lay down, closed their eyes and controlled their conscious minds for a short while. Lists would be made, chores would be identified, the day’s events analysed and the following day organised. But then some magic would occur when the mind took control and offered its own thoughts, a delicious state of limbo where the sleeper was no longer the driver but the passenger being guided into unconsciousness by their own mind.
Kim’s own journey from A to B could only be achieved once exhaustion was totally upon her. And the night’s events were still spinning around her head.
Of course they hadn’t
been on Tavistock Road to interfere. There was a dead girl in the morgue who needed answers but how could she, in all good conscience, stand in the doorway taking registration numbers knowing that a young girl was being offered as a sacrificial lamb to a pervert who liked young girls? That the girl had been an unwilling party had been evident in her eyes.
Kai Lord was not a stupid man and it would not take long for him to put two and two together and make four. He would know it was her that had interfered with the transaction and probably cost him a lot of money.
She smiled to herself. Oh well, too bad. That was definitely not a fact that would keep her awake at night.
The smile was wiped from her face as she heard a sound at the front door. She tipped her head, listening for any follow-up noises. Nothing. She headed for the kitchen and took a carving knife from the drawer. She turned off the lounge light and edged towards the front door, placing Barney firmly behind her.
She stood in the darkness of the hall as she looked around the doorway but there was no shadow against the crescent-shaped piece of glass at the top level. The deadbolts were still engaged and the chain still bridged the door to the frame.
Kim placed the knife on the table and opened the front door. She looked to the ground. Ten minutes earlier her feet had been the only ones to have trodden the fresh snow. And now she could see clearly a second set of prints double trodden as they approached and then receded from her doorway.
She stepped out, pulled the door closed behind her and followed the prints to the end of the road, where they simply stopped.
So, her visitor had either grown wings and flown away or parked away from her house and then walked down.
Kim quickly assessed the surroundings. Only a handful of lights illuminated the quiet street and those were shrouded in heavy curtains to keep out the cold. The sound of a car pulling to the side of the road would hardly have produced spectators or inquisitive glances.
Kim rubbed her bare arms and trudged back to her home. She locked the door behind her and turned on the light.
And that was when she saw it.
A slip of paper had been posted through her letterbox and had fluttered to the ground.
She reached down and picked it up, turning it over. The paper simply stated a name. A frown rested on her face as she reached for Barney’s lead.
If this was anything to do with the death of Kelly Rowe then someone linked to the investigation knew where she lived.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘Okay, boys and girls, are we all sitting comfortably?’ Kim asked, perching her bottom on the edge of the spare desk.
They all nodded in her direction.
She’d just had a call from the front desk, so by her reckoning she had approximately two minutes to come clean.
‘Boss, there’s something not right about the Robertson’s place. They’ve got the girls being ferried in and out on a—’
‘Okay, Kev, just give me a minute to—’
‘Owners wouldn’t even let us have a word with a couple of the women to see if—’
‘All right, Kev, I just want to share something—’
‘Hey there, peeps,’ said a voice from the door.
Kim groaned inside. He’d obviously made the stairs quicker than she’d thought.
All heads turned to the gangly male dressed in plain black trousers and an open-neck check shirt. The strap of a man-bag cut diagonally across his chest. The bandana holding back the fair curls was tie-dyed green.
‘Guys, you remember Detective Sergeant Penn from West Mercia?’
Dawson and Bryant nodded suspiciously while Stacey simply frowned. She knew the name and she knew of his involvement in the Hate Crimes case that had almost cost her her life but they had never met.
‘He’s agreed to come on over to us for a little while to help out,’ Kim said.
Secondments in the police normally fell into three categories: overseas deployment, mission deployment or under section 97 of the Police Act covering the need for specific expertise.
‘I need someone to liaise with the teams out in the field gathering information on Kelly Rowe—’
‘So, he’s replacing me?’ Dawson asked.
‘And I want someone equally capable of data mining and—’
‘So, he’s replacing me?’ Stacey asked.
Penn stood in the doorway, watching the exchange with amusement.
‘And someone who knows the area well,’ she said.
Penn had moved from Halesowen to West Hagley seven years earlier when he was twenty-three. When Woody had generously left the case of the abandoned child on their desks she had insisted that she needed an additional two officers. He had agreed on one and she had specifically requested the assistance of Austin Penn.
Bryant stood and strode towards him with his hand outstretched.
‘Welcome to the team, Penn,’ he said, pleasantly.
Bryant’s act seemed to press the refresh button on common courtesy as both Dawson and Stacey rose to shake his hand.
‘Where do you want me?’ Penn asked, stepping into the room.
She removed her behind from the spare desk and pointed. She perched next to the coffee machine at the top of the office.
‘Okay, Penn got his logins and access yesterday and started work remotely.’ She nodded towards him. ‘Anything to do with Kelly on the CCTV front?’
He grimaced as he removed his bag and set his coat on the back of the chair. ‘No local authority cameras close by. I’ve checked three service stations in the immediate area that caught nothing and a timber yard that covers the footpath completely is not currently in working order.’
They all groaned.
‘Want me to go any further out on that, boss? I’m at a radius of just under a mile.’
Kim appreciated that he would respect her authority so quickly. Travis was his real boss. She shook her head. There was no point. Anything caught further away from the crime scene would be useless.
‘To recap from yesterday: we know that Kelly Rowe was one of Kai’s girls.’
‘Anything to connect him to her murder?’ Dawson asked, quickly.
Oh, how she wished there was.
‘Not yet,’ she answered. ‘Her mother knew nothing of Kelly’s new career and thought she was working late nights at a bar. We found a pimp payment book which we now believe to be that of Kai Lord—’
‘Jesus, for a first-timer she couldn’t have got caught up with anyone worse,’ Dawson said.
Kim continued. ‘By the looks of it she got desperate for money and took a loan from him without fully understanding the repercussions. The interest rate was extortionate but she worked hard and was close to paying it off.’
‘Always someone waiting to take advantage,’ Stacey said.
Kim nodded. ‘Oh yeah, but what I’m struggling with at the moment is an obvious link between Kelly and Kai Lord. I can’t see where their paths would naturally cross. Before moving back in with her mother Kelly rented a converted flat in a decent street in Netherton neither close to Hollytree nor Tavistock Road. So, there had to be a broker that put them in touch with each other.’
‘I’ll dig a bit on that,’ Penn offered.
‘We also got a lead on a customer that works with kids and apparently he’s a bit weird,’ she said, emphasising the word weird. ‘We’re heading over to the community centre on Hollytree to see if anyone there knows him, and we collected registration numbers of potential punters and witnesses.’
‘Not all we did last night, was it, guv?’ Bryant asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘There was an attempt from one of Kai’s minions to hand over a girl to a customer who likes them young. Luckily, that transaction was thwarted,’ she explained.
‘What did you do, boss?’ Dawson asked.
Why did he assume she had done anything at all?
Bryant grinned. ‘Well, let’s say I’ve been tackled on the rugby pitch with more finesse.’
‘Hey,’ she defended. ‘W
e got the punter’s registration number, didn’t we?’
And for a full day’s work yesterday that was all that she had. If they didn’t make serious progress on the case today it wouldn’t be just the press after her blood. Woody would be leading the pack.
‘So, Kev, any progress on our child?’
‘Our child, boss?’ he asked with a lopsided smile.
She narrowed her eyes.
‘Sorry. As I was saying earlier we tried to speak to the girls at Robertson’s…’
Kim nodded. It was well known that they employed a high percentage of Romanian women. It’s where she would have started.
‘Bosses there wouldn’t allow us even a few minutes. We went back later just as they were all being ferried out of there on a minibus.’
Kim frowned. ‘You going back?’
Dawson nodded. ‘We’ll give it another try.’
‘Okay, but if you have no luck, cast your net wider.’
He nodded his understanding.
Kim took a piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to Penn. He looked at it and read it aloud.
‘Lauren Goddard.’
Kim shrugged in the face of everyone’s puzzled expressions.
‘I have no idea either but that note was hand delivered to my home late last night.’
Stacey’s mouth dropped open. Kev shook his head and Bryant swore under his breath.
Kim held up her hands. ‘It’s fine, guys, honestly. Whoever left this thinks they’re trying to help.’
‘Still, though, boss,’ Dawson said.
She waved away his concern and turned to the newest recruit. ‘Penn, I know it’s not much to go on but see what you can dig up?’
Penn nodded and began tapping away at his keyboard.
‘Also, Penn, Bryant will pass you the registration numbers from last night. Can you start to get some names? Two are marked. Start with those.’
Broken Bones: A gripping serial killer thriller (Detective Kim Stone Crime Thriller Series Book 7) Page 8