The Innocent Ones

by The Innocent Ones (retail) (epub)

  ‘I don’t care about that. Call her now.’

  The man pursed his lips for a moment before pulling out a Motorola clamshell.

  The officers from the van clambered out as the man spoke into his phone and Porter briefed them, giving them orders to work their way through the crowd, looking out for a small ginger‑haired boy in a blue jacket.

  As they went, the man jabbed at the off button on his phone. ‘Yeah, told you. He’s not there and all she could do was scream at me.’

  ‘Come with me, let’s go looking.’

  The murmurs grew louder as they got nearer the bonfire and the officers streamed through the crowd, the news rippling outward that there was a missing child. The drunks calmed down and the focus changed to a community working together, small groups heading off to the darker corners, scouring bushes and hedgerows, some heading for the cliff edge, to look out for a small body on the pebbles below, splayed and broken.

  Most people avoided Porter, the boy’s father alongside, all clutching the hands of their own children a little tighter, just thankful that they weren’t him. A few came forward, those who knew him, most carrying lager cans, but no one with any sightings. Some children danced around, curious about the adventure. One girl said that he might be in a gulley behind one of the pillboxes that dotted the coast, concrete structures used to monitor the sea during the Second World War, but Porter shooed her away. Someone else said that he might have gone to the beach and wandered into the sea, bringing a wail from William’s father. Others suggested new searching places as the focus of the festival became finding William. Someone turned off the music and the crowds disappeared from in front of the food vendors, the torches once used to light the way now being used to search the coastline.

  William’s father left Porter and instead wandered up and down with no real purpose, shouting his name, people avoiding him now, not wanting any part of the heartbreak they knew was on its way.

  A growing unease spread through Porter. The longer William couldn’t be found, the more likely it was that this wouldn’t have a happy ending. Town festivals like this attracted the sort of people who liked big crowds in dark places. The perverts, the molesters. Some cars had left earlier in the evening. Had William been in one, an abductor using the noise of the crowd to take him, presumed to be just another father dragging away a child who wanted to stay with the bright lights? Porter’s hope was that William had become aware of the trouble he was in and was hiding somewhere, or run home, scared of what his father will say when he discovers him.

  There was a shout.

  Porter turned. There was someone at the top of the steps that ran down a small gap in the cliffs and to the beach below, all white pebbles and rock pools, away from the smooth sand nearer the town. It was a woman in a scarf and woollen hat, and she was waving with both arms, trying to attract attention.

  The crowd turned towards her, and William’s father started running.

  ‘Shit.’ Porter ran too, wanting to get there before anyone else, but William’s father beat him to it, stumbling down the steps, his hand skimming down the metal rail, Porter a few paces behind, everyone hanging back, preferring to peer over the cliff edge.

  There was a cluster of people at the bottom of the steps, by a concrete pillbox, a solid structure with slits for windows and one room inside. It had once been built against the cliff face but erosion had made the cliff behind it collapse, so that it stood alone, just chalk and mud around it. Those at the bottom stood back as William’s father got close, their hands over their mouths.

  Porter saw what had attracted the shout. There was something in the mud behind the pillbox, a splash of shiny fabric underneath some seaweed. Except seaweed shouldn’t be that high: it was too far from the water.

  William’s father wailed and sank to his knees. Porter rushed down the steps and past him, to scramble onto the mud and stones and pull at the seaweed. He knew what he’d find but he couldn’t worry about the crime scene. Preservation of life came before anything else. But as he pulled the last piece away, he knew there was nothing to save.

  William was lying still, his face gleaming from the torchlights being shone from above, blood over his face, cuts on his neck, his head misshapen, his skull crushed.

  He searched for a pulse, but there was nothing.

  Porter looked upwards, his mind working quickly and wondering whether he had merely fallen, and saw just heads craning outwards, desperate for a glimpse of something they didn’t really want to see. No, it couldn’t be that. The body was covered. It had been hidden.

  He went to his knees. He looked back to William’s father and shook his head. There was nothing they could do. William was dead.

  Chapter Nine

  Present Day

  Jayne drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. This felt strange. Really strange. Almost a year since she’d left, and here she was again, the monotony of keeping watch.

  She was outside The Oaks, the hotel where Barbara was staying.

  This had been the worst part of her old job. The waiting.

  There had many other unpleasant parts, like serving injunctions on violent partners, making sure they got the piece of paper but with enough space behind her to run if she needed to. Private investigating had a glamorous ring, but the reality was much different. It was as mundane as most jobs get to be in the end, and it was part of the reason she’d moved to Manchester. There had to be more to her life.

  She’d been a psychology undergraduate once, but she’d dropped out as Jimmy enveloped her. That seemed like a long time in the past now. Her memories were of carefree student parties, everyone excited at the hopes and dreams of the future. Then it became about giving excuses why she couldn’t make the parties or the pub crawls, until people stopped asking her. It had become the easiest choice: the questions about who she’d been talking to ended up making the thought of going out unbearable.

  She found it hard to believe she was the same woman, but she knew for certain that she would never again be the person she’d been before Jimmy.

  She glanced towards the hotel to try to push away the dark thoughts that always seemed to be close by. There was no sign of movement.

  Dan had given her a description of Barbara. Middle-aged, dark side-parting, slacks and pearls, her voice plummy, out of keeping with the northern bluntness she was used to.

  The Oaks was one of those hotels that had once been the grandest place in town but now survived on weddings and those people who thought it might have retained some old charm.

  She stepped out of her car. She wanted a closer look.

  Some of the old charm was still there. In the reception, by the bar, there was a large fire, and the look was dark wood and patterned carpets, paintings on the wall and low lighting. The luxury was faded though. The doors were coated in peeling paint and there was a worn track along the floor, darkened by years of footsteps and spilled drinks.

  Jayne slid onto a bar stool. The barman sidled over, wearing the standard hotel uniform of a waistcoat, white shirt and thin black tie.

  As he poured a beer, he asked, ‘Are you a guest?’

  ‘Meeting one. He hasn’t booked in yet though. Will he get a room?’

  ‘Here? Tonight?’ He laughed. ‘He could have any room he wanted. Almost empty.’

  She raised her glass. ‘I’ll take a seat by the fire, just so I can look out for him.’

  Her seat gave her a good view into the lobby and right through the restaurant, the stairs at the end. She didn’t have to wait long. A woman sauntered through, elegant, confident, of the right age, but it was the pearl necklace that gave her away. She came into the bar and ordered a gin, before she sought out a secluded corner. Jayne had been able to make out her accent as she spoke to the barman. That was all she needed.

  * * *

  More than an hour passed before anything happened, and Jayne had become resigned to a long evening pretending to be waiting for someone, all the time watching, until the woman slam
med the paper down and rushed towards the car park at the rear of the hotel.

  Jayne sat upright and muttered, ‘Shit,’ to herself, before heading through a different door and to her own car, parked at the front. She switched on her engine and got ready to follow, smiling when she heard an engine through her open car window and the glow of rear lights cast a red glow around the edge of the hotel wall.

  Jayne leaned forward, her fingers gripping the steering wheel, waiting for Barbara to appear from the side of the hotel, heading for the exit just ahead.

  Barbara didn’t head out that way. Instead, the red glow faded, the engine noise too. Jayne was confused.

  She waited a few minutes, in case Barbara emerged, not wanting to meet her in the narrow entrance, but there was no sign of her. Jayne had no choice but to go into the car park. She drove along the narrow drive towards the hotel.

  The driveway opened out and took her to the rear of the hotel, where Barbara had parked, but, as she got there, Jayne groaned. There was another exit, arrows pointing towards a lane that ran between hawthorn hedges and led to a narrow country road. The hotel had a one-way system.

  She’d lost her.

  Jayne slammed her steering wheel in annoyance. Her first day back in her old life and it had gone wrong already.

  She set off for the exit, cursing herself, not paying attention, when someone stepped in front of her car.

  Jayne slammed on the brakes, the tyres crunching on the gravel.

  It was Barbara.

  Jayne thought about reversing, but as Barbara walked towards her window she knew there was no point.

  Jayne wound down her window and gave an embarrassed, ‘Hi.’

  ‘Why are you watching me?’

  ‘I’m just waiting for someone.’

  ‘Please, young lady, don’t show yourself up. I saw you in the hotel, and now you’re out here.’ She leaned in. ‘My son was murdered in this town. Now, you’re spying on me. Do you think I wouldn’t be looking out for someone just like you?’

  Jayne sighed. ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘You don’t know what I think. Do you know something about my son’s murder?’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  Jayne thought about what she could say, until she realised that the truth was probably the best version. ‘Dan Grant wanted to check that you were on the level, because he doesn’t normally get the parents of victims calling on him.’

  ‘This case is unusual, that’s the point. You just haven’t got the intelligence to see it.’

  With that, Barbara walked to her car, parked further along the lane.

  Jayne didn’t have the heart to follow. Her words stung, and there’d be little point now. Barbara knew she was being followed.

  She set off, giving Barbara a wave as she went past, some lame effort at an apology, and headed away from the hotel.

  Chapter Ten

  Dan sat down on the bench in the park, at the spot where Mark Roberts had died, bludgeoned to death a long way from home.

  Dan had visited before, he always did, because a site visit opened up new possibilities. Knowing the locations of the street lights, or the possibility of new eyewitnesses from overlooking windows, or even just to make what had happened seem more real.

  Barbara’s arrival had made him want to visit it again, to see if a new mystery made him see it differently.

  The park was small and overlooked the town. There was a housing estate behind, accessed through a small ginnel, but ahead was just grass and trees, with a children’s playground on one side, a cracked tarmac path cutting across. It was bordered by high metal railings, because on the other side was a slope, with brambles and nettles, too steep to walk safely, until it came to a stop by a railway line. The wooden bench was shielded from the houses by the bushes behind it, the wood old and flaking.

  The prosecution case was that Mark Roberts had been murdered because he had walked through somewhere dark, a mugging victim in a part of Highford where most people wouldn’t have walked at night: someone from out of town who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Nick’s defence was simple, that he had come across a body and panicked. That remained the same, whether or not Barbara was right in her suspicions that Mark’s murder had been targeted, not random, because if Nick didn’t do it, someone else did.

  Could it be more than a mugging gone too far? Was the darkness the reason for Mark being there, to meet someone, the shadows the whole point? This was a park that wasn’t a cut-through to anywhere, and where Mark died was secluded, set as far back into the park as possible, by a bench. And benches are for sitting on. For waiting.

  He smiled. Barbara had given the case a twist.

  The journey back to his apartment wasn’t long, and as he turned into the cobbled yard there was a familiar old blue Punto there, dented and ragged, Jayne in the driver’s seat, staring blankly ahead. She looked up as he pulled alongside her.

  He wound down his window. ‘This feels strange, you being here.’

  ‘Good strange, or weird strange?’

  ‘Good, of course.’

  They went into his apartment together, on the top floor of an old wharf building by the canal, four storeys of grey millstone with painted wooden canopies on either side, to protect the cotton once loaded from the canal on one side and winched into the yard on the other, before being transported to the mills that once blighted the skyline.

  The mills were gone, huge stone blocks that once dominated the town and spewed out smoke that filled the valley, only the high chimneys poking through the gloom. They’d either been left to decay or demolished to make way for new industry. Dan’s apartment was part of an attempt to make the town grow, attract a few young professionals, in the hope that it became a commuter town for cities like Manchester. It hadn’t worked so far. The town was hidden in the hills, so that it became an almost forgotten part of the north.

  Dan went straight to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of wine. There was always wine somewhere. ‘I’m guessing you want one.’

  ‘I always want one.’ Jayne put her bag on the floor and sat down with a slump. ‘What are we eating?’

  ‘I didn’t say it was anything fancy.’ He pulled out two ready meals from a bag he’d taken to the apartment earlier. ‘Chinese or Indian?’

  ‘Indian.’

  As he jabbed the film lid with a fork, making loud smacks, Jayne said, ‘Barbara rumbled me, confronted me.’

  ‘Your following skills not as good as they used to be then?’

  As the microwave whirred, he poured her a glass.

  Jayne took a drink, sighing and closing her eyes, ‘The Oaks has got an exit round the back and I thought she’d gone that way.’

  ‘Avoiding you?’

  ‘So I thought, but she was waiting for me to follow.’

  ‘That’s unusual. If she saw you, she was being careful, so why?’

  ‘Her son came to Highford and ended up beaten to death in a park. She’s bound to be wary.’

  ‘Fair enough. Did she go anywhere else?’

  ‘I don’t know where she’d been before I saw her. She read the newspaper in the bar for an hour or so and caught me watching.’ She sat forward, putting her glass on the coffee table. ‘What next?’

  ‘I’m going to see Nick tomorrow. It might give him some renewed hope.’

  The microwave pinged. As Dan poured the contents onto a plate, she said, ‘What do you think of his case? Do you think he did it?’

  Dan thought about that. ‘The evidence is good. Robbery gone wrong? That involves violence, and Nick isn’t violent, but he is a thief who doesn’t care about his victims. It’s not a huge step to a street robbery, but to kill someone? That’s a leap, not a new step. But he takes drugs, we know that. Did something click inside his head if Mark fought back? Possibly. I can see the jury thinking that. He tried to cover his tracks and that always looks suspicious. If he had any morality,
he’d have called the police. He didn’t. Instead, he stole a wallet. Does it get much more callous than that? It’ll win him few friends on the jury. Barbara might give us something extra, but we’re going to have to disclose it all to the prosecution if we follow her theory.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Barbara thinks there is a bigger conspiracy going on, that her son was about to uncover something, and whatever it was, it was enough to get him killed. If she’s right, and there are bad people involved, we might need to get information from the police. If we hold it back and spring some wild conspiracy theory as a surprise, what if they have evidence to rebut it? There’ll be no chance of Nick being believed then. No, we can only pursue it if it might be true, and we achieve that by giving the prosecution the chance to rebut it and failing.’

  ‘How long do you need me?’

  He jabbed at the film lid over his own food. ‘How are you about being back here?’

  ‘What, you want me to tell you how I can’t get by without your company?’

  He turned on the microwave and spoke over the whirr. ‘Highford isn’t all good memories. You came here to get away from Jimmy’s family and, well, your time here wasn’t always peaceful. I wondered whether it brought back bad memories.’

  She stirred her food with her fork and kept her eyes on her plate. ‘My life is filled with bad memories, Dan. They don’t go away just because I’ve moved to the big city.’ She heaved a large sigh and raised her head. ‘You didn’t answer my question. How long?’

  ‘For as long as you want to be here, but the trial is next week. At least until then. Can you spare the time?’

  ‘I reckon so.’ She raised her glass. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘Eat,’ he said, and he grinned as he clinked his glass against hers. ‘Once again, we’re a team.’

  And Nick Connor needed them both, he thought.

  Chapter Eleven

  May Day 1997

  The sun was bright as DCI Porter walked across the rugby pitch, the crowds gathering for the club’s end-of-season fundraiser, always held on the May Day holiday. Despite the onset of summer, he carried the shadow of William’s death with him. Not the discovery, even though that was bad enough, with visions of his small body coming back to him whenever he was alone. Memories of his own children growing up gave the visions an extra sting.