Hold My Hand

by M. J. Ford

  ‘Detective Ferman was pretty sure he wasn’t involved,’ she said.

  Ben snorted through his nose. ‘Is that the dinosaur who tagged along? Did he bring his magnifying glass and truncheon too?’

  He was talking towards Jo, but looking at Rhani as he spoke. She duly obliged with a laugh, but Jo didn’t want to give him any satisfaction. Was he actually trying to make her jealous somehow?

  ‘Not quite – he just said Matthews didn’t fit the bill. The case stank from the start.’

  Ben straightened a bit, into exactly the same mixture of outrage and hurt he’d shown whenever she’d questioned him about his other dubious calls.

  ‘Well, this is a new case,’ he said. ‘And it would be remiss if we didn’t pursue all avenues of enquiry.’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said Jo.

  Rhani and Ben continued to a marked car. Jo thought about suggesting they take Ben’s Jag, given the heat Matthews might get, but she suspected he wouldn’t take any more advice kindly. As it happened, it was Ben himself who called to her.

  ‘Jo?’ he said.

  She faced him.

  ‘There’s a journalist from the Oxford Times. I don’t know how she’s got wind, but don’t give her anything, okay?’

  Of course I won’t, you condescending arsehole.

  ‘Right, sir,’ she said.

  She greeted the front desk clerk and several other uniforms on the way to the CID room. DC Kevin Carter was playing some sort of golf game on his computer, which he promptly closed when Jo cleared her throat. The guy really was fifty years’ worth of useless flesh, with two failed marriages and three kids he rarely saw. She’d actually come across his profile on Tinder about two months back, and going by the age of the picture he’d used, she could have done him for fraud.

  ‘Anything on when the pool was put in?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Carter. She saw him start the game up again with his mouse.

  DCI Bridges was back in his office, on the phone, and a stack of papers lay in front of him. Jo wondered if her results were in the pile. It had been a fortnight since she’d undergone the half-day assessment for a Detective Inspector position, and she knew she’d done pretty well in the role play and interview board sections. It would likely come down to the written test result, and that was harder to judge. Bridges maybe knew already, and was just waiting for the right moment to tell her.

  Jo checked her emails. Some phone records had come through in relation to a drug-trafficking investigation they were doing in Snow Hill, as well as a few CCTV files on a burglary carried out on a machine-hire warehouse out west. She saw someone called Heidi Tan from Thames Valley had already started forwarding her the entire contents of the Dylan Jones file in batches of scans, and added her to the distribution list on the case. Efficient.

  Jo opened up the first few in no particular order. Most of it was clearly written on a typewriter, but there were some handwritten pages also. Witness statements, photos of Dylan, of Matthews, interviews. There was a recording of the original 999 call. She placed on her headphones.

  ‘What’s the nature of your emergency?’

  ‘A boy’s gone missing. From the circus. I think he was kidnapped.’

  Hearing her brother’s voice, raw and inflected with the accent of their youth, was shocking.

  ‘You’re calling from Home Farm, Yarnton, is that correct?’

  ‘Er, yeah, I think so?’

  ‘And can I take your name?’

  ‘Paul Masters … I ran here. Can you send someone?’

  ‘A car has already been dispatched. The boy who’s disappeared – can you tell me where he was last seen?’

  ‘I don’t know. At the circus. My sister—’

  ‘Detective?’

  Jo looked up. Bridges was standing over her.

  ‘Can I have a word?’

  ‘Doesn’t sound good,’ said Jo.

  Bridges wasn’t giving anything away.

  ‘In my office in five?’

  Not good at all.

  ‘Sure.’

  She took a deep breath. Rob Bridges was a good bloke, and she trusted him to be straight with her whatever. He was an odd one in the force, having had a career in finance before making the switch to law enforcement. Somehow he’d risen fast, and now, mid-forties, had moved across from the economic unit into CID. It was he who’d suggested she go for the promotion in the first place, and she knew that if it came down to it, he personally would vouch for her. Though if she’d failed the test, no amount of senior support would push her past the post.

  She turned back to the files, opening up the arrest details for Clement Matthews. The mugshot showed a pudgy man with curly dark hair. Clean-shaven. He looked bored, sleepy, with an edge of defiance in the way he stared down the lens. Jo resisted searching for her eight-year-old self’s statement in the interview files. There was a picture of a Liverpool football shirt, said to be the equivalent of the one Dylan was wearing, a 1987 season with the Crown Paints logo in yellow. Jo felt a wave of sadness at the thought of the rag holding together the remains, caked in soil and other debris that would probably never be washed out. The shirt was what she remembered most about Dylan, the thing that had caught her envious eye that day at the fair.

  Jo was about to close the picture when a thought arose.

  Why leave just the shirt? Why not the other clothes? Underwear, socks, trousers? If you were covering your tracks, why not get rid of everything? She fired a quick email to the Salisbury lab, copying Ben, to see if they’d found anything else. It might simply be that the other clothes had become separated with the decomposition.

  She left the computer and crossed the banks of desks towards Bridges’ office. He’d left the door open and she knocked, then went inside.

  ‘You may as well close it,’ he said.

  Jo did so, a sinking feeling in her stomach. Definitely bad news. She braced herself.

  ‘Is everything all right between you and DI Coombs?’ said Bridges.

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Humour me,’ said Bridges. ‘I let the relationship slide, because it hasn’t affected your work, and to be honest, I don’t want to stick my nose in. But if your personal life affects operations here, that becomes a problem.’

  ‘Has he said something?’ asked Jo, aware that she was being evasive.

  ‘No,’ said Bridges. ‘And I haven’t asked him yet. But I’m beginning to think I should.’

  ‘We’re not together any more,’ said Jo, as flatly as she could manage, and she felt suddenly angry not just towards Ben, but towards Bridges too. Why should I be saying all this? Ben’s the lying sack of shit who got us into this mess. He’s the one who flushed our entire fucking future down the drain.

  Bridges steepled his fingers. ‘I thought as much. Okay, Jo, I’m taking you off the Dylan Jones case from this moment.’

  ‘But, boss …’

  ‘Surely you can see why. We’re going to get a lot of attention on this. I can’t let the investigation be compromised.’

  ‘It won’t be. Look, talk to Ben. He’ll tell you—’

  ‘The decision is made, sergeant. Follow up on the Thompson gang surveillance. Pass anything on Dylan Jones to Ben.’

  ‘This is—’

  ‘A done deal. Thanks Jo.’

  Jo returned to her desk, fuming. She should have been grateful. The chances of identifying a suspect would be small, and in every likelihood whoever buried Dylan was dead anyway. It was the injustice that burned. The sense of powerlessness. She’d done nothing wrong.

  And, in the back of her mind, there was disappointment. She wasn’t sure about there being a poetry to her involvement, but she couldn’t argue there was a kind of circularity. Ben and Bridges had taken away any chance she had to see the case through. To make amends.

  The emails were still coming in from Thames Valley. She hovered the mouse over the delete button, ready to consign the case files to her Trash. So much for making amends.


  Then her phone rang. An Oxford number.

  She answered.

  ‘What did you tell them?’ said a man’s angry voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, who is this?’

  ‘She was here, just now. You must have told them!’

  In the background, Jo heard another voice. ‘Calm down, Gordon. Please.’

  Mrs Jones.

  ‘I’ll be making a formal complaint,’ said Mr Jones. ‘You come round here, pretending to be on our side. Dropping your little bomb and leaving us to pick up the pieces. This might just be a game to you …’

  ‘Please, Mr Jones,’ said Jo. ‘Tell me what’s happened. Has someone visited you?’

  ‘A journalist. A fucking hack!’ he said.

  ‘Gordon!’ came his wife’s distant exclamation.

  ‘Mr Jones, we didn’t contact any journalists,’ said Jo. ‘Please, believe me. We’re not sure how they’ve gotten hold of the news about Dylan.’

  ‘Well, you’re a detective, aren’t you? How about you find out?’

  The phone went dead.

  Bridges, who’d obviously overheard, was standing in the doorway to his office.

  ‘That sounded unpleasant.’

  Jo rubbed her temples. Maybe she was better off out of the case after all. The fucking hack had to be the same woman who was at the building site. She’d thought it might have been one of the construction workers who’d sold the info for a few quid, but how had they made the link to Dylan Jones?

  ‘I think we need to put out a statement to the press,’ she said. ‘The Joneses got doorstepped by a journo.’

  Bridges nodded. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘You’re on the Thompson gang, remember?’

  Chapter 3

  Jo spent the next couple of hours piecing together the movements of the gang, cross-referencing the GPS from phone records with on-the-ground surveillance reports from an undercover they had staying in the Snow Hill flats.

  She had a voicemail from Bright Futures, and recognised the receptionist’s discreet tones before she remembered the name. They wanted to know, politely, if she’d be able to call back in to amend some paperwork, because there was a problem with her bank details. Jo saved the message for later.

  The Thompsons were three brothers, all with lengthy records for theft, drugs and minor violence, but they never ended up doing more than a few months at a time inside. It was thought their network of mules, distributors and money men stretched to about forty individuals, involving a complex series of drop-offs and safe houses across the south of the city.

  If Jo was honest, there wouldn’t have been so much appetite for the investigation if it weren’t for a couple of deaths three months earlier – two teens found stabbed in a burned-out car, one of them a cousin of the Thompson brothers and the other a known member of a rival gang. It looked like there might be fractures in the family, and that meant a turf war was on the cards.

  The intelligence was painstaking and boring beyond belief, but if they were ever going to build a case, it was completely essential. Most of the phones were anonymous burners, tossed every few days. The general consensus was that this was a case of identifying one of the middle rankers and bringing them in. Then, when they turned, everything above should fall like a game of Jenga. They didn’t really care about the footmen – as Ben put it, they’d always find ways to get arrested another day. Eighty per cent of CID business came back to drugs, one way or another.

  At about four p.m., Ben and Rhani came in. Through the glass, Jo saw them booking in an untidily dressed pensioner wearing low-slung tracksuit bottoms and a striped T-shirt that revealed his abdomen and had sweat patches under the armpits. His thinning wisps of hair were matted to his head, and from the droop in the left half of his face and a badly slanting shoulder, Jo guessed he’d suffered a stroke at some point. He was grotesquely fat, the years adding more folds under his neck and blubbery upper arms, but the disinterested, almost vacant way he surveyed the room gave him away as Clement Matthews.

  They led him across to one of the interview rooms, before Rhani emerged again a couple of minutes later, making for the small kitchenette area and switching on the kettle.

  ‘He saying much?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Wants a brief, sarge,’ said Rhani. ‘And a tea with four sugars.’

  She made it quickly and carried it in.

  Half an hour later, Samantha Gore, one of the duty solicitors, arrived and the clerk from the front desk showed her in too.

  Jo waited a moment before heading to the AV suite where she could monitor the live feed to the interview room. Bridges had headed off for the day – some sort of meeting with the Local Authority. His instructions about getting involved had been clear, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  Matthews cut a sorry figure, slouched in his chair. Sam Gore finished introducing herself for the tape, then Ben showed Matthews the photo of Dylan.

  ‘I’m sure you remember this boy.’

  Clement Matthews peered over and nodded.

  ‘Can you speak up?’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was slightly slurred. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘You tell us,’ said Ben.

  Clement looked across at him with watery eyes, then at Sam, then shrugged. ‘I’m not under arrest, am I? I can go if I want?’

  ‘You’re not under arrest at the moment, but how you co-operate now will affect our decision whether or not to re-arrest you at a future point.’

  Ben next turned over a photo of the derelict house, and another of the drained pool.

  ‘Recognise this place?’

  Clement glanced down. ‘Means nothing to me.’

  ‘Have a closer look.’

  The old man’s eyes flicked down. ‘Still nope.’

  ‘Perhaps you could help my client with some more guidance as to what these images show,’ Sam interjected.

  Ben pointed to the second photo. ‘That’s where we found the body of Dylan Jones.’

  Matthews seemed to wake up. ‘You found him?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. You should have buried him deeper.’

  Clement Matthews chuckled. ‘Is that all you’ve got? Jesus wept.’

  He folded his arms and sat back.

  ‘We’ve got forensics crawling all over the place,’ said Ben. ‘If there’s even a hair there, we’ll find it.’

  ‘But at the moment?’ said Matthews.

  A pause.

  ‘I should say,’ said Sam, ‘I’m failing to see any compelling evidence of Mr Matthews’ involvement. He was acquitted of the abduction. The case collapsed. He came here today of his own free will.’

  And from the way Ben clasped his hands on the table, almost in prayer, Jo knew he felt exactly the same way. He looked defeated, like the story he’d built was crumbling around him, and it was a gesture she was only too familiar with.

  * * *

  She’d found out by accident. Ben had been behaving weirdly for days. Not sleeping, drinking more heavily than usual. She’d thought it was work, stupidly, but then she’d checked the savings account and seen the truth. They’d been putting a bit away each month for three years to get the deposit together. Nearly thirty grand. And when she checked, the account was empty. Well, not quite. The balance was two quid something. She logged out and in again, but it was the same. Had to be a mistake. But when she viewed the recent transactions, her whole world dropped away. There were regular payments to a stock-trading website, a few thousand at a time. The last one was six days before.

  Heart beating fast and fingertips tingling, she put the computer aside and tried to stay calm. All their money gone. Or maybe not. Perhaps it was sitting in another account still. He couldn’t have lost it all. He wouldn’t do that to her.

  Ben had always been a recreational gambler. Fruit machines in the pub, sports events. It had been cool in the early days because he often won, and sometimes he won big. And when he did, he was generous with it. In their late twenties, two grand on a foot
ball accumulator had gone straight on a blow-out weekend in Copenhagen. Of course, the wins were easy to remember. They’d had one or two arguments, no more than squabbles really, when she thought he’d gone too far. It was normally after a loss, when he’d sulk for a few days, then she’d learn he’d placed another bet to try and recoup. She didn’t get that – it reeked of desperation. And when she found a betting app on his phone, she’d put her foot down and demanded he delete it. He did so, but she’d suspected he’d reinstalled it not long afterwards. When they moved in together, in their first rented place, a condition had been that he stop gambling completely. Work had been crazy at the time, so there were plenty of other distractions.

  In the days after she found he’d emptied the account, she watched him closely and the signs weren’t good. He looked knackered and was only going through the motions at work. She checked his phone, and in his internet history found searches for short-term loans. She came close to confronting him, but something stopped her. She realised it was fear. Not of how he’d react, but of what his reaction would mean. If he really had lost everything, it was over. There was no way back. She couldn’t help him, because he couldn’t help himself. She flitted from anger, to pity, to despair.

  One night she went out with a friend and got drunker than usual. When she returned home, she found Ben asleep. For the first time in weeks he looked at peace, his brow smooth, his breathing slow. He looked like he used to, and her body took over. She woke him and they made love wordlessly. Maybe it was the booze, or a part of her knowing it would be the last time. Afterwards, as she was about to bring up the unmentionable, he broke down and told her. He said he’d done something awful, but they could get through it. She let him talk, knowing they couldn’t. She barely listened to his justifications, his retellings of the minutiae – the peaks and troughs of his early trading. She’d seen how the story ended already.

  She’d packed her things and moved out the following day – one night in a B&B, then finding a place on Gumtree across the other side of the city. She could’ve kicked him out, and he would have gone, but she knew she couldn’t afford the rent on her own and she couldn’t bear the thought of being in any way beholden to Ben for financial support.