Atherton smiled. ‘I bought you a pint, remember?’
‘I’ll tell you what I know if you tell me what you know.’
‘I can’t at the moment,’ Atherton said. ‘But I will promise to ring you as soon as the blockers come off the story.’
Purser looked at him keenly. ‘Something big, is it?’
‘It could be very big. But I’m not allowed to say.’
Purser nodded. ‘Here’s my card,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget a friend when the time comes.’
‘I won’t. So what do you know? It was suicide, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s what it looks like,’ said Purser. ‘But the doc said he couldn’t think why Canonbury would use so much when he must know as well as any other medical man what the lethal dose is. Also, the doc lives down the end of the lane, and he says he heard a car go past about a quarter to midnight. That lane doesn’t go anywhere else but Canonbury’s house.’
‘Any bruises on the arms? Any sign of a struggle?’ Atherton asked quietly.
‘Woah! What are you suggesting?’ said Purser with mock alarm. His eyes gleamed with the excitement of the chase. ‘It looks as though Canonbury was sitting on his sofa drinking whisky. The scenario is, he was making up his mind. But if there was someone who wanted him out of the picture …?’ He looked at Atherton hopefully.
‘I’m not allowed to say.’
‘Ah! That means yes. Well, I’ll tell you. No bruises, no sign of a struggle. But the doc says his bed had been slept in, and his pyjamas were lying on the bedroom floor. And Canonbury was in trousers, underpants and shirt, nothing else. So it looks like he’d gone to bed already, and got up again. Got up and got dressed to commit suicide. Does that make any sense?’
‘Maybe his bed was unmade from the previous night.’
‘No, the doc knows the housekeeper. She makes the bed every day. Makes the bed, folds his jimmy-jams and puts them under the pillow. And she says he’s very tidy, never drops clothes on the floor. When he gets dressed in the morning, he leaves them lying across the bottom of the bed.’
‘Did she tell the police that?’
He shrugged. ‘She thinks it was a sign of how upset he was. And between you and me, I’m not sure the police want to know.’
‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.’
‘Ah, like that, is it? Well, now you have got me intrigued.’
‘I haven’t told you anything.’
‘I know. That’s what makes it so tasty,’ said Purser.
Slider looked as though he’d eaten a bad oyster. ‘This gets worse and worse,’ he said.
‘Wait, wait,’ said Hart, ‘you’re saying they came round, broke in, killed him in his bed, then dressed him and took him downstairs to make it look like suicide?’
‘If they’d broken in, the police would have to have noticed that,’ said Swilley.
‘Maybe he come down in his p’jamas when they rung the doorbell,’ said McLaren, who was also officially ‘on’. ‘And they dressed him after so it’d look more like suicide.’
‘But no bruises on the arms,’ Atherton reminded them.
‘Thick, padded gloves,’ said Slider. ‘If they did it quickly enough, he wouldn’t have had much chance to struggle.’
‘Grab him and jab him?’ said Atherton. ‘How quick could it be? They’d have to have rolled his sleeve up.’
‘If he only had pyjamas on, they could have done it through the sleeve,’ said Slider.
‘That’s nasty,’ said Hart, screwing up her face.
‘I just wonder why he cancelled Newsnight,’ said Swilley.
‘He was shaken by the guv’s visit,’ said McLaren. ‘Couldn’t see himself talking calmly on telly with all that on his mind.’
‘But he’d already complained to Marler, to have it dealt with,’ Connolly pointed out.
‘Maybe Marler told him to cancel and go home – couldn’t trust him to bring it off,’ said Atherton.
‘Yeah,’ said Hart, ‘and then they thought about it and reckoned they couldn’t trust him in the long run, so they sent the heavies round.’
‘Or it could have been suicide,’ Slider put in.
‘Well,’ said Atherton, ‘I suppose we’ll never know, if the local police aren’t disposed to enquire any further. We certainly can’t. And another potential witness to Tyler Vance’s story is gone beyond recall.’
‘Which leaves us with – what?’ Connolly asked glumly.
‘The other people on the donors list,’ said Swilley, ‘who we’re not allowed to talk to.’
‘And Jessica – who won’t identify anyone,’ Hart added.
‘It might be worth getting her in again,’ said Atherton, ‘and seeing if she’ll give us the names of any other girls. Names, descriptions, anything we can trace them by. I know she’s scared, but she’s all we’ve got.’
‘I’ll think about it. Give me a little while,’ said Slider. He didn’t want any more bodies on his conscience.
‘A little while is all we’ve got,’ Atherton reminded him.
SEVENTEEN
More Clubbing Than the Inuit
Hart drew a blank on Shannon’s brother. His name didn’t come up on any register. Restlessly she checked on the monitoring of the girls’ phones. Shannon’s was still not switched on. Jessica’s was stationary, and the triangulation made her still at home. Given that Saturday was likely to be the busiest day in any café, she wondered why she hadn’t gone to work. And then a horrible thought came over her – what if it was stationary because she was dead? Could they have got to her during the night? It would not be difficult for them to discover that she had been taken to the station the day before for questioning. Would they think her enough of a threat to eliminate her?
Having thought the thought, she couldn’t shake it, so she went round to Wornington Road. The front door was closed this time, and ringing Jessica’s bell got no response. She went down the area steps and hammered on the caretaker’s door.
Anita appeared, cigarette drooping from her lips, one eye screwed up against the smoke, which gave her a sinister, Robert Newton look. All she needed was the parrot.
‘You again!’ she said. It was not a cry of welcome.
‘I’m worried about Jessica,’ Hart said without preamble.
‘Oh, worried now, is it?’ said Anita with broad irony.
‘She’s not answering her doorbell.’
‘Maybe she’s not in. Ever think of that?’
‘I know she’s in because her phone’s in there. She wouldn’t go out without her phone.’
This obviously had the force of truth for Anita. The normal teenager was surgically welded to her mobile. She’d as soon venture outside without it as without clothes.
‘Maybe she don’t want to talk to no one,’ Anita said, but with less force.
‘You got a pass key?’ Hart said.
The enquiry alarmed her. ‘You think summing’s happened to her?’
‘I don’t know. Probably not, but let’s just make sure she’s all right, OK?’
Anita grumbled, but went to fetch a ring of keys, and led the way up to the front door and then inside. The windowless hallway was dark, and the stairs and landing lights were of the lowest wattage and on the shortest timer. Hart followed the sound of Anita’s breathing – she was a big woman – as she heaved herself up the stairs, and stood behind her on the landing while she knocked at a door and called out, ‘Jessica! You in there, honey? It’s Anita. Open the door.’ When there was no response from inside, she rattled the bunch of keys. ‘F’you don’t open up, I’m coming in, honey. To see if you’re all right. Jessica? I’m coming in now.’
She had the key in the lock when the door slowly opened, and a sorry-looking Jessica stood there, in a vast, baggy jumper and bare legs, bed hair, smeared make-up and panda eyes that spoke of weeping. She opened her mouth to speak, spotted Hart, registered alarm and tried to slam the door shut.
But Hart had her foot in the way. She said, ‘’S’all ri
ght. I’m just worried about you, babes. Wanna have a little talk, OK?’ But as she forced the door further open with a practised shove, she saw that Jessica was not alone in the room. There was someone in the bed, and the mid-brown, corkscrew hair on the pillow, which was all that was showing, gave her the clue. She smiled with satisfaction. ‘Oh, good, Shannon’s here. Did you give her my message, love?’
Jessica stared at Hart with mad, scared eyes, but she only whispered, ‘She’s asleep. Don’t wake her. She’s ever so tired.’
Not only tired, it turned out, but hungry. She’d been on the move ever since she left Jessica’s room the previous time, sleeping rough, afraid to stop anywhere. She’d had a night’s respite with another friend in Willesden, but had moved on again for fear of getting her into trouble. Finally she had lost the determination to go on, and had come back to Jessica’s late last night, and begged shelter. They had sat up for hours, talking about their situation and crying together over what might happen, until Shannon had fallen asleep in sheer exhaustion. Jessica had been afraid to leave her to go to work. She was sleeping so heavily, even Hart’s ringing at the doorbell hadn’t roused her.
Woken at last, Shannon seemed less alarmed by Hart’s presence than resigned to it. Hart guessed she had reached that stage of flight where the effort of going on overcame the fear of giving up.
‘Come on, love,’ Hart said. ‘You’ll be all right wiv me. Get some clothes on – you too, Jess – and we’ll get you both some breakfast.’ The prospect of food got them going, and muted the threat she posed. If she was going to feed them, she couldn’t be meaning them harm, could she?
Hart rang it in while they were drooping about, listlessly pulling on clothes, so by the time she pulled up outside Andy’s Caff in Goldhawk Road, Connolly was waiting there for them, just in case the energy rush from breakfast caused either of them to bolt. Hart might be able to collar one, but she didn’t think she could collar both simultaneously.
Shannon engulfed bacon, egg, two sausages, fried slice, beans, chips, double toast and two mugs of tea with an avidity that suggested she’d been on short commons while on the run. Jessica had the same, but picked at it. She avoided the eyes of both policewomen, but kept looking at Shannon, like an amnesiac actor glancing into the wings for a cue. Shannon didn’t intercept the looks, or offer any of her own. When she wasn’t eating, she stared blankly at the wall, waiting for anything to happen that she could do something about.
Then it was back into the car and round to the station, and up to the soft room, where Slider was waiting.
Shannon registered his adult, male presence with a return of alertness. ‘You arresting me?’ she asked bluntly.
‘Have you done anything to get arrested for?’ he asked.
‘Not s’far as I know.’
‘There’s your answer, then. Why don’t you sit down, make yourself comfortable, and we’ll have a little chat.’
She gave him a look with just a hint of wry humour in it. ‘That’s what they all say. It never stops at a chat, though, does it?’
Connolly took Jessica away to see if she could get any more names out of her, of girls or partygoers. Shannon sat on the sofa, clutching the bottle of water they had provided for her and fiddling with the cap. She sat sprawled and knock-kneed, and had the leggy charm of a Great Dane puppy. She seemed very thin, too thin for it just to be the result of her six-day flight. To Slider it looked like a cocaine-and-vodka thinness. But though she was down, she was not out, like Jessica. She had hauled a brush through her hair, and it stood out round her head in a kinked aureole like a Pre-Raphaelite angel, almost blonde at the margin where the light shone through it.
‘How old are you, Shannon?’ Slider asked, to get her going.
‘Seventeen,’ she said. And then, as Slider continued to look at her. ‘Nearly. Coupla weeks, all right?’
‘You understand that you’re here voluntarily, to help us by answering a few questions?’
‘Didn’t have much choice, did I?’ she said, with a look at Hart, sitting quietly to the side taking notes.
‘You can leave any time you want,’ Slider said. She didn’t get up. She looked at him warily. ‘I mean it. You’re free to go. But we need your help. Two girls have died, and I don’t want any more to go the same way.’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said.
‘You’ve been on the run for nearly a week. If you help us, we can take care of you, keep you safe. If you leave, you’re on your own.’
‘Been on my own a long time,’ she said sassily.
‘And how’s that working out for you?’ Slider enquired quietly. She looked down at her thin, grubby fingers twisting the bottle cap open and closed. ‘What happened to Kaylee?’ he asked.
She jerked her head up with a look of panic. ‘I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened, all right?’
He’d hoped to surprise it out of her, but she was evidently too scared. He’d have to take her further back.
‘Tell me about the parties,’ he said comfortably, as if it was no big deal. ‘How did you start going to them in the first place?’
‘Parties?’ she said warily.
‘Jess told us about the parties, babes,’ Hart said. ‘No biggie. How’d you get in?’
She relaxed a little. ‘It was me and this other girl, Debbie. She lived down the road from me – when I lived with Mum. We went to school together, but she was, like, a year older than me. Then one night we went clubbing up the West End, and we missed the last train, so we started walking, and this cabbie pulled up and said we shouldn’t be walking that time of night and said he’d take us home.’
‘Don’t you know girls get in trouble that way?’ Hart said.
She looked impatient. ‘That’s mini-cabs. This was a black cab. And he seemed like a nice bloke. Anyway—’ she shrugged – ‘it turned out all right. He just drove us home, he didn’t do nothing to us. And on the way he got chatting, about us and what we liked and stuff, and he said how’d we fancy going to some really hot parties, and probably making a bit of money as well. And he give us this card and said give him a ring if we fancied it. So we did.’
‘What was his name?’ Slider asked.
‘He just said to call him Mick, but the name on the card was Shand Account Cabs.’ She looked up from her fiddling. ‘That’s the one they use all the time. There’s about six different drivers but you always get one of ’em. They’re all right. There was one, he tried getting in the back of the cab once with us, but we told … um, someone, and he got thrown out.’
Hart and Slider exchanged a look. It seemed an unnecessary step to save the girls from corruption. Perhaps it was more a matter of trust: if you break the rules we’ll cut you loose.
‘So it was the cab drivers who brought new girls in?’ Slider asked.
‘Some, but we brought our friends in once we knew it was a good gig.’
‘Did they encourage that?’
‘Yeah, as long as they were the right sort.’
‘And what made a girl the right sort?’
‘Well, pretty – you know. And up for it. And she had to be able to keep her mouth shut.’ She looked worried.
‘Did they threaten you?’ he asked gently.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘mostly you kept quiet because you didn’t want to be dropped. But if anyone got a bit – you know – well, they said if you told anyone, it’d be the worse for you. One girl, she went to the police, and they found out somehow, and they beat her up. So you knew – you knew they meant it.’ She was silent a moment.
Slider said, ‘What did she go to the police about? Having a party isn’t illegal. Was it the drugs?’
She looked up, examined his face, troubled. ‘No, not that. There was never any hard drugs, anyway, only weed and charlie and E, and everybody does them.’
He didn’t pursue that. ‘What was it, then? What did she go to the police about?’
She evidently didn’t want to answ
er, but he waited in silence, the silence that the amateur eventually feels obliged to fill. ‘Well, like, the girls – they like ’em to be young. Me and Debs, she was fourteen and I was thirteen when we started. They asked us to find girls like ourselves, or younger. Like, twelve was about right. That was what they wanted.’ She shrugged. ‘So we did.’
Hart was too good a policeman to show her feelings about that. But she asked, casually, ‘So what happens when you get older? Do they chuck you out?’
‘Well, some. It’s all right if you’re skinny, like me, so you look younger. But other girls, they just said thank you and told ’em not to come any more. That’s what happened to Debbie. I don’t know where she is now. I think she got a job.’
She said it as though getting a job was the same as fading out of life.
‘So you got Tyler into it,’ he said, not making it a question. ‘How did you know her?’
‘Well, she was fostered with this couple round the corner from us – when I lived at Mum’s.’
‘Didn’t she go to the same school as you?’ Hart asked.
‘That was after. The fostering didn’t work out, and she got sent back to the home, and they sent her to a new school at the same time. A fresh start, they said.’ She grinned reminiscently. ‘She was a riot, Tyler. A real laugh. They couldn’t handle her, the foster parents. She used to sneak out at night, and we went clubbing, so I told her about the parties and she like begged me to get her in. So I did. She was really popular. She really loved charlie, that girl, and when she was high she was up for anything. I didn’t like anything too kinky, but she thought it was all a laugh, so they all wanted to go with her.’
‘What happened the night she died?’ Slider asked.
‘I don’t know. I only know what they told me.’
‘But you were there.’
‘Well, she was in one of the bedrooms and I was in the one opposite, with this bloke.’
‘Who?’
‘We never knew any of their names. They had, like—’
‘Nicknames, I know. But didn’t you recognize any of them?’
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