‘How did you two meet? It seems a pretty unlikely pairing given that he’s a dealer.’
‘I said I thought he dealt.’
‘Luke? What are you doing hanging about with people like that?’ his mother demanded.
‘I don’t really know him; he’s just known by a lot of people. I never bought anything from him.’
‘Were you offered drugs?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What does he sell?’
‘Everything.’ Luke forgot himself and laughed.
‘Is it funny?’
Luke remembered who the woman in front of him was and closed his mouth. His cheeks turned pink. He was floundering now and showing signs of desperately wanting to flee the room. His mother glared at him.
‘Roxies?’
Luke’s mouth opened. He looked at his mother. ‘I heard so.’
‘Boy, horse, Special K, acid, Lucy, blow, China, hug, study buddies, ice, joker?’ Kelly reeled off some of the street names for drugs that she’d researched, and it had the desired effect. Luke nodded slowly and she could tell that he was trying to work out how this middle-aged woman knew so much about the underworld. Dunderhead, she thought. It was enough to puzzle the mother into silence for a few minutes too. The longer she stayed quiet, the more they could push her son.
‘Quite a market trader then. Did you see Faith talking to him?’
Luke didn’t answer, so she fired another question at him.
‘Did Sadie buy stuff from him?’
He was staring at her with the discomfort of a boy who knew exactly what had happened to his school friend. He nodded.
‘I think she got stuff for her mum.’
‘Luke! Who are these people?’
‘Bobby also told us that a girl answering to Faith’s description got into a car.’
‘No, I don’t think that’s right.’ It was said with real panic and accompanied by erratic head movements.
‘Is it possible that Faith had been taking drugs that night and wandered off with a stranger?’
‘Yes. I think it’s possible.’
‘Thank you. Mrs Miles, I think we might need to speak to Luke again, and if we make it formal and interview him under caution, we’ll need an adult to accompany him to either Penrith or Keswick station.’
Mrs Miles nodded.
They hadn’t even opened the car doors before they heard her screaming at her son. Luke Miles was in trouble.
Chapter 24
Kurt Fletcher was easy to talk to. He and Johnny sat inside the Pheasant and Gun, with the windows steamed up, surrounded by the noise of youths playing pool, the news on the TV and the jukebox. It was a kind of informal job interview really. Johnny knew that Kurt would make an excellent volunteer for the mountain rescue: he had the skills, the knowledge and the attitude. They had a steady stream of applicants, a lot of them from the cities, in love with the romantic notion of being at one with nature, and most of them were rejected. Ex-services were always welcome, and generally did well during the training, which was rigorous.
They’d spoken about it before, and recently Kurt had enquired seriously.
‘No sign of the bloke who went missing up there then?’
‘No. Time’s running out, I don’t need to tell you that,’ Johnny said.
‘I know. It’s easily done if you’re not careful. I bet he’s in a B&B somewhere, next to a roaring fire, with some bird he met, and he didn’t even go hiking.’
‘But his car was at Revelin Moss.’
‘Was it? What day was that?’
‘It was found on Monday.’
‘I saw a couple of cars up there on Sunday night, but I don’t think they were hikers, just kids messing around.’
‘What were you doing up there?’
‘I’d done Grisedale Pike. I go up there when I need to think.’
‘I’m sorry about what you saw, mate. It’s not easy.’
Kurt nodded.
‘The weather came in and I came down sharpish. But it cleared my head.’
Johnny nodded and they sipped their beer. Bursts of laughter echoed around the pub, and the landlord sat at the bar, watching his staff. He could have been a local nursing his half-pint, but Johnny knew better. He also knew that the pub profits would probably improve twofold if the landlord didn’t replenish his glass so often.
‘All quiet on Sunday, was it?’ Johnny asked.
‘Yes. I didn’t see a soul, apart from those kids – though I didn’t actually see them. They were playing music, probably up to other stuff too. I remember it because it kind of ruined my peace a bit, you know? It didn’t sit right with my mood.’
‘Glad I’m past all that.’ Johnny winked. It was true. He didn’t envy the young now. If social media had existed in the seventies and eighties, the shit that could have been posted on Facebook about him could have landed him in serious trouble. Josie spent hours in front of her phone in an effort to catch the perfect shot. She proudly told him, as though it was a fascinating and important fact, that Kim Kardashian took an average of three hundred selfies to capture one perfect post.
‘She must get cold,’ he had said. ‘She’s always starkers.’ Even Josie found that funny.
‘So you’re settling up here permanently then?’ Kurt nodded. Johnny wanted to know how long he could commit for; they ideally preferred a good stint on the job, say five years. He knew that Kurt had always travelled from Manchester to get his fix of the fells, but now he’d bought a little cottage near Keswick.
They’d met on the top of Scafell Pike, when Johnny was helping to carry slate up there to repair the cairn. It was a First World War memorial, and worth the effort. Kurt had offered to help, and had done so for three days. He worked in Manchester as a landscape gardener, but was desperate to relocate to Cumbria.
‘Plenty of demand for your skills, mate,’ Johnny said, his mind already made up.
It was true, and Kurt knew it, but a troubled ex-girlfriend had kept him in the city. He hadn’t said much, but Johnny had worked out that they’d been together for a long time, until her drug addiction took over and he had to be cruel to be kind and dumped her. She’d spiralled out of control and he’d ended up looking after her anyway. Then she’d relapsed again, and Kurt had hinted on a subsequent night out that she was on her last chance.
‘You still together?’ Johnny asked now.
Kurt shook his head. ‘I’ve got to leave her to it. I can’t help her any more.’
‘I’m sorry about that, mate,’ Johnny said.
‘Yeah, it’s fucked up. She was beautiful, look.’ Kurt took his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through his photos, stopping at one and showing it to Johnny. It was true: she was stunning.
‘How old is she there?’
‘That’s five years ago, so she was thirty. This is her a year ago.’ Kurt showed Johnny another photo.
‘Christ.’
‘I know. It’s fucking killing her. I would’ve married her.’
‘Why doesn’t she stop?’
Drug addiction was something Johnny knew little about. They were regularly tested in the army and so he’d never bothered. He believed it was all in the mind, like alcoholics; they could stop if they really wanted to. Kurt shook his head.
‘Imagine wanting something so badly that you’d kill for it. You told me once about thirst. Not regular thirst, say for a pint on a Saturday, but swollen-mouth thirst after being deprived of water for three days. You know what that feels like. What would you do for water then?’
‘Anything. Are you saying it’s like that? But why crave something you know is killing you? Water is vital, it doesn’t kill you.’
‘Because our brains are programmed to give the body everything it wants to remain happy, and when you’re an addict, your brain would rather crave the drug than face withdrawal. She can’t help herself. It’s not a disease like fucking AA says; that’s all bollocks. It’s a basic biological response to introducing a mind-altering sub
stance to the body.’
Johnny thought about what Kurt had said. It sounded very scientific. He’d never given addiction much thought. He saw addicts as losers, not victims; he simply assumed they had poor self-control. He’d never heard it explained like Kurt just had.
They sat in silence, then Johnny offered to get another pint in. The photo of Kurt’s girlfriend’s demise had shocked him, and he thought of Josie: at the beginning of her young life and potentially exposed to chemicals capable of frying her brain. Hard drugs seemed to have become the equivalent of nicking liquor from the drinks’ cabinet in his day: everybody seemed to do it, and no one seemed to notice. Until it caused problems.
Johnny had brought people off the mountains high, spaced, stoned, cabbaged, smacked … or whatever they called it from one fad to the next. He’d had conversations with Josie, who’d laughed it off, saying that she wasn’t interested. But everything changed when trying to impress your mates, and the difference between the two photos that Kurt had showed him demonstrated how quickly the poison took hold and started to rip through the body.
Kelly said drugs were rife in the Lakes. Whether it was a side effect of dealers moving out of the cities to avoid detection, or because there was fuck all else to do, it didn’t really matter. They were out there, and kids as young as primary-school age were being offered them on a regular basis. The Derwent Academy had a reputation for producing zombified teens fit for nothing much but NHS prescriptions. In his day, kids had hung around the bandstand in the local park smoking fags bought in singles; nowadays, even here in the Lakes, it was something injected, and way more serious, and nobody seemed to give a flying fuck.
Kelly said there wasn’t the funding to go after every smackhead in the north of Cumbria, and the sentencing wasn’t worth it: the CPS focused on rehabilitation rather than detention, and they were talking about legalising drugs for private use. It was the dealers they needed to catch, and then the suppliers, but they were like ghosts, and as Kelly had proven before, big fish were slippery fuckers. It was a dark world, centred round tight gangs, capable and skilled at avoiding detection.
‘So you found a place?’ Johnny asked Kurt once he’d sat down with fresh pints.
‘Yeah, I’ve been looking for something quiet. I fancied somewhere out of the way, like Borrowdale or Thirlmere, but then I saw this absolute peach only five minutes from Keswick.’
‘Nice?’
‘Yup. Pub down the road, and a fell at the foot of the garden.’
‘Perfect.’
They sipped their drinks. The pub fell silent and all eyes turned to the TV. The landlord turned the sound on the speakers down and the TV up. There was a piece on the search for Faith Shaw.
‘Concern is mounting for a missing teenager in Keswick, Cumbria. It comes as the news that a man missing in the same area for three days has been found safe and well in a guest house in Thirlwell, near Keswick.’
‘I told you,’ Kurt said.
‘No shit!’ Johnny thought of the time they’d spent searching, but it was good news; just a pity that the girl was still out there.
A photograph of Danny Stanton came up on the screen, and then the link turned to Faith. The screen filled with images of members of the wider Keswick community searching together in the snow. Some had dogs; many wore full waterproofs and others were soaked through; all were downcast and serious. A photograph of the girl accompanied the piece. No one said a word.
A statement released by the police was read out, and Johnny thought about Kelly. It urged people to come forward with information about the girl. The newsreader continued: ‘The community has come together here in this northern market town just before Christmas, but hope is fading that Faith will be found safe and well, as the region has seen a nasty snap of icy conditions recently and no one could survive for long exposed to such inclement weather. The idea that she wandered off or went with someone she knows is the focus of police efforts in Cumbria at the moment, and they still hope that she will make contact.’
A photo of a small faux-leopard-skin backpack appeared on the screen and the news reader explained that it was similar to the one Faith carried. Next, a young girl, slim, with brown hair, modelled a pair of jeans, a long green jumper and a baggy khaki cargo jacket.
‘Police are hoping that these items might jog somebody’s memory. Faith’s family are growing increasingly fearful for their daughter’s safety.’
Like most of the people in the pub, Johnny was thinking of Faith’s family and what Christmas would be like for them if she hadn’t turned up by then. Kurt, though, was thinking of another girl’s family, and the needle in her arm, her blood sticky under his hand as he tried to wake her up.
Chapter 25
Sarah Peaks glanced furtively over her shoulder. The weather meant that she could get away with wearing a woolly hat and scarf and a bulky high-collared coat. It wasn’t that she was being deceitful or treacherous; it was just that she wanted no more trouble. Her association with Tony Blackman was well known enough already, and she was regarded as the friend and lover of a kiddie fiddler. It had turned nasty, and she’d begun to return to the tragic texts of her postgraduate degree with renewed melancholy. A hero treated badly, wrongdoings unpunished, and the innocent fallen. It was romantic and foolish, she knew, but it was the only thing that soothed her.
She hadn’t told Tony that she was coming to see one of the detectives working on the prosecution case. He would go ballistic, and she couldn’t blame him. It was a long shot. She was here to appeal to rational intelligence, and she hoped her gamble would pay off. She didn’t expect much; only to give another viewpoint. Stories of young women accusing men of assault only for the case to be dropped due to unsafe evidence were gathering attention in the press. Sarah wanted to keep Tony out of prison, and though she wasn’t sure she could achieve that, at least she could try. The charges were serious, and could see him on the sex offenders’ register for the rest of his life, not to mention the inevitable hefty prison sentence.
Sarah had never thought that such a miscarriage of justice would happen to somebody she loved. She knew that it wouldn’t be long before the police turned their attention to Tony with regard to Faith. They always looked at paedophiles when young girls went missing, and it made her guts turn over. But it was human nature: paedophile in the area, ergo, he must have done it. The sense of injustice overwhelmed her sometimes, and it took all her strength to continue with her own job and not punch Sadie Rawlinson in the face. If she ever snapped and did such a thing, she’d never work again, and Tony needed her.
She was to meet two female detectives, DI Porter and DS Umshaw, and she was unsure how she felt about this. She was betraying not only a fellow woman but a schoolgirl, suggesting that she’d made up a complex and detailed tale of despicable deceit, wholly and knowingly on purpose. She had racked her brain for a motive, but all she could come up with was that it was for kicks. Stimulation was so instant, cheap and disposable now that youngsters continually searched for bigger highs. How cool would it be to orchestrate a puppet show, ruin real lives in the process and watch the drama from afar?
It didn’t sound convincing. Unless you knew Sadie Rawlinson.
There was also the problem of bias. Sarah would have to admit that yes, she had slept with Tony Blackman. That made her motivation questionable, because she had an emotional connection to the accused. The simple answer would be to lie, and she trawled through her memory to try to count up how many people actually knew. Not the kind of knowing that came from gossip and hearsay, but true knowledge that could be proven, and that number was zero. Except for Tony himself. She’d also have to find a believable story for why he was staying at hers so often. Of course, she could be an accommodating and empathetic colleague. It was a quandary, because at some point it would mean she’d have to ask him to deny, on oath, their true relationship. It was too much, but maybe she could tackle it later.
She walked up the stone steps and pushed open the large woo
den door, swallowing hard. Her mouth was dry and she’d brought no water. She checked her bag for chewing gum; she found Tic Tacs and popped three into her mouth.
The sight of police uniforms increased her heart rate, and she instantly became aware of eyes upon her, as if she’d committed an offence. Just being in the vicinity of law enforcers was enough to make some people sweat, and it was happening to her. She hadn’t been this nervous since the assembly she’d delivered two years ago. She wasn’t a natural public speaker, even though her audience was just kids, and she’d developed a rash on her neck for days before the big day. It was only an assembly about a proposed poetry competition in support of the poppy appeal for the British Legion, a subject she could speak on for hours, but nonetheless, her adrenalin got the better of her, and it was only when it was over that her heart rate returned to normal. Tony said it was because she cared. No one seemed to notice her terror, but the physical symptoms were utterly unpleasant, and she hadn’t volunteered for anything similar since.
The woman behind the desk checked her computer and said that somebody would be along to meet her soon. Her uniform was smarter up close. The jacket was more pristine and the white of the shirt purer somehow. The woman’s shoes were shiny and impeccable, and her tights a perfect shade of dark grey. She almost looked like cabin crew on a major airline, but Sarah forced the thought away, as if someone might be able to read her mind, and with it, her lack of respect.
A lift opened and two women walked out. They looked serious, and tough. The younger one had long brown hair, tied back, and she was effortlessly attractive. The older one was more haggard and worn. Given the choice, Sarah would opt for the younger one to argue with. She guessed that the older one was more senior, but she was wrong, as it soon became clear that the younger woman, who introduced herself as Kelly Porter, was in charge.
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