Bitter Edge

by Bitter Edge (retail) (epub)

  She lay back on the pillow and studied her ring. It was something reassuring to have on hand; more than that, it made her feel safe. Should things go awry this afternoon, she could always fiddle with the ring and take deep breaths.

  ‘I don’t want to get up,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I need to check on Josie. I’ll call her first, then peel some potatoes. Come on. Fancy a run?’

  To her surprise, Kelly realised that she did in fact fancy a run. Christmas Day was always quiet: there were no cars, no tourists and no phone calls. It was the perfect time to get out and enjoy the solitude. She looked at the ring again. ‘Do you think I should wear it?’

  ‘I think it’s there to be worn. It’s up to you, but it shouldn’t be seen as only for special occasions. Is it comfortable?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Wear it then.’

  She did.

  He called Josie first and received a few grunts in return. She’d be round before midday to open her presents. Kelly had spent two weekends driving to Glasgow and trawling the shops there for what a teenage girl might find cool, and then there was the lovely trinket box from Keswick fair – a night that seemed weeks ago now. She hadn’t expected shopping for a teenager to be so difficult. Josie wasn’t into any of the things Kelly had liked at her age – running, live music, National Geographic magazine and Top of the Pops – and she’d been stuck for ideas. Finally they’d decided on vouchers. It was dull, but anything else was risky.

  They had just over an hour before they’d need to welcome their guests, and so they decided on a short jog up through Waterfoot and on to Soulby Fell. There was no one about; it was as if the human population had been stricken by some lethal virus and had vacated the planet just for their convenience.

  ‘Do you think you might have to go in?’ Johnny asked her.

  She didn’t know. ‘I’ve got a few calls to make. I don’t need to go into the office unless I’m called. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. What about you?’

  It was the same for Johnny. He wasn’t on call like she was, but that didn’t mean the mountain rescue might not need him. Lunch was to be kept simple – a glorified Sunday roast with a few trimmings – and they’d leave the drinking to Wendy and Ted. Josie would be allowed a couple of bottles of beer.

  The sky had turned brighter, and the flat light associated with the heavy snow they’d seen for the past week was dissipating. A thaw was predicted, and it looked like the forecast was accurate. The temperature had risen a degree or so, and water dripped from the trees. It ran down the lanes as they ascended, soaking their trainers. Mud splashed up their legs and sweat stuck to them rather than steaming off.

  ‘Look.’ Johnny pointed to the peaks: the snowline was a little higher and they could see that some patches in the distance had melted.

  By the time they made it back home, Kelly calculated that they didn’t have time for a shared bath; they’d have to settle for showers and get cracking on the prep they should have done last night. Clean, and dressed in jeans and jumpers, they listened to Christmas songs and waited for their families to arrive. Johnny wore his new flip-flops and Kelly wore her ring proudly. It was very feminine and made her feel somewhat adorned. Of course, her mother would tell her that it was on the wrong finger, and Johnny would go along with it. The day wouldn’t be that bad, she decided.

  Until she remembered the Shaws again. And the Frasers, and the Trents …

  She pushed the thoughts away and carried on peeling Brussels sprouts.

  The time passed quickly and Josie arrived carrying gifts. The girl was smiling more than Kelly had seen in the last few months, and she changed the music to something more upbeat and modern. She even helped set the table. Kelly had made a vegetarian loaf for her. It looked like some kind of gigantic turd, and utterly unappetising, but she’d followed the instructions carefully, and, having nibbled a bit off the end, decided that it tasted quite good. She received an unexpected hug for her pains, and Johnny winked at her behind Josie’s back.

  Now they were waiting for Wendy and Ted. As Kelly was basting potatoes, Johnny came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. She hadn’t realised that she was shaking. ‘You OK?’ he asked. She couldn’t answer. There was nothing to say. She’d had a relationship with a man she called Dad for thirty-five years before he died, and now she was inviting a stranger into her home, into her life, and she had his blood flowing through her. Johnny took the spoon off her and told her to get a drink and check the table.

  ‘Josie wants to wait to open presents; she’s got your mum something too.’

  Kelly raised her eyebrows.

  The doorbell rang and she jumped.

  ‘Why don’t I get it?’ Johnny said. She listened as Johnny went to the door, and Josie greeted her mother. She heard Ted’s voice and it didn’t panic her. Hearing them together like that touched her. She went into the hall. Her mother and father were dressed smartly, as if on a date, and Josie and Johnny looked at her, waiting for her to say something.

  She went to Wendy and kissed her. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  She looked at Ted. They hadn’t seen each other for months. She’d been avoiding him. He looked charming and warm, like she always expected him to. She walked towards him, and he opened his arms and took her into them. She allowed herself to be held.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Kelly,’ he said.

  It felt good to welcome him to her home, but at the same time, it was difficult to push aside her old relationship with him and accept this new, intimate one.

  ‘Let’s get your coats off. Lunch is nearly ready.’

  Her mother followed her into the kitchen as Johnny chatted to Ted about the speciality beers he’d bought.

  ‘Thank you for inviting him, Kelly.’

  Kelly turned around and looked at her.

  ‘I’m so pleased for you, Mum. I really am. You make a handsome couple. And look at you! You’re a new woman. I love your make-up. You look gorgeous.’

  She couldn’t recall ever saying that to her mother before, and it felt satisfying and natural. But it was true. Wendy seemed calmer, less distant, and chattier. She didn’t want to ruin the moment by bringing her sister up, but they would have to have the conversation at some point about whether Nikki should be told. It wasn’t a conversation for today, though.

  ‘What are you drinking?’ she asked. ‘There’s sherry, champagne – well, Prosecco – beer, whatever you want.’

  ‘You look happy, Kelly.’

  She stopped fussing and looked at her mother, who was staring at her, smiling.

  Chapter 47

  Emma Hide wasn’t officially on call on Christmas Day, but she figured she might as well work as anything else. Andy had stayed over last night and they’d spent the morning together. She liked him; he was uncomplicated and easy-going, unlike men her own age, who seemed to be more into appearance than anything else. Andy dressed well but didn’t talk about it. The fact that her boss had introduced them was a little odd, but they’d got over that quickly. She couldn’t imagine Kelly at school with him. He said that Kelly always hung about with the boys more, and Emma could empathise with that, because the same was true of her.

  He was spending the afternoon with his kids. She hadn’t met them, and that suited her for now. They were still having fun. Meeting his children would take it to the next level. Everyone at the office had family to spend the day with, but her own family was complicated. Family gatherings were exhausting, and she avoided them. She’d popped into her mum and dad’s in Keswick for about an hour, but no longer. Her sisters would be there all day, with their kids, who were adorable, but Emma had always been the quiet one, preferring to come and go. No one minded, and they knew that police work didn’t stop for holidays.

  From Ted Wallis’s office, Emma had gathered the information one of the traceable drugs that had been found in Jenna Fraser’s system: from a batch of Fentanyl. The packets of Adderall from her bedroom had been traced to a specific batch in Li
verpool, and the information had been collated and shared with the Merseyside drug squad, who’d informed the inquiry that there were ongoing operations inside Cumbria involving surveillance and infiltration. They were delicate, long-term operations and involved persons travelling between Liverpool and Manchester and the countryside north and south of the M62.

  Jenna’s mobile phone had been plugged into the relevant sterile machines in the dark and had begun to regurgitate data. The data had been collated and stored, but was never examined; once the suicide verdict came back, it was decided there was nothing to investigate, and Kelly’s team didn’t have the time to trawl through all the phones they had bagged and tagged. Except it was Christmas Day, and Emma had nowhere to be, and she couldn’t stop thinking about what made an athletic sixteen-year-old get sucked so far down the rabbit hole that she jumped off a cliff.

  The data had chugged out of the machine and onto readable files. Much of the messaging had been wiped clean, but the mole had managed to salvage an impressive mass of information from iCloud and other mobile forums that was never deleted because it couldn’t be. Several clever IT people in the USA had made billions of dollars finding ways to hold and store data without using networks. It wouldn’t be long before the information was routinely used in police inquiries, for sure.

  The mole had unearthed a series of texts and phone calls between Jenna’s phone and one other number, and that was Emma’s first lead. On the day Jenna had jumped, she’d been texting and calling right up to when she left her house, half dressed, to run up Walla Crag.

  He had also recovered Jenna’s movements in the weeks prior to her death, and Emma’s attention had been caught by the fact that in the week before her death, the girl’s phone had pinged off a mast in Keswick not just a couple of times, but every single day. She had clearly travelled to Keswick for something regular and important. Emma brought up the original report on her computer and went through the statements from parents and friends – though Jenna had few friends. Nobody mentioned her going to Keswick. Nobody mentioned her talking for hours on the phone or texting somebody upward of twenty times a day.

  It didn’t take long to find out who the number belonged to.

  Emma closed her screen and thought about the implications of what she’d found out. It didn’t merit disturbing Kelly on Christmas Day, but she couldn’t wait to share her findings. Her boss was on call, but that generally meant for emergencies, and she didn’t think this was an emergency.

  Instead, she turned her attention to the coroner’s report on the other two teenage suicides. Four years ago, Ted Wallis had autopsied the body of Laura Briggs, and it made for uncomfortable reading. The fourteen-year-old had been badly abused, and her injuries were consistent with prolonged periods of rape. Old wounds had healed and been reopened repeatedly, and the coroner noted that her sexual organs had been deformed over time. As for her lethal injuries, they constituted several slashes to her wrists, made with pieces of broken mirror. She had bled to death in her bathtub in under three minutes.

  Again the girl’s phone had been picked apart as a matter of routine, and the records consigned to the bowels of cyberspace, kicking around in the dark until someone came along and sniffed them out. That was where they would have stayed had it not been for Kelly Porter demanding to know why so many school kids were being driven to oblivion. Was it simply a case of modern life pushing them to the limits, or was there something else to it?

  Emma turned to the post-mortem report on Jake Trent. The boy was fifteen when he injected himself with a cheap heroin substitute in his father’s bathroom. The traumatic part wasn’t the fact that it was gory or shocking; it was Jake’s age. Fifty-year-old has-beens were supposed to OD; but a fifteen-year-old boy with his whole future ahead of him? No, he was supposed to live. Emma admired her boss for taking the matter seriously, and that was why she was sitting reading reports on Christmas Day rather than watching It’s a Wonderful Life; because it pissed her off too.

  She rubbed her eyes as she studied the chemical composition of certain opioid compounds found in prescription drugs. Adderall was an upper, but fentanyl was a downer, and the danger was in using them at the same time. She thought back to what Sarah Peaks had said about drug education, and wondered if kids were informed about the physical dangers as well as the social ones. That was the problem: the education system was way behind these kids and what they knew. The problem was what they didn’t know. In the US, there was a different approach, and it was a priority to find out what kids were being exposed to, but here, where romantic naivety diminished the belief that there was a problem in the first place – and claimed that drugs were for losers – the emphasis, Emma found, was on raiding the big boys. In the meantime, thousands of kids were being exposed to ever more dangerous chemicals that no one knew anything about. And no one talked about.

  She sighed.

  So often with overdoses, a cocktail of several drugs acted together to break down organs. The question was, where had Jake got his supply? Keswick wasn’t a large town. There couldn’t be that many dealers, and plenty of them were known to the police.

  She checked the number found so often on Jenna’s phone again.

  Maybe there was a new kid on the block, or an old sweat hiding right under their noses, in plain sight.

  Chapter 48

  Craig Lockwood had little to occupy him on Christmas Day either. The boys were with their mother; he’d dropped them off at their swanky house, complete with matching BMWs in the driveway. It killed him when he saw her with her new husband. He couldn’t bring himself to even say his name. But what killed him even more was when the bastard spent time with his boys. They were old enough now not to be swayed by superficial gifts, and they generally came home to Craig telling him what they were or were not impressed with. They also told him how their mother had changed. The marital breakdown had been a cliché. Craig had neglected her and she’d looked elsewhere. The boys had opted to live with their father and she didn’t object; she was keener to jet off to villas in the sun with her new fella than be tied to motherhood. The irony was that now Craig spent much more time with his family than he ever had.

  His biggest achievement, though one he’d never admit to the boys, was keeping them off drugs. He’d terrified them with videos of overdoses, crime programmes and statistics so that they went to parties turned off the stuff before they even thought about trying it. It amused Craig, but the boys joked that they were more sensible than their dad. They hardly touched alcohol either; again, Craig had showed them pictures from the mortuary of enlarged livers and burst hearts. It wasn’t pretty, but he didn’t want them to end up as washed-up old losers, dependent on everything from substances to women.

  At fifteen, his younger son was the same age as the missing girl from Keswick, and it smarted. All parents must imagine it, he figured: that terror of your kid going missing and turning up dead, knifed or worse. He’d once sat them down and told them they had a hundred pounds each to see how many knives they could buy over the internet. They managed to legally purchase twenty-four between them. He then showed them some photographs of knife wounds.

  The elder boy was now eighteen and heading off to the London School of Economics. Craig’s worries were far from over, but at least his son had a path to walk.

  He’d had a lie-in on Christmas morning, and then showered and dressed ready for his main task for the day: to incarcerate Bobby Bailey. An old magistrate pal had signed a warrant, and now Craig was on his way to Ulverston again. The fair wasn’t moving on until the day after Boxing Day, when it would resume in Kendal.

  Maria had described which trailer Bobby stayed in; predictably, it was not the one he’d told the police. If Bobby had anything to hide, it would be in the trailer he called home. Only a few people knew which one that was, and that number now included Detective Chief Inspector Craig Lockwood. This was going to be a Christmas that Bobby never forgot.

  Craig would have preferred it if policing was still
done the old-fashioned way – with a good nose and a punch in the face – but it wasn’t and they all had to get used to it. Every damn thing had to be accounted for, and entering Bobby’s trailer might turn out to be crucial for Kelly. He had to do it right. He figured that Bobby would let his guard down on Christmas Day, not expecting the coppers to be out looking for him.

  He had taken his son’s car and wore a cap pulled down low. He heard music coming from trailers, and a dog pissed up the side of a lorry. A few kids chased each other and cycled up and down on new bikes, no doubt nicked. But he wasn’t here for petty theft.

  A few fair workers milled about, but no one paid his car any attention. Two men stood by the canal edge, talking animatedly and pointing out to sea. They paused occasionally to shout obscenities at passing women. After an hour or so, a group of four others approached and sat down. Craig was growing impatient. This was where Bobby usually hung out, and he begun to think that he’d been invited somewhere else for Christmas dinner. Either that, or he was sleeping off a hangover in his trailer.

  He got out of his car and made his way to the trailer that Bobby called home. The shutters were all down and he tried the door. It was open. He glanced around, but the group wasn’t interested in him and carried on laughing and chatting. Craig felt a slight pang of pity: it was a sad sight on Christmas Day.

  The stench hit him as soon as the door was ajar. Craig recognised the smell immediately. Either Bobby had a dead dog in there, or he was a goner himself.

  He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his mouth. He had plastic gloves should he need them, as always. The light was dim and the smell grew stronger. He gagged, but stepped inside. His eyes adjusted and he made out a scene of neglect and disarray, though it wasn’t as if the place had been burgled; just lived in by a lazy bastard. He looked around and called Bobby’s name.