A Place To Bury Strangers (Atticus Priest Book 2)

by Mark Dawson

  He walked down the hill and crossed over the junction. The occupant of the BMW—a woman in her late twenties—opened the door as he approached and stepped out.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said.

  Atticus stopped. She had long blonde hair and a face that was very slightly rounded, with expressive eyes and a slender nose. She was wearing a pair of jeans with black leather boots and a chunky cable-knit sweater. Atticus glanced into the car: the rear seats were untidy with clothes, an empty cardboard box, discarded fast-food packaging and at least two parking tickets that appeared to have been taken from the windscreen and tossed into the back. The vehicle would have been expensive when it was new, but it had not been cared for very well. Atticus concluded that she was a woman of untidy habits and careless. She was likely too young to have purchased a sixty-thousand-pound car on her own account, suggesting that she had a benefactor; the lack of a ring on her finger indicated against a rich partner, leaving him to conclude that the car had been a gift from her parents.

  “Can I help you?” he asked her.

  “What are you doing here, sir?”

  “I could ask you the same thing. Police?”

  She took a leather wallet from her pocket and flipped it open. The crest of the Metropolitan Police was embossed on the left-hand sleeve, and a warrant card, complete with a photograph of the bearer, an authenticating hologram and the signature of the commissioner, was on the right. Atticus looked at the card. Her name was noted as Jessica Edwards and her rank was listed as detective constable.

  Atticus glanced over at the Volkswagen as the driver opened the door and stepped out. Atticus recognised him: DS Simon McPherson. He had worked locally before going over to the drugs squad.

  “Simon,” Atticus said, “hello. Who’s that in the car with you?”

  “Jules Horne,” he said.

  Atticus held up a hand in greeting; Horne, who evidently had recognised Atticus too, raised his middle finger in response.

  Edwards noticed and, confused, asked, “Who are you?”

  “His name is Atticus,” McPherson answered for him.

  Edwards frowned in fresh confusion. “What?”

  “Atticus Priest.”

  Her frown deepened.

  Atticus spelt it out for her.

  “First time I’ve heard anyone called that.”

  “Not an unusual reaction,” Atticus said.

  “Atticus used to be a detective,” McPherson said. “I used to work with him. Until he was sacked.”

  Edwards ignored the little dig and gestured up the street. “Can I ask what you were doing in that house?”

  “Looking for a missing person. A girl—name of Molly York, seventeen years old. I was told she was with the occupant of the flat.”

  “Jordan Lamb,” she said.

  “That’s right. I’m guessing you’re looking for Pepsi? Lamb told me he’d been there.”

  “Shayden Mullins,” she said. “That’s right. We’d like to speak to him.”

  “He’s in trouble because of drugs?”

  She nodded. “I’m on Operation Orochi. We go after dealers from London who sell in places like this. There’s intelligence that suggests Shayden was sent here to set up the distributors.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted trip. He’s not there. Lamb told me he cleared out on Sunday. He got wind that the local drugs squad was onto him and moved.”

  She swore. “Don’t suppose Lamb told you where Mullins might have gone?”

  “Back to London. But that’s all he knows.”

  The detective leaned against the side of the car. “I might as well go and have a chat with him myself.” She paused, then took out a card with her details on it and handed it to him. “If you find this Molly York and he’s with her, I don’t suppose you could give me a call?”

  “Of course,” he said. He reached into his pocket and took out one of his own cards. He handed it to her. “If you do the same.”

  Jessica put out her hand, and Atticus shook it. “Deal.”

  “Bye, Simon,” Atticus said.

  “Goodbye.”

  Atticus raised a hand in farewell to DC Horne and was rewarded with a second middle-finger salute. He set off in the direction of the office. He paused on the corner of Brown Street and looked back: Edwards and McPherson were marching up the hill to Lamb’s property.

  16

  Atticus walked back to his office. He sat down in the sofa in the bay window and took his phone from his pocket. He opened Facebook and pulled up Shayden Mullins’s profile. The biographical details suggested that he was a student, studying at Mossbourne Community Academy in London E5. His place of birth was listed as Accra in Ghana, and his newsfeed showed a picture of a black woman standing next to the back of a pickup truck that was loaded with cardboard boxes and black bin liners. The woman was smiling at someone off camera, and Shayden’s accompanying comment thanked her for bringing him up and wished her a happy Mother’s Day.

  There was nothing else of interest; Atticus knew that kids today were more likely to use Instagram or YouTube. He opened Instagram and found Shayden’s account there. He scrolled down to the most recent update. It had been posted yesterday at six fifteen and showed Shayden and another young black man standing in front of what looked like a tower block. The shot had been taken from a distance away, meaning that a good chunk of the building behind them was visible. The first fifteen or twenty feet was composed of red brick, with the remainder clad in some sort of smooth white material. It was the sort of building that was ubiquitous in London, with nothing visible that would have allowed Atticus to identify it.

  He scrolled down to the next update. It was an amateur flyer for a party with a thumbs-up emoji beneath it. The party was advertised as Tappy Turnup and that it would be the biggest night in Hackney. The music included hip-hop, afrobeat, dancehall and drill. The location was limited to just E5; a caption suggested that if you needed to ask where it was, you weren’t cool enough to go.

  Shayden had left a comment that he was ‘back from Cunge’ and that he would be going to the party. Atticus didn’t know what ‘cunge’ was, but Google did. It was street slang for ‘country.’ Shayden was telling his friends that he had returned from Salisbury.

  The post had been liked by seven people. Atticus clicked on their profiles and scanned through their updates. The first five offered nothing of interest, but the sixth was more useful. It was from another young man, similar in age to Shayden. He started each day by linking to a music video featuring drill artists: loud, aggressive and violent rap. His post included the flyer, and he had added an accompanying caption beneath it:

  Buzzing. Going to the Kenton.

  Atticus opened a fresh Google search and looked up ‘E5’ and ‘the Kenton’ and got lucky on his first attempt: the Kenton was a pub in East London. He opened Google Street View and dragged his fingers around the screen so that he could see the pub’s surroundings.

  He got lucky again.

  The pub was pinched between the intersection of Kenton Road and Bentham Road. The latter ran along the northernmost side of the pub; its entire length, all the way to its junction with Bradstock Road, was taken up by six identical tower blocks. Each block was decorated in exactly the same way: red bricks nearest to the ground and then white cladding up to the top.

  It was the same tower block from the background of the photograph with Shayden and the other youngster.

  “Bingo.”

  17

  Atticus spoke to Jacob and checked that he was okay to look after Bandit for a little longer. Jacob said that he was—he said the dog was currently lying on his bed with his legs in the air in search of a tummy rub—and didn’t protest too much when Atticus insisted on paying him another twenty for doing him the favour.

  Atticus went back to the office, found his leather satchel and stuffed in the things that he thought he might need for his trip to London: his phone, his MacBook, a Sony 4K Camcorder, an Olympus digital recorder,
and a GPS car tracker that he had purchased from an entirely disreputable eBay seller. He went to his bookshelf and took down David Bronstein’s Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953, the classic recount of the Candidates’ Tournament that led up to the championship match between the author and Mikhail Botvinnik. He looked out of the window and saw that it was still cold and damp; he opened the cupboard and took out the stainless-steel hip flask that his mother had given him several Christmases ago. He had a bottle of Glenfiddich single malt on the sideboard and, with the aid of a plastic funnel, he decanted enough to fill the flask to the top.

  He screwed the top back on, added the flask to the bag, closed the zip and made his way down to the street. There was a train in twenty minutes and, if he was brisk about it, he ought to be able to catch it.

  Atticus made the train with three minutes to spare. The station was quiet; it was too early for the return of commuters and too late for many people to want to head into London. He bought a ticket and stopped at the concession for a coffee, then found a seat in an empty carriage. The coffee was watery and unpleasant; he unscrewed the hip flask and poured in a measure to add a little extra warmth.

  He took out his phone and opened the chess app that he preferred. He had a number of open games, and he saw that all of his opponents had taken their moves and were waiting for him. He was about to open the game at the top of the list when he noticed an invitation for a fresh game.

  > JACK_OF_HEARTS wants to play.

  Atticus stared at the screen. Jack had been one of his regular opponents until he had sent a series of unsettling messages at the conclusion of the Mallender case. Jack had known too much about Atticus and the investigation. Atticus, on the other hand, knew nothing about Jack at all, and he had found that disparity unnerving and deeply frustrating. He had never encountered a problem that he didn’t want to solve, and this one had been a continuing source of irritation that had been exacerbated by Jack’s subsequent silence. Atticus had sent invitations for new games, and Jack had ignored them all.

  Until now.

  He accepted the invitation and watched the screen as Jack’s first move was played. He or she—Atticus had no idea as to his opponent’s gender—was playing the English Opening, moving a pawn to 1.c4 in a dynamic strategy that would limit some of Atticus’s favourite counters. Atticus pushed his pawn out to e5 in the Reverse Sicilian defence and waited for a moment to see whether Jack was online.

  The board remained static.

  Atticus put his phone away, took Bronstein’s book from his bag and opened it to the first page. It was one of the seminal chess texts, a report on a championship that had featured some of the best games of all time: Euwe-Smyslov, Taimanov-Najdorf and Keres-Reshevsky, among the most reproduced and analysed games in history. Smyslov had won the tournament, and Atticus wanted to analyse his games for new strategies that he could bring to his own online encounters. He took out his earbuds and popped them into his ears, connecting them to his phone and selecting his David Gilmour playlist. He took a sip of the distinctly average but now slightly improved coffee and found his place in the book, and, as the train wheezed out of the station, he started to read.

  Atticus reached Waterloo and transferred onto the Jubilee Line. He rode it to Stratford and then took the 277 bus into Hackney. It was a short walk from there to Kenton Road, and he took the opportunity to get a sense of the area. Hackney had been, until recently, one of the less pleasant suburbs of London. It was known for poverty, and after that, just as night follows day, came its reputation for crime and violence. But, just as with all of the inner-city suburbs that were within a short bus ride of the Square Mile, newly arriving workers looking for somewhere cheap and convenient to live had dragged it out of the doldrums. There were coffee shops and boutiques now, and the cars parked on the crescent that fringed Well Street Common were expensive.

  He reached Kenton Road and followed it to the pub. The Kenton was a two-storey public house at the junction with Bentham Road. The exterior was painted bright yellow with half-height windows and square lights on either side of all three doors. The cornice was painted grey with the pub’s name picked out in white. The first floor had two narrow windows flanking a wider middle window that had recently been smashed, the glass now covered by a wooden board. The light was beginning to fade, and the series of tower blocks that overlooked the area prickled with lights in the windows. The nearest block—identified by a sign on the wall as Ravenscroft Point—had attracted a clutch of young men to the communal space outside the main entrance. There were half a dozen of them; Atticus watched them for a moment, saw a phone being shared around, and heard hoots of laughter at whatever was playing on the screen.

  He pushed the pub’s door open and went inside. The Kenton was a typical East End boozer. At some point in its history, it had clearly been a well-loved local, but, just as seemed to be the case everywhere these days, the present proprietor had taken the decision to update it to reflect the changed demographic in the area. The walls had all been painted, rustic furniture tried (and failed) to look authentic, and flamboyant touches—a gilt mirror, ironic statuettes on the bar—had been added. The beers on tap were foreign and expensive, and the Sunday roast started at £15. This was not aiming to draw in the working class, but, rather, the middle-class wage slaves who liked to pretend that they were authentic Eastenders, but really were not. This was a theme-park version of the East End.

  Atticus went to the bar and waited for the tattooed and moustachioed barman to notice him.

  “Evening,” the man said. “What can I get you?”

  “A pint of Estrella,” he said.

  The man took down a pint glass from the rack behind him and started to pour.

  “It’s all changed round here,” Atticus said.

  “Tell me about it,” the man replied. “You been here before?”

  “Never been here, but I know the area. Haven’t been back for years.”

  “Different now, I bet.”

  “Unrecognisable.”

  “The pub was done up a couple of years ago,” he said. “I suppose it’s all right.” He finished pouring the drink and slid the glass across the bar. “Five quid, please.”

  Five pounds for a pint. Atticus ignored the impulse to make a comment, took out his bank card and waited for the barman to ring up the sale.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  “You might be able to help me with something,” Atticus said. “I’m looking for someone, and I think they’ve been in here recently.”

  The man shrugged. “It can get busy in here, though. I wouldn’t expect too much.”

  Atticus took out his phone and opened the photograph of Shayden Mullins that he had grabbed from the young man’s Facebook profile. He put the phone on the counter and turned it around so that the barman could look down at it.

  He gave a little snort of disdain. “That’s Pepsi. He was in here last night. He’s in the LFB.”

  “The what?”

  “LFB—London Field Boys. It’s a gang—one of the main ones around here. Bad news.”

  Atticus swiped to the flyer for the party. “Was he here for this?”

  “Yeah,” the man said. “We’ve got a room in the back we hire out.”

  “I need to find him.”

  The barman looked at him suspiciously. “What are you? Police?”

  “No. Why would you think that?”

  “Because you’re asking about him. He’s bad news—we had to get the police out to deal with him and his mates.”

  “Why?”

  “He was selling things he shouldn’t have been selling. Why are you looking for him if you’re not police?”

  “It’s not him I’m looking for,” Atticus said. “He’s been hanging out with a girl who’s gone missing from Salisbury. Her dad hired me to try to find her, and I think she’s in London with him.”

  Atticus took the phone back and swiped through his photographs until he found his picture of Molly. He l
aid the phone on the counter again.

  The barman nodded. “Yep. She was here, too. Both of them.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I had to tell them to leave because of the drugs. There was an argument. It got heated. They were gone by the time the police came, but as soon as they’d left, someone put a brick through the window upstairs.” He shrugged. “Not unusual around here, unfortunately.”

  “I don’t suppose you know where he lives?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t. Sorry.”

  18

  Mack had been busy. Mack had called the station and requested that uniformed officers be dispatched to Imber to keep an eye on the graveyard until they were able to confirm that the bone from the Plain could be matched to the disturbed grave. There was no reason to suspect that foul play was involved, but Mack wasn’t minded to cut corners. She had called Professor Fyfe to update him and, once that was done, she had driven to school to pick up the kids.

  It was her turn. They both went to Greentrees Primary School, not far from the family home in Bishopsdown. Andy worked late on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they had agreed that she would be responsible for collecting them and feeding them before he returned to put them to bed.

  She parked the Range Rover outside the gates and went out to meet the children in the playground. Sebastian came first, his school bag slung across his shoulder and his scarf haphazardly knotted around his neck. Daisy was older and, although still just nine, she was developing the kind of sassy attitude that Mack’s mother reminded her that she herself had exhibited at the same age. Daisy was with two of her friends, and Mack knew better than to interrupt them until Daisy had had the chance to say goodbye and come over by herself. Daisy had made it obvious that her parents and friends were not to cross paths; the former, she had said, were ‘embarrassing.’ Mack couldn’t wait for her to be a teenager…