Crooked Street

by Priscilla Masters

  He performed the same action six times until he’d collected all the money owed from Mill Street – for this week. Astrid Jenkins always left her door unlocked and the money on the table, placed there by her carer.

  He prepared to cross the road. There was a Gatso speed camera here, at the bottom of the long, straight hill, so the traffic was always moving nice and slowly, just under thirty miles an hour. He ran across the road which brought him to the base of Big Mill. He looked up at it uneasily. In his mind it was a dangerous eyesore. He scuttled past it. He didn’t like the place. It had a bad feeling. They ought to pull it down or develop it, he muttered to himself. Do something with it, anyway. Not just leave it like that. A hazard. That’s what it was. A magnet for druggies and thieves. He averted his eyes from the broken windows and hummed to himself to melt away the spooks.

  He turned into Wellington Place next. No one misbehaving here today. All doors were opened, all money sullenly handed over. Carly was a bit more polite than usual. She was a nice girl was Carly. And her bloke wasn’t a bad sort either. Not really. Carly even managed a tight little smile when she gave him her money but her overwhelming expression was one of sadness; grief like a grey wash running down her face.

  He threaded round the back of Big Mill, sensing its shadow filtering out the last vestiges of sunlight. If possible the back was even worse than its front. It was a neglected area, dank even on this bright April evening. People had chucked rubbish over the railings. The railings themselves had been bent apart to allow miscreants to squeeze through. Jeff tutted to himself, quite ignoring the fact that as a boy he would have been one of those miscreants himself – probably one of the ringleaders. He hurried along Britannia Avenue, puffing after the steep climb towards the top. He was panting when he arrived, took a deep breath and knocked on the first door. ‘Hello, Marty,’ he said jauntily. ‘How are you doing?’ No truce for her this week.

  The stare she gave him was not so much nasty as disturbing. She seemed to be looking right through him as she handed the money over without speaking, merely fixing her eyes on him as though she knew something he didn’t.

  Like, maybe what had happened to Jadon?

  ‘Thanks,’ he said uncomfortably, putting the notes carefully into the roll, slipping an elastic band around it then fastening it into his case.

  He walked fast.

  He’d felt uncomfortable and uneasy earlier. Now the feeling was compounding.

  He didn’t know exactly when he woke up to the fact that something wasn’t right, that he was on the edge of something, teetering over.

  Jeff was not blessed or cursed with much imagination but he could imagine himself in Jadon’s shoes, stepping along this very road on that rainy night, raising a hand to knock on doors and demand his money, the street as quiet as it was now, the people not at the supermarket but hiding, opening their doors reluctantly only to hand over the part payment of their never-to-be-paid-off debt before giving him a look of hatred and slamming them shut again.

  Josie Murdoch slapped the money into his hand so hard it almost hurt. He frowned at her, wanting to say, ‘There’s no need to be like that. We did you the favour in the first place, you know. You and your old man were desperate. Glad enough then to accept our terms and grab the money with your sticky little paws.’ He’d half got the speech ready but by the time he’d got two words out he was speaking to a door.

  Nobody liked him.

  Next was the bit he dreaded, crossing the child’s play area into Barngate Street. It was a dull evening and the police tape still made the area out of bounds. One of the swings was moving but there was no one on it. He stared at it. To and fro. Not possible, he thought. There was no breeze tonight so why would it move? He stepped towards it, wondering.

  The jumble of streets and houses lay ahead of him, around him like a maze, but there was little sign of life. Most families were inside their houses, a few children standing on their doorsteps, a couple of faces watching from windows. Jeff was thoroughly spooked now. He was slipping away from the real world into that place – the nothing place wherever Jadon was. The parallel universe where no one would find him. No one was taking any notice of him. He was invisible.

  He looked around him at the darkened windows and thought he saw a light in one, someone moving, watching him. Then he realized it was simply the reflection of the early evening sun and the person was himself. Invisible no longer. He told himself off for being skittish and twitchy, acting like a big girl’s blouse. He stood still and lit a cigarette.

  How lonely, he suddenly thought, can it be, walking along a street of ten or twenty houses and yet see no one and be seen by no one? Was he already living in Glover’s parallel world?

  Bad thoughts.

  The roads were still quiet, the crowds still out shopping for their Easter eggs. The sun had dropped behind the buildings so the shadows were long. Even his. He looked down and smiled. He looked like the man on stilts you see at the circus. Long, long legs.

  He was impatient now to finish. He wanted to go home. He looked to the front. Just two more streets, Barngate and Nab Hill Avenue, cut back through the play area towards the bottom of the hill, take the short path behind Big Mill and you’ll be in Sainsbury’s car park, my son. Then home sweet home.

  Never had he yearned so much for people, for the crowded sociability and reassurance of normality – a supermarket car park, home. Safety in numbers. He wished a few more people were around – at least a few more than these two boys kicking a football around aimlessly. He felt he was being watched.

  This time I shall not hide behind my own front door – I’ll choose an anonymous spot. I know I cannot hide the body in the same place. It will not remain hidden much longer. Soon people will be there, looking, digging, photographing, planning. Finding. No. This time … Let’s do it out in the open. Shout it from the rooftops. Leave him there for all to see, not drop him down in the cesspit, even though that is where he belongs …

  The sun had dropped behind the row of roofs. Jeff Armitage glanced around him, along darkening streets; even the parked cars seeming a sinister hiding place. The two boys kicking the ball didn’t appear to be taking any notice of him or anyone else who just might be hiding – in the passageways, behind parked cars, along the darkening streets.

  He quickened his pace. Never before had he felt so reflective dealing with his clients. He’d never really thought about them. Not as people, anyway. Neither had he thought about the circumstances which had led to their debt. He stopped and lit another cigarette. Each one of them handing over their money seemed to display the exact same emotion: hatred and resentment, which wasn’t fair. Daylight had been a solution of a sort. They had lent them money at a time when they had needed it. They had been on their beam ends. Bloody desperate, and Daylight had come along like the Good Samaritan. That’s what they’d done. Handed over the cash. In notes. No cheques or questions. Cash in their desperate hands. They’d turned up day and night with money. Twenty-four fucking seven.

  Any time, any place.

  Their clients couldn’t expect that little service to go unrewarded. He dragged hard on his cigarette. They weren’t a sodding charity. And yet each one of them opened the doors with spite and hatred and a certain knowing look, as though they awaited his fate like watching Christians being thrown to the lions, waiting gleefully for him to be gobbled up, or fall into the black hole like Jadon. Simply cease to exist. What was he saying? He took another drag on his cigarette and told himself off for being fanciful. It wasn’t like him to think like this. He was a man of action. That was what he was. He didn’t worry about what people thought of him and he didn’t have post-mortems. It was business. Just that, and he was a businessman. They had costs and wages to pay, premises to rent, loans to pay back. It wasn’t as though they were rich men themselves, rolling in money. They too had had to borrow to get started.

  The two boys were still kicking the ball around when they were joined by a third person, someone in a hoo
die and tracksuit bottoms, hands in pockets, head down. It was hard to tell whether it was a woman or a man. Certainly someone slight. Small woman, very small man. Jeff took no notice and carried on walking, slowly now as he puffed on his cigarette, still lecturing himself.

  Jeff, he was saying, get a grip. You can’t suddenly develop a conscience, start justifying what you do – as though you have to. Not now. This is the way you live. This is the job you do. This is the service you provide in this expensive, complicated world we live in.

  Suddenly he stopped, struck by something. She or he was still there, hood pulled up right over his or her head. Almost his last thought was that it was like a monk’s cowl. Then he felt the push, frowned and looked down. Why hadn’t he felt any pain when blood was pumping out of him? Confused and bemused, he tried to call out but the two boys were still engrossed in their aimless football.

  It brought back tear-jerking memories. Him and his brother kicking a ball and waiting. Dad somewhere, probably in the nearest pub, mum somewhere else, probably trying to fix the washing machine – broken again. No money. Never any money.

  He looked at the monk figure, questioning. Then he felt the thrust again and knew he was going to die very soon.

  ‘No!’ he said, tried to peer through the haze, to appeal to the children. Then he fell heavily, his mouth tasting the bark on the ground. The monk figure dropped the knife.

  Done. It is done.

  EIGHTEEN

  Wednesday, 16 April, 8.10 p.m.

  The boys had sauntered over to the man lying on the ground, staring silently for a moment before they realized what they were looking at.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Iain said. ‘He’s dead.’

  Bob was his brother, only five years old to his brother’s six and a half. He simply stared, open-mouthed.

  Then they did what any normal pair of brothers would do in this situation. Ran for home, yelling as they went: ‘Mum! Mum!’

  Petula Morgan of Number 12, Barngate Street took a bit of convincing that they were serious, followed them out to the slide (where they weren’t supposed to be, this late) and saw what they had – the huddle of clothes on the floor drenched in blood. She fished her mobile phone out of her pocket and dialled, her hand shaking, her eyes glued to the person lying on the floor. She knew instantly who it was. She’d had the money by the door ready to hand over. She pulled the boys tightly to her.

  Police were there within minutes. A squad car burst noisily and visibly on to the scene, siren blaring, lights flashing. Petula had never felt so glad of its presence. It was only when the officers ran from their cars that she unglued her eyes from the man, looked around and wondered.

  PCs Paul Ruthin and Gilbert Young had been cruising near the area when the call had come in. Hearts pounding, they had looked at each other, switched the blue light and siren on and screamed their way across the sleepy town to the children’s play area. It didn’t take a trained eye to see that the guy was dead. Lying on his front, face in the ground. Ruthin felt for a carotid pulse and found none. He too was on his phone in minutes. Then they waited.

  Joanna was at home, starting to pack things up in boxes and mark them with a thick black felt-tip pen. The young couple had come up with three and a half thousand out of the four (hopefully not acquired from a doorstep money lender) and neither she nor Matthew had had the heart to turn them down again. The pair had reminded them so much of their own past. Romantic and idealistic. So in effect Waterfall Cottage was sold and she was feeling bereft, as though she had lost a piece of herself. She was sealing the first box and writing BOOKS on the top when the phone rang.

  As soon as she heard the words body, children’s play area, and the location – between Britannia Avenue and Barngate Street – she knew it would be one of them. She just didn’t know which one.

  ‘Wait there,’ she said. ‘Get a forensic tent and lights. Touch nothing. Wait for me. I’ll be there.’

  ‘Matt.’ He was outside, collecting up gardening implements. ‘A body’s turned up. I think it’s connected with Jadon Glover’s disappearance.’

  He looked interested. Since establishing a connection between the case of the battered child that had upset him so much and Joanna’s current investigation he had felt a part of it.

  ‘You want me to come?’

  ‘Actually, that’d be really helpful. It looks like he’s dead so if you could certify him and we can clear things with the coroner, move the body, it’d make things happen a bit quicker.’

  ‘OK. You’re on.’ Since convincing her that to move was the right thing Matthew had been in very conciliatory mood. She could have asked for the moon and he would have had a good go at getting it for her.

  They were in the car, heading for the crime scene when he looked at her. ‘They have to be connected?’

  ‘Have to be, Matt. Unless Jadon has kept himself hidden, coming out to murder one of his colleagues.’

  His hands gripped the steering wheel as he manoeuvred out on to Ashbourne Road and headed towards Leek. ‘Pretty unlikely, Jo.’

  He turned to look at her as a lorry thundered up behind them. Too close.

  ‘I have to consider all possibilities.’ She glanced at him. ‘You’re always advising me to keep an open mind.’

  ‘I didn’t think you listened to my advice.’ His face was humorous.

  She matched his humour. ‘I don’t make a habit of it but every now and then you make a sensible suggestion.’

  His response was a smile and a nod and she spoke her thoughts out loud.

  ‘I’m betting it’s one of the other money lenders.’

  ‘You think it’s the same guy as whoever abducted Jadon Glover?’

  ‘Or woman – yeah. I’d take a running bet at it.’

  ‘Right.’ He smiled at her. ‘Different MO though.’ As she had picked up some of his medical phrases, he had picked up on copper-speak.

  Murder attracts attention. How so many people knew what had happened so quickly was beyond Joanna’s comprehension. She only knew that bad news travels faster than the speed of light, permeating through narrow streets, from living room to living room. Phone lines, text messages, gossip flashing from door to door.

  They’d arrived. Why do people do it? Just come to stare at a dead man? Simply to share in the excitement, have a bit part in a real-life drama?

  Matthew parked the car and together they threaded their way towards the area. The two constables had already erected a forensic tent to give the dead man the dignity of at least not starring in his very own snuff video.

  ‘Familiar ground this,’ Joanna said as she stepped over the bark, keeping to the marked access route. Already combed for signs of a man who had vanished off the face of the earth, she thought. And all we found that time was a cigarette butt.

  Phil Scott met her. ‘Thought I’d bring the pathologist with me,’ she said. ‘Save a bit of time. And he wasn’t doing anything useful at home anyway.’

  Matthew touched her shoulder. ‘Don’t go pushing your luck now, Jo,’ he said softly and the intimacy in such an environment made her shiver.

  The light was going fast. In forensic suits and wearing gloves and the most unbecoming hats you could imagine, they approached the tent. Their man lay face down, head pressed into the ground, in a dark pool of blood. He was dressed in a suit and still clutched his leather man-bag. She watched Matthew go through the paces. Feel for a pulse. Roll him over. And now she could see who it was. Jeff Armitage had met his end. Matthew looked up at her.

  She nodded. ‘Jeff Armitage,’ she said. ‘One of the Daylight boys.’

  Matthew carried on then. She watched as he went through the paces, took his temperature and then an ambient reading, listened for a non-existent heartbeat, touched the skin, looked at fingernails, hands and lips, checked pupil reaction and searched for obvious injury, in this case only too easy to spot. Five separate and large blood stains had seeped through his cheap suit jacket. One of the areas was just over his heart. As Joanna wa
tched Matthew do the necessary she knew something else. Jadon Glover’s body was out there somewhere. They simply hadn’t found him yet. She watched Matthew take notes and followed his line of reasoning. The wound low down, somewhere near his liver, had probably been struck first, the one higher up second and as the man lay dying on the floor he’d suffered three more – to make sure. Ending with the heart.

  Matthew looked up at her. ‘You’ll be reopening the case.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She tried to smile. It was a brave attempt which didn’t fool her husband for a moment. ‘Well, we never really closed it.’

  He simply nodded. ‘OK – I’ll leave you here then.’

  ‘Yeah. One of the cars will run me home later. I’ll ring the coroner, Matt. Thanks. You get off home.’

  ‘Yeah. See you – much – later.’ He gave her a sterile peck on the cheek and left her to begin. It was going to be a long night.

  ‘OK,’ she said, addressing PC Gilbert Young, their newcomer from Stoke, ‘who found the body?’

  ‘Two little boys, age five and six, from Barngate Street.’ Beardmore glanced at his notes. ‘Number twelve.’

  Joanna looked up. ‘Are they OK?’

  ‘As far as I know. We haven’t had a chance to …’

  ‘No worries. I’ll go myself.’

  She knew the geography of this area already, only too well. She crossed the road and made her way down Barngate Street to number twelve. All the lights were on. She knocked on the door and heard voices inside. She knocked again.

  The woman who came to the door looked pale, shocked and slim, with long rats’ tails of thin, straggly blonde hair. She looked worried and frightened, dressed in maroon leggings which emphasized her skinny legs, a sloppy grey sweater and slippers. She looked resigned when Joanna said, ‘Police.’ As though there was no fight in her. Joanna felt sorry for her. She looked like a victim – even without this newest curse.

  ‘The boys?’

  ‘They’re in here.’ The woman moved a step closer and spoke quietly, conspiratorially. ‘I’m Petula Morgan,’ she said, ‘their mum. They’re only five and six and a half. They don’t really know or understand what’s going on or what’s happened. Please, go easy on them. I don’t want them traumatized any more than they already have been.’