Crooked Street

by Priscilla Masters

  As Matthew began with the initial assessment her mind started drifting, aimlessly floating like a helium balloon without a weight through the various crime scenes connected with this case. She was transported elsewhere, back out on to the chilly moors, walking the cramped streets of Jadon’s Wednesday night patch. Even stepping through Big Mill with its ghostly clatter of ancient machinery long gone. She realized now why she had been so distracted. There had been so much going on in the teeming streets of Leek, so much hidden behind the closed doors of the terraced houses and so many stories of poverty and debt, of heartbreak and happiness, of parsimony and profligacy, stories which had cost happiness and ultimately lives like Frank Widnes. Now all these stories and dramas floated through her mind, bunches of flowers and dead children mixing together like a bizarre Chagall, and they started to form some sort of pattern – an order. The patchwork quilt was re-stitching itself, pieces finding their correct order and place. It wasn’t that she hadn’t noticed all this. She had. Her eyes had taken it in. But she hadn’t paid it enough attention, thought deep enough about it or understood its significance.

  Now she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t recognized their true worth.

  ‘You OK?’ Matthew certainly was. In a long waterproof apron, mask, gloves, with his hat on, he was in his element, his eyes bright with the work ahead of him, that puzzling out of events and their correct sequence.

  ‘Yeah.’ She looked up. What remained of Jadon Glover’s clothes had been cut off and bagged up. He lay there, naked, in an advanced state of putrefaction. Blowflies, rodents and degradation had all done their worst. Joanna corrected that thought. Not their worst or their best, only what came naturally in their quest to survive. Whatever Jadon Glover had been like in life – dapper, deceitful, selfish, smart, in death he was … disgusting.

  She shelved her thoughts. No use sinking into thought now. She needed all her attention. All her wits.

  As Matthew began his detailed analysis of the state of the body and its internal organs her thoughts took a journey of their own, back to the wedding photograph of Eve and Jadon. There was so little resemblance between the smiling, confident groom and this thing lying on the table. Her mind moved on to the little boy, Rice, who was missing from the wedding. But her mind was blocked with the images of small bunches of flowers tied around the lamppost. The tragedy had been a couple of years ago but someone was still bringing fresh flowers and not for Rice Sutherland. She’d noticed. The ribbon was fresh, as were the blooms. Not silk ones, attached a month or a year ago to bleach in the sun and be soaked by the rain, catch flakes of snow, attached only to be abandoned and forgotten. These flowers had been put there less than a week ago. Roses and lilies; expensive in an area that did not allow a large budget for such luxuries. Someone was caring for the site. Who? Someone from Nab Hill Avenue or the surrounding streets? Did it have any connection with current events? She knew now it was one small fact that she had overlooked and shouldn’t have done because she couldn’t answer her own question.

  She glanced across at Matthew, wondering whether he’d noticed her lapse of attention, but he was too absorbed. He’d pulled his mask up over his nose and mouth but his eyes were firmly focused on his fingers which worked and probed, measured and asked digital questions. He made notes partly speaking into a recorder, sometimes writing on a tablet, sometimes taking photographs. Currently he was frowning as he examined an internal wound in something that looked like a piece of rotten meat.

  ‘OK,’ he said, finally looking up. ‘Again, cause of death stab wounds to the abdomen and chest but he didn’t die instantly.’ He tugged his facemask down. ‘Your killer’s getting better at her job,’ he said.

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Probably. It wouldn’t have taken much force. And aren’t most of your debtors women?’

  She nodded then asked the million-dollar question. ‘When was he stabbed?’

  ‘Probably,’ Matthew said, considering, ‘around the time he went missing. We’ll need some help from the forensic entomologist. I’ve already given Tim a ring. He’ll be able to pin down a time span better than I can.’

  And now for the worst question. ‘How long was he alive in that stinking place?’

  ‘An hour – two hours at the most.’

  ‘Conscious?’

  He nodded. ‘He must have been. It looks like wood and old faeces under his fingernails.’

  It was a terrible thought. She was distracted by Mark Fask who had been busy bagging up the clothes. ‘We got a notebook here, Jo,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit soggy and smelly.’ He held up an evidence bag.

  ‘Are you going to be able to read it?’

  He nodded. ‘I think so. We’ll dry it out first and take a look through.’

  ‘Yeah – good, thanks.’ She wished she could rid herself of the nightmare picture of those hands scrabbling at the edge of the wooden lavatory seat, trying to lever himself out of the cesspit, mortally wounded. In photographs she had seen for herself how well muscled Glover had been due to his regular visits to the gym. Fitted up by Pecs, he might have managed to lever himself out of the toilet but it would have been a waste of effort. There was no one who could help for at least five miles in any direction. Only his killer had known he was there at all. He might even have crawled to the road but how much traffic passed? It was too remote. From the time his killer had planned where to dump his body he was doomed even if he was not quite dead. Surprised at her reaction for a man she had perceived as thoroughly callous, she felt nothing but pity. But Glover, she tried to tell herself, was a greedy, hard-hearted bastard who fed on the poor and needy. Then she remembered Marty Widnes of Britannia Avenue and half revised her opinion. He had shown her pity. Pity or rather guilt? Whichever, it was disproportionate when it was Daylight who had impacted on her husband’s suicide but it was still pity. Of a sort.

  Matthew tapped her shoulder, breaking into her thoughts. ‘I’m all done,’ he said, jaunty as he peeled his gloves off and released himself from the long apron. ‘You’ll have my report by tomorrow morning, Inspector.’

  She nodded then smiled at him. ‘Thanks, Matt. I’d better go,’ she said. Then, knowing that the SOCO and two junior officers were surreptitiously watching them, she touched his cheek with her index finger. ‘I’ll see you,’ she said and he nodded, his eyes bright and resisting asking the question: when?

  She hitched a lift back to the station with Jason Spark. On the way she received an unexpected phone call. ‘Joanna?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She waited, thinking: caller, identify yourself.

  ‘Baxter here.’

  She was floundering.

  ‘Cornell. SOCO. Work with Mark Fask.’

  She was all apologies. ‘I’m sorry, Baxter. I just didn’t recognize your voice – or your number.’ Already she felt her pulse start to trot, its speed increasing. She knew the SOCOs. They would be busy combing the crime scene. They wouldn’t be wasting time ringing her unless they had something important to tell her.

  ‘We’ve done some digging,’ he said, ‘excavating the cesspit. We’ve come up with a mobile phone.’ Pause, ‘In a very degraded state.’

  ‘Jadon’s?’

  ‘We haven’t confirmed yet with his service provider but we think so. It’s a 4G model.’

  ‘Can you get anything from it?’

  ‘We’ll try,’ he said. ‘There’s another thing.’ He hesitated, then added uncertainly, ‘Ma’am.’

  She winced and waited.

  ‘We’ve been taking some soil samples from around the cottage. The soil there’s pretty unique. It has a high peat content and because of the altitude of the moorlands it’s low on minerals and salts. They leach away,’ he explained helpfully.

  ‘And that means?’

  ‘Not trying to do your job for you, Inspector, but no one brought Jadon all the way up here in a wheelbarrow, did they?’

  She’d got it. ‘Wheel arch samples.’

  ‘Unless they got their car valeted and,
if you ask me, the people who were in hock to Jadon Glover weren’t the sort to blow a fiver on having their car cleaned up.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  But when Cornell had hung up Joanna was still left with nothing but questions. What had Jadon and Jeff’s murders really achieved? Would it be the end of Daylight? Would the debts be wiped out? She didn’t think so. Robertson would have his money, Eve too. Were the other two ‘directors’ in danger now? Should they be protected? Yes, until they’d made an arrest. Where did Eve fit into all this? Matthew, she reflected, had been right. Rice should probably have been Rees. Poor child – she’d even got his name wrong.

  So she let the objects spin around her mind. Where did Karl Robertson fit in? Where did the murder of Rice fit in, if at all? And then there was the other child, the one who had run out into the road after a football. The child whose death was still commemorated with fresh flowers every week. Was the accidental death of that little boy part of this or not? Why had Karen Stanton concealed the truth?

  Still questions.

  Her phone rang again. Barraclough, this time.

  ‘Didn’t the children say that the lady who killed Jeff Armitage dropped something?’

  ‘Yes. Something metallic.’

  ‘We’ve found a metal button. It just might be – on the other hand …’

  Killers had been convicted on something as small as a button. She felt a faint glimmer of hope. ‘Do we know when it was dropped?’

  ‘Put it like this – the area’s been sealed off since Glover’s murder. It was only reopened last week.’

  So, not great, but something.

  She didn’t have to instruct him to bag it up, tell him that from small acorns, etc., etc. He was an experienced SOCO who drank in every word at the briefings. He knew what to do without any prompting from her.

  For now her focus was on the child who had met his death on Nab Hill Avenue and the flowers laid there so carefully.

  And as if to echo her starting point Baxter Cornell rang again just as she was returning to the station. ‘Joanna,’ he said urgently.

  ‘Speak.’ She felt excited. Cornell wouldn’t have rung had he not had something important to say.

  ‘We’ve started drying out Glover’s notebook,’ he began.

  She was impatient to find out more. ‘And?’

  ‘He kept a handwritten record of his visits.’

  ‘As well as on his tablet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything from the night he died?’

  ‘Yes. He broke his routine.’

  She waited.

  ‘He went to Wellington Place and then Britannia Avenue. Ticks by everyone’s name except the Murdochs. Big cross there.’

  ‘And then?’ She was so eager she pulled over by the kerb to listen closely.

  ‘Then he went straight to Nab Hill Avenue, not Barngate Street.’

  Instinctively, as though ringing an expensive wine glass, Joanna knew what it was that Karen Stanton had seen and why she had concealed it.

  At last, a focus. A channel narrowing down the field.

  ‘Do you know who he visited first there?’

  ‘No. There’s no entry for Nab Hill Avenue. He’s opened it and underlined and that’s where it ends …’ he hesitated, ‘… with a streak of blood. It must have been in his pocket and then fallen out when …’

  He didn’t need to say any more.

  ‘Nab Hill Avenue …’ She recalled the three women. A coven, Mike had called them. ‘Narrows the field a bit.’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Whoever killed him,’ she was thinking out loud, ‘almost certainly wouldn’t know he kept parallel records. They would just have thought the entries were made on his tablet. Thanks.’ She’d known as soon as they’d found Glover’s body that it would yield clues. That was why the killer had hidden it so well – in the grounds of a cottage they must have thought was abandoned. Now corroborative evidence would come thick and fast. Cornell was right to focus on the car that must have been used to dump Glover’s still-living body. But there would be more to find – a murder scene. She felt the quickening that accompanied the first hint of light after a very long night. At times she had wondered whether they would ever find Glover – not knowing whether he was dead or alive. After Jeff’s murder she had even wondered whether it was possible that Glover had murdered his partner. But now they had found Glover’s body there was a trail to follow. And it led to Nab Hill Avenue, a significant dead end.

  She called the station and gave Mike a potted version of Cornell’s information. ‘Dig out the files of the child who was killed in Nab Hill Avenue,’ she said. ‘Find out if there is any connection with the three debtors who live in the street.’

  ‘Will do, Jo.’ He paused. ‘You think that’s where this all ends?’

  ‘Someone is putting flowers there,’ she said. ‘Fresh ones, every week.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Saturday, 19 April, 2 p.m.

  Joanna pulled up outside Brooklands Nursing Home. It was a large, Victorian house with a flat-roofed modern block built on to the back. She rang the bell.

  A plump, middle-aged woman answered and, responding to Joanna’s query, showed her into a room on the first floor and a woman sitting in a high-backed armchair. She looked up with alert blue eyes as Joanna introduced herself.

  ‘I wondered if you’d want to come and talk to me,’ she said crisply as the nursing assistant closed the door behind them and Joanna sat down opposite.

  Monica’s hands gripped the blanket that covered her knees. Her knuckles were lumpy and arthritic. ‘Bloody cheek, that’s what I call it.’

  ‘Take me through events,’ Joanna said. ‘When did you break your hip?’

  Monica laughed and touched her short straight iron grey hair. ‘February,’ she said. ‘Slipped on a patch of ice going to the privy. I was lucky I made it back to the house.’ Her sharp eyes bored through Joanna’s. ‘Crawled, I did. I’d have frozen otherwise. I wouldn’t have been found.’

  How long might she have laid there? It was the question she could not, should not ask. Monica answered it for her anyway.

  ‘Days,’ she said, ‘maybe weeks.’ She laughed, a dry, witch’s laugh. ‘Probably within the year.’

  ‘Did anyone ever come to visit you at the cottage? Who knew of the existence of your … toilet arrangements?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Monica said. ‘Hikers maybe, people passing and such like.’

  ‘Did you have visitors?’

  Her eyes were sharp as she responded with a shake of her head.

  ‘So you went to hospital?’

  Monica nodded.

  ‘And then—’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘You put the cottage up for sale and so …’

  Monica leaned forward. ‘Still call it a bloody cheek, dumping him in my private …’ Then, mercurial, she cackled. ‘Know how the cottage got its name?’

  Joanna spent the next half hour listening to the story of the Starving Crow.

  And then Monica told her another story – of a woman who had been out walking her neighbour’s dog and had asked if she could use the lavatory.

  ‘I felt embarrassed,’ she said, ‘but the woman didn’t seem to mind the rudimentary loo.’

  4 p.m

  Mike was ready for her when she arrived back in Leek, everything spread out on the table. ‘The child’s name,’ he said, ‘was Stephen Gorling. He was just four years old.’

  ‘What was he doing in Leek?’

  ‘Staying with an aunt who lived in Nab Hill Avenue while his mother had a weekend away with her new boyfriend. He saw a car outside and thought his mother had come back so he ran out into the road.’

  ‘I thought he went out after a football?’

  ‘That’s the story that was put around but that was initial conjecture. The reason that came out in the inquest was that he ran out thinking it was his mum. Stephen’s mother drove a large black Mitsubishi.’

  ‘
But, wait a minute, that wasn’t the car that hit him?’

  ‘No. It was the car behind the Mitsubishi but it was that, apparently, that was the reason he ran out into the road – or so his aunt said. He shouted, “Mum’s back.” Put that together with the fact that the accident happened on a Wednesday evening. But there was no mention of Glover.’

  She looked at Mike. ‘It seems a bit harsh to hold him responsible for the little chap’s death if he had nothing to do with it. He can’t help it that he drove the same car as the child’s mother.’

  ‘Well, those are the facts,’ Korpanski said. ‘It all happened on a Wednesday night which was his night for collecting money in that area. In those days, before Nab Hill Avenue was blocked off, he used to drive up the roads and park where he could. Of course, the new Sainsbury’s wasn’t complete then either. When Sainsbury’s opened up and simultaneously the council, in response to parents’ pressure groups, blocked off Nab Hill Avenue, making it into a dead end, he started parking in the supermarket and walking his round. It just made things easier for him. Had Glover not been skulking round the streets the little boy wouldn’t have been run over.’

  It was, at best, a tenuous connection but … ‘Who was the aunt?’

  ‘Erienna Delaney.’

  ‘Shall we head over there? Now.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  And so they funnelled back to Nab Hill Avenue.

  The street was dark and menacingly quiet as they entered. The terraced houses seemed to be holding their collective breath, waiting for the denouement. As they walked up the street nothing stirred except a small shivering of the cellophane wrapping around the flowers. Pink and yellow tulips today. Joanna took a look at Mike. She wasn’t an imaginative person but she felt spooked. Something here wasn’t right. Even Korpanski was looking around him, all his senses fully aware, his glance shifting from left to right with nervous, jerky movements. She drew in a deep breath and kept walking. One step at a time. She knew one aspect of this environment which was making her uncomfortable. After the noisy battle to get through the other streets, this one was eerily quiet. As they approached number eight the door flew open and Erienna Delaney was standing there. She must have been watching their approach. Her face was calm but hostile, her eyes wary. She stood back to let them enter her house without asking a single question or speaking a single word. The silence didn’t feel right. In fact, nothing felt right. Joanna was glad she had not come alone. There was something reassuring about Korpanski’s sheer bulk which practically filled the narrow hallway.