by Bill Rogers
Chapter 33
‘Levi can’t do that,’ said Max when Jo arrived back at their base on The Quays. ‘Harry won’t let him.’
‘Harry who?’ said Ram. ‘The Boss has gone AWOL.’
‘I’ve sent him loads of emails and texts,’ said Jo, ‘and left several voice messages on his phone. I’m concerned that something serious has happened.’
‘There’s nothing more any of us can do,’ said Max. ‘I vote we just crack on.’
‘Where you up to?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been collating the latest data Central Park have sent over, and Ram has been feeding it into the investigative analysis software, and the geographical analysis machine.’
‘With any luck,’ said Ram, ‘it may help us predict where the next attack might come, and direct the resources to prevent it.’
‘And has it?’ she asked.
‘Early days,’ he replied. ‘But if I had to stick my neck out I’d say that the indications are that if he is going to attack again it’s going to be in South, or East, Manchester. That’s where the geolocation data is veering. Having said which, I think any of us would have been thinking that simply on the basis that he started out to the west of the GMP area, and has been moving steadily eastwards.’
‘Except that the most recent victim was just off the northern inner ring road,’ she pointed out.
‘Which is why,’ Max said, ‘everywhere inside the ring road has been flooded with uniformed and plain-clothes officers. The investigative analysis has taken that into account.’
Jo sighed. ‘Let’s hope that the software knows more about his risk aversion than we do.’
She slid off the desk and stretched. ‘I’d better give Gordon a ring and let him know.’
‘I’m glad I wasn’t there,’ Gordon said once she’d told him about the press conference. He sounded exhausted.
‘Don’t worry, Gordon,’ Jo said. ‘We are going to get him. It’s only a matter of time before he slips up. They all do – you know that.’
‘Well, I wish he’d get on with it. After today I reckon my time as SIO is running out.’
‘You don’t think Gates will take over Firethorn?’
‘She’s too wily for that. She’ll parachute in a chief superintendent, and let him take the flak.’
He paused. She imagined him rubbing his chin again. ‘You just caught me,’ he said.
‘Why? Where are you going?’
‘You do realise that you and I have worked seven days without a break? Three of them with little or no sleep?’
‘Tell me about it,’ she replied. ‘I’m using matchsticks to keep my eyes open.’
‘There you are then. I’m heading home, and not coming back in until tomorrow night. There will be plenty of foot soldiers out there tonight, and with all the press attention I reckon the unsub would be mad to go anywhere near any of the city’s red-light districts.’
‘There’s only one problem with that.’
‘Go on.’
‘He is mad.’
‘So will I be if I don’t get some sleep. Nick’s going to take over today, and I’ve told him to take Sunday night and Monday off. Besides, if I don’t it’s either this or have Marilyn filing for divorce.’
‘Again?’ she joked.
‘That’s not funny, Jo. Too close to the truth.’
And too late for me, Jo realised. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘Forget it. I suggest you go home too. Max as well. The last time I saw, you both looked like death warmed up.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Gordon said. ‘Now go home.’
She had no sooner come off the phone than Harry called. He sounded worse than Gordon.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,’ he said. ‘I did tell you about my daughter, didn’t I?’
Jo recalled how his daughter’s mental health had led him to recuse himself from Operation Juniper. He had not mentioned it since, but they could all tell it still hung over him.
‘Yes, Harry, you did.’
‘She’s had a relapse. I’ve had her admitted to a secure unit in the psychiatric ward. She still hasn’t come to terms with losing her mother.’ He paused. ‘They think she stopped taking her medication. I blame myself. I wasn’t there to check on her.’
‘I’m so sorry, Harry.’
‘It’ll only be for a week, the doctors said. Once she is stabilised, she can come home.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ Jo told him. ‘You concentrate on getting her well.’
‘There is some good news,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve been given the opportunity to relocate north. I’ll bring her with me. It’ll be a fresh start for both of us. I’ll be able to spend more time with her, plus I won’t be worn down by the endless commuting, and I’ll be able to get over to The Quays as often as needed.’
‘I’ll look forward to that,’ said Jo. ‘And to meeting your daughter.’
‘You’ll like her,’ Harry said. ‘And I know she’d love to meet you.’
‘Look after yourself, Harry,’ she said.
‘And don’t you worry,’ he told her. ‘I’ll see to Simon Levi. He’s all mouth and no trousers. By the time I’ve finished with him, he won’t come within a hundred miles of The Quays.’
Chapter 34
It was two in the afternoon when Jo got back to the apartment. She kicked off her shoes, and lay on the bed.
When she woke up, it was ten to seven in the evening. She splashed her face and went to see what she had in the fridge. Not having done a shop for over a week, she discovered it was almost bare. She found the remains of a block of cheese, and paired it with a hunk of half-stale bread. Then she opened a bottle of wine.
Seated in front of the TV, she sipped her wine as she flicked through the TV channels hoping to find something distracting. Line of Duty, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles. Cop shows were the last thing she needed right now. She plumped instead for Great Canal Journeys, and began to eat.
It was hopeless. She was unable to shake off the thought of women walking the streets tonight, the unsub lurking in the shadows waiting for his next victim. Here she sat in her nice cosy apartment with a glass of red, watching a narrow boat chug along an idyllic stretch of British countryside. She drained her glass, put the bottle with the others waiting to go in the bin, grabbed her jacket and car keys, and fled the apartment.
If anything, there were even more bodies in and around the streets off Piccadilly station than in the immediate aftermath of the discovery of Mandy Madden’s body. She counted less than a handful of sex workers, outnumbered ten to one by freelance photographers, reporters, and plain-clothes police. In fifteen minutes down here she hadn’t seen a single punter foolish enough to expose himself – not in the literal sense – and had only been challenged herself on one occasion, by a pair of police community support officers looking to relieve their boredom. She decided to try Cheetham Hill.
The story was the same here. After five minutes of aimlessly criss-crossing the district, she gave up, and headed two miles south-west of the city centre.
She had just passed the junction of Alexandra Road with Yarburgh Street and Claremont Road, where Alexandra Park marked the boundary between Moss Side and Whalley Range, when she spotted Max standing talking to a specialist firearms officer armed with what looked like a Heckler & Koch semi-automatic carbine. They were on the pavement beside the railings of Alexandra Park. Max’s car was parked behind an Xcalibre armed response car, and a blue-and-white Challenger van. Jo pulled in behind them.
The firearms officer spotted her first, and nodded in her direction. Max turned.
‘Great minds,’ he said.
‘I couldn’t just sit there twiddling my thumbs,’ she said. ‘I drove around Ardwick and Cheetham first, but it’s like the circus is in town. I was hoping our unsub might try his luck down here, where it was likely to be quiet. I was obviously wrong.’
‘This has nothing to do with Firethorn,’ said M
ax. ‘It’s a joint Xcalibre and Challenger operation. Part training exercise, part show of force.’
‘We have intel that the Moss Side Bloods and the Longsight Crips are planning to face off against each other,’ the firearms officer told her. ‘This is our way of letting them know we’re not going to tolerate another turf war. No way are we going to let them take us back to 2007 or the 1990s.’
‘Your presence has certainly deterred the punters,’ said Max.
‘Still a few toms around though,’ the SFO observed. ‘One of them was desperate enough to proposition me ten minutes ago.’
‘They have to be desperate to do it at all,’ said Jo. ‘More so now with a killer roaming the streets.’
The firearms officer slapped the stock of his gun. ‘Just let him try on my watch.’
‘How long are you going to be here?’ she asked.
‘Your guess is as good as mine. Till the early hours of the morning here and hereabouts, so long as nothing kicks off in the meantime. There’s a debrief and disarm at 6am, and the promise of bacon butties. Won’t be missing that.’
‘Sounds like our cue to leave, Jo,’ said Max. ‘God knows what we were thinking coming back out here tonight.’
‘That’s the trouble with living on your own,’ she said as they made their way back to their respective cars. ‘Anything’s better than hours of aimless TV channel hopping.’
Max walked around the bonnet of his car, and paused, one hand on the roof, the other on the door handle.
‘It’s not just that,’ he said. ‘It’s having nothing else to worry about. No one there to remind you that there’s more to life than what we do. To point out that if some crazy bastard were to come running out of that park behind you, and blast us both to kingdom come, there’d be others stepping into our shoes before Flatman has started the post-mortems.’
He pulled the door open, and grinned apologetically.
‘On that cheerful note I’ll bid you adieu. Let’s go get some sleep.’
Jo closed the door of her apartment, and stood with her back against it. She knew that what she had done tonight had been irrational. Compulsive obsessive, Abbie had called it. She had never understood how she could walk away from a critically ill patient every night knowing someone else equally competent was going to take over, and yet Jo couldn’t do the same when the threat was so much less tangible, and the next victim as yet unknown.
We both save lives, she’d said. So what’s so different about your job? Jo had never managed to find an answer to that. She still couldn’t.
She walked into the lounge, picked up the bottle, and her glass, walked into the bedroom, and kicked the door closed behind her. Twenty minutes later the bottle was empty, and Jo was dead to the world.
Chapter 35
SUNDAY, 14TH MAY
‘This is a lovely surprise, Joanne,’ said her mother. ‘And on my birthday too! Leave your umbrella out there in the porch, and come in and give me your coat.’ She shouted up the stairs, ‘Dad! Get off that computer. Joanne is here.’
Jo handed her mum the bottle of wine, and the bunch of flowers she’d picked up from the Tesco Express on the corner, and shrugged off her coat.
‘Ooh, Cotes Du Rhone!’ her mum declared. ‘Your dad’s favourite. It’ll go perfectly with the roast. However did you guess?’
Jo smiled.
‘Because it’s what you’ve cooked every Sunday lunch since I can remember.’
‘Not on Christmas Day. Never on Christmas Day. You go through. I’ll put these flowers in a vase.’
Before she’d had a chance to sit down, her dad appeared, filling the room with his presence. A big man with a big heart.
‘How’s my Jo-Jo?’ he said, bending to give her a hug.
‘Now, Jack,’ said her mother from the doorway, ‘you know how she hates being called Jo-Jo. She’s a big girl now.’
Jo smiled. ‘And how many times have I told you that I’m not keen on Joanne either, Mum? But you’re never going to stop calling me that.’ She sat on the sofa and waited for her dad to settle himself into his favourite high-backed armchair. ‘We saw you on the TV,’ he said. ‘That’s a wicked thing this man is doing. Those poor girls. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But it’s wonderful what you’re doing, Jo-Jo. Stopping people like that. We’re very proud of you, you know? Your mother and I.’
‘I know, Dad.’
‘You should be more careful though. You always seem to get into the most terrible scrapes.’
‘She was like that as a child, Jack,’ her mother reminded him. ‘Do you remember? We were always at the doctor’s or accident and emergency. Forever falling out of trees she was, and jumping off shed roofs. Do you remember that time she tried to do a wheelie on her bike around the children’s playground and ended up falling backwards on to the kids’ roundabout while it was whizzing round? An accident waiting to happen, Dr Gladstone called her.’
This is what I miss, Jo reflected. The easy familiarity. The unconditional love.
It continued throughout lunch. Her mum wittered on about people that Jo had either never met or only vaguely remembered. Dad tucked into his roast beef, roast potatoes, and two veg with a gusto undiminished by the years. Jo sipped her wine, and reflected on how lucky she had been.
Jack and May Stuart were not her real parents. It was something she had never told any of her work colleagues, not even Caton. Which was odd really, given he had lost his own parents at an early age, and had been brought up by an aunt. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of the fact, rather that to have done so would have meant having to talk about what came before. BS was how she had always thought of that time. Before the Stuarts.
For years – right up to her eighteenth birthday – the story of how she came to be with May and Jack had been hazy and fragmented. She had built it together from what a succession of social workers had told her. Distant episodic memories, and stories she had constructed, to comfort herself. Only when she was given a copy of her case file did it all fall into place. Her parents hadn’t been married when her mother, Jodie, became pregnant. She was fifteen and a half. Jodie’s parents were staunch Christians. The kind that were bigger on mortal sin than on the Beatitudes. Proper Old Testament Christians for whom the Sermon on the Mount was meant for other people.
It didn’t help that the father was ten years older than Jodie, feckless, and already married. Arrangements were swiftly made. As soon as the child began to show, Jodie was sent away to her grandmother’s, in Hull. When the child was born, it would be put up for adoption. Jodie would return home. No more would be said about it.
Except that Jodie got off the train in Leeds and chanced upon a squat populated by would-be hippies who saw themselves as a reincarnation of the flower power revolution. They survived on begging, busking, and charitable handouts. While Jodie was in hospital giving birth, the squat was raided, and the occupants dispersed. It was a difficult birth for mother and baby. By the time Jodie was due to leave hospital, there was nowhere for her to go. She was sixteen years and two months old. Through the efforts of the hospital social worker, she was placed in a mother-and-baby home. At seventeen she was told she had to move out. Move on.
In less than a year poor Jodie’s life had begun to unravel. How she ended up addicted to heroin was unclear. The outcome was not. She died of an overdose, in another squat in a disused warehouse in Oldham, as her daughter lay hungry and shivering in a cot bed just feet away. The coroner declared an open verdict. Jodie’s parents were traced, and given the opportunity to raise their granddaughter Joanne. They declined.
Foster parents were found while the adoption was pursued. The first couple to come forward had reached the final stages when the husband admitted his heart was not in it. He had been going along with it, he said, for the sake of his wife. The adoption attempt failed, as presumably did their marriage. The second couple pulled out at the eleventh hour when the wife discovered she was pregnant after seven years of trying.
By this ti
me little Joanne was three years old. Her then foster parents, Jack and May Stuart, decided she had been through enough, and applied to adopt her themselves. They were the only parents she had ever known. They would be forever Mum and Dad.
Jo could recall only two occasions when their perfect relationship as a family had been clouded. The first was when she had sat them down, and told them she was gay. It was only in hindsight that she had come to realise that their evident disappointment, despite their brave attempts to hide it, was nothing to do with generational homophobia. May had longed for a traditional wedding, and to become a doting grandparent. Jack had been looking forward to walking her down the aisle, and proudly delivering the father-of-the-bride speech. And taking his grandson to watch Stockport County. But their love for Jo quickly swamped their feelings of regret at what might have been taken. They even took Abbie into their hearts. And so Jo had disappointed them a second time when she and Abbie split up, and renewed hopes of grandchildren had been dashed. Yet here they were, their affection for her undiminished. I am, she reflected, truly fortunate.
Two hours later and Jack and May stood on the doorstep, arms around each other’s waist. Jo gave them a final wave, and set off. I should do this more often, she told herself. Why the hell don’t I? Is it because the novelty would soon wear off?
But then, supposedly absence made the heart grow fonder. The thought of Abbie marching out of their apartment shortly before Christmas flashed across her mind.
‘Not always,’ she decided. ‘Not this time.’
Chapter 36
MONDAY, 15TH MAY
1.47AM
Yesterday he had been consumed, as he was every time he was reminded of his mother, with anger, regret, revulsion, and an overwhelming sense of loss. There was, he knew, only one thing that would release this pressure cooker of conflicting emotions. So here he was, and he could not believe his luck.
The target for his hunt this evening had been the Coldhurst red-light district, but the Metro News had headlined another Operation Derwent attempt to rid the Westwood streets of prostitutes for once and for all. And so he had headed here, three miles further north, to Richmond Street, hard by the Metrolink station.
