‘We could be.’
‘No, we couldn’t.’
‘Oh, come on, now. You’ve got this whole gruff I-don’t-care-what-I-look-like thing going on – some women go for that.’
Banecroft paused for a moment. ‘Yes, actually I meant in this car. Seeing how incredibly uncomfortable it is to sit in, I can’t imagine two individuals getting up to anything else. Given the available space, it would be a struggle for one individual to get up to anything else.’
Dr Carter gave Banecroft a playful slap on the shoulder. ‘Hehehehehe. You! I’ve decided I like you.’
‘I’m thrilled.’ Banecroft tried the door again.
‘So, we can’t spend all day flirting. We need to discuss the case.’
‘Oh, goody.’
Dr Carter pulled what she no doubt considered a serious face. ‘Here’s the thing: you can’t go anywhere near this investigation. You must let the police go about their business.’
‘We’re the press. Everyone else’s business is our business.’
Dr Carter ran a finger up and down the arm of Banecroft’s overcoat. ‘Oh, come now. You’re not that kind of press.’
He gave the lawyer his best glower.
‘Oh, look at Mr Grumpy Face.’
From the way Dr Carter pulled back, in what little room was available, perhaps even she realized that the cutesy pet name might have been a mistake.
‘I am the editor of a newspaper, and as long as that remains the case, we will not ignore the news. And this – whatever it is – has the smell of news about it.’
Dr Carter nodded. ‘I’m just saying that maybe there’s a combination of factors here – guilt, maybe wanting a little of your old life back – and you’re trying too hard to see something that isn’t there. A young man went up to the roof of a building alone and then … It’s a tragedy, certainly, but what it isn’t is a story.’
‘I decide what is and isn’t a story. To be clear, are you telling me to kill the story?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t put it in those exact terms, but—’
‘In that case, let me put my response in crystal-clear terms. I do not kill stories.’ Banecroft looked out the windscreen, watching the soft rain that had begun to fall. ‘I am the editor of this newspaper until Mrs Harnforth says otherwise. Until that time, I will run it as I see fit. Now open this damn door.’
Dr Carter sighed. ‘It’s not locked – you just need to push it then pull it.’
Banecroft did as she suggested and the door popped open. He awkwardly grabbed his crutch from the back seat – narrowly avoiding catching Dr Carter as he did so and risking a lawsuit from his own brief – and then he was out.
Dr Carter watched him half stomp, half hobble through the steadily building rain. She pressed a button on the car’s centre console to speed-dial a number. It was picked up on the second ring.
‘We may have a problem,’ she said. ‘Another problem.’
‘Thanks.’
Although she didn’t want it, Hannah accepted another mug of tea from Grace. The mood in the room hadn’t exactly improved, but the tension had at least eased somewhat. In the absence of anything else to do, Reggie had begun writing up his notes and Grace had given Stella some petty cash figures to put into a spreadsheet, a request that was met with only minimal grumbling.
Reggie sat down beside Hannah and spoke in a hushed voice. ‘I feel weird pointing this out but … well, we keep an eye on unusual deaths and all because … well, we do.’
‘Right,’ said Hannah, wondering where this was heading.
‘This – as in poor Simon – has happened before. That building – somebody …’ Reggie looked uncomfortable saying it. ‘Y’know …’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Someone jumped off it a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Oh,’ said Hannah, unsure what to make of that.
‘Yes, I don’t know if—’
Reggie was interrupted by a thumping noise coming from reception. The doors to the bullpen flew open and in clomped a soggy Banecroft.
‘Bloody Manchester with its shitty weather.’
‘One,’ said Grace, as if on autopilot.
‘God damn it, Grace – that was almost entirely a statement of fact.’
‘Two.’
Banecroft mumbled something under his breath, safely out of even Grace’s bat-like hearing range. Then he noticed the toilet on the spare desk. ‘Ah, excellent. First things first, I take it this is the demon loo of Falkirk?’
It was only then that Ox wheeled around from looking out the window. ‘Really?’ His voice seemed to chill the room; the edge to it was unmistakable. ‘That’s the first thing, is it? That’s the important thing we need to talk about? Some shitty toilet from shitty Falkirk we got for your shitty front page?’
‘Ox,’ said Grace, ‘do not—’
‘No, no,’ said Banecroft. ‘If he has something he feels he needs to say, let him say it.’
Ox took a few steps towards Banecroft. ‘If I have something I need to say? Me? You hypocritical son of a … I’m not the one who tortured that kid—’
Reggie got to his feet but Ox waved him away. ‘No, it needs saying. Leave off.’ He pointed an accusing finger at Banecroft. ‘You treat all of us like … Whatever. But that kid, he was a good lad.’ Ox held out his hands. ‘He was a good lad. He bloody loved this paper. It was his dream. This – this crappy, stupid paper – was his dream. And you took it away from him.’
Banecroft stopped, as if considering Ox’s words for a moment, and then spoke in a confident voice. ‘Crap.’
Reggie, Grace and Hannah all tried to stop him, but Ox charged at Banecroft, tackling him messily against the wall and sending them both tumbling to the ground.
Ox scrambled to his knees, his fist raised over the supine figure of Banecroft. Grace reached him first and grabbed his arm. Its momentum dragged her forward, causing her to trip over him and stumble clumsily to the floor.
Ox attempted to pull his hand free to get to Banecroft.
‘Ox Chen, stop it this instant!’ bellowed Reggie.
Hannah rushed over to check on Grace, who had banged her head on the way down.
Reggie stood between Ox and Banecroft. ‘Our friend is dead and this is no way to honour his memory. Get back on your feet immediately.’
Ox, his breath coming in ragged pants, glowered at Banecroft, but he stood up begrudgingly. The anger fell from his face as he looked at Grace. ‘Ah, jeez, Grace. I’m sorry, I—’
‘It is all right,’ she interrupted. ‘No harm done. Reginald, take him home. Stella, come on – we are going as well.’ Grace took Hannah’s hand and got to her feet.
Banecroft lay sprawled on the floor. He spoke in what, for him, was a relatively quiet voice. ‘We still have a paper to put out.’
‘And we will catch up tomorrow,’ said Grace, with more force than she perhaps intended. ‘Nothing is getting done tonight.’
Banecroft made as if to speak but, unusually for him, heeded a warning glance from his office manager and didn’t.
Hannah patted Grace’s arm. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘I am fine.’
‘I really am—’ started Ox.
‘Forget about it. If you like, you two can drop me and Stella home. I know it is only around the corner, but I forgot to bring an umbrella with me.’
‘Of course,’ said Reggie.
They grabbed their coats from the hooks on the wall and walked to reception in silence, while Banecroft remained on the floor.
Hannah offered him her hand but he waved her away. Instead, he raised his voice loud enough to be heard by the four figures making their way down the stairs.
‘Tomorrow, eight a.m. – editorial meeting!’
I Wax to Suck Your Blood
The proprietors of the Wacky World of Wax museum in Merthyr Tydfil have been left mystified by a series of bizarre attacks. Manager Glenys Davies, age undisclosed, said they first noticed something strange a few weeks ago.
> ‘We kept getting called out with the alarm going off, thinking we’d had a break-in – only nothing was ever taken. After a while, we thought it was a fault, only the alarm company said it never was. Then our Gareth noticed some damage to one of the waxworks. Margaret Thatcher had peculiar indentations on her neck that looked like they might be teeth marks. To be honest, she’s taken a lot of damage over the years – including an excrement-throwing incident that was very unpleasant. We laughed it off at first but then we found similar marks on the necks of Prince Harry, Tim Henman and Judi Dench. I mean, Judi Dench! Who doesn’t like her?’
While police struggled to come up with an explanation, local ‘paranormal investigator’ Rhodri Halverson was far less reticent. ‘Clearly what we’re dealing with is someone who is having vampiristic urges and who is trying to assuage them by biting waxworks. Y’know, like people try and give up smoking by sucking on one of them fake ciggies.’
Ms Davies for one thinks Halverson might be on to something. ‘It does seem like somebody is having a bite. They keep doing it too – we’d another break-in last week and this time it looks like they had a go on David Beckham. Whoever it was left Posh alone, which probably makes sense – there’d not be much eating in her.’
Staff have speculated that whoever the culprit is, they seem to be combining vampirism with Welsh nationalism as all of the waxworks attacked to date have been English.
CHAPTER 22
‘Large white wine, please.’
The blond barman gave her a wide, customer-service smile. ‘Sure. We’ve got Pinot Grigio—’
‘Yeah, anything.’
The smile fell a bit. ‘Right.’
DS Andrea Wilkerson had never drunk in here before; it wasn’t her kind of place. She generally didn’t go for Manchester’s swanky wine-bar circuit, preferring the kind of proper pubs coppers typically frequented. The reason she wasn’t in one of those establishments right now was because she really needed a drink and she was avoiding other coppers. It had been a properly crappy day and she did not want company. Still, this bar wasn’t exactly in her comfort zone; she’d bet good money it was one of those places that gave you your change on a little tray, so you looked like a tight-arse if you dared pick up the coins.
DI Sturgess had given her a proper bollocking. During her time on the murder squad, she’d worked mostly with DI Clarke and only occasionally with Sturgess. He wasn’t a barrel of laughs at the best of times, but this was the first time she’d really seen him go nuclear, and it hadn’t been pretty. To be fair, as much as she hated to admit it, he had not been wrong – she had made a pig’s ear of the Simon Brush thing. As Sturgess had told her, at a volume loud enough for half the station to hear, when an investigation was ongoing it was not her job to speculate to witnesses as to what had happened.
Fair enough, but with anybody else in charge of the investigation – bloke goes to the top of a tall building alone and comes down the quickest way imaginable – it would’ve been an open-and-shut case. The conclusion she’d come to wasn’t exactly a leap – no pun intended. DI Clarke would’ve rubber-stamped it and taken an early lunch. That was bad enough. For the witness she had been sent to collect to do a bunk out a window and then turn up in the middle of the crime scene – that had been a lot worse.
The blond and his grin came back with her large wine. ‘Here we go.’
Wilkerson started to fish in her coat pocket for her purse.
‘You can settle up now, or start a tab if you like?’
She looked at the wine and then back up at the pretty-boy grin. ‘Tab, please.’
He turned the wattage of the smile up another notch. ‘No problem. Wine o’clock, is it?’
God, she really hated people who said ‘wine o’clock’.
She took a drink and looked down at her phone. When she raised her head again, the grin had taken the hint and gone back to the other end of the bar where it was busier and, presumably, there was a more receptive audience for his flirty little act. He wasn’t her type. Not for a minute did she think she was his either. He was just flashing those baby blues at any woman who walked in, in the hope of scoring some tips.
Wilkerson tended to go for men who didn’t take longer than her to get ready and who were also quite good at leaving quickly once they were. She preferred her own company most of the time, which was why she’d made the error of hooking up with married men in the past. That phase was over. Once you’d opened the door to your flat on a Sunday morning to a wronged woman and her two snotty-faced kids, whatever misplaced thrill there’d been soon turned sour.
She took another large sip of her wine. One of the main reasons she was avoiding the usual coppers’ pubs was that news of Sturgess’s latest meltdown would no doubt have got around, and there would be a queue of sympathetic souls eager to slag him off. He was not a popular man. Most everybody considered him to have serious tickets on himself, thinking he was too good to rub shoulders with the rank and file.
The thing was, he was right. Wilkerson was extremely unimpressed by a lot of what she’d witnessed since she’d joined the force. And when she’d made detective, she’d been further disappointed that the sloppiness and stupidity she had seen while in uniform were still evident further up the chain. It was by no means universal, but there were still a lot of people like DI Clarke who were happy to simply follow the path of least resistance. Sturgess was a perfectionist, and while that made him unpopular, it didn’t make him wrong.
Coppers often dealt with people who were having the worst days of their lives. That deserved somebody’s best, not just, ‘Yeah, it’s everywhere. These things almost never get solved. Please fill out this form saying we turned up.’ On the rare occasions she’d been assigned to Sturgess, Wilkerson had pretended to be disappointed, but in reality she had been delighted. She wanted to be the best. And, besides, whether giving orders or a bollocking, at least Sturgess managed to do so while looking her in the eyes, as opposed to other senior officers, whose gazes tended to drift a bit further south.
‘Hi there.’
Wilkerson looked up to see a Danny DeVito lookalike, complete with the Yank accent, hopping on to the stool beside her.
Oh great. She nodded and took another drink.
‘So, what’s good here?’
She shrugged. ‘I dunno. Never been here before.’
‘Me neither. I’ve only recently arrived in Manchester.’
‘Great. Look, no offence, but I’ve had a hell of a day and I just fancy a quiet drink.’
He nodded and touched his index finger to his nose. ‘Gotcha. Say no more.’ He mimed locking his lips and throwing away the key.
‘Thanks. Sorry.’
The grin turned up and the newcomer ordered a Jack Daniel’s and Coke, which arrived promptly. He gave a big tip. Maybe he was hoping to bang the barman.
He took a sip of his drink. ‘So, what do you do?’
Wilkerson gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Really? You thought you’d try again?’
‘Hey’ – he gave her a wide smile – ‘I’m very engaging company when you get to know me.’
‘Let me save you some time, fella. I’m never ever, ever going to sleep with you. I know you probably figured coming over to merry old England with your Yankee Doodle accent would make you somehow exotic or exciting and you’d suddenly be catnip for the ladies, well, I’m afraid not. We’ve got annoying little short-arsed slapheads over here already – we don’t need to import them.’
Not that she’d been thinking this far ahead, but she would have expected him to be either embarrassed or angry. Instead, he just kept on smiling at her.
‘Relax, I’m not trying to sleep with you.’
‘Good to know.’
‘I mean, I could if I wanted to.’
Wilkerson gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I really doubt that.’
He took a sip of his drink while casually glancing around the bar. ‘If I wanted to, you’d have no choice.’
Wilkerson’s eyes wide
ned and her voice came out as an irate hiss. ‘What did you just say?’
‘You heard me.’
She shoved her hand into her pocket, pulled out her wallet and flipped it open to her police ID card. ‘Say it again.’
He reached his hand inside his own pocket and pulled out a gold coin. As he spoke, he twirled it between his index finger and thumb, showing a bird on one side and an upside-down pyramid on the other. ‘I know you’re a police officer. In fact, I followed you here from the station.’ He dropped the coin and let it dangle from a silver chain. ‘You see, we need to talk.’
Wilkerson was possessed by the strong urge to punch this arsehole in the face. ‘Stalking a police officer? Are you out of your tiny mind?’
With a twist of his wrist he started the coin spinning. ‘Almost certainly, but not in the way you imagine. But first, this works better when you’re emotional. So you need to focus all that anger here …’
Moretti watched Wilkerson’s eyes as they focused on the coin. Then he saw the tell-tale sag in the eyelids and he knew he was in. He stopped the coin spinning and quickly slipped it back inside his pocket. He surreptitiously glanced around the bar again and noticed the concerned expression on the barman’s face as he watched from the far end.
‘OK,’ he said to Wilkerson, ‘now you need to give me a big, warm smile.’
She did.
‘Throw in a hearty laugh …’
She did.
From the corner of his eye, Moretti saw the barman relax and rejoin the conversation he’d been having.
‘That’s right. I’m a funny, funny guy.’
‘You’re a funny, funny guy,’ Wilkerson repeated.
‘And for the record, I could have you do anything I wanted you to, but I have neither the time nor the energy. In fifteen minutes, you will walk out of here and all you will remember is having a quiet drink all on your own. But before that, you’re going to tell me everything about your investigation into the body in Castlefield and the guy who jumped off the building.’ Moretti took another sip of his drink. ‘Because, sweetheart, you ain’t never met a short-arsed slaphead quite like me.’
The Stranger Times Page 16
