by Neil White
‘They always managed to find the money somehow,’ she said, and then asked, ‘How are things looking with the abductions?’
He shook his head. ‘I only know what I read in the papers.’
Laura sighed and thought about her own son. Bobby would be out of bed by now, wondering where she was. He was four years old, in a strange town and a new school, a long way from his real father. It wasn’t meant to have turned out like this. She had moved north to be with the man she had fallen in love with, Jack Garrett, a Lancashire journalist. But she was the one who was supposed to be with her son, not Jack.
However, she understood the pressures. The abductions had just started to break into the national news. Children had been going missing all summer, snatched in the street, usually benefits kids, unwatched and out too late. They disappeared for a week, sometimes longer, and then reappeared, seemingly unharmed, but with no idea about where they’d been.
‘What’s your theory?’ she asked.
Pete shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Could be a woman. You know, the kids are looked after and then given up again, some nurturing instinct satisfied.’ He smiled. ‘They’d never ask me anyway.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve spoken my mind too often.’
‘What about this?’ asked Laura, nodding towards the house.
At that, he exhaled. ‘I don’t know. Some psycho is the obvious guess, but there is one thing.’
‘Go on.’
‘The victim knew him. There was no break-in, no sign of a struggle anywhere else in the house. No-one reported it in until the old guy made the call.’
Laura knew there was some sense in what he said. This was no domestic, or a burglary gone wrong. It was a sadistic execution. A young woman, small, frail and barely twenty-five years old, had been strapped to a chair and strangled with a cord. There were no signs of a fight, and no evidence of sexual assault. There was just a chair in the middle of the room, a dining-room chair with strong wooden legs, and she was strapped into it, her wrists tightly bound with thin nylon rope.
But that wasn’t what had struck Laura when she first went in there. It was something else, the sight that had caused the young probationary officer to spend the next hour sitting outside, gulping lungfuls of fresh air in between heaving.
Whoever had killed this young woman had ripped out her tongue and gouged out her eyes.
Laura had just about managed to hold onto her hurriedly-eaten breakfast, and then she had turned to examine the rest of the scene.
There had been no other injuries. No defensive wounds to the hands, no ripped clothing. But then Laura spotted the marks ringed around her neck, as if the cord had been pulled many times over. It hadn’t been a quick kill. It had been dragged out, made to last.
Laura took a deep breath and shuddered slightly as the image came back to her. She turned to Pete and asked, ‘What did you make of Randle?’ The police had been called by an old man, William Randle. He said he was a friend of the dead girl.
Pete stroked his cheeks thoughtfully. ‘Hard to say. He didn’t look the sort, if there is such a thing, and there was no blood on him. But it’s all a bit too neat for me.’
Laura was about to ask something else when she heard a car drive into the cul-de-sac. It pulled up in front of the house, and she watched as a small man in a neat suit climbed out.
‘Oh great,’ Pete muttered, ‘now it’s all going to turn to shit.’
As she watched the figure walk towards the house, Laura sensed he was right.
Sunrise made even Blackley look pretty.
Sam Nixon liked to walk into work, along a canal towpath overgrown with long Pennine grasses, where ripples in the water twinkled like starbursts as they caught the early morning sun. He went past old wharf buildings, those three-storey stone blocks with large wooden canopies hanging over the water, all of them painted an incongruous robin’s-egg blue, waiting for the bales that no longer came. There were no cars at that time of the morning, and all he could hear were the sounds of a new day, the whistles of the morning birds as they swooped from roof to roof, or the rustle of leaves and litter as they blew along the towpath. The day felt fresh, the humidity of the previous few days cleared by overnight rain.
It was Sam’s favourite part of the day. The sun reflected off the slate roofs of the red-brick terraces that dotted the hills surrounding the town centre, steep and tight, the lines broken only by the domes and minarets of the local mosques. Their luscious greens and coppers were bright dots of colour in a drab Victorian grid.
Beyond that, Sam could see a cluster of tower blocks that overlooked the town centre, bruises of the sixties, dingy and grey, where the lifts reeked of piss and worse, and the landings were scattered with syringes. They had views to the edges of town, but everything looked bleak and wet from up there, even in June.
Sam was a lawyer, and his office was in the middle of a line of Victorian bay fronts, with stone pillars in each doorway and gold leaf lettering on the windows, legacies of Blackley’s cotton-producing heyday. The town used to rumble with the sounds of clogs and mills, and the mill-owners’ money would end up in the pockets of the lawyers and accountants who spread themselves along this street. Blackley’s life as a Lancashire cotton town had ended a couple of decades earlier, but it was marked by its past like an old soldier by his tattoos. The factories and mill buildings which lined the canal were either derelict or had been converted into offices, the empty ones now stripped of their pipes and cables by burglars who traded them in for scrap, left to rot with broken windows and paint-splattered walls. Those that were bulldozed away were replaced by housing estates and retail parks.
Sam knew that’s why he preferred Blackley in the morning, when the day still had some promise. He was a criminal lawyer, so as soon as he hit the office his day would be taken up by deadbeats, drunks, junkies and lowlifes, a daily trudge through the town’s debris. Criminal law was budget law, the most work for the least reward, so he had to put in long hours to help keep the firm afloat. He started early and finished late, with his day spent fighting hopeless causes in hostile courts, and most evenings wrecked by call-outs to the police station.
But Sam thrived on it. He enjoyed the dirt, the grime, and knew that sometimes he was the one helping hand that kept some people from falling through the cracks completely. A social service. A legal service. Sometimes both.
Sam never ducked the dinner party question. How could he do it, watch child abusers and murderers go free? He gave the same honest reply each time, that everyone deserved a voice. How can a man be condemned until he has had his chance to speak?
It was more than just a question of justice though. Sam also enjoyed the human drama, the touches of court theatre, the fact that someone’s life could be changed in an instant. Just the right phrase or the right question, maybe just a look, could mean guilty or not guilty, jail or no jail. His profession seemed relevant, important.
He jingled the change in his pocket as he walked, and waved to Karim at the newsagent as he turned off the towpath. He didn’t need to visit the shop to know the headlines. It had been the same story for months: the child abductions across Lancashire, the fortnightly images of a distraught family, begging for information. They would reunite, but then the story would start all over again with a different child.
Every time he read about the case, Sam did the same thing: he hugged his own two boys a little bit tighter. Eight and five, big men in their own worlds, but when he held them, they felt tiny, brittle, vulnerable. But he knew he didn’t hug them enough. He was always at work.
But today, the abductions were on his mind for a different reason. So many police officers were being assigned to the investigation that the bread and butter work was drying up. Old DNA hits on burglaries and car break-ins weren’t being chased, and there hadn’t been a big drugs arrest for months. The margins are tight in criminal law, and Sam knew that the firm had taken a hit over the summer. He needed someone to be caught.
>
Despite this, he was whistling when he turned into his street, enjoying the final few minutes of relaxation before he arrived at a vast pile of paperwork. But then he saw him.
There was a man outside his office, about fifty yards ahead. He looked old, Sam could tell that from his stoop, and he was shabbily-dressed, his clothes hanging loose from his body. Sam felt himself becoming uneasy at the way the old man watched him, hands clutched to his sides, his unblinking eyes fixed straight on him.
It seemed as if the man was not just observing him - it looked like he was waiting for him.
Sam slowed down his walk and watched the stranger carefully. It was easy to be big in the courtroom, protected by respect and court rules. This was a world away from all that, just the two of them alone in a narrow Lancashire street. He sensed the old man looking at him, felt him watch every step as he got closer to his office. He was on the other side of the street but Sam felt like he was being tracked. He checked his pocket for his phone, could feel himself getting nervous, ready to call the police if a knife appeared. Defence lawyers piss people off. Victims, witnesses, sometimes just the moral majority.
As Sam got closer to him, he tried to check the man’s reaction. There wasn’t one. The old man just stared at Sam, his face expressionless.
Sam bounded up the office steps, his breathing ragged, and fumbled with his keys. As he opened the door, he turned round. The old man hadn’t moved. He was still watching him.
Sam made a mental note of the time and turned to go inside.
‘Who is he?’ asked Laura, watching the stranger as he approached them.
‘DI Egan,’ said Pete, his voice low. ‘David Egan. We call him David Ego. You’ll soon find out why.’
Laura looked at Pete, not sure if he was joking, but as Egan walked towards them, she sensed what he meant. He was jogger-trim, his nose tight and hooked, hair bottle-dark and cut just a tad too neatly, not a hair out of place. His white shirt was bright and crisp, all the better to emphasise his suntan, which seemed more salon than sunshine.
‘I’m starting to get the picture,’ she said.
Pete smiled. ‘He’s going to be pissed off about this.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the last time I saw him,’ he said, ‘he was at one of the press conferences for the abducted children, preening himself. There isn’t much airtime in this case, and he’ll want to get in and out quickly.’
‘If he’s involved in the abduction cases, why doesn’t he stick with those?’
Pete looked at Laura and said under his breath, ‘I suspect it wasn’t his choice.’
DI Egan looked around, taking in the scene. He almost stepped on Laura’s toes before he noticed her. She noticed his quick appraisal, his eyes flicking over her body, ending at the ring-finger. There were no rings there, not now her divorce had been finalised. Lesbian or prey, in his eyes she could see that she was either one or the other.
He spent too long looking at the identification she had hanging around her neck and then asked, ‘So what do we have, Laura?’ He looked away before she had chance to answer, so she ended up talking to the back of his head.
‘It looks like she died from strangulation, sir, but it wasn’t quick,’ she said, trying to hide the fatigue in her voice. The early start was catching up with her.
Egan started to show interest. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw her neck before the doctor arrived, and there were a lot of marks, as if she had been strangled over and over.’
‘What, you mean sex games? You know, strangle, release, strangle, release?’
Laura thought she saw a twinkle of excitement in his eyes. ‘Can’t say I do,’ she replied, weary of cops who see the quick thrill in everything. ‘She died in her clothes. If it was kinky, it was shy kinky.’
Egan pursed his lips and looked away. He hadn’t offered much yet.
‘And there was something else.’
Egan turned back, his eyebrows raised. ‘Go on.’
Laura glanced at Pete, and then said, ‘She’s missing her eyes and tongue.’
‘What do you mean, “missing her eyes and tongue”?’
‘Just that. She’s been tied to a chair, and her eyes and tongue have been cut out.’
Laura heard him mutter ‘Shit’ and then watched as he began to chew at his lip. She sensed that he had just seen this investigation stretching a long way into the future.
‘I bet you could do without this,’ said Pete to Egan, as he raised his eyebrows at Laura. ‘With all the abductions, I mean.’ Laura sensed the barbs.
Egan’s top lip twitched.
Laura looked down and tried not to smirk. She had figured out that Egan’s eyes were on the career ladder, she had seen his type before. Delegate everything and then take all the credit. Look pert and enthusiastic in strategy meetings and then ditch the work onto others. She realised now why Pete hadn’t climbed very far himself.
‘Is it drugs?’ asked Egan, looking around, trying to change the subject. ‘Some kind of revenge attack?’
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ she said, guessing the answer. Laura was new to Blackley, but she knew enough that this wasn’t a drug neighbourhood. It was full of new-build townhouses, all shiny red bricks, narrow paths, and neat double glazing, brightened up with cottage fascias and potted plants. It was a first-time buyer estate. Drug dealers stay low until they can move really high. It’s all about the quick pound, not the stepping stones. ‘I checked with Intel half an hour ago, and she’s not on our radar. Just a nice, quiet girl, so the neighbours say.’
‘How was she discovered?’
Laura and Pete exchanged glances before she said, ‘The call came around four this morning. Some old boy, William Randle, said he went round to check on her. He found her tied to a chair, dead.’
‘Went round to check, at four in the morning?’
‘That’s what I thought.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Said he’d had a dream.’
Egan smiled, almost in relief. ‘This sounds like a quick one.’
Laura sensed his thoughts: he wanted to be off this and back on the abductions.
‘Maybe quick, maybe not,’ she said. ‘I saw the body, and I saw him, and he doesn’t seem a likely. But he only has an alibi until midnight, not afterwards.’ Laura thought back to the meeting she’d had with the old man. He hadn’t spoken much, seemed in shock, like he just wanted to get away.
‘So is he suspect or witness?’ asked Egan, watching her carefully.
‘Suspect. Everyone is this early into it.’
‘So are you going to arrest him?’
Laura noticed the tone of Egan’s voice, slow and deliberate, making sure it was her decision. He would stand by her as soon as it looked like she had got it right.
She paused for a moment, thought about what they had in the way of evidence. Even though the old man had been visibly upset, all the time he’d been talking Laura had been surreptitiously checking his face, neck and hands for wounds or scratch-marks from the victim. She couldn’t see anything. He’d agreed to a DNA swab, for elimination purposes she’d told him, and his fingernails had been clipped and taken away, but nothing in her instincts told her that he was the killer.
‘No,’ she said, after a moment. ‘He’s a suspect, but no more than that.’
Egan nodded, a thin smile on his lips, and then headed up the path towards the front door.
‘Crime scenes are still in there,’ she shouted.
Egan stopped, looked back at her. Laura thought he looked irritated, as if she had somehow insulted him. Before he had a chance to speak, a uniformed officer appeared at her shoulder.
‘We’ve got a neighbour who says she heard something last night.’
Egan looked over, suddenly interested, and then rushed back down the path towards them.
‘Who is it?’
The uniform pointed behind him to a house a few doors away, at the edge of the cul-de-sac. On the doorstep stood a woman in her fifties, w
rapped in a quilted dressing-gown, her hair messy and eyes bright with fear.
‘What’s she got?’ Egan was barking the questions, sounding impatient.
‘She says she heard a car leave very late, just after midnight. There’d been a car outside, a nice one, Audi TT, navy blue. When it left, it screeched away.’
‘Did she get the number?’
The uniform held up a scrap of paper. ‘Not last night, but she did this morning when she saw the police arrive. She remembered it because it was one of those personalised ones.’
Egan looked down at the piece of paper and looked pleased. ‘We need to do a vehicle check on this.’
The uniform smiled. ‘Already done it.’
Egan pursed his lips a couple of times, like a nervous tic, and then asked, ‘Who’s the keeper?’
‘Someone called Simon Hampson.’
‘Is he known to us?’
‘His father is.’
‘Go on.’ Egan was sounding impatient again.
‘He’s the local MP, Greg Hampson.’
Egan looked like he’d been slapped. Everyone had heard of Greg Hampson. Home Office minister, and tipped to be the next Home Secretary.
Laura sighed. This was about to get sensitive. Then she noticed that Egan was beginning to pace, looking deep in thought. She sensed that she was about to get busier.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all those people who have offered advice and encouragement during the writing of Fallen Idols, and also all the family and friends who supported me in my earlier writing ventures. The staff at the Crown Prosecution Service in Burnley and at the Magistrates’ Court in Blackburn deserve a particular mention, as do the members of the Colne Writers’ Circle. Writing can be lonely, and sometimes a writer needs to hear the encouragement in order to keep going. Many people did just that. I know who you are, and I will always be grateful to you.
In particular, I would like to thank my agent, Sonia Land, for showing continued faith in me and providing sound advice whenever I sought it, and also my editor at HarperCollins, Maxine Hitchcock, for being so thorough and enthusiastic.
