MURDER AMONG FRIENDS a totally gripping crime thriller full of twists

by JANICE FROST

  “Damn right you shouldn’t. You put a member of the public at risk. That’s unforgiveable. No doubt they’ll put it down to a rookie mistake. Better incompetents on the streets than no one at all seems to be the policy these days.” Warwick cleared her throat. “Anyway, that’s not what I’m here about.”

  Jane led the way into the kitchen. Warwick went straight to the window and looked out at the garden. “That where you were attacked?” She nodded at the wheelie bins.

  “Yes.”

  “Lucky your neighbour was around.”

  “Oh, it was Dudgeon really. He was the actual hero. Dudge is Allie’s Staffie,” Jane said.

  “Right. I’ve read the report. And nothing was stolen from your home.”

  “No. I think that was because Dudge scared my attacker off with his barking.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You aren’t still thinking my attack had something to do with my special constable duties, are you?” Jane asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it unlikely.”

  “That’s what I thought at first. Before I found out that you were playing amateur detective. Who knows what other damage you’ve done. How many other boats you’ve rocked.”

  Jane took it on the chin and kept her mouth shut. It wasn’t easy.

  “So, is there anything else you haven’t told me? Anything else you’ve discovered through your amateur sleuthing?”

  The silence went on too long for Jane to claim she knew nothing more.

  Warwick sat down, uninvited, on one of Jane’s kitchen chairs. “Well, are you going to tell me?”

  “I’ve discovered that Kylie Bright was bullied by Mark Ripley. He coerced her into having sex with him.” She had the satisfaction of seeing Warwick raise an eyebrow, the closest she’d come so far to betraying any feeling besides annoyance.

  “Yes, we know about that. How did you find out?”

  “I . . . through a friend.” Too late, Jane realised Warwick would understand that she had again withheld information. “I should have mentioned that a friend of mine recognised Mark Ripley from his photograph in the local paper. She’d seen him with two of his friends at the fitness club on Outer Circle Road, Hi! To Fitness. She and her friend were in the café at the club and they flirted with Mark and his friends. Mark was the only one who responded. He didn’t seem to mind that they were a bit young. She also found out that Mark Ripley and these friends — Adam Eades and Phil Lavin — ran a group coaching unconfident men on how to hit on girls. I only found that bit out this morning.”

  Jane expected another rebuke. Warwick’s silence was unsettling.

  “Well well,” she said at last. “You have been busy. Go on.”

  “That’s it, really.”

  “What about theories? Do you have any?”

  Jane was taken aback. She hadn’t expected to be asked her opinion. She was immediately suspicious. “I’m reluctant to draw any conclusions, but I can’t help feeling that it must be more than coincidence that Kylie and Mark knew each other, and now they’re both dead.”

  Warwick mumbled something that Jane couldn’t make out. Something sarcastic, no doubt.

  “I thought that the attack on Ryan Brown might have been perpetrated by the man who harassed Kylie in the restaurant, and that he might also have killed Mark, but I realise that’s probably just me making connections where none exist. Just because both of them knew Kylie didn’t mean it was significant. Kylie and Ryan had only just connected, after all.”

  She felt that she was rambling. She expected to see a gloating look on Warwick’s face, but instead she was surprised to see the DI looking at her with something resembling respect. A momentary illusion, obviously.

  “How exactly did your friend learn about the pick-up group?” Warwick asked, stone-faced again.

  “From her friend’s sister who’s at Lincoln University. My friend’s name is Thea Martin. She’s actually one of my students. I’m an English tutor.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  She’s been checking up on me. “Thea’s friend, Stacey, asked her sister to see what she could find out about Adam and Phil.” Jane paused, adding, “I didn’t ask Thea do to that.”

  Warwick ignored Jane’s claim. “You seem to have recruited a legion of young women to do your snooping for you.” She let her remark sink in before saying, “What else?”

  “Nothing. That’s all I know.

  “Are you sure?”

  Warwick got up and stepped forward, trespassing on Jane’s personal space. “No more private investigating. Our job is difficult enough without bloody amateurs putting good, solid police work at risk. Understood?”

  At least she didn’t point her finger, but Jane imagined it stabbing at her chest. One stab for each word. “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Jane was sure she would go then, but Warwick lingered. What does she want? A cup of bloody tea? A glass of wine? Well, she can sing for it.

  Warwick looked around the pleasant kitchen. “Nice place you have here.” She leaned closer, suddenly fierce. “You have all this, a successful career, a family. Why do you still want more? Your meddling probably cost that young woman her life. If you’d told me about Kylie sooner, mentioned Eades and Lavin . . .”

  Once more, Jane was taken aback. She stared at Warwick, speechless. Their eyes locked. Warwick’s glinted with anger. Jane wondered what Warwick saw in hers. Anger, undoubtedly. But also puzzlement.

  Their stare lengthened. For the first time, Jane saw what Frieda had meant when she described Warwick as ‘vulnerable.’ Frieda was right about her brittleness too. Warwick maintained the stare, but she was edgy as hell. What was she afraid of Jane seeing in those striking green eyes?

  Suddenly, Jane thought she understood. Warwick’s arrogance, her aloofness, everything that made up her hard-as-nails persona came from a place of deep pain. As soon as she intuited this, she looked away. Out of pity.

  Warwick probably misinterpreted her surrender as weakness. Much as she knew she should hold her tongue, Jane let the words slip out.

  “I feel sorry for you.”

  The atmosphere, already charged, became incendiary. For a moment, Jane thought that Warwick was going to slap her across the face. She took a step away.

  But Warwick brought herself under control. She turned, stormed off down the hallway, slammed the door behind her. Jane waited until she saw the DI’s legs pass her kitchen window before heaving a sigh of relief.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jake Flood lived with his parents. Their house, a mile from the nearest village, was set back from a quiet country road, concealed from view behind a tall yew hedge.

  His mother directed Steph and Elias to the garage. “He’s converted it into a sort of den for himself.”

  The garage was at the end of a path running alongside the house. Steph looked through a window and saw a barefoot, bare-chested young man in silky red shorts and red boxing gloves laying into a free-standing yellow punch bag.

  “See anything?” Elias asked.

  “Skinny kid beating up a big yellow penis.”

  Jake started when they stepped into his view. For a couple of moments, the punch bag swayed between them like a silent, accusing metronome, before Jake stilled it with a gloved hand.

  “Jake Flood?” Steph asked.

  “That’s me.” He eyed them with distrust.

  “I’m Detective Inspector Warwick and this is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Harper. Okay if we have a word?”

  “What about?”

  “It’s concerning a murder we’re investigating.”

  Jake’s jaw dropped. “A murder?” He began untying his boxing gloves. Once his hands were free, he grabbed a T-shirt and pulled it over his head. The thin material clung to his sweat-soaked torso. Steph wondered why he hadn’t dried himself off a bit first.

  “You recently paid some students at the university for coaching on techniques to help you become successful with women.
Is that right, Jake?” she said.

  Jake reddened. Like Scott Brocklehurst, he seemed shy and unconfident.

  “Yeah. Oh, I get what you’re here about. That student who was murdered on Greestone Stairs, right?”

  “Yes. Mark Ripley. Did you realise you’d met him when you heard the story?”

  “I knew him as one of the blokes who ran the course I went on, yeah. I don’t know anything about his murder. I was at home the night it happened. In my bedroom playing a new game. Ask my mum and dad.”

  Steph nodded. “We will. I need to ask you some questions about the ‘bootcamp’ you went on. What do you remember about the other two lads who were with you?”

  “Adam and Phil?”

  “No, I’m talking about the other clients, Scott Brocklehurst and Ronan Cox.”

  “I didn’t speak much to either of them really. Scott seemed okay. Ronan was a bit of a psycho.”

  “How so?”

  “He went for a girl. She ignored him, and he got really mad. Mark, Adam and Phil had to stop him before he did her some harm. He went for Mark too. He got chucked off the course, and rightly so.”

  Steph couldn’t help noticing the difference between Jake and Scott’s attitude to how the young woman had been treated. Jake made no attempt to blame the woman or condone Cox’s behaviour.

  “Ronan Cox was an invented name. Did you hear him refer to himself any other way? What do you remember about him, Jake? We’re trying to trace him,” she said.

  Sweat trickled down Jake’s forehead. He reached for a towel, wiped his brow, then draped it around his neck. “What, apart from the fact that he was a complete dickhead?” He thought for a moment. “He was about five ten or eleven. Muscly. Brownish hair. I think the girls he approached could tell there was something off about him.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just a hunch, really. Mark stopped a couple of girls first, just to show us how to go about it, then the other lad, Scott, and I had a go. We didn’t get any phone numbers but at least the girls stopped to answer our initial question. With Ronan, they sort of shied away. If you ask me, I think he was overconfident and put them off.” Jake shrugged. He said, rather generously to Steph’s mind, “Maybe he was nervous. He did seem edgy. Scott thought he was on drugs. Maybe he was stressed out about it all and that’s why he kicked off the way he did.”

  No, you were right the first time. He was a dickhead. Steph signalled to Elias to take over.

  “There was another murder last week, Jake. A young woman by the name of Kylie Bright,” Elias said.

  “I know. I read about it. She was a student too, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. Did you know her?”

  “No, and I was here the night she was murdered as well. I play most nights, usually online. I don’t know many other students, not female ones anyway.” His expression saddened. “Don’t know many girls full stop.”

  “You’ll meet the right one, one of these days,” Elias said, gently.

  Jake brightened. “I hope so. My mum and dad didn’t get together until they were in their thirties. Neither of them had had partners beforehand, they were both too shy. They got engaged a week after they met. Been married twenty-four years now. Tell you something, mind. I’m not going to pester any more women in the street. I never felt right about doing that.”

  “Good man,” Elias said. They left him to his punch bag.

  “Interesting what he said about women seeming to sense that Cox was bad news, wasn’t it? Pity I . . .” Steph checked herself. Pity I never had that gift. I might have seen Cal coming.

  “Pity you, what?” Elias said. His eyes were on the road, but Steph sensed his curiosity.

  “Pity he hasn’t got a girlfriend,” she said. “He seemed like a nice lad, under all the shyness.”

  “People aren’t always how they appear,” Elias said. His head turned fractionally in her direction. Steph looked ahead.

  * * *

  It was late in the evening. Steph was thinking back to her first encounter with Cal. She’d been lying on the beach wearing a skimpy red bikini that her friend Marketa had encouraged her to buy the day before they jetted off for their week in the sun.

  “Two hunks at twelve o’clock,” Marketa whispered. Reluctantly, Steph raised her head. She’d come to Corfu to recharge her batteries, not for a holiday romance. She propped herself up on her elbows, dipped her head to look over her sunglasses and saw . . . two Greek gods emerging from the waves, tanned and golden.

  “OMG,” she said under her breath. Marketa giggled.

  Their names were Cal and Jay. Close up, out of the sun’s radiance, they weren’t god-like at all, just two moderately good-looking Mancunian blokes with fair hair and lean, tanned bodies.

  Cal and Jay had stopped to say ‘Hi,’ and they’d all ended up having drinks in the bar at the hotel where Steph and Marketa were staying. Afternoon blended into evening, and it was midnight before they parted company.

  Right from the start, there was a mutual attraction between Steph and Cal. Jay and Marketa, not so much. They played along for a couple of days, but soon the foursome fizzled out. Steph wanted to spend time alone with Cal, but she didn’t want to abandon Marketa. It was Marketa who assured her that, though she and Jay weren’t attracted to each other, they were happy to keep each other company and give their friends space for their romance to blossom.

  Steph and Cal were inseparable for the last three days of the holiday. The boys were staying on in Corfu for another week. All the following week, Steph worried that Cal would take up with someone else as soon as she boarded her flight home. She reminded herself that she hadn’t gone on holiday to fall in love. Better to enjoy the memory of the fun days she’d spent with Cal, even as she forgot all about him. Later, she wished she’d followed her own advice.

  Cal had turned up at her door with a huge bunch of red roses and a bottle of champagne the day after he arrived back in England. She’d been so delighted to see him that she hadn’t stopped to wonder how he’d found out her address. She’d only given him her mobile number. She never overlooked something so basic again. At the time, she was twenty years old and worked in a bank. She hadn’t started thinking like a detective yet.

  Almost from the start, Cal began to spend most nights at the flat she shared with Marketa in Manchester. When Marketa pointed out that maybe their relationship was moving a bit too fast, Steph accused her of being jealous. Cal agreed. In fact, Cal had put the idea in Steph’s head, something Steph didn’t appreciate until after Marketa moved out and she was alone with Cal, who gradually began to reveal his true nature.

  Again with hindsight, she could see how she’d overlooked the subtle ways in which Cal set about subverting her relationship with Marketa. Marketa was too possessive of her, she was a bad flatmate. She never did her fair share of the chores, she was pinching food from Steph’s shelf in the fridge, borrowing her make-up and trying on her clothes when she was out. He claimed he’d heard Marketa on her phone, talking about Steph behind her back. Saying spiteful things about her to her other friends.

  All these accusations and insinuations built up to a terrible day of reckoning. Steph returned home from work to find Cal with angry scratch marks on his cheek, which he claimed Marketa had made when he rejected her blatantly sexual advances.

  “You should have seen her, Steph. She was like a wildcat. She wants me, Steph. Always has. Jay said she told him she fancied me right from the start, but you bulldozed her chances of getting off with me. She hates you, Steph.”

  Marketa denied scratching Cal, or that she’d ever fancied him. “Can’t you see what he’s doing, Steph? He can’t stand you being friends with me. He wants you all to himself. Can’t you see he’s one of those men who needs to have total control over the people around him, and especially his partner?”

  Steph didn’t see. She covered her ears, closed her mind. She was infatuated with Cal. He was the love of her life. He would never harm her.

&nbs
p; “Shut up. You’re just jealous because Cal chose me instead of you.”

  “Is that what he told you? It’s a lie, Steph. Come on, we’ve been friends for years, you’ve known him for six weeks. Think hard about who’s more likely to be lying to you.”

  They’d argued late into the evening. Steph said things to her friend that could never be unsaid. Hateful things, fuelled by the lies that Cal had told her.

  Marketa moved out the following day, leaving her share of the rent for the rest of the month in an envelope on the kitchen table. When Steph came down for breakfast, Cal was busy counting the notes to make sure it was all there. Steph, emotionally drained by the events of the night before, went off to take a shower. When she came back, the envelope was gone, the rent money with it. She never questioned Cal about its disappearance. The following day he moved in.

  Chapter Twenty

  “I think I’ve found Ronan Cox.”

  Steph had just sat down at her desk. She stared at Elias. “What?”

  “I might have—"

  “I heard you. How?”

  “A man by the name of Dominic Tickle was arrested on a domestic abuse charge a few of weeks ago. His victim, Holly Carpenter, recently gave her victim support officer some information she hadn’t mentioned previously. Apparently, she hadn’t considered it important, and in any case she’d forgotten about it.”

  “Yes, yes. Get to the point.”

  “When Holly first met Dominic Tickle, he told her his name was Ronan Cox.”

  “What? Seriously?”

  “Yes. She found him out when she was in the pub with him one evening. A mate came up to him, greeted him as Dominic and started tickling him. He had to own up to Holly that his real name was Dominic Tickle. He told her he was thinking of changing it because he hated his surname.

  “Who was Holly Carpenter’s victim support officer?”