Strangers

by Paul Finch

  ‘Who is Charlie?’ Lucy casually asked Delilah. ‘I mean, what’s her story?’

  ‘Ahhh …’ The Polish girl gestured vaguely. ‘No one know. Only come to Talent Team four year ago. Most people think she porn star in America, but something go wrong and she come home.’

  ‘She’s English?’

  ‘London, I think.’

  ‘Surely a girl in that league doesn’t need to do this for a living?’

  ‘She like it. She have cash.’ Delilah’s eyes bulged, as if she was massively impressed by the info she was imparting. ‘She come in wearing fur, dripping jewels … when she bother to come in.’

  ‘How do Jayne and Suzy tolerate that?’

  ‘They not control her … like you say, she not need this job. But when she here, I guess they see her as asset. Like I tell you, Mr McCracken’s favourite. Spend all night with him when she here.’

  ‘Suppose that empowers her,’ Lucy said. ‘Means she can do what she wants.’

  ‘No one say “no” to Charlie.’

  ‘Kind of a boring name, though … isn’t it? I mean … Charlie?’

  Delilah shrugged. ‘We pick and choose names. When you look so good you not need fancy one, uh?’

  It was tempting to ask if Charlie had ever gone by any other name. But that might seem like one question too many. Thanks to Delilah’s penchant for chatter, there’d be other opportunities to learn about Charlie without seeming overly nosy. But one thing was certain, in Lucy’s eyes at least: Charlie – the most expensive girl in the Twisted Sisters’ high-class establishment – now qualified as something else: one of those ever-elusive ‘major lines of enquiry’.

  On the surface it might seem ridiculous. Here was this highly paid prostitute. That in itself was a rare enough thing. Would she really want to muddy those waters with a string of pointless murders just because men had been unkind to her in the past? But then again, such thinking didn’t allow for psychosis, for bloodlust, for an unstoppable compulsion to kill. Jill the Ripper was a serial killer. That meant killing wasn’t her hobby; it was her vocation.

  Killing was what she did. Whether she liked it or not.

  That night, Charlie left the club in McCracken’s company. It was one o’clock in the morning when the goddess of the house sashayed back upstairs to gather her personals, while the mob lieutenant and his towering, ox-like sidekick came to collect their coats.

  ‘Been working hard tonight, darling,’ McCracken told Lucy. ‘Take this for your trouble.’ He handed her two folded twenties. She thanked him profusely as she accepted it.

  Again, his eyes lingered on her as though he knew her from somewhere.

  ‘Anything else I can do for you, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘Nah, it’s fine.’ He shrugged his coat on. Charlie came back downstairs, now wearing a mink and carrying her handbag.

  ‘Ready, love?’ he asked.

  ‘Always ready for you, Frankie,’ Charlie replied in a chirpy Cockney voice.

  They linked arms and left the building together, Shallicker ambling at the rear, his shovel-like hands thrust deep into his pockets, his big jaw working his latest lump of gum.

  ‘Looks like she’s not playing hard to get tonight,’ Lucy said to Delilah.

  Delilah waved that away. ‘She go home with him sometime. I think he have more work to do to make honest woman of her.’

  Lucy was impressed even by that. It said a great deal about Charlie that she would keep a major player in the local underworld on tenterhooks. How often did guys like Frank McCracken get strung along by the women in their lives?

  As she pondered this, she noticed Suzy McIvar crossing the vestibule, Gregor close behind her. The two of them halted half-way over, Suzy glaring at the door that had just closed behind McCracken and his party. It was written in the murderous frown on Suzy’s face that there was no love lost there.

  Lucy watched carefully. It was easy enough to work out what was going on here.

  Jayne McIvar, as the diplomat, was more tolerant; she recognised that the Crew were top dogs and that playing their game was the only solution to what otherwise could become a messy problem. Suzy, the more elemental of the two, was clearly less happy to accept this. Suddenly she noticed the coat-check girls watching her. Her frown became a snarl.

  ‘You two got nothing better to do than fucking gawk?’

  Abashed, Delilah withdrew into the cloakroom. But before Lucy could follow, Suzy called her back, stalking across to the counter.

  ‘Hayley Gibbs!’

  Lucy turned round.

  Suzy’s odd-eyed gaze penetrated her like a spear. ‘What is it with you and Frank McCracken? He thought he knew you from somewhere, didn’t he?’

  Lucy’s thoughts raced as she shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Miss McIvar … he seemed to think that before, but I’ve never met him in my life.’

  Lucy felt scared again, not to mention helpless.

  Suzy continued to glare at her. ‘You’re sure there’s nothing you’re not telling us?’

  ‘He was just tipping me, Miss McIvar.’

  ‘Do not lie to me, cutie! If it turns out you’re not who you say you are, I fucking swear …’

  ‘Now what?’ another voice interrupted.

  It was Jayne, finally drawn from her office by the angry tones. She took things in immediately, and made swift eye-contact with her sister before glancing at the ceiling, indicating that Necktie Nicky and a couple of other Crew associates were still on the premises. ‘You talking trash again?’ she said with quiet intensity.

  ‘Just trying to establish a few facts,’ Suzy retorted.

  ‘Really? Didn’t we long ago establish the fact that your temper is one day going to get us into it deeper than whale shit unless you learn to rein things in?’

  Suzy pointed at Lucy. ‘This one’s got something going on, I’m telling you.’

  ‘No one has got anything going on here!’ Jayne stressed. It was a strangely meaningful statement, Lucy thought – and its import was not lost on Suzy, who slowly and grudgingly lowered her finger of accusation.

  ‘Haven’t we agreed that we really don’t want any scenes inside the club?’ Jayne asked, though it wasn’t really a question. Again, her tone implied that Suzy’s outburst might have consequences. She threw another pertinent glance at the ceiling. ‘We don’t want anyone thinking we might – just might – end up being a source of embarrassment, do we? Not for any reason.’

  Suzy said nothing. She glowered at Lucy one more time, but clamped her mouth shut.

  ‘Why don’t you cool off, eh?’ Jayne suggested. ‘Go and find a leather bar you can have a drink in.’

  Suzy switched that icy, odd-coloured gaze to her sister, but only for the briefest time. And then she turned on her heel and strode to the main entrance, slamming the door behind her.

  Chapter 19

  ‘I’m telling you, ma’am,’ Lucy said, ‘this Charlie’s a good fit for the profile.’

  She’d found Nehwal and Slater in a corner of the cramped and noisy snug of the Aspinall Arms, the old-fashioned red-brick local at the rear of Robber’s Row.

  With police shifts starting and ending at unusual times, the Aspinall tended to be busy at all hours, but today, with the addition of journalists as well, it was literally packed to its outer doors. Groups of lunchtime drinkers stood shoulder-to-shoulder around them, shouting and guffawing.

  ‘The trouble is,’ Nehwal said, ‘you’re supposed to be looking for someone called Lotta.’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘Charlie … Charlotte … Carlotta … Lotta. They’re all horns on the same goat, and this is some goat, I’ll tell you!’

  Slater rubbed at his neck. His cheeks were sallow, his brow creased. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Lucy, but this sounds tenuous.’

  ‘It is tenuous,’ Nehwal agreed, before Lucy could reply. ‘But I do see the link.’ She gave it more thought. ‘I take it there’s no one else working there called Lotta?’

  ‘Not as I’ve been
able to discover, ma’am,’ Lucy replied. ‘Not yet. The trouble is I can’t probe too much. The intel’s got to come to me rather than me go looking for it.’

  ‘You’ve at least learned some of the other girls’ names?’ Slater asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. We’ve got a Silvie, a Silky, a Danielle. We’ve got a Marguerite, we’ve got a Jezebel, we’ve got a Courtney, we’ve got a Celeste …’

  ‘But no Lotta?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘When you say she fits the profile, presumably you’re going on more than just the two names sharing an etymological root?’ Nehwal said.

  ‘Totally, ma’am. Charlie’s a looker. On top of that, she’s tall, she’s shapely and she’s blonde … she ticks all those boxes. And she’s powerful, I mean physically. I can tell that just by looking at her.’

  ‘But there’s no smoking gun?’ Slater said.

  ‘Not so far, sir … no.’

  He sipped at his beer. ‘There’s no way you can engineer some kind of meeting between Tammy and this Charlie, so you can confirm afterwards that it’s the same person?’

  ‘I don’t see how that’d be possible, sir. Not without arousing even more suspicion. The way I see it, what we really need to know next is who Charlie is. I mean her true identity, where she lives, what her other life’s all about …’

  ‘You’ve checked the database?’ Nehwal asked.

  ‘Been on it all morning, ma’am. No one matches.’

  ‘And nobody else at SugaBabes is in a position to fill you in?’

  ‘I’m not sure anyone there knows her that well. But again, I don’t want to risk asking too many questions. I’ve already been warned to keep my head down.’

  ‘I suppose uncovering her real ID would help us build a proper picture,’ Slater said. ‘Trouble is, short of tailing her from the brothel – which is always problematic, as they’ll have spotters everywhere – I don’t see how we can do that.’

  ‘I do,’ Lucy replied.

  Nehwal glanced up at her. ‘Okay …?’

  Lucy leaned forward to speak in confidence. ‘We need to put an obbo on Frank McCracken.’

  The two senior officers regarded her askance.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Nehwal finally said.

  ‘You want to put the Shakedown captain of the Crew under surveillance?’ Slater asked in a tone that suggested he needed clarity, that he’d obviously misheard what she’d just said.

  ‘Only his home address,’ Lucy confirmed. ‘That way we can spot Charlie whenever she arrives. And when she leaves again, we put a tail on her.’

  There was a protracted silence at the hemmed-in table.

  ‘She’s his on/off girlfriend … at least that’s my information,’ Lucy explained. ‘So she’s bound to be there some of the time. Look … I know we’re already pushing the boat out having me at SugaBabes. It’s a high-risk environment – at times it feels very high risk. It’ll be no different at McCracken’s home address. But there ought to be more places to conceal a vantage point around there, plus Charlie’s going to be less on her guard, isn’t she? She comes out of his front door in the morning, on some quiet suburban housing estate … is she really going to be looking over her shoulder when she heads for home? And we might not need to sit on the place for too long … sometimes Charlie and McCracken leave the club together. All I’d need to do in those circs is alert the surveillance team soon as I get off shift, and they can watch out for the first girl who exits McCracken’s pad the next day.’

  Nehwal said nothing, but by her expression the idea was growing on her.

  ‘We ought to consider this, ma’am,’ Lucy urged her. ‘It surely can’t hurt.’

  Eventually, the DSU nodded. ‘I guess it’s what you call lateral thinking. Which is all we can really ask for in this situation.’ She glanced at Slater. ‘Any resources you can divert from the Intel Unit for this?’

  The shock of Lucy’s suggestion seemed to be fading from his face too. ‘Don’t see why not. We aren’t getting any other results.’

  That wasn’t entirely true, but they weren’t the results the taskforce needed. Only the previous day, Ripper Chick enquiries had led to the arrest of a couple of suspects: two female addicts from Stockport, who, in the guise of turning tricks, had rolled a number of drunks at knifepoint, though their motive had always been robbery rather than murder. Only one person had actually been stabbed, and that had been superficial. The arrest team had obtained the blade, which was nothing like the sort of weapon required to saw off a penis and scrotum. In any case, the two prisoners were human scarecrows on whom the slutty street-gear had hung like rags on wire frames; neither of them had even closely resembled the buxom suspect on the CCTV footage. They’d both now been charged with other offences, but were no longer implicated in the Lay-by Murders.

  ‘If I put in an action request, ma’am, can you okay it?’ Slater said.

  ‘Gimme a break!’ Nehwal replied. ‘This is Frank McCracken we’re talking about. The SIO can okay it, or no one does.’

  ‘You really sure about this?’ Slater asked Lucy.

  ‘I’m not sure of anything, boss,’ she replied. ‘But I went to SugaBabes looking for their top girl, and I found her. Whether she likes collecting male sex organs, or just says she does, is another question.’

  Nehwal deliberated. ‘McCracken lives in Didsbury, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Like a king,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ve been checking him on the system today, too.’

  ‘Didsbury …’ Nehwal thumbed her chin. ‘I’m sure we can find an observation point round there somewhere. Okay … assuming the boss has it, it’s an obbo for Mr Shakedown.’

  ‘Whoever it is, ma’am, just make sure they keep their heads down,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ve seen these fellas in action, and I’m telling you, it isn’t pretty.’

  Nehwal gave her a frank stare. ‘It’s you who’ll have to keep your head down.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘You’ll be on the obbo too.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Frank McCracken may be the smoothest gangster in Manchester,’ Nehwal explained, ‘but he’s also Jack-the-Lad. Yeah, some nights Charlie will go home with him and that’ll give us an advantage, but overall, how many bimbos are likely to visit that palatial residence of his? Probably more than a few. And thus far there’s only you can really identify the main suspect.’

  ‘But I’m working for the Twisted Sisters, ma’am … it’s not like I can just take time off.’

  Nehwal considered this. ‘Well … it’s too early for you to resign from SugaBabes. How about you working there nights and manning the OP during the day?’

  ‘And when’s she going to get some kip?’ Slater wondered.

  Nehwal sighed. ‘Well … you’ll need to be on the OP now and then, PC Clayburn. We can’t have this thing dragging on. We have to find this girl, Charlie, and either bring her in or dismiss her from the enquiry.’

  ‘I’m sure we can sort something out,’ Slater said.

  ‘Send me the forms, Geoff,’ Nehwal told him. ‘And I’ll prioritise them. In the meantime, sort out your surveillance team … quickly.’

  A couple of minutes later, Lucy and Slater were heading back up the stairs in Robber’s Row, the DI having wolfed his pint and his pie and chips.

  ‘Someone needs to get onto Cheshire CID too, sir,’ Lucy said. ‘Seems there’ve been three aggravated burglaries down there in the last few months, two in Wilmslow, one in Delamere Forest. Townhouses and a farm. Occupants badly assaulted. I’ve no actual details, but tell the investigation teams they need to look at a guy called Pixie. It’s obviously a street name, but I’m sure they’ll have it listed.’

  ‘This undercover stint’s proving useful,’ Slater remarked.

  She shrugged.

  ‘How you finding it?’ he asked. ‘I mean day to day.’

  ‘I won’t pretend it isn’t a challenge. There’s something about that Suzy McIvar. She’s not a full shilling.’

  ‘You’r
e telling me.’

  ‘If she was blonde and white, I’d have her down as a suspect.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be a bad call.’

  ‘And I don’t think she’s overly fond of the Crew.’

  ‘She likes to take care of business personally … but the Crew have rules and the McIvars are signed up to them.’

  They entered the Intel Unit, which at present was empty, the rest of the girls having not yet mustered for duty, and trekked into Slater’s office. While the DI booted his desktop up, Lucy slumped into a chair. The night shifts weren’t a problem for her in themselves – so long as she didn’t have to come to work during the day as well, but at the moment there was no other way she could have conflabs with supervision. She yawned and stretched.

  ‘What does your gut tell you about this lass, Charlie?’ Slater asked as he typed.

  ‘You mean do I think she’s the killer?’

  ‘You’ve been in this job long enough to let your nose lead you.’

  Lucy pondered. ‘I find her suspicious, sir. Even in that company, she stands out.’

  ‘And yet don’t serial killers supposedly like to hide?’

  ‘Suppose that depends on how narcissistic they are?’

  He nodded and continued typing.

  Like most wannabe detectives, Lucy had read extensively on serial murderers. A rare breed among criminals, they often had unique psychological characteristics, not least an overwhelming desire to remain central to the story. For most repeat killers, it wasn’t simply a sexual thrill; it was a power game. And that wasn’t just the power they wielded over their victims, but the power they could exert over entire terrorised communities. You didn’t hear about bank robbers writing cryptic letters to newspapers, or drugs couriers taunting the police with complex clues. In their twisted fantasies, serial killers were the most dominant personality around, and yet to make that fantasy real they needed to impose themselves constantly, even if such self-promotion ultimately compromised their anonymity.