by Neil White
The stairs creaked as he crept upwards, moving slowly, not wanting to trip and break something. He swallowed as he went, nervous, his tongue flicking to his lip. He wasn’t a criminal and wasn’t used to this mixture of fear and excitement, the adrenalin making him light-headed.
The stairs opened onto a small square landing, with five doors leading off it. He pushed open the first one. There was a bath and a sink, old and large, with limescale covering the brass taps. The toilet was next door, the door coated with decades of paint. The whole place had never had an update.
There were three bedrooms. The first door opened onto a small room filled with boxes. The curtains were open and there was enough streetlight to let him see what was inside. He opened the first box. It was old newspapers. In the next, engineering magazines from the seventies.
Carl stepped out of the room. There was nothing in there for him.
The curtains were closed in the next room. They were thick and heavy and blocked out the streetlight, so he felt confident enough to turn on his torch.
The beam hit an old double bed with a solid iron frame and springs that sagged towards the floor, the cover a patchwork quilt, the mattress deep and heavy. The room looked like it wasn’t used any more. There were ornaments and photographs scattered around, although they looked faded, as if from another decade, maybe longer, but there were none of the other signs of everyday living. No hairdryer on the floor or creams on a dresser or an open jewellery box. The alarm clock next to the bed was an old black-faced Westclox, the numbers painted in that faint green that maintained a moment’s glow as he moved his beam away. He noticed the time. Five twenty. It had stopped.
Carl went to a wardrobe and looked in. The clothes smelled fusty, the hangers filled with dark heavy coats and blouses with frills.
He stepped away. It intrigued him, but it wasn’t what he was looking for.
The next room was different. He could tell it was being used from the scent of stale sleep and deodorant. There was a double bed in the middle of the room, the cover red and silky, like a parody of something sensual. There were clothes piled neatly on one side of the floor, ready for the wash but still folded. Men’s clothes.
He went to the wardrobe again, and there were women’s clothes, like the other room, except these were different. They were more modern, slinkier, silkier. Skirts and blouses and scarves. Each set was covered in a clear plastic cover, like the sort his mum brought home from the drycleaner’s. He flicked through them. Seven sets. One of them looked familiar, like the one he had seen the woman wearing the night before.
He closed the wardrobe door and went back onto the landing. He listened. It was still quiet. The man hadn’t returned.
The living room was the next place to look, because that was where he had seen them together. He moved quickly down the stairs and went in through the door closest to the front door.
The heat hit him straight away. There was a coal fire glowing and it gave the room that sleepy heat, as well as enough light to let him look around. The torch went into his pocket.
The look of the room was dated. The fireplace was low and fronted by old green tiles. The chairs and sofa sagged in the middle and the standard lamp in the corner had a dark red fringe. Carl walked over to the record player, fascinated. He had never seen one before, only those turntables used by DJs. This was a faded pastel green box with a dirty brown speaker grille, the word Dansette emblazoned on the front like a chrome badge on a classic car.
There were photographs on the wall. Carl looked at them. They were of a woman, about his mother’s age, was Carl’s guess, in her forties, although they were dated, the dirty colours of the seventies showing in the clothes. There was a young boy in some of them, but no men.
He sat down, disappointed. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to find, but it all seemed so ordinary. It was time to get out and start looking again.
Then he saw it.
He had been looking towards the doorway and the stairs. There was an alcove under the stairs, filled with coats and umbrellas and boots. And there was a door handle too.
Carl went to it and twisted the handle. It was locked.
He looked for a key but he couldn’t see anything at first, the walls too dark, making everything gloomy. Then he saw a gleam. There was a hook behind the coats, and swinging from it was a key.
It fitted. Carl swung open the door.
There was a flight of stairs going down, a solid wall on one side. He had expected a blast of cold air and the damp smell of a cellar, but instead it felt warm. He went down slowly, his torch on again, looking out for hazards. He took the key with him. He wasn’t going to be locked in.
The stones were smooth and worn and narrow. He turned a corner at the bottom, into what would once have been the storage for the coal poured through the small opening at the top of the cellar space, long since bricked up. The floor was tiled, and there was a desk against a wall. As the torch flashed around, he saw some shelves along one wall holding garden things, like fertilisers and wood stain. It was used as a storage room, nothing more.
He turned to go back up the stairs when his torch flashed upon something else in the room. It was in the corner, hidden underneath some tarpaulin. He walked over and shone his torch on it. Why would something need to be covered up in a cellar?
He pulled back the tarpaulin and then dropped his torch in shock, casting him into darkness, but he had seen enough. He sat down, his hand over his mouth, worried he was going to vomit.
On the cellar floor was a woman. Naked and dead.
Twelve
Joe sat in his car and looked up at his mother’s house, a small semi on an ordinary street, with a low brick garden wall and short concrete drive. The day at work had been long and he didn’t have the energy for a family gathering, but it’s what they did, the Parkers, some effort to hold together what was overshadowed by the darkness of Ellie’s murder.
They had become more regular as the year had gone on, Joe and his older brother Sam worried that their mother couldn’t cope with Ruby, a headstrong teenager born in the wake of Ellie’s death, in the hope that the joy of a new life could somehow make up for the loss. Everyone knew that Ruby was a replacement and it seemed like she always struggled to live up to the billing. Joe’s mother found it hard to cope, spending most days in a fog of vodka-fuelled unhappiness, so Sam had taken it upon himself to be there more for Ruby.
Their mother’s life had been made even worse by the loss of their father a few years after Ellie, a heart attack bringing an end to his grief. Joe knew that visiting was a good idea, but he found himself pulling away from his family more and more. He had promised that he would make more of an effort, desperate to make up for the part he felt he had played in Ellie’s death. It was his shadow, the dark cloak that surrounded him and stopped others getting close.
Sam was already at the house, his grey saloon parked on the drive, and Joe knew there was no way of avoiding it. Sam was made head of the family by their father’s death and he bore that title like a duty. Even his choice of career had been motivated by their sister’s murder, driven by the need somehow to make it right. But how could you make up for something like that?
Joe got out of his car and walked up the short drive. He knocked on the door, to announce his arrival before going inside. There were shouts from the living room and then two little blonde girls ran towards him, one jumping and grinning, the other running more chaotically, her arms raised in the air as if she was about to crash into the walls.
Erin and Amy, Sam’s daughters. He bent down to kiss them on their heads as they clung onto his legs, laughing.
‘Can you find your daddy for me?’ Joe whispered to them, and they ran off, shouting.
When he looked up, Sam’s wife Alice was there, wearily pretty, the humdrum of motherhood showing in her tired eyes.
She smiled and then looked beyond his shoulder.
‘What’s wrong?’ Joe said, turning round.
‘
I just wondered whether you were bringing someone with you,’ she said, and Joe noticed a glint in her eye. ‘A new girlfriend or someone. We keep hoping.’
Joe smiled. ‘You know me better than that. If I ever meet someone, you’ll find out when you get the wedding invitation.’
She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You should find someone, Joe. You’re too good-looking to be single.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, laughing. ‘But I’m thirty-four. All the good ones are taken now.’
Alice set off down the hallway, Joe following. ‘So apart from being the most eligible bachelor in Manchester, how are you?’ she said.
‘Oh, just the same. You?’
‘Married to your brother,’ she said. ‘So just blissful.’
It was meant as a joke, but there was an edge to her voice. ‘Everything all right, Alice?’ Joe said.
Before she could answer, Sam appeared at the end of the hallway, pulled along by his daughters, who were screaming, ‘Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe.’
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Sam said, a hint of complaint in his tone.
‘I’d never miss it. How’s Mum?’
‘Just the same. On her way to drunk.’
‘And Ruby?’
‘She’s not here.’
Joe sighed. Every week he wondered when he would get the call to say that Ruby had been arrested for something, dragged into stupidity by those kids who hang around in black hoodies, all dressed the same so that no one would be able to identify them properly. Joe appreciated the irony; he would stay out all night to help those in the hoods if he got the call.
‘You’ve left it late,’ Sam said.
‘Yes, I know. Something came up at work.’
‘Why do they always come first?’
‘What, the crooks, the thieves and worse?’ Joe said. ‘Don’t. I’m sick of the same argument. I’m too tired, and it wasn’t like that.’
‘So what was it? ’
Joe thought about what he could say when Sam spotted the earnest look in his eyes and said, ‘Something more than the usual?’
Joe shrugged.
‘Anything you want to share?’
‘Am I making it that obvious?’
‘Come on, talk to me,’ Sam said, and nodded towards the back of the house.
Joe followed Sam through the living room, towards a small conservatory at the back, where Joe knew his mother sat on her own when Ruby was at school.
Sam closed the door behind him, the warmth still there from a day of the sun streaming through the window and roof. He sat down with a sigh on the sofa, the cane supports creaking.
Joe had noticed that Sam had become quieter since joining the Murder Squad. It was harder to raise a laugh from him these days, and he wondered whether his brother was going through the same as him, if he too felt surrounded by death.
‘I can tell you want to say something,’ Sam said.
Joe sat down opposite. ‘Times are hard at the office, that’s all. I know you think we’re all rich in law, but what you see from the police station runners is just show. The pinstripes, the flash cars. They feel the need to look the part, but the firm has had enough. I’ve got to work out who to sack, or else sack myself.’
‘That’s not good.’
‘Yeah, but you know what, I might go for option two. I’ve had enough.’
‘Come on, it can’t be that bad?’
Joe rubbed his eyes. ‘Yeah, maybe just a long day. I was at the station last night. Well, more like this morning.’
‘Anything decent?’
‘Not really,’ Joe said. ‘A strange one though. The client wouldn’t tell me anything about it, and then I got a visit from his mother today, who told me that he had gone missing. It seems like I was the last person to see him.’
Sam raised his eyebrows. ‘How come?’
‘I don’t know. I dropped him off near his house but he never made it home. He’s only a kid. Fifteen. They might blame me. I should have watched him all the way.’
Sam pulled at his lip and looked back towards the house, to where Erin and Amy were playing on the floor with Alice.
‘You look as though you’ve got a secret to share now,’ Joe said.
‘Was it Carl Jex?’
Joe was surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘His mother reported him missing,’ Sam said. ‘Some of us knew his father.’
‘David Jex?’ Joe said, and when Sam nodded, Joe knew that the coincidences were drawing together. But then something struck him. ‘You said knew.’
‘Well, know, I suppose, but he went missing around six months ago. Just vanished. People were talking about him today, after his wife called in about Carl. He was under a lot of stress so we’re expecting him to turn up dead somewhere. I didn’t know him but it’s still pretty sad. The job can make people like that sometimes.’
Joe was surprised about that, his brow creased into a frown. Neither Carl nor his mother had said anything about David Jex going missing. ‘So what are you doing about Carl?’ he said.
‘At the moment, not much. I heard that when someone offered to go round, his mother refused.’ Sam leaned forward. ‘Tell me about him. I might be able to get someone to do something.’
‘A bit intense and awkward but he seemed pretty well-balanced for a teenager. No police record but he was pulled in for being a peeping Tom. He asked for Honeywells but wouldn’t tell me anything about his defence. Nothing. He just wanted to know whether the cells were bugged. So he stayed quiet, because I couldn’t advise him if I didn’t know what he was going to say. He was interviewed, released, and I drove him home. Except that I didn’t drive him all the way home. He walked the last part, once he was happy there was no one following. His mother said that he never made it, but I had watched him walk towards his house, so how can that be right? It’s strange that his mother shared his paranoia about the police, as if it was some kind of family disease. It doesn’t fit with being married to a detective.’
‘Being married to a copper doesn’t stop the crazies,’ Sam said. ‘And you should see some of the letters we get from people who think we’re all part of some conspiracy, some state machine. The sort of people who think the Royal Family are lizards.’
‘I know, I’ve met a few myself; but this seemed different.’
‘How different?’
Joe thought about that, and whether he should mention the Aidan Molloy connection. Sam was his brother, but he was also a police officer.
‘If I tell you something, I want you to keep it to yourself,’ Joe said. ‘I’m talking brother to brother here.’
Sam shook his head. ‘You might switch off your morals when you go into work, but I have mine with me all the time. I’m not keeping a criminal’s secrets for you.’
‘Can’t you just switch off from being a copper for just five minutes?’
‘You’re not speaking to me because I’m your brother. It’s because I’m a police officer.’
Joe sighed. ‘Okay, I understand.’ He leaned forward and spoke quietly. ‘When we left, he told me that whatever he had been doing was connected to the Aidan Molloy case.’
‘What, the miscarriage case?’ Sam said.
‘That’s what Aidan’s mother calls it.’
‘Saying it often enough doesn’t make it any truer.’
‘I know that well enough,’ Joe said, ‘but David Jex was involved in the Aidan Molloy case, which makes me curious.’
‘So what do you think?’
Joe thought about that for a few moments before he said, ‘I don’t know, but there’s something going on. DCI Hunter was floating around the station last night, and he was David Jex’s boss on the Molloy case.’
Sam looked surprised. ‘Drew Hunter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Glory Hunter?’ Sam smiled. ‘Everyone’s favourite cop. Whenever Crimewatch turn up, he’s the one who likes to do the “to camera” pieces. It’s a bit of a joke, his vanity, but he’s lucky that
he’s got a reputation to match it. A good copper.’
‘But you think it’s a coincidence.’
‘You’re seeing shadows that don’t exist. Aidan Molloy was a murder case, so they had a murder DCI on it. If David Jex was on his team, perhaps Hunter feels protective towards his son.’
Joe put his head back against the chair and the cane arms creaked. Of course it made sense.
