by Bill Rogers
It took Hope five minutes to recount their tour through some of the best pubs Salford and Manchester had to offer. That was half as many minutes as it had taken them in hours. She only stopped to have a drink of water when her mouth dried up. Her voice remained clear, and confident.
She’d started off with good intentions, planning to have a bottle of water or a Red Bull in every third venue. However, it seemed that she’d lost count halfway round, and settled for whatever bottle was passed to her. She’d eaten a Greek veggie burger in the Knott Bar at around 5pm, and shared a plate of saag aloo with Veronique in The Garratt on Princess Street at around 8.30pm.
‘We only had three more pubs to go to the end of the official tour,’ Hope said. ‘I was feeling proud of myself for having stayed the pace.’ Here, she smiled grimly. ‘After all, it’s not as though I’m going to have the same alcohol tolerance as someone the size of Veronique?’
Her friend feigned hurt, but both she and Jo knew that Hope was right. She may have been carried along on a tide of peer pressure, but her peers should have known better than to expect this slightly built young woman to keep pace with them.
‘By the time we reached Sinclair’s Oyster Bar on Cathedral Approach, I knew I’d had more than enough. I remember being unsteady on my feet, and having to sit down at one of the outside tables. I sat there for quite a while. I don’t think I had a drink?’
‘You didn’t,’ Veronique confirmed.
‘Someone suggested we finish off at The Crescent, because it was on the way home?’
‘It was Keira’s idea,’ Veronique reminded her. ‘We did go into The Crescent, but they refused to serve us because they said we’d already had far too much.’
Good for them, thought Jo. What a pity that hadn’t happened a lot earlier. Not that you could blame the bar staff. It must have been impossible to decide who was with whom.
‘I think you’d better take it from here, Roni,’ said Hope. It was the first time that her voice had faltered.
‘Carla invited a few of us back to her place in the Student Village, on the other side of the Irwell,’ said Veronique, ‘to sober up with a pizza and a box set of the first season of Girls. I said I’d better stay with Hope, but she said no, she’d be alright, and I should go. Carla ordered a taxi to pick us up in the bus lay-by. We walked with Hope towards the Towers while we were waiting for it to arrive.’
She looked down at her friend. Hope, head bowed, clasped the glass of water tight with frail hands as though her life depended on it. A look of pity flitted across Veronique’s face. When she turned back to face Jo it had been replaced by a different one. Regret, Jo thought, or guilt?
‘The bloody taxi came too soon,’ Veronique said. ‘Carla and the others ran back to the taxi. Hope was holding on to the railings by the park. The others had the door of the taxi open. “Come on, Roni!” shouted Carla. “She’ll be alright.” ’ She shook her head as though reliving the moment. ‘I didn’t know what to do. Then Hope said, “You go, Roni. I’ll be alright, I promise.” ’
She turned her head, and stared out of the window.
‘Only she wasn’t, was she?’
Jo stood up and walked over to the window. Even this late on a slate-grey winter’s afternoon, the view was impressive. From up here, Salford merged seamlessly with Manchester, her bigger brother. The glass and steel monoliths that had come to define the twin cities were set into stark relief by a pale sun breaking through the leaden sky over Kinder Scout, twenty miles away in the Pennine Hills.
‘Show me,’ she said, ‘where she was when you last saw her.’
‘You can’t quite see it from here,’ said Veronique. ‘It’s just beyond that corner where the road curves around the trees.’
‘In each of the pubs that you visited,’ Jo said, ‘was it always you that ordered the drinks for your friends, Veronique?’
The young woman looked surprised by the sudden change in direction.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They asked me to hold on to the kitty and get the drinks in. I do most weekends, because I don’t drink that much. You see, it’s nearly always packed at the bar then. When there’s an organised pub crawl, even more so.’ She grinned self-consciously. ‘You may not have noticed, but I have the advantage of being tall. I can pass the drinks back to them over people’s heads. It’s the only way to do it. Besides, if the bar staff reckon one of your party’s had too much to drink, they can refuse to serve all of you.’
‘How often does that happen?’
She shrugged.
‘Sixty per cent of the time.’
Jo was pleased that the drive to make bars act more responsibly seemed to be working, but it didn’t help if the punters kept finding ways around it.
‘And more and more of the pubs,’ Veronique continued, ‘have bouncers on the door to weed out people who look like they might cause trouble, and turn away anyone who’s had too much to drink.’
Jo returned to her seat and retrieved the still photo of the video footage from her bag. She handed it to Veronique.
‘Yeah,’ she said immediately, stabbing the picture with a long red-varnished fingernail. ‘That’s Kelly and that’s me. And look, that’s you, Hope, just in view.’
Hope stared at it briefly, and then turned away.
‘And this man?’ said Jo. ‘The one wearing gloves. Do you remember seeing him?’
Veronique stared at it, nudged her friend, passed her the photo, and pointed to the man in question.
Hope looked at it and shook her head. Then she looked at Jo. Her hand trembled as she passed it back.
‘Is it him?’ she asked.
Jo had no idea which reply she had been hoping for.
‘We don’t know,’ she said. She placed the photo back in her bag. ‘In the week before the night in question, Hope, did you ever get the sense that there was someone watching you?’
‘Someone?’
‘A man?’
‘Of course there were men watching her,’ Veronique retorted. It could easily have sounded belligerent, but she didn’t mean it to be. She was simply pointing out the obvious.
‘Have you seen her? She’s beautiful! Do you know how many students there are at this university? Over twenty thousand. Half of those are male. Then there are all the lecturers, and technicians and builders. Everywhere we go there are men leching.’
Over the years, Jo had been made well aware of how attractive to men she was. Nowhere more so than within the force itself, including men who were well aware of her sexual orientation. Those with the biggest egos had regarded her as a challenge. Until she’d put them straight.
‘I appreciate that,’ she said. ‘Even in a crowded room, we women tend to know when someone is paying us close attention. You get this sense that someone is watching you. You look up, and there he is, staring straight at you? That must have happened to you, too?
Both girls nodded.
‘So, Hope, did you get any such feeling in the week or so before that night? That someone was watching you or following you?’
‘I’m sorry. No.’
Jo could tell that Hope was tiring, physically and emotionally.
‘One last thing,’ she said. ‘Could you just close your eyes, rest your head back, and try to relax.’ She waited until Hope had done that, and her breathing had become shallow. ‘Now, Hope,’ she said. ‘Take yourself back to the moment that Roni and Carla got in that taxi, and you were standing there on your own. Is there anything at all that you remember?’
There was a distant hum of rush-hour traffic on the A6, and the low, steady, heartbeat thump of a subwoofer in the flat above. After an age, Hope opened her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I still can’t remember a thing.’
She looked disconsolate.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jo told her. ‘I’m sure you’ve already been told that it’s completely normal not to remember anything after a trauma such as you have suffered. Your brain is protecting itself, that’s all. You’ve been really helpf
ul. Both of you.’
If only that were true, she told herself as she headed for the lifts.
Chapter 9
Jo decided to retrace the steps that Hope Bellman would have taken to reach the entrance to the flats. Presumably she had been taken somewhere along that route. She had covered thirty-five yards when something made her stop, turn around, and look up at the tower block.
Two faces stared fleetingly down at her from a tenth-floor window. One deathly white, ghostlike, the other a black shadow barely discernible in the dark interior of the room.
Jo turned, and carried on counting. She had reached one hundred and fifty-six by the time she arrived at the spot that Veronique Akubilo had described. For all but the last forty yards, Hope Bellman would have been visible not only from her own tower block, but the one set back a little beside it, and five more blocks that lined the south side of the street.
Jo stood by the railings beneath the line of trees where Akubilo had left her friend. It wouldn’t have helped to tell her, but it had been a bloody selfish thing to do. Besides, Akubilo already knew that. It explained why she was sleeping on that fold-up camp bed in Hope’s lounge.
Jo stood with her back to the railings, and began to scan the area with the eyes of a predator. Twenty-five yards in front of her in a gap between the trees, across a road, a verge, a broad pavement, another verge and a set of iron railings, cars sped past on the A6 dual carriageway. She tried to envisage it at night. Eyes fixed on the road ahead, the headlights of their vehicle barely spilling beyond the railings: it would have taken less than half a second for a driver to pass by. The likelihood of anyone, even if endowed with the best peripheral night vision in the world, noticing Hope Bellman being bundled into a vehicle was less than the odds of winning the EuroMillions lottery.
Jo looked to her left. The bend, and overhanging trees which must have been in leaf at the time, would have obscured the vision of everyone unless they were rounding the corner at the precise moment that Hope was abducted. Behind her, across a wide area of grass, was a low building that she knew to be a Sure Start Children’s Centre.
She turned to her right. The trees ran out in less than fifty yards, as did the far verge and the railings. She could see the bus stop and the lay-by where the taxi had pulled in. Two hundred yards further down the road stood several more high-rise blocks of flats, and the slip road from the dual carriageway. From this direction, the predator would have been far more exposed. And yet, what lighting there was had been trained on the A6 rather than this stretch of road, as was the only camera that she could see, high up on a stanchion.
There was no way that the unsub could have followed the girls on foot, waited until Hope was alone, and then gone back for his car in order to abduct her. Perhaps he had an accomplice who followed in a vehicle at a distance, and who was called up when the opportunity arose? If not, he must have parked his vehicle close to the end of the pub crawl, or his intended victim’s rooms. But that would entail him knowing where she lived. That would also have required a back-up plan if Hope had been accompanied to her flat? Or a willingness to abort his mission. How many times does he have to gamble and fail, she wondered, before he makes a successful abduction?
Jo shook her head. There were too many ifs and buts. If nothing else, she now knew for certain that the unsub was a high-risk predator. A gambler who planned meticulously in order to reduce the odds, and had the ability to think on his feet when things did not go exactly to plan. That sounded like every serial killer she had studied, and several she had experienced first-hand. Not that this suspect had killed anyone. Not yet. She walked back to her car, and drove the six miles that her satnav said it would take to reach the spot in Worsley Woods where Hope Bellman had been found.
It was raining. A miserable drizzle rather than the torrential downpours of the past few days. A blue-and-white streamer fluttered from the branch of a tree, the only clue that this had been a crime scene. It had been raining on the morning that a dog walker had discovered Hope lying curled up on a bed of leaf mould beneath these trees, beside the broad metalled path of the Route 55 National Cycle Path.
Hope had been barely conscious. Dressed in the clothes that she had worn the night before, she was freezing cold, wet and shivering. According to the paramedics, in less than an hour she would have succumbed to hypothermia.
Dense woodland bordered the cycle path, which stretched ahead in a straight line for two hundred and fifty yards, before curving away to pass beneath the M60 motorway a similar distance away. It was close to sunset, and the light all but gone. It must have been this gloomy the morning that Hope was left here.
Jo found herself shivering, less from the chill wind and rain than from this unwelcome reminder of another wood and a different time, and how close she had come to a worse fate than that of the student. As she shook her head to chase the memory away, droplets of water sprayed from the peak of her NCS cagoule.
A warning shout made her turn. A man and a woman, sporting helmets and capes, powered towards her on their mountain bikes. Jo stepped aside as they passed, the spray from their wheels soaking her boots and the bottom of her trousers.
She squelched her way back to the bottom of the wooden steps that led up to Greenleach Lane, where she had to wait for a middle-aged woman, already halfway down, accompanied by a Westie and a Labradoodle. As soon as the Labradoodle’s feet had reached terra firma, it proceeded to shake its woolly coat, soaking Jo’s trousers to her knees.
‘Molly!’ said the owner, with an apologetic smile, before striding off with her dogs, waving a black-handled pooper scooper and a bulging plastic bag.
Jo climbed to the top of the steps and stood by the wooden fence on the bridge at the corner of Roe Green Junction. This had to be where the unsub had entered the woods. From the map on the board, Jo surmised that no vehicle larger than a bicycle could have entered the woods, and come within half a mile of the spot where Hope was left. Too far and too risky for him to have carried her. Theoretically, he could have parked on the hard shoulder of the M60, carried the student down the maintenance steps and then a further five hundred yards, before placing her on the grass beside the path. But the cameras that had been installed for the ‘smart’ motorway improvements would surely have been too great a deterrent. In fact, she was fairly sure that the hard shoulder was now coned off at that point – something she would check on the way back.
Instead, Jo’s instinct told her that this was definitely the place that he had chosen. Beside a bend in the road, shaded by overhanging trees, with woods on either side, and a hundred yards across the village green to the nearest large suburban house hidden behind a row of beeches, it gave quick and partly concealed access to the woods. He would have been unlucky to encounter a walker or cyclist that early in the morning, and yet he must have known that within an hour or so, one or the other would find her.
Presumably that had been his plan. Each of his victims had been left where someone would come across them before too long. And yet every one of them had been vulnerable in one way or another. Sareen Lomax might easily have stumbled into the path of a speeding car – in the same way that Hayley Royton could have fallen on to the rocks at Pickup Bank, or Hope Bellman might have crawled deeper into the woods and perished of hypothermia.
Whoever this unsub was, his behaviours were contradictory. He planned meticulously, yet left crucial elements to chance. An opportunist rapist seized his moment. This perpetrator had an overall design, a strategy, and an array of tactics that he employed according to changing circumstances. Andy was right. This was an elaborate game. A game of chess, she decided, in which the victims were his pawns, and the police his opponent.
Jo returned to the car, removed her boots and placed her sodden socks inside them. She dried her frozen feet with the micro towel in her sports bag, slipped on a pair of her training socks, put on her shoes, closed the trunk, and set off for GMP Headquarters in Central Park, deep in thought.
Chapter 10
If the number of people packed into the media suite was anything to go by, Operation Juniper had gone viral. Jo had read that Manchester was the second largest media centre, including digital and creative industries, outside of London. She counted three national TV crews, another three representing local stations, and a host of radio reporters. The national broadsheet and tabloid newspapers were all here, as were the locals.
‘If any more turn up, we’ll have to go outside to the car park to accommodate them all,’ whispered Gerry Sarsfield.
‘What was that?’ demanded Helen Gates, the newly promoted Assistant Chief Constable, who was sitting to his left.
‘I was just saying to SI Stuart that we seem to have attracted quite a crowd, Ma’am,’ Sarsfield replied.
‘Mixed blessing,’ Gates said, pursing her lips, and scanning the crowd for a friendly face or two. ‘It means we should be able to get our appeals out to a wide audience, but on the other hand they tend to start trying to outdo each other with snide comments and unbridled criticism when the big guns are here. Then there’s a danger that the sniping is what gets into print, on to screen and out on the airwaves, and our message gets lost.’
Harry Stone slipped into the seat beside Jo. He looked harassed. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘The traffic was appalling, and the taxi driver wasn’t much better. Doesn’t know the city and couldn’t work his satnav.’
‘It’s good to see you, Boss,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine.’ He grinned ruefully. ‘My hair got soaked running between the taxi and reception. I had to dry it under one of the hand dryers in the men’s toilets. That’s the other reason I’m late.’
Stone looked around the crowded room. ‘Are you ready for this?’
Jo pointed to the cards in front of her. ‘As I’ll ever be.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Because it looks like they’ve sent the A team. I suspect that you’re going to have to field some bloody difficult questions.’ He smiled weakly. ‘But you can always deflect the impossible ones.’
