‘So,’ Shirley said, sitting beside him on the couch when she’d brought their coffees in a few minutes later. ‘Tell me what’s happened.’
Jeff sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. ‘I don’t even know where to start.’
‘Well, I’m assuming something must have changed with the case, or they wouldn’t have let you out,’ Shirley prompted. ‘Why don’t you start there?’
‘They dropped the charges.’
‘Really?’ Shirley smiled widely. ‘That’s great. Is that because they’ve found Skye?’
‘Kind of.’
Concerned when Jeff lowered his head and started chewing on his lip, as if struggling to control his emotions, Shirley said, softly, ‘What do you mean, Jeff? Don’t tell me she’s …?’
‘No. God, no.’ Jeff shook his head. ‘At least, they don’t think so,’ he added grimly. ‘But they won’t know for sure until they trace whoever’s uploading the videos.’
‘Videos?’
‘They’re on some paedophile website the police have been investigating,’ Jeff told her, feeling sick to his stomach just saying the words. ‘Apparently there’s some kind of special department that deals with these sites, and they’ve been trialling some program that compares images from the videos against pictures they’ve got stored on a central database and they got a positive hit on Skye’s picture. They realised it couldn’t have been me doing it, because they were filmed and uploaded while I was inside. And she was alive in them, so they had to drop the murder charge.’
Shirley didn’t know what to say. It was wonderful that he’d been exonerated, but absolutely dreadful that it had taken something like this to prove his innocence.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured, reaching for his hand. ‘I can’t even begin to imagine how you must be feeling. But they’ll have her back in no time now that they’ve got a lead – you’ll see.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ Jeff told her. ‘They reckon this bloke – or blokes, ’cos they’re not sure if it’s just one, or a whole gang of them – must be some kind of tech-head, ’cos he’s blocking them from getting any solid information.’
‘They’ll get him,’ Shirley said with certainty.
‘I hope so,’ Jeff said plaintively. ‘I just want her back, Shirl.’
‘I know, love,’ Shirley murmured. ‘But you need to stay strong because Skye’s going to need you more than ever when she’s found, and you’ll be no use to her if you make yourself ill.’ She paused at this, and peered deep into his eyes before suggesting, ‘Why don’t you stay here?’
‘No, I can’t.’ Jeff shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t have stayed last time; look at all the trouble it caused.’
‘I don’t care what anyone thinks,’ Shirley said firmly. ‘Your stuff’s still here, and no one else needs the bed so there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t use it. Anyway, what kind of friend would I be if I left you to face something like this on your own?’
Jeff felt the sting of tears at the back of his eyes. After everything he’d put her through already, she still wanted to support him.
‘You are one truly special lady,’ he said quietly. ‘And God only knows why you’re still single. All I can think is that your last boyfriend must have been some kind of idiot not to have put a ring on your finger when he had the chance.’
‘He tried, but I said no,’ Shirley told him, smiling shyly.
‘Lucky me.’ Jeff’s eyes were dark and piercing as he stared into hers.
Suddenly acutely aware of their entwined fingers and her heart pounding fiercely in her chest, Shirley gasped when Jeff leaned over and kissed her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, pulling away quickly after a moment. ‘I shouldn’t have done that; it was totally out of order. I’d best go.’
‘Wait!’ Shirley jumped to her feet when he stood up and, blushing, admitted, ‘I’ve wanted to do that again ever since the first time, but I never dreamed you’d ever feel the same way about me as I do about you. I know you’re probably feeling guilty about Andrea, but please don’t, because it was more my fault tha—’
Jeff pulled her into his arms and kissed her again before she could finish the sentence – and this time he didn’t stop.
23
The dog’s head was buried in the grass a couple of hundred yards away, his tail sticking up in the air. He was foraging, and Bob hoped he wasn’t worrying a rabbit or some other small creature. He knew it was nature, but he hated seeing animals in distress, and he really didn’t have the time to rescue it or put it out of its misery.
‘Leave it,’ he ordered as he approached. ‘Let’s go.’
The dog wagged his tail at the sound of his master’s voice but carried on digging and whining. Bob pushed the long grass aside and saw an ancient sewage-outlet pipe, the mouth of which was stacked with debris that had gathered there over the years. Guessing that Oscar had probably chased a rat into the pipe and was trying to go after it, Bob gripped the dog’s collar and tried to tug him away. But, just as he was about to clip the lead on, something caught his eye that caused him to freeze for a second.
Sure that he had imagined what he’d glimpsed, Bob reached into his inside pocket for his key-ring torch. He leaned forward and directed the faint beam at the heap of tin cans and bottles that were snagged behind a mangled bicycle wheel. As his vision sharpened, a sickly taste flooded his mouth. He tried to tell himself that it was an animal that had crawled into the pipe and died, but no animal he’d ever seen had long blonde hair like that.
‘Oh dear lord!’ Legs almost giving way with shock, Bob staggered back onto the path. ‘Oscar!’ he barked when the dog seized the opportunity to go back to his digging. ‘Stop that!’
The dog obeyed and Bob quickly clipped its lead on. Then, hands shaking wildly, he fumbled his mobile phone out of his pocket.
‘Police!’ he blurted out when his call was answered. ‘I’ve found a body. I th-think it’s a young girl.’
‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘Bob. Bob Wilks.’
‘And where are you, sir?’
Bob gave his location, and then asked, ‘Will somebody be here soon? Only I should really be getting home to my wife. She has Alzheimer’s, and she’ll be confused if I’m not there when she wakes up.’
‘A unit is on its way,’ the operator assured him. ‘Could you go back up to the road so they can see you, please?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Bob agreed, tugging on Oscar’s lead. ‘I do hope I haven’t called you out on a wild-goose chase,’ he said then, doubt beginning to creep in as he scrambled back up the bank. ‘It looked like a body, but I didn’t get too close, so I could have made a mistake.’
‘You were right to call us,’ said the operator. ‘And don’t worry, nobody will mind if it turns out to be a false alarm.’
The road that separated the canal from the woodland was usually rammed with traffic by 8.30 a.m. as commuters from the outlying villages headed to their jobs in the city. But there was an eerie silence along the road this morning, because the area had been cordoned off. Squad cars blocked the road to prevent vehicles other than emergency ones from entering the search zone, while police tape had been strung across both ends of the towpath to prevent unwitting ramblers from tainting potential evidence.
After the markers had been set in place, and numerous crime-scene photographs taken, the corpse had been extracted from the outlet pipe where the dog had discovered it and was now laid out on the towpath so that the attending pathologist could do a quick examination.
Thanks to the high summertime temperatures, and the shallow layer of stagnant water in the base of the pipe, the body was in an accelerated state of decomposition; its bloated, green-tinged flesh was already beginning to split. The pathologist had handled many such cases, but rarely were the victims quite as young as this one. He wouldn’t know her exact age until he was able to conduct a thorough examination, but he assessed her to be within the 14–16 age range. And
she was naked, which implied that the motive for the attack had been most probably sexual.
What disturbed him most was the damage that had been inflicted on the body post-mortem. And he sincerely hoped that it had been done after she had died, because he dreaded to think what the poor child would have suffered had she been alive when her attacker had battered her face almost to a pulp, smashed out her teeth, and crudely cut off her fingertips. It was an obvious attempt to prevent the police from making an identification, but the perpetrator had overlooked one crucial piece of evidence.
24
The list of missing children in the Greater Manchester area was depressingly long, but only seven of them matched the general description of ‘Canal Girl’ – as the victim had been dubbed by the police – in terms of gender, hair colour, approximate age, and height. No clothing had been found at or near the scene, and no potential murder weapon had yet been located, so the necklace that had been recovered from around her throat was all they had to go on, and each team of officers who had been tasked with visiting the missing girls’ families the following morning were given a photograph of it for identification purposes.
PCs Jones and Dean had been assigned the two families who lived local to their patch: those of Chloe Lester and Skye Benson. And as the Lesters’ place was closest, they went there first.
Dennis Lester wasn’t pleased to be woken by the police at such an early hour, and he made his displeasure clear by yelling, ‘Fuck off, I ain’t done nothing!’ through the door when they knocked.
Only when Dean had explained via the letter box that they were here about his daughter did he relent and open up for them. But after looking out and seeing no sign of Chloe on the landing behind them, he said, ‘Where is she, then? You usually fetch her back after she’s done a runner.’
‘Can we come in?’ Dean asked.
‘Nah, I’m not in the mood for visitors,’ Lester drawled, scratching his belly through a hole in his stained vest. Then, narrowing his eyes when something occurred to him, he said, ‘Here, I hope she hasn’t been telling tales, ’cos she’s a born liar, that one, and you don’t wanna be taking no notice of anything she says.’
‘We’ve found a body,’ Dean told him, opting for the blunt approach, because it was clear that nothing else was going to work. ‘So, if we could just come in for a minute …?’
Lester released a heavy sigh, as if he really couldn’t be doing with this, and said, ‘All right. But give us a minute to put the dogs in the kitchen. They don’t like you lot, and I ain’t gonna be held responsible if they savage you.’
He left the door slightly ajar, and Jones and Dean exchanged a bemused glance when they saw him go into the living room and come back out carrying two ancient, scabby-looking Jack Russell dogs by the scruffs of their scrawny necks.
After tossing them into the kitchen and slamming the door shut, Lester called over his shoulder for the officers to come in as he made his way back to the living room.
Both men wrinkled their noses when the stench of sweaty feet, stale cigarette smoke, and dogs hit them in the face, and neither of them particularly fancied sitting on the filthy couch when Lester waved for them to take a seat after himself flopping into a tatty armchair. But, mindful of why they were here, they pushed their concerns about their uniforms and the probability that they were going to be flea-bitten by the time they left to the backs of their minds, and sat down.
As Dean explained what little they knew and showed Lester the photograph to see if he recognised the necklace, Jones gazed around in disgust. The man clearly spent the majority of his waking life in that chair, because it was surrounded by heaps of crushed beer cans, dirty plates, and mouldy kebab and pizza remnants; and Jones guessed that the dogs, who were both barking now and scratching at the kitchen door, didn’t get out much, either, judging by the little heaps of shit he could see among the rubbish covering the floor. His eye was drawn to a stack of porn magazines partially hidden beneath Lester’s chair, and he frowned when he made out the title of the top one: Teen Sluts.
‘She ain’t got no jewellery, so it deffo ain’t hers,’ Lester said as he handed the photo back to Dean after glancing at it. ‘And even if it had been, it wouldn’t be no more, ’cos she never keeps nothing for two minutes, her. If it’s worth more than a quid, she’d have flogged it first chance she got.’
‘Would you be willing to come and do a formal ID of the body?’ Dean asked, adding, ‘But I have to warn you that it won’t be pleasant, and you wouldn’t be allowed to go into the room with her.’
‘What, go and look at a stiff?’ Lester pulled a disgusted face. ‘I don’t think so, mate.’
‘If you’re not up to it, you could always provide a sample of DNA for comparison,’ Dean suggested.
‘Yeah, right,’ Lester snorted, fishing a can of beer out from down the side of his cushion and tearing the tab off. ‘I know what you lot are like. Soon as you’ve got it, you’ll be trying to pin every robbery and mugging from the last fifty years on me. Fuck that for a game of soldiers.’
He paused to take a swig of beer. Then, rifling through the dimps in the ashtray that was sitting on the arm of his chair, he said, ‘It wouldn’t help, anyhow, ’cos her mam was a slag, so Chloe’s probably not even mine. I’ve always thought she was more like the cunt her mam was knocking off round the time she got caught. Ken Brown, I think his name was. And he had a few bob, if I remember right, so you’d be better off tracking him down if you’re after someone to pay for the funeral.’
Outraged by his callous attitude, Jones said, ‘A child has been murdered, and she could be your daughter. Don’t you care?’
‘Why should I?’ Lester shot back unrepentantly. ‘Bitch never gave a toss about me. She’s as bad as her mam, that one: coming and going like I’m running some kind of hostel for fuckin’ whores. If that body is hers, I’m just surprised it’s taken this long for someone to do her in, ’cos she’s always been more trouble than she’s worth.’
Dean saw the warning glint of anger spark in Jones’s eyes and stood up quickly, saying, ‘We’ll leave you to think about it. Just call if you change your mind.’
‘I won’t,’ Lester said adamantly, staying put as Jones too rose to his feet.
Jones gave him a scathing look and then stared pointedly down at the magazines. ‘That’s some hobby you’ve got there, fella. Always go for the young ’uns, do you?’
‘Fuck off,’ Lester growled. ‘Them’s all legal, them.’
‘I bet,’ drawled Jones, looking around the room now. ‘No computer?’ he asked after a moment. ‘I wouldn’t mind taking a look to see what kind of stuff you’ve got on there.’
‘Do I look like I’d know how to use a computer?’ Lester sneered. ‘Even if I could afford one, I wouldn’t want it,’ he went on. ‘Leaves you wide open for people to find you, that internet shit; and I’m fucked if I’m having all the birds I’ve ever shagged coming after me for child maintenance.’ He shook his head now, and smirked as he took another swig of his beer. Then, belching loudly, he raised an eyebrow. ‘You still here?’
Jones gave a snort of disgust and stalked out, and Dean gave Lester a curt nod before following quickly.
‘Lowlife bastard,’ spat Jones, still furious as they made their way down the communal stairs. ‘I’m going to look him up on the system when we get back to the station; see if I can get anything on him.’
‘Just leave well enough alone,’ Dean cautioned as they exited the block and walked back to the car. ‘You’re already facing a complaint of harassment if Jeff Benson decides to go ahead with that, so I wouldn’t be adding another one to the list if I were you.’
‘Yeah, well, let’s just hope this poor girl doesn’t turn out to be Chloe Lester,’ Jones muttered. ‘’Cos I’d hate to see what kind of send-off she’d get if it was left to that heartless cunt to arrange it.’
Dean nodded his agreement and climbed into the passenger side as Jones got behind the wheel. ‘Did you manage to fi
nd out where Jeff Benson’s staying?’ he asked as they buckled their seat belts.
‘No.’ Jones shook his head and started the engine. ‘His brief reckons he was going to try and get into a homeless hostel, but I didn’t have time to ring around before we set out. I thought we could call in at that garage where he used to work after we’ve spoken to Andrea; see if he’s been in touch with that friend of his – Shirley.’
‘Good idea,’ said Dean, reaching through the middle of the seats to put the photograph in the back. ‘If he’s contacted anyone, it’d be her, I’m sure. Nice woman,’ he remarked then, gazing out of the window as they set off.
‘Yeah, she is,’ Jones agreed. ‘Shame she had to go through all that shit with her neighbours after we arrested him, ’cos she didn’t deserve that.’
‘Neither did he,’ Dean said quietly.
Jones drove on without replying. But he couldn’t deny what Dean had said, and he’d felt guilty about the way he had treated Jeff Benson since it had come to light that he could not have murdered his daughter. Not only that, but Andrea had also confessed to having made up the abuse allegations to get back at him for his supposed cheating. And then she had retracted her statement about him trying to stab her, so Jones no longer believed a word she’d said and was actually beginning to wonder if Shirley had been right about Andrea being the real perpetrator all those times he’d been called out to domestics at their place.
Whatever the truth, Jones just hoped that the twisted bitch didn’t fall apart when they saw her now and told her about these latest developments, because he really didn’t think he’d be able to dredge up an ounce of sympathy for her.
25
Shirley had taken the rest of the week off work. Unlike her colleagues, who all regularly went down with mysterious illnesses the morning after a major football match or a hen or stag party, she had never taken one single sick day in the entire time she had worked for Ripley Autos. But she was damned if she was going to leave Jeff on his own at a time like this so she’d got up early and left a message on her boss’s answerphone, telling him that she had flu.
Afraid Page 25
