Alias

by Cari Hunter

  Chapter Seventeen

  If he wasn’t sitting in a butty shop, surrounded by blokes in steel-toed wellies and hi-vis vests, and already smelling of bacon and lard, I’d say Rob Reid had the look of a boy band member about him. Not the lead singer, more the rakish one in the background who got a groupie pregnant and sees the kid every other weekend. He’s in his mid-twenties, dark haired and self-assured, standing to shake my hand, and winking at the girl behind the counter when he pays for our drinks. She rolls her eyes at him behind his back and winks at me instead. I smile at her. She’s a cute baby dyke, and we have matching nose rings.

  “Did you get a chance to go through the questions?” he asks, after allowing me a minute to take off my coat.

  “Yes, last night.” I give him the envelope, and he leafs through the sheets, checking I’ve completed every part. I half-expect him to whip out a red pen and award me a grade.

  “Do you have anyone who can corroborate this?” He indicates the section focusing on my supposed affair with Jo. “SMIU are caught between a rock and a hard place. They don’t want to draw attention to your presence at Hamer’s, but their investigation is hamstrung for lack of witnesses.”

  “That’s a shame,” I murmur into my mug.

  He continues without waiting for me to name names. “They pulled this lad’s name from your files, a Krzysztof Janicki. He seems to have worked with you and Starek, but they’re having problems finding him.” He sets a photo of Krzys on the table. It’s one I haven’t seen before, and I slide it toward me, pretending to study it, while I wait for my heart to stop going like the clappers.

  “I recognise his name from the files,” I say, hedging my bets. I didn’t return the photo of the three of us to the SMIU, and there was nothing else to suggest we were friends. “We worked the same shift pattern. Other than that…” I shrug and pass the photo back, hoping that’ll be the end of it, but Reid is like a dog worrying at a bone.

  “His last known address was in Longsight. There was no answer when Granger called round, and he’s paid his landlord four months’ advance rent, which is odd given the wage at Hamer’s.” He consults his pad. “His neighbour—a Mrs. Deirdre Asante—hasn’t seen him for three weeks.”

  “Right.” It’s a struggle to say even that much as I wait to see whether Deirdre has grassed me up.

  “Weird, huh?” He stirs another sugar into his tea and crumples the empty packet. Everything sounds too loud and too abrasive, and the smell of sweetness is making my mouth water in a bad way.

  “Yeah,” I say through a throat full of saliva. “He switched lines with me, didn’t he? Could Hamer’s have sent him on business somewhere?”

  “It’s possible, but we’ll probably never know.”

  I nod slowly. If that was a test, I have no idea whether I’ve passed, nor whether he’s held anything back. I came here expecting a conversation with an ally, not a cross-examination.

  “So you work with Jez?” I say, tired of being the one under the cosh. “On the TPU?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” He turns to a new page, distracted. “I offered my services when I heard about your case.”

  My ears prick up. I’d been under the impression that Jez had recommended him without prejudice, and he instantly goes onto my list of people to tread carefully around. I let him skim my answers as I sip my coffee. It’s a bitter, cheap brand, reminiscent of three-in-the-morning night shift brews when my eyes were burning and my mouth tasted like the bottom of a budgie’s cage. It’s perfect, and it allows me to look him in the eye when he’s finished reading.

  “When did you last see a doctor?” he asks.

  I count the days on my fingers. It seems like months since Lewis discharged me, and I cancelled a check-up in Manchester scheduled for the day of Pryce’s interview.

  “A week ago,” I tell him. “I’ve got a neurology appointment in a fortnight.”

  He frowns as he jots down the date. “That’s after the disciplinary panel. Could you bring it forward?”

  “I could try.” I have no intention of trying. I haven’t yet accepted that the panel will even happen, because I’ve pinned all my hopes on Pryce and me signing, sealing, and solving everything in the next twelve days.

  “Push for a CT scan. We need hard, medical evidence that your amnesia isn’t just…” He pauses, grappling for the right word. I let him sweat for a moment. I bet he doesn’t get flummoxed very often.

  “A convenience?” I say. I’m sure he’d be interested to see a new scan as well.

  He stops chewing the end of his pen. He’s probably a smoker, used to accompanying a brew with a fag. “It may seem harsh, but yes, a convenience. Incontrovertible facts substantiated by a doctor will be a lot harder for the SMIU to dismiss or discredit. Now, I have transcripts of your emergency call and subsequent contact with the dispatcher, and a list of all the personnel who were on the rescue team that night.” He shows me the list. Pryce’s name and work mobile are at the top. “Can you think of anyone we’ve missed? Anyone who might have seen you on the road or in a local shop? Anyone at all?”

  “No,” I say, still fixating on that top line. “I’m sorry.”

  He finishes his tea and then steers the meeting onto safer ground, explaining the format of the disciplinary proceedings, the work he will do to prepare for it, and the ways in which I can assist him. I nod at appropriate intervals, ask appropriate questions, and make the odd note, and all the while I’m thinking: twelve days. Twelve days. What the hell can we expect to get done with so little to go on?

  “Is there anything you’ve not disclosed that you want to tell me in complete confidence?” he asks, by way of a conclusion.

  “No.” I don’t trust him as far as I could chuck him, and the only information he’s getting from me is stuffed into that brown envelope.

  “Okay, then.” His smile bares perfect lines of whitened teeth. “Keep in touch, and let me know how your appointment goes.”

  “I will.” I remain seated as he stands, making it clear that we won’t be leaving together.

  After giving him a ten-minute head start, I sit in my car for a further five, texting Pryce to tell her I’m setting off. I take an unorthodox route into the city, going via Cheetham Hill and Shude Hill to approach Piccadilly the back way and shake off any tail. I knock on the door of Pryce’s room a little after twelve, right on schedule.

  “Good timing,” she says, showing me into an airy kitchen-diner with a view over the canal. A bowl of beaten eggs stands ready on the countertop, alongside grated cheese, sliced peppers, and strips of spiced chicken. She picks up a spatula, having apparently figured out that I function best on a full belly. “Omelette okay?”

  “Yes, perfect. What can I do?”

  Oil sizzles as it hits a hot frying pan. “Choose your filling.”

  We eat by the window, watching geese glide around the canal basin. It’s started to rain, and clouds sit heavy over the high-rises, the inclement weather keeping the drunks and the spice addicts from the towpath benches. I smile at the view, despite the gloom. Manchester feels like home in a way that Saddleworth never could. One day, when all this is over, perhaps Pryce and I will get a chance to go out and paint it red.

  “Did your meeting go okay?” she asks, as we warm our hands on fresh mugs of coffee.

  “Sort of. I found out Reid actually volunteered to represent me, and I don’t know, there was something about him that seemed off. It might be my aversion to cocky little shitheads, but I didn’t like him. On the plus side, I didn’t tell him anything useful. He’ll phone you at some point. You’re his prime witness.”

  “That’s fine. I’ve already made a statement for MMP, so I’ll refer him to that.” She clears our plates, putting them in the sink and then turning to lean back against it. “Speaking of witnesses, I’ve been thinking I should interview the girl from Newbury Road in an official capacity.”

  “No. No fucking way,” I say. “They’ll know you’re up here, that you’re in
volved.”

  “I am involved,” she counters. “I’m investigating the crash, and substantiating your explanation of it is a part of that process. Speaking to an acquaintance of the deceased is a sensible way to go about that.”

  “And how the fuck will you explain finding her name? ‘Oh, I unofficially searched the decedent’s house with the woman accused of killing her’?”

  Once again, Pryce avoids my bait. “She’d be one of several on my list, and we’re pretty sure she worked with Jolanta in some capacity, so hopefully she wouldn’t think it odd.”

  “But if she does, she’ll go straight to Hamer’s and tell them a DS from Wales is poking her nose into their business. Then maybe someone will remember seeing your car last night, and then—”

  “What exactly are you planning to do?” she retorts. “Spend days deciphering your own coded notes? To what end? You don’t need to bring Hamer’s down, Alis. That’s MMP’s job. You need to find out who murdered your friend and why, and whether that person was a colleague. We can’t rely on a memory stick that you can’t locate and might not even exist, so we need to focus on our only solid lead, and that’s the women from Copthorne.”

  “It’s too dangerous.” I’m on the verge of pleading with her, but she folds her arms and stands taller.

  “Is there anything else?”

  For a few seconds I can’t fathom her meaning, and when I finally get it, it doesn’t make me angry or defensive, just tired.

  “No, there’s nothing else,” I say. “I’d never laid eyes on the woman before last night. She might know me as Rebecca, but I can’t remember her. I’m not trying to hide anything or stop you from talking to someone who might drop me in the shit.” I take a breath. Pryce hasn’t moved from the window, and I can’t see her properly. I have no way of telling whether or not she believes me. “I don’t want you to get hurt because of me. That’s all.”

  I’m not going to spell it out, to describe how Jo’s death feels like a concrete block crushing down on my conscience. If she can’t grasp that, she should probably reconsider her career options.

  She sits opposite me at the table again. Her face is pale, accentuating the shadows under her eyes left by stress and a late night in an unfamiliar city.

  “I think we’re out of options,” she says. “I’ve spent the morning trying to come up with a way around this, and there isn’t one.”

  I nod, resigned. “When do you want to go?”

  She checks her watch. It’s mid-afternoon, late enough for the woman to be out of bed, and a good time to catch the baby having a nap.

  “Now,” she says.

  * * *

  I don’t go with her. I stay behind in her hotel room, chewing the skin on my fingers, digging a fork down my cast to alleviate an imaginary itch, making more coffee and not drinking it, and placing bets on which goose will get to the far side of the canal basin first. Forty minutes later and fresh out of spurious distractions, I find a pen and paper and start to work through the photocopies I’ve brought with me. Google provides addresses for the named companies and a handful of the individuals, and I arrange them by colour and then alphabetically, making separate tables for the codes I’ve assigned to each, many of which overlap. Thoughts of putting the data into a pie chart make me peckish, and I wander into the kitchen to pinch an apple from a bag near the microwave. I perch on the counter to eat it, imagining what the Northern Quarter looked like before the majority of its warehouses were converted into apartments for trendy urbanites and students with deep-pocketed parents. The theme sticks with me as I return to the sofa, niggling and nagging until I stop what I’m doing. I’ve learned by now to pay attention to niggles.

  Without really thinking about it, I pull up a satellite view of Copthorne Road on my phone and widen the area to include the warehouses. There are four in total, one set too far back from the main road for us to have seen it last night. I change to street view, which goes no farther than the gap between the first two warehouses, and let the image linger there. The access road looked different when Jo and I crept down it on foot. She tripped into a pothole and grazed her hands, her torch swinging around as she fell, the arc of light giving me a split-second flash of how terrified she was.

  My phone snaps to black, and the thread of memory vanishes along with the image.

  “No, no. Oh fucking, come on!” I punch in the security code and centre the access road on the screen, but all I’m left with is that fretful feeling I get after a weird dream I can no longer describe in any detail. I launch the phone onto the floor, where it bounces and lands screen-up, the image jolted farther to the left. Squinting, I tilt my head and toe the phone back toward me. The street view is dated 2008, and daylight clearly shows the company name on the smaller warehouse: “DH Hamer.”

  “Jesus.”

  I home in on the sign. The font and lettering are the same as on the warehouse I worked in. Donald Hamer’s sons would have been in their early teens in 2008, too young to play a role in the family business, and all of the active premises are now clustered around the Ardwick flagship. I settle on the sofa again, shoving the photocopies off my cushion, as if clearing a margin around me will give me space to think. Now more than ever I miss the access afforded me as a DC: the ability to identify myself over the phone and have people look through records, or to show my badge on the doorstep and see a perfect stranger become instantly attentive. Without MMP’s resources I’m limited to the internet, but I do my best, searching for property registries and, when that fails, scrolling through the local estate agents who specialise in commercial sales. I score one hit out of four, finding the name of the company who owned the larger warehouse featured on street view. They supplied kitchen and bathroom fittings, went into liquidation in 2014, and don’t seem to be affiliated with Hamer’s. The property has been on the market for almost two years.

  Using the satellite mapping as a guide, I draw a sketch of the industrial site and add the names of the two buildings I’ve linked to businesses. The next obvious step is going to the site in person, but that would be a precarious undertaking, given its proximity to the houses on Copthorne Road. I’m mulling over the logistics when Pryce walks in. I’ve been so engrossed that she actually startles me, and I smile at her, energised by a few productive hours of quasi-police work but mostly just grateful she’s back in one piece.

  “You’ve been busy,” she says, observing the chaos I’ve created in her living room.

  “I have, but you first. How’d it go?”

  “Put the kettle on, and I’ll tell you all about it.” She kicks off her shoes and heads into the bathroom.

  We reconvene over a brew and a plate of biscuits. Pryce is a dunker. Not so hardcore that she has to slurp up soggy crumbs, more of a delicate dip that’s quite genteel when you watch her. And I am watching her, until I realise that I’m gawping and switch my focus to my own ginger nut. She flicks to the relevant page in her notepad, the official standard police-issue one rather than the type she’s been using with me.

  “Our woman at Newbury Road is Shannon Millward, twenty-three years old. One daughter of eighteen months and a son of seven months.”

  “Crikey.” I cringe at the logistics. “Any sign of dad?”

  “Dads, plural, and no, she’s on her own with the children.” Pryce curls her leg beneath her and rubs at her heel. We’ve come a long way from the DS who sat bolt upright in the plastic hospital chair, her gimlet stare pinning me like a bug under a scope. “I’d like to say I utilised all my skills and experience to prise the information from her, but Ms. Millward wasn’t shy when it came to describing”—Pryce stops to get the quote right—“the ‘thick as shit, bone idle twats who spawned these two.’”

  “Lovely,” I say, impressed by her accent. She’s hit broad Manc right on the nose. “Did she tell you anything pertinent to the matter at hand?”

  “In a roundabout way, yes. She confirmed that she and Jolanta were moved onto a hospitality project external to Hamer�
�s. She tiptoed around specifics, but I didn’t get the impression she’d been forced into anything. She claimed to have been cherry-picked for the role.”

  My eyebrows almost shoot off my forehead. “What, like it was a privilege? ‘Hospitality’? Who the fuck is she trying to kid?”

  “Herself?” Pryce suggests gently. “She was raising two children on her own, on minimum wage. If someone flattered her into thinking she had what it took to be a high-end escort and offered to get rid of all her money worries, I can understand how she might twist that into something she could live with.”

  “And Jo was equally vulnerable.” I put my coffee down before I spill it. I want to smash the mug against the wall. “Those fucking arseholes.”

  “Vulnerable is the perfect word,” she says. “I bet the other woman at Copthorne last night has a carbon-copy background: dependent family, debts to pay, habit to fund, some weakness that Hamer’s can exploit. You know as well as I do that coercion can take less obvious forms than brute force.”

  I scrub my face with both hands, grazing my cheek with the cast. I hate to think of Jo doing this, but she’d have been too proud to tell me or to ask me for help.

  “What else did Shannon say about Jo?” I ask. “About us?”

  Pryce turns to a fresh page of notes. “This is where things got interesting. She’d heard about Jolanta’s death and said she wasn’t surprised Jolanta had been going on holiday with you—her interpretation, as I hadn’t elaborated on the nature of your relationship. According to her, it would’ve been the perfect time to get away after ‘that argument she had with that Polish bloke.’”