by Nick Oldham
Henry came along for the ride, switching off his pager which was irritating the hell out of him by vibrating in his pocket. Downstairs he phoned comms and they passed a message to him to ring Karl Donaldson at the FBI office in London.
A call that would have to wait.
Danny presented Joe Lilton to the custody officer who went through the computerised booking-in system which automatically checked all incoming prisoners on the PNC. No previous convictions were thrown up for Lilton, but reference was made to his firearms certificate. He still held one. The custody officer pointed this out to Danny, who said, ‘I know.’
They went through the full kit and caboodle with Lilton.
His clothing was seized and bagged up for forensic; swabs and hair were taken for DNA sampling. He was given a paper suit and slippers, then Danny booked out a set of tapes and she and Henry took him to an interview room.
He had indicated he did not wish to have a solicitor present.
As they left the custody office, there was the sound of an incredible ruckus from outside in the yard. Three police officers were fighting a young girl who was going berserk, scratching, spitting, kicking, screaming.
Henry caught sight of the rumpus as it tumbled through the custody office door. He gave a short laugh before following Danny down to the interview room.
‘What’s going on, Karl?’ Myrna demanded to know.
‘I’ve done what I can - left a message for the guy I know in Lancashire to contact me. I can only wait for his call, Myrna.’
‘Yeah, sure, you’re right. Ring me as soon as you hear something, okay?’
‘I will, Myrna, promise.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
She hung up and looked across the room at Tracey, still sleeping and twitching. Myrna folded her arms on the desk, laid her head on them, closed her eyes.
‘I want to get this straight from the word go: I did not kill her. No way are you going to pin that on me.’
‘Why are you here, then?’ Danny’s tongue flicked her bottom lip as she regarded the man sat opposite her in the paper suit. She hoped she was keeping a sneer off her face; probably it was a forlorn hope. Danny detested everything about Joe Lilton from the colour of his eyes to the fact he breathed the same air as she did.
‘Because of what you said the other day, and that I know you lot will get round to me sooner or later.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, you always pick on the father or stepfather, don’t you? First port of call, usually.’
‘That’s because they’ve usually done it, Joe,’ Henry observed.
Lilton raised his face towards Henry in a challenging manner. ‘Not in this case.’ His voice was hoarse.
‘What did I say the other day, Joe - to make you come in?’ Danny asked.
‘It was when you were talking about how the investigation was going and you mentioned DNA.’
‘Go on,’ Danny encouraged him.
‘Is it right that if you get DNA samples you can match them up to offenders?’
‘It’s very true.’
‘How, like, accurate is it?’
‘Foolproof,’ Henry said.
Joe’s head dropped. He studied his thumbs as they circled each other.
‘For example, Joe,’ Henry began, ‘in the case of Claire, she had semen inside her that is estimated to be four days old. It’s a piece of piss to match that up with a suspect. It’s also piss-easy to prove that someone ISN’T involved.’
Joe’s cranium remained pointing towards the detectives.
‘So, Joe,’ Danny sighed, ‘why have you come here?’
Joe looked at her. ‘You fucking know, don’t you? You fucking know you bitch, don’t you?’ He jabbed a finger at her. ‘You fucking know why I’m here.’
Danny remained impassive as the end of his finger hovered near the tip of her nose; she willed him to hit her. Instead he sat slowly back, dropped his head into his hands and sobbed.
‘I didn’t kill her. You’ve got to believe me,’ he slavered through his fingers.
‘What did you do?’
Joe looked up again. ‘Made love to her.’
Danny seethed. It was the second time a child-molester had referred to making love to his victims. ‘You made love to her?’ she demanded with a snarl.
‘Yeah, she was willing.’
‘She was eleven years old,’ Henry pointed out. He too was holding himself back from pitching over the table to strangle the bastard.
‘You put your penis into her vagina and you ejaculated. Is that what you’re trying to say, Joe?’ Danny persisted.
‘God, you make it sound so clinical,’ he snapped. ‘It was nothing like that.’
‘What exactly was it like, Joe? Eh? Screwing your eleven-year-old stepdaughter? Go on, did the earth move? Was it all passion? Do you expect us to believe this shite?’ Danny’s voice was rising uncontrollably, particularly as she remembered Claire’s face when she drove her back home that day of the storm, back to a home where she was suffering abuse of the worst kind. That look on her face. . . ‘You screwed your daughter, for God’s sake! A forty-four-year-old man, screwing his eleven-year-old daughter. That is not making love, as you so eloquently put it. It’s a serious criminal and moral matter, not a moment of passion between consenting adults.’ Danny stood up, pushed herself away from the table and walked to the corner of the room.
‘DS Furness has stood up and walked across the interview room, away from the suspect, Lilton,’ Henry said for the benefit of the tape.
‘But I didn’t kill her. That’s the bottom line.’
Henry spoke into the microphone in a steady tone. ‘I suggest, Mr Lilton, you take on the services of a solicitor. I feel it is inappropriate for this interview to proceed without one being present.’ Henry concluded the interview as per the Codes of Practice, sealed one of the tapes and got Joe to sign across the seal.
Danny remained tucked away in one corner, arms folded, head down, silently scuffing a shoe across the carpet.
Without warning, Henry’s hand shot out and grabbed Joe Lilton’s throat. He heaved the man to his feet, sending the chair underneath him spinning across the room with a clatter. He shoved Lilton into the wall, on which his head smacked hollowly. Lilton had fear flittering in his eyes. Henry’s face was only inches away from Lilton’s.
‘You are a fucking pervert,’ he growled at the man. ‘In the past you would’ve been bounced around the cells and sometimes, just sometimes, I hanker for the good old days, Joe, because more than anything, I want to beat you to an inch of your life - and then kick you some more - whether or not you killed Claire.’
He released Joe with an exaggerated flick of the fingers, like he was dropping something horrible. Then, grabbing Joe’s arm, he said, ‘Come on, let’s go and see the Custody Officer.’
‘There was no need to do that, Henry.’ Danny’s voice was strained. She was sitting on the examination couch in the police surgeon’s room in the custody complex, her feet swinging. Lilton was in a cell, awaiting his brief.
‘Yeah,’ he conceded, slightly embarrassed. ‘I suffer from the “red mist” syndrome occasionally. It gets me into trouble now and then.’
‘He’s not worth it.’
‘Hey, okay, nuff said.’ Henry held up his hands in surrender.
Danny looked down at the floor and suddenly it came out. ‘I saw her face, Claire’s face, the expression on it,’ she choked, ‘and it’s only now I realise what it meant, and I made her go back home and it was obvious to anyone with half a brain she had good reason not to want to go back.’ A torrent of tears welled up and flooded over the edge. Her face rose pleadingly to Henry. He crossed to her. She slid off the couch and her arms went round him. ‘Her dad was sexually assaulting her. No wonder she went off the rails ... and I didn’t spot it. Someone with my experience - I must be thick as a brick. And she even came in twice to see me, but didn’t have the courage to stay and speak. And what did I do? Nothing. I deserve to lose my
job for this.’
‘No.’ Henry held Danny at arm’s length so he could see her. ‘You cannot blame yourself for this. Every cop in the world would go bananas if they blamed themselves for things going wrong in other people’s lives.’
She closed her eyes sadly and wiped away her tears with a flourish of both hands. ‘Yeah, right,’ she muttered. ‘What are we going to do about Joe Lilton?’
‘Do you think he killed her?’
Danny shook her head. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Let’s interview him with a solicitor, then bail him to come back here in a week. We’ll probably have a better picture of things by then. What about Mrs Lilton? Should we arrest her too?’
‘I don’t think she will be involved, but I suppose we need to speak to her at some stage.’
The door swished open. It was the Custody Sergeant.
‘Henry, Danny, need to have a quick word.’
The detectives exchanged a glance, both thinking the same thing: Joe Lilton had made a complaint of assault against Henry.
Both were wrong.
Myrna stirred. Her head was still resting on her forearms. She was stiff and aching. For a few moments she did not move, keeping her eyes closed and breathing in deeply through her nostrils. She sat up and stretched the feeling back into her blood-starved limbs. The crinkle of pins and needles was painful and pleasurable at the same time. She rolled her neck and winced as her back muscles protested.
The clock on her desk told her that ninety minutes had passed since her last phone call to Karl Donaldson in London. Dawn had already revealed itself across Miami; soon the office cleaners would be in, followed shortly by the more enthusiastic workers amongst the staff.
She rubbed her eyes, cleared her throat and glanced across to Tracey.
‘Holy shit!’ were the first words Myrna uttered.
The girl had disappeared.
The custody officer pulled the custody record out of its plastic wallet.
‘We don’t know who she is - she won’t tell us,’ he said to Danny and Henry, ‘but she’s about eleven or twelve; she’s as pissed as a rat, glued up to the eyeballs, as violent as any girl that age can be and basically a real bitch to deal with. I gave her a drink of tea which she promptly threw all over me. Luckily most of it missed; now she’s stripped herself stark naked and is prancing about in the buff in a juvenile detention room, having urinated and then shat in one corner. She’s now smeared excreta all over the walls.’ He raised his nose. ‘Can you smell it?’
Henry inhaled. ‘Ahhh, yes, the smell of shite.’ He smiled empathetically at the Sergeant; Henry was pleased to announce that his spell as a custody officer had been brief but horrible, done a short time after his promotion to uniform Sergeant, somewhere in the dim, distant past. The role was unenviable, having to be a kind of unloved intermediary between the investigating officers and the prisoners. Always a no-win situation. It was a job Henry had quite happily left behind.
‘So it’s a crap job you’ve got,’ said Henry. ‘What’s it got to do with me?’
‘It’s probably all balls, I suppose, but she said she knew who killed Claire Lilton, but she wasn’t going to tell us - then she stuck two fingers up at me and lobbed a turd in my general direction. I’m getting too old for this,’ he whined, rubbing his neck. He was twenty-seven. ‘Just thought you’d like to know, that’s all. Take it or leave it.’
‘Nothing lost having a word, is there?’ Danny said.
Myrna shot out of her chair and crossed quickly to the restroom. Tracey was not there. She began a systematic walk through the offices of Kruger Investigations. Ten minutes later she returned to her office, pretty certain Tracey had gone. She sat down heavily and reached for the phone to call night security down at the front entrance. As her hand drew the receiver to her ear, she noticed her purse was open. With a curse playing on her lips, she grabbed the black bag and rummaged through it.
Tracey had beaten her to it.
She had been cleaned out.
Juveniles are not detained in normal cells, but in juvenile detention rooms which, instead of cell doors, have thick wooden ones with toughened glass windows. There are no toilets in such rooms and every time the occupant wishes to pay a visit, they have to ring the bell. Henry hated dealing with kids. Give him a hardened professional criminal any day. Much simpler.
He and Danny stood outside the DR and tried to peer through the layer of faeces the young lady had smeared over the window. They could just see her, sitting cross-legged on the floor, naked, singing at the top of her voice, then shouting obscenities between verses. They could smell her very well.
The cell was covered in it and so was she.
Danny turned to the custody Sergeant. ‘Why was she arrested anyway?’
‘A nothing of a job really. Caught shoplifting in W H Smiths. The store detective chased her, she ran away down the Prom and she kicked off when she was collared. She gave the store detective a real shiner, I’m told. Took three bobbies to bring her in.’
‘And we don’t know who she is, yet?’
‘No.’
‘Yes, we do,’ came a triumphant voice, interrupting the Sergeant’s reply. It was one of the arresting officers. ‘Been leafing through the Missing from Home reports, just in case - and voila!’ He flapped a message switch. ‘I think it’s this girl.’
‘Well done,’ the Sergeant commented.
‘What’s your plan of action?’ Danny asked.
‘Hm ... got to get her cleaned up before we do anything with her. Going to have to get a couple of policewomen into overalls, drag her out and dump her under a shower. This DR’ll have to be steam-cleaned now - little madam. Danny?’ He looked questioningly at the DS. ‘Don’t suppose you’d be interested in grabbing a pair of overalls and helping out?’ It was a fairly rhetorical question. ‘No, supposed not.’
‘We’ll come back and speak to her when she’s clean - and sober,’ Henry said.
The custody officer looked severely miffed at the problem. Bloody kids, he thought. Should be shot at birth.
‘Just got off speaking to the States again. A woman named Myrna Rosza, remember? She was the one who originated the information on Charlie Gilbert.’
‘Yeah, I remember.’ Henry had the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder, sipping a cup of tea, dunking a ginger biscuit at the same time, saturating it to the point of near-disintegration before dropping it skilfully into his open mouth. Gorgeous.
‘Done anything with that yet?’
‘No,’ he mumbled. ‘Filed for the moment. Too busy with other things.’ He reached for another biscuit and dunked it.
Karl explained the phone call he’d had from Myrna. ‘Sounds very interesting,’ Henry commented. ‘Why does she want to speak to Danny Furness?’
‘Dunno, but that was the gist of the message; she’s supposedly a witness to that murder and she’ll only talk to this Furness guy.’
‘This Furness guy happens to be a girl, actually.’
‘So be it.’ Donaldson took a breath. ‘But having said all that, there’s a bit of a sorry twist in the tail. The girl has now disappeared.’
‘Oh, that’s handy. What do you reckon to the story anyway?’
‘Myrna is ex-FBI, very bright, don’t take no shit, and wouldn’t bother me if she didn’t think it was worthwhile. I think the girl is genuine.’
‘But she’s done a bunk?’
‘As you say - done a bunk.’
‘I’ll speak to Danny Furness for a start, Karl.’
‘You know him - her?’
‘Yes. I’ll see what she knows about this girl, if anything. Let us know if she turns up again; I don’t really see us getting too excited until then. At the same time I’ll liaise with the murder team over in Darwen and let them know what’s happening - oh shit! Sorry, Karl. Just had an accident here.’
Henry had misjudged his timing and whilst in mid-air, on the journey from cup to lip, his ginger biscuit disintegrated all over his shir
t and tie.
There was, undeniably, the smell of shit in the air: disinfectant, cheap soap and shit.
Danny’s nostrils dilated as she sat down opposite the girl. A woman from the social services sat next to the girl, a stern look on her face. Her nose twitched.
The girl slumped in the plastic chair, a sneer slashed across her face, contempt oozing from every pore in her body. The white zoot suit was far too large for her, made her look stupid and vulnerable.
She peered closely at the girl’s face and saw the redness around her nostrils and top lip, symptoms associated with glue-sniffing. Danny’s eyes looked into the girl’s which were wild, pupils still dilated. Danny speculated how far gone she was, whether it was recoverable or had her brain and vital organs been irreparably damaged by the fumes.
Danny pitied her. She made a note to get the police surgeon to check her out.
‘How’re you feeling?’
Sullen, no response. Expected.
‘You’ve cleaned up quite nicely.’
She shook her head sadly as though this was all crap and she did not need to be here. Her eyes - dilated, watery - showed nothing but hatred for Danny.
Danny inspected the faxes in front of her. A Missing from Home report from the police in Huddersfield told her the girl was called Grace Lawson, that she was eleven years old and had been missing from a children’s home for three months. It was a long time, but not unusual, particularly for kids who could fend for themselves.
‘What’re you doing in Blackpool, Grace?’ Not that Danny needed an answer. Second to London, Blackpool, during summer months, was a Mecca for kids on the run. The girl’s eyes flickered.
‘Yeah, that’s right. We know who you are.’
She sighed disdainfully and raised her eyebrows.
‘Cat got your tongue? Not talking will do you no good at all.’
‘Oh, just fuck off, bitch.’
Water off a duck’s back. ‘What are you doing here in Blackpool? How long have you been here and who have you been with?’
