by Mel Sherratt
‘Graham!’ She smiled as she walked towards him. ‘I’m starving. Did anyone order anything for me?’
‘Hi, Allie. Yes, I think so.’
Allie studied him as he checked over his list. His clothes were clean, beiges and browns. A plain man in all senses of the word. He had a full head of blonde hair, greying slightly at the roots; his face was neither attractive nor ugly.
‘Two bacon and cheese oatcakes, with extra crispy bacon,’ he told her when he looked up again. ‘I’ve only just dropped them off. They should still be warm.’
‘Oh, thanks. You’re a good one.’ Allie turned to head back inside the main building.
‘I’ve been following the news,’ he said.
She turned back to him again.
‘Well, I expect everyone in Stoke has.’ He looked sheepish. ‘I can’t remember ever hearing anything like this before. They’re all connected to the schools, aren’t they?’
Allie remained straight-faced. No one had given that information out but it was clear that the public would make their own assumptions.
‘I went to them too,’ he explained.
‘Did you?’
He nodded. ‘You don’t remember me?’
She shook her head. ‘No, sorry.’
‘I knew Mickey Taylor and Suzi – Sandra Seymour and, well, everyone knew dirty Dwyer. He was a teacher there. P.E. was never my favourite subject. I hated sports,’ he said with a grin.
‘And the others?’
‘They were in my year. So was Karen Baxter – she’s your sister, isn’t she?’
Allie took a sharp intake of breath. She didn’t really talk about Karen outside of her immediate circle of family and friends anymore.
‘I can still remember finding out she’d been attacked,’ he went on. ‘Sorry, it must have been awful for you.’
‘I don’t remember much of her school years now,’ she said, avoiding his question.
‘Yes, I blanked out a lot of them too. All those weird clothes and haircuts.’ He smiled. ‘I – I just wondered if you’d thought that maybe Eve might be a nickname for a person.’
Allie wondered if anyone had already thought of that. ‘It’s a line of enquiry we’re looking into,’ she assumed. ‘Do you have someone in mind?’
He shrugged. ‘Not anyone in particular, but you remember us kids? We all wanted to be different so we made up names. Maybe Eve was someone without any reference to Eve in her name.’
Allie’s mobile phone rang. She pulled it out and checked the screen but it was an unknown number. She smiled at Graham apologetically and headed back upstairs while she took the call.
The aroma of bacon wafted towards her as soon as she opened the door to the incident room. She made her way over to her desk, relishing the small parcel she could see waiting for her. She scooped it up quickly.
‘I’ve just had a call from the Co-op,’ she told Sam as she turned to leave again. ‘The boy named Danny – he’s there with his mates. I’m going there now, see if I can catch him.’
Twenty minutes later, Allie parked as near to the top of Sneyd Street as she could and walked up the bank towards the Co-op. On a corner and opening up on to Hanley Road, it was a busy shop at any time of the day or evening. As she drew level with the building, she spotted a boy fitting the description that Mrs Green had given her. He was sitting on a concrete bollard opposite two other boys, who looked similar in age.
‘All right, lads,’ she said as she approached them.
None of them spoke.
‘I’m after Danny. Is that you?’ She looked at him deliberately.
‘Depends what you’re after him for.’
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Allie Shenton and I’m investigating the murder of someone I think you know.’ She looked at the other boys too. ‘Someone you all know.’
‘It’s about Frank, isn’t it?’ Danny stood up. ‘It had nothing to do with us.’
‘I don’t bite,’ she told him, hoping she could gain his confidence before he legged it.
The other two boys followed suit and all three began to move off.
Allie reached for Danny’s arm. ‘Look,’ she lifted a foot up, ‘don’t make me chase you in these heels. I’ll break my bloody neck.’ She smiled. ‘I only want to ask you a few questions. You’re not in trouble of any kind.’
‘We haven’t done anything,’ he said.
‘I know.’ Allie nodded her head. ‘Two minutes, that’s all I need.’
Danny shrugged. ‘Why me and not them?’
‘Two minutes.’
Eventually, Danny nodded. ‘Okay.’
Over the road was a church with a low wall around its front. She pointed to it and they crossed to it in silence. Then she sat down and showed him her warrant card.
‘What’s your surname, Danny?’
‘Am I under arrest?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Peterson. It’s Danny Peterson.’
‘Will you sit for a moment? I’ll get neck ache looking up at you, and the sun is in my eyes.’
A pause.
‘Where do you live, Danny?’ she asked once he was in her level of sight again.
‘Greenbank Road in Tunstall.’
‘With your parents?’
‘My gran. Mum moved to Rhodes last year. I don’t know who my dad is.’
‘Did you not want to go with your mum?’
He shook his head. ‘She didn’t want me to go with her. She says I’m a troublemaker and she can’t deal with me.’
Allie tried not to feel too sorry for the boy. It wasn’t right that some children got pushed aside for new relationships, but equally he might be putting on a front.
‘Danny, you do know that Frank is dead?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And that he was murdered in his home.’
Danny nodded.
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘Here.’
‘At the Co-op?’
When Danny nodded, Allie held in a sigh. ‘Is that where you hang out?’
‘Mostly.’
‘With those two? Are they your friends?’
‘Yeah, but I’m not telling you their names.’
She took the mobile phone he was more intent on giving attention to and placed it on the wall in between them. She expected him to reach it back but he didn’t.
‘I don’t want their names, Danny,’ she told him. ‘I’m only after information about Frank, anything that might help me to find out what happened to him on Friday night.’
‘It wasn’t me! I didn’t do anything!’
‘Do you think I’d be sitting here with you if I thought you had?’
Allie could see the boy’s appeal to predators. His looks made him seem a lot younger than his sixteen years. Jet black hair and olive skin, clear skin and sparkly eyes. He was obviously not sleeping rough, as his clothes were clean and so was he. His jacket was expensive, looking out of place with his cheap jeans and trainers. She wondered if he had saved money for it or if it was a knockoff from a market stall.
‘Did you visit him a lot?’ she questioned over the thunder of a lorry roaring past.
Danny shook his head. ‘It was pissing – chucking it down with rain one night, and he said we could go to his house to keep dry. We thought we’d have a laugh, and being three of us, we knew we’d be okay. Safety first, and all that.’
Allie nodded. ‘So you went to his house. What happened there?’
‘He made us tea and some toast. We watched the telly for a bit and then we left.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever visit on your own?’
Danny looked more interested in the cars coming past on the road.
‘Danny?’
‘Yeah, a couple of times.’
‘And Frank behaved okay with you?’
‘He didn’t touch me. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’
‘I need to check.’ Allie nodded. ‘It isn’t common for men to invite boys into their homes like that.’
‘Well, I’m okay.’ Danny shrugged off the comment.
‘Did he ever give you money?’
‘Just a fiver.’
‘Just the once?’
He nodded. ‘He didn’t ask me to do anything for it either. He just said I could treat myself but I wasn’t to tell the others or they’d all be trying to fleece money from him. He bought me a pizza too.’
‘Can you remember where he got it from?’
‘I think it was Farm Fresh or something like that. It wasn’t very nice – too thin.’
Allie frowned. Of course, she supposed pizza didn’t have to be brought in. Frank was a pensioner and until they’d looked into his financial records, she’d have to assume he was on a pension. It probably only cost a pound or two from the freezer shop. Maybe a takeaway pizza was more of a treat.
‘Danny, did you ever share a pizza with Frank from Potteries Pizza?
Danny shook his head and reached for his phone. ‘I liked Frank,’ he said. ‘Was there a lot of blood?’
Allie tried not to smile at how his sentence had flipped from caring to grisly in a matter of a second. ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ she replied. ‘But you need to be careful. I don’t want to hear of you going into anyone else’s house, do you hear? People won’t always be as nice as Frank.’
‘Okay.’
His head was down over his phone again. Allie watched him for a moment and then stood up. She couldn’t tell him that what Frank had been doing seemed like a perfect grooming trick. Lord knows what might have happened to him if Dwyer hadn’t been murdered. She made a mental note to find out where Danny lived and see if she could see his Gran. He seemed a decent kid; she hoped he’d stay that way.
His friends were walking back to him now. Allie crossed the road to her car. Glancing back before she opened the door, she looked at all three, laughing about something on Danny’s phone. Innocence and youth, she mused. And after the indecent images they’d retrieved from Dwyer’s computer overnight, Allie was glad that none of them had been hurt too.
This old man, he played four.
He played knick-knack on his door.
With a knick-knack, paddy-whack,
Give the dog a bone.
This old man came rolling home.
1988
Patrick walked along Leek Road as quickly as his feet would allow him. It was ten minutes to eleven and he was late: his dad would backhand him if he wasn’t in by eleven and he had at least a thirty-minute walk from Abbey Hulton because he didn’t have enough money for the bus fare home now. But he didn’t care. What he had spent his money on was worth every last penny.
He staggered along the pavement, careful not to step out onto the road. Blurry vision made him realise how drunk he was. His old man would backhand him when he saw that too. But he couldn’t stop grinning, recalling the evening with Melissa Stout.
She’d given him his first blow job. His first taste of a woman’s lips around his cock. Okay, she’d pumped a bit hard at his shaft, as if it were a bottle of ketchup, but who was he to complain? He was still a virgin: he’d take what he could.
Fifteen years old and never been shagged but he’d had a girl suck his cock. As memories came flooding back, he felt himself getting stiff again. He tried to quicken his step, get home while it was all fresh in his mind and relive it, fantasise with his eyes closed that she was kneeling in front of him again. It had happened so quickly. One minute, he was sitting with his mates – ‘the outcasts,’ they called themselves: him, Daz and Lefty. The next, he was buying her a drink at the youth club with the last of his money from his paper round. Half an hour later, he was behind the shops in a doorway with her hands down his pants.
Melissa Stout wasn’t anything to look at, everyone knew that. But everyone also knew that she put out whenever she fancied. Besides, she was the only girl who had shown any interest in him. No one would come near him, usually. He’d only decided to go to the youth club at the last minute because Daz wanted to get off with one of the fifth-years.
He pulled his wrist closer to his face. What time was it? It was nearly eleven. Fuck: he was going to be in for it. Maybe he should run.
Footsteps thundering towards him made him turn quickly. Four lads were running along the pavement. Patrick’s heart sank when he saw them up close. It was Mickey Taylor and his cronies. Well, he wasn’t going to let them spoil his evening.
He hadn’t spoken a word when a fist punched at the side of his head.
‘What the fuck was that for?’ he cried out.
‘I’ve been told you were ogling my girl at the youthie, Shorty,’ said Mickey, squaring up to him.
‘You weren’t even there. How would you know?’
‘You wouldn’t catch me there. Not ruining my street cred.’
‘Yeah,’ said Johnno. ‘Youth clubs are for geeks like you and the fucking outcasts.’
‘More like you’ve probably been banned.’
Patrick wished he’d kept his mouth shut as soon as the punch landed on his nose. It happened so quickly that he couldn’t have moved out of the way even if he’d been sober. He put a hand to his face, unsure if the stars he could see were above him in the night sky or inside his head.
‘I know everything that goes on.’ Mickey prodded a finger into his shoulder. ‘I know you were looking at Sandra.’
‘I wasn’t.’
Johnno sniggered. ‘I heard you got your end away with Slag Stout. I hope she didn’t catch anything. Or rather I hope you didn’t catch anything from her, the dirty whore.’
Patrick grimaced. He was never going to live that down now. It was one thing to think about what she had done but another to have it thrown in his face for the rest of his time at school.
The boys surrounded him. Patrick tried to run through them but they pushed him back. He tried again, but they pushed back more forcefully this time and he fell, landing heavily on the pavement.
‘Are you an item now, then?’ Mickey laughed cruelly. ‘Slag Stout and stupid Shorty!’
Hearing the rest of the boys laughing, feeling brave thanks to the lager he’d drunk that evening, Patrick spoke back.
‘If you were by yourself, Taylor, this would be a fair fight. You’re nothing but a coward on your own.’ He pushed himself back up to sitting. ‘Why do you get your kicks from picking on me?’
Mickey bent down and leered at him. ‘Funny you should mention kicks, you cheeky fucker.’
For days after, all Patrick could remember was a boot coming towards his face. And the feeling that his dad would do far worse by the time he finally got home after they had finished with him.
Chapter Twenty
Malcolm Foster unlocked the front door to Winton Insurance Brokers, glancing quickly over each shoulder before stepping inside. Luckily, Tower Square wasn’t too busy at this time of night, and it was dark, although he knew he’d probably be picked up by someone’s CCTV camera. He hurried up the stairs and pushed open the next door that he came to. Through this and his office was at the end of a long corridor.
He’d been working there for twenty-two years, always coming in to catch up with any outstanding paperwork on a Sunday evening – not that he would ever class himself a stickler for routine. Like a lot of people, he tolerated a job he was good at because he didn’t have the inclination to try and do something better. Steady Eddie was his game, no rocking of the boat for Malcolm. But today wasn’t any ordinary day. Today, he had a lot of cleaning up to do.
In the quiet of the room, he switched on his computer and, while it booted up, thought about what was on it. M
ore to the point, what he needed to erase. If he wasn’t quick, and the police could somehow link him back to Frank Dwyer, he’d be jailed, he was sure.
He’d only heard of Frank’s murder that morning. Malcolm had been in Dubai for a fortnight’s holiday with his wife and had caught up with the news on the way home. The taxi driver had given them a blow-by-blow recounting of events pointing to what he thought was a serial killer at work in Stoke, and how he thought that the police had done nothing and had no idea who it was. By the time they’d arrived home, Malcolm was already imagining the worst: that he’d be next. It would be some sick fucker who’d come to get his revenge on the sick fuckers who’d made him that way.
He drummed his fingers on the desk. What if the taxi driver was wrong and the police were keeping evidence back until they had more to go on? The enquiry could lead them to him and he’d be well and truly screwed. Perspiration burst over his top lip; his shirt was wet to the touch.
He opened the drawer and took out the desk tidy, littered with its many bits of paraphernalia. Underneath it was a manila folder. He pulled that out too. Not even bothering to look inside it, he threw it into the metal waste bin. Using the box of matches he’d bought at the Spar supermarket across the square, he lit one and dropped it on top. Heart pounding, he watched as passwords to websites that he didn’t want anyone to see went up in flames.
He ran a hand over his chin: if only everything was as easy to get rid of. It was going to take an age to delete it all. Thank God none of it was on his home computer. His marriage had survived only because of the images that he looked at, kept hidden away from everyone. But they had come attached to emails from Frank Dwyer, and he’d paid good money for them: if that came out in the open, all their lives were ruined. If the police dug deeper still, everything might come out about Nigel. He’d left Stoke fifteen years ago now. There was no point in opening up old wounds. It wouldn’t be good for any of the family.
