All eyes were on him as he ran through the desks to the main office at the back of the room, but his speed was so great that nobody there had time to rise up and challenge his odd behaviour. All he left in his wake was unanswered questions and shocked expressions.
The supervisor sitting behind the desk was taken by surprise when he flung the door open and came to a stop at its edge, slapping both hands flat on the desk.
‘What the…’ the supervisor, whose badge indicated her name to be Ingrid, began. But Wayman cut her off to explain the situation and what he and the rest of his team needed from her… right now.
Burton paced the floor waiting for his DC to return, shocked by what Jane Francis’s fiancé had just told them. Right under their noses – their John Doe had been right under their noses all this time. How could anyone not have known?
But wait, there are about 500 people working in this building, he told himself. He knew a fair few of them, but he couldn’t know them all. But to have him here… right here… it defied belief.
Yet, if he was such the computer wizard that Sean said he was, then he could have easily been running the shots all the time by directing them to crime scenes and falsifying his identity to that of a man lying comatose in the hospital. That would have been a piece of cake for him to do.
And no wonder he stole Monica Williams’s phone, once he knew she had a picture of him. And wiped her cloud storage at the same time. He couldn’t have known about the external hard drive backup though, which was a blessing.
Burton was just grateful that Sean had finished his shift at the same time as his fiancée tonight and he was more than grateful that his eagle eyes had spotted the picture. What were the odds of that happening? Burton couldn’t imagine, but he was glad that today, of all days, Sean’s and Jane Francis’s shifts coincided.
After about twenty minutes, Wayman finally returned to the incident room. ‘Got it!’ he declared, waving a piece of paper in his hand.
‘Right,’ Burton said, grabbing it from him. ‘Wayman, you’re with me, and ring down to the desk to get a couple of uniforms to come with us. I don’t think that he’ll be wanting to come along willingly.’
With instructions for the lights and sirens to be extinguished, they made a quiet approach to the address in Withington. The brick-fronted building looked like it had at one time been one two-storey house, but had since been divided into flats. All four men left the car and made their way up the gravel drive where Burton pressed the buzzer for flat four. No reply. He gave it a couple more buzzes before trying another flat. Number two answered almost immediately. A young man’s voice said, ‘Hello.’
‘I’m DI Burton from Manchester City Police and I’m trying to locate Rob Pratchett. I believe he lives at number four?’
‘He did,’ the man said, ‘but he moved out on Saturday morning. Didn’t have much from all accounts as I think he was only working down here for a short while.’
‘Do you mind if we come up and have a word, sir,’ Burton pushed to get them all in the building.
‘Sure, of course.’ Burton pushed the door inwards when the buzzer sounded to open the door, closely followed by Wayman and the uniforms.
‘Yes, that’s Rob,’ the young man, who introduced himself as Frank Downs, told them on seeing Rob’s photograph. ‘He only moved in about six weeks ago, but he said that it was only a temporary contract he was working on and that he’d be leaving to go back home at the end of that time.’
‘Where was back home?’ Burton asked, notebook at the ready.
‘Not sure, really, but somewhere up north. I think I heard a fair bit of Geordie in his accent, though. It is quite distinctive, isn’t it?’
‘Did anybody come to visit him when he was here?’ Burton was hoping that this Pratchett person was not a loner and that he did have memorable visitors.
‘Just his girlfriend. I never saw anybody else coming in, but then I’m not usually in until after five during the week.’
‘What did the girlfriend look like?’
‘I can show you,’ Downs said, reaching for his phone out the back pocket of his jeans, then stopped short. ‘Now this is not how it looks,’ he said almost apologetically.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw them together a few times, thought she was pretty hot like, and one day when she left, I took a photo of her getting into the car.’
‘Have you taken many pictures of this person?’ Burton asked, knowing that repeatedly taking pictures of someone without their permission could be seen as harassment and could get them into trouble.
‘Er… no.’ Downs seemed unsure, which made Burton think that it may not have been just the one.
‘Okay, let’s have a look. Just make sure you don’t make a habit of it in future.’
‘I won’t, detective. There she is,’ Downs said, holding up a picture of a woman getting into her car. She must have seen him taking the photograph as she was looking directly up at the lens, and not looking too happy about it either. But it wasn’t her expression that interested him, it was her face.
‘I think I heard him call her Carol, or something like that,’ Downs offered, trying to be helpful, or trying to make amends for his perceived indiscretion.
‘No, it wasn’t Carol,’ Burton told him, ‘it was Claire.’ He took the phone off the man and showed it to his DC. The woman in the picture was Claire Rawlins.
27
Sally Fielding could hear voices moving around her. She was cold, she was shivering, and she knew that she was no longer in the warmth of the house. The voices sounded as if they were at the bottom of a well or far away at the end of a very long tunnel. A man’s voice and a woman’s voice, both talking.
Where was she? What was happening? She could feel something rough tied around her eyes, she couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but knew it was there to stop her from seeing where she was. It smelled of damp, of earth, and it felt like it was out of doors somewhere. She couldn’t feel her arms or her legs no matter how much she tried, only the blindfold around her eyes.
‘I think she’s coming round,’ the man’s voice said. ‘She’s been out a bit longer than I’d expected.’
Then the woman’s voice joined his. ‘I must have given her a bit too much then.’
‘You’re supposed to be the one with medical training!’ His voice was angry. ‘You could have killed her by giving her an overdose.’
‘I gave her enough to knock her out.’ Her response was equally angry. ‘I know what I’m doing. Do you think we’ve come this far for me to kill her before we’re done with her?’
Recognising who the female was, Fielding finally managed to find her voice. ‘Claire… what’s going on?’
‘Finally,’ the man said. ‘She’s back with us.’
She felt hands at the back of her head untying her eye covering. Her sight was at first blurry, but she adjusted fairly quickly to the low light. She wasn’t outdoors as she’d at first anticipated. She was inside some kind of wooden structure. A battery light hanging on a hook was the only illumination. It revealed Claire Rawlins and the man from the flat.
‘What is this?’ Fielding struggled in vain with the cable ties on her hands and feet. She knew they were virtually impossible to get off.
‘This,’ the man said, ‘is your fate, your payback.’
‘What do you mean?’
He turned to Claire. ‘Would you like to explain, or should I?’
She looked at him. ‘I think that the pleasure should be yours, don’t you?’
‘Very well.’ He turned to Fielding and said with a smirk, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
He pulled up one of the folding chairs and sat down directly in front of her, looking her over. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’
Fielding in turn looked at him, at his features, in his eyes. She had no idea who he was, had never seen him before, but as she looked closer, he did bear a slight resemblance to their sketch of John Doe. But their John Do
e had had hair, whereas this man now seated before her only had a slight stubble all over his head, and he didn’t have any facial hair.
But what could he possibly want with her, and what was Claire Rawlins doing here with him?
‘I think we’ve been looking for you,’ she said. ‘You know Alex Carruthers, don’t you?’
He laughed. ‘Him? He was a means to an end, and this is the end.’
Fielding knew she was centre stage in the whole course of events, the main player. But she couldn’t figure out how she had become this. Was it to do with one of her cases? Was it something to do with her life back in the north east? He’s got a bit of a Geordie accent… she thought. ‘I don’t understand.’
He sat back and folded his arms. ‘Then let me explain.’
Claire pulled up another seat and sat alongside him.
‘Do you remember when we were at school…’
‘We?’ said Fielding. ‘I don’t know you from school!’
‘Oh yes you do,’ interrupted Claire. ‘Everybody knew him… and his brother… because of you and your two stupid little friends.’
So this was what all of this was about, something to do with her school days? ‘My friends? Do you mean Jennifer and Caroline? Did you have something to do with their deaths?’
‘For a police officer, you’re really not all that bright, are you?’ Claire said to Fielding. ‘Not very bright at all. Have you not cottoned on to this yet?’
‘But I don’t know him,’ Fielding protested again. ‘I neither know him nor his brother.’
‘Will you stop saying that!’ the man shouted. ‘Rob and Jonathan Pratchett… know the names now?’
Fielding was silent. She had to think, but yes, she did remember the names now, and they brought back memories long forgotten. The boys had been sixteen when they arrived in Boldon, just around the same time that Claire had done, and they hadn’t just been brothers, they were twins. They had both been plus size, as she recalled, and other children in the school had taunted them about this. She remembered because they’d been referred to as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, two characters from the Lewis Carroll books. At the time, she and her two friends were into anything to do with Alice and her adventures and had their own little ‘Wonderland’ gang. Naturally, she was ‘Alice’, Caroline had been the ‘Queenie’ and Jennifer ‘Hattie’. It was a possibility that the name-callers had picked up on this for obvious reasons, but in reality, it had nothing to do with them. Surely they weren’t being held responsible for that, were they?
‘I still don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What does this have to do with me or my friends, we didn’t call either you or your brother names?’
Pratchett looked over towards Rawlins and back to Fielding again. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
Fielding shook her head. She really had no idea, despite what he thought. ‘Did you kill all those people?’ she asked.
Claire exchanged glances with Rob Pratchett and smiled, saying, ‘That was a joint effort.’
‘But why?’ Fielding tried to discreetly work at her ties as she kept them talking. But she was not as discreet as she’d thought and Pratchett had seen what she was doing. He brought two more cable ties out of his jacket, slipped them on and pulled them tighter than before. They dug into her and she flinched with the pain.
Claire continued as if nothing had happened. ‘Your profiler was correct in that all the victims were not the intended ones. The only ones we wanted to die were you and your friends.’
‘But what about Alex Carruthers?’
‘Just a pawn in our game,’ Pratchett laughed, ‘and he fulfilled his purpose. Then we made him the prime suspect, didn’t we?’
‘But the other three people… they were innocent. Why did they have to die?’ Fielding couldn’t budge the new ties no matter how hard she tried while keeping them talking.
‘They weren’t so innocent,’ said Pratchett. ‘We found out things about them that made them guilty. Guilty of not speaking up when they saw abuse in the schools they worked in. Turning a blind eye to children being taunted, just like you and your friends taunted me and Jonathan. So not so innocent.’
‘Why the sudden urgency to get “payback” as you call it?’
Pratchett stood up and put both hands on the back of the chair and stared at her with an intensity she found disconcerting – even more so than the position she had found herself in now. ‘Because,’ he said, eyes not blinking or leaving hers, ‘Jonathan killed himself last year. And you and your friends are to blame.’
‘How can we be to blame for something your brother did last year? I haven’t seen either of you in over thirteen years and neither my friends nor I taunted either you or your brother. We would never have done that. Surely you haven’t been carrying a grudge for all that time for something none of us did? That’s just insane.’
‘I’m not insane!’ Pratchett barked at her, his face so close to hers that she could feel the heat of his breath on her.
‘Rob…’ Claire put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Keep it together.’
He turned around and slapped her hard on the face, causing her to fall to the ground.
‘What are you doing?’ she cried out, holding her cheek where he’d hit her with his hand. But he ignored her and turned his attention back to Fielding again.
‘You three bitches drove my brother insane. He was never the same after the name-calling he got from all of you. Spent most of his time in and out of institutions after that. You had no idea what you did to him… and me, but I had the strength to fight it and I swore that one day I would get my own back on all of you – for Jonathan. Claire here… my lovely Claire… she helped me, she was here for me, and she said that she would help me. It was despicable what you did.’
‘But it wasn’t even us,’ Fielding tried to argue with him. But she realised that this hatred he had for her and her friends had been thirteen years in the making and wasn’t simply going to go away with her saying a few words of kindness to him.
‘Give her another shot, double it this time,’ he shouted to Claire. ‘I want this over with now.’
‘Are you sure?’ she questioned him.
Is she having doubts perhaps now that she is facing the reality of the situation? wondered Fielding. Was the reality of killing someone that she had briefly gelled with again on their trip back up north too much for Claire Rawlins?
Pratchett grabbed her by both shoulders. ‘This is what we have been planning for over a year now. If you can’t do it, then I will.’ He let go of her and strode over towards her bag to get the syringe.
‘No… no,’ she stopped him. ‘I’ll do it.’
Fielding saw the syringe getting closer and closer to her skin, then felt it sink deep into the muscle of her upper arm. It stung for a few seconds, then she felt her head begin to spin and her head dropped heavily down onto her chest.
28
Burton dialled Fielding’s phone for the fifth time – still going to voicemail.
‘Do we know where Claire Rawlins is staying?’ he shouted frantically to anyone who would listen, but nobody had an answer for him. ‘Have a look on Fielding’s desk,’ he shouted over to Summers, ‘see if you can find the card that she gave her.’
Dammit, she contacted us, Burton thought, not the other way around, realising that this had been planned for a very long time, her and this Rob Pratchett. But why? As far as he knew, neither his name nor Claire Rawlins’s name had popped up in relation to any of Fielding’s past cases. This had to be something personal between them.
Then he remembered Dr Barnes at the coroner’s office. Surely he would have contact details for Rawlins as she had been working there. He found the number for the coroner’s office in his contact list and dialled. When the girl on the switchboard told him that Dr Barnes had left for the evening, Burton insisted that she give him either his home or mobile number. She refused him on the basis of confidentiality. It was then that he lost his patience with her and threatened
legal action if she did not comply.
There was a pause. ‘I’m going to pass you to my line manager.’
And after a brief but fired discussion – with another threat of court action and anything else he could throw at her – Burton was finally given Dr Barnes’s mobile number.
‘She said that she had been called back to her office in the north east,’ Dr Barnes told him, ‘and cleared out her locker at lunchtime. What’s happening?’
Not wanting to go into the full details, Burton simply explained that they urgently needed information from her on the case they were working on. ‘And do you have an address for her?’
‘Well I don’t, I’m afraid.’ It wasn’t the answer Burton had hoped for. ‘But HR will have it… I’ll give you their extension number.’ Burton could hear the sound of him turning pages. ‘Here we are,’ he said at last. ‘HR are the same number as you dialled to get me, but then it’s extension 4421. There should be somebody still there as I believe that they work up to 7pm.’
Burton steeled himself to go through the whole process once again. But he got the same girl on the switchboard as before. She didn’t waste any time in putting him through to HR. The man he spoke to was very helpful, going out of his way to be of assistance. But he came back with the information Burton neither expected nor wanted.
The address he provided for Claire Rawlins was that of Rob Pratchett’s temporary apartment in Withington.
This wasn’t the way Sally Fielding had envisaged herself going out. Lying in a bed somewhere, surrounded by children and grandchildren, having lived a long and happy life – that was how she’d thought that her story would have ended.
But no, here she was tied up and sitting on the cold, damp floor of what seemed to be a shed in somebody’s back garden. Or an allotment maybe? Was that where she was, in Jacob Stephenson’s shed in his allotment? She could see the irony in that.
Claire Rawlins and her boyfriend, Rob Pratchett, would have been highly amused by that final kick in the teeth – depositing their final victim at the crime scene for one of their other victims. Who would have ever thought to look for her there? Her phone wasn’t even turned on. They’d both made sure that it was turned off when they left her to her fate. And there it was, lying on the ground some distance away from her, too far for her to reach and turn on again. Taunting her, like some in her school had taunted Rob Pratchett and his twin brother, Jonathan. They would have thought that to be fitting and apt.
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