by LJ Ross
“Carole is five feet three and doesn’t strike me as a killer,” Lowerson remarked, to which MacKenzie found no argument.
“She wouldn’t be first on my list, either.”
“We’re almost certain that Barbara let whoever it was into the house of her own accord?” Lowerson asked, although he already knew the answer.
“Yup,” MacKenzie nodded, without looking up. “All of the windows and doors were locked, including the front door, which means that our killer took Barbara’s house keys and locked up behind them. The keys aren’t listed on the inventory, which means that they’re still missing.”
“And Carole is the only other person with a set of keys?”
“Yup, which we now have in our possession,” MacKenzie said again, this time looking up to meet his weary eyes with older, wiser ones of her own. The sound of intense activity drifted from the incident room down the hall and she had noticed Lowerson looking up like a curious meerkat every few minutes.
“Focus, Jack,” she snapped. “The rest of the boys and girls are working on what looks to be the Next Big Thing, whereas you’re trawling through the house inventory of an old woman nobody seemed to care about.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said quietly but couldn’t quite hide the sulk.
MacKenzie considered the potential cost-benefits of dishing out a good bollocking, but the hour was growing late and it had been an early start for both of them. Perhaps a good night’s rest would help.
“It’s not all about high profile cases, Jack,” she said, before standing up to stretch out her aching muscles. She waited for her words to register but when no response was forthcoming she waved her hand.
“Go and get some shuteye. I’ll see you first thing tomorrow.”
Lowerson scrubbed a hand over his stinging eyes and stood up, preparing to leave with his tail firmly between his legs.
At the doorway, he turned back.
“Mac, it isn’t that I don’t care. I just don’t know where else to look. Nobody saw anything, forensics haven’t found anything and we stomped all around the centre of Newcastle today trying to find a lead but we’ve come up blank. Nobody in Rothbury knows anything about it. We’re waiting for Barbara’s bank and telephone records and for the CCTV footage to come through but, until they do, we seem to be chasing our tails.”
The sky was pitch black outside and MacKenzie’s reflection was mirrored in the long windows of the room while her face remained shadowed.
“They always leave a trace, Jack,” she said. “It’s just a question of finding it. We’re in the business of playing a long, disciplined game where no time is ever wasted. We’re not glory-hunters but, take my word for it, the people of this region are grateful for every one we catch, even if they don’t know it yet.”
* * *
Before turning in for the night, Ryan and Phillips decided to pay a visit to Karen Dobbs’ former drug dealer. After a short drive through the city centre towards the run-down edges of Walker and Daisy Hill, they pulled up outside two former council houses which had been knocked together and lavishly redesigned to include large faux-Grecian columns and a video-entry security gate that was almost as big as the house itself. Phillips jerked a thumb towards a fountain in the shape of Michelangelo’s David, which dominated the tiny garden.
“Looks like Mr Pinks is a man of taste,” he joked.
Ryan slammed out of his car. He strolled towards the ridiculous curved gates and stared at them for a moment. Then, without further ado, he stepped to the side and hopped over the boundary wall, which was less than two feet high.
Behind him, Phillips barked out a laugh.
“He’ll have you for trespassing.”
“A four-year-old could get over that wall,” Ryan muttered, scowling at the ostentatious car parked outside, the fancy new windows and the shiny black door with its gigantic knocker that was so drastically out of place on this street, in an area where people struggled to make ends meet. Lewis Pinks profited from his neighbours’ misery and he didn’t have the basic decency to take his ill-gotten gains elsewhere. Instead, he lived amongst them, rubbing their noses in it daily.
Ryan ignored the knocker and raised his fist to bang on the front door.
A few moments later, a girl—you could hardly call her a woman—answered with a baby cradled on her hip. She was pretty, her fine hair dyed a brassy blonde and bundled atop her head. Her young face was heavily made up in a manner that reminded him of a kid playing dressy-up.
“What do you want?”
“Hello,” Ryan ignored the sharp tone. “I’m DCI Ryan, this is DS Phillips. We’d like to have a word with Lewis Pinks, if he’s at home.”
“Why?”
“That’s something that we need to discuss with him,” he said gently, mindful of the fact that she couldn’t be more than eighteen. “Is he in the sitting room?”
“Well…” she glanced behind her and jiggled the baby as it began to fuss.
“Don’t worry, pet,” Phillips gave her a fatherly smile and let the baby tug on his thumb. “We’re not here for any trouble.”
“OK,” she seemed relieved. “Let me see where he is.”
She bit her lip and glanced around the street. At least they hadn’t brought a squad car this time.
“D’you want to come in?”
“That’s very kind.”
They watched her move off down the narrow hallway and found their eyes drawn to the garish wallpaper: black, with shiny silver fleur-de-lis. The floor had been carpeted in bright white thick-pile.
Presently, their hostess returned and indicated that they should follow her into an open doorway.
They found Lewis Pinks sprawled on a black leather sofa with a can of lager in one hand and a television remote in the other. He wore a football shirt over jeans and he had the skinny look of someone who had suffered a malnourished childhood.
“Lewis Pinks?”
“Aye,” he said, casually. Too casually, Ryan thought. “Who’s asking?”
“DCI Ryan and DS Phillips, Northumbria CID,” he answered, flashing his warrant card.
“You’re a way from home,” Pinks replied, referring to the fact that Tyne and Wear Area Command were usually the ones to pay him a visit. In fact, they were almost on first-name terms.
Ryan surveyed the man with mounting dislike and the girl hovered beside him while the baby sucked loudly on its hand.
“My throat is parched, pet. Do you think I could have a glass of water?” Phillips appealed to her.
The girl waited for any word from the Man of the House but when none was forthcoming she moved off in the direction of the kitchen and Ryan took his chance. He recited the standard caution, which received a grunt of understanding.
“I’ll cut to the chase. Karen Dobbs was found dead this morning. Do you know anything about that?”
“Naht.”
No grief, no remorse, no surprise. Just a flat denial.
“Aren’t you sorry to hear that the mother of your child is dead?”
“She says that her kid was mine but it could have been anybody’s. So what?”
“A DNA test proved that the boy is yours,” Ryan said, mildly, “but we won’t argue about that now.”
Lewis slurped some of his lager and shuffled on the sofa.
“What can you tell us about Karen?”
“She was a junkie, man,” he shrugged. “What did she think was going to happen?”
“Some people say you supplied the drugs,” Phillips threw in.
Pinks set his can on a glossy side table and jabbed at the remote until the screen was muted. Then he stood up and planted his feet.
From his superior height, Ryan looked down his nose.
“If you’ve come round here to throw accusations and harass me, I’ll get straight on the phone to my solicitor.”
Ryan folded his arms and angled his head.
“Did you hear that, Phillips? Apparently, Mr Pinks feels harassed.”
“Look, Lewis,” Ryan said, tiredly. “We’ll forget for a moment that you’re a flea on the arse of society. Right now, all I care about is finding out who killed Karen Dobbs. When was the last time you saw her?”
“Haven’t seen her in months.”
Ryan told himself to be patient.
“Lewis, don’t play games. We can both pretend that you’re not a scheming little drug dealer until the cows come home but you’re still the man who reported her missing this morning.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Look, we’re not accusing you of her murder. Yet,” Ryan added, silkily, and watched the man’s face turn a shade paler. “All we want to know is how she led her life, whether you saw anything, or if you can help us to find who did kill her.”
They could almost see the cogs turning in his head.
“We’re tracing the call, Lewis, and if we find it came from you we’ll be back here to harass you again,” Phillips added.
It seemed to do the trick, because Pinks licked his upper lip and swiped the back of his hand across his mouth in a nervous gesture.
“OK, look, I might have gone by her house now and then, just to see if she needed anything,” he said eventually.
“Like the Good Samaritan,” Phillips agreed.
“Exactly!” Pinks nodded vigorously and clearly had no appetite for sarcasm.
“Did you happen to make one of these charitable visits earlier today?”
“Maybe, I can’t remember.”
Ryan raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“Give me strength,” he muttered. “Just tell us what you know about Karen and when you last saw her.”
The capitalist living inside Lewis Pinks reared its ugly head.
“Aye, and what do I get in return?”
Ryan took a step forward, until they were almost touching.
“You get to keep both legs,” he said, with a tigerish smile.
Pinks might have had some bravado, but he didn’t have a death wish.
“Hey! I was only asking. Um, yeah, I saw her last Saturday. I usually go around on Saturdays,” he stopped himself from saying ‘to collect’.
“And?”
“Karen was into smack and she wouldn’t turn down a bit of MD and all that,” he said, as if describing her favourite packet of crisps. “She would usually run through her dole money by the end of the first couple of days. She’d try and tap up her old lady after that. If that didn’t work, I—ah—I hear that she supplemented her income in other ways.”
Standing in such close proximity, Ryan could almost feel this man’s filth crawling over his skin.
“You heard that she supplemented her income. Let’s just say it, shall we? Karen prostituted herself to get money for the drugs you supplied to her.”
Pinks was about to flare up, when Phillips stepped smoothly into the breach.
“Allegedly,” he said, then motioned for the man to continue his story.
“I never gave her nothing,” Pinks spat out, but when both men continued to regard him with empty, unwavering stares, he licked his lips again and thought about how much he should say.
“Alright, yeah, alright. I knew she was in trouble with the law for putting it about,” he held his hands up, as if the admission were a great concession on his part. “But what could I do?”
Ryan’s eyes flashed, but his voice remained calm.
“Did the johns come around to her house? Where did she go, Lewis? Where was her corner?”
Some danger must have transmitted itself, because Pinks made another one of his wide-armed gestures.
“I heard, you know, on the grapevine, that she used to go down to the petrol station—the one at the bottom of Shields Road—and hang around the back so that the shop assistant wouldn’t see her.”
“You never happened to accompany Karen on any of these visits? Not even to buy a pint of milk?” Phillips asked.
“Nah, man, not my scene,” Pinks said, derisively.
“Alright. What else did you happen to hear? Did Karen mention anybody who was giving her trouble, anybody who worried her?”
Pinks had the grace to look away. Karen had been in and out of hospital more times than he cared to remember. He’d heard the horror stories and seen the scars left on her body afterwards. It made him defensive.
“How the fuck should I know? She was filthy, man, she asked for it—”
In a flash, Ryan had him up against the wall, one muscular forearm resting heavily against the other man’s windpipe while he sputtered and gasped for air.
“How does that feel?” Ryan ground out. “Because that’s how Karen felt while some bloke choked the life out of her, you piece of shit.”
Phillips didn’t bother to intervene because he recognised controlled violence when he saw it. Besides, in this instance he agreed with it.
Less than ten seconds later, Ryan released Pinks and the man bent over at the waist to draw gulps of air deeply into his chest. Ryan stepped back and waited until he looked up again.
“I’ll report you!”
“Go ahead. In the meantime, I want to know anything else you remember. Otherwise, so help me, I’ll come back and finish the job. Rely on it.”
As they turned to leave, the blonde girl reappeared with two tall glasses of water she had garnished with little slices of lemon and ice. The baby had disappeared, presumably to bed, and Ryan looked at the water she held in her hands then back into her eyes. Sadness swept over him at the sweetness of this woman-child and the life she led with the man who had resumed his former position slouched on the sofa. He wondered what the future would hold for her.
“Thanks, love, but we’d best be heading off,” Phillips said, then led the way out of the house.
Outside, he turned to Ryan with knowing eyes.
“Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?”
“She probably thinks he’s Prince Charming,” Ryan answered, looking away.
“We can’t save them all.”
Ryan nodded briskly, then strode back towards his car.
CHAPTER 10
It was pitch black by the time MacKenzie let herself into her smart little house in Ponteland, a short drive from CID Headquarters. She wondered whether it was healthy to live so close to the office, to be on hand for any emergency that might arise, but work had always been her solace. The lack of companionship or wider social life hadn’t bothered her; she was reliable and punctual and, if she said it herself, she was a damn good murder detective.
Then Frank Phillips had stomped into her life, shaking everything up.
Of course, she had known Phillips for years in a professional capacity. She had admired his calm, easy demeanour and ready sense of humour from afar. They fostered an amicable working relationship while his wife was alive, which had turned prickly in the years following her death as they acknowledged the unspoken attraction simmering between them. She didn’t fully understand what had led her to take the plunge but something about Frank made it inevitable. It was there, in his eyes: endless patience, endless kindness. She never imagined that life could be so easy living with him, as she mostly did these days, and the panic she expected to feel had never come.
MacKenzie fiddled inside her satchel for her front door key.
There had been another concerning shift in her mindset recently. She had never regretted the lack of children in her life because she had never found any man she wished to procreate with. That was the way it had always been and it made life simple. While other female friends rushed down the aisle or to the maternity ward, MacKenzie had remained content to be ‘Auntie Denise’ to their children. It had always been a relief to return to her tidy, stress-free home without the clutter of toys, the squeal of babies or the added responsibility. Life as a murder detective carried enough of a heavy burden and she didn’t need any further complications. Besides, she wasn’t sure that her professional life would be compat
ible with a family anyway.
But, just recently, she had caught herself wondering about it. As a woman in her forties, it was no small source of anxiety to find that she had fallen in love and, worse still, that the prospect of creating miniature versions of herself wasn’t nearly as terrifying as it should have been.
Was she too late?
With these sobering thoughts crowding her mind, MacKenzie pushed away the day’s mail with the toe of her boot and closed the front door behind her, then bent down to collect the small pile, taking it with her into the kitchen.
She dropped the mail onto the countertop alongside her bag and began to shoulder out of her coat. She slung it over the back of one of the wooden bar stools, then reached across to fill the kettle. Her eye came to rest on one envelope that stood out from the others. Setting the kettle to boil, she reached for it and frowned down at the neat black lettering. She didn’t recognise the handwriting, nor did she know anybody who would normally use stationery like the expensive, weighty-looking cream envelope she held in her hand. There was no postmark, which meant that somebody had slipped it through her letterbox themselves.
With a shrug, she slid a finger under the flap and broke the seal.
Inside, there was a single sheet of paper that read:
Et ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
Her fingers trembled against the paper and it fell from her hands, floating to the floor with a soft rustle in the silent house.
* * *
Plain-clothed police officers assigned to Operation Angel gave up their Saturday night take-aways and spent their evening sitting in unmarked vehicles around the city. To his surprise, Ryan won his argument with Morrison and dispatched a small army of officers to watch over the seven remaining cemeteries falling under the remit of Newcastle City Council, with extra surveillance assigned to Elswick and All Saints since they were due to host funerals the next morning. As day turned into night and the hours slipped slowly by, they sat stiffly in their cars, eyes aching under dim street-lighting while they completed an exercise equivalent to watching paint dry. Pairs of officers walked the perimeter of Elswick, valiantly covering an area larger than several football pitches.
