by Menon, David
‘God, I feel sick,’ said Paul.
‘I thought I was in my final moments,’ said Jake. ‘All I could think about was you. The memory of it still traps me inside my head, you know. Those shackles are still on. Those tight hands with the desire to kill me in every pore of every finger are still in position. The gentle whirling sound of the video camera as it prepared to make me a worldwide hit. I can still hear the voices that ripped through me like tiny daggers until I heard a different kind of voice. A voice that spoke a language I still didn’t understand but that I knew was friendly.’
‘And who the hell was that?’
‘We had a French group working under our command. They stormed the shack and luckily the first one they killed was the one who’d been holding the knife. You see, the Taliban had planned to grab one of the coalition soldiers for weeks. That’s why they took me straight to the little studio they’d set up. But it was only a mile from where the French had been on patrol and they received some intelligence on the location. I’ll never bad mouth France or the French ever again, not even in jest.’
Paul sat up and cradled Jake’s face in his hands. ‘Jake, you’ve got to get some help to sort all of this out in your head.’
‘No, I don’t!’ Jake insisted, ‘all I need is to come here and talk to you.’
‘Jake, I’m not a professional.’
‘You are! You do this all the time at work.’
‘Jake, I’m a social worker, not a therapist. I can’t deal with all you’ve got going through your head.’
‘You don’t know everything that’s going through my head.’
‘And that’s the point!’
‘Paul, please, don’t close me down.’
‘Close you down?’
‘Take away the only place I can go.’
Paul couldn’t get over the look in Jake’s eyes. They were full of pain. They’d witnessed his imminent death and his lucky escape. What was the country doing for these guys? The country sends them out and makes a big show of driving their dead bodies through villages where people turn out to show their respect. But what happens to men like Jake who come back alive but without everything in their soul that they’d taken out with them? Are they just left to deal with it on their own? Would those who publicly display their support for the dead look the other way when the living show their problems? Is it too uncomfortable for them? It’s easy to applaud dead bodies. Anybody can do that. Reaching out and helping the living was more difficult.
Paul held Jake’s hand. ‘I’ll do what I can, Jake.’
‘I know you will,’ said Jake who had tears running down his cheeks.
‘Do you want to stay for dinner?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Paul stood up. ‘I’ll go and see what I’ve got. I haven’t done much shopping this week so we might have to send out for something.’
Jake reached out for Paul’s hand and held it. ‘Paul?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Thanks.’
Paul smiled. ‘What are we going to do, Jake?’
‘About us?’
‘And Tiffany and the baby.’
‘I don’t know. I want to be here with you more than anything but I can’t leave her. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
ELEVEN
It had quite made Sara’s day when she got to work that morning and a very cute PC called Kieran Quinn, who’d caught her eye a few days ago and who was manning the reception desk downstairs, had noticed that she’d had her hair trimmed the night before. The comment had made her blush. Either he’s into older women or he doesn’t realise how much older than him she is. But then she thought, so what? He’d look very nice inside her. It had been a while since she’d been taken down and dusted and three weeks without sex for a woman as physically inclined as Sara was like an eternity.
Her friends all said she had a man’s attitude when it came to sex. If she wanted it she went looking for it or she welcomed it if it came to find her and she didn’t see any wrong in that. Samantha, her great heroine from Sex and the City had shown all the women of the world the way and that it was okay for women to chase cock as much as men chase fanny. She liked sex. There was nothing like the feeling you get from it when it’s good and as far as she was concerned people who said they didn’t need it were only making up for the fact that they couldn’t find it. She wondered how experienced young Kieran was. Sometimes younger men could surprise a girl with their knowledge. Her vibrator had been seeing a lot of her lately and that was all very fine but she couldn’t talk to it about the football. Kieran looked like he’d be into football. He was well over six feet tall with dark blond hair and green eyes. He’d tan well in the sun and he had the sexiest dimple in his chin. He clearly had an eye for her and she couldn’t wait to get his pants off, so by the end of the day she’d have exchanged numbers with him and made arrangements for him to come round and check out where she slept. Although he won’t be doing much sleeping once she’d got him under her duvet.
But first there was work to do. Yesterday she’d had the most blazing row with Steve Osborne. He’d accused her of trying to undermine him because she wouldn’t accept his theory that the social worker Paul Foster might be involved in the disappearance of the missing girls. His argument was that Foster was the only common link they knew about so far between all the girls. They and their families had all been clients of his. He was only offering it as part of a discussion but one thing led to another and before they knew it voices were being raised and doors were being slammed shut. The first thing she intended to do today was build some kind of bridge with the sexist prick and she was glad when she caught up with him in the corridor.
‘DS Osborne.’
‘Ma’am,’ said Steve, he carried on walking but she called him back.
‘DS Osborne?’
Steve sighed and turned around, ‘Yes, ma’am?’
‘I think we need to talk, don’t you?’
‘I’ve consulted my federation rep, ma’am.’
‘About what?’
‘About the guidelines on workplace bullying.’
Sara was absolutely incensed. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that I was bullying you?’
‘That’s what it felt like to me, ma’am, yes.’
‘DS Osborne, I completely reject the idea that I was bullying you and I can assure you that I will fight any complaint vigorously, but if there was any bullying going on then I think it was going both ways. Ever since I set foot in this building you’ve done nothing but take any step you can to confront me. Now I know you’re sore because I took the box of toys you thought were yours but you’ve got to deal with it, Steve. Or else you’ll never get to play with them. Now, underneath all this pointless attitude you treat me to I truly believe there’s a bloody good copper just screaming to get out. Your assessment is due in a couple of weeks’ time. Let’s not make it war and peace without the peace.’ She held out her hand. ‘Let’s grow up and get on.’
For once in his life Steve knew he had to bow to the intellectual superiority of a woman. Sara was tough. And he’d have to admit that he didn’t think he’d have been able to confront the bad blood between them like she just had. So he would give her a chance. But only one.
‘Okay,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘This is day one.’
‘Good.’
‘I must say I’m impressed, ma’am.’
‘With what exactly?’
‘In our argument you didn’t bring in the whole man-woman thing,’ said Steve, feeling he was being clumsy with his words although he knew exactly what he was trying to say. ‘You didn’t try to say that it was due to you being a woman and me being a man.’
‘That’s because I’ve got balls, Steve.’
Steve smiled. ‘Yes, I think you have.’
‘But do me a favour?’
‘I’m spoken for, ma’am, sorry.’
Now it was Sara’s turn to smile. She wouldn’t take her clothes off for Steve if someone offered
to pay her, however much she liked the physical side of life.
‘That’s a shame, I’m really gutted,’ she said, ‘but what I meant was don’t wear that tie again.’
Steve looked down at his red, white, and blue stripped tie.
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘What’s right with it?’
‘My mother bought me this last Christmas.’
‘Then as an act of revenge I would accuse her of having abused you when you were a child.’
Sara went into the ladies and couldn’t help laughing but was also relieved that she and Steve had settled things. She used her usual mix of firmness, honesty, and humour and it seemed to have worked. She did believe that Steve was a good copper. It just needed to be wrestled past his attitude.
She then went into a meeting with Tim, Joe, and Steve. Joe briefed them that as a result of intense house to house enquiries made by uniform and the checking of school attendance records, it was now certain that fifteen teenage girls had gone missing from the Tatton estate and other estates across Greater Manchester and in all cases none of the parents had reported anything to the police. None of the parents would talk. Sara hadn’t even been able to prize anything out of Shona Higgins parents. Whoever had frightened these people into silence had done a bloody good job.
‘So what do we think?’ Sara asked.
‘That there is a connection between them all, ma’am,’ said Steve. ‘All the girls have been declared missing and their details fed through all the national channels. We have checked out all the paedophiles on the watch list who are living in the area and managed to eliminate them all from our enquiries and in any case, to put it bluntly all of these girls would be too old for them.’
‘The youngest is thirteen and the oldest is fifteen, right?’ Tim wanted to confirm.
‘Yes, boss,’ said Joe. ‘There are two offenders who have previous for having sex with underage teenage girls that live on the estate but we’ve been able to rule both of them out too.’
‘And didn’t anybody notice anything on the days these girls disappeared?’ Sara wanted to know.
‘Ma’am, no witnesses have come forward and no incidents have been recorded,’ said Steve.
‘But I can’t believe that nobody saw anything,’ said Sara, ‘I mean, nobody from the schools they were supposed to be attending? The local shops? Bus drivers?’
‘On the face of it, it’s baffling to tell you the truth, ma’am,’ said Steve. ‘These girls just seemed to have walked off into nowhere.’
‘So where do we go from here?’ asked Tim.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Joe, ‘the only thing we can do at this stage is to look through that lot.’ He pointed at the mountain of tapes taken from CCTV cameras on the various estates and outside the schools the girls were supposed to have attended. ‘It’ll take a while but it might bring something up.’
‘Okay then, Joe,’ said Sara. ‘Thanks for everything so far. Let’s see if you get something positive from the tapes.’
‘We can try, ma’am,’ said Joe. ‘I’ll keep you informed.’
‘But who could be frightening them?’ Sara asked. ‘That’s what I want to find out.’
Later that morning Sara met with Superintendent Hargreaves to bring him up to date on both the missing girls and the Naumann extradition case.
‘They’ve both changed their story, sir,’ said Sara. ‘First, Lady Eleanor insisted that nobody else had been there at the time of Peter Jenkins’ murder and had dismissed Wilfred Jenkins assertion at his trial that there had been. Then Naumann tells us that he was the said mystery man who was there when Peter Jenkins died.’
‘So what are we saying has happened here?’ asked Hargreaves who’d always had a more modern attitude to female officers than some of his contemporaries. As far as he was concerned if an officer could bring in the results then he didn’t care whether they were male, female, black, white, brown, yellow, gay, straight, or indifferent.
‘I think that Naumann may have killed Jenkins and Lady Eleanor is protecting him like she’s always done,’ said Sara. ‘Naumann also had a motive to kill Ronald Harding, Lady Eleanor’s husband who was a closet homosexual who’d refused to give Lady Eleanor the divorce she’d asked for when the war ended and she wanted to marry Naumann. For decades they’d carried on an affair and Naumann was the biological father of Lady Eleanor’s daughter who she blamed for the killing.’
‘Even though Naumann waited until 1974?’
‘Opportunity, inclination, there could’ve been several reasons why Naumann waited that long.’
‘And Lady Eleanor’s daughter disappeared straight after?’
‘Exactly, sir,’ Sara went on, ‘Naumann had been married to another woman but he’d always remained in love with Lady Eleanor. He had motive and the need to protect his anonymity provided the perfect alibi.’
‘So where the hell did the daughter go?’
‘Who knows? But we know that people can just disappear if they really want to.’
‘The evidence is flimsy to say the least though, Sara,’ said Hargreaves.
‘It is at the moment, sir, I agree,’ said Sara. ‘But what we need to do is to trace people who worked at the Hall back in 1974 and find Clarissa Harding’s boyfriend.’
‘Alright,’ said Hargreaves as he leaned back in his chair and rubbed a finger over his chin. ‘But let’s stay aware of the timescale we have on Naumann. Don’t let it start running out on us.’
*
Lorraine was pegging her washing out when two strong arms grabbed her from behind and one of the hands went up to cover her mouth. It was a fairly secluded back garden and nobody would’ve been able to witness the scene unless they happened to be peering out of their window at the time. And even if anybody had seen they wouldn’t risk talking to the coppers or anyone else for that matter.
Jake threw her down into the armchair in her living room. The curtains had all been drawn closed. He didn’t like what he was doing but he didn’t feel like he had any choice. He’d been dishonourably discharged from the army after they’d discovered he’d taken the handguns and ammunition. His previous exemplary service coupled with his two brushes with death at the hands of the Taliban had proved to be enough in the way of mitigating circumstances for him to escape a much harsher judgement. But still he felt like there was unfinished business to attend to with regard to the army. He didn’t want to take anything out on the army itself. Nobody amongst their ranks would ever be the target of his hunger for revenge. But what he did want to do was to show whoever would listen enough to make sense that the troops shouldn’t be out there. But that was for another day. That was what he was saving up for. Other people who have never had a knife held at their throat, save up their money for a new dining room suite. Jake was saving up to buy something that money couldn’t.
‘No, please, not again!’ Lorraine pleaded, her face covered in the tears. ‘Sir, please, I didn’t tell them anything.’
‘Tell who?’ asked Glenn Barber who was sat opposite her on the sofa.
‘The police! They came round here but I didn’t tell them anything, I swear I didn’t.’
Glenn sat with his legs folded over each other and a cigarette on the go. He nodded to Jake who hoisted Lorraine up and dragged her down at Glenn’s feet. He was holding her by her hair and once more she was almost passing out with fear. Glenn leaned forward.
‘Now, Lorraine,’ said Glenn. ‘Who raised all these suspicions in the first place? Who was it that let the cat out of the bag? Was it you?’
Lorraine shook her head as vigorously as she could in the grip of Jake’s firm hands. ‘No, sir, no, it was that social worker.’
‘Who? A bleeding heart social worker?’
‘He was the one who called in the police to investigate what had happened to the girls. He’s the one who’s made you have to watch yourself, sir.’
‘And what’s his name, Lorraine?’
‘Paul Foster, sir,’ said Lorraine, usin
g her hatred for Paul Foster to get herself off the hook with Barber. He needed to be taught a lesson anyway and Barber was the one to do it. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. ‘He works down at the centre in Broughton. He lives round here somewhere but I don’t know where.’
Jake heard Paul’s name and it felt like a knife going through his heart. Jesus Christ, could things get anymore complicated?
‘Paul Foster,’ said Glenn Barber as he rolled his cigarette in his fingers. ‘So he’s the one who thinks he can interfere in my business? Well he’ll have to learn like you all do.’ He stabbed the still burning cigarette into Lorraine’s chin. She let out a scream but Jake held her steady. He was doing his job well despite being knocked way off centre by the mentioning of Paul’s name. He knew what Glenn Barber would intend to do about Paul and it sent a chill through his soul.
‘Don’t keep me waiting for information again, Lorraine,’ said Barber after he’d stood up. Lorraine was crouched down on the floor holding her chin. ‘Let me know as soon as you do. Then we wouldn’t have to make these little visits.’
