by Neil White
‘It’s not that complicated,’ Hoyle said. ‘He knows which battles to fight, and which ones to back away from. He’s hurt about the story in the paper this morning. He called me and wanted to know whether he could sue anyone, but I told him that there was nothing untrue in there. I also told him that there are more ways to play the same tune. He’s not happy, but he wants to find Jane’s killer. If using you does that, he’s prepared to work with you.’
Jack shook his head. ‘The deal works both ways though.’ Hoyle looked confused, so Jack added, ‘I’ve got to want to work with him. I told Roberts this morning that I wasn’t interested in helping him out, and nothing has changed. Besides, your angle doesn’t work. People who know Don will know why he wants the information, and won’t be sucked in by some father’s cry. Those who don’t know him won’t call him, because no one is interested in Don Roberts, because he hasn’t paraded himself at the police press conferences with a tissue in his hand. The public have got to like him to help him. That’s not fair, but that’s the world. And so the answer is no, I’m not interested. If I change my mind, I’ll get in touch.’
Jack went to leave the room, but Hoyle gripped his arm and said, ‘Don’t mess with Roberts. You can hide behind your pen, but it is still only a pen, and Roberts has got more dangerous weapons than that, and a very long memory.’
Jack looked down at Hoyle’s hand around his arm and then yanked it away. ‘Good to hear it.’
Hoyle stared at Jack for a few seconds, and then he picked up his files and marched out of the room.
When Jack was alone again, his teeth chewed a furrow into his lip. He was freelance so that he could do things his way, and when he thought of Don Roberts, he knew there was only one way, and that was Don’s way. But Jack knew that he had just created a very powerful enemy.
Laura watched the squad look up as Carson barged in. Her eyes felt heavy from her midnight meeting with Carson. Rachel Mason tracked Joe Kinsella as he followed Carson into the room, and then she glanced at Laura, before turning away and looking back at her computer screen.
The meeting had the same format as the day before. Joe was at the front, just behind a silent Carson, keeping an eye on people’s faces. Laura sat at the back to listen out for the whispers.
There was a sense of frustration that they were getting nowhere with the investigation. It had been forty-eight hours since Jane had been found and nothing had turned up so far. They had knocked on doors, spoken to the town’s peepers and perverts, pestered the forensic science lab for results, but still they had no leads. The mood in the room was tetchy and Carson wasn’t about to improve things. He slammed the door shut when everyone was in, making the newspaper on the desk flutter. It was folded in half so that Carson could reveal it as a surprise for those who hadn’t seen it.
Carson folded his arms and spoke to the group.
‘Has anyone thought of anything that will bring us closer to the killer?’ he asked, the words coming out with a growl.
Some people exchanged glances, the occasional shrug, but no one spoke.
Carson nodded to himself and then turned to the desk behind him. He lifted the newspaper and opened it out, showing the headline over the photograph of Jane Roberts.
‘Remember this?’ he said. ‘A leak, disclosing squad secrets. We had to release a story to try and expose him, and that meant giving details of how Jane Roberts was found.’ He looked at all the faces in the room. No one was averting his gaze. ‘I said yesterday that whoever was leaking secrets to reporters had a chance to leave the squad, no questions asked.’ He threw the newspaper back onto the desk. ‘I’m glad to see that you’re all still here, because something happened last night that changed things.’ He reached for an A3 piece of paper that had been face down on the desk. When he lifted it up, there were murmurs around the room.
Carson was holding up the photograph of Jane Roberts that had been emailed the night before.
‘The more observant amongst you will notice that Jane looks a little fresher than when we found her, and she’s wearing clothes. It was sent to Jack Garrett last night, McGanity’s paramour. So this means one thing: whoever sent those emails is the killer because she was naked when she was found and so the killer must have taken the photograph.’ He banged his hand hard onto the desk. ‘We’ve lost a day already, by not looking at them hard enough. The emails are the key now. We have direct contact.’
Carson let that hang in the air for a few seconds, and then he said, ‘McGanity was almost run down last night, and we think it was our man, because the emails mention it. He referred to Laura by name, and so he knows who is on the squad. He knew that Jack Garrett had been here yesterday. We need to be vigilant. Keep an eye on your mirrors. Watch out for people hanging around near your house. Make sure you know where your family is.’ He paused, and was met with silence again. No one seemed cowed. ‘The email also said that there was another victim last night.’ That sent a buzz of whispers around the room. He pointed to two detectives sitting alongside Laura. ‘You two. Compile a list of all Escort or Astra vans, light brown in colour.’ He pointed to two more. ‘Get in touch with Google. Find out which IP address was used to send these emails. Don’t let them fob you off.’
‘Sir, we’ve got something,’ a voice said at the back. When everyone turned to look, Rachel Mason pointed at the computer screen. ‘I skimmed through the logs from last night while you were talking. Someone reported that his girlfriend hadn’t come home.’
There were murmurs around the room as Carson said, ‘What does it say?’
‘A twenty-four-year old woman, Caroline Holt,’ Rachel said, reading from an Incident Report. ‘She’d been to visit her cousin along the road. She hadn’t come home by midnight, and when he called her cousin, she said that she’d left a few hours earlier.’
‘That’s him,’ Carson said, a gleam in his eyes. He nodded at Rachel. ‘Go speak to her boyfriend. Get photographs. See if there is any link to the other two victims.’
The rumbles of conversation carried on until Carson clapped his hands. ‘Right, that’s it. Back to work. You know what you’re doing.’
Laura stayed where she was as the officers who had enquiries to make filed out, and then she went to the front to speak to Joe and Carson. As she got there, she caught Rachel Mason looking back as she left the room, those icy-blue eyes watching her.
‘There was nothing going on back there,’ Laura said to Joe.
‘Same here,’ Joe said, scratching his lip with his finger. ‘If the killer was in the room he’d make a good poker player.’
‘So what are we doing?’ Laura said.
‘The emails said that Emma was the key,’ Carson said. ‘That has to be what we look for now, a connection to Emma. Let’s go back to their friends and parents and find out who she is. They need to think harder.’
‘And if it still comes up blank,’ Joe said, ‘we just wait for him to do something else that shocks us. Except that I don’t really want to wait for that, because if it involves another dead body, the attack on Laura is a sign that it might be one of us that gets found.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
Rupert checked his watch, nearly eleven-thirty, and looked up at the police station.
Blackley. He had never been here before. He had always lived where he had practised – in Cleveleys, a small seaside town on the Lancashire coast forty miles away, so different to Blackley, where the skyline of terraced streets was broken by old stone chimneys and giant blocks of empty mills, the windows in darkness, shadows of dereliction.
The police station looked new though, all giant glass panels and wooden surrounds, rising high amongst the office complexes and out-of-town superstores. The doors to the station were built for impact, not use, large and made from heavy wood, and as he walked towards them, he tried to blink away his doubts. He was sworn to confidentiality, his patients had been troubled kids through the years who had needed guidance to help them back on the path to a successful adult life. He’d lost more tha
n he’d saved, but for everyone he did help to straighten up, it was worth all the effort of the failures.
Confidentiality. It was that word again, the one that he had stood by throughout his working life, and sometimes hidden behind when the police wanted information, or when social services were looking to apply their own brand of care. He would disclose what he was required to disclose, by court order, or when he was engaged to help the system, but when he saw a child as a patient, his first duty was to keep their secrets.
But did he owe a greater duty to the public now, to tell them what he knew?
He pulled on the door and went into the reception area of the police station, a line of chairs opposite a bank of glass counters. There was a large window behind him, so that it was like being in a glass tank. He could only see movement behind one of the counters, the rest shielded by blinds, where a grey-haired woman bent down in hushed conversation with a young man holding driving documents. Just routine.
Rupert looked along the chairs. There were only three people there: a young man in a tracksuit, his jaw set, his stare fixed at a point on the ceiling, and a middle-aged man sitting alongside a woman in a suit, who was checking her hair in the glass opposite. Solicitor and client was Rupert’s guess.
He sat down and waited his turn.
The door that went into the main body of the station was busy with police officers heading in and out, talking into radios or laughing and joking.
Not long after, the young man with the driving documents stepped away from the counter and the woman behind the glass shouted, ‘Next’. Rupert looked along the row and gestured towards the others. The solicitor smiled and shook her head, said that she was waiting to see someone, and the young man in the tracksuit simply ignored him.
Rupert looked up at the glass counter. The woman in a clean white shirt with red and black shoulder flashes beckoned him forward, although she looked impatient rather than helpful. Rupert took another look along the row and saw that it was he who was expected to be next.
He creaked to his feet and walked slowly over to the window.
‘Yes, love?’ the woman asked, her tone patronising.
He thought about leaving. This was it, his last chance to stick to his vows of confidentiality. Then he remembered the description of the dead girl, of how she was found, along with her picture.
‘I’m here about the murder,’ he whispered into the glass. ‘Jane Roberts. I want to speak to the detective in charge.’
Rupert saw her eyes flicker wide, and then she nodded.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Rupert Barker.’
‘And you want to speak to Inspector Carson?’
Rupert nodded. He remembered the name from the news report.
‘Wait there,’ she said, and she pointed to the chair he had been sitting in before.
Rupert went back to his chair. His hands were wet. His mouth was dry. What if his thoughts meant nothing? He would have broken his vow and it would all have been in vain. He might as well give away the key to his old filing cabinet, childhood confidences betrayed. What would happen to his former patient, Shane Grix? Would the police be kicking his door down later on, based on confidences he had disclosed years ago? Maybe the killer and the patient he had in mind were different people? He had slowed down now, retirement bringing a different gear. Should he ruin his reputation based on a decades-old hunch?
He looked up when the door banged open, his heart thumping hard in his chest. It was a uniformed officer, heading out on a patrol. There was a police driver just behind him, taking bags towards a van parked just outside.
Rupert closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He wasn’t ready to do this, he knew that from the relief he felt when the officer kept on walking. He opened his eyes and waited for some suits to come rushing towards him, and he knew that once they got him in one of the rooms on the other side of the doors, he would find it hard to resist their questions. He felt the urge to go.
Rupert stood up quickly and marched to the exit. He couldn’t do this. When he got outside and felt the soft caress of summer again, he let out a long sigh and let the breeze dry the sweat that had spread across his forehead. It was time to go back to his life. He wasn’t prepared to give up the one thing he still had: his reputation.
He walked quickly to his car and climbed in. He felt his pulse slow down when he heard the engine rumble to life, and as he pulled out of the car park, the police station fading in his rear view mirror, he gave a relieved smile.
He had done the right thing.
Everyone looked round when there was a knock on the door of the Incident Room. It was one of the civilian workers from the front desk.
‘Yes?’ Carson said.
‘There’s a man at the desk wanting to speak to someone about your murder case.’
Laura exchanged glances with Carson and Joe. ‘Who is he?’ she asked.
‘Someone called Rupert Barker. He seems nervous.’
Carson looked at Laura. ‘Sounds like he needs your gentle touch.’
‘Or maybe any touch but yours,’ she said, and then stood to follow the civilian worker back through the police station.
Laura walked out of the Incident Room and towards the doors that separated the waiting room from the main body of the station. As she looked through the doors, Laura could see one of the local solicitors, a wannabe glamour-puss, sitting next to her client and preening in the glass, and there was someone in a tracksuit, but he didn’t look much like a Rupert.
There was a room behind the glass kiosks, where the counter staff went when they had to make some enquiries they were trying to keep secret from the customer. Laura put her head round the door. ‘Where did he go?’
The counter assistant looked up from the note she was writing and then back out through the glass.
‘He was here a minute ago.’
Laura looked through the glass in the door again. ‘He’s not here now,’ she muttered under her breath, and then gave the door a push and went into the foyer. She was met with a couple of blank glances, apart from the solicitor, who was still flicking at her long hair and smiling at her reflection.
Laura went towards the exit doors and then out into the sunshine. She looked along the line of parked vehicles just outside the front doors and saw a car starting to pull away. She tried to make out a number plate, but he was too far away. A departing police van then blocked her view.
Laura pointed at the camera in the corner of the foyer as she rushed through. ‘How can I view what has just been recorded?’
The woman behind the counter shrugged and then pointed upwards. ‘In the CCTV room, I expect.’
Laura walked quickly through the station and headed for the stairs, avoiding the lift, a confined space. Laura got nervous whenever she felt closed in. She hadn’t always been that way, but a bad experience a year earlier, when a case had ended up with her being trapped in a small space, had made her this way. If there was a way to avoid them, she would take it.
She headed for the top floor as quickly as she could, her legs aching from her efforts the night before. She was out of breath when she burst into a small room that was dominated by a bank of television screens. There were images from around Blackley, the town centre and Saturday night flash points, along with some of the major traffic routes out of town. The CCTV operator looked up, his eyes taking a second to re-adjust from focussing on the screens.
‘Do you have the foyer downstairs monitored?’ she asked.
He shrugged and nodded, then pressed a couple of keys. An image of the entrance downstairs was displayed on one of the centre screens.
‘Can you wind it back ten minutes?’ she asked.
His tut was barely audible, but Laura heard it, although she focussed on the screen instead as the footage was rewound.
‘There!’ she said quickly, as a figure seemed to walk backwards out of the station. When the operator pressed the play button, Laura watched as the figure walked in.
He seemed old and small, his head bald, his features pointed. He seemed uncomfortable, nervous, as if he wanted to say something but would be quite pleased if he never got the chance. As he sat down, Laura watched as he shifted in his chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs, biting his lip, his hand running over his scalp as if he was brushing hair that had long since lost the battle with time, glancing up as two police officers strode through on their way out of the station. When it was his turn to go to the counter, he seemed to hold back, and although he held his nerve long enough to speak to the lady at the counter, he stepped away quickly after that and looked at the floor. He sat down for a short period and then he left, as if he was no longer uncertain, more determined to get away than he had been to enter.
‘Have you got any external footage?’
He tutted and pressed a couple of keys, and then a view of the car park appeared on one of the screens. Laura watched as the man walked quickly to a car. As he climbed in and reversed, there was a good shot of the number plate. She jotted it down and said, ‘Save that footage,’ and then ran out of the room. The CCTV operator barely acknowledged her demand.
She went into the room next door and found a spare computer terminal. Once she had logged in, she did a check on the number plate. Rupert Barker. The same name as given by the man who came in.
Laura headed for the stairs again. She knew where she was heading next: to see Rupert Barker.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Some kids looked at Jack’s car as he drove onto the Whitcroft estate. They had the usual hoods and loose fits, with more menace than the black hair and pale faces of teenagers seen in the better parts of town, where rebellion was just a phase. Jack knew that they were trying to work out how to spoil someone’s day, and their eyes had settled on Jack’s relic from the seventies, the Calypso Red paint blistering on the front wings and the windscreen covered in dust and squashed flies.
