Who Is She?

by Ben Cheetham

  “Pussy-blocked me.”

  Jack gave him a sidelong glance. “Sometimes I think you’ve got mummy issues. That girl wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”

  “Nah. That whole bad bitch thing is just an act. Believe me, mate, I know a real bitch when I see one. My ex-wife’s the biggest bitch in Manchester.”

  “Do you buy that, It just kind of came to me, line?”

  “I don’t see why not. But I hope she is lying. I’d love an excuse to talk to her again.” Steve’s expression suddenly turned serious. “A cop killer.” He shook his head. “B-a-a-a-d news.”

  “On the plus side, we didn’t have to speak to every tattooist in Manchester before coming up with something. I say we check out the other places that do facial tattoos, then head back to HQ. If Viv’s right, our guy’s walking around free after killing nine people. That’s a lot of unsolved murders. Maybe we can find one that connects to him.”

  Chapter 11

  It was late afternoon by the time they returned to HQ. They stopped off on the way to fill up on fast-food. Steve burped and patted his belly. “Viv’s right. I should go on a diet. Start running again. Get back into shape.”

  “Forget it, you’re too far gone,” said Jack.

  Steve stroked his salt ’n pepper moustache. “I’ve had this thing twenty-odd years. My first wife loved it. Said it tickled her–”

  “I don’t need to know what it tickled.”

  The daylight was dropping when they pulled into HQ’s high-security carpark. Lights glowed behind dozens of alternating clear and blue-tinted windows. The glass walls and sharp modern angles were, doubtless, supposed to portray an open and friendly police force. But to Jack’s eyes they only emphasised the cold, institutional nature of the building. The detectives made their way up to the incident-room. DC Olivia Clarke met them at the door with an armful of printouts. She treated them to one of her bright-and-breezy smiles. She had stylish hair, a slim-cut suit and an easy-going manner that combined to make Jack feel about a hundred-years-old.

  “What have you two reprobates been up to?” she asked.

  “We’ve been talking to tattooists,” said Steve. “I’m thinking about getting ‘past its sell by date’ tattooed on my forehead.”

  “At least then no one could accuse you of false advertising,” Olivia said dryly.

  “You’re supposed to say, Aww, Steve, you’re not past your sell by date.”

  “Aww, Steve, you’re not past your sell by date,” obliged Olivia.

  Jack was looking at the uppermost printout – a high-angled, grainy colour image of a motorway carriageway. It was time-stamped 23:22 15/11/17. There was one car in the image. It was too dark to make it out clearly. “Find anything?”

  “Yeah, take a look at this.” Olivia leafed through the printouts to one time-stamped 23:28. There were three vehicles in the image. The foremost was a small car in the slow lane. Next came a bigger car, possibly a Range Rover or some other SUV. It was tailgating the small car, almost bumper to bumper. In the outer lane, slightly behind the other vehicles was what looked to be a minibus. Light from a lamppost was splashed across a front bonnet that had been amateurishly painted in a rainbow of colours. “That’s the M61 southbound slip road adjacent to the crime-scene. Now look at this.” She flipped to a CCTV-still of the multicoloured vehicle and small car time-stamped 00:23. “Those are two of the same vehicles on the M60 eastbound, just past junction fifteen. In almost an hour, they’d travelled less than a mile.”

  “That’s got to be them,” said Steve.

  “We believe this is the other car.” Olivia showed them an image of a black Range Rover with tinted windows. “It was picked up by the same camera half-an-hour later.” She turned to the next image – a close-up of the SUV’s front bumper. The registration was just about legible. The left-hand headlight was smashed.

  “So assuming the victim was driving the foremost car, I think it’s also safe to assume the perps in animal masks were in the minibus and the perps in balaclavas were in the SUV,” said Jack. “They wait until there are no other vehicles around, ram her off the road, chase her down and do their thing. One of the perps from the minibus takes the victim’s car. The shooter and his accomplice follow after filling in the grave.”

  “Sounds about right,” agreed Steve.

  “Have you got the other regs, Olivia?”

  She nodded. “The Range Rover’s reg comes up as an Audi hatchback that was stolen in Liverpool in 2016. The other car and minibus are both insurance write-offs. Someone probably bought them from a scrapyard. Pretty much untraceable.”

  “Shit,” muttered Steve.

  “Have we got any faces on camera?” asked Jack.

  “Nothing clear.”

  “At least we know for sure that they used the motorway and came from somewhere north of Manchester,” pointed out Steve. “Maybe Preston or Blackburn.”

  “Or Liverpool,” said Jack.

  “Liverpool’s south of Manchester. You’ve lived here long enough by now to know that.”

  “I was thinking about the stolen Audi.”

  “I’m just on my way to show these to the DCI,” said Olivia.

  “One second.” Jack jotted down the Range Rover’s reg, thanked Olivia and headed for his desk. The Incident Room had a subdued, end-of-a-long-day atmosphere. Some officers were tapping away at laptops. Others were chatting quietly. DS Gary Crawley was slumped in his chair, heavy-eyed.

  “I’ve spent the entire day traipsing around Walkden,” he told them through a yawn. “Total waste of time.”

  “Why don’t you go home?” suggested Steve.

  Gary glanced at his watch. “I don’t clock-off for another twenty minutes.”

  “Bollocks to that, you’ve been up since midnight.”

  “So what’s new? I can sit around here or go home and have my ears abused by a stressed wife and two screaming babies.”

  “Well if you’re hanging around, you can make yourself useful,” said Jack. “We need to put together a list of every unsolved murder in the past… let’s say ten years in Greater Manchester and Merseyside.”

  “That’ll be a big list. Are you looking for anything in particular?”

  “Yeah, anything with gangland connections.”

  “Especially suspected hits where the victim was killed by a single gunshot to the head,” added Steve.

  They left Gary to wearily get on with his task. “You didn’t mention the possibility of two dead police,” Steve said quietly to Jack.

  “Say the words cop and killer in the same breath and you’ve got a roomful of angry people. That’s not going to help anyone. If we come up with anything we’ll take it to the DCI and find out what he wants to do.”

  Jack spent the next hour or so trawling through the PNC databases. He took a closer look at the stolen Audi first. The red hatchback had been stolen on February 2nd 2015 from the driveway of a house in Allerton, a relatively affluent suburb on the south side of Liverpool. The registration MY63 ARL indicated that the car was registered in Merseyside between September 2013 and February 2014. The thieves had forced a patio door while the owner was asleep, taken the car keys, the car and nothing else. Merseyside police believed the Audi had been stolen to order by a gang of professional car thieves from outside the city. The owner, a Mrs Felicity Booth, had spent the previous day shopping at the Trafford Centre. The thieves were thought to have seen her there and followed her home. No suspects were identified in connection with the theft.

  Manchester was a hotbed of car crime. In recent years, organised gangs had targeted Audis, VWs and BMWS in the region. The cars were often exported to the Middle East and Eastern Europe where there was a booming market for high-end German cars. They could also be stripped and sold for parts or used as getaway vehicles. The scumbags stealing the cars were low-end crims, but the people they passed them on to were gangsters running multi-million pound operations. It would definitely be worth bringing a few of the higher-ups in for
questioning. They wouldn’t give up any names, but they might disapprove sufficiently of attempting to murder a woman and stealing her baby as to make life difficult for the perpetrators. They might even convince the guilty parties that returning the baby was in everyone’s best interest.

  Of course, that would give the perps a heads-up. But that was inevitable anyway considering the dead-end the motorway cameras had led to. Right now Paul was probably organising a press-conference to release the victim’s image.

  Next Jack looked into British police officers killed in the line of duty dating back twenty years. The list was fairly short, but still far too long. He scanned through thirty six names, mostly PCs but also a sprinkling of DCs, sergeants, an inspector and even a commander. The causes of death ranged from collapsing and dying whilst in hot pursuit of suspects to being deliberately rammed, run over, stabbed and shot. Similarly the killers encompassed the whole gamut of criminal humanity – violent drunks, petty thieves, drug dealers, armed robbers, gangsters, terrorists, sexual predators, psychopaths. In the vast majority of cases, the perpetrators had swiftly been caught. There were a handful, though, that had never been solved. One immediately caught Jack’s eye.

  On 28th April 2016, PC Andrew Finch had been on patrol in Leeds city centre. At approximately 2:15 pm, he approached an illegally parked car. In an apparently unprovoked attack, PC Finch was shot point-blank in the face by the driver. He died instantly. The car drove away at speed. A shop worker who heard the shot and went outside to investigate, photographed the car with their mobile phone.

  Jack looked at a slightly out-of-focus image of the car. Registration: MA13 SOR. Colour: black. Make: Audi A3. The registration and colour were different, but the make and model were the same as the stolen Audi. The registration belonged to a BMW that had been stolen in Manchester a couple of months before the Audi. A cane with a hook on the end – or some such thing – had been pushed through the owner’s letterbox and hooked the keys. Quick, easy, low risk and high return. As with the Audi, no suspects had been identified or arrests made. The photograph was of the rear of the Audi. Glare on the windows made it impossible to see the driver or any other occupants.

  Another dead end.

  After the shooting, a huge investigation had been launched. PC Finch was a family man with an unblemished record, well-liked by everyone who knew him. There was no reason someone might want to kill him. Hundreds of members of the North’s criminal fraternity, particularly anyone who might bear a grudge against the police, had been questioned. But no solid leads were generated. The killer was either a lone-wolf or inspired such fear that no one dared speak out. The latter was entirely possible. A psycho who hated the police so ferociously that they were willing to kill a random constable in broad daylight was not someone you grassed on. The black Audi was never seen again. Was it the same car that had been stolen from Allerton? Were the killer of PC Finch and the man who attempted to kill the tattooed woman one and the same?

  The possibility sent a cold thrill through Jack. There was nothing more dangerous than a killer with a gun and a grudge against coppers. His thoughts turned to Naomi. She worried about him just as much, perhaps even more, than he did about her. Recently she’d been pressuring him to go into a different line of work – preferably a primary school teacher or some other equally low risk profession. Cases like this made Jack wonder whether he should do just that.

  He printed out the salient details and headed over to where Steve and Gary were working on the list of unsolved civilian murders. “Are you ready for this?” said Steve. “We’re looking at sixty one unsolved murders in Greater Manchester and seventy two in Merseyside in the last decade. That’s a shit lot of paperwork to go through.”

  “Well there’s going to be even more,” said Jack. “We need to expand our focus to West Yorkshire.”

  “Not me,” said Gary, standing. “The wife just messaged me. She says she’s divorcing me if I’m not home in the next half-hour.”

  As Gary trudged to the exit, Steve asked, “Find anything?”

  Jack showed him the printout. Steve pulled his moustache uneasily. “I remember this case. Finch was about Gary’s age. He had a couple of young kids. They held a funeral for him in Leeds city centre. Thousands of people lined the streets. You must have heard about it.”

  “It rings a bell, but I was going through a bad time back then. My wife Rebecca was seriously ill.” Jack felt a sting of self-contempt at the vagueness of his words. Rebecca had been depressed, relentlessly slipping towards suicide. He’d berated Paul for not saying it like it was, yet here he was doing the same thing. Depression. Suicide. Were there any words in the English language harder to say?

  “I’ll end up seriously ill myself if I don’t get some sleep soon,” said Steve, displaying his usual insensitivity. Or perhaps, conversely, sensing Jack’s discomfort and clumsily attempting to put him at ease. “Let’s show the DCI what we’ve got, then we can bugger off home.”

  As they left the Incident Room, they spotted Paul emerging from the toilets at the far end of the corridor. His hair looked recently brushed. He’d put on a fresh shirt and tie. “Press conference,” Steve murmured out of the side of his mouth.

  The scent of aftershave preceded Paul as they approached him. “DI Anderson, DI Platts, I was just about to come looking for you two.” He motioned for them to follow him into his office. “So how’s your day been? Productive?”

  “We might have something,” said Jack.

  “Just give me the gist of it.” Paul glanced at a clock on the wall. “I’ve got about ten minutes before I speak to the press.”

  Steve told him about the tattooist’s theory. Jack took over when it came to the Audi and PC Andrew Finch’s murder. Paul listened with a gathering frown. “This is a...” he sought the right words, “disturbing development.”

  “I think we should begin bringing in all the usual suspects,” suggested Jack. “Start at the top and work our way down.”

  “I agree, but I need to speak to the Super first. You know how emotive this kind of thing is. Leave it with me for now. Steve, you keep working on those unsolved murders. Jack, I want you to head back to the hospital. The victim’s regained consciousness.”

  Jack’s eyebrows lifted. He’d fully expected to hear that the woman had died. “Has she said anything?”

  “Yes. She said she wants to talk to you.”

  Jack’s surprise turned to puzzlement. “Me? How’s that possible?”

  “Apparently she heard you asking about her tattoo.”

  “But she was in a coma.”

  “They say comatose people can hear things,” said Steve. “I watched this program about–”

  “I’m sure it was very interesting, DI Platts,” Paul cut in pointedly.

  “And is that all she’s said?” asked Jack.

  Paul nodded. “Apparently she’s having problems with her memory.”

  “So she can’t remember what happened to her?”

  “It seems that way.”

  “Then why does she want to talk to me?”

  Sighing, Paul took another look at the clock. “DI Platts, you can return to your desk now.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Steve left the room. Paul waited until Steve’s footsteps had faded away, then said, “I’m sensing some reluctance.”

  “My shift’s over in five minutes. I have to pick Naomi up from her after-school club.”

  “Couldn’t you get Laura to do it?”

  “I could, but... well I had to wake her in the middle of the night to babysit Naomi. She’s been at work all day. She’ll be exhausted.”

  “If you can’t go to the hospital, I’ll just have to get someone else to do it. There are plenty of other things for you to be getting on with. I need someone to go over to Walkden tomorrow and do some follow-ups.”

  The implication of Paul’s words was obvious – you wanted back on the team, this is the price. Jack couldn’t help but wonder whether Paul was doing this o
ut of spite because he rarely got to see his own children these days. He bit down on the impulse to say so. If he was going to stay in this job, he had to be all the way in. “I’ll call Laura.”

  “Thank you, DI Anderson.” Paul made it clear the conversation was over by shuffling some papers on his desk.

  Chapter 12

  Jack forgot his annoyance as he drove to North Manchester General. He was intrigued to find out what the tattooed woman had to say. He didn’t intend to stay at the hospital long. As always, Laura had gladly agreed to look after Naomi. But Jack could tell from her voice that she was worn out. He made a mental note to buy a bottle of her favourite wine on the way home.

  He parked up and made his way to ICU. Doctor Medland met him at the reception desk. “The patient regained consciousness about an hour ago,” he explained. “Frankly, we were all amazed. But as I think I said to you before, it’s incredibly difficult to predict how things will play out with brain injuries.”