Problems with Girls (DI Sloane Book 2)

by Kelly Creighton

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Also by Kelly Creighton

  PROBLEMS WITH GIRLS

  DI Harriet Sloane Book 2

  Kelly Creighton

  First published in 2020

  by Friday Press

  Belfast

  Copyright © 2020 Kelly Creighton

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.fridaypressbooks.com

  @friday_press

  For Maddie and Martha

  Prologue

  It is early evening. We are coming home.

  Flying over the lights of London, past the horizon of clouds that looks like a mouth, lips parted. Flying away from the glowing teeth of an orange sun. I am the only one awake for the turbulence warning. I grip my armrest and wish I’d ordered that glass of Merlot. I don’t know when I became so afraid of flying.

  The young boy in front, whose unselfconscious burps have been the elevator music of this flight, is my distraction. He reaches his hand back and pulls the shutter down on my window. The snap awakens Rowan. The plane dips then straightens, less obviously this time. I breathe my relief into Rowan’s dry fragrant head. He doesn’t know we are not on the ground anymore, that we are no longer in America, no longer in England.

  ‘We’re almost home,’ I tell him, although he is not listening but is looking at the iPad while we fumble in the sky again. I open my shutter to look out at the clouds. Jared is asleep on Paul’s knee. Paul is sleeping too. He hasn’t even felt that turbulence.

  Rowan reaches for his twin, paws at his hand. I encourage him to sit back. He is strapped to my lap by the loop around my seatbelt. Who are they kidding that this will save anyone, if it needs to?

  The woman who has dozed beside me cuts across to look out at the clouds. ‘That was hairy,’ she says in a soft Northern Irish accent.

  ‘I hate flying,’ I say.

  ‘I can tell. Did the babies like the big smoke?’

  ‘We were in Florida,’ I say. ‘My partner suggested we do this for their first birthday. One last hurrah before I go back to work after maternity leave.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she says and smiles at Rowan, who lifts his head from my chest to look at her. He smiles coyly, both hands coming up to hide his face.

  ‘Sweet boy,’ she says.

  The plane plummets, this time waking Paul. ‘What’s happening?’ he says.

  ‘Turbulence,’ the woman says.

  Paul rearranges himself, holds onto Jared as he fixes his shirt. ‘At least this flight is short,’ he says.

  Most of the people around us are without children. They are in business suits and reading papers, tapping on laptops or sleeping, and gradually waking. The woman beside me wants to talk, trying to distract me. ‘I haven’t been home in years,’ she says.

  ‘Where are you from, originally?’ I ask her. Anxiety creeps up on me.

  ‘Belfast. Have lived in London for thirty-odd years,’ she says.

  Jared wakes. He cries, was already asleep when we boarded and now he doesn’t know where we are. I keep looking at Paul for reassurance, but he is dealing with the baby. The woman beside me takes my hand in hers. ‘It will be over soon,’ she says.

  ‘I know,’ I say. But I let our hands stay like that.

  Soon I see the festive lights of the runway, then we are on home ground, then collecting baggage at the carousel. I get the boys into the double buggy and leave Paul to wait for our cases when I see the woman struggling with a suitcase. No one else seems to want to help her.

  It is heavier than I would have thought. It takes both of us.

  ‘Oh, thanks for that,’ she says.

  I realise I haven’t asked her a thing about herself. ‘Are you back for business or pleasure?’ I ask, much calmer now.

  ‘Neither,’ she says.

  ‘Well, good luck.’

  ‘Good luck to you, too.’ She nods at the babies who are fussing, pulling hats off one another. She laughs mildly and walks off.

  Paul joins me and we carry on through the airport, to the car park, to our car.

  Outside it is close and warm, cloudy with a chance of rain. Our people carrier looks like a stone at this time of day. How different things will be now, I think, setting Rowan into the car seat, and Paul, putting Jared into his. We start for home.

  I pull down my visor, look in the mirror to make sure everything is as it should be. But I hardly recognise any of this. Least of all, myself.

  Chapter 1

  It was a beautiful Wednesday morning in May when I went back to the job. We had brought the Florida weather home to Belfast with us. My babysitter and sister-in-law, Sylvia, stood in her hallway with her arms out for my boys like she was being handed a gift. She and my brother Addam, the minister, were done asking God for a child of their own and were planning to adopt. In the meantime, she was borrowing my two.

  Which is not to say that I didn’t see fear in Sylvia’s eyes the day I left Rowan and Jared with her for the duration of my shift and drove away, heading back to the day job at Strandtown PSNI station.

  When I entered the office Chief Dunne did not flinch.

  ‘You’re back already,’ said Carl Higgins, fixing his flicked-out Oasis-style hair and looking every bit as trendy as I remembered. ‘I thought you were avoiding us.’

  ‘I couldn’t stay away,’ I said.

  There was a woman standing in the corner looking at the message board, her chin in her hand. She glanced at me, carried on with what she was doing, then she called over to the chief.

  ‘Harriet, how are you?’ Fergus Simon greeted me, wrapping his arms around me for a second or three.

  ‘Great! Where’s Diane?’ I asked after my old partner; her car w
as missing from the parking area.

  ‘Diane requested a transfer, didn’t the chief tell you? Secret service. All very hush-hush,’ said Fergus tapping the side of his nose.

  ‘Was it something I said?’

  I was watching the chief in conversation with the new woman when he caught my eye and finally came over. ‘DI Sloane, welcome.’ Then he called over to her: she still had her eyes glued to the board. ‘Hewitt, come here and introduce yourself to Sloane.’

  Hewitt approached us. She was a bit younger than me, mid-thirties I’d have thought, and serious as hell looking. She had a long face, thin lips and eyes that you do not want on you if you are in a phase of self-doubt, which I was.

  ‘Sloane; Hewitt. Hewitt; Sloane,’ Chief Dunne said. ‘I’ll leave you to do the formalities yourselves.’

  Hewitt shook my hand. ‘Fleur,’ she said in a thick Scottish accent, ‘and you’re Harriet. Heard a lot about you.’

  ‘You’re looking at the new Superintendent,’ said Higgins, unpeeling a satsuma. I looked sharply at him. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Fleur.’ He popped a segment in his mouth.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said to Hewitt, could barely get the word out.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Hewitt. ‘We’re having a meeting soon, I expect it’ll get you up to date. Welcome back, I suppose.’

  I gave her an insincere smile, waited until she was away before I said, ‘Welcome back, I suppose?’

  ‘She’s a toughie,’ Higgins said out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I said. I stood in the toilets, looked at myself in the mirror and wondered if I looked as stupid as I felt. How did I think I could leave for a year on maternity leave and they wouldn’t have given the job to someone else?

  *

  Dunne and Hewitt were across the room talking about an initiative only they were privy to that would be filtered down to the team in the coming weeks. I felt like a gooseberry.

  I skim-read all the recent caseloads for our district pretending I wasn’t listening to the two of them. Diane’s words came back to me from when we’d been working on the case of River Reede, the four-year-old who had gone missing from his home in Witham Street.

  Diane said Chief Dunne was infamous for bedding younger women, despite having been married for decades. When I thought about it I couldn’t help but see a fresher version of his wife Jocelyn in Superintendent Fleur Hewitt; they both had fine features and unruly brown hair. Both had this earthy superior thing going on. Plus, not once did he clear his throat impatiently with Fleur.

  They were fucking. That was as clear as day. But what did anyone care? Greg Dunne was old by now and wasn’t I living with a beautiful man who was not only an anaesthetist but a good and dependable person. Didn’t Paul dote on the boys and even put a wrapped present in my bag when I wasn’t looking?

  I’d heard enough about Dunne and Hewitt’s cosy little number and decided to tear open the present: a framed photo of the babies. I set it on my desk and ran my finger along the attached card, which read:

  It’s your turn now, Harry/Mummy, knock ‘em dead!

  Love you, Paul, Jared and Rowan xx

  Chapter 2

  Reading local case files was making me edgy. I felt this void inside that I could not place, it felt new. I much preferred to look forward those days than back. But I was reading up nevertheless: drugs, robberies and assaults, protests and arrogant rugby players. Superintendent Hewitt appeared by my side and abruptly proceeded to tell me that she hadn’t had the time before to say but Sarge Higgins and I would be working together. I called bullshit. Hadn’t made the time, more like.

  Sergeant Higgins? I almost said, but I didn’t want to look surprised when this was my patch, this office was as mundanely familiar as my own living room – more familiar, actually. Yes, I’d been away but I was back. This team was mine, even Higgins, pain in the ass or not. I’d take him as a partner. So be it.

  ‘Great,’ I said. Hewitt walked off and it was just Simon and I. ‘Carl passed his sergeant exams then?’ I asked him. ‘Any more surprises? What are you, the new Chief Constable?’

  ‘I’m happy where I am, ta muchly,’ said Simon. I was convinced he meant that.

  ‘What’s she like?’ I nodded at the door Fleur Hewitt had just left through. ‘Aren’t Scottish procedures different from ours?’

  ‘She’s alright. Dead clued up. Anyway, she’s lived here for years.’

  ‘I’ve never seen her before.’

  ‘You should have applied, Harry.’

  ‘I did apply, but don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I thought you were a shoo-in.’

  ‘I think someone is trying to force me out.’

  ‘You’re kidding! Who?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m kidding,’ I said. I was not.

  *

  It was gone noon when a woman walked into the station. She stood by the window waiting for a desk sarge to take her query. I saw her through the glass and knew I knew her.

  ‘I’m here to speak to Superintendent Hewitt,’ she said.

  ‘I think you’re for me,’ Hewitt said, swanning past. She went out into the hall and opened the side door into an interview room.

  ‘Oh hello,’ the woman called out to me. ‘Where could I possibly know your face from?’

  ‘The flight, last night,’ I said, remembering. Sixteen hours before, my hand had been in hers.

  ‘Wow, how do you like that!’ she said.

  Hewitt looked at her watch, catching the woman’s eye. ‘Ready?’ she asked.

  ‘As I’ll ever be,’ the woman said, looking back at me. A smile of relief swept across her face, and I couldn’t tell why I felt relieved too. There was something comfortable about her.

  That pleasant thought was all too short-lived when a call came through from dispatch:

  A dead body had been found in the PACT office on the Upper Newtownards Road.

  Higgins was already at the service car when I got outside. It was sunny and breezy, but despite that, there was no mistaking I was back in Belfast and back to work as I jumped into the marked Skoda beside him and we set down the Holywood Road.

  Siren on, turning left onto the ankle of the Upper Newtownards Road, near Fat Factory: a shop of sorts that hired out their toning beds, which supposedly ‘sculpted’ the body through vibrations alone.

  Beside that was Wee Buns, a bakery. And beside that, was the PACT office. The acronym stood for Progressive Active Community Together; a party not popular on a road where most folk still voted for their choice of the big two. And usually the orange option.

  Outside the office stood Mike Birch, a local MP, he was in a grey suit. He held his glasses in his hand. Two red marks tracked the bridge of his nose. Higgins let the siren die and we got out of the car.

  ‘I can’t believe she is in there like that,’ said Mike.

  ‘When did you arrive?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ten minutes ago. I can’t believe it.’

  The office was small with only a desk and a filing cabinet, behind the desk was a flurry of sheets strewn over the floor. Staplers, paper clips and pens that had been scattered everywhere. Despite the disruption to all the paperwork, it was clear the deceased had not fallen on top of it. I stepped over the pages to better see the soles of two lime green Converse trainers that were prodding out from the desk.

  On the floor was the body of a woman. She was lying face down with three oozing stab wounds to her back. She was wearing a sleeveless blood-dyed T-shirt. On her lower half were three-quarter length jeans. She had her hair cut in a bob and coloured rose petal pink. Her young face was turned slightly sideways so I could see her cloudy green eyes that were fixed and staring blindly. She looked like a teenager.

  Chloe Taylor.

  ‘Chloe Taylor is her name, twenty-one years old,’ Mike Birch said, he reeked of booze and aftershave. ‘She was a volunteer here with PACT.’

  On the desk were two cups of coffee that had not been touched, they
had square brown logos on the front. I held my hand above the cups. They were a little over room temperature.

  ‘Are these yours?’ I asked Mike.

  ‘Nope. There has been a lot of political unrest here … Not that I’m telling you how to do your job.’

  I’d seen the demonstrations on the telly. I had no need to be in the area since I wasn’t working and had moved into my twin sister Charly’s old house at Mount Eden Road off Malone, while she and her family moved only around the corner into my parents’ old house, and my father out of there and into an apartment at New Forge, just five minutes from Bethany Nursing Home where my mother had already languished for years due to Huntington’s.

  But I knew the protests were outside PACT for months and had only ceased one week before Chloe Taylor’s body was found there.

  I got Mike to show me where I would find the surveillance tapes. He walked past Chloe, trying not to look at her, located the tape deck which was open and empty. ‘No, this isn’t right,’ Mike said, perturbed. ‘Someone has opened this and taken the tape. We tape everything. Bit old-fashioned but we don’t waste taxpayers’ money on high-tech gadgetry. We’ve been more vigilant since there’ve been threats to the office. Most protests are peaceful, people wanting the union upheld and we want to move beyond that, be progressive. Some people want to go backward, so there have been threats, mostly online.’

  ‘Did you report them?’ asked Higgins.

  ‘Oh, yeah. I have a reference number.’ Mike looked at the papers on the floor hopelessly, then at the empty tape deck.

  Outside grew a crush of nosey sods who were asked to move along while the road was closed off and cordoned by tape that shook behind a curtain of air.

  In that crush was a man who wore an apron that had the same name and logo as the coffee cup, the same brown square and swirling font. I slipped under the cordon and went to have a word with him.

  His name was Boyd Matchett, nickname Bap, he was a man in his thirties and owner of the bakery/coffee shop next door. Boyd told me he ran the place with his wife, Lyndsey, co-owner of Wee Buns and sole proprietor of thickly drawn on eyebrows.

  She also was outside, rubbernecking with the rest of the crowd.