Problems with Girls (DI Sloane Book 2)

by Kelly Creighton

  Lyndsey followed me into the bakery again. ‘Can I get you something to eat or drink, love?’ she said in that endearing yet condescending manner I sometimes like, but because she was younger than me, and I was jetlagged, I found it irritating.

  ‘Just a few minutes of your time,’ I said.

  ‘Is someone dead in there? That’s the impression I get with the police tape and everything.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘We don’t have answers for any questions people may have at the moment.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Boyd. He sat down.

  ‘Did you notice anything suspicious this morning?’ I asked him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see the young woman enter the office?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I could hear someone in there when I was in our storeroom,’ said Lyndsey. ‘I could hear life in PACT.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Like a chair scraping on the floor and footsteps, no voices or anything. And no music; usually Birchy likes to get the radio on first thing. It’s not loud, but when we’re getting set up, before we put our own radio on, you can generally hear the humming noise of the radio next door. Sure you don’t want something, love? A wee cappuccino?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘The office was opened by a volunteer this morning.’

  ‘The young girl?’

  ‘A young woman.’

  ‘Oh, God, it’s not her, is it? I’ve seen her there loads of times. I didn’t see her today.’

  ‘I’m afraid a young woman has been killed next door.’

  Lyndsey covered her open mouth with her hand. Boyd’s pale eyes grew wide in shock.

  ‘So, she didn’t come in here and get two coffees?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think I’d know her to see,’ said Boyd.

  ‘Ah, you would,’ said Lyndsey, ‘wee young girl, she’s only about nineteen or twenty, dyes her hair different colours. Sometimes it’s pink, sometimes it’s that washed out grey.’

  ‘I know who you mean. She wasn’t in the bakery today.’

  ‘Someone was,’ I said. ‘There are two cups of your coffee in there and they are still warm.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ said Lyndsey.

  ‘Well, they’re not cold. They aren’t yesterday’s.’

  ‘Who have we had in here?’ Lyndsey flicked her hand at her husband.

  ‘Some school kids buying sausage rolls for their lunch,’ he said. ‘Not many people, those protests have lost us a lot of business. The usual trade, workers in the area are keeping away.’

  ‘Has business picked up in the last week, since the last protest?’ asked Higgins.

  ‘Not really,’ said Lyndsey.

  ‘But you said you were busy,’ I reminded Boyd. ‘Busy doing what?’

  ‘Making phone calls. Making orders. And we did have some customers.’

  ‘Can you give me a list of all the people who have been here in the last couple of hours?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, sighing. ‘But, can I tell ya, this isn’t our coffee. We don’t sell that coffee since we were messed about by the supplier, we use something else but we just have all those cups and aren’t wasting old ones when they’re perfectly fine.’

  ‘And we’re not the only coffee shop that does this type of coffee, you know,’ said Lyndsey. ‘There’s probably … how many, Boyd?’

  ‘You’re looking at fifty, sixty, easy in Belfast alone.’

  I reiterated my request for a list. Boyd held a pen then set it down. ‘There were a few mums in, groups of couples, these ones who leave the kids to school and do some messages, pop in and grab a coffee on the way back for pick up. Mostly women and kids. Women who come out of the Fat Factory and pop straight in here for a fresh cream bun after.’

  Lyndsey shook her head at his poor timing for a joke. ‘No one who’d go in and … kill someone, put it that way,’ she said. ‘If I think of anything, can I let you know, love?’

  ‘Please do, even if you don’t think it’s important.’

  ‘Every little helps, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Is that Tesco or Asda?’ Boyd said.

  ‘Tesco,’ she said.

  I gave Lyndsey Matchett my card and walked back towards the scene. Mike was standing in the office, still speaking with Higgins. ‘A really good, decent person,’ said Mike. ‘She doesn’t deserve to be lying there like that.’

  ‘Let’s get you out of here,’ I said.

  We brought him to the station to give us a statement. There he wouldn’t be able to look at the body anymore. Mike Birch told us the same details in the interview room, repeatedly, and with the same steady disbelief at the remarkable and remarkably sad day he had found himself living. We soon sent Birch home.

  *

  ‘She’s been dead a while,’ said Brian Quinn when we met him back at PACT’s East Belfast office. ‘Look at her arms, they’re blotchy. Lividity has set in.’

  ‘When do you think she was killed?’ asked Higgins.

  ‘Going on for an hour and a half ago.’ Quinn bent down and looked at her hands and arms. ‘No defensive wounds, she hasn’t seen this coming at all.’

  ‘What else can you tell?’ I asked.

  ‘Straight off the bat? The perp is above average height, which you can tell because of the direction of the blood spatter.’ Quinn pointed at the wall and floor. ‘And when we look closer at her stab wounds I bet that will verify it; the angle the knife entered the victim’s body.’

  ‘There was a knifepoint robbery at Mayhew’s pharmacy up the road yesterday,’ said Higgins.

  ‘Do they hold money here, though?’ I said, thinking the pharmacy sounded like a robbery. What was there to steal in a political office?

  ‘They were looking for pills up there, or money,’ said Higgins.

  On the short drive back to the station again he was still talking about the robbery but I doubted the person who robbed Mayhew’s was thinking so clearly. Whereas PACT looked like someone had put thought into it. The disruption of the office looked staged to me.

  ‘Don’t know if you heard,’ said Higgins, ‘but that particular individual from the pharmacy didn’t leave with anything, he was scared off by this little, ballsy, middle-aged pharmacist who told him where to sling his hook.’

  ‘Can’t be the same perp, can it?’

  I watched the woman, my aeroplane neighbour, walk down the Holywood Road dabbing her eyes with a tissue. Hay fever was my first instinct, then I saw her face clearly and saw that she was in floods of tears.

  *

  ‘A dead woman?’ asked Superintendent Hewitt inside the station.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A stabbing. Young woman called Chloe Taylor. What happened with your visitor?’

  ‘That was Janet Ward,’ said Hewitt, ‘her sister Karen was strangled almost forty years ago. Janet wanted to talk to us about the possibility of reopening the case.’

  ‘Christ, what a burden,’ I said. ‘Must still be so upsetting.’

  ‘I’m sure it is, but I think she was more upset I said no.’

  ‘You said no?’

  ‘We can’t just reopen it now.’

  ‘But she flew all the way from London.’

  Hewitt frowned. ‘She could have phoned and saved herself the hassle.’

  I went to my desk and watched Hewitt, trying to get the measure of the woman.

  Chapter 3

  Some places you’d rather not be. I’d rather be doing the Orlando flight with two babies five times over than standing in the hospital mortuary next to Jackie Taylor. Jackie stared at the girl on the cold silver table, his face simmering like water. He opened his mouth and a noise came out that made me look away from him and at the girl again.

  ‘Is this your daughter?’ the medic asked him. ‘Can you confirm that you are looking at Chloe Taylor?’

  ‘I can confirm it,’ said Jackie, a squarely built grim-faced man. He was wearing a pale silver-grey s
hirt with the sleeves rolled up and sweat patches under his arms, he had a swallow tattooed on his forearm.

  His face did not register anything. We left the room and I thanked him, and before we were about to bring him back home he said he needed to use the toilet. When he came out and re-joined Higgins and I, his face was reddest around the eyes. I don’t know how he held it together.

  ‘What about Chloe’s mother?’ I asked him in the car. ‘Is she still living?’

  Jackie glanced out of the window, he flinched a bit then composed himself. ‘She wouldn’t be interested. She hasn’t seen Chloe in years.’

  ‘So, she doesn’t know that Chloe has been killed?’ He looked at me in shock, and I tried to pedal backwards, ‘…attacked.’

  The word killed seemed too harsh, even though he had seen the outcome with his own two.

  Jackie said nothing.

  He was shivering as we passed Stormont Hotel and the parliament building that late afternoon after four P.M. when the place was leafy, lush and peaceful.

  We took a right, just facing the civil service grounds, and drove until we reached the Taylors’ home: a lovely detached house with the long sweeping pavior driveway full of cars. An Audi, a Fiesta, the arse of a silver BMW was hanging out into the street, blocking the footpath. There were magnolias in bloom in the well-kept garden, and a bike leaning against the wall.

  I opened the back door of the service car to let Jackie out. Once inside the house, he went upstairs and left Higgins and me to fend for ourselves.

  There were four people in the house. Drew Taylor, for one. He was standing with his fingers tucked in his armpits looking out of the conservatory and at the tree in the back garden that gently swayed in the breeze, there was a flour sift of light coming in through the leaves. Drew turned and looked at us and stared. There was another man, younger than Drew; he was lifting huge boards and carrying them out of the room and upstairs. And two women: the dark-haired one was standing looking at her phone in the kitchen and the other one, with the streaming long blond hair approached me, a forlorn look shaping her face.

  ‘I’m Lizzie,’ she said in a husky voice. ‘Chloe’s best friend.’ She put her hand out to shake mine, then Higgins’.

  ‘DI Sloane,’ I said. ‘This is Consta … Sergeant Higgins.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you both,’ she said. ‘Pity about the circumstances.’ Lizzie glanced at Drew and was silent.

  Seeing him there the usual assumptions came to me; he was a prominent loyalist. Where trouble was, Drew Taylor was never far away.

  Diane Linskey and I had once interviewed him over the possibility that he’d thrown – or knew who had thrown – a pipe bomb into the service car of one of our colleagues.

  Fortunately it didn’t detonate.

  Didn’t harm Detective Amy Campbell, who was sitting guard outside the PACT offices around the time of the flag debacle in 2013.

  We never got a conviction, as is infuriatingly often the case with this kind of crime. No one wants to talk and sometimes you understand. I remembered him, and Drew sure as hell remembered me, he exhaled noisily and looked back at the tree.

  ‘We want to get a better knowledge of Chloe,’ Higgins said to Lizzie, ‘what she did on a daily basis … who she was in contact with. Can we have a chat with you, with you being her best friend?’ He smiled then, laying the charm on thick.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Lizzie, unable to resist. He was pretty for a copper, even I had to admit that.

  ‘Her father told us Chloe was studying at Queens,’ said Higgins.

  ‘Yes, first year Social Anthropology.’

  The young man with the boards came back and lingered near us.

  ‘Are you Chloe’s brother?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘This is Thomas,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Thomas!’ Drew gestured him over. Thomas hesitated then he chose us, he paused in front of me. He was rangy with curly brown hair and a cute but pimple-stippled face. He looked at me open-mouthed.

  ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ I said and he mumbled something, looking unsure whether to walk off or not. Drew joined us instead. He wanted to hear everything. ‘Hello again, Mr. Taylor. What is your connection?’

  ‘We’re cousins,’ he said full of his usual bad attitude.

  ‘Thomas, I’ve given the kitchen a clean,’ said Lizzie with her hand on his back. ‘You’ll have callers. I thought your dad wouldn’t want the place messy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Thomas rubbing the back of his head, uncomfortable with being touched, I understood it; when you are having a baby, or two, or when you are grieving, people think they can touch you, friends, strangers, enemies.

  ‘We were all working this morning, it was a mess,’ Thomas said to me apologetically, then he thanked Lizzie.

  ‘You weren’t planning on this,’ said Drew, throwing a dirty look Lizzie’s way.

  ‘You want to see my own house at the moment, Thomas. Complete bombsite.’ Lizzie gave a helpless little laugh and Drew gave her another dirty look.

  Out of the kitchen came the other woman, the one with the long dark brown hair, she was far smaller than the blonde, she stood by Drew to let everyone know who she belonged to and rocked on the spot as if she were holding a tired baby. ‘I put the soup in the fridge,’ she said, fake-yawning.

  ‘When did you last see Chloe?’ I asked Thomas.

  ‘This morning,’ he said without meeting my eye, ‘she was getting ready to leave.’

  ‘How was she feeling?’

  He stared blankly at me.

  ‘Anxious, happy?’

  He looked at Drew for an answer; Drew looked back at him.

  ‘Just her normal self,’ Thomas decided on. After a pause he added, ‘She was going to the office to volunteer. She has no class on a Wednesday till late afternoon.’

  ‘Did Chloe drive to the PACT office?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And whose cars are those outside?’

  ‘The Audi is Dad’s. The Fiesta is mine.’

  ‘The BMW?’

  The brunette nodded at Drew. ‘Ours.’

  ‘Oh, and you are?’ asked Higgins. ‘We haven’t been introduced.’ Smooth bastard!

  ‘Roxanne. I’m married to Drew; Drew is cousins with Chloe.’

  ‘I last saw Chloe last night,’ said Lizzie. ‘She had a drink at mine. What about you, Drew?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘When did you last see your cousin?’

  ‘Chloe?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lizzie gave him a benevolent smile.

  ‘Must have been months ago now. Christmas.’ He thumbed the corner of his mouth.

  Lizzie sat on the brown leather sofa in the light blue living room, she squirmed then put her hand down beside her. ‘Is this your bag?’ she asked me.

  ‘It’s mine,’ said Roxanne.

  Lizzie stood and handed Roxanne the handbag before she sat down again. Roxanne pinched it like a sample of piss. Drew nodded to the kitchen where they all went, except for Lizzie who stayed with Higgins and me.

  ‘I keep asking myself if this is real,’ she said. ‘Chloe was so humble, such a sweetheart.’

  ‘Did everyone think so?’ I asked her.

  ‘No one gets a clean sweep, do they? Have you talked to Lewis?’

  ‘Who is Lewis?’ asked Higgins.

  ‘I thought he might have shown up here, and since he hasn’t, looks like a red flag to me.’

  ‘Who is he?’ I said.

  ‘Lewis… Chloe’s on-again, off-again.’

  ‘And they were…’

  ‘Off at the moment, but they’ve been together for years. I thought he would have called. I asked Thomas, but he hasn’t heard from him.’

  ‘He sounds like a person we need to speak to,’ said Higgins. ‘Do you have a surname for Lewis?’

  ‘Skelly. He studies at the Belfast Met; so does Thomas, actually.’

  ‘Thank you, Lizzie,’ I said and went over to Thomas. ‘Could
you tell your dad that we’ll get in touch tomorrow? He has my number.’

  ‘Are you leaving now, Inspector?’ Drew asked me.

  ‘Detective Inspector; yes. For now.’

  ‘Great, take her with you. She’s doing my head in.’ He meant Lizzie, who was standing at the front window looking out.

  ‘Here’s my babe now,’ she said. I was unsure if she’d heard Drew, if she was ignoring him. ‘We’d already planned to go out for a bite to eat, and I should try to keep to a routine, shouldn’t I? Even though it’s the last thing I want to do. Look, anything I can do…’

  We followed her outside. Out of an old silver Mercedes that was bumped up ahead of our service car came a man, early thirties, maybe older, he was in a white shirt and black trousers, a broad white smile on his chops, tanned skin and black hair. He smiled at us as she lifted her bike from against the house and strapped it to the back of his car rack.

  Drew came out now too and lit up a cigarette. He stared at Lizzie and the man whose car she was getting into, her babe. Drew’s eyes followed them out of the street. Then he put the cigarette out on the wall. And stared at me as he did it.

  *

  Higgins drove, cut out onto Stormont Road back toward the station. ‘When are we going to acknowledge what happened at the Christmas party?’ he asked me.

  ‘What are you on about?’ I muttered.

  He made a kissing sound.

  ‘It won’t be repeated,’ I said.

  ‘No, I know that. It just came out of nowhere. Like a bat out of hell.’

  ‘Let’s stick a pin in it.’

  ‘What, no post-mortems?’

  ‘None,’ I said and Higgins laughed.

  Fuck, so it did happen. I’d hit the Merlot hard that night and told myself I’d imagined it.

  Chapter 4

  My shift was done by six. I travelled along the Outer Ring to Forestside. Sylvia greeted me at the door. She had the boys’ bags ready to go, their coats on. ‘Let’s take those off you two,’ I said. ‘It’s even warmer in the car.’

  ‘I couldn’t get dinner made, Harriet,’ she said. ‘Now Addam will come home wondering where his dinner is and he shouldn’t have to.’

  ‘Can’t he bring something in?’ I asked her.

  ‘That’s not how we do things in this house, Harriet,’ she said, which felt like a verbal spanking.