by Mark Sennen
‘You want in on that, ma’am?’ Collier winced. ‘Since it looks as if you need your horizons broadening.’
***
Riley and Davies arranged to meet Dave Smeeton on Tuesday to finalise the details of the operation. Smeeton had opted for a picnic spot close to the village of Yelverton, where the main road ran through an area of low moorland dotted with patches of bracken and gorse. It was a popular place for dog walking, and there were plenty of cars coming and going, enough activity to reassure Smeeton.
‘Not exactly anonymous, are we?’ Davies said as Riley rolled the car over some bumpy grass and pulled up a little way from any other vehicles. ‘And two men sitting in a car together looks highly suspicious to me.’
‘You’re a dinosaur, Phil,’ Riley said. Davies sometimes became a parody of himself, but Riley was happy to wind him up. ‘Prehistoric. I should report you to our diversity lead officer so you can be re-educated.’
‘Piss off, my education’s complete, thank you.’
They sat in silence, watching the world unfold as the morning sun warmed the air. A man unloaded a pair of black labs from the rear of a big Audi, the dogs immediately making a beeline for a woman with a small King Charles spaniel. Shouting ensued, the woman lashing out with her walking stick. Bored with the dog fight, Riley turned away. Nearby a young father was strapping a toddler into the back of a car and packing up a baby buggy.
‘That’ll be you soon, Darius.’ Davies reached out and touched Riley on the shoulder. ‘Commiserations. You’ll be serving eighteen years at least. That’s longer than the Tarquin lads will receive, and they’ll get free board and lodging.’
Riley ignored the dig. ‘Is Smeeton going to play ball?’
‘He doesn’t have much of a choice, and I doubt he’s clever enough to turn things around on his own.’
‘He might tell Hartson. If he does, then anything could happen.’
‘There is that.’ Davies sat back. ‘But Smeeton’s our only option, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’ Riley looked through the windscreen. The woman with the spaniel had put the dog on the back seat of her car and was feeding it treats to try to calm it down. The man with the labs had disappeared for his walk. ‘Which is worrying because he’s already fifteen minutes late.’
***
Dartmouth was only some thirty miles from Plymouth, but the journey took well over an hour. Savage brought Calter with her and suggested the scenic route cross country. Unfortunately, the route proved to be a mistake when, somewhere in the rolling hills north of Kingsbridge, they encountered a Convoi Exceptionnel negotiating a lane barely wide enough for one car. A traffic officer on a motorbike was doing his best to help, but the vehicle’s driver was Eastern European, and there was a language issue. After a few minutes, the officer came back to the line of cars queueing down the road. He smiled when he recognised Savage.
‘Ma’am.’ He bent to the open window and then looked back at the lorry. ‘Bloody foreigners. And I’m not talking about the Polish guy in the truck. I’m talking about whoever ordered the fffing glulam.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Glulam. The laminated beams on the back of the vehicle.’ He waved an arm at the lorry, and Savage saw it was carrying two colossal curving wooden trusses. ‘Some bloody London-type and their overpaid architect decided it would be a good idea to build a monstrosity of a house down at Gara Bridge. Only the idiots didn’t factor in the difficulty of getting past this bend. They’re the bloody foreigners I’m on about. If I had my way, I’d send the lot of them back to the capital and build a wall around the M25 to keep them there.’
Savage agreed with the officer and gave a shrug and a smile. Not much she could do. The officer pointed to a lane off to the right. Take that and you’d be in Dartmouth in thirty minutes. He, meanwhile, would be stuck out here for the next couple of hours. Lunch, he moaned, was a distant dream.
The officer’s diversion came good, and Savage nosed the car into the Dartmouth one-way-system a little after eleven.
Toby’s Tats lay a couple of streets away from the posh shops, in the maze of little lanes well back from the river frontage. A window display held an impressive selection of bongs, and a sign proclaimed the shop stocked over two hundred vape flavours.
‘Looks like tattoos and body mods are losing out,’ Calter said.
A heavy oak door creaked open, and they made their way inside. Dark walls with UV lighting picked out fluorescent acrylic display cases laden with vape flavours. A stand with silver jewellery. A hat tree with dozens of beanies, a cannabis leaf logo embroidered on one, Blow Me on another.
‘This would do for Patrick,’ Calter said. She’d picked up one of the hats. Headcase was stitched into the material. ‘Love it.’
‘Can I help?’ A young woman popped up from behind the counter. She had long blonde hair tinged with purple. A silver stud on one side of her nose. She rolled some gum in her mouth. ‘Or are you just browsing?’
‘You can help.’ Savage pulled out her identification. ‘We’re looking for details of a possible past customer.’
‘We don’t sell legal highs anymore if that’s what this is about. Toby says it isn’t worth the aggro, says nobody lets anyone do nothing these days. If it wasn’t for the vape gear, we’d have to shut up shop.’
‘You don’t do many tattoos or piercings then?’
‘A few, but most people go to the stores in Newton Abbot or Torquay to get their ears done. The mums don’t seem to want to bring their kids in here.’
Quite understandable, Savage thought, looking at the dingy surroundings. ‘Is Toby in?’
‘Dunno.’ The girl worked the gum hard for a few seconds. ‘Is he in trouble?’
‘No.’
The girl stood for a moment, the gears in her head whirring until she’d computed the situation. Finally, she pointed to the right, where a narrow stairway led upwards.
Savage thanked her and went up the stairs, Calter following. At the top, there was a small landing. Off to the left, a door stood ajar. Savage knocked and entered.
‘Alright, love?’ A big man in a muscle shirt stood over near a sink. Shaved head, a dozen gold rings in a jumble on his right ear, a sleeve of bright inkwork covering each arm. He turned and cocked his head to one side. ‘You my eleven fifteen?’ His gaze flicked down to Savage’s waist for a moment. ‘Bellybutton, right? Or was it the clitoral hood?’
‘Mr Barrows?’ Savage said.
‘Toby will do.’ Barrows waved at a padded bench covered with a sheet of tissue paper. ‘Don’t be nervous, pop yourself on there, pull up your top, and loosen your trousers. Won’t be a mo and I’ll take a look.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Savage had her ID out again. Behind her, Calter sniggered. ‘Police, Mr Barrows.’
‘What?’ Barrows finished drying his hands and chucked the towel away. ‘This is harassment plain and simple. We’ve complied with the law and stopped selling legal highs. What people do with the bongs is their own bloody business. As for myself, I haven’t touched anything dodgy for a decade.’
‘Calm down.’ Savage raised her hands. ‘Our visit isn’t concerned with highs, legal or otherwise, you’re not in any trouble, and this has nothing to do with your past offence.’
‘Oh.’ Barrows relaxed. He dropped his gaze to Savage’s waist. ‘But I guess you’re not here for a genital piercing?’
‘No.’
‘Pity.’
Savage waved at the bench. ‘But we do have some questions about body modification.’
‘Somebody made a complaint, have they?’ Barrows puffed himself up again. ‘Because I’ve got all the certificates, fully qualified, council inspected.’
‘Do you recognise this girl?’ Savage pulled out a photo of Abigail Duffy. ‘She might have come here to have something done.’
‘I doubt it.’ Barrows took the picture. Narrowed his eyes for a moment until a flicker of recognition came over his face. ‘Then again, she does look somewhat familiar.�
��
Savage produced another picture, this one the closeup of Abi’s thigh that Layton had enlarged and enhanced. ‘What about this? Is it something you might have done?’
‘Scarification.’ Barrows nodded. ‘Yeah, I do it from time to time. Not many do.’
‘How come?’
‘Cutting the skin like that, for some, it’s beyond the pale. Seems like it’s perfectly acceptable to get a boob job or a tummy tuck or a facelift, but a little slice with the knife and people hold their hands up in horror.’
‘And this one?’
‘Yes, that’s mine.’ Barrows handed the photo back to Savage and moved to the doorway. He leaned out and shouted downstairs. ‘Rachel? Do you remember that friend of Paulie the Pipe? We did letters on her thigh, right?’ Barrows waited until a grunt floated up from below. ‘D’you remember what they were?’
‘Boc,’ came the answer from downstairs. Savage felt a tingle sweep across her shoulders. There was the name too. Paul had been the unknown man Abigail had been with at the party in Torquay. Several witnesses had said she’d left with him in a white van. Whether he was called Paul or Paulie, he was almost certainly the same person Barrows was referring to.
‘That confirms it.’ Barrows turned back to Savage. ‘Not boc, BOC. Neat as anything she wanted it, right up on her thigh.’
‘Did she say what it stood for?’
‘Yes, she did. We get a load of different initials, and usually I wouldn’t have remembered, but this stuck in my mind because it was a bit odd.’ Barrows shrugged. ‘You see, there were three of them.’
‘Three letters?’
‘No, three lasses. The girl in the pic and two others. Serious they were, and that’s unusual. Normally if you come to a place like this with your friends, you’re egging each other on, laughing about it, especially if the work is somewhere intimate like the upper thigh. Not these three. Hardly a peep out of them.’
‘Three?’ Savage was for a moment perplexed. This was unexpected. ‘Can you remember their names?’
‘Sorry, no.’ Barrows frowned. ‘But I only did the girl you showed me. The others were too young. Sixteen or thereabouts. I wasn’t going to risk it with all the trouble I’d been having.’
There was silence for a moment until Calter spoke.
‘You were going to tell us about the letters,’ she said. ‘What they stood for.’
‘Yeah, that was odd. Really weird. Still, these days with young women, it’s their bodies, their choice, right? Hashtag MeFuckingToo. Bit ironic considering what she said the abbreviation was.’
‘So?’ Savage tried to contain her impatience.
‘Bride of Christ.’ Barrows held his hands up. ‘And no, I don’t have a fucking clue what it meant. Chastity? The Silver Ring Thing, perhaps? Only there was no way the lass was a virgin, not after hanging out with Paulie the Pipe and his lot of renegades. So if she was saving herself, I reckon it was a bit late in the day to come over all chaste.’
‘When exactly was this?’
Barrows bit his lip and looked across at the padded bench. ‘Be autumn last year. Late September or early October would be my best guess.’
‘Do you have any idea where she or the other girls were living?’
‘No. You’d best ask Paulie. She hung round with him for a couple of months, and that’s when I first met her. She was here with Paulie when he came in for a new fitting for his Prince Albert. This friend of mine, right craftsman he is, does a beautiful bar in high-end—’
‘Does Paulie have a second name, and where can I find him?’
‘His nickname’s all I know. Paulie the Pipe.’ Barrows rubbed his chin. ‘As for where he lives, well, that’s handy for you because it’s in Plymouth, isn’t it? Some hippie commune in the west of the city, from what I recall.’
‘And the pipe moniker? What’s that about? Drugs?’
‘No, love, not drugs.’ Barrows smirked. ‘Paulie’s a well-hung lad, you see. It’s pipe as in drainpipe, right? I only know because of the piercing. First time he visits, he drops his keks and I spy what’s hanging between his legs. There I am, standing there gawking, thinking fuck me, we’re going to need a bigger boat.’
‘Right, thanks for that, Mr Barrows.’
‘We’re going to need a bigger boat.’ Barrows laughed as they left, doubled over at his own joke, his face turning red, tears streaming from his eyes. ‘Bloody hell. Bloody fucking hell.’
‘Well,’ Calter said as they stepped out of the shop. ‘I guess the detailed physical description might help if we need to confirm Paulie the Pipe’s identity.’
‘Yes,’ Savage said. ‘But if that becomes necessary, I’ll leave it to you, OK?’
Chapter 12
They waited an hour past the rendezvous time, but there was no sign of the souped-up Corsa or Dave Smeeton. As Riley drove them back to Plymouth, Davies was on his phone, speaking in low tones, an urgency to his voice. When they pulled into the station car park, he pocketed the phone and looked across at Riley.
‘Tried my best,’ he said. ‘Nobody seems to know where he is, but the word is out. All we can do is to keep our fingers crossed.’
Fingers crossed? An operation six months in the making, and they were relying on luck? Riley couldn’t see that washing with Maynard, and in the end, it all boiled down to his mistake at the party. If he hadn’t sent DC Hester in, then Tarquin would still be running. Major players would have been going to prison, and perhaps a little misery would have been averted.
He spent the next hour collating data on Andrei, the mysterious Romanian pimp. After a snack in the canteen, he returned to his desk and tried to catch up on the backlog of forms he needed to fill in. He’d barely made an impression when Davies interrupted him.
‘It’s Smeeton,’ Davies said. ‘Got a tip-off.’
‘Where?’ Riley looked up from his screen.
‘Remember he said something about being a security consultant at a storage company? Well, turns out he’s got a container of his own there. It’s not much of a place, just a farm over Langage way. A load of forty-foot units in a muddy field. Fifty squid a month and no questions asked. My source says Smeeton’s running a little processing business at the site.’
‘Who told you this?’
A snitch of mine who’s a small-time dealer himself. Smeeton pissed him off recently by stealing some of his trade.’
‘You think he’s telling the truth?’
‘I told him I’d be back to castrate him if he was lying, so yes, I reckon.’ Davies glanced at Riley’s screen where a long form cascaded down the page. Made a face. ‘You on for it?’
‘Sure.’
‘Good. Let’s go then.’
***
Finding Paulie the Pipe proved to be easier than Savage had expected. A shout-out to all the Plymouth neighbourhood teams asking if anyone knew of the whereabouts of a hippy commune – as Toby Barrows had called it – led to an address in the Stoke area of the city and a surname for Paulie the Pipe: Kenner.
One twenty-seven Molesworth Road turned out to be a sizeable Georgian manse set amid sprawling overgrown grounds. A set of rusty iron gates hung open, the right-hand one bearing a Danger: Derelict Property Keep Out sign.
Calter pulled the car up at the gates, and they got out and walked in. A white van stood on the driveway, a rainbow sticker on one of the side windows.
‘This must be the vehicle seen at the party in Torquay,’ Savage said as they approached the front door. ‘The last known sighting is Abi getting into a white van with a man called Paulie.’
‘We’ve hit gold then, ma’am,’ Calter said. ‘Begs the question though: why didn’t the Exeter team get this far?’
‘They weren’t aware of the tattoo, and tracking down every white van would have been impossible.’
‘But a white van with a Paul as the registered owner?’ Calter shook her head. ‘Somebody boobed.’
Three steps led to a columned porch where there was a piece of laminated A4
paper pinned to the door above the letterbox. Bold writing at the top proclaimed Official Squat, while below in small type a bullet-pointed list of legalese detailed the residents’ occupation rights.
A cheap pound-shop bell press was stuck to the door frame, and Savage reached out and pushed the button. The bongs of Big Ben resonated from inside, and a few moments later, the door opened. A fair-haired young woman in her early twenties stood on the threshold. She looked Savage and Calter up and down.
‘We haven’t got a telly, so we don’t need a licence.’ The woman peered into the street, perhaps looking for some kind of detector van. ‘And we wouldn’t watch any of the crap on it if we had.’
‘We’re not with TV Licencing.’ Savage pulled out her warrant card. ‘We just want to speak to Paul.’
‘Paulie, you mean? Paulie Kenner?’
‘That’s him.’
‘He’s round the side in the greenhouse, only… um… perhaps I’d better go and get him.’
‘No need. We’ll find him.’
As Savage and Calter turned, the girl called after them. Savage ignored her, and they ventured to the side of the house, striding through knee-high grass until they reached a brick path. The path passed through an overgrown shrubbery and led to an old-fashioned orangery, all glass and wood, the wood badly in need of a coat of paint.
They moved to the door to the orangery. Inside, a number of infant tomato plants were trained on strings that rose to the ceiling. Next to the tomatoes, several growbags contained other seedlings. Farther on, there were ferns and rubber plants and beautiful orchids and lilies, the larger plants forming a lush wall of vegetation. Savage walked in and reached out, pushing aside the leaf of a giant fern to reveal dozens of cannabis plants in neat rows. She was about to comment when a gasp came from deep within the building, a female voice rising in pitch and intensity.
‘Oh my God! OhmyGod! OmiGod! Oh! My! God! P… P… Paulie!’
Savage cast Calter a glance and rapped on the wooden frame at the entrance. ‘Mr Kenner? Paul Kenner?’
