‘Where the fuck are you going?’ he muttered at yet another left turn just outside Bellingham. The road narrowed and O’Connor found he had to hang back but, even so, he kept catching up to the lorry on awkward bends. In the end the driver seemed aware of his presence and pulled into a lay-by, politely allowing O’Connor to overtake.
‘Bugger!’ O’Connor cursed, trying to negotiate the lane and rethink his strategy. It was dark now and his car was mid-grey and fairly anonymous. Would the driver of the lorry recognise it again if it suddenly reappeared in his rear-view mirror? O’Connor hoped not. He drove for a few more miles then turned into a farm lane and knocked his lights off. A minute later he watched in his rear-view mirror as the lorry passed his hiding place. He counted to ten, did a dodgy three-point-turn and resumed his pursuit.
Trees started to close in to the left of the road and O’Connor could make out the black shape of Kielder Water to the right. The lorry’s rear lights appeared and disappeared as the driver followed the bends of the smooth road next to the reservoir, O’Connor keeping at least a quarter of a mile back. Suddenly the lights got brighter as the driver braked and turned off to the left. O’Connor slowed his speed and crawled the last few yards to the turning before driving past and pulling up in a lay-by further along the road. He opened the driver’s door cursing as the interior light came on, and eased himself out, closing the door behind him as quietly as he could manage.
A huge moon had appeared over the tops of the trees and it wasn’t difficult to see the road or the dark entrance to the turning the lorry had taken. O’Connor had no idea if it was a car park or one of the forest tracks that he knew were popular with mountain bikers and walkers. If it was the latter, then the lorry was as good as lost to him – the tracks went on for miles. O’Connor had spent a team-building weekend with some colleagues from his previous posting in a cabin on the lakeshore and they’d hired bikes for the day, ending up mostly lost and frustrated by the dense forest.
Keeping to the grass verge to mask the sound of his footsteps he crept closer to the turning, stopping suddenly when he saw the lights of the lorry just a few yards from the road. He crouched down and inched forward like a clumsy Cossack dancer trying not to fall flat on his face.
The driver’s door of the lorry was open, and the driver was fiddling with the lock on the rear doors. He climbed inside and started to remove boxes, stacking them on the hydraulic platform that folded down at the back of the lorry for easy unloading. Instead of lowering them to the ground he left them in a neat pile and disappeared further into the interior of the storage area.
A minute later he was back but he wasn’t alone. As he jumped down three men followed him, each one clutching a water bottle. In the silence of the night, O’Connor could hear them breathing heavily as they eased themselves down to the ground and looked round at their location. One split away from the other two and approached the driver. O’Connor couldn’t hear what was being said but the tone was angry. The driver simply shook his head, locked the lorry and walked back to the cab. As he climbed inside, the other two men started shouting but he ignored them, put the vehicle in gear and drove back to the road.
O’Connor just managed to duck out of sight of the sweep of the headlights, throwing himself into the gap between a pair of gorse bushes, cursing under his breath. He counted to ten and then struggled to his feet, ripping his shirt on the thorny branches as he pulled free. His first thought was to follow the lorry, but he needed to find out who the passengers were and what they’d been promised. He had no doubt that they had been smuggled into the country and their testimony would help him to build a case against Sims and the driver of the lorry if he could get them to tell him exactly what had happened.
Stumbling along the grass verge, trying not to think about what he might be treading in, O’Connor jogged into the parking area. He couldn’t arrest the three men, not until he knew for certain that they were illegal entrants to the country, but he could help them, get them to a town, to a bed. If he could persuade them to come with him.
The car park was deserted. O’Connor had no idea what the men had said to the driver, but they sounded like they hadn’t expected to be dumped in the middle of nowhere. They must have set off on foot, hoping to stumble upon civilisation by luck. He considered shouting out to them but what could he say? They’d already been betrayed once. If they thought he was the driver why would they come back? And if they knew he was the police they’d only run faster and further.
‘Fuck it!’ O’Connor cursed, turning back the way he’d come. There was nothing more he could do here. As he made his way back to the car, he took comfort from one thought – he’d been right about Sims.
25
‘Bugger!’ Ian Dalglish cursed as the car in front slowed. He could see brake lights ahead – three lanes of traffic grinding to a halt. There must be road works, Dalglish thought. Why else would there be delays at half past one in the morning? Inching forwards he considered ringing Eileen, his wife, to let her know that he was delayed but he’d probably wake her up and he didn’t want to have to face her wrath as soon as he got home. She’d be angry enough anyway.
He hadn’t expected to be so late. His brother’s stag party was supposed to have been a tame affair, just a curry and a few beers – but not for Dalglish as the designated driver. What he hadn’t anticipated was just how drunk Greg would get and just how little regard his friends had for his safety. He’d had to drive Greg back to his fiancée’s flat after he’d been abandoned in a Portaloo in Sheffield city centre. At least he’d managed to stop the so-called friends from tipping the plastic toilet over and soaking his brother in sewage.
It had taken an hour to persuade Greg to go to bed and another twenty minutes to explain and apologise to his fiancée who seemed to blame Ian for the whole sorry mess. And now here he was crawling along in the slow lane of the M18 somewhere south of Doncaster.
Consulting the satnav didn’t help as it showed there wasn’t a junction for at least eight miles, so he’d have to sit it out until then. He tapped the screen again and consulted the list of radio stations. If he was going to be stuck at least he could find some decent music. He scrolled down to a rock station and turned up the volume. Just as he put his hand back on the steering wheel, the glow of brake lights started to fade and the red pinpricks in the distance disappeared. Whatever had been causing the hold-up seemed to have loosened its grip on the snake of traffic.
‘Thank fuck.’ Dalglish sighed, increasing the pressure on the accelerator.
Two minutes later and the traffic was flowing smoothly allowing him to speed up to eighty miles an hour. He adjusted the volume on the stereo, turning it down to help him to concentrate on the galaxy of cats’ eyes guiding him along the motorway.
Something ahead and above caught his attention, his eyes automatically drawn to the dark horizontal line of a bridge ahead. Was there a person there? Or an animal. Going too fast to make any sense of the movement, Dalglish gasped as the blur solidified into the shape of a person teetering on the wrong side of the bridge’s railings. He yelled and slammed his foot down hard on the brake, steering to the left through the vibrations of the raised markings on the hard shoulder, coming to a stop under the bridge.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered to himself as he leapt out of the car and ran back along the hard shoulder to where he’d seen the person falling. Other cars were slowing down, the traffic splitting to the left and right to avoid the shape in the road. Three cars were lined up in the slow lane and he could see the glow of a mobile phone in one as somebody called for help. Hazard warning lights surrounded him as he stepped into the middle lane, protected by a line of four or five cars, and made his way to the person lying on the tarmac.
He knew not to do more than a basic check for breath and a pulse – moving an injured person could be fatal – but he couldn’t help but push a stray strand of hair back from the face for a clearer view. A woman. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifti
es, the side of her face that he could see was expertly made-up and he could smell her perfume over the exhaust fumes of the surrounding vehicles. Dalglish didn’t know much about women’s fashion but her clothes looked expensive – this wasn’t somebody who’d hit rock bottom, she looked more like she’d been for a night out with friends, or a boyfriend.
Had she been alone? Dalglish stood up and closed his eyes, trying to remember what he’d seen in the few seconds before the woman had fallen from the bridge. Had the movement been a struggle between two people or was it just one woman climbing the railings? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember.
A distant siren made him open his eyes again. The emergency services were on the way.
He stared down at the broken mess on the road. It looked like help was going to be too late for this woman.
26
‘Julia Sullivan suffered a traumatic injury to the skull from the car crash,’ Cooper said as soon as Kate set foot in the incident room. ‘That must be the healed fracture found at the PM. It’s in her hospital notes but it wasn’t covered in the information from her GP.’
Kate removed her suit jacket, draping it across her chair, and settled in front of her computer. It was too early and she hadn’t had enough caffeine to be able to see where Cooper was going with her comment. She looked at the DC and made a ‘come here’ gesture with the fingers of one hand while using the other to swipe her ID through the card reader that would let her into the computer system.
Cooper smiled. ‘Too early for conversation? Okay. Here’s what I’ve been thinking. What if Julia Sullivan’s head injury caused her personality to change? It’s well documented that people who suffer from traumatic brain injuries often seem different. It might explain her religious conversion and her radically altered political views.’
‘It might,’ Kate agreed. She’d come to a similar conclusion herself while researching the Church of the Right Hand but she hadn’t seen anything criminal in their activities. She typed in her email password. ‘But how is it relevant?’
‘We can’t find a link between the three victims,’ Cooper said. ‘But they’ve all been in the local press. The Houghtons because of Peter’s environmental scraps with various bodies, Julia Sullivan and her odious views and Liv Thornbury was in the Sheffield Star a couple of times when she was coming up to retirement. There are at least two ‘profile’ pieces on her. We’ve been told that all three may have met with somebody unknown to their family or friends. What if that somebody has been checking the local press and biding his time?’
‘I still don’t see–’
‘Change,’ Cooper said. ‘They’ve all changed. Liv retired, Julia went very right wing and Eleanor got married to an environmental vandal. The changes in their lives were very public and might have drawn the attention of our killer.’
Kate sighed. ‘Sam, this feels very tenuous. If the killer knew these women in the past it wouldn’t have been difficult for him, or her, to find them.’
‘I know that. But why now? What if he saw an article about Liv’s retirement and it prompted him to look up other people he knew…’
‘You’re missing the obvious here, Cooper. If the killer knew these women then there must be a link. If nothing else, the killer is the link. Who did they all know in the past?’
It was Cooper’s turn to sigh heavily. ‘There’s something here, I can feel it. I just can’t put my finger on what it is that’s bugging me.’
Kate opened her email account and scanned through the latest communications. ‘We’ve got some forensics back on the Houghtons’ house,’ she said, clicking on the title of the message. It wasn’t good news. Analysis of the contents of the outside dustbin was inconclusive. The fibres and debris were contaminated with dust and grime from the inside of the bin and it could easily be argued that the dustbin might have been mixed up with that of another house at some point. The hairs were awaiting DNA analysis, but Kate knew that unless the owner was on the database, they’d be useless unless a viable suspect was found. No fingerprints on door handles or the gin bottle – not even those of Peter or Eleanor Houghton, confirming Hollis’s suspicion that the killer would have wiped everything clean – and no DNA from the washing-up gloves. The car was also clean. The only prints on the door handles belonged to Cain Powell and there was nothing on the steering wheel, the tubing or the tape that had been used to secure it to the rear window. There was no similar tubing or tape in the Houghtons’ house or garage suggesting that the killer had been prepared.
‘Bollocks,’ Kate hissed.
‘Problem?’ Cooper’s blonde head popped up like a meerkat from behind her computer monitor.
‘Forensics on the house in Turton. Nothing. Not a fucking thing!’
Cooper flinched at Kate’s outburst. ‘Looks like somebody knew what they were doing. I bet the Sullivan house is the same.’
‘Probably. The SOCOs were already there when Dan and I arrived so it was difficult to see if any cleaning had been done. If there’s anything I’m sure they’ll find it.’
‘Find what?’ O’Connor rolled up his shirtsleeves as he strode to his desk. ‘Lost something?’
‘And a good morning to you, too, Steve,’ Kate sniped.
O’Connor gave her a lopsided grin and tugged an imagined forelock. ‘Sorry, boss. How are you this fine morning?’
‘Crap,’ Kate said. ‘Why do you look so chipper, or shouldn’t I ask?’
O’Connor sat down and pulled his chair tighter in to his desk before swiping his ID and logging on, all the time with a maddening smile plastered across his face.
‘He’s up to something,’ Cooper said. ‘I know that look.’
‘I am most definitely up to something,’ O’Connor admitted, turning his chair round to face Kate. ‘Remember when I said that there was something not right about Houghton Haulage?’
Kate nodded, wary. She thought O’Connor’s maverick tendencies might have been curbed after she’d sent him off on a couple of menial errands, but it seemed he was still on top form.
‘Well, I took it upon myself to investigate further and–’
‘Steve, I told you to leave it alone.’
‘It was all in my own time,’ he said. ‘I’ve been tracking the unmarked lorries that Sims bought, and I’ve found out why he was so cagey when me and Matt last paid him a visit. He’s involved in people trafficking.’
‘I don’t…’ Kate began but O’Connor spoke over her, giving an account of tailing one of Sims’s vehicles through the wilds of Northumberland the previous night. She listened, incredulous, as he described seeing three men get out of the back of the lorry in Kielder Forest before being abandoned by the driver.
‘And you know for certain that Sims is involved?’ she asked, her mind spinning as she tried to work out what to do next. She’d need to liaise with Border Force and Northumbria Police and get a warrant to search the vehicles at Houghton Haulage. And she needed to apologise to her detective sergeant.
‘He told me and Matt that he owned the fleet of seven-and-a-half-tonne trucks. They’re part of his pet project which he claims is about exploiting different ferry routes post-Brexit. Looks to me like it’s more about exploiting desperate people with nowhere else to turn.’
‘Wow,’ Cooper interjected. ‘Growing a social conscience, Steve?’
O’Connor ignored her. ‘If we search the trucks and find that they’ve all got some sort of hidden compartment then Sims has got a lot of explaining to do. If we can get Northumbria Police to do what I did and follow one of them then he won’t have a leg to stand on. It’ll be his word against the driver’s, but I’ll bet there’s a paper trail.’
Kate grinned. ‘I’m sorry, Steve. You were right. This is your case so how do you want to play it? Do you want to be part of the search team or do you want to be the one to collar the driver?’
‘Both,’ O’Connor admitted.
‘Okay, well, that won’t work. Look, I’ll let the DCI know what’s going on and tell her
that you’re running the case. You’re a DS with a lot of experience, I doubt she’ll argue. You’ll need to contact Border Force and find somebody in Northumbria Police to work with. This is going to take a lot of your time, but you deserve the credit.’
O’Connor nodded. ‘Appreciate your support, Kate,’ he mumbled, uncomfortable with the praise but not, she suspected, the responsibility.
‘And I want to know immediately if there’s any link to Houghton Haulage and the murders of Julia Sullivan and Liv Thornbury. The trafficking and the murders are to be kept separate for now but, if you find anything, however insignificant you think it might be, you’re to tell me immediately. Clear?’
‘Crystal.’
‘Great work, Steve.’
Kate continued trawling through her email. It always amazed her that she could log off at six or seven in the evening with an empty inbox and, twelve hours later, log on to at least a dozen messages, most of them sent by colleagues at odd hours. After the disappointment of the forensics report she wasn’t especially buoyed by the fifth email in the list.
‘Got phone records for Liv Thornbury and Julia Sullivan,’ she told Cooper. ‘Nothing for the Houghtons yet. I’ll send you a copy and get them to Julia Sullivan’s family and Sylvia Kerr. They might be able to help us eliminate some numbers.’
Trawling through phone records was tedious work but, with Cooper’s eye for detail, it had proved crucial on past cases. They needed to find and call any numbers not known to the family and to see if the same number appeared on both sets of records – the former could be farmed out to civilian admin staff, but Cooper’s were the only eyes Kate trusted for the latter task.
Shattered: a gripping crime thriller Page 15
