Читать книгу Shadows: The gripping new crime thriller from the #1 bestseller - Paul Finch - Страница 17

As always with decoy duty, the menacing prospect of suddenly encountering the offender you were trying to lure was juxtaposed against the many hours of tedium that in actual fact would fill your shift.

The previous year, as part of the now legendary ‘Operation Clearway’, Lucy had gone undercover as a prostitute, walking the highways and byways on the outskirts of town. Though to a degree that had been worse than this – because, even though she’d been intelligence-gathering rather than presenting herself as a potential target, she’d been dressed in demeaning clothes and had been subject to the disdain of the general public, not to mention the potential violence of those nocturnal wanderers who existed only to hate and hurt – she’d mostly been in the company of other girls and had been able to spend the dark, wet nights in chatty conversation. Here, in the centre of Crowley, despite it being superficially less dangerous because she was now just an ordinary woman in jeans and an anorak – albeit wearing a concealed Kevlar stab-vest and carrying both a radio and a CS spray, with a support car never too far away – the main problem was that all-pervading boredom.

Lucy had been allocated four cashpoints in the obbo’s so-called ‘central zone’, which was mainly the district in closest proximity to Robber’s Row police station. They were all cashpoints that she herself had specified, each one located about a mile and a half away from the next. This worked well because it wouldn’t have done for them all to be close together. It was highly possible that the Creep, if he was here at all, would allow for the fact he was on foreign soil by scoping things out before launching an attack, and if he spotted the same lone female making constant rounds of the cashpoints, he’d soon get suspicious. As such, she’d commence her first walk at 10.30p.m., making a casual but lengthy circuit of the four cashpoints, starting at the RBS on Brunton Way, in the town centre, then moving on to the Co-op on Goodwood Drive, the NatWest outside the Lidl and finally the branch of Lloyds at Broadgate Green, drawing a minor amount of money from each one of them.

At the end of this, at around midnight – it was a timed circuit, and it was important that she kept to the schedule – she would wander idly into the car park at the rear of the Plough & Harrow, the only pub in Broadgate Green, where she’d get into the support car for some sandwiches and a flask of coffee.

At 12.30, the whole process would repeat itself, as it would at 2.30. They’d wrap things up with a debrief at the office at 4 a.m.

For the first five nights, nothing happened at all. In fact, it reminded Lucy of her very earliest days in the job, when, as a probationary constable, and regardless of the weather, she’d invariably be allocated the long-haul of foot-patrol in the town centre. It had been an even longer haul during this particular op, because out of uniform and to all intents and purposes a civvy, there were no calls coming over the radio to send her to an emergency, no one to summon her across the road to report a noisy party next door or prowlers at the back of their house, or just to invite her in for a cuppa. Not that Lucy could complain. This had been her idea after all – and anyway, it wasn’t as if she was completely alone: there were several other officers, two males and three females, all going through exactly the same process in different parts of the borough, thus far to no gain.

A couple of times that Monday night, mainly during her first circuit of the cashpoints, Lucy saw other pedestrians heading home from wherever they’d been. A couple were walking dogs. A middle-aged man hummed to himself as he tottered along, beer fumes wafting in his wake. But during the second circuit, which commenced at 12.30a.m., the streets were empty.

The strange thing was that, though well aware that this particular hour was the optimum one for an attack, Lucy, also knew that, even though they were planning for it to happen, it was still unlikely. As she drew money out of the RBS, then the Co-op, then the NatWest, and then headed down for what was perhaps the most far-flung of her four locations, the Lloyds on Broadgate Green, she tried to mentally calculate the odds of this thing actually coming off – especially after five nights on the trot and the Creep still a no-show. They weren’t looking good.

Okay, they had Jerry McGlaglen’s assurance that the Creep was in Crowley – that was worth something, no doubt about it. In addition, they had the psychological profile, which suggested that, if he had come up here to Manchester to escape the heavy police presence on his home patch, he would still struggle to resist the urge. But it seemed a long shot that it would occur in the skinny timeframe they’d allowed themselves, if at all. As with all serial offenders who’d suddenly gone to ground, there was always that possibility that he’d been sent to prison for something else, or had become ill, or had even died. There was also a chance that, because he felt the heat was getting too much, he’d decided to let it go for a while. Whatever the experts said, it was entirely possible that he maintained that degree of self-control.

All kinds of things were possible, in truth. There were no fixed rules in psychosis.

As Lucy walked along the dark hedge bordering the grounds of Crowley Grammar School, and pondered all this, it occurred to her that the Robbery Squad had actually invested a lot of faith in the tip-off she’d brought to them. Not that they would blame her particularly if nothing happened. So much policework relied on hunches and tips and ‘information received’. If this specific job failed to produce, and DI Blake had to account for her wastage of time and manpower, there’d be no hard feelings; it would be accepted as an occupational hazard. But then there was the Lee Gaskin factor.

Of all the detectives involved in the operation in Borsdane Wood five years ago, an occasion when Lucy had taken her eye off the ball for half a second and one DI Mandy Doyle nearly died as a result, Gaskin had taken it the worst.

That had been Lucy’s first CID assignment. She’d been in plain clothes a week when it occurred, and had been kicked back to Uniform straight afterwards, but it had been implied to her at the time that she was lucky she was still in a job. Most of those involved had been content with that punishment, apart from Doyle, who had never been happy from the outset with Lucy’s attachment to her otherwise all-male team, and Gaskin, who, for some reason best known to himself, had hung onto Doyle’s every word. Lucy hadn’t known either of them especially well back then, but in that one week she had seen enough to know that if Doyle had said to Gaskin, ‘Jump, you soppy little twat!’ he’d have replied, ‘Of course, ma’am … how high?’

Clearly, even five years later, this irrational devotion hadn’t diminished, and the bastard was now well-placed to do some dirt on her if he wanted to. Lucy had no doubt that Kathy Blake would already know about her past indiscretion, but if this op really went pear-shaped, and Gaskin made enough of a stink about Lucy and her intel not being all they’d hoped for, it wasn’t impossible that it would make a negative impression.

As Lucy pondered these thoughts, she cut across a now sleeping housing estate, walked down a passage between two clusters of maisonettes, and set off across Broadgate Green. This was a triangle of grass in what was an otherwise heavily built-up area of council housing. On the Green’s north side stood a row of six shops, in the very middle of which was the Lloyds branch. There was a raised terrace in front of the row, paved and fenced off from the road with a crash barrier, while to the west of it, Halpin Road, one of Crowley’s larger thoroughfares, though at this late hour it was quiet.

Lucy crossed the Green and glanced once over her shoulder as she ascended the steps to the shop-front terrace. Tonight, the support car, Danny Tucker’s Vauxhall Passat, contained both him and a Robbery Squad DC called Ruth Smiley. Lucy had already known who Ruth Smiley was before any of this started, because, aside from Kathy Blake, she was the only other female in the Squad. She was in her late-thirties and ex-military, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. What was more, she carried this aura around with her, looking and sounding both tough and efficient. She wasn’t tall but was in visibly good shape, and yet, though her short, dark-red hair was shaved at the sides, almost like a crew cut, and her usual attire of polo shirts, slacks and flat shoes rather than dresses, skirts and heels, gave her the air of a toughie, up close she was alluringly pretty, with bright blue eyes, pink lips, and a button nose. She was notoriously curt and forthright in her conversation, but that hadn’t stopped a lot of the guys at the station hitting on her (and getting knocked back). At present, however, it was Smiley’s renowned competence at the job that was of greatest value, and both she and Tucker were displaying it amply: the Passat had shadowed Lucy’s every step this evening, yet never once had she spotted it.

She trudged on along the terrace to the cashpoint, glancing over her shoulder again and peering directly across the Green to the mouth of the alley that had brought her here. It was a small relief to see that a vehicle, most likely the Passat, had pulled up at the far end. It showed no lights, but it hadn’t been there a moment earlier. It was perhaps a little further away than Lucy would have liked, but that said, Tucker, who was physically fit, could probably cover the distance on foot pretty swiftly if he needed to.

Lucy went through the usual motions, inserting her card, tapping in a key number and then waiting patiently. From somewhere behind, there came the echoing double-thud of what sounded like a door opening and closing. She withdrew her card and a couple of tenners, before it occurred to her that what she’d just heard could well have been the support car.

She spun around.

The figure was only about fifteen yards away.

It had approached silently along the terrace from its eastern end. It wasn’t especially impressive in height or breadth, but it wore a black, heavy cape, too big for it really, which covered it from shoulders to ankles like a voluminous, waterproof shroud. The hood was pulled down over the face, which could not be seen in any case because the head was bowed.

Even under normal circumstances, the sudden sight of this spectre in such close proximity might have made Lucy jump. It did more than that now: a yelp caught in her throat and she stumbled backward, bracing herself against the cashpoint ledge with her hand.

And yet the figure came straight on towards her, the cape so long that it was almost gliding.

Though momentarily transfixed, Lucy caught movement in the corner of her vision. She assumed it would either be Tucker or Smiley emerging from the alley on the far side of the Green, having seen what was happening before she had. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the advancing form, which now was only five yards away. With escalating alarm, she noticed that both its hands were concealed. She tried to say something, but her mouth was too dry. Belatedly, she stuck her hand into her anorak pocket, scrabbling for her CS spray. She could now sense someone running full-pelt across the Green, but still at least a hundred yards off.

The figure now stopped directly in front of her, slowly lifting its head, and at the same time drawing one of its hands from under its capacious folds.

But the hand, when it came into view, and which was little more than a curved, bony claw, was empty, and in fact cupped. The face, which was wrinkled and wizened, was familiar to her.

‘Armed police!’ Danny bellowed, as he reached the northern edge of the Green, his Glock drawn and levelled two-handed. ‘Stay where you are! Don’t bloody move!’

‘Danny, wait!’ Lucy shouted, raising a warning hand.

She again glanced at the figure in front of her, at the docile, non-comprehending eyes of Sally Skegg, one of several of Crowley’s resident homeless; a mentally challenged but otherwise completely harmless street-woman. Lucy peered past her and at the distant east end of the terrace saw what looked like a rusty shopping trolley full of discarded cans.

‘It’s okay, Danny! False alarm.’

Warily, he lowered his weapon.

Lucy turned back to the bag lady, who didn’t even seem aware that Tucker was present.

‘God’s sake, Sal!’ Lucy said. ‘You can’t be wandering the streets this late. Not in October. Here …’ She dug into her pocket for some change, and dropped it into the cupped hand.

On the Green, Tucker shoved his pistol back under his jacket. He lifted his chequer-banded baseball cap and scratched under his hairline. There was a screech of gears from somewhere nearby. Ruth Smiley was trying to find a quick way around to them, and by the sounds of it, she wasn’t succeeding. As Sally Skegg glided back towards her trolley, counting her handful of newly acquired coppers, Lucy moved to the barrier to speak with Tucker. Before she did, she glimpsed more movement in her peripheral vision, and looked to the west end of the terrace.