Читать книгу Strangers - Paul Finch - Страница 12

An executive decision was taken to locate Operation Clearway’s Major Incident Room, or MIR as it was known in the trade, at Robber’s Row. The taskforce took residence on its top two floors, where suites of offices were available which already were well equipped and close to all necessary facilities. The MIR itself was on the lower of these, the station’s fourth floor, where the N Division’s Sports & Social Club had once been: over a hundred square yards of floor-space with a raised stage at one end and a bar at the other, though both of these were now defunct. Robber’s Row was one of the last nicks in GMP with a section-house attached, in other words sleeping quarters for junior officers. Few of these comfortable but basic one-bed domiciles were used any more; in fact most of them would need to be aired out at the very least, but the proximity to the MIR of such a purpose-built bunkhouse was perfect, given that, as promised, nearly half of the two hundred officers attached full time to Clearway had been brought in from outside the GMP area.

The whole thing would be a home from home for Lucy, who’d worked out of Robber’s Row for the last four years, ever since she’d transferred away from Cotehill Crescent, the sub-divisional nick where she’d been posted until the incident at Borsdane Wood. But the atmosphere would be different in the MIR. A little less formal perhaps, with everyone in civvies and relatively few newbies involved, but with less margin for error than would normally be tolerated. The thought of having Priya Nehwal in command was a little unnerving – she was the best, so she expected the same from her staff. But in truth, she was only one member of the top brass on Operation Clearway, Deputy SIO in fact. According to the bumph circulated by email those first couple of nights, the rest of the senior supervision would comprise Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Cavill, also from GMP’s Serious Crimes Division, who was SIO, and Detective Chief Inspector June Swanson from Merseyside, who was Office Manager. Both of these characters were unknown quantities to Lucy, so it was anyone’s guess what their overall management style would be, but given the general experience of the taskforce, it was to be hoped that it would be pretty relaxed.

It all started reasonably well that first morning.

As part of the Intel Unit, as they’d now be referred to, Lucy found her induction briefing on the top floor in what had once been the classroom where the N Division Training Officer had put probationers through their paces. From here on, this would be their base. It was airy and spacious, with rows of neatly arranged tables and chairs, and a large desk and widescreen VDU at the front. It also had a locker room attached and a small anteroom, which the DI running the Intel Unit could make use of as a private office. If nothing else, it was a relief to be in there, given that downstairs it was already a tale of chaos, taskforce detectives doing their level best to work amid the bedlam of delivery guys tramping in and out wheeling desks, filing cabinets and computer equipment, and techies hammering and banging as they installed new electrical fittings. Not that the Intel Unit didn’t feel a little crowded itself. That first day, approximately thirty young female officers were assembled there, mostly seated, while a row of fifteen blokes stood at the back.

‘Morning, everyone,’ DI Geoff Slater said from the front. ‘Chuffed to bits to see so many of you here … but if I don’t sound overly excited, apologies in advance. We’ve got a shedload of work ahead of us.’

Slater was another GMP Serious Crimes Division man, but to Lucy’s eye he looked more like a TV cop. He was somewhere in his late-thirties, tall and lean, but with an air of virility. He had a thatch of unruly black hair and rugged, lived-in looks. His shirt, tie, jacket and trousers were all vaguely rumpled. He didn’t seem especially happy: he wore a serious, rather sullen expression – and yet it all hung together nicely.

‘You all know why you’re here and what a ball-acher of a job you’re going to be doing when you’re out there,’ Slater said. ‘Hopefully you all gave deep consideration to this assignment before you stuck your hands up – I hope so at least, otherwise you might find you’re in the wrong place. I’m certainly not going to do you the disservice of trying to sugar-coat this, because that’d be a total waste of time. Likewise, I don’t want to spend time we can’t spare making formal introductions, aside from to introduce myself, which I already have done, and your two immediate line-managers, detective sergeants Sally Bryant from Merseyside and Maureen Clark from Lancashire.’

Two of the seated women stuck their hands up to indicate who they were.

‘You’ll obviously need to get to know each other,’ Slater said, ‘but you can do that on your first tea-break. You’re all wearing name-tags anyway, so that should help and there’re a couple of charts on the wall that you might find useful.’

Lucy glanced up. Among a mass of other paperwork, mainly maps and photographs with marker-pen notations all over them, there were two colour charts, one for women and one for men, each bearing ordered and neatly blown-up headshots, with essential details like name, rank, collar-number and police force of origin listed underneath. She skimmed through. Several of the women were already serving detectives, though the majority were PCs like herself. The male officers, she’d already learned, had largely been drafted from the Tactical Support Group, which meant they’d most likely be ex-military, which their burly physiques and hard, truculent faces also seemed to imply. Their role was basically to keep an eye on the women, but also to drive up in unmarked cars every so often, posing as customers, so as to maintain the illusion that the girls were working prostitutes.

‘What I will say is this,’ Slater said. ‘We’re a small but vital part of a very big operation. I’ve been a detective for sixteen years and I’ve never known a case where as many resources were being chucked around. I could put my cynical hat on and say that if we were investigating the usual type of serial murder … i.e. drug-addled hookers getting sliced ’n’ diced rather than the white, middle-class men who use their services, there wouldn’t be half as much media attention and nowhere near as much pressure on us to get a result. But I’m not going to. I don’t know if that’s the case, and frankly I don’t care.’

His gaze roved across them. His delivery was a low, taut monotone.

‘Mine’s a school of thought where all lives are valuable,’ he said. ‘Where each one that gets snuffed out leaves a hole in people’s lives that will probably never be filled. None of these fellas asked to get murdered, much less tortured. And that’s the other thing. That’s the really nasty bit … someone’s out there using a butcher’s knife to carve off these blokes’ crown jewels. Now I’m sure everyone here knows some misogynistic pillock who in one of your lighter moments you’d happily say deserves such a fate. But you’ve still got to ask yourself the question … do you really want someone wandering the streets who’s capable of this kind of sadism? I mean, disregarding the mistreatment she may have suffered at the hands of men, because that’s irrelevant to our role here … do you really want this woman walking about free? Because who gets it next? Not just the bloke who propositions her or offers her money … maybe the bloke who makes a politer approach, offering her a drink or asking her out on a date. Maybe the bloke who opens a door for her, or simply gives her a smile when he’s out walking his dog. And this is the real rub, ladies. Because when you get out there, this could be the very same person you’re swapping banter with when you’re fixing your make-up in the bus station toilets. It could be the girl standing on the next street-corner, the one who comes over every five minutes to scrounge a ciggie off you.’

He scrutinised them carefully.

‘When policewomen usually do decoy work, they’re standing among the prospective victims. This time you may be standing with the killer. And for that reason if none other, you’re going to have to stay sharp. You’ll be working four days on, three days off, four till four. You’ll not be on the same pitch all the time, though I’m not going to allocate any one of you more than two or three pitches, the whole purpose of this being that you get to know the other girls who work there … that you talk to them, find out who they think might be doing it. But for your own safety, at no time can you take your eye off the ball. I mean not once. Because if you let something slip about who you are, and Jill the Ripper picks up on it, and you’re stuck with her all night on a lonely road … I wonder who’s not going to be heading home again when the shift finally ends.’

Lucy had already considered this discomforting possibility, though by the looks on the faces of some of the others, primarily the younger girls, they hadn’t. There was no safe way to perform this kind of work. At the best of times, the women they’d be interacting with were likely to be damaged. They wouldn’t all be bad people; there’d be tired mums trying to make ends meet, students with college bills to pay, actresses and models who couldn’t get real work. But it was an unforgiving profession. There’d be thieves among them too, addicts, mental patients, disease carriers. And now one of them could be a murderer.

‘And if that hasn’t scared you shitless,’ Slater said, ‘sorry … but next up we’re going to run through the details of the enquiry. And this isn’t going to be pleasant either.’

He called various images onto the VDU as he outlined the progress thus far. As expected, the crime scene photos were graphic in the extreme, and yet, from a purely analytical perspective, there were startling similarities between them. The most recent victim, Ronald Ford, lay on his back in the roadside woods near Abram, with a pool of blood and brains beneath his broken skull, and his trousers and underpants pushed down to his shins, exposing a gore-glutted cavity where his genitals used to be. Two of the other victims, William Hammond and Graham Cummins, who were found in lay-bys near Chadderton and Southport respectively, lay in exactly the same posture, suffering from exactly the same fatal injuries. Only the second victim, Larry Pupper – the heavily built HGV driver, who’d been dragged a considerable distance – lay on his side in a muddy, litter-cluttered ditch on the outskirts of Salford. His trousers were tangled around his feet, as though he’d been trying to take them off altogether, which suggested the killer had waited until he was most off his guard in order to attack, and his face was battered savagely and extensively, implying that even then he’d put up a fight. Perhaps even after the beating, he’d struggled, which might explain why he’d needed to be dragged still further from the East Lancashire road. Whatever, it looked as if he’d died before he’d reached his final destination – in the photo he lay draped on his side, his arms twisted out of shape as though partly dislodged from their sockets. The gaping wound where his genitals had been hacked off was less bloody than the others.

Medical examiners now felt certain the actual implement used to achieve this ghastly effect was a knife with a thick, serrated blade – the sort a butcher might use to saw through bone and gristle. There were plenty other lines of enquiry too, though few had borne fruit as yet. Slater hastened through them anyway, skimping on detail where he could – primarily because this was mainly of use to the girls as background info. They had no investigative brief, and so the DI was much more interested in those factors that had potential relevance for the role they would be playing.

In which case he now summoned the mugshots of three living men onto the VDU.

‘A bit of intel on the kind of people you are likely to hear about,’ he said. ‘I doubt you’ll encounter any of these characters personally – I sincerely hope you don’t – but you definitely need to know something about them. As you’re probably aware, we have a wide range of crime syndicates trading in the north-west. But tough as they like to talk, on the whole they are all dominated by these maniacs. Anyone know who they are?’

Lucy eyed the three faces with interest. All looked to be in early middle age, but at second glance there was no doubting their chosen professions.

‘The Crew,’ one of the other girls spoke up.

‘That’s correct,’ Slater said. ‘This is the infamous Crew. For any of you who’ve spent your police service on another planet, the early noughties saw the formation of a particularly dangerous cartel here in the north-west of England … they’re known simply as the Crew, and they control most of the high-level crime in Manchester, Liverpool and various of the two cities’ satellite towns. As I say, it wasn’t always thus. Back in the day, the numerous gangsters we had up here were too busy fighting each other to actually make any money. At least, that was the case until one of our leading Manchester hoodlums –’ he indicated the middle face ‘– a certain Bill Pentecost, decided enough was enough.’

Lucy looked in fascination at the image of Bill Pentecost, the north-west’s legendary boss of bosses. At first glance there was nothing immediately brutal about him, but on closer inspection something wasn’t quite right. He was weasel-faced, with a shock of greying ‘wire-wool’ hair. His features were lean and sharp-edged, and he wore steel-framed, rectangular-lensed glasses over a pair of narrow, ice-blue eyes.

‘Pentecost started his career as a council estate money-lender,’ Slater said. ‘His trademark was extreme terror; he would punish those who failed to pay up by crucifying them on doors. But he built his larger empire on drugs and extortion, finally coming to occupy a position as one of Manchester’s top godfathers. As such, his vision gradually broadened. He decided that he’d rather make deals than engage in crazy violence, and so arranged a meeting of all the heads of the region’s main gangs, at which he proposed the set-up of a kind of overarching north-west crime faction, in which they’d all participate and which in due course would become known as “the Crew”. Members would have an equal partnership and an equal say in all major decisions affecting the governance and protection of crime in this region, the endgame being to establish permanent peace and prosperity.

‘And guess what … with a few minor exceptions, it worked. Harmony wasn’t just restored to the north-west crime network, all these years later the Crew is still the leading underworld power in this region. It’s got a controlling interest in just about every racket you can think of, and Bill Pentecost, now in his mid-fifties, is firmly cemented in place as top dog.’

He paused to take a breath, and for the first time smiled – a rather tired smile, Lucy thought, the smile of a guy so used to thinking how unfair it was that these killers were all millionaires while the average copper spent so much of his time worried about his pension that if he didn’t laugh about it he’d cry.

‘As I say, you’re unlikely to meet him,’ Slater said. ‘He never gets his own hands dirty anymore. He’s got umpteen layers of fall-guys between him and the streets, but it’s important you know who he is, because quite a few of these girls are likely to be on his pay-roll, albeit indirectly. Which brings us to the second name you need to know, and this is someone it’s just conceivable you might meet up with.’

He indicated the left-hand image. This one portrayed a younger man, perhaps only his mid-forties, but again lean and feral of feature, an impression enhanced by a vaguely insane smile. His head was completely shaved, and his eyes sunk into pits. Lucy had the notion that if some Photoshop genius added a goatee beard and a pair of antlers, it would be a perfect spit for the Devil.

‘As I say, the Crew have many rackets,’ Slater said, ‘and one of the most lucrative is the sex trade. So this is their pimp-in-chief, the ludicrously named Nick Merryweather, more accurately known as “Necktie Nicky” thanks to his preferred method of despatching those he doesn’t like. For the record, Serious Crimes Division has two unsolved murders on its books wherein the APs, both of them underworld players, were found with their throats cut and their tongues pulled out through the wound. They’re suspected to be Crew hits, and Necktie Nicky, though a Crew lieutenant rather than a soldier, was almost certainly the assassin. So this is someone to be especially wary of, though most likely, if you do your job properly, you’ll be a flyspeck beneath his notice. That’s assuming he bothers coming out to check on business. He has lots of madams and under-pimps to do that for him.’

He moved along to the third and final mugshot.

‘Now … prostitution being what it is in the age of Internet-fuelled home industry, not even a terror like Necktie Nicky can exert ownership over the entire field. He doesn’t actually run any brothels – he protects them, in other words he takes a big share of all their profits. That’s the way the Crew work, which makes it hard if not impossible to hit them with any real criminal charges. But as I said, there’s so much sex-for-sale out there now that even Nick Merryweather can’t cover the entire spectrum. So to help him, he relies on this charmer, fellow Crew lieutenant Frank McCracken.’

McCracken’s face was in some ways the scariest on show, because it was the most normal. There was a hardness about it, for sure, but he was also a handsome man, square-jawed, dark-eyed, his lightly greying hair worn in a sharp crew-cut. His eyes were chips of glass – there was no doubt that this character would kick you to death if you said a word out of place. But he too was in his fifties, and if you weren’t on the look-out for villainy, it was possible you could pass him in the street without giving him another glance.

‘Anyone know what McCracken’s official role in the Crew is?’ Slater asked.

Another girl put her hand up. ‘The Shakedown.’

‘Correct again,’ Slater replied. ‘And you even use the underworld terminology, so ten out of ten. Frank McCracken’s role in the Crew, ladies and gentlemen, is what they call “the Shakedown”. If ever a lucrative theft is committed in the north-west area, like a robbery, a high-end burglary or fraud, or if pimps, dealers and bookies are active who aren’t “officially approved”, it’s McCracken’s job to ensure the Crew gets its cut. And trust me, he’s very good at it. Some of his methods, at least those reported to us as hearsay, are beyond imagining. On the upside, McCracken is another who only comes out to play if the opposition gets serious. It’s unlikely that small-time operators like you will actually encounter him.’

He paused to look them over. Everyone was maintaining a suitably serious aspect, but quite a few of the girls, again mainly the young ones, had noticeably paled.

‘I’d imagine none of you are feeling any the less nervous after what I’ve just told you,’ Slater said. ‘Sorry about that, but how would it help if I lied? This just underlines the importance of the front you put out when you hit those streets. As I said, the Crew don’t control all the sex-for-sale in the north-west. It’s too diverse, involves too many people and is too technology-driven. From your POV it’s a good thing that you won’t be the only freelancers out there. But it’s important that each one of you gets a good cover story and gets it right – who you are, where you live, why you’re on the game, etc. In the first instance, you won’t be going out there cold. Vice have loaned us one or two working girls who also happen to be snitches – but only the most trustworthy, so that means there’s no more than a handful of them. They won’t be able to hold all your hands all the time – and at some point you are going to be asked questions. It’ll happen less out there on the fringes of town, where everything’s a bit wild and woolly, than it would on the backstreets around Piccadilly and Whalley Range, but it’s going to happen and you’re going to have to be ready for it. Now you’ll all have protectors, you know that … but some crap you’ll just have to deal with. Any questions so far?’

‘Most punters would be surprised to learn there’s any kind of prostitution out on the road networks,’ one of the girls said. ‘People drive around all day and never see anything.’

‘That’s true,’ Slater replied. ‘We’re going to train you up on that as well. Because you start openly touting at some service stations and you’ll be locked up by Traffic before you can say “Cynthia Payne”. It’s the quieter spots the girls tend to work from: lay-bys, lorry parks, picnic areas – especially at night, when they’re deep in shadow. Again … sorry not to sweeten this for you, but it’s in those shadows where you’ll need to be. And it isn’t going to be nice.’

They broke for coffee at around eleven, and were on their way down to the canteen when Slater sidled up alongside Lucy.

‘PC Clayburn, is it?’ he asked.

Lucy waited to let the others pass. ‘That’s right, sir.’

He stopped next to her. ‘You were the one involved in the Mandy Doyle incident?’

Lucy’s heart sank, but there was never any option these days other than to admit her error and hope to brazen it out. ‘Right again, sir.’

He regarded her with an odd kind of indifference, which she found more unnerving than she would if he’d been openly angry. ‘So … what?’ he said. ‘You just admit it like that? No excuses? No convoluted self-justification?’

‘None whatever, sir. I dropped a total bollock, and that’s why I’m here now … I’m trying to make up for it.’

He readjusted the pile of paperwork under his arm. ‘I worked with Mandy Doyle on the Drugs Squad. We were partners for three years.’

Lucy’s cheeks reddened. ‘I’m just glad she’s alive, sir.’

‘So am I.’ He yanked at his tie to loosen it even more. ‘She’s an idiot, by the way. Always was.’

Lucy thought she’d misheard. ‘Sir?’

‘Mandy,’ he explained. ‘Spent her entire career trying to prove she’s as tough as the lads. Made up for her lack of imagination with a bolshiness that extended right across the board. Difficult enough when you were a similar rank. But if you were lower, you could expect to put up with a whirlwind of shit. But why am I telling you that, eh?’

Lucy was temporarily lost for words. ‘I … didn’t know her that well.’

He shrugged. ‘Lucky you. Or unlucky. She obviously had to blame someone once she went and got herself shot.’

‘Strictly speaking, sir, it was me who went and …’

‘Uh-uh.’ He shook his head. ‘I read all about it, PC Clayburn. You had a guy in custody on suspicion of raping and brutalising an old lady, yeah? But by his own admission, and as later excavation of the deposition site revealed, he’d also murdered two young women. That should have put him in a different category. That meant he was physically pretty adept, and yet your gaffer went and left you – five days into CID – on your own, handcuffed to him.’

‘There was a police driver …’

‘The driver’s irrelevant. He was in a separate compartment of the vehicle.’

With Radio One playing, Lucy reminded herself.

‘He couldn’t necessarily have known what was going on in the back,’ Slater added. ‘Even if Haygarth hadn’t produced a gun, he might still have overpowered you.’

‘I was still a police officer, sir.’

‘Your loyalty to DI Doyle is touching, if a tad misplaced. She spent the next year saying you’d almost got her killed, when the reality was exactly the opposite – it was her who almost got you killed.’

Lucy preferred not to ponder that, even though her mum had – excessively. You didn’t dice with death every day as a copper, but it happened more often than in most civilian occupations. It didn’t pay to dwell on the near misses, to wonder what might have happened rather than what did happen. That was a sure-fire way to cost you your nerve for future such situations. But sometimes it was an effort to suppress those distracting thoughts.

‘You never should have been left in that vehicle on your own,’ Slater concluded.

‘I still looked the other way when I shouldn’t have.’

‘Oh hell …’ For the first time, Slater’s blank expression slackened; he almost smiled. ‘I wouldn’t have fancied watching a scrote like that take a piss either. The fact is there should have been two of you, minimum. And that was Mandy Doyle’s fault. She had tactical command, so she ought to have taken care of it.’

‘I’m glad you see it that way, sir. Not everyone does.’

‘Shit, Lucy …’ He walked again; she followed. ‘You know what this job’s like. Fill a form in wrong and it can follow you for the rest of your career if it suits someone’s purpose. But DI Doyle’s gone now on a medical, so theoretically that’s a clean slate for you.’

‘I want to get back into CID.’

‘I know. Priya told me.’

‘Can you and DSU Nehwal make it happen?’

‘Is that your burning ambition?’ he asked. It sounded like a genuine question.

‘It’s what I joined up for in the first place.’

This time he did smile. ‘So what were you watching as a kid? Cagney and Lacey? Prime Suspect? No offence intended … with me it was Miami Vice.’

‘Yeah, well … I guess we all got a bit of a shock when the reality hit us.’

‘Telling me. Anyway, the truth is, Lucy, we need detectives. Urgently … and I mean everywhere. Special units too, not just Division. Too many people are joining up these days who are only interested in fast-track promotion, and CID’s the wrong place for that.’ He halted at the entrance to the canteen. ‘So if you’re serious, and you do a job for us … we might be able to assist. It’s early days though. I mean we’ve got to catch a killer first.’

‘And you really think the Intel Unit’s going to have a role in that, sir?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t it more likely forensics’ll nab her? Or some good old-fashioned detective work?’

He shrugged as he walked inside. It was already noisy and crowded, mainly with plain clothes and civvie admin staff from the MIR, though uniforms and traffic wardens occupied some of the tables. They threaded their way through to the service counter with difficulty.

‘We’re dealing with someone who’s deadly serious about what she’s doing,’ Slater said over his shoulder. ‘You can tell that by the scorecard she’s racking up. It’s always going to be shoe-leather that brings someone like that to heel. Whether that’s Plod going door-to-door, detectives bouncing around the MIR having great ideas, or you lasses walking those grubby roads in your kinky boots … it doesn’t really matter.’

‘We just nab her any way we can.’

‘Correct.’

But Lucy was under no illusion. Slater was clearly disposed to be her friend – possibly because, at thirty, she was older and more experienced than most of the other Intel Unit girls and maybe, therefore, was someone he felt he could look to. The Mandy Doyle incident aside, her record was pretty good – so that could only help. Alternately, he might just fancy her. But even that was tolerable if, when all this was over, it meant he and Priya Nehwal could exert some influence in her favour. And by the sounds of it, there was one sure way to make that happen – feel the collar of Jill the Ripper.

No pressure then.