A Velvet Scream (3 page)

Mike was a man who liked action. He was already standing up.

Joanna unhooked her jacket from the hook on the back of the door. ‘What do we know about our victim?'

‘Kayleigh Harrison. Fourteen years old. Lives with her mum,' Mike turned to look at her, ‘who hasn't yet reported her daughter missing. Fairly obviously, judging by her age and the fact that she was probably inside an over-eighteens' nightclub until the early hours, I would guess she's a bit of a tearaway. She should have been tucked up with her schoolbag by her bed.'

Joanna smiled. Even if she hadn't known it, by Korpanski's censorious tone she would have guessed that he had a teenage daughter of his own to protect. They were already out of the door and heading towards a squad car now. ‘Have they spoken to her mum?'

‘They haven't been able to get an answer at the house.'

It was now nine o'clock. ‘Maybe she's at work?'

‘Not according to the neighbour. More likely to be blotto,' he said, ‘according to the uniformed guy who called round.' He inched the car across the slippery car park.

‘Blotto,' she commented. ‘This early?'

‘There's more. The guy who found her this morning had left his car in the car park last night because he'd had a “good night out” last night. Unfortunately for him the effects of the “good night” were still in his bloodstream so the uniformed guys have advised him not to drive. He's cursing, saying it'll cost him his job if he doesn't get to see a client today.'

‘I would have thought he's got reason enough to miss a call today.'

Korpanski said nothing but kept his eyes on the road.

‘So this “guy” was also in Patches last night?'

‘Seems so.'

‘Fairly drunk and with a gang of “mates”?'

‘That's right.'

They'd arrived. Though Patches nightclub was on the opposite side of the town to the station they were there within minutes. Leek is not a large town.

Even as they climbed out of the car, Joanna realized that no one could be in any doubt that
something
had happened here last night. The car park was cordoned off, already a scene of activity, with a few curious onlookers watching and exchanging – what? Misinformation, probably. It was generally the case.

Sergeant Barraclough, ‘Barra' to all, was directing the fingertip search of the car park, which was damp and grey with slush, the scene furred by fog that clung around the area. Joanna didn't envy them. A fingertip search is an unpleasant job: on your knees, even with ‘waterproof' trousers which never quite were. The scene bore the indistinct uniform greyness of a Lowry, peopled by stick men and women whose focus was on the ground, all dressed in identical suits, hats and overshoes, each one anonymous.

Do Not Cross tape had been strung around the entire area and the team, in their now sodden white suits, were moving forward in a slow, swaying movement. Joanna watched for a moment as they moved through the scene, the main sound a sort of sucking wetness with the odd shouted instruction. She glanced across at the nightclub. As do most clubs in the day, Patches looked decidedly seedy. It was a large, square building which had been a silk weaving mill two hundred years ago, but that had long since closed. It had then, briefly, been an antiques centre, but that had closed too and it had recently been converted into a nightclub with a coat of post office red gloss paint and blue window frames. There wasn't much choice of venue for a night out in Leek. Apart from the pubs and The Winking Man, which was way out high on the Buxton Road, there was only here, so the local youngsters tended to congregate at Patches. With the fresh snowfall last night the A53 Buxton road would have been impassable, so unless any revellers could be bothered to venture into Hanley they were stuck with Patches.

The car park was empty apart from the one splash of colour, a red Audi TT, with the number plate SEC5 21. The five had been curved to make the clumsy words, SECS 21. Joanna smiled. The plates were, strictly speaking, illegal, though they still struck her as funny. Though, in the circumstances  . . .

Barra came forward to speak to them. He jerked his head in the direction of the car.

‘Belongs to Steve Shand,' he said. ‘He left it here last night because he'd had a drink too many – or six. When he came for it,' he said, following their eyes, ‘he found young Kayleigh. Lucky he did and even more lucky he noticed her. She was partly hidden behind the wall and barely conscious. But he was here a while, so he said, because his locks were frozen. He was blowing on them when he heard a noise. He said it sounded like somebody moaning or groaning. He thought it was a cat or something, then took a look and found her. Otherwise she could have been dead.'

‘What time was it?' Joanna asked.

‘Seven thirty. He was going to work.' Barra gave a rueful smile. ‘Needless to say, we've detained him. He wasn't fit to drive anyway.' His eyes flickered back towards the vehicle. ‘We've kept the car. Just in case.'

Joanna nodded and Barra continued. ‘We'll do a quick check of it and if it's all right with you he can have it back this evening.'

‘Yeah. Fine. What does he look like?'

‘Thick set. Muscular. Looks like he “works out”. Early thirties.'

‘Have we got any sort of statement from Kayleigh about her attacker?'

‘Not much of one so far. She says he was tall, skinny, London accent.'

‘Not a local lad then?'

‘It would seem not. No one she knew anyway.'

‘OK. Well, it's not much but it's something to go on.'

Barra nodded.

‘The accent of our Audi owner?'

‘About as local as oatcakes.'

‘Sort of lets him off the hook then, along with Kayleigh's description.'

‘Sort of.' She could tell that Sergeant Barraclough was not quite convinced.

‘What job does this guy do?'

‘He's a rep for a pharmaceutical company. Visits doctors in their surgeries and such like.'

Joanna looked around. ‘Have you found much here?'

‘Bits and pieces. Not a lot. The sort of stuff you'd expect. Plenty of condoms. A couple of fag ends and lager cans but it's so wet and cold.' He paused. ‘The snow really hasn't helped.'

‘No. Right. And how is the girl?'

‘Physically, she's recovering.'

‘I'd better go and see her.' Joanna said. ‘Just show me exactly where she was found, Barra.'

‘Over here.' He led her between lines of tape, to the far corner of the car park where a low wall stood, probably a relic of some long destroyed outbuilding. Now it served as a store for bins – and was well hidden from the rest of the area. ‘Quite clever, really,' Barra observed. ‘She'd have been out of sight. And considering the music would have been blaring, out of hearing as well. They just kept the old bins and stuff here. Bits of rubbish. Shand, the guy who found her, said she was covered in rubbish; looked just like an old pile of nothing until she moved. Lucky she did or this would have been a murder investigation.'

Joanna looked around her. ‘Do you think our perpetrator recced the place first and chose this spot deliberately, or just hit lucky?'

She knew exactly what she was asking. In spite of the cockney accent, was this a local man with local knowledge?

Korpanski, too, was looking around – along the ground, then upwards. ‘Hit lucky or unlucky?' he asked. ‘If he'd taken a look around first surely he'd have seen that?' He indicated a CCTV camera set high on the corner of the nightclub, pointing down towards the car park.

‘I think he must have recced the place first,' Barra said. ‘It's just a little too lucky and well hidden here. But the camera's set quite high up. I wouldn't be surprised if the angle's all wrong. Maybe we'll find he's done the old “hoody” trick and isn't that recognizable from up there. It's a bit too high. If I'd been advising the owners of the club I'd have said to bring it down a foot or two and get an angle which would at least give us a sporting chance of a face and identification. From up there we'll just get the tops of heads and boots.'

‘I wonder,' Joanna mused, ‘if he is a stranger? He could still be a local man with a London accent. Hopefully we'll find him soon with or without the CCTV. Anyway, we'll take a look at all that later.' She peered down at the spot where Kayleigh had been found. It was a depressing little area, even without the memory of the sordid scene that must have been played out here last night. Melting snow, grey and cold, plenty of slush, dented lager cans, cigarette butts, polystyrene burger boxes, the general detritus of scruffy humans who can't be bothered to bin their rubbish even though the bins stood right here, mere inches away. In spite of the open air there was a stink around the place too, of something unpleasantly rotting mixed with stale urine. The men spilling out of the club must have used this place as a pissing wall.

Joanna turned away.

‘We've retrieved her knickers,' Barra said, ‘from over the wall where he must have chucked them along with the other shoe, but we haven't found a coat.'

‘She probably didn't wear one.' Joanna had seen the girls shivering as they queued up to enter the clubs both here and in Hanley. She had stopped once and asked them why they suffered the cold. The girls had been quite happy to tell her: because it cost five quid to leave it in the cloakroom, queuing up to dump it in the cloakroom lost them valuable dancing time and the coat would probably be nicked if they left it while they had a dance. ‘Right.' She didn't need to tell Barra to bag the knickers up together with anything else they found and send them to forensics. It wasn't necessary because Barra must have combed a thousand crime scenes before. The last thing he needed was Inspector Piercy breathing down his neck. ‘I'd like to take a quick look around the nightclub. Is the owner here?'

‘Yes. I saw him twenty minutes ago.'

‘How much does he know about what happened last night?'

‘I just said an alleged serious sexual attack on a minor. Naturally he insists as it happened in the car park it's nothing to do with the club and he can't help us. It's for over-eighteens. Strictly.'

‘And Kayleigh's fourteen.'

‘Poor kid,' Barra said sympathetically. ‘She's bound to be a wreck after this. She was probably heading that way before the assault. Now – well.'

They crossed the car park and approached the building, Mike striding at her side.

‘We're going to get this guy,' she said as they reached the door. ‘I just know it.'

He grunted. ‘Is that before or after your honeymoon?'

She almost,
almost
, responded: what honeymoon
?
Because now the case was all-absorbing and the wedding, even the disciplinary hearing tomorrow morning, was forgotten, but she stopped herself just in time, horrified by the answer that had arrived so automatically. She met Mike's eyes with an expression of rising panic. She knew that he had spoken the truth this morning: that the job would always absorb her to the exclusion of all else, even Matthew. Worse still, Matthew knew it too. Bloody Sergeant Clever Korpanski had even been uncomfortably near the truth about Matthew wanting a trophy wife and two point four kids. She strode towards the entrance, quickening her pace. Korpanski opened his mouth to say something but she was leaving him behind. At a guess, knowing Mike, it would have been something cheerful and funny, but when he caught her mood he clamped his lips tight shut before a single word escaped. Instead, he gave her a ghost of a smile followed by an awkward, almost apologetic twist of his mouth.

Barra had already put the boards up outside the nightclub, inviting people to speak to the police following a ‘Serious Incident'. Date and time were there together with a hotline telephone number. Hopefully someone would recognize the man from the description that Kayleigh Harrison had given. Maybe the investigation would hit lucky and someone would even identify him. If he
was
a local man with a southern accent he would stick out a mile in this moorlands town which had not only an accent but also a vocabulary and grammar all of its own. People would know him. If, on the other hand, he was from outside the area, what was he doing in Leek at this time of year, so outside the holiday season and with roads which were frequently closed to traffic because of the weather?

It was different in the summer with an influx of seasonal holidaymakers who rented cottages in the Peak District, visited Alton Towers and the factory shops in the Potteries. But few visitors came to Leek in December except the extreme climbing fraternity, who found the challenge of The Roaches in snow and ice exciting and bought both their equipment and provisions in the town. But they were easy to spot. Healthy, hearty, noisy, muscular, tanned men and women wearing North Face, Berghaus and Gore Tex: people in big boots, thick socks and healthy strides. They wouldn't be outside a nightclub raping a fourteen-year-old.

The manager of Patches was an American called Chawncy Westheisen. He was a bluff fellow, burly and over six foot high, with an impressive paunch. He greeted Joanna and Mike very cautiously. ‘I'm horrified to hear what happened,' he said. ‘One of the reasons I came to Staffordshire from the Big Apple was to escape the violence. I had a club over there and we had a shootin' one night. Two of my bouncers were badly injured. One never worked again. It upset me greatly,' he said, leading them into his first-floor office. ‘Troubled me so much I came over to the UK to look for some sort of small townsville where I could open another club. I brought the name with me from New York. It's been quite successful here as a drinking place – a couple of bars, a dance floor and quiet zones too. I learned that,' he said, with a frank sweep of his blue eyes, ‘from my days in New York. You know what it's like, Inspector. Places become fashionable and they make money and then so  . . .' He left the sentence hanging in the air; neither of the two police officers could quite have finished it.