Candles and Roses (16 page)

He held his arms wide in a defenceless gesture. ‘Didn’t mean to make you jump. Just came to check you were getting on all right. Looks like you managed it OK?’

‘Yes, think so. Maybe you should check it. Just to make sure.’

‘Sure it’s fine, but I can have a look.’ He stepped forward, and peered cursorily at the cask. ‘Looks OK to me. You’ve got the hang of it.’

‘That’s good. Look, I’d better get back upstairs. They’ll be dying of thirst.’ He was still standing between her and the cellar door.

‘Aye,’ he said, showing no signs of moving. ‘Look, I just wanted to make sure you understood.’

‘Understood what?’

‘What I was saying the other day.’

‘I don’t—’

‘About Lizzie. Lizzie Hamilton.’

‘It’s not—’

‘I didn’t want you to get any wrong ideas. You know what I mean? It’s what happened. She just left. That’s all. I don’t know why. I don’t know where she went. She just left.’

‘I know. You said. Anyway, it’s none of my business.’ She took a step forward, hoping he would step aside.

‘People do that.’ He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘They move on. That’s what she did. I don’t know why.’

‘Look, I need—’

‘Might have been all sorts of things. Money troubles. Who knows?’ He sounded as if he’d almost forgotten that Kelly was there.

She took another couple of steps forward, determined this time not to give way. ‘They’ll be waiting up there.’

Slightly to her surprise, he stepped back, allowing her to pass. Relieved, she hurried towards the steps, just wanting to be away.

Behind her, she heard him repeat, as if uttering some form of mantra: ‘She just left.’

***

‘Tell me about Joanne Cameron,’ McKay said. ‘Whatever you’ve got.’

There was a pause at the other end of the line as DI Warren checked through his notes. ‘We don’t have a lot. She lived by herself in a flat in Brinnington, a suburb of Stockport. Not the most salubrious address. She worked in a credit control place.’

‘Credit control?’

‘Debt collection. Chasing unpaid bills, but business-to-business. Paid on commission. Hard work, I imagine.’

‘And what’s the story? Out on a bender in Manchester was what I heard.’ ‘We’ve spoken to this Jade Norris—the woman who responded to the TV appeal—this morning. She was a work colleague of Cameron’s at the credit place. They went out last Friday night. Supposed to be some sort of girls’ night out, apparently, but only the two of them turned up. They basically just got bladdered in various pubs around central Manchester. Norris copped off with some builder from Basingstoke. Cameron had been chatted up by one of his mates, so Norris assumed she’d done the same.’

‘She didn’t notice her friend had disappeared then?’

‘Apparently not. Sounds like they were all pretty pissed by then. You know how it is on nights like that. You turn round and someone’s buggered off. You don’t necessarily think a lot of it.’

‘Aye, I remember,’ McKay said, with some feeling. ‘Been a few years, though.’

‘Me too.’

‘What about these builders? You managed to track them down?’

‘Give us a chance,’ Warren said. ‘I’ve only just got back from speaking to Norris. But she went back to the rented house some of them were sharing in Levenshulme and she’s given us the address. Not sure whether the other guy lives there or not, but assume we won’t have much difficulty finding him.’

‘Norris hasn’t kept in touch with her bloke, then?’

Warren laughed. ‘I don’t think it was that sort of relationship. From what she said, she buggered off first thing in the morning, hangover and all. Didn’t even wait for breakfast.’

‘You paint a touching scene,’ McKay said. ‘Anything else?’

‘We’ve had the CSI out to look at her flat. No sign of any disturbance, but it looks like she’s not been there for several days, which would tie in with her going missing on Friday. Also looks as if she wasn’t planning to leave. Food going off in the fridge. Dishes in the sink. We spoke to a couple of neighbours, but it’s the kind of place where nobody really talks to anyone else. Nobody had noticed she hadn’t been around. Landlord knows nothing. Rent paid by standing order and not due for a couple of weeks.’

‘This woman Norris told us that Cameron was Scottish. Any other info on that?’

‘Not really. Norris confirmed that when we spoke to her this morning. She reckoned Cameron had a strong Scottish accent, but couldn’t pin it down any further. Not like Billy Connolly seemed to be the best she could offer.’

‘Aye, well, quite a few of us don’t talk like Billy,’ McKay said.

‘She said she didn’t think Cameron came from Glasgow or Edinburgh. Further north, she said. Maybe the Highlands, but she didn’t know any more than that. Cameron had once told her where she was from, but it hadn’t meant very much.’

‘About as much as Brinnington and Levenshulme mean to me.’ McKay finished scribbling down notes. ‘That’s great.’

‘Don’t imagine it’s getting you very far.’

‘It’s a start. At least we’ve got a name.’ He paused. ‘Though we also have another victim.’

‘Shit. You’re kidding.’

‘As of last night. Apparently the same MO. Young woman, same sort of age as the first two. As yet unidentified.’

‘This really is one step forward, two steps back, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the way it’s feeling. But any step forward is welcome.’

‘We’ll get on to the builders this afternoon. I’ll keep you posted.’

McKay ended the call and sat for a moment, staring blankly ahead of him. For the moment, they were keeping the third murder under wraps but they’d have to announce it to the media very shortly. Then the shit would really start to fly. That, he thought, was when Helena Grant would start to earn her keep.

‘How’re they doing?’ McKay said to Horton. She’d just reappeared from the MIR where she’d been debriefing the team on the latest developments.

‘You know. Plugging on.’

‘All we can do. What’s the word from Jock Henderson and his pals on our third lady?’

‘MO the same as the first two. Chloroform burns around the mouth. Death by asphyxiation. Though obviously we’ll have to wait on the post-mortem to confirm the details. Victim a white female aged probably late twenties. No particular distinguishing features other than a couple of minor scars and one off-the-shelf tattoo. We’re doing the usual fingerprints and DNA stuff, but nothing back yet.’

‘Fingers crossed she proves less difficult to ID than Joanne Cameron.’ He filled her in on the conversation with DI Warren. ‘We need to find out more about Cameron. I’ll see if we can get access to her bank details and phone records. That might give us something. Even if it’s only some of her former addresses. Her mate reckoned she’d said she was from the Highlands, but the mate was very fucking vague about any geography north of Preston.’

‘Even if she was right, Highlands doesn’t narrow it down much.’

‘No, but if there is a pattern here, then maybe it’s not coincidence she was brought back up here, alive or dead. Maybe she was a local girl.’

‘There’ll be a few Camerons up here, though, I imagine.’

‘Aye, too right. We could maybe try the academies, though. See if any of them have a record of a Joanne Cameron of the right sort of age. We’ll have to be discreet. We don’t want word leaking out that she’s our victim before we’ve announced it formally. And I’d like to find any next-of-kin before we do that.’

‘Catch 22,’ Horton said. ‘If we announced the name of the victim, we’d find out if there was any next-of-kin soon enough.’

‘Aye, but what a fucking way to find out your daughter or sister’s been killed. It might come to that, but let’s try anything else first.’

‘You know your trouble, Alec,’ she smiled. ‘You’re just a soft touch.’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘so I’ve been told. Now fuck off and make some fucking phone calls.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

Despite his earlier concerns, the afternoon proved much more fruitful than McKay had feared. The first sign of progress was a mid-afternoon call f
rom Warren in Manchester.

‘We’ve tracked down the builders,’ he said. ‘Easier than we expected. Checked out the address that Norris had given us. The two we wanted were at work but one of their mates was there. Off sick with the flu he claimed, but it looked to me like the flu you get after ten pints the night before. He told us where his mates were working and we tracked them down there.’

‘Always good to catch them at work,’ McKay observed. ‘Makes them keener to tell you the truth so you bugger off before the boss loses his rag.’

‘Too right. And I got the feeling that neither of them was exactly flavour of the month already. Lazy buggers, according to the site foreman.’ Warren was obviously consulting his notes. ‘Guy called Dave Bennett was the guy Norris was lucky enough to cop off with. Weaselly little toerag. Couldn’t tell us much except to confirm what Norris had told us. Norris and Cameron had turned up at the pub together, already the worse for wear. Bennett spent the evening with his tongue in Norris’s ear, and his mate Pete Graham spent the evening trying to get to first base with Cameron. Without much luck, apparently.’

‘So what’s Graham’s version of events?’

‘That around elevenish Norris announced she was heading home. Wanted to get the last train from Piccadilly. He tried to persuade her to stay longer, but no luck.’

‘Any particular reason for her deciding to leave? Some fall-out with this guy Graham?’

‘He reckons not. Said she’d been lukewarm all evening. Mind you, both these guys struck me as the opposite of irresistible. My guess is that Cameron just got sick of this oaf trying to paw her and decided to cut her losses.’

‘She didn’t bother to say goodbye to her mate?’

‘Norris was otherwise engaged. And I’m guessing Cameron was feeling pissed off at the end of a miserable evening. She left her supposed mate to it and buggered off.’

‘Sounds plausible enough. Graham didn’t try to follow her?’

‘Reckons not, and that sounds plausible too. It was pissing down. He stayed in the pub with various other mates who were still hanging about at the bar. Then when Bennett and Norris headed off for their night of passion, he went on to some nightclub with the others. They called over a couple of other guys who vouched for that. So I reckon Graham’s telling the truth.’

‘We don’t know if Cameron ever got home that night?’

‘Difficult to say. Her flat looks like she was expecting to go back there, but there’s no way of knowing if she got back that night or if she went back and went missing sometime afterwards. The first might be more likely, but there’s no way to be sure.’

‘Neighbours have no recollection of her coming back?’

‘Like I said, it’s not that sort of place. No-one noticed anything, but I don’t think they would have, whether or not she returned.’

‘What about CCTV? Around the pub she was in? At the station? On that last train?’

‘We can give it a go,’ Warren said. ‘But I suspect it’ll be a waste of time. It was pissing with rain when she left the pub. You won’t catch many faces on the street. As for the station—well, do you know Piccadilly? It’s a big place and heaving on a Friday night. We might catch her face if she was passing, but the odds are against it.’

‘And the train?’

‘Can check. Some trains have CCTV. But that last train’s always packed. Standing room only. Even if there was a camera on there, we’d be lucky to spot her.’

‘And if we don’t spot her, it proves nothing either way. Aye, I know,’ McKay agreed morosely.

‘We’ll get them checked out anyway. You never know,’ Warren said, in a voice that suggested you generally did. ‘We’ve got her mobile phone number from Norris so we’ll follow that up to see if there’s any interesting call data. And the other news is that we’ve got the report back on the check we did on her flat.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Not much in itself. Like I said, there’s no evidence of any crime scene there. So whatever happened to her, it didn’t happen there. We didn’t find much in the way of other information either. There was an old empty cheque book lying around, so we’ve got details of her bank account. We’re in the process of contacting the bank to find out if there were any withdrawals after that Friday night, and anything else that might help us.’

‘Previous addresses, too, if you can. Anything that will give us a clue where she came from.’

‘Ah, well, I might have a tiny bit of information there.’

‘Go on.’

‘Like I say, there wasn’t much in the flat. Not even a computer or a laptop. But one small thing we did find was a handful of books. Most of them just trashy paperbacks, but there were a couple of older hardbacks.’ A pause, while Warren took another look at his notes. ‘Little Women and the Catcher in the Rye, apparently.’

‘Very literary. And?’

‘Thing is, they were both old school editions. Books she’d presumably kept since she was at school herself. Both falling apart, so assume she’d kept them for sentimental reasons.’

‘Come on then, you bastard,’ McKay said. ‘Don’t string me along. What was the name of the school?’

Warren laughed. ‘Place called Fortrose Academy. Mean anything to you?’

McKay took a breath. ‘Oh, aye,’ he said. ‘That means something all right. A bit more than sodding Levenshulme, anyway.’

***

McKay began with a call directly through to the rector of Fortrose Academy, who fortunately was around and available, and explained the reasons for his call. He had little faith in the integrity of his fellow man, but he reasoned that, of all people, the rector of a local academy was unlikely to blab to the local media or anyone else. Particularly in this case when, as he’d stressed, the priority was to identify the next of kin.

The rector understood and instructed his secretary to help DI McKay obtain whatever information he needed. McKay asked for anything they had on one Joanne Cameron who would have left the school perhaps ten to fifteen years earlier. The next stage took slightly longer because the records pre-dated the school’s current IT system. But within fifteen minutes the secretary had phoned back with the information requested.