Everyone Lies (19 page)

There was a murmur of excitement – this was a good, solid lead.

‘We need to canvas massage parlours and saunas,’ she said. ‘Talk to the girls. Do they know anyone with a rep for this kind of thing? Has one of the girls gone missing in the last few days?’

Renwick shifted in his seat and cleared his throat diffidently.

‘Sergeant?’ she said.

‘These girls move about a lot, and the physical description won’t make it any easier.’ He dipped his head apologetically. ‘I mean, we’ve got a slim girl, mid-twenties, five seven tall, blonde hair, blue eyes.’ A slight grimace. ‘You could be describing about 90 per cent of the girls.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘we take it slowly and carefully, and we follow up every possible lead.’

‘Yes, ma’am, but—’

‘They won’t be keen to talk, and they might be wary about talking in front of their bosses or their peers,’ she said, cutting him short before his helplessness infected the rest of the team. ‘So hand out business cards, tell them they can call Crimestoppers, remain anonymous. Exercise tact.’ She looked at Renwick. ‘Do you think that will be a problem, Sergeant?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, ma’am.’

‘Guv,’ she said. ‘You can call me Guv, or Boss, or Chief Inspector.’ She looked around at the shiny eager faces of her team. ‘I don’t like to be called “ma’am”. Clear?’ She got an uneven chorus of, ‘Yes, Boss’ and ‘Yes, Guv’.

Simms wrapped up the meeting a few minutes later. On her way out, she glanced at Renwick. ‘My office, Sergeant,’ she said.

She sat behind her desk and left him standing.

‘Look, Boss, I didn’t mean to piss on your parade back there, I was just—’

‘You’re an experienced officer, Sergeant Renwick,’ she interrupted. ‘You must know how important morale is in any investigation, especially one with as much stacked against it as this one.’

She riffled through a stack of papers in her in-tray and placed in front of him the sloppy, incomplete statement he had taken from Jordan Fitch.

‘Jordan Fitch is an addict,’ Simms said. ‘Her sister – who, by the way, was not a serious user – was one of the penicillin victims. Jordan watched her little sister asphyxiate. She remembered every detail. Said she’d told the same story to the officer who took her witness statement.’

‘Sorry, Boss,’ he said, ‘I don’t …?’

He didn’t even recognize the name.

‘Read it,’ she said. ‘Tell me what’s missing.’

She watched and waited for him to make the connection. At first she saw bewilderment, then concern. A fraction of a second later, he saw his name as cosignatory, and he blurted out, ‘Oh, sh—’

‘It’s like I said – garbage in, garbage out,’ she said. ‘If you’d bothered to listen to Jordan, the tainted drugs could’ve been off the street months ago. Lives could have been saved.’

He closed his eyes briefly and hung his head. When he opened them again, the whites showed a panicked urgency. ‘Boss, I— ’

She raised a finger. ‘Stop. I don’t want excuses or selfjustification. I expect you to do your job, because that’s what you’re paid to do. Okay?’

‘Yes, ma’am – uh, I mean yes, Boss,’ he stammered.

‘I expect you to be thorough, efficient and precise. I expect you to be an example to every individual out there. Are we clear?’

‘Yes, Boss.’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘you can go.’

He turned to leave, but at the door he hesitated, spun on his heel and stood to attention. ‘Boss, I messed up – big time,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

Taken aback, for a few seconds she eyed him suspiciously. He flushed under her stare, but held her gaze.

‘The younger members of the team will look to you for guidance,’ she said. ‘Don’t let them down.’

He braced up. For a second she thought he might salute, then her mobile phone rang and she glanced away to take it out of her desk drawer. When she looked again, he was gone.

19

‘Action is the antidote to despair.’

JOAN BAEZ

It was 11 p.m. Nick Fennimore sat at his office desk, waiting for Kate Simms to Skype. He drummed his fingers on the mouse pad, checked that the volume on his laptop was turned up, took a sip of coffee, discovered a crusting of mould on its surface. He set it to one side, picked up the hot coffee he’d just prepared and sipped that.

Still no call. He tapped the mouse pad, just to be sure, paced to the window and watched the sleety rain hiss against his office window for a few minutes. He stopped himself in the act of checking the volume setting on his computer again, realizing his impatience wasn’t about the case, it was about Kate Simms’s call.

He shook his head and returned to the window to watch the slushy mix of ice and water melt. Rivulets formed and merged and changed direction, and he tried to predict patterns in the seemingly random tracks on the windowpane.

At 11.23, the two-note alert tone sounded and he sat at his computer.

‘Sorry about the delay,’ she said. ‘The debrief went on for a bit, and I wanted to check a few details before I spoke to you.’ She was seated at a desk, the window behind her a square of black, the wash of cold fluorescent light from above casting shadows under her eyes. ‘Have I kept you from anything important?’

Since his return, Fennimore had spent his days lecturing, his evenings brooding. Thinking about Kate’s four-year-old son, working for a few hours on the aged-up image of his daughter. He was on the point of launching the picture onto the web a dozen times, but every time he had aborted at the last second. He knew about the con artists who trawled for people like him, hoping to turn a profit from others’ misery. Sometimes it seemed that his notoriety made him a prime target for every new-age crystal fumbler, seer and pendulum dowser on the planet. They would turn up at his book signings with a dream, or a map already felt-tipped with a search grid that was sure to lead him to his daughter. Sometimes shy, tremulous, hypersensitive, sometimes steady-eyed and solemn, they fell into two broad categories: well-intentioned but deluded, and the worst kind of manipulative.

So, he filed the new version of fifteen-year-old Suzie safely on his laptop and trawled the net himself, looking at missing persons sites and forums, getting nowhere, the trail being too old, far too cold.

But Simms didn’t need to know any of that, so he told her he’d been marking students’ scripts and working on a book outline – which was true, at least in part – you could get a lot done if you only slept four hours a night.

‘What’ve you got?’ Fennimore asked. She had left a message on his voicemail that afternoon, requesting the Skype conversation. ‘It sounded urgent.’

‘We’ve been hammering the local saunas and massage parlours for the past three days,’ she said. ‘Nothing. Then we get a tip-off via Crimestoppers – a local sauna owner – seen with blood on him the night of the murder, scratches on his face and hands.

‘Claims he’d had a skinful – can’t even remember getting home. I’ve fast-tracked his DNA profile. And we’ve already got a match from his dentition to the bite marks on the victim.’

Fennimore recalled the purplish marks on the victim’s body, blooming under the pathologist’s forensic light, like invisible ink on a page.

‘We also found a smashed phone in a sewer directly outside his place.’

‘The victim’s?’

‘We don’t know; it’s been raining here since you left on Sunday night, so it’s been under water and gunk since then. The SIM card is gone.’

‘What about the IMEI?’ The IMEI number would enable them to trace the phone back to the factory that produced it and – with luck – from there to the service provider.

‘If I had that,’ she said, ‘I’d be listening to the answer-phone messages right now, mapping out a timeline and list of suspects from the phone log and contacts.’

‘Tetchy,’ he said.

‘Tired,’ she countered. ‘Sorry.’ She swept a hand over her face. ‘The IMEI has been scratched out.’

‘That doesn’t mean it’s irretrievable.’

‘Nick, there’s nothing
to
retrieve.’

‘It might appear that way, but, hear me out. In most new mobile phones, the number is on what looks like a piece of paper, stuck to the main housing, behind the battery.’

‘I
know
that.’ Irritation was etched between her brows. ‘But as I said, the paper—’

‘But it’s not just paper,’ he interrupted. ‘It’s a laminate. The paper is sealed behind a bonded plastic sheet. Scratch it, it can look like you’ve destroyed the number, but it’s only the plastic you’ve destroyed.’

She nodded, looking brighter. ‘I’ll send it to the lab tonight.’

‘They might look for DNA, too. I know, it’s been under water,’ he added hastily, ‘I was listening – but skin cells can get trapped in seams in the casing and saliva spray carries buccal cells which can lodge in the mic hole. It’s an outside chance, but it would give you a definite match to your victim.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll give it a try.’

‘What d’you know about sauna guy?’

‘George Howard,’ she said. ‘There isn’t much
to
know. He’s been in the business for six months, maybe a bit longer. No arrests, no convictions.’

‘So, not on the DNA database. Unusual, in his line of work.’

‘Until recently, he was an accountant with the Audit Commission. When the NAO got canned, he decided to invest his redundancy payout in a business venture.’

‘Well, that’s the British entrepreneurial spirit for you.’

‘The local Field Information Development Officers have been monitoring him, on and off, since last autumn. He’s not doing badly for a start-up business in the current economic climate; covert surveillance shows a steady flow of punters, and he’s hiring new girls all the time.’

‘But he hasn’t fallen foul of the law, till now?’

She shook her head. ‘His website is carefully worded: customer pays for the room and companionship – anything else is the choice of consenting adults. He’s operating out of a large detached Edwardian house in Cheetham Hill. Discreet signage, parking around the back. There’s a veterinary practice on one side and a solicitor’s office on the other – so no neighbours to upset. His private accommodation is on the ground floor, the girls’ rooms on the upper floors. He also has the basement rigged out as a dungeon. Scientific Support have already taken away a variety of whips and riding crops.’

‘Any link to the tainted heroin?’ he asked.

‘They’ve turned up a small quantity of drugs in the rooms: speed, Viagra, cocaine, a few tabs of E. No heroin – and not enough of the rest to charge him with supplying.’

‘Careful man.’

‘Accountant,’ she said, as if that explained everything. ‘And Audit Commission, too. Which makes me wonder why he’d dump a body halfway across town—’

‘And ditch the phone a few short steps from where he lives. It does seem odd, doesn’t it? You’d think a man like that would be a meticulous planner.’

‘You would,’ she said. ‘I could really do with some psychological insights from your Professor Varley, but he’s in back-to-back meetings in London till Thursday and my boss tells me that ACC Gifford wants “A swift resolution and efficient use of resources” – and you know what Gifford thinks about my use of resources.’

He knew all right: ‘Wasteful, irresponsible, a wanton misuse of taxpayers’ money,’ Gifford had said of their unofficial investigation into Rachel’s death.

Simms nodded, seeing the unspoken words in his face. ‘We’ll know if it’s sauna guy under the victim’s fingernails by tomorrow morning. And if it is, I’ll be under pressure to charge him. You know how this works, Nick – if I charge him, I won’t be able to question him. I already lost the dealer that way, I don’t want to lose this guy.’

‘But you’ve got ninety-six hours to question him without charge.’

‘Not without a Magistrate’s Extension,’ she said. ‘Which my superintendent would have to request, and since he thinks the dental match to the bites is proof of guilt, that’s just not going to happen.’ She sat back in her chair and for a moment her face blurred.

‘This whole thing smacks of nomination,’ Fennimore said, bitterly. ‘Find your suspect, build a case, send him down.’

She puffed air between her lips. ‘What can I tell you? It’s hard to argue with six and a half billion in spending cuts. They’re a gift to men like Gifford. They prove he was right all these years – it really
is
all about the bottom-line.’

Fennimore was silent for a while. ‘What d’you need from me, Kate?’

She took a breath. ‘I’ve sent Professor Varley the files; he’s agreed to look them over and we’ll meet here in Manchester, Thursday afternoon. I need to buy more time to question Howard and gather evidence, which means convincing my superintendent that Howard might be a sleaze, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a killer. It’ll take more than slight inconsistencies in the PM findings to persuade him that there could be another assailant. And if there are other suspects, I need to identify them fast.’ She stopped and stared straight out of the monitor at him. ‘Nick, I need you here.’

He hesitated, but he was already wondering who he needed to speak to, to enable Josh to coordinate the forwarding of lab analyses to him, simultaneously working out the earliest scheduled flight to Manchester in the morning.

20

‘Every contact leaves a trace …’

E
DMUND
L
OCARD

‘… But the tricky bit is finding the contact points and recovering the trace.’

P
ROFESSOR
N
ICK
F
ENNIMORE

Fennimore’s plane touched down in Manchester at eight twenty. Kate Simms was waiting for him, looking trim in a skirt suit, the jacket nipped in at the waist.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she said, talking fast, already heading for the exit. ‘We’re in the short stay. You’re at the Midland again, yes? We’ll talk as I drive. I’ll have to drop you at the hotel and run – I’ve delayed the briefing till 9.30, but I can’t keep them waiting any longer than that.’

‘Hey, slow down, take a breath,’ he said.