Hurt (DS Lucy Black) (9 page)

‘Jesus,’ Tara shouted, as the uppermost car of the moving pile, a red Skoda missing a door and bonnet, seemed to teeter at the edge, then fell forwards, knocking into the adjacent pile in the next row. In a moment, in a domino effect, the piles of scrapped cars began tumbling one into the next, bits of the car bodies dropping into the gaps between the rows where the three uniforms were, trapping them beneath the debris.

With the uppermost car now fallen, Lucy could see Shaun, the man in the red T-shirt, his back pressed against the far fence, using his legs as leverage to the uppermost car in the next pile over, recreating the effect again. Then he turned and began scrambling up the metal fence, using the barbs at the top as a grip to pull himself up.

As Tara and the two uniforms ran towards the fallen cars to look for their colleagues, Lucy sprinted down the roadway out of the scrapyard, trying to keep an eye on Shaun’s progress. As she reached the main gateway, she saw him swing over the top of the fence, as if to drop to the ground beyond.

Puffing furiously, she sprinted the circumference of the fence, aware now that at least one other TSU officer was following some distance behind her, realizing that she needed support.

As she neared the spot where Shaun had been climbing, she realized that he’d not made it down, as she’d expected. His trousers had become entangled in the barbs and he was caught at the top of the fence, tugging at the material, trying to tear himself free. Just as Lucy approached, she heard the rip of fabric and he fell onto the ground in front of her. He struggled to get to his feet, but Lucy covered the final few yards and fell onto him, pinning him back down.

He writhed beneath her, trying to buck her off his back as Lucy laid her full weight against him. Finally, the TSU officer arrived and, dropping beside her, laid his weight on Shaun’s legs, effectively pinning him to the ground.

‘You’re under arrest for theft,’ Lucy managed. ‘Put your hands in front of you.’

Shaun tried to kick and shifted his weight, but he was overpowered. Finally, Lucy felt him slump, and he extended his two hands out in front of his head, his face pressed into the dirt of the ground where he’d fallen.

Lucy moved quickly, looping the cable ties around his outstretched hands, pinching them tight against the skin of his arm. His hands lay flat on the ground, the wrists bound together, his arms outstretched above his head.

The TSU man stood up, dusting himself as he did so, then turned quickly to look into the yard through the gaps in the fence to where one of his colleagues lay on the ground beneath the scrapped Skoda.

‘Are you OK, Danny?’ he called.

Lucy leaned down close to Shaun’s ear. ‘You stole from graves, is that right?’ she said.

Shaun looked up at her, his face smeared with mud. ‘No comment.’ He smiled.

Rising, Lucy stepped on his hand with her steel-capped boot, pressing down until she heard the fingers’ crack behind the screaming of the man and the shouts of the TSU officer as he tried to pull her away.

A fire tender was at the scene within minutes, with cutting equipment, lest it should be needed. They shifted the remains of the cars as carefully as possible in order to create sufficient space for the PSNI men trapped beneath to crawl out. In addition, it became apparent that in pushing over the cars, Shaun had trapped one of his own gang members beneath a badly rusted Scenic. He cried out periodically in rage as the officers worked first to rescue their own colleagues before coming to his aid.

The metal gang members were brought back to Strand Road station, where Tara, preening herself on having overseen the operation to arrest them, briefed Burns. Lucy was called into his office after he had spoken with Tara.

‘I understand you questioned one of the suspects?’ he said, without preamble.

Lucy nodded. ‘I wanted to be sure we had the right people,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I should have waited.’

‘You should indeed,’ Burns said. ‘You got a description apparently. What did he say?’

‘As they arrived, they saw an older man, grey haired, getting into a red car in the parking bay. He drove off and they started harvesting the metal. As they moved down the line, they came across Karen’s remains. He said they didn’t touch the body. They scarpered when they found it.’

‘You should have left it until he was brought back here.’

‘We have a description now, at least, sir.’

‘Though there’s no guarantee that the man they saw had anything to do with Karen’s disappearance.’

‘It seems a little odd that a man would be in the park at that time of night for any legitimate reason.’

Burns accepted this with a curt nod. ‘Regardless, we needed him to make a proper statement.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ Lucy said.

‘I understand you also broke another suspect’s fingers.’

‘That was an accident. I didn’t feel his hand beneath my boot until he cried out.’

‘You were asking the first suspect you arrested about taking fences off a child’s grave, apparently. I hope the two things aren’t connected.’

‘No sir,’ Lucy said, thinking back, trying to remember who had heard her asking Marcus about Mary’s grave. Then she remembered.

As she left Burns’s office, Tara sat at her desk in the incident room, watching her. When she saw Lucy, she raised her hand meekly. Lucy nodded curtly and left without speaking.

* * *

After leaving Strand Road station, Lucy had headed back to Maydown. Fleming was in his office at least, though with the door closed. Lucy considered knocking to ask how he was feeling, but decided against.

She’d just made it into her own office when her phone rang.

‘Dave Cooper here, Lucy. I think Bradley is about to go online.’

‘Is this some sixth sense, ESP thing?’

Cooper laughed. ‘No. He’s online already. Just not as himself. Come across and I’ll show you.’

Cooper’s office was as cluttered as it had been the day previous. The large iMac sitting on the main desk displayed Karen Hughes’s Facebook account profile.

‘I checked out Bradley’s account yesterday, tracing through all of the friends that he had, in case there were other girls there he was targeting,’ Cooper explained. ‘I have a feeling that a number of these friends are sock puppet accounts.’

Lucy shrugged. ‘What’s that mean?’

‘I think Bradley created a whole load of accounts, all in different names, which he then befriended.’

‘He made friends with himself? Why?’

‘To make him seem more normal.’

Lucy raised a sceptical eyebrow.

‘Look,’ Cooper said. ‘If he sent you a friend request, and he only had one or two other online mates, you’d think it a bit strange. If instead he has loads of friends, all your age, all with similar interests, he looks less suspicious.’

‘How do you know they’re sock puppets?’

‘A lot of the accounts either aren’t fully developed, or their content is repetitive, where the same message is being posted in fourteen or fifteen accounts almost in rotation. Look.’

He showed her Paul Bradley’s page. He’d posted a status update the previous Saturday saying ‘Saturday lie-in =)’.

‘See this,’ Cooper said. ‘Watch.’

He opened a second Facebook profile, this time for someone called ‘Liam Tyler’. ‘Look.’

On the previous Saturday, ‘Tyler’ had posted the same status update. A girl named Annie Marsden had attached a comment with a smiley face of her own.

‘You think “Tyler” is actually Paul Bradley?’

Cooper nodded. ‘If Paul Bradley is even his real name. That could simply be another alias.’

‘But one of his aliases has gone online?’

Cooper nodded. ‘“Simon Harris” went on about ten minutes ago. Watch.’

He pointed to a small pane in the lower half of the page, which listed online friends of Bradley’s. A green circle marked the name ‘Harris’. Suddenly the name vanished.

‘We’ve lost him again?’ Lucy asked.

‘Wait,’ Cooper said. ‘If I’m right, you’ll see one of these other names go live.’

Sure enough, a moment later, a green dot appeared next to the name ‘Tom Gallagher’. Cooper pointed to the screen. ‘That’s another of them.’

‘How many does he have in total?’

‘I think about twenty,’ Cooper said. ‘We need him to log in as Paul Bradley though; I’ve got Facebook to agree to give us Bradley’s ISP address when he next logs in. But we can’t ask for that for all of these accounts too unless we can prove they’re all the same person.’

‘I’ll update Burns anyway,’ Lucy said, going out of the unit and phoning through to CID. As she was explaining to Burns what Cooper had told her, Cooper himself appeared, barely able to contain his excitement.

‘They’ve been in touch. Bradley’s just gone online. I’ve reverse-checked the ISP address they’ve given us. It’s a restaurant in the Foyleside shopping centre.’

The Foyleside Centre was built in the early nineties, covering four floors and housing almost fifty different stores. Level four was little more than a central concourse with shops lining both sides. The two middle floors, however, were more open-plan, meaning that there were a variety of approaches and escape routes, should Bradley try to make a run for it. Fortunately for them, the Wi-Fi address they had been given belonged to the fast-food outlet on the uppermost floor.

The difficulty was that, although they had a picture of Bradley from his account page, there was no guarantee that the man in question would even look like his picture. They did, though, have the description from the metal theft gang, who’d seen a man with grey hair in the area where Karen’s body had been found.

All of this was explained to the team by Burns who briefed them in the back of the Land Rover on their way to the Foyleside. The rear of the Land Rover was stuffy, the benches on each side lined with members of one of the two Tactical Support Units accompanying the investigating team. The proximity of the bodies, and the vague smell of sweat generated by the boiler-suit type uniforms the officers wore made it difficult for Lucy to concentrate on what Burns was saying. She wanted to get out and get moving.

‘Lucy and Tara go in together first. Get something to eat, scope the place out. We’re probably looking for a man, on his own, using a phone. Grey-haired particularly. Obviously if you recognize anyone on the Offenders Register let us know immediately. We’ll hold back on a full entrance until we have a target,’ Burns said, before turning to Mickey and the DC sitting next to him. ‘You two hang around outside; be ready in case anything goes down. We’ll post one TS Unit outside the main entrance and a second at the bottom of the stairs to the fourth floor. If he makes a run for it within the centre, they can close in on him from top and bottom floors.’

‘How come they get food and we have to window-shop?’ Mickey complained.

‘How many women only window-shop?’ Burns asked. ‘Besides, you’ve had a few too many dinners recently by the looks of you.’

The team erupted into laughter, the loudest of which belonged to Mickey himself, keen to ingratiate himself with the boss.

Lucy and Tara stepped out into the light mizzle of rain that seemed to hang perpetually over the city. Lucy glanced at the shoppers passing, arms laden with bags, looking forward to Christmas, blithely unaware that a possible child killer was sitting in their midst.

‘What do you fancy?’ Tara asked as they entered the Foyleside. ‘I’ll get the grub, you have a look around; you’ve a better idea of some of the weirdos out there through the PPU anyway.’

Lucy grunted, already scanning the area as they entered the central concourse. If the Wi-Fi signal was strong enough, there would be no need for Bradley even to sit inside the restaurant.

‘I’ll have a cheeseburger and Diet Coke,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ll grab a table near the door. That’ll give us a good chance to look around.’

As it transpired, that would prove difficult. The centre was heaving with people, burdened down with shopping, presumably trying to complete Christmas shopping. They could already see a queue for the fast-food place stretching out through the main doors.

‘We’ve another week to go and I’m sick of bloody carols already,’ Tara said as a piped version of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ began playing over the centre’s speakers.

There were two doors into the restaurant; the main one where the queue had formed and a second exit to the left, nearer the front entrance of the Foyleside itself.

‘You take the main entrance and join the queue,’ Lucy said, ‘I’ll take a look around the place, like I’m looking for seats.’

Lucy moved to the nearest door and pushed her way in. As she did, she phoned Cooper.

‘Is he still online?’ she asked quietly.

‘He’s switched accounts again,’ Cooper said. ‘I think he’s currently “Steven Burke”.’

Lucy ended the call and began weaving between the packed tables, looking for any single men. To her left was a harried family, four kids climbing on the seats while their father and mother tried to distribute their boxes of food. The youngest, a girl with tight curled hair, smiled up at Lucy who winked at her in return. Her three brothers, meanwhile, were fighting over who was getting the first strawberry milkshake.

Over to the right, a number of tables were filled with young girls, out shopping together, five of them crowded around one bag of chips and a drink. All had phones, probably sending texts to one another as they sat there, Lucy reflected. Then a little further ahead, she saw the actual recipients of their messages: a table of teenage boys, similarly clumped around food for one, watching across at the girls.

A man banged into Lucy, his tray held in front of him defensively.

‘Sorry,’ he managed. Lucy glanced at him, middle-aged, grey-haired, then checked his tray, three drinks, enough food for a family. Across to the right, at the window, she saw a man, mid-twenties, black hair, sitting alone. He had a phone in his hand, the crumpled wrapper of his burger lying on the table in front of him. As she moved towards him, she got a clear view of the table and saw a woman and child also sitting at it.

Suddenly, Tara’s voice crackled through her earpiece. ‘In the corner. The grey coat.’