One Bad Turn (29 page)

‘I’ve found her, Sarge!’ Krispy called out, his face reddening at the sound of his own voice. ‘The housing manager at the council called me back to say a
Pat
Doyle had moved to Davyhulme with a new partner. I’ve spoken to the housing association who owns the flat she lives in and they’ve given me her contact details.’

‘Halle-bloody-lujah,’ Coupland only just resisted the urge to ruffle Krispy’s hair. ‘You go for it, son,’ he instructed, watching Krispy dial the number, holding his breath while he waited for it to pick up. The phone rang out. The young DC tried once more but the outcome was the same. ‘I’ll go round there,’ Ashcroft offered, writing Patsy’s address and postcode down on a post-it-note. ‘Take Turnbull with you,’ Coupland instructed, ‘he’s due time off checking through archives for good behaviour. Remember, no heroics,’ he added firmly, ‘call for back up the moment you think you need it. I’ll speak to DCI Mallender, get some cars on standby.’

The address Krispy had given them was a nondescript housing association flat on the outskirts of Davyhulme within easy reach of a primary school. Ashcroft pulled up outside, climbed out of the car quickly and rang the buzzer. Turnbull preferred to take his time, checking out the area around him. ‘There’s no one home,’ he said after Ashcroft’s third attempt went unanswered. ‘I can see that,’ Ashcroft replied irritably, some part of him was hoping to reel in the killer without DS Coupland by his side. He returned to the car, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel while Turnbull meandered to the end of the street. When the pavement gave way to road he turned, slowing his pace as he returned to the car. Ashcroft lowered the driver’s window: ‘In your own time,’ he called out, turning on the ignition to show his impatience. ‘I think you’ll find,’ Turnbull said, his voice low and undulating, ‘that school has just finished for the day. Maybe if we wait a few minutes longer we’ll be in luck.’ Ashcroft narrowed his eyes but he was more annoyed at himself for not working that out than anything else. ‘Smartarse,’ he muttered, switching the engine off before leaning back in his seat to see if Know All was right. After a moment or two a couple of women with small children in tow came into view as they entered the street. One woman was in her twenties and of Asian origin; she held the hand of a small boy as she crossed the road, waving to her companion as she let herself into one of the properties opposite. The other woman was white, early forties, accompanying a girl who was walking in front, already embarrassed about being seen with a parent. The woman glanced at Turnbull who by now was leaning against the car door as though shooting the breeze with its occupant. He nodded, waited while she made her way her way to the main door Ashcroft had tried ten minutes earlier before slapping his hand on the car’s roof and saying ‘we’re on,’ with just a touch more smugness than Ashcroft thought it deserved.

Turnbull reached the front door just as the woman tried closing it behind her. Startled, she looked from him to Ashcroft, who held his warrant card aloft. ‘What is it?’ she gasped. The child had moved to her side during this exchange, happy to engage now something strange was afoot.

‘Pat Doyle?’

The woman nodded, her arm snaking around the girl’s shoulders.

‘We need to speak to your son, love, do you know where he is?’

The woman blinked. ‘I don’t have a son,’ she squeezed the girl’s shoulders, ‘there must be some mistake.’

‘No mistake love,’ Turnbull reached for his mobile then scrolled down for the email Krispy had circulated earlier with the newspaper article reporting on Lee Dawson’s trial attached as a scanned copy. The photograph was grainy, but when he zoomed in on the pregnant woman leaving court after the verdict there was no mistaking it was her. He held it out for Pat to see. There were lines around her eyes now, and her hair may have been thinner than the woman’s in the photo, but the glare she gave the camera back then was the same glare she gave the detectives now. ‘Let me see,’ the little girl said, but the woman held her back. ‘Please Mum,’ the girl begged. Sighing the woman reached into her bag for her purse, pulling out two fifty pence pieces. ‘Go and get yourself some sweets from the corner shop, but mind you don’t speak to anyone on the way. Straight back, you hear?’ The girl didn’t need telling twice, she snatched the money, running down the path before her mother had time to change her mind. ‘You’d better come in,’ Pat said, climbing the stairs to her flat on the first floor.

The place was sparsely furnished; the only photographs were the cardboard framed school photos charting the growth of her daughter every year since nursery. In the open plan living room/kitchen there was a small television and a wooden framed settee, a crocheted blanket over the back of it. Pat followed Turnbull’s gaze. ‘I brought him home in that shawl,’ she said, ‘couldn’t bear to be parted with it…afterwards.’ Ashcroft leaned against the breakfast bar where a radio was perched. A jute shopping bag lay on its side, beside it shopping yet to be put away: an unsliced loaf in a paper bag, a carton of eggs, a tub of supermarket own brand margarine beside it. The place smelled ever so slightly of damp. Pat turned to face them, ‘You’ve got until she gets back.’

‘Fair enough,’ Turnbull agreed.

‘How did you find me?’

‘Wasn’t difficult,’ Ashcroft shrugged, ‘look I know this isn’t easy for you, but we’re only interested in the boy.’

‘Why?’

‘Slow walker, is she, your daughter?’ Turnbull countered. The corners of the woman’s mouth turned up in a smile, albeit an awkward one that didn’t make it to her eyes. ‘Fine,’ she shrugged, moving to the window which looked out on the street below. ‘You know about his dad then?’ She kept her back to them as she asked this.

‘We do.’

‘He was innocent,’ she told them, half turning, ‘I knew Lee better than anyone, back then anyway, and if he’d killed Eddie Garside he would have told me. Even if that meant asking me to keep it a secret afterwards.’

‘You didn’t wait for him though?’

‘We were going through a rough patch when he was arrested, we wouldn’t have stayed together even if they’d let him go.’

‘And the boy?’

A pause. ‘I called him Lee after his dad. I gave him up when he was six months old. What choice did I have? I didn’t have two pennies to rub together back then, my parents had their hands full with my younger brothers and sisters. There were times when I couldn’t even feed him.’

Ashcroft looked at her hard, ‘Couldn’t you get help?’

She looked away, ‘I’d started drinking, wouldn’t have accepted help even if it had been offered. You’ve seen this place, I know it’s not much but it’s a palace compared to where I used to live.’

‘And you’ve the girl now?’

Her face lit up at the mention of her daughter. ‘Still with her father too.’

Ashcroft’s gaze swept over the counter top, the cheap cans of supermarket beer waiting to be put into the fridge. ‘They’re for him, not me,’ she said sharply.

‘I take it your partner doesn’t know about your son?’

She shook her head. ‘What was the point? It would have meant dredging up the past.’

‘And you wouldn’t have come out of it looking too well.’

A sour look passed over her face. ‘I suppose if you put it like that, no.’

Ashcroft stepped out into the hallway. ‘I need to make a call,’ was all he said. Pat waited until he was out of earshot. ‘What’s eating him?’

‘We need to track down your son urgently. He might be in a lot of trouble.’

She regarded the older DC shrewdly. ‘What kind of trouble?’

‘The worst kind.’

There was a pause. Through the window her daughter could be seen walking back along the street, a slim bar of chocolate already open and half demolished. Pat hesitated as though making her mind up about something. She turned to face the detective full on. ‘Then you’ll want to hear this,’ she said gravely.

Coupland was long enough in the tooth to know that the more you wanted something to run smoothly the less chance there was of it happening that way. The likelihood of Ashcroft returning with an address for Lee Dawson’s son never mind turning up with the killer himself was always going to be a long shot; he was probably hiding out somewhere plotting to go on the run - or his next murder. But the call he’d just taken from Ashcroft - telling him that the boy, named Lee after his father, had gone into care as a baby meant the investigation had taken a huge step back while they relied on social services to help them track him down. Mallender had already made a call to the head of Salford Council’s Children and Families department requesting that full cooperation be given to the investigation, reminding them that now wasn’t the time to obstruct any enquiries by referencing client confidentiality and data protection. Mallender had insisted that he make that call himself, reminding Coupland that while his strengths were many, diplomacy wasn’t one of them. Coupland had put up no resistance, conceding that on this the DCI was right. The incident room was full to capacity with call handlers and officers - both uniformed and CID, working through actions that made Coupland hope they got a result soon, for the sake of morale. An uneasiness settled on his shoulders.

Ashcroft and Turnbull said they’d be back by now, he found himself thinking.

Chapter 17

He was surprised at the pressure he needed to exert to pierce her flesh. He’d used a kitchen knife, made for cutting through skin and bone but even so it stalled on entry, and she’d looked at him then like he was a loser, that even in the process of killing he hadn’t got what it took. That’s what he thought her look meant anyway, it could have been fear. He’d got it right in the end though, and he’d stood back fascinated, watching blood pool around her as her face took on an entirely different look.

Ashcroft frowned when Turnbull put his head round Pat’s front door, calling him back into her flat. ‘We need to go,’ he raised his hands palm upwards as though saying,
What the fuck?
Turnbull stood his ground.
‘You need to see this,’ he widened his eyes in response. There was something in his tone that put Ashcroft on alert. Curious, he followed Turnbull back into Pat’s living room. There was a shoebox on the breakfast bar, an old one by the look of it,
Dolcis
in large letters across the lid.

‘Tell him what you told me,’ Turnbull prompted. Pat’s mouth became downturned once more. ‘My son came to see me not long ago.’ She swiped a strand of hair that fell across her face behind her ear. ‘It hadn’t taken him long to find me, it’s not like I was hiding from him - more the press and the members of Eddie Garside’s family who thought it was OK to put dog shit through my door. I just wanted a quiet life…’

‘And then he showed up.’

‘Yeah, but it wasn’t the shock you’re imagining. I suppose I’d always hoped he’d come find me…only it didn’t quite work out the way I’d pictured in my head all these years.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He wasn’t really interested in me, just his dad.’

‘What did he want to know?’

‘He’d found out from his adopted father that his dad was in jail. The selfish bastard hadn’t bothered telling him much else and understandably he was distressed. He came looking for me to get answers.’

Something she said jarred with Ashcroft, ‘Help me out here, you called his adopted father a selfish bastard, why would you say that?’

‘Because he knew Lee’s dad swore blind he was innocent yet he chose not to mention that when he told him about his past.’

‘You’re very informed about a complete stranger,’ Ashcroft observed.

A sigh, ‘It was a private adoption, OK? I knew the couple I’d left him with.’

‘Right,’ Ashcroft said urgently, ‘you really do need to start at the beginning…’ He was thinking of the call he’d made to Sergeant Coupland, wondered whether he’d sent him on a wild goose chase. Unable to stand still, he paced around the room as he listened to Pat.

‘I worked a couple of days a week in the local newsagents close to where Lee and I lived. The owners had a daughter, Karen, a couple of years older than me, married. We hadn’t been friends as such at school but when I started working for her parents we started to chat when she came into the shop and she’d confided that she and her husband had been trying for a baby only he must’ve been firing blanks or something because nothing had happened. She’d been a little put out when I fell pregnant by accident - I hadn’t been with Lee all that long but she got over it and everything was fine.’

‘Until your boyfriend was sent down for murder and you turned to drink,’ Ashcroft added for her.

‘Pretty much,’ Pat agreed, ‘by then I was struggling on my own in a run-down flat and I think we both came to the same conclusion round about the same time: Karen and her husband could provider a far better home for a baby than I ever could. She was very good to me, didn’t judge me or anything. She knew how hard it was for me to give my baby up - I agreed I would move away so they could raise him with a free hand on the condition she and I kept in touch.’ Behind them the living room door opened to reveal the little girl standing in the doorway. ‘What you got there, Mum?’ she enquired, her eyes locked onto the shoebox, ‘Mind your own beeswax,’ the woman snapped before relenting when she saw the girl’s stricken face, ‘why don’t you go to your room and play on your computer for half an hour?’

‘I’ve not done my homework yet,’ the girl objected, keeping her smile in check before retreating in case her mother had time to change her mind, ‘thanks Mum!’ she called out, padding down the hall. Pat waited for the sound of a bedroom door closing before she continued.

‘The only thing was Karen didn’t want her husband finding out that we were still in contact, he’d felt it would be better for everyone concerned if we cut all ties, so we came to an agreement that once a year she would write to me and update me on Lee’s progress. She kept her word, every once in a while a card would arrive in the post from her - she used my sister’s address - stopped any unwanted questions from this end.’ She inclined her head in the direction of the hallway and the sound of music coming from her daughter’s room. ‘I kept them in here.’ She pointed to the shoebox. Ashcroft moved towards the breakfast bar and peered into it. There were a number of greeting cards inside, most with no message on the front, just a picture of a flower or a sunset. He was about to reach for one when his hand brushed against a laminated pink card with tiny baby footprints on it. He picked the card up to read the message beneath the image:
Danielle, Too precious to stay, 3 September 1992.
Ashcroft frowned. ‘I was pregnant with twins,’ Pat explained, her voice low, arms wrapped around her middle, ‘The girl was stillborn, nothing could be done for her…it’s what tipped me over the edge I think.’ She wasn’t the only one, Ashcroft thought, ‘Did your son know this?’ Patsy became defensive, ‘Not till he came to see me, but I was hardly going to hide it from him, he’d had enough secrets to stomach over the years…’