Storms (13 page)

‘Correct, ma’am’ Jeff confirmed. ‘It was fairly active in the northwest a few years ago and everyone thought it was all but gone. But now it seems it’s coming to life again’.

‘Okay well keep going’ said Geraldine. ‘We’ve got to get to a result on this one, Jeff’.

‘We’re doing our best, ma’am’

Jeff and Ollie went back into the interview room where Squires was sitting with his head in his hands.

‘Do you like to have a few pints down the pub of an evening, Mr. Squires?’ Ollie asked.

Squires raised his head sharply and said ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that’s a bloody crime now’.

‘Not at all’ said Ollie. ‘But it’s where you drink and who you drink with that matters to us’.

‘Police fucking state or what!’

‘Do you drink at the Hare and Hound in Stockport?’

Squires paused. It was the first time they’d seen a chink in his armour of certainty, the first time he’d seemed knocked off balance by a question.

‘Yes, I go to the Hare and Hound’ Squires confirmed without looking at Ollie.

‘It’s about five miles away from your house in Cheadle’ said Ollie. ‘Aren’t there pubs nearer to where you live that you could go to?’

‘What can I say? I like the beer at the Hare and Hound’.

‘Do you attend meetings of the Albion movement there?’

Squires’ face contorted in a mixture of cynicism and pure contempt. ‘I’m aware that there are members of the Albion movement who meet there and I may drink and discuss stuff with them, yes’.

‘Do you or do you not attend meetings of the Albion movement at the Hare and Hound pub in Stockport Mr. Squires, yes or no?’

‘Yes, I attend those meetings! I detest what all this multi-cultural bullshit is doing to this great and once proud country’.

‘Once proud?’

‘Well we can’t be proud of it anymore’ Squires asserted. ‘Not with all the mosques and the Muslims running riot all over the bloody place. And its time all the blacks got to know who was the bloody boss in this country. I’m not ashamed for being associated with a movement that believes in restoring the natural supremacy of the white, Christian race in Britain’.

‘So you’re an apartheid movement?’

‘I can’t think of a better word for it, yes’.

‘White people living in the good parts of town whilst blacks and other racial minorities are placed in camps that stretch on for miles and condemn all living there to poverty’.

‘You’re painting a mightily pretty picture to me, young man’.

‘Restoring the natural order’.

‘That’s it’.

‘So what would you do with a black like me who’s just as proud to be British as you are but who’s a serving police officer?’

‘Well you wouldn’t be able to carry on as a police officer’ said Squires, smirking. ‘But we’d find you a job cleaning the floors and the toilets. That would be more where you fit into the natural order of things’.

Jeff was impressed with the way Ollie was keeping his cool under intense provocation. But he also knew there were limits. He could see from Ollie’s face that there was a rage going on inside. Not surprising with all the offensive shit coming out of Squires’ mouth and pelted like stones in Ollie’s direction. There was an anger in Squires too. That was very clear. The kind of anger that could drive him to murder? Whoever had killed Leroy Patterson, Tyler Moore, and Aidan Matthews had done so with meticulous planning. That needed cool, calm reflection rather than angry outbursts of potentially uncontrollable anger.

‘What do you do with them, Mr. Squires?’ Jeff asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The murders of Leroy Patterson, Tyler Moore, and Aidan Matthews would’ve required a lot of thought and application. How did you manage it? Where did you take them? Where did you get the apparatus you used to murder them?’

John Squires threw his head back and laughed. ‘You’re making a big mistake here, detective’.

‘Are we?’ Ollie asked. ‘You’ve made very clear your distaste for black people, Mr. Squires’.

‘Don’t you try and twist my words, boy … ‘

‘ … it’s Detective Sargeant Oliver Wright to you, Mr. Squires’.

‘Get the job so that the politically correct quotas looked good?’

‘Now that’s enough, Squires’ Jeff interrupted. ‘You’ve been asked some serious questions because we believe you’re in serious trouble. Now as we speak a team of officers is searching your home. Your white transit van is nowhere to be seen and isn’t even parked nearby. So why don’t you save us all a lot of time and tell us what you’ve done with the van and how you came to commit these murders?’

‘If you upset my wife in the course of your ridiculous and useless search of my house then I will deal with whoever is responsible’.

‘Like you dealt with the three members of the Gorton boys who ended up dead?’ asked Ollie. ‘Or is it only black people you have murderous thoughts about?’

‘You’re treading on thin ice boy’.

‘The van seen that night was registered to you, Mr. Squires’ Ollie went on, ignoring having been addressed so disparagingly again. So why don’t you stop playing games that are not that clever and start co-operating? It will be to your benefit in the end’.  

Annabel had found Tim’s assistant Joe to be rather engaging. True he was fit and good looking. You’d notice in a good way if he walked in the room. And he made her laugh too. But she detected a rather large chip on his shoulder where women were concerned. Like with many people who appear to be happy on the outside you only have to scratch the surface a little to find the potential demons lurking inside. A lot of people put on an act. They show the world a face that betrays the real one underneath. She’d done it herself at times. It was almost like a defence mechanism.

But it was when the subject of previous relationships came up that the chip controlled by the demon came up. Suddenly he didn’t seem to like the fact that she was divorced with a teenage son to bring up. He also questioned her account of how her marriage had failed. He said it was unfair of her to put all the blame for the collapse of her marriage on her husband and that she must’ve done something to him to make him walk out leaving her with piles and piles of debts. 

‘It didn’t go well then?’ said Tim who was talking to Annabel in the office that went with her new role of hotel duty manager. ‘And before I left the two of you to it you seemed to be getting on great’.

‘Well we were’ said Annabel. ‘Until I told him about Clive’.

‘Joe was left pretty bitter by his divorce’ Tim explained. ‘His ex-wife had an affair but she ended up throwing him out for some reason. Then she made it very difficult for him to see his daughter who he hasn’t seen now for years and he’s been back and forth to court I don’t know how many times. I know that it’s all hit him hard’.

‘Well I’m sorry about all that but we’re all different’ said Annabel who was trying to keep her married lover Dermot at bay for the moment. He’d started telling her that he was developing feelings for her and she didn’t know if she really wanted that. She’d never really thought about it because she thought they were just having fun. He’d even mentioned leaving his wife and she didn’t know if she wanted that either. She wasn’t one of those daft girls who have affairs with men who are already attached and then get all moralistic and hypocritical when he mentions leaving his current partner because the girl having the affair doesn’t want to be ’seen’ to be breaking up somebody else’s relationship. What do they think they were doing when they started sleeping with him? They want to have their fun in private but be ‘seen’ to be a ‘really nice person’ to the outside world. No, she wasn’t like any of that duplicitous lot. But she didn’t know if she cared enough for Dermot to want him to leave his clearly unhappy home for her. She wouldn’t have minded stepping out with Joe for a while and seeing how things went. But it didn’t look like she was going to get the chance. He hadn’t even asked for her phone number.

‘But we’re all different, Tim’ Annabel asserted. ‘And we’ve all been through different situations. I don’t blame all men for the way Clive treated me and nor should he treat all women as if they’re the same as his ex-wife’.

‘I understand that’ said Tim who was glad she hadn’t brought up the subject he thought she might have done. ‘But Joe is not in that same place. I don’t know if he ever will be’.

‘Well before you go there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about’ said Annabel.

Tim was suddenly nervous. He’d just taken control of one of the leading hotel chains in the north but he suspected that the question that was about to come would reduce him to jelly deep down inside. ‘Oh yeah?’

‘What did you do with Kyle at the weekend?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Well since he came back from your place he’s been wandering round moodily. He’s been up and full of the joys of spring one minute and then apparently down in the depths of despair the next. You wouldn’t know anything about what might be driving that?’

‘No’ said Tim. ‘Why would I?’

‘Well I thought he might’ve confided in you and sometimes when you do that situations that weren’t real before suddenly become very real to you’ said Annabel. ‘And he’s constantly sending and receiving messages on his mobile phone. I mean, if I didn’t know any better, the way he’s acting would make me think he’d fallen in love or something’. 

STORMS TWELVE

It was the way Tim had looked at Annabel when she said that if she didn’t know any better she’d think that Kyle was falling in love by the way he was acting. It made her suspicious. Tim was a highly successful businessman who was loaded. Regardless of his sexual leanings he should’ve been well spoken for when you consider that and the fact that he isn’t exactly ugly.

It was all starting to fall into place now and she didn’t like the picture it was painting. Tim had seemed particularly enthusiastic about getting to know Kyle and about having him over to stay. She hadn’t wanted to believe anything as gross as what was playing out in her mind now. But maybe she’d been such a bloody fool. She’d had her suspicions about Tim right from the start because of how he seemed to want to hide himself away. She understood why when it came to taking over the business. But now she had to face the fact that her son had fallen into the trap of a sexual manipulator. And she’d let it happen.

She sat in the kitchen staring at Kyle’s mobile phone. She’d never looked at it before. She’d never had cause to before. It was one of those lines you don’t cross with teenagers. Or maybe she’d got that all wrong. Maybe she was the most useless mother in the history of useless mothers. No, she didn’t think that. She was a good mother to Kyle. She’d just made a serious error of judgment where Tim was concerned and now she couldn’t forgive herself.

Kyle was upstairs in the shower. She knew it was a total invasion of his privacy but did she really have any choice? Ever since he’d come back from his weekend stay with Tim he’d had his mobile virtually strapped to him and he’d been on it almost constantly. Was it Tim he was exchanging messages with? Had he met someone else whilst he was there? She was going out of her mind and in the end she just grabbed it and pressed the message key.

And then she got all the proof she needed to make her feel sick to her stomach.

From Tim: Saturday night was sensational. You’ve turned a light on inside me.

From Kyle: I can’t believe all those things we did. You’re like a magician.

From Tim: You feel good then?

From Kyle: I feel absolutely fucking fantastic!

From Tim: I told you I’d make you feel that way.

From Kyle: And you weren’t kidding.

From Tim: We have to keep it to ourselves though, my dear Kyle. Nobody else must know, especially not your Mum because they wouldn’t understand.

From Kyle: No, I know and I understand. But when will I see you again?

From Tim: Can you invent a sleepover at one of your mates?

From Kyle: Yeah, that should be easy enough. Mum won’t suspect anything.

From Tim: You’re her angel child.

From Kyle: I felt more like a devil in your arms.

From Tim: I’ve been walking around ten feet off the ground.

From Kyle: Me too. I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel like this. Thank you.

From Tim: We’ll just have to keep it quiet until you’re sixteen. Then we can be open about it.       

There were many more messages along the same lines but Annabel had read enough. She couldn’t help though looking at two video messages but immediately wished she hadn’t. The first one was from Kyle and was a full-frontal nude of himself. The second one was from Tim. He was masturbating to the nude picture of Kyle. She ran over to the kitchen sink and threw up. She wretched deep inside her stomach and brought back everything she’d consumed that day. She wiped her mouth and then looked up when she heard Kyle come into the room.

‘What’s the matter, Mum?’ Kyle asked. He was dressed in his dark blue bathrobe and was drying his hair with a towel as he walked towards her. ‘Are you okay?’

Annabel could feel the colour draining from her face. ‘We need to talk, Kyle’.

‘This sounds serious’ said Kyle who then noticed his mobile phone was still in her hand. ‘That’s my phone’