Strangers (11 page)

‘Keira,’ Lucy said.

‘Yeah, I heard. So what’s the story, Keira? Lost your job? House repossessed? Kids hungry?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And you thought this’d be a piece of piss?’

‘Not exactly a piece of piss.’

‘Easy money then?’

Lucy shrugged, took the wad of notes from under her sleeve and screwed it up into a ball. ‘You telling me I just got lucky when I met that gang of workmen?’

Tammy eyed the money as it disappeared into Lucy’s bag. ‘Sometimes we get lucky, I suppose.’ She took a step back, this time eyeing Lucy herself. ‘You don’t look the worse for wear considering you’ve just been star-attraction in a backseat gangbang.’

Lucy realised her mistake. She should have smeared her lippy and mussed her hair a little. But it was too late now. She could only brazen it out.

‘How many were there?’ Tammy asked.

‘Three.’

‘Jesus! Talk about getting off to a flyer. Anyway … your minge must be killing you, which means
this one’s
for me.’

Lucy hadn’t realised it, but another vehicle had drawn up at the verge just behind them: a grey SUV with tinted windows. The front nearside window rolled downward.

There were two guys inside it, one behind the wheel and one in the front passenger seat. This immediately struck Lucy as a potential problem, though if Tammy needed the custom, who was she to object? As the girl teetered across the grassy verge in her ridiculously high heels, the passenger grinned, white teeth splitting his thick black beard. He was somewhere in his early thirties, brawny and wearing a lumberjack-style plaid shirt.

‘You gents looking for a good time?’ Tammy tittered, leaning down at the window.

Plaid Shirt’s expression rapidly changed – from lewd grin to twisted scowl.

‘YOU MURDERING SLAGS!’
he screamed, before throwing something into her face.

Lucy caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark, lumpen object wrapped in what looked like white tissue. The next thing, Tammy’s hoarse voice rang out, an exclamation of horror and disgust, as she tottered backwards. The SUV sped away, howls of mocking laughter echoing from its interior. When Tammy turned to face Lucy, the excrement was smeared down her left cheek and around the side of her mouth. Solid fragments of it spattered her décolletage; a strip of filthy toilet paper had tucked itself into her cleavage.

Quite clearly, the two most recent murders had finally hit the headlines.

‘Dirty bastards!’ Tammy stammered, eyes glimmering with tears of shock.

Lucy hurried over to her. ‘Here, let me help.’

She had some face wipes in her shoulder bag, but Tammy tried to pull away, too embarrassed in front of the new girl to allow herself to be assisted.

‘No,’ Lucy said, refusing to release her arm. ‘Let me help.’

‘Not here, for fuck’s sake!’ Tammy snapped, voice turning nasal as the tears flowed. ‘God, the stink!’

‘I can clean it off,’ Lucy insisted.

‘Yeah, but not out
here
!’ Tammy yanked her arm loose and strutted quickly away, working her way deeper into the copse of trees, heels clacking as she joined a paved pathway, which snaked from the road into denser shadows. Lucy followed, shoving the wipes back into her bag. Fleetingly, Tammy was invisible in the darkness ahead – it was only possible to follow her by her footfalls and sniffles. By the sounds of it, she’d quickly got on top of the tears. Probably couldn’t afford not to in this line of work. Lucy accelerated and fell into step alongside her. The path weaved away from the picnic area towards what looked like an open, well-lit space, though they passed several more girls before they got there, most of them standing talking quietly, indistinguishable in the darkness, only the tiny red pinpoints of cigarettes and the occasional whiff of cannabis revealing their presence.

Tammy sniffled again and tried to wipe under her eyes, inadvertently smearing her fingertips with excrement. ‘Bastards!’ she hissed. ‘Can’t fucking believe this!’

‘Nor me,’ Lucy agreed.

‘Yeah, but you’re new. I ought to have learned my lesson by now.’

The path ended at the edge of what was actually a lorry park. This was a rectangular dirt lot, rugged and rutted at this time of year, and about thirty acres in size. It was still close to the East Lancs, extending along it in a southerly direction, but was encircled on three sides by trees and undergrowth. At the far side stood a single-storey red-brick building, a combo of service garage and lorry drivers’ cafe.

‘There are some toilets round the back,’ Tammy muttered as they walked over there, passing numerous trucks and wagons, some old and some new, some with curtained interiors.

When they reached the building, they circled round it, away from its glazed, brightly glowing frontage, passing a row of bins and a pile of spare but rusting auto-parts. At the very rear, two doors stood covered with flaking paint. One was marked ‘Gents’, the other ‘Ladies’.

Two more girls were standing here, chatting as they smoked. One of them, a bottle-blonde in a fur coat and a preponderance of mascara, spotted them as they approached. Initially she looked shocked, but then she grinned,

‘And what happened to you, Tammy, love?’

‘What’s it look like?’ Tammy replied sulkily. ‘Some bastard threw a turd at me.’

The bottle-blonde coughed cigarette smoke as she guffawed. ‘Oh my God … sorry, love, but rather you than me!’

The other woman, who was older, grey-haired in fact, and considerably heavier – and thus looked awful in her matching red mini-dress and stilettos – seemed completely unmoved. She simply took in the night air, expelling streams of smoke through her flaring nostrils.

‘They were a lot of help,’ Lucy said when they’d entered the toilets, to which Tammy only grunted.

The Ladies was a small, boxy room with white-tiled walls and a damp concrete floor. There were four cubicles, three of them marked “Out of Order”, and two large mirrors over two side-by-side washbasins. The mirrors were grubby and smeared. Across the top of each one, some past comedian had used a black marker-pen to offer his opinions on the unfortunate women who’d routinely imprint their faces in the glass below in order to fix their make-up. The one on the left read
Blowjob Queen of Manchester!
, and to ensure there was no misunderstanding, an arrow pointed downward. The one on the right was signposted:
Takes it up the arse! Yukkity yuk!

Lucy handed the face wipes over so that Tammy could clean herself, though it was already apparent that the girl was going to need to go home and take a shower. Throw enough shit and some of it will stick, as the old saying went – sometimes, as in Tammy’s case, in your hair as well.

However, if Lucy had anticipated a range of expletives from the young hooker – and here in the stark white light of the drab toilet, she could see just how young she was, clearly not much more than twenty – she was to be disappointed.

Tammy merely sighed to herself as she rubbed and scrubbed at her face, occasionally wrinkling her nostrils, accepting the odd bit of help from Lucy.

‘Digby’ll go spare if I go home without earning tonight,’ she muttered. Again, this was spoken matter-of-factly, without feeling, as if all this awfulness was simply routine.

‘We can probably get most of it off here,’ Lucy said, in attempted consolation.

‘Gimme a break, love. No john’s going to want to give me one now, is he? The first whiff he gets, he’ll chuck his tea up.’ Tammy continued scrubbing on her own. ‘Can’t believe we’re actually getting blamed for these
murders
now.’

‘Yeah, how about that,’ Lucy said.

‘You picked a good time to start out, I’ll tell you.’

‘That’s what
I
was thinking.’

‘Don’t worry …’ Tammy actually managed to crack a smile.

In the process of cleaning away the filth, she’d also removed most of her slap, but she was none the worse for that. She had rosebud lips, a snub nose, a dusting of freckles and a pair of fetching green eyes – there was something of the saucy minx about her. Lucy couldn’t help wondering how so pretty a youngster had finished up in this profession.

‘I’ve got just the thing for us,’ Tammy said. ‘Look in my bag.’

Lucy did as instructed, and alongside Tammy’s purse found the vodka bottle. It was still half full.

‘Help yourself,’ Tammy said.

‘Nah …’ Lucy shrugged ‘I’m teetotal.’

‘What the fuck!’ Tammy broke off cleansing herself to gaze at her new pal in disbelief. ‘Aren’t you full of fucking surprises? You’re the hottest thing I’ve seen up here in yonks, you chuck your money round like there’s no tomorrow and now you don’t imbibe!’

‘I used to, but it never did me any good.’

‘Never does me any good either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it. Hand it over.’

Lucy obliged, and Tammy took several large swigs, a quarter of the bottle vanishing in one fell swoop. She screwed the cap back on and belched again.

‘Ahhh … nothing better when you’ve had a chocolate log chucked in your face. Anyway –’ she grabbed the handbag and shoved the bottle back inside it ‘– gotta make a move. Nice meeting you. What did you say your name was?’

‘Keira,’ Lucy replied. ‘But my real name’s …’

Tammy held a hand up. ‘Best if I don’t know your real name.’

‘You told me yours.’

‘Yeah, but I’m a fuck-up … as you’ve seen. Bad stuff always happens to me, but it’s usually for a reason. Anyway, thanks again for your help.’ Tammy turned back from the doorway. ‘Listen … if you need someone to show you the ropes, the blonde bimbo outside, Sandy, can be alright. She’s a bit of piss-taker, but her bark’s worse than her bite. Just watch the other one, Tomasina. If she finds out you’ve got that much dosh in your purse, she’ll have the lot. And she’ll kick your face to mush in the process.’

Lucy nodded and smiled in thanks. And then Tammy was gone, the toilet door slamming, the sound of it echoing through the damp cell that appeared to be their one and only indoor refuge on these cold, wet autumn nights. She turned back to the mirror, the sheet of grimy glass with
Blowjob Queen of Manchester!
scrawled over the top. A foul stench emitted from the sink. When she glanced down, she saw that someone had vomited into it. And now, just to complete the picture, it was also crammed with Tammy’s screwed-up, shit-stained tissues.

Lucy regarded her sallow features in the tarnished glass.

This was going to be a vastly more challenging stake-out than even she’d anticipated.

Chapter 8

As a policewoman, Lucy counted herself an old stager. She’d dealt hands-on with all the horrors of urban living, from child abuse to fatal road accidents, from violent brawls on Saturday nights to forgotten OAPs so long abandoned there were only bones remaining when someone finally found them. Nothing shocked her, nothing upset her – she simply refused to let it. But possibly thanks to her being in a semi-disorientated state due to the new work patterns, not to mention the strange nature of the new work, she couldn’t help but brood on what she’d seen that night. The memory alone was hardly conducive to sleep: that dank, soulless location; those wet woods and rain-washed roads; that grubby little lorry drivers’ caf with the rubbish heaped behind it and the nasty little toilet in its guts. And then the shadowy forms on the edges of her vision: the girls themselves, the pimps, the addicts, the muggers.

Lucy’s alarm was set for two o’clock that afternoon, but she gave up on bed around seven-thirty a.m. When she tottered downstairs in a sweater and pyjama bottoms, her mum was still in the house, dressed for work but clearing away the breakfast things in her usual efficient way. The explanation Lucy offered was that she’d try to snatch some zeds later but that for now she wanted to catch up on what was happening, which was at least partly true. She curled on the couch and tuned the television to one of the all-day news channels, from whose coverage of the two latest murders she immediately detected a change in tone.

The news teams were now all over it, to the exemption of any other item. It was still early, but various anchormen had already departed the studios. One was broadcasting live from outside Robber’s Row, which was almost hidden from view behind a wall of press and TV vans, while another was intoning into a microphone on the edge of one of the north-west’s many interchangeably bleak and featureless wastelands. In this latter case, dog-teams, both the officers and their pooches clad in hi-viz jackets, could be seen progressing slowly across the grey clinker-desert.

‘Two of them this time, apparently,’ Cora said, placing a cup of tea and a plate of buttered toast in front of Lucy as she sat riveted to the screen.

‘Yeah, I know … I heard last night.’

‘They don’t think these two were actually up to anything.’

Lucy glanced at her. ‘Sorry … what do you mean?’

‘According to the news, they were just a pair of lads trying to sling some rubbish.’

‘Yeah?’ This was first Lucy had heard about the new murders in any actual detail, and it surprised her. She turned back, refocusing on the breaking story.

It seemed that two young men from Hindley Green, Wigan, Kevin Crumper, aged twenty-five, and Arnold ‘Barney’ Hall, aged twenty-seven, were thought to have been fly-tipping on the evening of October 18
^th
, on a stretch of former colliery wasteland at Bickershaw, when they’d encountered their killer.

Twenty-five and twenty-seven.

Two robust young blokes.

Again, Lucy wondered if there might be more than one assailant. If there was – say if there was more than one prostitute involved – it meant that she and the rest of the Ripper Chicks would have to step even more lightly. One twisted killer was dangerous enough, but a conspiracy of them? Under those circs, you had to be extra wary who you got friendly with and who you asked questions of. But still … there had only been that
single
figure on the Atherton CCTV video.

What kind of girl would a single killer have to be to overpower two red-blooded young guys on her own? In her mind’s eye, Lucy pictured a kind of Amazon, an unfeasible example of the female form, someone part way between an Olympic athlete and a supermodel. Unless, of course, she’d used guile rather than brute force. Both men had not necessarily been killed at the same time, for example. They could have been separated from each other first.