Strangers (20 page)

At the far end of the valley floor, maybe a hundred yards away, quite close to where the pump-house stood, they spotted what looked like the interior light of a stationary vehicle. Nehwal slowed them to a halt.

‘What’s the normal form down here?’ she asked.

Lucy shrugged. ‘It varies, but generally the doggers wait at the south end of the valley … that’s behind us, where there’s a barbed wire fence. The couples tend to park up at the north end, which is where that one is … and turn their internal lights on when they’re ready for some action. That’s the signal for the doggers to come over.’

‘That organised, is it?’ Nehwal sounded fascinated. ‘Who knew?’

‘They like to play it reasonably safe. If a car’s doors and windows remain closed, it supposedly means the couples are only interested in putting on a show. But if the windows are open, it’s an invitation for the blokes outside to reach in with various of their body-parts. If the doors are open too, it’s anything goes.’

Nehwal continued to watch the parked vehicle. It remained motionless, and though it was difficult to be sure from this distance, both their eyes were now adjusting sufficiently to the darkness to distinguish what looked like a single figure in its front passenger seat.

‘You seem to know an awful lot about it, PC Clayburn …?’

‘I’ve policed this town for the last …’

‘Ten years, yes.’ Nehwal put the Lexus in gear and eased it forward again. Lucy powered her window down. Icy air wafted in, but there was nothing to hear aside from the smoothly purring engine and occasional crackle of distant fireworks.

They stopped again some ten yards short of the motionless vehicle. It was a car, a cream-coloured Ford Fiesta, and it had been parked about five yards to the left of the derelict pump-house, which in the glow of Nehwal’s headlights was a scabrous, skullish ruin, the rotted boards having fallen away from its front entrance and the two windows above it.

As they’d already seen, a person occupied the Fiesta’s front passenger seat, though the windscreen was so smeary that it was difficult establishing whether it was male or female, or whether it had moved at all since they had first started their approach. Lucy didn’t think it had. Nor did she expect that the preponderance of redness she could see all over it could have any kind of benign explanation.

‘This isn’t good,’ she said quietly.

‘Agreed.’ Nehwal turned her engine off. ‘Even so, you have to stay in here.’

Lucy glanced round at her. ‘Ma’am?’

‘Use your loaf, PC Clayburn. If this is our girl and she’s still in the area, we don’t want her seeing you the night before you go undercover in a brothel where she might work, do we?’

‘If this is our girl you’re going to need all the help you can get. She’s butchered six men.’

Nehwal grabbed a torch from her glovebox and opened the driver’s door. ‘I’ll call you if I need you.’

Lucy offered her the radio from the dash. ‘Take this at least.’

‘I checked that out at five this morning. Battery’s been dead for the last hour and a half.’

‘In that case …’ Lucy reached behind her. ‘Sorry for the disobedience …’

Nehwal said nothing but waited outside the Lexus, while Lucy stripped off her raincoat and then wrestled her way into the much heavier parka. Once it was on, she zipped it and then tugged up its stovepipe hood, so that her head and face were almost completely covered.

She jumped out and they approached the Fiesta side-by-side, though Lucy’s stilettos were hardly the ideal footwear on the softish clay surface, which broke and shifted under their pinpoint heels. They halted by the vehicle’s front-offside corner. In the weak, brownish glow of the interior light, the figure in the front passenger seat was covered by a sheet.

That sheet was dingy and blotched with crimson.

Nehwal dug a pair of disposable latex gloves from her back pocket, and pulled them on. Then she moved forward to the open passenger window, and reached through, catching the edge of the sheet between two fingertips and trying to pull it. Initially, the sheet resisted but then, slowly, it began to slide free, rancid fold after rancid fold passing down over the inert shape beneath, until it dropped into the footwell.

Involuntarily, despite their near half-century of combined experience, the two policewomen grunted with shock.

It was an elderly man – quite elderly in fact, maybe somewhere in his seventies – though actual identification would not be easy. His face hadn’t exactly been obliterated, but it was so puffed and bruised and cut, and so much blood had streaked down over it from his dented cranium, that it would have been difficult even for a relative to recognise him. Whoever he was, his trousers had been pushed down to his ankles and his grimy shirt torn open into two flaps; the women didn’t need to look too hard at the gory mess exposed between his thighs to guess at the cause of death.

‘God almighty,’ Lucy breathed.

‘There’s a spool of crime-scene tape in the boot of my car,’ Nehwal said dispassionately, taking her phone from the frontal pouch of her sweat-shirt. ‘We want a perimeter ASAP.’

Lucy made to move but then stopped. ‘Ma’am … what about that idiot we saw running?’

‘He’s well gone by now, but we need to trace him.’ Nehwal tapped in a number.

‘A male suspect after all, ma’am?’

‘Unlikely. Unless he had his own clever reasons for pointing us in the right direction.’

‘A dogger then? Looking for some fun.’

‘Probably. Doesn’t know how lucky he is he didn’t get it, does he? But he’s a witness … so we need him. Blast it … can’t get a signal.’

‘Lowest part of town. Reception’s always poor down here. Ma’am … this body looks very fresh.’ Though it broke all the rules, Lucy couldn’t resist placing a knuckle against the corpse’s neck. The banging of her heart steadily increased. ‘He’s still warm.’

Before Nehwal could respond, there was a clatter of woodwork from inside the pump-house. They swung around together, gazing at the gloomy structure.

Instinctively, Nehwal pocketed the phone so that both her hands were free.

They waited, their smoky breath furling around them.

Aside from a renewed popping and fizzing of distant fireworks, there was silence. Nehwal switched her torch on, its cone of light embossing the mossy, red-brick exterior of the old industrial outbuilding, yet intensifying the blackness behind its apertures. Lucy couldn’t help glancing back at the mutilated form slumped in the car. An OAP yes, but the seventh in line, and the others hadn’t been even close to that age. One of them had weighed twenty-five stone, for God’s sake! Two of them got chopped together at the same time!

Just how physically powerful was this killer? What kind of chance would they realistically stand in a full-on confrontation, even the pair of them together?

‘Go round the back,’ Nehwal said quietly. ‘Cover the rear exit.’ Lucy nodded and made to move, only for Nehwal to grip her wrist. ‘Go armed.’

‘Ma’am, I’ve been plain clothes all day, I’ve got no …’

‘Find something.’

Lucy was initially bewildered by this, but then spotted the way Nehwal was wielding the torch – now like a baton rather than a flashlight. She leaned down and picked up a broken half-brick, before proceeding warily around the exterior, stepping with difficulty through clumps of desiccated weeds and thorns. At the rear, she halted in front of a single narrow doorway, the door itself broken off and lying to one side.

Various stagnant odours leaked through the gap: oil, mildew, rotted rags.

She listened again. Something creaked inside, very faintly – but that could have been Nehwal progressing in from the front.

Unable to believe she was doing this while wearing a skirt, heels and a heavy old coat that wasn’t hers, and with a jagged lump of brick in her hand, Lucy edged forward into the darkness – and almost immediately came to another bare brick wall.

From here, she could go either left or right. Theoretically she should have held this point, to ensure no one slipped past. But there was no conceivable way she could allow her boss, who was no more than five-five and in her early fifties, to enter the building alone.

Heart thumping, Lucy went left, turning a corner into open space. Nothing stirred in the inky blackness in front of her. Instinctively, she reached for the phone in her pocket, to switch its light on, only to remember that it was in the pocket of the other coat. Not that she was completely blinded; after so long at the bottom of Dedman Delph, her eyes were readjusting quickly. She spied a row of broken windows further to her left, all covered in wire netting. It gave sufficient illumination to show a floor strewn with boxes and piles of old newspapers, and what looked like masses of wood and timber piled against the walls.

Still there was no movement, neither from Nehwal nor anyone hiding out in here. Even so, Lucy only shuffled forward with caution. ‘Ma’am?’

There was no reply. Until a fierce red light seared through the windows, a loud series of
rat-a-tat
bangs accompanying it.

More fireworks … but even so Lucy froze.

In that fleeting instant, she’d seen a figure standing in a corner.

Indistinct but tall – taller than she was – and wearing dark clothing, including some kind of hat pulled partly down over its face. It stood very still between an old wardrobe and an upright roll of carpet.

Lucy pivoted slowly towards it. As the firework flashes diminished again, only its outline remained visible – its outline and its face, which, though it was partially concealed, glinted palely, and, she now saw, was garish in the extreme; grotesquely made-up with bright slashes of what in proper lighting would no doubt be lurid colour.

An icy barb went through her as she realised that the figure was wearing a mask.

It could even be a clown mask.

And yet still it didn’t move. Its build was difficult to distinguish, but there was something slightly “off” about it, she now thought: it seemed to sag a little.

Injured maybe? Tired? Or playacting?

Lucy hadn’t glimpsed any kind of weapon, neither a blunt instrument nor a blade, but the hunk of brick in her hand suddenly felt ungainly and inadequate.

She faced the figure full on. There was about six yards between them. At any second, she expected it to lurch forward in a blur of speed, maybe silently, maybe screaming.

She lofted the brick as though to throw it.

‘Listen …’ She spoke quietly, calmly. ‘I am a police officer, and I am armed … and you are going to have to show me both your hands.’

The figure made no move to comply.

‘I will tell you one more time …’

‘Relax,’ a voice interrupted.

Lucy jumped as the room filled with brilliant white torchlight.

Nehwal stepped in through a connecting door, which in the dimness Lucy hadn’t previously noticed. The DSU’s beam focused itself on the shape in the corner.

It wasn’t a living person at all, but a mannequin, an effigy suspended between two corroded bolts in the wall by loops of string tied under its armpits, which explained the odd posture. It was made from an old dark suit and a tatty brown sweater. Its head was a crumpled football, with a plastic mask attached to the front, the latter not depicting the face of a clown but the face of a grinning male with a sharp moustache and pointed beard. The broad-brimmed Guy Fawkes hat looked like a fancy dress shop reject.

Nehwal glanced around. ‘Lots more firewood in the room next door. Plus several cans of petrol. Someone was planning a big party for Thursday.’

Lucy walked over to the figure anyway, just to be sure. Up close, it smelled like a pile of unwashed laundry. When she pressed the ragged jersey, it yielded, newspaper crackling underneath. She turned back. ‘Ma’am … we both heard something.’

Nehwal pointed upward. When Lucy looked, she saw a mass of crisscrossing pipework dangling with cobwebs and crammed with birds’ nests. Disturbed by the torchlight, pigeons fluttered back and forth among it.

‘There’re more of them next door,’ Nehwal said. ‘Roosting in the firewood, which is all loose. A few bits shifted even while I was poking around.’

Lucy glanced again at the Guy. It sagged on the two bolts, its head cocked to one side as it regarded her with the empty holes of its eyes.

‘Ma’am, if you tell anyone about this, well … let’s just say I’ll never live it down …’

‘PC Clayburn, we’ve just walked together into what we thought was a murderer’s den.’ Nehwal scanned the rest of the room. ‘We’ve got a bloke outside who looks more like a pile of dog-meat than a human being. Trust me, I’m not in the mood to be telling funny stories.’

They searched the rest of the place together, but it wasn’t large and there was nobody else concealed in there. Eventually, they went outside, where a faint scent of cordite was noticeable, along with traces of smoke settling in the valley from high overhead.

‘Going to have to call this in one way or the other.’ Nehwal fiddled irritably with her phone. ‘And the only way to do that is by finding higher ground. In the meantime … I need that perimeter.’

Lucy followed her to the Lexus, though they steered clear of the Fiesta to avoid compromising any telltale footprints or tyre-tracks. Nehwal opened her boot, and handed Lucy a roll of incident tape and several plastic pegs, along with the torch.

‘You going to be all right?’ she asked. Fleetingly, she looked to be having second thoughts about leaving Lucy here alone. ‘I’ll be ten minutes max.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Lucy replied, though in truth she didn’t know which to be more unnerved by: the prospect of waiting down here in the blackness of Dedman Delph for ten minutes (or, more likely, half an hour), with a mangled corpse not five or six yards away, or the thought of that eerie, grinning figure inside the pump-house.

Nehwal nodded, and opened the driver’s door. ‘Whoever our girl is, I’d imagine she’s far from here by now.’

Lucy shrugged. ‘If she isn’t, ma’am … well, I can always arrest her.’

Chapter 15

Lucy arrived at Robber’s Row late-morning to find that, despite a foul autumn drizzle, the station was under siege. The main road was all but barricaded by press vehicles, their drivers arguing with traffic wardens and uniformed bobbies. Cables snaked everywhere, cameras hovered overhead on cranes, while higher still, a news chopper lofted through the air. Half a dozen live broadcasts were occurring right at this moment, delivered from the station’s doorstep.