Strangers (33 page)

‘All I managed to do was dismiss a suspect. Was it worth it?’

‘Depends how you look at it. You also got to know some of the worst villains in Manchester. And now they’ve got to know you. For a copper that’s not always a bad thing.’

Lucy wasn’t completely sure whether she agreed, but she nodded anyway and after the DSU had left, went to her desk and locker and cleared them of the few bits and pieces they contained. The office phone then rang. Lucy had no option but to answer it.

‘Incident Room, Intelligence Unit.’

‘PC Clayburn, please,’ came a muffled male voice.

‘Speaking,’ she replied. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Okay, erm …’ The caller seemed surprised to have reached her so quickly. ‘Erm … you don’t know me, right?’

Lucy hit the record-and-trace switch, at the same time deducing what she could from his accent, which, though he was clearly holding a cloth over his mouth, told her that he was a native Mancunian. ‘If you say so, sir.’

‘I understand you’re trying to find this Jill the Ripper?’

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘Well … it’s a bit embarrassing, this, but I think I can help.’

‘Why’s that embarrassing?

‘Because she tried to kill me too … but I managed to get away.’

Lucy straightened up. ‘Who are you please?’

‘I can’t … can’t tell you that.’ The voice was suddenly hurried, panicky. But then it calmed a little. ‘I’m not saying it over the phone. I’ll meet you in private though.’

‘Whoa, wait …’ Lucy glanced round, but no one else had come into the room. ‘Are you saying you know who the murderer is?’

‘No. I can give you a good description though. And … I’ve got a photo.’

Lucy’s spine tingled. ‘A photo?’

‘Snapped a shot of her on my phone, just before she attacked me. I don’t think she realised. Otherwise I’m sure she’d have finished me off.’

‘Were you injured, sir?’

‘No. As I say, I got away.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Look, I can give you all the details if you’ll meet me. But I need you to come alone.’

Which suddenly sounded a little bit fishy.

‘Why’s that?’ Lucy asked.

‘I need assurances this’ll be kept quiet.’

‘Sir … we’re not concerned about the morality or immorality of men who use prostitutes. All we’re interested in …’

‘You’re not listening!’ Abruptly, he’d turned aggressive. ‘I want to make sure my name’s kept out of it. I mean
totally
out of it … even if you catch her because of what I tell you.’

‘That’s okay. We use confidential informants all the time.’

‘I don’t even want to be classified as an informant. I want this meeting never to have happened. Okay?’

‘I’m sure we can come an arrangement.’

He paused, breathing hard. ‘Okay, here’s the deal …’

‘Before we discuss anything,’ Lucy interrupted, not ready to let this unknown person make
all
the running. ‘I’ve got one question for you … which you’re going to
have
to answer.’

Another pause. More heavy breathing. ‘Go on …?’

‘Why’ve you called
me
?’

‘What?’

‘Why did you ask for me by name? Do we know each other?’

More silence. And then a thud and a click, and the line went dead.

‘Shit!’ she hissed. ‘Damn it to sodding, bloody hell!’

When Des Barton finally dared to poke his head in, Lucy had pulled her combat jacket on and was now poring with biro in hand over a Greater Manchester A-Z.

‘Hiya, chuck,’ he said, approaching.

She glanced up. ‘Des, just the man …’

‘You alright?’

‘What? Oh yeah, sure.’ She flipped another page of the map-book, tracing across it with the nib of her pen.

‘Thought you’d have gone round the corner for a couple of cold ones?’ he said.

‘Thought
you
would have.’

‘Yeah … first chance I’ve had in yonks to get home in time for tea. That’d go down well.’ He paused. ‘Why I’m really here is to say sorry about what happened. I know you wanted to stay on.’

‘It’s nothing,’ she replied.

‘It is?’ He looked puzzled, but shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Anyway, there
is
some news … I chased the VRMs of all the red sports cars clocked at that roundabout near the scene of the Ronnie Ford murder, like I promised. Not too many of them. Five in total.’

Lucy glanced up again. ‘Five? Over the whole period?’

‘Yeah. I’ve had one of our researchers check ’em, and none of their owners have form.’

‘Well … we tried.’

‘However, in an effort to be thorough – because we only had that chippie bloke’s word that it was a sports car – I’ve now had them extend the search a little wider. To
all
red cars.’

‘Cool.’ Preoccupied, she flipped another page.

‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘I am.’

‘So … what’re you doing now?’

She tapped her teeth with her pen, then slammed the book closed, shoved it into her jacket pocket and headed for the door. ‘I’ll tell you on the way.’

‘Hang about!’ Des didn’t follow. ‘On the way where?’

She glanced back. ‘A lead’s just come in, and I could really use a wing man.’

He folded his arms. ‘I’ll bet you could, but first … out of due consideration for the fact I’m just about to go off duty, you’re going to tell me what it is, aren’t you?’

Lucy glanced at her watch. It was six-thirty. Time was running out, but Des was right; if she wanted his cooperation the very least she could do was cooperate back. So she explained, telling him about the call she’d just received, how it had been directed to her personally, how the caller had claimed to have a photographic image of Jill the Ripper, and how she’d now traced his call to a public phone-box on St Clement’s Avenue over on the east side of town.

Des rubbed his jaw. ‘You’re going to log it obviously? You’re going to tell the boss?’

‘I want to make sure it’s kosher first.’

‘Any idea who this guy is?’

‘None. He wouldn’t give a name. He’s not even arranged to meet me. But I want to look the call-box over. See what’s what before I cordon it off.’

‘Most likely there’ll be nothing.’

She shrugged. ‘I can also check if there’s a camera in the area that might’ve filmed him. Or ask around, see if someone was looking out of a bedroom window or something. I just need someone riding shotgun. Make sure I don’t get jumped.’

‘I don’t know, Lucy. I promised Yvonne I’d be home on time tonight.’

‘We’ll be ten minutes tops.’

‘Erm, we
won’t
be ten minutes,’ he stated. ‘St. Clement’s Avenue’s the other side of the borough. And if we start asking around …’

‘There won’t be any of that,’ she promised him. ‘If there’s anything that spikes my interest, I’ll call it in straight away. But I don’t want to go live on this yet in case it turns out to be nothing. Look Des, you’ve probably guessed from what Slater said that I’m the one who got rumbled. I’m already on the verge of looking a plonker … so I want to get this right.’

Though clearly torn with indecision, Des finally, reluctantly, nodded.

‘Great,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ll take my bike; you take your car. Then you can shoot straight off after if there’s nothing in it. You won’t even need to come back here.’

‘This had better not turn out to be a ball-acher,’ he said, following her from the room.

‘As if I’d do that to you.’

Chapter 25

Lucy rode ahead of Des’s juddery old Beetle, crossing the benighted centre of Crowley, which, with rush hour behind them, was rapidly emptying of traffic and pedestrians.

St Clement’s Avenue was towards the eastern end of the borough, on one of its old industrial parks. They reached it by taking Adolphus Road, which dipped down under a couple of railway bridges and then passed through several hundred acres of derelict land. Once there’d been lines of terraced streets here and, no doubt, sometime in the future, car showrooms and warehouse DIY stores would spring up to replace them, but at present it was disused. Beyond it stood Penrose Mill, a square-shouldered Victorian colossus whose chimneys hadn’t smoked in decades and whose parallel rows of oblong windows looked in on dust-filled emptiness.

Lucy circled around the Gothic structure via a series of cobbled side-streets, eventually swerving into St Clement’s Avenue and proceeding along it at pace. The phone-box from which the call had been made sat in the glow of a single streetlight at the junction with Sawberry Lane, another identically bleak and underused thoroughfare.

Lucy parked up some twenty yards away, Des slowing to a halt behind her. She took her helmet off and walked warily forward. The box was empty, but already she could see a white envelope lying on top of the telephone. She glanced around before entering. The crossroads was hemmed in by tall fences of corrugated metal, but no one else was in sight.

There wasn’t a sound, until Des slammed the door to his Beetle, the impact of which echoed across the decrepit neighbourhood.

Glaring back at him, to which he mouthed a bewildered ‘What?’, Lucy dug a pair of disposable gloves from her pocket and snapped them in place before entering the phone-box.

The envelope, which had been neatly sealed, was typewritten:

PC CLAYBURN

Holding it by its corner, she took it outside, where she opened it, going in from the bottom end rather than the top so as not to disturb any DNA-loaded saliva. She extricated a single typewritten sheet:

YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE

MEET ME AT 8

THE PLAYGROUND, MULBERRY CRES

COME ALONE

NOBODY ELSE OR WE DON’T TALK

‘What do you think this is?’ Lucy wondered, slipping the note into a sterile evidence sack.

‘A bollocking,’ Des replied. ‘If you don’t take it straight to the boss.’

‘Yeah, but it’s addressed to me.’

‘And who are
you
? No disrespect, Lucy … but you’re no one.’ He set off back to his car. ‘That makes this a bit too weird.’

‘Whoa … Des, we have to go over there now. We’ve got twenty minutes or this deal’s off.’

He glanced back, clearly unhappy. ‘At the very least we should call it in.’

‘He said I have to go alone. The fact he’s taking me across town means he’s probably going to be watching me. If the whole taskforce turns up, we’ll not see him for dust.’

‘He’s typewritten this note, chuck. You know what that means? This is pre-planned.’

‘Yeah, I get that, but like I say … we do nothing and we lose it all. We’ve now got
less
than twenty minutes.’

Des dallied by his car. ‘You seriously want to go over there?’

‘What choice have we got?’

‘But if I follow you … which someone has to, he might leg it then too.’

‘Not if you stay back a little and try to keep out of sight.’

‘You’d better not be glory-hunting here, Lucy.’

‘Des, I didn’t ask for this.’

‘Look …’ He tried to sound sympathetic. ‘I don’t know why you’re not part of the team anymore. You say you’re the one who got rumbled. But it was always likely to happen, you being an old hand – there was always more chance you’d get clocked than most of the other girls. But whatever it was, even if it was your fault,
this
is not going to make up for it.’

‘Des …’ Lucy held her ground. ‘We need to check this lead before it fizzles out. So are you coming or not? We haven’t got time for you to think about it, to go asking for permission, to hang fire till we get some back-up … we’ve got to act on it
now!
’

He glanced again at the plastic-wrapped note. ‘You know there’ll probably be another one of these when we get there, sending you somewhere else. It’s the oldest trick in the book.’

‘All the more reason for us to play it canny.’ She stowed the evidence in the inside pocket of her combat jacket, boarded her bike and hefted her helmet. ‘So don’t crowd me.’

‘And I
really
wanted to get home for tea tonight.’

She pulled her helmet on and lifted its visor. ‘Do you want to get your tea, or do you want to be the guy who turns in a photograph of Jill the Ripper?’

‘Just get going!’ Des opened his car. ‘And don’t hit the gas. I know I’m supposed to be hanging back, but in this donkey-wagon that won’t be a problem at all.’

The second location was somewhat less intimidating than the first: a middle-class housing estate on the edge of Crowley Golf Course. Though it was only mid-evening, plunging temperatures and November damp was keeping the locals indoors. Light still showed through most downstairs windows, but only via drawn curtains. All was quiet.

Mulberry Crescent was in the very centre, and near enough identical to all the other roads on the estate, distinctive only for the fenced-off kiddies’ sandpit and playground at the south end of it. Lucy and Des had agreed beforehand that he wouldn’t actually follow her there, but would park in Dunwood Avenue, which stood adjacent, and sit with his headlights turned off but his engine running. As they were both officially off-duty and not equipped with radios, they’d agreed to maintain an open line to each other via their mobiles. Des had expressed dissatisfaction with the idea when he’d realised it meant she’d be out of his sight. That seemed to defeat the point of the whole exercise, but as Lucy argued, it was surely a mistake to risk calling this guy’s bluff when they hadn’t gleaned anything useful from him yet.

Subsequently, Lucy cruised down Mulberry Crescent alone. She constantly checked over her shoulder. No one was ever in sight, but there were countless parked cars, low walls and shadowy places concealed amid suburban shrubbery, where someone could hide while they watched her. And given the quirkiness of this whole situation it seemed highly likely that someone would be.

She drew to a halt at the kerb beside the gate to the playground. Beyond its waist-high mesh fence lay the sandpit, and beyond that a row of benches facing the swings. Though obscured by dimness, a lone figure looked to be seated on one of those benches.

Whoever it was, his back was towards Lucy, and he was hunched forward so that she couldn’t determine any distinguishing features.