02-Shifting Skin (5 page)

The dog began to slink guiltily away, the section of intestine dangling from its jaws.

Jon Spicer walked into the incident room expecting to be one of the first people in. But there was a man sitting at the desk opposite his. Late twenties, dark brown hair that had been freshly cut, crisp pale-blue shirt. So this is my new partner, Jon thought.

The day before, his boss, Detective Chief Inspector McCloughlin, had mentioned with a meaningful wink that he was being paired up with someone. New resources had been released to the murder investigation and Rick Saville, promoted to detective sergeant only a few months before, was one of seven new officers assigned to it. McCloughlin had described him as

‘slick’. Scrutinising him from across the room, Jon wasn’t sure if the word applied to his ability as an officer or to his appearance.

He thought about the meaning of McCloughlin’s wink. Last summer he’d fallen out with the DCI over the Chewing Gum Killer investigation. Jon suspected Rick Saville had been paired with him to report everything they did back to McCloughlin.

Easy, he told himself. Reserve judgement. As he crossed the room Saville glanced up, spotted him and immediately began to rise.

‘In early,’ said Jon, taking his suit jacket off and hanging it on the back of his chair. ‘Rick Saville, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. Good to meet you.’ Not overdoing his smile.

Jon shook the sergeant’s hand, feeling slightly less pressure returned. Jon kept his grip, waiting for the subtle press of fingers that would indicate membership of the Masons. Nothing happened. Maybe he was a DS this early in his career because he actually merited the rank.

‘Where are you joining us from?’

Rick sat down. ‘I’ve just completed a stint at Chester House

– a project for reducing bureaucracy.’

‘And did it amount to anything, apart from producing more paperwork?’

Rick smiled briefly, though his eyes remained guarded. ‘Not really.’

‘I take it you’re on the accelerated promotion scheme, then?’

He nodded. ‘I did my two years’ probationary down in Chester, but all the action’s up here, so I applied for the fast track with Greater Manchester Police as soon as I could.’

‘Graduate?’

‘Yes, Exeter University. History and Law. You?’

Jon shook his head. ‘Joined as a bobby over twelve years ago.’

‘You’ve done bloody well to make DI by now, then.’

‘Cheers. How do you find the accelerated promotion scheme?’

Rick kept his hands on the table, interview-style. ‘Very challenging, to be honest. It’s all the tests – they never seem to end.’

Jon leaned back and looked at the paperwork spread out on Rick’s desk. Statements from friends, relatives and associates of the Butcher’s second victim.

Rick saw the direction of Jon’s gaze. ‘A bit of homework. All these tests I do, it’s a hard habit to break.’

Jon sat down. ‘Any first impressions?’ he asked, turning his computer on.

Rick tipped his head to one side. ‘Not really. I just wanted to familiarise myself. But this second victim, Carol Miller, she seems to have been called in on a lot of evenings and weekends to cover the maternity ward.’

Jon shrugged. ‘That’s the nature of locum work, isn’t it? You’re on call for when the full-time staff cry off. Which is usually evenings and weekends.’

Rick tapped a biro on the pile of documents, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. ‘Her last twenty-four hours...She left the baby with her mum just after five in the afternoon, but she wasn’t on duty in Stepping Hill until seven. You don’t leave your baby two hours earlier than you need to, surely? Yet Carol Miller’s mum was under the impression her daughter had left to go directly to work. So what was she up to?’

Grudgingly, Jon admitted to himself that he was impressed. Of course, the discrepancy hadn’t escaped the investigating team. Many suspected Carol was hiding something. Attention had turned to her phone records. ‘That’s what a few of us are wondering. Maybe she just needed a break from the little one, but didn’t want to admit it.’ He opened his briefcase and took out a perspex folder. Inside was the card from the maternity ward’s noticeboard.

His first thought was to keep everything back from his new partner, at least until he could be certain if he was McCloughlin’s stooge or not. He glanced across the desk. Rick’s eyes were roving back and forth across a witness statement. Skim-reading

– something Jon couldn’t master, hard as he’d tried. Watching the younger officer absorbing information like a sponge, he suddenly felt threatened.

He looked at the card again, knowing that teamwork was far more effective.

‘I had a thought yesterday, sparked by something my missus said. Carol Miller was always trying to lose weight, but never very successfully. Then she got excited about something she’d spotted at work. Last night I checked the staff noticeboard on the maternity ward at Stepping Hill hospital. One of the midwives mentioned Carol had been talking about getting a rowing machine. I found this.’ He spun the postcard across the desk.

Rick trapped it under one hand and picked it up. ‘A rowing machine. Did you try the extension number?’

Jon shook his head, ‘I thought it might be more interesting to catch him face to face. His shift starts later this morning.’

By now the room was filling up with members of the investigating team. Behind their desks was McCloughlin’s private office, separated from the rest of the room by a flimsy partition wall. The phone on his desk began to ring.

‘Where’s the boss?’ asked Rick, the word sounding odd coming out of his mouth.

Jon shrugged as Rick got up. He skirted eagerly round his desk, stepped into the office and picked up the receiver. Far too keen, Jon thought, knowing he would now have to take a message. Turning his head slightly to the side, he listened to his new partner.

‘Hello. DCI McCloughlin’s phone...No, he’s in a meeting I think...Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know where the meeting is. Can I take . . . Right, I see. Hang on.’ He now sounded totally flustered. ‘Jon? This guy’s insisting on talking to the SIO.’

Jon swivelled in his seat. ‘Who is it?’

‘The radio operator downstairs. Can you...?’ He held the phone out as if it was a piece of equipment he no longer knew how to operate.

‘DI Spicer here.’

‘Jon, it’s Sergeant Innes,’ voice sounding strained. ‘Who’s the tool that picked up the phone?’

‘My new partner.’

He heard an exasperated sigh. ‘Where’s McCloughlin?’

‘I don’t know. Have you tried his mobile?’

‘It’s switched off. A call’s come just come in from near a patch of waste ground by the Belle Vue Housing Offices. Are you near a box?’

‘Hang on.’ He transferred the call to the phone on his desk and turned to his computer screen. ‘I am now. Go ahead.’

‘Have a look at this FWIN.’

Jon typed the Force-Wide Incident Number in and the operations room report filled the screen. ‘Oh, shit, another body.’

‘Yes. Minus her outer layer – and I don’t mean clothes. I’ve told the nearest uniformed units to get over there and secure the scene. The major-incident wagon’s also on its way.’

Jon scanned through for the exact location of the incident.

‘Off Mount Road? I don’t believe it.’

Anger surged through him. The bodies were being dumped right on their doorstep, and Jon felt as if the killer was deliberately goading him. He felt his grip tightening on the telephone receiver. ‘OK, we’ll get over there. Leave a message on McCloughlin’s voicemail will you?’

Before he’d hung up, Rick was in his face. ‘Mount Road? Where’s that?’

‘Put it this way. With the traffic at the moment, it would probably be faster to walk there.’

Despite that, they drove, Jon anxiously listening to the police radio for any sign of McCloughlin’s whereabouts as they fought through the commuters clogging the A6, siren only slightly speeding their progress.

Finally they turned off the main road on to Kirkmanshulme Lane, only to join the end of a stationary queue of cars. The oncoming lane was just as choked, and Jon realised there was no way of cutting through. ‘Bollocks,’ he said, his fingers drumming angrily on the steering wheel.

Rick looked out of the side window. ‘Belle Vue. Strange name for such a grim-looking area.’

Jon glanced at his passenger, then at the surroundings beyond their windscreen. ‘Belle Vue? In its day this was the biggest leisure park in Britain. There was a zoo, complete with mangy lions and miserable bears, a huge roller coaster, boating lakes, dodgems, miniature steam railway. Even a speed-racing track.’

‘Where?’ asked Rick, twisting in his seat, trying to find evidence of what Jon had just described.

‘This whole area. The speedway track was over there, where that car auction site is. One of my earliest memories is of coming out here with my dad, getting sprayed with the red grit that the bikes used to kick up as they roared past. I used to wear a pair of old flying goggles to protect my eyes. They still race, but at the greyhound track nowadays. Of course, you’re not allowed to perch on the barriers at the bends any more.’

‘I bet there was hardly any trouble, either.’

Hearing the wistful note in his voice, Jon let out a short cough.

‘Don’t you believe it. There’s no harking back to a lost golden era with Manchester. The housing around this area was shocking – still is, in fact.’ He nodded at the road in front. ‘There are houses just up the road in Gorton on the market for five grand. Negative equity is alive and well around here. When the leisure park was first built it was surrounded by back-to-back terraces crammed in around the cotton factories and chemical works. Smoking chimneys, open drains, the stench from the knacker’s yards.’

‘You make it sound like a Lowry painting,’ Rick laughed, a note of disbelief in his voice.

Jon’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘That’s because it was, man. Lowry painted life as he saw it, no gloss. When my family first moved over here from Galway they lived in an area called Little Ireland in Ancoats. You’ve never heard of it?’

Looking a little bored, Rick shook his head.

‘Engels described it in his
Condition of the Working Classes in England
,’ Jon replied, resisting the temptation to make a comment about his partner’s university education. ‘It was the worst slum he’d ever seen. Hundreds of Irish families shared cellars as their homes, slept on straw. You’re from Chester. Did you never learn about the region’s history at school?’

Rick reddened. ‘I went to boarding school down in Surrey.’ Jon clenched his teeth. Should have bloody guessed.

Rick broke the awkward silence. ‘So it wasn’t all polite promenading, then?’

Jon sighed. ‘People needed an escape. Working in a factory all week was tough back then. That’s what led to the music halls and drinking dens. I’ve read about what used to go on and it was pretty much the same as today, including the drunks, the prostitutes, the gangs.’

‘Gangs?’

Enjoying the fact he was giving a history lesson to a graduate in the subject, Jon nodded. ‘Scuttlers, they were called. Peaked caps, bell-bottom trousers. They’d form a group and steam into people – knock them down and rob them. Manchester’s always had gangs. Three lads from one were arrested for breaking into the zoo. They got into the bird enclosure and kicked a load of penguins and pelicans to death.’

‘Recently?’

‘No, late fifties. My granddad told me about it. They all got packed off to borstal.’ He paused, then couldn’t resist adding,

‘Their grandkids are probably the ones mugging clueless southerners who come to study at Manchester University today.’

Rick started to pick nervously at a thumbnail. The last comment had definitely hit home.

Eventually they started inching past the huge expanse of a multiplex cinema’s car park. It was empty except for a group of lads racing radio-controlled cars across the smooth asphalt.

A pang of guilt played in Jon’s head. Trying to make up for his cutting remark, he said, ‘The lake was right there, massive thing with an island in the middle. The roller coaster was called The Bobs, one of those old, creaking wooden things. The cars rattled round it, looking like they were about to fall off at any moment. There’s not much my old man admits to being scared of, but he happily let me know that The Bobs terrified him half to death. I was too small to be allowed on – probably saved me from a lifetime of nightmares.’

‘So it was all here when you were growing up?’ Rick asked, sounding chastened.

‘Yeah, just, though it was well past its heyday by the time I was old enough to visit.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘It closed down during the seventies, bit by bit. Bigger and better attractions elsewhere: Chester Zoo, Alton Towers, Blackpool. Plus tastes change – there used to be a huge ballroom where they held the national brass band contest. Not much demand for stuff like that any more.’

Rick was staring at the cinema. ‘How long’s that been here?’

‘The Showcase? Early nineties, maybe. After the last parts of the park were demolished this place was waste ground for over a decade. The facelift started with that. Burger King and Pizza Hut sprang up on the back of it, and so did the bingo hall. But I hear they’re all struggling again. The Printworks in the city centre is dragging huge numbers of cinema customers away. If the Showcase folds, it’ll revert to wasteland again, I suppose.’ Jon thought about the processes of decay and regeneration that seemed to wash regularly across the city like a tide lapping at a beach.