Devil's Game (13 page)

The silence after she had cut the connection rang in Thackeray’s ears like a death knell. He sat for a long time at his desk before eventually getting to his feet and putting on his coat. But before he could switch out the light his mobile rang. He scanned the screen quickly, hoping it was Laura again, and almost cut the call off when he saw it was not. But Superintendent Longley was already in full flood.

‘I’ve just had Peter Maxwell bending my ear,’ he said. ‘What the hell have we landed ourselves in with these bloody people? Do you have a suspect you’ve got any chance of charging, or what? I need to clear my lines before they all get on the phone to the chief constable and make my life a misery.’

‘They were brought in as witnesses,’ Thackeray said. ‘I can’t believe you’re suggesting we soft-pedal because half of them are Freemasons and the other half belong to your golf club. Sir?’

‘You know that’s not what I’m saying, Michael. Don’t be so bloody offensive. But I need to know what’s going on with these beggars. They can’t all be murderers and those who are not can make our lives very difficult if they choose. How long do you think it’ll be before the
Gazette
gets a whisper? You’d better be very careful about the pillow talk yourself. That young woman of yours is as sharp as a barrowload of porcupines.’

‘There’ll be no pillow talk,’ Thackeray said between gritted teeth. Longley hesitated, as if wondering if he could follow up that remark, and decided against it.

‘Let me have a full report first thing in the morning,’ he said. ‘This could get very nasty.’

‘It’s already very nasty,’ Thackeray said, thinking of the post-mortem report which had listed the forty-nine injuries Karen Bastable had been left with, most of them inflicted painfully before she had died. The mental image of that carefully constructed parcel of human remains still flashed vividly in front of his eyes whenever he thought about the murdered woman and filled him with fury. So, she was a slapper, as several of this evening’s witnesses had contemptuously complained. She was, as her friend Charlene cheerfully admitted, out for a bit of fun. But no shortcomings on Karen’s part could even begin to justify her fate.

‘I’ll see you first thing, then,’ Longley said.

‘Sir,’ Thackeray agreed wearily. He buttoned up his coat, switched off the office light and locked the door. Nothing awaited him but a small and slightly bleak flat where he still stored some of his possessions. It had been a bolt-hole which he had seldom used as his relationship with Laura lengthened and deepened, but one he had never quite summoned up enough courage to dispose of. It increasingly looked, he thought, as if that was all he could now call home.

Sergeant Kevin Mower had worked in Bradfield long enough to have almost obliterated the memories of his inglorious and brief career with the Metropolitan police. And least welcome of all was any reminder of his spell at Paddington Green, where his involvement with the wife of a senior officer had led to his rapid departure from his job and a hasty relocation to the north of England. But the information that had landed on his desk that morning took him unwillingly back to his unruly youth and a quick trawl through his surviving contacts in London to discover who might be willing to help with his inquiries.

The catalyst for his phone-bashing was a brief report which identified the fingerprint that had been found on the plastic wrapping around the remains of Karen Bastable. According to the database, it matched the prints of a convicted drug dealer and suspected pimp, who had last been recorded ten years previously, living in a bedsit amongst the warren of run-down houses which had until then defied creeping gentrification between Paddington Station and Notting Hill. Mower very
much doubted that traces of Leroy Jason Green would remain in West London, especially as he had good evidence that he had very recently been in West Yorkshire, but he had to be sure, especially as the last official contact with Green had been on his release from prison eleven years earlier. The criminal records photograph revealed a young, good-looking Afro-Caribbean man who had succeeded in retaining a faint smile in the face of the police photographer.

Mower eventually got through to a Detective Sergeant Doug Mackintosh at Paddington Green, a name he vaguely recognised, but who seemed to have no recollection of his own brief sojourn at the station, which was probably just as well.

‘Doug,’ he said more cheerfully than he felt. ‘They tell me you’re the man for intelligence on your manor. I wonder if you can help me? I’ve got a good fingerprint lead on a murder suspect up here and he turns out to have been one of your bad lads some time back.’ He passed on the name the fingerprint records office had given him, and Green’s record of intermittent fines and imprisonment for drug offences from the Police National Computer, and waited, without much optimism, for anything further the Met could come up with. But to his surprise, it turned out that he had struck gold with Doug Mackintosh, who had the sort of encyclopaedic memory that was invaluable to police intelligence. Mower heard the computer keys rattling at the other end of the line and then Mackintosh came back to him with a note of quiet triumph in his voice.

‘He’s still on file here, though we haven’t had any official contact with him for more than ten years. He did a three-year stretch for dealing, not the first time he’d been nicked, and we
assumed not the last. But then he went very quiet. I’ve got a couple of later reports on his activities locally, and then he seems to have vanished. Maybe that’s when he graced you up there with his presence, but I would have expected him to have been more than a blip on your radar before now, given his record.’

‘We’ve got nothing up here,’ Mower said.

‘Well, he’d been in and out of trouble since he was thirteen, according to our information, though he was never charged as a juvenile. That came later. But he kept cropping up as a known associate of various undesirables over a period of years. And again, after he came out of the nick, for a year or so. But we never managed to pin anything else on him. Either he got a lot more careful or, more unlikely, he gave up dealing. He certainly didn’t seem to change his associates much. There’s one odd note, though. One of his mates apparently told one of our informers that Green had “got religion”. Maybe in gaol? Who knows? It happens sometimes. After that little nugget of info was recorded, he seems to have dropped out of sight completely and my predecessor in this job seems to have reckoned he left the area about nine years ago. No information about where he went. Simply dropped out of sight.’

‘That fits with his criminal record,’ Mower said. ‘He’s had no convictions in the last ten years, as far as I can discover. Which means the photo we have of him is years out of date.’

‘But you reckon he’s in the frame for murder?’ Mackintosh asked. ‘He must have moved into the big time and kept a very low profile. Maybe someone up your way made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. But I must say, we never had him down as more than a relatively minor player.’

‘Could be he moved up a league, I suppose.’ Mower said. ‘But this isn’t gangland stuff, drugs, gun crime, the usual. This is sexual and very nasty.’ Mackintosh whistled down the line.

‘Serial killer?’ he asked.

‘No evidence of that yet, but we’re asking other forces to check for similar cases.’

‘Right,’ Mackintosh said. The computer keys tapped away again at the other end of the line. ‘I’ve got no current information about family, though there’s mention of a mother and a sister in some of the early references. I’ll put the word out and let you know if we get a sniff about where he’s gone, if you like, anyone still around who might know. If it’s that serious. Though it’s a long time since he moved on, by the look of it.’

‘I’d be grateful,’ Mower said. ‘We need to find him fast. It’s the sort of case where it could happen again. If it hasn’t already.’

‘Keep me posted,’ Mackintosh said. ‘It’s always interesting to know where our graduates end up. And help make sure they’re still getting their just desserts.’

Superintendent Jack Longley sent for his DCI halfway through that morning, and Thackeray found him in a foul mood.

‘I’ve just spent an hour with the chief trying to work out how to handle the press over this,’ Longley said. ‘We’ll have all the hounds of hell up from London as soon as it leaks out. I’m surprised that little toerag Bob Baker hasn’t got onto it already, but the press office says not. I suppose the people you interviewed are keeping a very low profile themselves in the circumstances, but we’ll have to say something sometime
today. I can’t imagine all that activity up at Bently Forest went entirely unnoticed, remote as it is. Someone from the Forestry Commission will see the signs left by all those vehicles and begin to wonder what was going on.’

‘I should imagine there are some frantic phone calls going on this morning,’ Thackeray said. ‘Kevin Mower says that it was obvious some of the men knew each other when they were put into the vans. We’re working out the links between them all. It’s a moot point whether they had recognised each other at the gatherings, as most of them claimed to have worn masks while they were playing games up there, but we’re analysing their statements to try to work out how they heard about what they seem to call their ‘little club’. Someone out there launched this thing and I want to know who that was. It’s only been going about six months, according to some of them, but I’m not sure I believe that. They say it started up in the summer, when the weather was warm, and there was some talk about whether they could keep going as it got colder, but apparently they worked out ways of keeping warm enough.’ Thackeray’s face was dead-pan but Longley allowed himself a small smile.

‘Banging away a bit more vigorously, maybe,’ he suggested. ‘Anyway, the chief’s told the press office to prepare a statement for later today, which he’ll approve personally. If we leave it until after the
Gazette
’s gone to press, we might gain ourselves a bit more time to think, but the proverbial will undoubtedly hit the fan tomorrow.’

‘No doubt,’ Thackeray said.

‘What about forensics?’ Longley asked.

‘Mower’s not had much joy with the fingerprint on the plastic Karen Bastable was wrapped in. It’s on record but
belongs to a black lad, a Londoner with a record, who seems to have disappeared from the radar about ten years ago. How he comes to be up here, God only knows. Anyway, we’re pursuing that, and they think they may possibly get DNA from it, but that will take time. DNA results on the body itself are not through yet. When we get those we can ask the men we picked up in the forest to supply DNA samples for elimination purposes. If they won’t volunteer, we may have to arrest them. I’ve no doubt one or more of them had sex with Karen that night, though that doesn’t mean they necessarily killed her.’

‘What a nightmare,’ Longley said. ‘Peter Maxwell swears he never touched her, but no doubt someone did.’ He glanced down at the list of names which lay on the desk in front of him and permitted himself a grim smile. ‘I know most of these beggars socially,’ he said. ‘They must be going spare. If – or when – their wives find out there’ll be an army of bloody Amazons on the warpath. Any other leads?’

‘We’ve circulated other forces to see if there’ve been any similar cases, but I don’t hold out high hopes,’ Thackeray said. ‘With that level of brutality, any similar killing would have been all over the tabloids and we’d have been well aware. But it’s worth a trawl. I asked for details of unsolved disappearances as well. If our man has made a habit of burying bodies on the moors, he could have got away with it until now. It was sheer chance Karen’s body turned up so quickly. It could have lain up there for years before anyone stumbled on it.’

‘Like the Moors murder lad who’s never been found?’

‘Exactly,’ Thackeray said.

Longley sighed.

‘You never get used to it, do you? The level of depravity. I
can’t say I’m not looking forward to my retirement, you know, Michael, and a rest from all this blood and mayhem. Old Huddleston, your predecessor, seems to spend most of his time at Headingley watching cricket. That wouldn’t suit me. I’ve got my eye on a little place up the Dales, not too far from a good golf course, of course. And maybe I’ll take up fishing. They say that’s very soothing…’ Thackeray was surprised to see the dreamy look that came over Longley’s face as he contemplated this idyllic future. His own retirement was much further away than the superintendent’s, and he had to admit that it filled him with a sort of panic, particularly if, as seemed likely, he had to face it without Laura. He shuddered slightly.

‘If that’s all…?’ he suggested.

‘Aye, get on with it, Michael,’ Longley said, with a heavy sigh. ‘I’ll send you a copy of the press release when it’s finalised. Keep me up to speed on developments, though. I want no special favours for these beggars you brought in last night. They brought it on themselves. So play it by the book. But I want no cock-ups either, no excuses for complaints. One of them may be as guilty as hell, but the rest are likely innocent, legally any road, and we’ll have to live with them when it’s all over. So tread carefully.’

‘Sir,’ Thackeray said, and turned to go. ‘Though you can be sure the papers won’t find any of them innocent when they get a handle on them.’

‘Just don’t let the handle come from us,’ Longley said.

Laura Ackroyd sat at her computer feeling faintly nauseous. It was, she supposed, only what should be expected, although as far as she knew Vicky Mendelson had never suffered much in that way. She had seemed to sail through her pregnancies in
an enviable glow of euphoria. But then she had wanted her babies, Laura thought, and she was doubting, in the sleepless watches of the night, that she really wanted hers, at least without Michael at her side. She was finding it difficult to concentrate on the first draft of her feature about Sutton Park School and she was faintly relieved when her mobile rang. But when she pulled it out of her bag and saw who the caller was she hesitated for a long time before finally answering.

‘What the hell do you want, Vince?’ she asked angrily before her former boyfriend, ex-colleague and more recent tormentor, had time to draw breath.

‘That’s not very friendly, doll,’ Vince Newsom said. ‘Especially as I’m halfway up the M1 to cover this lezzy headmistress you’ve outed up there. Bradfield doesn’t half pick ’em, don’t you reckon? And I suppose you’re all for her exercising her human rights with the little darlings in Year seven.’

‘If you’re just going to be vile, we may as well stop there,’ Laura said.

‘OK, OK,’ Vince said, laughing. ‘I know all about your liberal sensibilities. I just wondered if you knew whether darling Debbie’s been suspended or not. The school’s not taking calls from the press, and the council press office is playing dumb as well, so I don’t know whether to head for the school or this village where she lives. What do you reckon?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t see any reason why she should have been. But Bob Baker broke the story and he’s following it up.’ She glanced across the newsroom at Baker’s desk, which stood empty, the computer screen blank. ‘He’s not here at the moment, so I can’t pass you over,’ she added with some satisfaction.

‘Do you have his mobile number?’

‘No,’ Laura said truthfully. ‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

‘Huh,’ Newsom muttered, from which Laura gathered that he did not altogether believe her, and knew she would not make the slightest effort to find it for him, but she merely smiled at that. ‘I think I’ll head out to the love nest and then come back into town if she’s not there,’ Newsom concluded. ‘What about lunch, doll? For old times’ sake.’

‘No thanks,’ Laura said firmly. ‘I’ve not forgotten the last time you were up here. Or forgiven you.’

‘Water under the bridge, sunshine,’ Newsom said airily. ‘Lighten up, why don’t you? Go with the flow. How’s the love life, by the way? Still with your gloomy copper? You could do better than that, you know.’

Furious, Laura cut the connection. When she was a very young and, she admitted to herself, impressionable reporter, she had been seduced by Newsom’s good looks and undoubted charm, and had lived with him for more than two years before throwing him out of her flat when she finally realised just how unscrupulous he was prepared to be to further his career. It was a judgement which was only confirmed in spades later when he helped himself to information she had been given to pass on to Michael Thackeray, putting them in a position that threatened both their careers. There were still unanswered questions in Laura’s mind about exactly what had happened that night, when she had stupidly drowned her sorrows to the extent that she had not really known what she was doing, and had allowed Newsom to take her home and rummage in her bag for her keys, and more. Dislike and distrust had turned, she realised now, into something very close to hatred, and it was not an
emotion she had previously thought herself capable of. She sighed, and turned back to her computer screen. But she could not concentrate, and when the words on the screen misted over in front of her, she eventually went outside to her car to call Debbie Stapleton’s home number. The phone was answered quickly and a slightly relieved voice replied.