Hurt (DS Lucy Black) (18 page)

‘I’m not sure, sir. I’ve not had time to check.’

‘Get a press release out this evening asking for the stepfather to do the right thing and hand himself in. Then organize for the mother to do an appeal tomorrow morning for the news.’ He held out his hand, looking for the camera to be returned. ‘You need to stay on top of it, Lucy. Let me know if the techies find anything.’

Lucy demurred from pointing out that she and Fleming had been following it up when Burns had had them called back to the station to see the collection found in Kay’s shed. For the foreseeable future, he would be her superior and she saw little value in unnecessarily antagonizing him. Instead she handed him back the camera with a simple, ‘Yes, sir,’ then ducked back under the tape and began picking her way back to the farmhouse.

‘Sergeant?’ the uniform called after her.

Lucy turned expectantly.

‘Your face mask? I need it back,’ the man said, smiling.

Lucy handed him the mask, then stopped, glancing back up to where Burns stood. Something struck her about the clothes of the child. Not the clothes. The shoe. She remembered again the shoe found in Gary Duffy’s garage, which had provided the evidence that led to his imprisonment. The distinctive skull and crossbones motif.

‘Sir,’ she called, moving past the uniform. ‘Sir!’

Burns turned towards her.

‘It’s the shoes. I think I know who the girl is.’

Mickey glanced at her, his face sharp.

‘I think she’s Louisa Gant.’

Burns angled his head slightly. ‘We’ll check it up. Thank you, Sergeant,’ he added, turning from her again.

After pulling up in front of the PPU block, Lucy thought better of it and drove across to the ICS block. She buzzed at the door and waited, studying her reflection in the foiled glass of the door, fixing a stray hair behind her ear.

Cooper opened the door. He wore a black shirt, open at the collar, and jeans.

‘Lucy, come in,’ he said, holding the door open so that she could pass.

‘I’ve been sent to find out if you got anything on the phone we recovered yesterday.’

‘Not even a good morning?’ Cooper smiled, leading her towards his workroom.

‘Sorry,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s not been good. More a fairly shitty one, to be honest. But good morning,’ she said, then glanced at her watch. ‘In fact, good afternoon. I didn’t realize the time.’

‘You’ve not had lunch then,’ Cooper said. ‘I’ll make tea. Milk? Sugar?’

‘Both,’ Lucy said, sitting down heavily on the stool by the workbench where she stood.

‘So what’s happened?’ Cooper asked.

‘My boss has been suspended,’ Lucy said. ‘Both suspects in our case have died so far, we’ve not found the one girl we lost and I think we’ve found a girl that went missing years ago and whose killer is also dead.’

‘That is fairly shitty,’ Cooper agreed.

‘Actually, it’s probably business as usual, if I’m honest,’ Lucy conceded. ‘I just feel bad for Tom Fleming.’

Cooper carried across two mugs of pale liquid and handed one to Lucy.

‘When you asked about milk and sugar, I assumed I’d not need to specify I wanted actual tea in my tea too,’ she said, peering doubtfully at the mug.

‘The bag’s in there,’ Cooper said. ‘You can stir yourself.’

He pulled a Twix out of his coat pocket, opened the packet and handed Lucy one of the two fingers.

‘I couldn’t work out if you liked it weak or strong,’ he added. ‘You strike me as strong.’

Lucy pulled the bag up with her spoon and squeezed out the tea. ‘So, any luck with the phone?’ she asked, before lifting the finger of Twix and taking a bite.

‘The same as with Karen Hughes,’ Cooper said. ‘Almost an identical pattern. “Harris” started contact with her on Facebook. She befriended him the same as Karen, they batted some comments back and forwards. She mentioned her favourite band was Florence and the Machine. Then when she changed her profile picture from a puppy to a shot she took of her garden, he posted a comment “Dog Days are Over”.’

‘One of her songs,’ Lucy said, nodding.

‘I had to google it,’ Cooper admitted. ‘Sarah got the joke though. She agreed to meet him not long after.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Ten weeks ago,’ he said. ‘Their first contact was on 9 October. Their first meeting was in early November. They seemed to meet up for drinks or coffee a few times, then he suggested they go to a party. It quietened down a bit after that, then they seemed to make contact more frequently, another party, now she’s vanished.’

‘Can you find out who “Harris” is? Assuming it’s not his real name.’

‘I thought “Harris” was lying in a morgue with two lungs full of Enagh Lough.’

‘Regardless,’ Lucy said. ‘Has there been any activity on the accounts since?’

Cooper shook his head. ‘Not a peep. Certainly none of the identities that I’d traced.’

Lucy supped at her tea, washing down the last of the chocolate, the taste cloying at her throat.

‘Thanks for that,’ she said.

‘The first contact with Sarah Finn was on 9 October, right?’ Cooper said. ‘The first contact with Karen Hughes was on 18 September. We know that Bradley or “Harris” or whatever his name is selected these girls for a reason, groomed them online to meet them in the real world. Assuming that something made Bradley target these specific girls online, then he must have encountered them in some way in the real world prior to that first online contact. It might be worth looking at where the girls were or who they met in the days prior to the two first contacts. If you find something the two had in common, you’ll not have far to look for Bradley, I’d have thought.’

Lucy felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and, pulling it out, saw Robbie’s name on the caller ID. She realized that he had left her a message earlier which she hadn’t listened to yet. She hesitated answering, feeling absurdly guilty, then excused herself and, moving out of the office, answered the call.

‘Hey, Lucy,’ Robbie said when he answered. ‘I’ve been trying you and Tom all morning.’

‘We’ve been busy,’ Lucy said quickly, despite the fact there had been nothing accusatory in his comment.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s about Gavin. He skipped out in the middle of the night. He didn’t arrive back here until just after seven this morning. I got him out to school. He signed out of school at eleven to attend a Mass for his father with his grandparents. He’s not come back to the school yet and I can’t get in contact with the grandparents.’

Lucy exhaled deeply.

‘I’m sorry to land this on you,’ Robbie said. ‘You know the protocol, though.’ If a child in care didn’t return to the residential unit when expected, Social Services were required to inform the PPU.

‘It’s no problem,’ Lucy said. ‘Why didn’t you contact us last night when he went out?’

‘I didn’t know,’ Robbie replied sheepishly. ‘I fell asleep on the sofa in the common room. He’d already gone to bed and I’d the place locked up for the evening. I got up to wake him this morning and saw he was gone. I was about to call when he arrived at the front door.’

If Gavin had been missing during the night there was every chance that he, and his new gang of friends, had been part of the recreational rioting that Lucy had witnessed in Gobnascale earlier. ‘I’ll get onto it as soon as I can,’ Lucy said. Despite her caseload, she would have to follow up on it, especially without Fleming to handle it.

‘There’s something else,’ Robbie said. ‘I stuck on a washing load after he went to school. When I gathered up his clothes, they were stinking of petrol. Especially the sleeves of his hoodie.’

‘He was probably part of the crew rioting at the top of the hill this morning,’ Lucy said. ‘I spotted him with them the other day.’

‘Great!’ Robbie said, sarcastically. ‘He’s only here a matter of weeks and he’s already found himself a gang.’

It was as she was hanging up that Lucy realized that if Gavin had been back at the unit just after seven the riot had not even started by that stage. In fact, the only petrol they knew of as having been used at that stage was the stuff that had been poured through Gene Kay’s letterbox before being set alight.

Gavin Duffy’s grandparents’ house was in Holymount Park, in Gobnascale. Lucy rang at the door and waited, but no one answered. She peered in the windows, smearing away the misting of rainwater that had gathered there, a result of the fine miasma which had swept up over the city from along the Foyle Valley. She angled her head to see through the cracks in the blinds, but the place seemed empty, the darkened outline of a small Christmas tree visible in the corner. Lucy considered that the couple would hardly feel like celebrating Christmas, having lost their son only a month earlier.

She was turning to leave when a couple came shuffling up the street under a black umbrella towards the house. The woman looked to be in her sixties, brown hair streaked with grey, her eyes rheumy. The man seemed older, balding with a grey moustache. He blinked at Lucy from behind rain-streaked glasses.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m looking for the Duffys,’ she explained.

‘That’s us,’ the woman answered, smiling uncertainly.

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Black of the Public Protection Unit. I’m looking for your grandson, Gavin. He’s not turned up at school. They’ve been trying to contact you.’

‘We were at Mass, over in the chapel.’

They pointed towards the outline of the Immaculate Conception Church, across the road from the estate where they lived. ‘We went to the cemetery afterwards.’

‘It’s our son’s Month’s Mind,’ the man said. He shuffled past, pulling out his keys, and opened the door. ‘You may come in, so,’ he added.

The house was compact, three rooms downstairs – a living room, kitchen and cloakroom. The living room was cosy, the small fire smouldering in the grate surprisingly warming. The old man grunted as he bent and flicked on a switch at the wall, bringing the thin Christmas tree in the corner alight, throwing kaleidoscopic shadows on the wall.

‘You’ll have tea,’ Mr Duffy said, a statement not a question.

‘I was sorry to hear about your son,’ Lucy said, a little insincerely, to the woman, who sat next to the fire now. She twisted slightly to address the husband who stood in the adjacent room, filling the kettle. ‘It must be very hard. Especially at this time of the year.’

‘We wouldn’t have been celebrating it at all were it not for Gavin being here.’

Lucy heard a grunt of derision from the kitchen. ‘When he’s here. He was to be at the Mass this morning. His own father’s Month’s Mind.’

‘It’s a Mass for when—’ the woman began.

‘I know,’ said Lucy. Catholic families celebrated Mass one month after the death of a loved one in their memory. Lucy had attended a number herself over the years.

‘Oh,’ Mrs Duffy replied, understanding the implication. ‘He’d wanted Gavin to come. The wee boy didn’t know his father at all.’

‘Only his bitch of a mother,’ her husband said, passing Lucy a cup of black tea and handing a second cup to his wife.

‘Don’t say that,’ his wife commented, though without conviction.

The man reappeared a moment later with a small tray, a cloth doily on it, on top of which sat a milk jug, a sugar bowl and a plate of biscuits. Lucy took milk and sugar, declined the Bourbon creams, then regretted having done so having managed only a single finger of a Twix bar since breakfast.

‘She ran off the first time Gary went inside. Then she remarried. Do you know what the new one did to the wee boy?’

Lucy had heard when he’d first been transferred in. His stepfather, in order to teach him a lesson for accidentally breaking the wing mirror of his car with his bike, had beaten him with the flex of a games console. His PE teacher had noticed the shape of the bruises the following day when Gavin was changing for football, his T-shirt riding too high up his trunk as he pulled his shirt over his head. The doctor who examined him said there were injuries consistent with punches around the boy’s ribcage, in addition to repeated bruising from an electric flex.

The officers who had questioned his mother and stepfather, separately, said that the mother had accused the boy of injuring himself because he didn’t like her husband. It was only after she read the extent of the injuries that she admitted what had happened. She claimed that the boy was uncontrollable, and that she could no longer look after him. At the age of twelve, Gavin had entered residential care and there remained, until his grandparents had asked to have him brought nearer their home after his father’s death.

‘What’s he done then?’ Mr Duffy asked.

‘Nothing that I know of,’ Lucy said. ‘He’s just not in school.’

‘We hardly see him,’ the man commented.

‘We need to give him space,’ his wife countered. ‘It’s been difficult for him.’

‘He should have been there this morning,’ the man repeated, earning a roll of her eyes from his wife.

‘He wasn’t at the Mass?’ Lucy asked.

The woman shook her head. ‘He’s like his father. Wayward. Gary was the same. Even after he got out. He was so angry all the time when he was younger. Then they lifted him for that wee girl’s killing – all the people who’d been his friends would have nothing to do with him. They wouldn’t let him onto their wing in the prison. For his own safety. Then he became withdrawn, wouldn’t talk about anything. We couldn’t get through to him. We asked him to say where the wee girl’s body was, to admit if he’d done it.’

‘Did he?’ Lucy asked, having debated whether to mention the body that had been found on Carlin’s farm. There was no point. She’d still not heard whether she was right in believing it to be Louisa Gant.

The woman shook her head. ‘He said he was innocent of it.’

‘But you didn’t believe him?’

The woman’s eyes filled. ‘That’s a terrible thing for a mother to say. That she didn’t believe her own son. But he was a bad boy. From he was a teenager, it was like something was broken inside him.’

‘He’d his mother’s heart broken before he ever went inside. Then, when he did, they all abandoned him. All the ones he ran with. He’d no one left in the end. Nowhere to go.’