Justice for the Damned (14 page)

Li headed out of the city centre towards the industrial sprawl of Attercliffe. After a couple of miles, he turned into the car park of a cash-and-carry warehouse. Jim pulled up behind him, boxing the van in. Li got out, frowning in his direction and saying, ‘Hey, you can’t park—’ He broke off, rolling his eyes as he recognised Jim.

Jim lowered his window. ‘Get in.’

Li shook his head. ‘I don’t want anything more to do with you. You’ve caused me enough trouble already.’

‘And I’ll cause you a shit lot more if you don’t get in.’

Li stared undecidedly at Jim for a moment, then with a sigh he ducked into the passenger seat. He sat shaking his head, waiting for Jim to speak.

‘Tell me about this trouble I’ve caused you.’

‘Some of your colleagues came to see me yesterday. They kept me up half the night asking questions about Bryan Reynolds.’

‘And what did you tell them?’

Li pulled an offended face. ‘The same as I always tell them – fuck all.’ His tone became accusatory. ‘The Minx was being watched. That’s why you sent me in there, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Yes
, is that all you’ve got to say? Don’t I even get an apology? You’ve dropped me in it big-time. They’re saying I’ve broken my parole conditions. They’re threatening to return me to prison unless I give them something on Bryan.’

‘So give them a little something.’

Scowling, Li made a dismissive gesture. ‘Fuck that. I wouldn’t give them the shit off my arse. I’d rather serve out the remainder of my sentence. Actually, the way things are going maybe it’d be better if they do take me into custody.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

Li squinted searchingly at Jim. ‘Where’s Bryan?’

‘Funny you should ask that, because I was about to ask you the same thing.’

The squint turned into a look of dismay. ‘I knew it, I knew the moment I saw you that you were trouble. Why couldn’t you have just left me alone? I’m not dealing any more. I run a clean business. I don’t deserve this. Do you hear me, copper? I don’t fucking deserve to end up at the bottom of the Don because of you.’

Jim held up a hand to calm Li. ‘You’re not going to end up at the bottom of the Don.’

Li shot him a look saying,
The fuck I’m not.
‘Bryan’s people have been calling me all day. He left The Minx last night without saying why or where he was going. No one’s heard from him since. His people are starting to get worried. They want answers from me. I told them I don’t have any. That I was just delivering a message.’

‘Did you tell them who you were delivering it for?’

‘No.’ Li paused a breath, before adding meaningfully, ‘I don’t know what your game is, copper, and I don’t want to know. But I hope for both our sakes that nothing bad has happened to Bryan.’

Jim was surprised to find himself thinking,
I hope so too.
Li was right, he didn’t deserve this. The last thing he needed was another death on his conscience. ‘Have you got any relatives outside the city?’

‘I have a cousin down in London.’

‘Then you should go stay with him.’

‘I can’t do that without permission from my parole officer.’

‘Forget permission. Just do it and don’t tell anyone where you’re going. What’s your mobile number?’ Jim scribbled it down on a scrap of paper as Li told him. ‘I’ll contact you as soon as I manage to track down Bryan. Do you need any money?’ Li shook his head. As he reached for the door handle, Jim added, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, you’re fucking not,’ muttered Li, getting out of the car.

Jim pulled his car forward so that Li could reverse out of the parking space. As he watched the van accelerate away, his mind turned over the possibilities of what might have happened to Reynolds. When men like him suddenly disappeared it usually meant one of two things – they’d either gone into hiding or they’d been killed. And Reynolds had no reason to go into hiding. Jim puffed his cheeks. He hated Reynolds and everything he stood for. If a rival dealer had murdered him, he would have bought the whole station a round of drinks in celebration. But he’d never meant for him to die like this. If dead he really was. Jim struggled to see how Forester could have got the better of Reynolds without help. Not that Forester was lacking for that kind of help.

Another possibility occurred to Jim. Maybe Reynolds was alive but being held captive. Forester wasn’t the type to have someone killed without first finding out everything they had to say. He’d proven that by abducting Mark. Perhaps right now Reynolds was being tortured for information about what or who had led him to Forester. Shoving the car into gear, Jim accelerated fast out of the car park. If he was right, time was in short supply. Reynolds was as tough as granite. He wouldn’t give up a name easily. But even the hardest rocks break when put under enough pressure. Jim’s heart squeezed at the realisation that he might soon find himself the subject of unwanted attention from both Reynolds and Forester’s goons.

Reflecting that he’d been more than a bit premature in telling Margaret he was out of trouble, Jim made his way to Woodhouse, a former pit village on the city’s south-eastern outskirts. He eased up on the accelerator as he passed Forester’s red-brick semi. The place appeared unoccupied – Forester’s Jag wasn’t in the driveway; the curtains were drawn although it was still light. Maybe he had decided to take up residence elsewhere for the time being. That would have been a smart move, and Forester was clearly a smart man. Jim did a U-turn and drove back past the house, his shadow-ringed eyes scouring its windows. Just because the place appeared to be empty didn’t mean it was. If Forester had brought in some heavies for protection, they might be lying in wait for anyone searching for Reynolds. Jim saw nothing to suggest such was the case, and there were no vehicles parked on the street near the house.

He parked up out of sight of the house, but within view of its driveway. He forced himself to let the tension out of his body. All he could do now was watch and wait and hope that someone or something led him to Reynolds. Traffic built as rush-hour started, then slowed as the afternoon wore into evening. No one pulled into the driveway. The sun dipped behind the chimney pots of Woodhouse. Jim drove along the street again and pulled over outside Forester’s house. Its windows were as dark as the night sky. He stared at them a long moment, then retrieved some latex gloves, a torch and an extendable baton from the glove compartment. The time for watching and waiting was over.

As Jim made his way up the garden path, he noted the alarm box blinking beneath the eaves. If he was going to risk breaking into the house, there wouldn’t be much time to look around. He would have to move quickly. His heart gave a heavy beat, as if unhappy at the thought of being forced to work hard. Glancing about to make sure no one was watching, he headed around the back and chanced the door handle. His eyebrows pinched together as the door slid open a crack. Silence. Obviously the alarm wasn’t on. Had the door been left unlocked by accident or design? He squinted at the doorframe. The tape holding back the lock indicated the latter possibility. Most likely, he reasoned, Reynolds had wanted to ensure he could make a quick escape. His straining ears caught no sound of movement from inside.

Extending the baton, Jim nudged the door further open with its tip. Cautious as a stalking cat, he entered the house. His torch’s beam revealed no signs of a struggle in the kitchen, dining room or lounge. He padded upstairs. Frown intensifying, he dropped to his haunches beside the missing square of landing carpet. It appeared to have been roughly cut away. There was a tiny smear of something on the skirting board to his left. He peered closely at it. Blood! He ran a finger over it. Dry blood. Surely it had to belong to Reynolds or his skinhead sidekick. No doubt, the carpet had been removed because it too was bloodstained.

Jim quickly checked out the bedrooms, bathroom and study. There were no further signs of a struggle. The house was as empty as it appeared from outside. So where the hell was Forester? Was he down in Westminster? Jim doubted it. If he wanted to stay off the radar, London was hardly the place for him to do it. More likely he was somewhere few people knew about. Perhaps a second home in the countryside. Or perhaps he was with his mother in Totteridge – assuming of course that she was still alive. The first possibility struck Jim as more probable. Surely Forester wouldn’t want to risk getting his mother mixed up in this mess.

Jim returned to the study. There was a PC on a desk. He switched it on, but it was password protected. He rifled through the desk’s drawers, searching for a utility bill or letter that might point him in the direction of Forester. Apart from the usual array of stationery, the drawers contained nothing of interest. He turned his attention to a filing cabinet. Its top two drawers contained more of the same. The bottom one was so full of papers it was difficult to open. They mostly consisted of copies of old speeches and newspaper cuttings dating back three decades. All the articles involved Forester acting in some capacity as a politician, except one. At the bottom of the drawer, nestling like a pressed flower between the pages of a speech, there was a cutting from the South Yorkshire
Chronicle
dated 12 January 1996, with the headline ‘Man dies in Huddersfield House Fire’. Beneath it, a brief article continued, ‘A man in his late sixties has died following a house fire in Huddersfield. The fire happened at around 1 a.m. at a house in the suburb of Deighton. The man has been identified as local resident Norman Harding. Investigators are still trying to confirm the cause of the fire.’

Jim pocketed the article and returned the rest of the papers to the drawer. He rifled through the master-bedroom’s bedside tables. They only contained female underwear. In a bedroom across the hall, there was only male clothing.
I’ve been happily married for nearly twenty years to Philippa Horne.
The quote from Forester’s website popped into Jim’s head. Being ‘happily married’ obviously didn’t extend to sharing the same bed.

Reluctantly, Jim made his way downstairs. He would have liked to conduct a more thorough search, but he’d already spent far too long in the house. In the hallway, he plucked a cordless phone from its base unit and tried 1471. A toneless voice informed him that the phone had last been called at eight o’clock the previous day – roughly an hour after he’d phoned Forester. The number had an 01433 area code, which he knew belonged to the Hope Valley area of the Peak District, a few miles south of Sheffield. He made a note of it, then scrolled through the numbers stored in the phone’s contact list. One caught his eye. It was the same number he’d just written down, listed below the word ‘Southview’.

‘Southview,’ he murmured. What was Southview? A place? A house name? Whatever it was, it was worth checking out.

Jim returned to his car. He dropped heavily into the driver’s seat, utterly drained of what little energy he’d had. He desperately wanted to continue the search, but his body was screaming for rest, and he knew he couldn’t afford to ignore it.

When the cleaning lady came out of the bedroom, Edward went in and inspected her work. Everything had to be just so. Every surface had to be spotlessly clean. The bedsheets had to be tucked in so tightly that not a single crease remained. And most importantly of all, there had to be a vase of fresh lilies on the dressing table. Mabel Forester adored the scent of lilies. Edward hated it. To him they smelt sickly sweet, like cheap perfume. He frowned at a tiny smudge on the window. He pointed it out to the cleaner, who quickly polished it away. Nodding approval, Edward headed down to the kitchen where Philippa and a woman in chef’s whites were bustling about. The chef was cutting a filet mignon into individual steaks. Edward’s nose wrinkled. Steak. Something else his mother loved which he loathed. When he was a child, she’d fed him steak several times a week. And she’d always made sure to remind him how lucky he was to be eating it. He could still hear her saying,
When I was a little girl we couldn’t afford to eat meat more than once a week, and even then it was just liver and onions.
She refused to have liver in her kitchen. To her mind, it was a food of poverty. When he left home for university, Edward had made a point of eating the stuff on a regular basis. He didn’t particularly like its grainy texture, but it had given him a small measure of satisfaction to know how much his mother would have disapproved.

Edward flinched at a knock on the front door. ‘She’s here,’ he hissed at Philippa.

Philippa pulled off her apron and checked her reflection in a mirror. After smoothing down a few strands of hair and fixing a smile in place, she reached for her husband’s hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. He took a breath and they made their way to the door. As he opened it, he tugged his hand free of Philippa’s.

Mabel Forester was being helped out of the back seat of a sleek black Mercedes by a chauffeur. She was a small woman, slim as a blade, and barely five feet tall. But what she lacked in size, she more than made up for in personality. Even at seventy-eight, her hollow-eyed, high-cheekboned face had a kind of severe beauty. Lipstick and blusher disguised the smallness of her mouth and the paleness of her complexion. A glossy black shoulder-length wig concealed her thinning grey hair. Her cheeks had the unnatural tightness of plastic surgery. She was wearing a pink Chanel suit that gave her a look of old-time sophistication. But it was her eyes that really showed her personality. Unlike her son’s dullish brown eyes, hers were so vividly blue that they almost seemed to be illuminated from within. They sparkled with an indomitable vitality and energy that made a mockery of her apparent need to be helped from the car. Edward and Philippa exchanged a knowing glance as Mabel made a great show of slowly climbing the steps to the door. She ran her gaze over her son and daughter-in-law with a look that somehow managed to convey both affection and disapproval at once.

‘Hello, Mother,’ said Edward, leaning in to kiss the cheek she offered him. The faintest of shudders ran through him as his lips brushed her ever so slightly furry skin.