No Good Reason (29 page)

“Have to be a quick one,” Meg said. “I’ve got an unstable LVF here. You’re in Minors, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s not really a medical thing. I’ve got a lad saying some weird stuff about that abduction case, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Weird how? What’s he come in with?”

“Lac to his palm. He’ll need stitches. He got a bit overly friendly when I examined him—trying to chat me up, bragging about his new car. I wasn’t really listening, and he stinks of booze anyway, but then he started playing the big man, and that’s when he mentioned the case.”

“And? Oh, just a minute.” Meg scanned the ECG trace Liz held out to her. “How’re you doing, Bert?”

“Better than I was, love.”

She checked his observations. All looked stable, so she turned back to Emily, her head humming with everything she was trying to keep in order.

“This lad reckons there’s a lock-up,” Emily said. “And that the suspect, Ned something-or-other, keeps a Land Rover in it.”

“Ned Moseley.”

“Yes.” Emily clicked her fingers. “That’s the one.”

“Bloody Nora.” Meg heaved out a breath that whistled between her teeth. A lock-up could conceal a vehicle, but it could also be an excellent place to hold a captive. “Did he tell you where it is?”

“No, he clammed up when I showed a bit too much interest. I think I spooked him. He’s got a curfew tag, so I doubt he and the police are on the best of terms.” Emily moved to her left, allowing Liz to position a small trolley at Bert’s bedside.

“Shit,” Meg said. “ I can’t leave Bert just yet. You’re going to have to stall this lad.”

“Stall him how?”

“I don’t know. Hell, bat your eyelashes, tell him you’re just a junior and you’ve asked me to come and supervise your suturing.”

Emily smiled demurely. “I can get a bit tearful, if it’ll help.”

“Perfect. We should have his name and address anyway, if he’s booked in at reception, but it’d be useful to get a bit more information out of him before I drag Sanne and the rest of Eds Up over here.” Meg washed her hands, letting the water warm them, and pulled on a clean pair of gloves. “Give me a shout if he looks like he’s going to scarper.”

“Will do.” Emily hurried out, leaving Liz staring after her quizzically.

“What on earth are you up to?” Liz asked.

“Absolutely nothing.” Meg drew the curtains around the bed, and picked up a tube of anaesthetic gel. “Bert, close your eyes and think of England. I’ll have this done in a jiffy.”

*

With Bert stable and sneaking sips of his wife’s tea, Meg left him in Liz’s hands and went to the Minor Injuries bay. She found Emily at one of the computers, chewing on a pen as she studied an X-ray.

“Impressive,” Meg said. “Fall off a bike or a trampoline?”

“Skateboard, actually. She was screaming blue murder when she came in, which gave me a good excuse to leave our mystery informant for a while.”

Meg eyed the five cubicles, each with its curtain drawn. “Which one is he in?”

“Three. Once I’d treated him to a Mars and a bottle of Fanta, he seemed happy enough to wait.”

“What’s his name?”

“Callum.” Emily checked his notes. “Callum Clark.”

“Right.”

Meg tugged the curtain aside, revealing a mucky-looking lad in his early twenties slouching on the bed. Using his unbandaged hand, he stuffed his mobile phone back into his pocket. There was chocolate coating his teeth as he grinned at her, and the tiny cubicle stank of artificial orange flavouring and alcohol. Taking shallow breaths, she stepped closer.

“Dr. Woodall has asked me to take a look at your hand with her. Do you mind?”

“Nope,” he said, ripping off his bandage before she could stop him. He poked a finger into the laceration. “Smashed a glass while I was washing up, miss. Thought I’d chopped summat off, it bled that bad.”

“Hmm.” Meg decided not to challenge his story, although the ingrained dirt on his hands suggested that they hadn’t seen soap and water for several days. She ran him through the usual sequence of tests to assess circulation and sensation, trying all the while to remember whether she had seen his face before. She couldn’t. He looked like most of the lads she had grown up around, the mates her brother brought home, the ones who smoked dope outside the chippy or tried to get her drunk so they could hit on her. He had an electronic tag half-hidden by his sock, and his unthinking referral to her as “miss” implied he was no stranger to prison.

“That all looks good, Callum. I’m going to stick around while Dr. Woodall stitches you up.”

“Fill yer boots.” He settled back on the bed and crossed his legs at the ankles, though within seconds he was scowling at his tag and uncrossing them again.

Emily began to lay out the contents of a suture kit, taking her time, giving Meg a chance to skim through Callum’s notes. A resident of Halshaw, in the last four years he had racked up three A&E attendances for alcohol and drug intoxication, and two for injuries sustained while fighting. A suspicious-looking gap in the pattern probably denoted time in prison. As a potential witness, he didn’t seem very promising.

“Which school did you go to, mate?” Meg asked.

“Halshaw County,” he said, without taking his eyes off the needle approaching his hand.

“Hey, me too.” She perched on the end of the bed, ignoring the rank smell of his socks. “Was Mrs. McNeil still there when you went?”

He looked at Meg as if she had suddenly grown a second head. She sensed a similar reaction from Emily, who tried to disguise hers by jabbing local anaesthetic into Callum’s palm.

“Fucking hell!” He glared at Emily, but Meg still had most of his attention. “Yeah, she was still there. Gave me loads of detentions. Are you from Halshaw, then?”

“Ennerdale Close.”

“No shit, that’s just around the corner from my flat. You still live there now?” He rolled his eyes. “Course you don’t. Got somewhere nice, I bet.”

She shrugged but saw a hint of an opening. “It’s okay. Bit safer, y’know, what with everything that’s been going on around here lately.”

He pushed himself forward until he could whisper directly into her ear. “I might know summat about that.”

“Really?” She kept her voice low. “Have you told anyone?”

“Don’t know that I should. Coppers never do me no favours.”

“Suppose not. There could be a reward, though.” Meg had no idea whether there was one, but it certainly made his ears prick up. “And I know a few bobbies, from working here. You tell me, I pass it on to them, and then you don’t need to do anything but collect your money.”

His eyes glinted, and he licked his lips, leaving orange spittle at the corners of his mouth. He capitulated sooner than she had expected, but then drink and drugs didn’t come cheap, she supposed.

“Ned Moseley keeps a Landie in a lock-up two streets over from Prospect, near the fields.” He glanced nervously around the cubicle as if afraid the conversation was being recorded. “One of them old types. I don’t know the reg. He’s not had it long, but I seen him driving around in it. It’s the middle garage. I think it’s got a blue door.”

From the corner of her eye, Meg saw Emily jot a note on her glove.

“Blue door, near the fields. Got it.” As Meg pushed up from the bed, he grabbed the hem of her scrubs top.

“Hey, how do I get my reward?”

She waved his paperwork. “All your details are on here, pal. Don’t you worry about a thing.” Poised to leave the cubicle, she remembered her original ploy and bent to study Emily’s sutures. “You’re doing a lovely job there, Dr. Woodall. Carry on.”

She added a patronising pat on the shoulder and forced herself to leave the cubicle at a walk, not a run. Once out of sight, she jogged down the corridor until her mobile picked up enough signal to call Sanne.

“Hey, you, what’s up?” Sanne sounded tired and distracted. The beep of a fax’s modem indicated she was still in the office.

“Grab a pen, love,” Meg said. “I think I’ve got something for you.”

*

“Callum Clark?” Nelson repeated the name as one might say “Bubonic plague?”

“The very same,” Sanne said.

“‘No comment’ Callum?”

“Yep.”

Nelson pushed his chair back and flung his pen onto his desk. “And, what? He just suddenly remembered seeing Moseley in this Land Rover and decided now might be a good time to help us out?”

Sanne shook her head. “From what Meg said, he’d probably never have breathed a word about it, if he hadn’t been trying to impress the alluring Dr. Emily.”

Nelson retrieved his pen and used it to scratch his chin. “Think Clark might be our man, and this is a ploy to throw us off the scent?”

“Unlikely.” It was the first thing she had considered. “He’s tagged, and I already spoke to his probation officer, who confirmed he’s been obeying his curfew. Electronic records prove he barely left his flat for three days around the time Josie escaped. The farthest he travelled was here, to chat to us for the afternoon. He can’t have been up on Gillot Tor, moving Rachel.”

Nelson’s eyes gleamed with renewed enthusiasm as he mulled the information over. “Did we just get lucky?”

She nodded, at first with uncertainty, but then with mounting confidence. “Let’s rally the troops, mate.”

It took four hours of phone calls and wrangling with the local council and the brass to establish that no one paid rent on the middle garage with the blue door. That—in all likelihood—whoever had commandeered it and fitted a new lock had acted opportunistically, making use of an abandoned space. Which was fortunate, given that the word of an intoxicated repeat offender would never have been sufficient basis for a search warrant.

As the shadows lengthened and coalesced in the dusk, Sanne stood beside Nelson, watching a uniformed officer assess the best angle of attack for his battering ram. In a nearby tree a thrush was singing its heart out, while a yapping dog sprinted across the playing fields. A gang of children shrieked and then swore at the dog, and the officer smashed through the blue door with a single, precisely aimed strike.

Someone closer than Sanne thumped the officer on the back and began to help him strip the shattered remnants. When the two men had cleared an entrance and stepped aside, Sanne and Nelson followed Eleanor into the garage. Their torch beams crisscrossed each other, glinting back off the dilapidated Land Rover Defender occupying most of the small space. It was a model favoured by many of the local farmers, and this one appeared to have been in recent use. Mud and grit caked its wheels, and its dull green bodywork was similarly splattered.

Sanne heard Nelson’s quiet, amazed murmur and shared his sense of wonder that Callum Clark had been telling the truth.

“No plates,” Eleanor said, the words muffled behind her paper mask. She had squeezed into the narrow gap between the front grille and the far wall.

“What’s the betting the VIN’s missing as well?” Nelson said. Along with the masks, they were all wearing forensic Tyvek suits, booties, and gloves, and there was no chance of their contaminating anything, so he tried the handle of the passenger door. Sanne found herself holding her breath as it swung open.

“Anything in there?” Eleanor asked.

“Odd bit of litter. Crisp packet, chocolate wrapper. Nothing else that I can see without getting in.”

“Leave that to SOCO. Sanne, try the back.”

Sweat crept down Sanne’s spine as she nodded. The rear compartment was solid metal, its windows set in and around the back door and obscured by a large spare tyre. If Rachel was anywhere in the garage, it had to be there.

The handle gave easily, and Sanne tugged the door open before she could think about it. Her mask was dragged in against her face as she hyperventilated, but her torch illuminated only an empty space. She staggered a little, grabbing hold of the bodywork for support.

“It’s empty,” she called, and heard Eleanor’s answering curse. Even as Sanne spoke, though, she moved closer and dropped to a crouch by the back step. Vague details became clearer as her eyes adjusted to the poor light—a large, incongruously clean patch on the floor of the compartment, and a tiny, rust-red smear on the green paintwork. The smell of bleach burned in her nostrils. Whoever had tried to clean the interior hadn’t done a very thorough job, however. Once SOCO got hold of it, they would probably unearth a treasure trove of DNA evidence.

“Got something over here,” Eleanor said. “Looks like fishing tackle.”

“Bingo,” Sanne whispered.

Ten days into the case, they had their first real breakthrough.

*

No one went home. Those members of EDSOP not involved in a second search of Ned Moseley’s house grabbed hot drinks and any sugary foodstuffs they could find and crowded into the observation room to watch his interview. This time around, he had surrendered without a fight and immediately requested his lawyer. He wasn’t yet under arrest, but Carlyle had recited the official caution prior to starting the interview.

Perched on the edge of a chair, Sanne stared at Ned through the one-way mirror. He was obviously unnerved. His eyes were flitting around the room as if seeking an ally or an escape, and he could barely speak to confirm that he had understood the caution.

Carlyle pushed a glass of water closer to him and waited while he drank. “What can you tell me about the garages near the playing fields on Turner Street, Ned?” he said as Ned set the glass down.

Picking at a piece of loose skin on his palm, Ned glanced at his lawyer for guidance. She gave him a nod.

“I started keeping my fishing tackle in one because my mum says it makes my kitchen smell bad otherwise, and the air-raid shelter in the yard is damp.” His posture relaxed as a thought seemed to occur to him. “Did the owner complain? It looked abandoned, see? That’s the only reason I used it, but if he needs it back then that’s fine.” He smiled, a good citizen doing his best to abide by the law.

Carlyle wasn’t smiling. “Just fishing tackle? Nothing else?”

“I put my scooter in there when it snows.”

“What about your Land Rover?” Carlyle asked the question so quietly that Ned had to strain to hear it. His forehead crinkled in confusion.