The Torment of Others (33 page)

‘I’m supposed to scare the hell out of people. I’m a cop.’ Carol sat down and took a swig of her beer. ‘As you will have noticed, we just wound up for the night. I got the van to drop me off round the corner.’

‘I noticed. I was just finishing up my drink then I was off to get the night bus.’

Carol grinned. ‘Your sophistication never ceases to amaze me. What’s wrong with a taxi?’

‘You get a better class of nutter on the night bus. I blend in perfectly.’

She couldn’t argue with that. ‘So why are you here? I thought you were washing your hands of the undercover.’

He shook his head. ‘I never said that. Just that I didn’t think I had anything useful to offer.’ He gave her a shrewd look. ‘But I do now.’

She raised her eyebrows in a question.

‘It’s not going to work, Carol,’ Tony said flatly.

From anyone else, it would have been grounds for offence. But she knew him better than that. ‘What’s the problem? You don’t think Brandon’s line will force his hand?’

Tony pulled a face. ‘The challenge was fine. It’s the bait that’s the problem.’

‘You don’t think Paula looks like a hooker? I thought Jan had done a good job getting her kitted out. Or is it that you think she’s not close enough to his type?’

He shook his head. ‘She looks like a hooker. And she’s his type. That’s not it. Paula’s right on the money. It’s what you’re doing with her that’s the issue. Carol, this man knows Temple Fields. It’s his stamping ground. Like I said earlier, I think the chances are high that he works here. Which means he knows these streets, he knows the women who work them. So if he saw Paula out there tonight, he knows she’s new meat. And what did she do tonight?’

Carol thought for a moment. ‘She acted like a street hooker.’

Tony put his glass down heavily. ‘No. She didn’t. Carol, she didn’t go with a single punter. As a whore, she was a total failure. Now, if our man was watching her, he’ll have thought one of two things. Either that she’s a decoy, in which case you’re blown. Or that she’s so new to the game she’s being too picky. In which case he’s not going to chance an approach.’

Carol closed her eyes momentarily. With all she’d learned from Tony about putting herself in the shoes of the enemy, why hadn’t she thought of that? Because she’d been too wrapped up in her own reactions. Her priority had been taking care of Paula, not making sure the honeytrap was tempting enough. ‘So what do I do now?’ she asked wearily.

‘You go back out on the street with Paula tomorrow night. And you set up some fake punters. A couple of guys in cars, a couple on foot. Make it look like she’s learned not to be so fussy. Make it look like she’s working and not standing around like cheese in a mousetrap.’ He smiled. That’s all I wanted to say. Now, are you going to give me a lift home or should I go and get the night bus?’

Rain drizzled depressingly from a battleship-grey sky, leaching all colour from the Derbyshire landscape. Their small cavalcade had swept out of Bradfield against the incoming tide of the morning rush hour, arriving at the car park by the remains of the old railway station in Miller’s Dale just after nine. The brown gritstone of the walls seemed to weep moisture. Carol turned to Jonathan France, white-faced beside her in the back seat. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

They had spoken little in the car on the way over from Bradfield. Carol was lost in her plans for the next stage of the undercover. But even if she hadn’t been, the presence of Sam Evans driving the unmarked CID car would have kept the conversation within narrow limits. As it was, Jonathan hadn’t shown much inclination for talk. He’d mostly stared straight ahead, as if mesmerized by the sweep of the windscreen wipers.

I’m ready, if that’s what you mean,’ he said, a deep breath lifting his shoulders. He grabbed the waxed jacket that he’d placed on the seat between them, opened the door and got out.

Carol joined him. ‘I do appreciate you helping us with this,’ she said. ‘As soon as you’ve identified the site, I’ll have someone take you back to Bradfield.’

He nodded. ‘I don’t know how you deal with this stuff day in, day out,’ he confessed. ‘Just thinking about it makes me shiver.’

‘Keeping faith with the dead. That’s what Tony calls it.’ Carol looked around her. The team was gathering, scenes of crime officers in their familiar white suits, designed to avoid any contamination of evidence. Kevin and Sam were struggling into their suits, both muttering complaints about the general level of discomfort. ‘We should suit up too,’ Carol said. She retrieved a couple of suits from the SOCO van and took the opportunity to have a word with Kevin and Sam. ‘I didn’t plan on being here,’ she said. ‘But Dr France had cold feet. It’s your operation, I’m only here to observe. I won’t stay long.’

Kevin gave her a tight smile. Thanks, guv.’

When everyone was ready, they set off along what had been the railway track. Now it was a public footpath, the rough stone chippings making for awkward going. It must have been a breathtaking journey back when the steam trains plied this route, Carol thought. Even on a miserable winter’s morning, the light poor and the visibility worse, the drama of the landscape was obvious. Striated limestone cliffs and reefs loomed above them, occasional hardy patches of vegetation sprouting from the cracks. Mottled with more shades of grey than she could count, the huge bluffs stretched skywards, seeming to move towards closure above her head. She tried not to think how threatening it must have seemed to Tim Golding.

After a short distance, they left the track and cut down a steep slope towards a meadow. A handful of sodden sheep munched miserably at the pale grass while others huddled beneath the bare branches of a clump of trees. The ground was heavy underfoot and Carol could feel her walking boots add weight as the mud began to stick to them. It was a long and tiring forty minutes to the mouth of Swindale. They gathered at what looked like a cleft in the rock, no more than four feet across. Carol was sweating inside her protective suit, but her feet were freezing. Not even good quality boots could keep the water out when you had to walk through the river overflow. She turned to Jonathan. ‘The scenes of crime officers will go in first. They’ll tape off a narrow route as they go. That will be the route that we use in and out from now on. So if you go just behind them and direct them to the place you think we’re looking for…?’

He nodded. He unzipped his suit and took out the blown-up photo of the rock formation. He’d laminated it, a sensible precaution against the weather. Carol stayed close on his heels as he followed the SOCOs through the narrow neck of the dale. To her astonishment, a few yards in, the walls of rock spread open dramatically, becoming a valley about fifty feet across. The rough vegetation on the valley floor thinned out in places, offering a faint path forwards. They carried on in, Jonathan occasionally steering them with a few words. ‘Just there on the right,’ he said eventually. Carol looked at her watch. Eight minutes from the mouth of the dale. She stepped up beside Jonathan and compared the picture in his hand to the rock in front of her. Even to her untutored eye, there seemed little room for doubt. But Jonathan took her through the common features, indicating the points of identity. ‘I can’t imagine there are two sets of stromatactis formations with those identical configurations,’ he concluded.

Carol asked the photographer to start on a set of pictures, then she collared one of the uniformed officers she’d requisitioned for the search. ‘Bryant? I want you to drive Dr France back to Bradfield. And then I want you to come back for me. I’ll meet you in the station car park at one.’ She turned to Jonathan. ‘I’ll keep you informed,’ she said, putting a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t brood on it.’

He gave a rueful smile. ‘I’ll try not to.’

She turned back and watched Kevin go to his task. ‘Right,’ he said to the waiting team. ‘Let’s fan out from here. Three metres apart. Any sign of disturbed ground, uprooted plants…You know what we’re looking for. Let’s do it.’

Carol hung back, trying to find some shelter in the lee of the bluff a few yards from the site of the photograph. The officers were making slow progress, hampered by the brambles that twined through the dense undergrowth. While she waited, she took out her phone and started making the calls to reshape the undercover operation for that night. She’d just finished talking to Paula when a shout went up from one of the officers towards the right-hand end of the line. ‘Over here,’ he called.

At once, everyone froze. Two of the SOCOs who had remained behind headed for the man who had called out, spooling crime-scene tape behind them to make another narrow corridor of access. It took them a few minutes to reach the man, then another couple of nail-biting minutes while they looked at what had stopped him in his tracks. Then one of them turned back towards Carol and gave her the thumbs-up sign.

She reached the spot at almost the same moment as Kevin. They crouched down, the better to see what was being pointed out. Below the brambles, dead bracken had been piled in a vain bid to disguise the unmistakable hump of a shallow grave. To one side, the earth had been disturbed, presumably by a fox or badger. At first glance, it looked as if someone had strewn a handful of short grey-white sticks on the soil. But Carol knew different, knew what a scatter of finger bones looked like.

She stood up, head bowed, rain streaking her face. It looked as if they’d finally found Tim Golding. Or Guy Lefevre.

Or both.

Midnight. Carol rubbed eyes made tired by hours of peering at CCTV screens and sighed. They’d done everything Tony had suggested. But they were no further forward than they had been when Brandon had first insisted that they try the undercover. Carol wondered how long he would continue to sanction this level of expenditure and staff on such a labour-intensive operation. Following the discovery in the dale, they had two major murder inquiries on their hands. If the press got a whiff of how many officers were involved in the prostitute killings, there would be an outcry. Hysterical demands that more officers be allocated to the paedophile murders, that saving children was more important than saving hookers. It was logical to devote more attention to the Temple Fields murders at this point, because the killer was clearly active now, whereas the paedophile murderer seemed to be dormant for the time being. But logic was always the first victim when the press got their teeth into a campaign. They needed a quick result, both for morale and so that they could be seen to be throwing every resource at finding Tim Golding’s killer. If they couldn’t manage that, it would be Carol who would carry the stigma of failure in the eyes of her colleagues and junior officers. It wasn’t the sort of start a supposedly elite unit needed, though she suspected there would be plenty who would savour her lack of success.

She pressed the transmission button on her radio and said, ‘All units, stand down. Tango Charlie two three, pick up DC McIntyre. Full briefing tomorrow afternoon at four.’ A man emerged from the café bar behind the van and climbed in, driving them back to base. Nobody spoke. They were all too tired and disheartened. When they arrived at the police station, the others filed out, leaving Carol and Merrick slumped in their seats.

Merrick glanced across at her. ‘We’re not going anywhere with this, are we?’

Carol shrugged. ‘At least it stopped raining. What else is there to try?’

‘We should be concentrating on finding Tim’s killer. We both know he’s going to kill again if we don’t find him. And I don’t want another kid’s blood on my hands.’

‘The man who killed Sandie Foster and Jackie Mayall is also going to kill again, Don. And he’s got a much shorter killing cycle. The women on the streets deserve our protection as much as the kids do. We don’t have the right to create a hierarchy of deserving victims. We leave that to the press. We treat them all the same, and we devote our resources where they’re most likely to get a result.’

From the look on his face, Carol could tell Merrick didn’t agree with her assessment. ‘We can’t keep this up indefinitely,’ he said.

‘And if Tony’s right, we won’t have to. Once our man accepts Paula as a fixture, he’ll bite.’ Carol sounded more confident than she felt.

Merrick pursed his lips. ‘And until then, we keep putting Paula on the line?’

Carol reached for her jacket and stood up. ‘It’s her call. If she wants out, she only has to say.’

‘But she’s not going to say, is she?’ Merrick challenged her. ‘She’s ambitious, she wants to do well. She wants you to think well of her. She sees backing down as bottling it.’

‘You seem to be very clued up on Paula’s thoughts,’ Carol said. ‘Has she told you she wants out?’

Merrick seemed embarrassed. ‘Not in so many words, no. But I can see it for myself.’

Carol sighed. Sometimes she couldn’t resist the feeling that Merrick had been shoved one rung up the ladder too far. He’d been a terrific sergeant, but he wasn’t cutting it as a DI. ‘Don, you’re probably not wrong. But we haven’t got the right to pull this rug out from under Paula. She’s been asked to do something–asked, not ordered–and until she says she’s reached her limit, she deserves not to have her courage undermined by us second-guessing her. So unless you think she’s either a danger to herself or to anyone else, she keeps on keeping on.’

Merrick’s dark eyes took on a sulky look. ‘If you say so, ma’am.’