Dying Eyes (12 page)

Jeeves tilted his head again. “Ah,” he said.
“Ah” number three.
“Look closer at the paper. What do you see?”

Brian squinted at the little pieces of paper. What the hell was Jeeves getting at? “It’s, erm, just a bit black, and‌–‌”

“It was wet,” Cassy interrupted.

Brian frowned. “Wet? But what does that mean?”

Jeeves edged around the slab towards Brian and Cassy. “I took a closer look at her underwear.” A creepy, elongated smiled worked its way across Jeeves’ face.
Weird bastard.
He certainly didn’t strike Brian as the sort of man to be trusted with a load of underwear. “Look at this picture. See that?”

Brian narrowed his eyes. It was a close-up of several circular molecules that looked like tiny islands, as green as fresh peas from a pod. He’d seen a picture like it somewhere before, but he couldn’t quite make it out. “Some sort of molecules?”

“Unless I’m very much mistaken, which I doubt, these are cyanobacteria.”

Brian had no idea what Jeeves was talking about.

Jeeves turned back to the picture and tapped it with his middle finger. “Cyanobacteria, you might know better as blue-green algae. These molecules are very easy to wipe from the skin but stick to clothes like flies to faeces.”

Cassy scratched her head and looked away from Nicola’s cold, pale body on the slab. “What does blue-green algae have to do with anything?”

Jeeves smiled. “Unless Miss Watson decided to go for a fully clothed paddle on a cold January evening, I’d say someone tried to drown her.”

Brian shook his head. “But…‌if they tried to drown her, then why didn’t they just finish her off there? Leave her wherever they drowned her?”

Jeeves smiled again. “I think the question is, why did your culprit take her to a well-known prostitution hotspot to dry her body off before they killed her?”

Chapter Fourteen

Brian and Cassy sat in the police car. Cassy slurped the last remnants of a thick McDonald’s milkshake, the straw scraping the bottom of the carton. Fifteen minutes had passed since their trip to forensics. Neither of them had spoken much since seeing Nicola Watson’s body again, draped across that slab.

“What d’you make of it?” Cassy dangled the straw between her teeth and blew bubbles of milkshake out of the other end.

Brian flicked his heater up towards his windscreen, waiting for the frozen condensation to recede, and rubbed his purple hands together. His breath clouded.

“I mean, she’s been found in a prostitution den. Price wants us to pursue that lead. Do you think maybe she’s been picked up? Got herself embroiled in something nasty? I dunno.”

Brian wiped his sleeve against the car window, making a hole in the condensation so he could see where he was going.

“But then, the paper in her hands. And then the water. Something doesn’t fit.”

“We go back to Foster Road, and we ask around. Chances are she’s got involved with some bad people, and she’s not the good girl her parents and her work colleagues make her out to be.”

Cassy frowned as Brian revved up the engine which spluttered out exhaust fumes. “You don’t really just think that. What’s getting to you?”

Brian tried to kick start the engine again.

“Come on, man.” She tossed her empty carton to one side. “You don’t have to be dicky with me. I’m your mate, for God’s sake.”

Brian finally got the engine going. “I don’t know. That’s the thing. I just…‌I usually get my head ‘round shit like this. But I just don’t know. My gut tells me that Danny Stocks knows more than he’s letting on to. And then there’s BetterLives, who seem all happy to help when we aren’t accusing one of theirs. And then there’s her family…‌I don’t think they’re being totally honest with us. Something’s just not adding up.”

He put his foot on the accelerator, and they headed towards Foster Road. “I have a feeling they aren’t being completely honest down at Foster, too. And whatever did happen, we can’t take anything away from the fact that she was killed there. That’s where it happened.”

“What if it didn’t?”

Brian let the thought play out in his head. The water. The paper.

“We find out.” He took a left turn onto Foster Road as a group of hooded kids cycled past, flicking two fingers at them when they thought they were out of sight.

They got out of the car and walked down Absom Road, which ran parallel to Foster Road. It wasn’t quite as much of a shithole, but it still reeked of sewage and sweet, sweat-tarnished perfume. It was a poor excuse of a road, and no decent sized cars could fit down there. But as long as hookers could take their clients somewhere out of sight, it served its seedy purpose.

Brian and Cassy walked up to the first redbrick building on the right. Brian stopped at the door.

“I’ll start at this one. You work your way down. We’ll try to speak to everyone. It doesn’t matter if they’ve already been spoken to‌–‌we speak again.”

Brian knocked on the first door as Cassy knocked on the doors on the opposite side.

A little thin-haired man, his balding head peeling like a mistreated potato, came to the door of the first house. He was holding a cat, and his white vest was browning at the armpits.

“I don’t see nothing,” he said. “Now’t bad to see ‘round ‘ere, officer. The young’uns, they ‘ave their stuff to do, but we were all kids, ain’t we?”

Brian held up the picture of Nicola. The man squinted at it.

“Have you ever seen this girl around here before?”

“Well, I see a lot of girls coming in an’ out of this place. But she don’t look like the type.” He frowned and drew out his last words. He was like a scruffy version of Wallace from
Wallace & Gromit
.

Brian sighed. “Thanks, sir. If anything does come to you, you’ll give me a call, won’t you?” He handed his card to him.

The man waved Brian off. Another dead end. Cassy was at the bottom of Absom Road, engaged in conversation. They would never get anywhere like this. People didn’t talk. Probably all had some silence pact or something. That’s if they knew anything at all.

Something caught Brian’s eye in the distance. A person stepped out of their front door. He was wearing a blue jacket, a cap covering his eyes. Brian walked towards him, even though the man was beyond Cassy.

The man turned around and looked at Brian. Brian raised a hand, but the man pretended he hadn’t seen him. He shuffled down the alleyway and took bow-legged strides away from the officers.

“Sir, can you wait up a second?” Brian called. The clouds of breath above the man increased in number as he continued walking. Cassy turned to Brian to see what he was doing and then spotted the man ahead of her.

“Sir, this is the police, can you…”

The man ran.

“Shit. Cassy, get the car and bring it ‘round here right now. I’ll get him.”

Cassy frolicked around, caught in the moment. She took a quick look at Brian’s bouncing waist. “But you‌–‌”

“Just go!” Brian said as he sprinted past her and towards the man, who climbed the stairs at the side of the buildings and kept on running.

Brian had always intended to start exercising as a New Year’s resolution, but not exactly in this manner. He launched himself up the stairs and past the doors of houses, some derelict, some as good as new. The frosting breath of the man in the distance grew larger as he turned a corner.

The man wasn’t slowing down for anybody. He darted down the metal grating and froze at the end before disappearing right around the corner.
Shit
. Out of sight. Brian would have to be careful. All sorts of bad things happened to police officers when the suspects weren’t in vision.

Brian slowed down before the turn and poked his head around, half-expecting something to smack him in his face.

The man stood at the very end of the walkway, elevated fifteen or so feet above the ground. His cap had fallen off. Brian could see his face now, panicked and wide-eyed. He faced Brian and took a pained glance at the ground below him.
Shit
. Not a jumper…

“Sir, step away from the edge of the walkway, slowly.” Brian had seen people jump from this height before. He wasn’t high enough. As a rule of thumb, suicide jumpers needed to jump from at least three times their actual height to kill themselves, and even then, only fifty percent died. This was just shy. Once, a few years back, a woman had jumped from this height. Instead of killing herself, her thighbones crunched into her pelvis, which pierced through her flesh and mashed her colon. She lost her legs, and the damage to her digestive system meant that she defecated into a bag to this day.

The man’s eyes were huge and animalistic. He was panting now. “Just‌–‌just leave me, okay? Just let me go, and…‌Just leave me the fuck alone.” Something small dropped from his hand, tumbling from the elevated platform and to the ground below.

“Sir,” Brian said. Cassy’s car approached from the other side of the road, behind the man. “Sir, we just want to ask you a few questions about Nicola Watson. The girl who was killed. You know how it looks‌–‌if you jump, you’ll never get away with it, whether you like it or‌–‌”

“I don’t care how it looks,” the man shouted. His entire body shook. He moved one foot backwards and dangled it over the edge teasingly.

Flashbacks of the staircase.

Brian took a step towards him as Cassy crept out of the car. The man’s eyes widened as Brian treaded closer.

“This doesn’t have to end in tears, mate,” Brian said. “We just want to talk. A few questions, that’s all. So get away from that edge, and we can talk.”

Cassy moved stealthily up the road below them. She grabbed the item that the man had dropped. Brian had to keep the man talking. Just a few more seconds…

“Just a stupid mistake…‌a stupid mistake.” The man dragged his foot back onto the metal grating and moved shakily towards Brian.

“Come on,” Brian said. “We can talk about that mistake. Come on, that’s it. Another step. Another step.”

The man looked up at Brian and shook his head. “You’ve no idea. No idea.” He laughed before stepping backwards and closing his eyes.

If Cassy had arrived at the top of the ladder a moment later, she’d have fallen to the ground to whatever fate awaited her pelvis and colon below. Instead, she caught the man’s back and pushed him forward. Flailing his arms, he went flying face-first into the grated flooring.

Cassy charged towards the man and sat on his back and dangled the small item he’d dropped over his face. Brian rushed over to help pin him down. The man cried out with pain.

“Sir, we’re taking you into custody for the possession of a suspected illegal substance,” Cassy said.

Brian let out a snigger of disbelief when he faced Cassy. They had no right to arrest him for fleeing a scene. But drugs…‌Cassy was good. Really good. “You…‌You’d better be more careful in the future.”

“Thanks for the concern. Now let’s get this bastard down to the station.”

The man didn’t put up any sort of fight. He just smiled as they pushed him down the stairs and towards the car.

“Price,” Brian radioed in. “I think we’re on to something.”

Chapter Fifteen

The man didn’t say a word on the journey to the station. He just kept looking down at his hands and scratching at them. A constant smug smile clung to his face. Something was distinctly unlikeable about him. Maybe it was just the ‘70s-style moustache.

Maybe it was what they had in common. The willingness to jump.

They pulled him down the corridor and towards the interview rooms. Heads turned. Whispers started. But the man just smiled through it. Defeat in his eyes‌–‌the chase over. No jumping off buildings today.

They had to question him about the drugs. The possession of drugs was their excuse for bringing him in here. Then, they could take the interview in a more extra-curricular direction.

Brian placed him in a chair and sat opposite, flicking the recorder on. “I don’t know whether you’re familiar with this procedure, but you have a right to inform someone of your arrest, a right to legal advice, and a right to look at the police codes.”

The man smirked. He wiped his mouth with the sleeves of his blue jacket.

Brian plonked the small bag of weed against the table. “Well?”

“What’s the point in arguing any of it?” the man grunted. “You’ve made your minds up about me. You can throw me to the wolves. They always do.”

Price appeared at the door and tapped his watch. He didn’t have long to talk to him. Not this time. The man was entitled to a duty solicitor, so he’d get one. That’s just how it worked.

Cassy slipped the printed sheets that Price had given her over to Brian. The man sat back and folded his arms.

“Adrian Priles,” Brian said. “Forty-six years of age. Cinema attendant down at the docks. Suspiciously away from your flat the two previous times we paid visits. But strangely…‌that’s all we have on you, and
that
we pulled from your driving license and ID card scans. Tell me, Adrian, if you’re so squeaky clean, how long have you been lurking around brothels with drugs?”

“It’s not what it looked like, okay?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what it looks like, Adrian. We turned up. We were just about to ask some nice, friendly questions. You do a runner. You pull yourself to the top of a staircase, and you get yourself all ready to jump. And this is just days after a murdered girl is found on the street parallel. So apologies if, in your opinion, it’s ‘not what it looked like’, but it is exactly what it looked like. Start talking.”

“You think I was something to do with
that
?” Adrian slammed his palms against the table. “I just wanted a toke. It’s not what it looks like.”

“New blend, by any chance?”

Adrian shrugged. His nostrils twitched. “Perhaps.”

“I have a colleague looking into this supposed new blend. I’m sure he’d love to hear what you have to say.”

Adrian shook his head. “Unless?”

“Well, you could talk to us about what you were doing at the brothel in the first place if you really did just want a ‘toke’. How about that?”

Adrian twiddled with his finger before reaching into his pocket. “Don’t bullshit me. I know I’m not here because of the drugs. I know how you people work. Let me show you something.” He pulled a ring out of his pocket and slipped it on his finger. “This is my wedding ring. I have a wife at home. She’s expecting a second kid. I tell her I go out with Dave and Andy a few nights a week. Dumb bitch still thinks Dave and Andy exist.”