Force Of Habit v5 (29 page)

‘No.’ She looked a bit sheepish. ‘Remember that morning I caught you snooping in my file? You gave me your phone with the info on the files you wanted me to check. I logged your phone on an online tracking system available to the general public and paid with my credit card. They sent one text to your phone, for confirmation, and I used that to active the account and then deleted the text from your phone.’

North was looking at her in disbelief.

‘You’d really pissed me off the night before. I wanted to nail you and didn’t think it would be too hard to do it.’

North smiled.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t be. I like it, Just James – not to mention that by doing it you saved my life. Thank you. I owe you, big time.’

James blushed. ‘And I will be sure to collect, but I almost didn’t get to you. You were in that big house with your interesting friends - the Chief has had everyone looking for them all of today, by the way. They left and you seemed to be settled in for the night. You needed to rest up and half the north east was out looking for you, so I stupidly thought that you would stay put. I should have known better. I was on my way home and you started moving and I had to high tail it after you. I caught up with you going towards the Metro station but before I got to the entrance a group of those hooligans appeared and went in after you.

‘When I got down there you were on the track, in the tunnel, and then the train went on its way, after you. Three of them followed the train on foot. All I could think was to get to the next station to help you. On my way over I saw the train stopped on the bridge, figured out what had happened and that you were trapped. I headed down onto the quayside. It was all I could do.’

‘And you nicked a moped from the pizza joint opposite the station en-route. Good work, James. What about the mug shots from the helicopter? They couldn’t tell it was you?’

‘If there is one thing you’ve taught me it’s to always go hooded and because it is so freezing cold up here, what with my snow gloves and fifty-five layers of clothing I wasn’t exactly portrait ready. Besides, I kept my head well down. All that clobber also came in handy trying to sort you out, trying to get you dry and your temperature back up. I swear that you turned blue out there. I got you back here -’

‘How?’

‘I was driving home when you went walkabout. I had to ditch the car when you showed up strolling through the town centre, what with the one-ways and pedestrian streets. When you disappeared down the tunnel my first thought was to head back and get it but when I came out of the station I saw the scooter sitting there and just hopped on. After, when I left you with a bunch of drunken football louts who thought you were legless, I got my car and managed to get you in the boot in case I ran into any of our colleagues.’

‘You are something else, Just James,’ North grinned.

‘I put you in a warm shower. You threw up quite a bit of that river. Then I dried you off, got you into that bag and tried to get you to swallow some paracetamols. It’s all I had. I nearly called an ambulance a half dozen times. This morning you seemed somewhat better, you didn’t have so much fever so you must have kept the pills down. I had to get on, show my face at the station, act normal and see if I could make some headway. Then I stopped at your flat on the way back this evening. It was empty apart from a few clothes and some stuff in the kitchen – and I have to say that I found that a tad incongruous. The state you were in when I met you, you wouldn’t have been bothered about going out shopping for fruit and veg. Did your wife get it in for you?’

North was a blank.

‘You wear a wedding ring.’

He said nothing.

‘You are always touching it. It means a lot to you.’

He looked at the dulled metal. He was touching it now and hadn’t even realised.

‘You've been married a long time.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she stock the cupboards?’

He shook his head.

‘Your falling apart had nothing to do with getting stabbed and almost dying.’

He realised that she was stating facts not asking questions but he shook his head in agreement anyway.

‘You're quite the detective, Just James,’ he smiled. ‘Falling apart, eh?’

She nodded.

‘Yeah, I guess your right.’

‘I've never been in love. I thought I had been but seeing you I know I wasn't, not really. He could never have touched me like that. I hope I fall as deep some day.’

‘Be careful what you wish for, Just James.’

‘Would you change anything?’

‘Only the ending.’

‘Maybe you haven't got to the end yet.’

‘When we met you were very negative towards me, to say the least, and have just admitted to bugging my phone in an effort to serve me up what you believed would be my just desserts. You would have patted my wife on the back and asked her what took her so long to come to her senses. What turned you all of a sudden?’

‘You.’

‘Me? You thought I should be thrown out on my ear.’

‘I didn't know shit,’ she imitated him. Smiled. He smiled. ‘I can't believe that Superintendant Egan told you that. That's breach of confidence.’

‘Yeah, well I’m sure he’s had to tell you plenty, since.’

Her face went blank. ‘Why?’

North looked at her. ‘Egan didn't send you out to find me? To help?’

‘Why would the Super send me to help you? You are top of the most wanted list.’

‘You did this off your own bat?’ North was impressed. It didn't happen often.

‘What's going on?’

‘Me and Ron Egan go way back. He had a problem and so did I. My boss agreed to loan me out, so to speak. He thought that me working up here would be like a sabbatical to get over the break-up – a change is as good as a rest and all that. Anyway, Egan’s problem was that there was a large drug operation they just couldn't seem to get near, they always seemed to be one step ahead. He thought they had people on the inside.’

‘On the force?’ she said it like she couldn't believe it.

‘Come on, you will have seen a good few meatheads and slimeballs by this point in your career, James. There are some right fuckers same as there are everywhere else in life. Only the brass ever hit the national news when they’ve been caught being naughty, everyone else is just local gossip. Egan didn't know who he could trust so he asked me to help. Deacon had saved my life not long after I got here and you came from outside, so you two became my team. You and Deacon were the only people I could trust.’

‘But you didn't trust us enough to tell us.’

There was that anger again. That pride.

‘Orders. I'm sorry James but I couldn't.’

‘So that's why you were looking at my records that morning.’

He nodded. ‘I had to know who had recruited you and a bit about your background.’

‘I thought it was weird you would have access to stuff like that, even in the office. That's HR only stuff.’

‘Never let anything go by you, Just James. If it itches, scratch it until it stops or it bleeds, but you seem to have cottoned onto that already. If the Inspector didn’t take you into his confidence how come you came after me, me the most wanted? Helping me evade the police? Your own kind,’ he smiled.

‘You’re my kind North. And we’re going to prove it to the rest of them.’

‘You don’t think that I could have killed Harris?’

‘Oh, I think you could have killed him alright. But if you had they would never have known about it, would they?’

She had wonderful intuition.

North finished a glass of water and James refilled it for him.

‘Dawn Ward was sent down for committing the exact same crime,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘For doing exactly the same as was done to Denise Rawlins - sans syringes.’

‘What?’

‘Are you finally having the breakdown they've all been waiting for?’ She pulled a laptop from a backpack and hit a couple of keys. He sat up and stared at the screen. ‘While you were out getting framed, sitting in stir and going on the lam, I was back in the office. Dawn Ward beat, tortured, abused and killed her girlfriend.’

‘Wha-’ he caught himself. He read on. Dawn Ward had been a street prostitute and heroin addict. So had her girlfriend, Shannon Evans. Two women with links to prostitution and heroin killed in the same way over a decade apart. Had Ward been a dealer back then too?

‘The thing is, the Dawn Ward case never showed up in my initial search for similar cases.’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. We did everything we reasonably could.’

‘I’m not. When we had Dawn Ward’s name I pulled the old files, read the original notes and the autopsy details and got a nasty case of déjà vu. No syringes, but the rest was eerily familiar. Then I double checked the information in the database. It isn’t in there. Not good police work.’

‘You don’t sound surprised.’

‘After what I’ve seen the last few days?’

‘Whose case was it?’

‘The lead was a DCI Mitch Mitchell.’

‘Like the drummer?’

‘What?’

‘Before your time.’

‘But it gets better - look at the initial police presence on the scene.’

North followed her finger. North looked at the name.

The fucker.

‘And I spoke to Christine Reynolds.’

‘Who?’

‘Christine Reynolds, Donna Ward’s friend. Aunty Chris. I went by the hospital on the way here. The good news is the doctor seems to think that Donna Ward could make a full recovery - physically anyway. I don’t know if you can ever be the same person again after something like that, do you? Anyway she came round, briefly, and it was tears all round. The bad news is Christine Reynolds isn’t talking. She denied everything. She said that ‘He’s killed her’ and ‘He’s killed them both’, don’t mean anything to her. She was quite adamant that it must have been the shock talking. I think she doth protest too much. I think that they are involved in something and that they know who did this but one can’t talk, as yet, and the other isn’t going to talk. Not the way things are. What happened to Donna is linked to her daughter’s case isn’t it? Do you think Dawn Ward was innocent - of the crime she was sent down for, that is? Do you think that she could have been framed? That the two murders, Shannon Evans and Denise Lumsden were committed by the same person? And that same person did for Donna Ward?’

North did.

‘Shock theory, eh? Well shock therapy will soon sort that out. If Aunty Chris is way more co-operative when she is in shock, let’s go give her some bad news.’

THIRTY-SEVEN

They woke up half a dozen neighbours before they woke up Christine Reynolds. Everything that had happened had taken its toll on her. She was totally shot to shit. Seeing the pair of them at her door at midnight had her right back in the mire.

‘What’s happened?’

‘May we come in, please, Christine?’

‘What’s happened? Oh God, something’s happened - Donna!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said North, ushering her inside.

‘Oh, God.’

‘She...’ he left off and looked away.

Aunty Chris dropped into a chair and her face dropped into her lap.

‘I don’t understand. She woke up. The doctor said she’d be okay.’

James stood near the door. She was back outside of her comfort zone.

North pressed on. He couldn’t let up for a moment.

‘You have to help me, Christine. You have to help Donna. Who did this to her?’

Aunty Chris started shaking. Drool and snot ran from her nose and mouth.

‘What’s going to happen to those poor kids?’

North wondered where the Ward kids were at. Aunty Chris was supposed to be looking after them but only she had surfaced. No one had seen Darren since the night of the arson on the pub. North was beginning to wonder if he and his mate had been burned after setting fire to the Pond House. He sent James on a reccy with a subtle movement of his head.

‘Christine, who did this?’

Christine sobbed. James came back into the room with an expression that made it very clear to North what she thought about all this. North felt he had no choice and he chose his words carefully. He knew the reaction she would have upon seeing them, sad faced on the doorstep at this hour and he’d ran with it. Kept it in motion. At no point had he actually said that Donna Ward had died. He went in search of some drink to help calm her down and loosen her lips.

James came over and tried to console her while fighting her guilt at being a party to this. What was North turning her into? But she knew that she wasn’t so easily lead. She could have intervened but she had chosen not to. She would do it to get the job done – North’s life depended on it.

North returned pouring a bottle of vodka into a tumbler. Aunty Chris drank. James whispered that there was only one child in the flat. North went for a look. It was the fat kid, Danny. He was sparko. North returned to the living room.

‘Christine,’ he said.

‘That fucking copper,’ she snarled. ‘It’s all been for nothing.’

North held his breath. Daren’t move in case it distracted her and brought her to her senses.

‘She was obsessed. I told her to let it all go, the past is the past and what's done is done and we should be thankful that we have what we have now, especially after the shit we came from, after all the shit we’ve been through. We were doing good.’

James handed her a tissue.

North topped up her vodka.

‘Dawn’s death hit her hard. She never forgave herself. She had been a shit mam, on the game, addicted to the drugs and before she knew it her kid had grown up to be a fucked-up mini-me and was going down for murder. It would have tipped most over the edge but somehow she turned herself around. She got clean - that's where I met her, in outpatients - and we even managed to get ourselves proper jobs, cleaning. We do the County Court now,’ she said with a hint of pride, even in her present state. ‘She got custody of little Chelsea and hooked up with a couple of deadbeats, one after the other, who gave her Darren and Danny and took every penny she earned.’

So Chelsea was Dawn Ward’s kid and she didn’t even know it. Grandma had brought her up as her own.