Hard Girls (35 page)

Annie was fast asleep when the phone rang and she picked it up groggily saying, ‘What?’

She was tired out, she had also had a few drinks and the combination of the alcohol and the tiredness had sent her into a deep and satisfying sleep. She was not happy about being woken out of it.

‘Who is this?’ The voice was garrulous and high-pitched. Annie was annoyed, it was obviously a nuisance call.

‘Is Kate there?’

Annie yawned, and the noise was loud in the darkness. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Miriam.’

Annie was so tired she couldn’t place her for a few moments. ‘What do you want, Miriam? It’s late.’

Miriam didn’t answer for a few seconds, then she said softly, ‘Is Kate there? Only I have a woman here who has been attacked. She won’t go to the police station. But I still think that somebody should talk to her. I think she should report it, or at least have the conversation on record.’

‘Who is it?’ their nearest and dearest,3ifgo

‘I would rather not say. If Kate’s not around, you’ll have to come.’

Annie sighed heavily. She knew she would have to go. Still, she was intrigued, and she wanted to see what had happened. ‘Where are you?’

‘St Saviour’s Hospital. Can I take it you’ll be coming instead of Kate?’

‘Yeah. Give me twenty minutes.’

Annie replaced the receiver and jumped out of bed. As she pulled on her street clothes; scruffy denims, and a dark-green fisherman’s jumper, she wondered where Kate was.

A few minutes later, as she dragged a brush through her hair, she popped her head around Kate’s bedroom door. The room was empty and, assuming that she was probably still at the station, she dialled the number quickly. No answer. She tried her mobile and it was switched off.

Annie pulled on a raincoat and left the house. She was freezing cold and wondering what the fuck she was doing driving around Grantley in the middle of the night.

As she pulled into the hospital, Annie wondered whether Kate was on her way home. Perhaps she’d just missed her at the station. She turned her attention to the job in hand. Miriam was waiting in the light of the ambulance bay. She was hard to miss, she looked like a demented social worker, all flowing clothes and wiry hair. Her fat feet were encased, as always, in her open-toed sandals.

Annie smiled briefly as she walked towards her. ‘Is it a domestic or a working girl?’

Miriam sighed sadly. ‘It’s a domestic, but she’s been beaten very badly, Annie.’

‘Why all the hush-hush? Is she well enough to make a statement?’

Miriam rolled her eyes in annoyance. ‘Why don’t you just come with me, and if you can manage to keep your mouth shut long enough, I’ll explain the situation.’

Annie was shocked by Miriam’s manner. She bustled through the overly bright hospital corridors and into a small ward where she turned around and, putting her finger to her lip, she said quietly, ‘You can’t say anything to anyone about this poor woman or her plight unless she says that you can. Do you understand that?’

Annie was annoyed. She knew the law, after all, she was in the police force. ‘Of course I do.’

As they walked down the ward, Annie saw that there were only four beds. Three were empty and the fourth was by the window. As she approached it, she saw a woman of a heavy build with one arm in a plaster cast.

‘It’s all right, Hayley. It’s only me, Miriam. I’ve brought a friend to see you, Annie Carr.’

As the woman turned her head to look at her, Annie saw that she had her jaw wired up, that the fingers on her good arm were badly broken and missing a couple of nails, and that her face and neck were covered in small cuts. It looked as if she’d gone through the windscreen of a car.

She looked at Miriam for some kind of explanation, of course she wanted to know what had happened. This was clearly not a car accident, it was a beating. But she also knew that battered wives often needed time and space before they were ready to leave the abuser.

‘This is Hayley Dart, Lionel’s to the point of emaciationeved to see iflt dwife. I thought that someone should see what he is capable of.’

Annie looked at the woman in the bed, and tried to hide her shock and surprise.

‘This isn’t the first time he’s done something like this, he’s always been a violent man. But the attacks are escalating in their severity. I just wanted someone else to see her, someone else to bear witness to her injuries. I want her to know that when she is ready, there will be a whole network of people she can rely on. I want her to see that she is not alone.’

Annie was open-mouthed with astonishment.

‘He’s going to take early retirement. I hear Kate put the idea into his head. I think it must have prompted this latest attack.’

Annie nodded her head slowly, trying to take it all in. The woman in the bed was once more looking out of the window, and Annie knew that she was ashamed and embarrassed by her predicament. Battered women often believed that they brought the violence on themselves, it was a classic symptom. The bruises made them feel self-conscious and often they ended up colluding with their attacker simply because they were too ashamed to admit what was happening to them.

‘How long has this been going on?’

Miriam shrugged heavily. ‘Years, but this time I felt I needed to bring in an independent witness. He’s shattered her jaw and broken her arm. He bent her fingers back until they snapped and he ripped her nails off. Her ribs are also broken, and she has internal injuries. It was a neighbour who called the ambulance. She won’t press charges, she never does. But he needs to know that other people are aware of what he is doing. He is a bully, and bullies need to be confronted. Bullies need to know they won’t be tolerated.’

Annie nodded in agreement. The door to the room opened and Lionel Dart scurried in. He s the old code:

Chapter Twenty-Two

Kate was still smarting from Annie’s comments about her so-called predictability. She was back in her own house, she was not going back permanently to Patrick’s until she felt they were both ready for it. She couldn’t get past the fact that he had basically ordered her out, and she knew that her pride was not only wounded, it still needed a very large bandage. But she consoled herself with the fact that they were at least back on speaking terms. The lines of communication were once again open, as American talk show hosts say.

But she still felt that there was something missing. She guessed it was because for the first time ever, they had not had make-up sex. She wondered if Patrick was thinking the same thing. Was he also secretly questioning their failure to consummate their new-found togetherness? He had not even caressed her in a sexual way and, although she had not thought about it at the time, now, as she remembered it, she felt slightly snubbed by him all over again. She assumed he had been shagging for England with Eve and the fact that he didn’t seem to want her was now taking hold in her mind. The two-faced bastard had not even tried to kiss her properly, he’d just lain there, holding her in his arms, until she had dropped off.

She quickly went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She was still slim, still attractive and although she wasn’t a spring chicken, she wasn’t that much different to the woman he had met all those years ago. She put on some lip gloss and brushed her hair, immediately feeling much better just for doing it.

Back in her front room, she sat on the floor and spread everything she had on the dead girls out in individual piles. She accepted that there could be a man out there somewhere who was just choosing the girls at random, who had no real reason other than that he wanted to kill somebody. But the viciousness of the girls’ deaths told her that this was personal. It was someone with an axe to grind. Why they wanted to grind the axe in the first place, she still couldn’t work out. She felt though that, if she
could
work that much out, she would be a step closer to finding the man responsible.

They had interviewed so many people, had investigated so many men, and yet they were still no nearer fingering a suspect than they had been at the start of the investigation. Kate had spent hours poring over the details of the crimes, re-reading the witness statements, and trying to look at it all from a fresh perspective.

She picked up Janie Moore’s files, then she picked up Sandy Compton’s paperwork and placed it on the floor beside Janie’s. She stared at them for long moments then, sitting back against the sofa, she placed Candy Cane’s papers in the middle of the other two. She picked up the first piece of paper from each pile and read them. She did the exact same thing with each piece of paper that came to hand. She read them all again, as if she had never read any of them before. She picked up the other girls’ files and read them again too, placing them in different orders, straining her eyes as she tried to see something, anything, that would make her feel she was in with a chance of winning.

The shook her head in mock despair. se along quite eventually phone rang and she answered it quickly, annoyed at the intrusion. It was Patrick, and he was trying to be as affable and friendly as possible. She gave him a few Brownie points for that much anyway.

‘Why don’t you come over for dinner, Kate?’

Kate shook her head, forgetting he couldn’t see her. ‘No, Pat. Thanks for the offer but I really need to work. I can’t concentrate at your house and I have all my paperwork here.’

Pat couldn’t be sure, but he felt that there was a note of censure in her voice. But he knew better than to remark on it. He knew she was still smarting from his fling, and he didn’t blame her for that, he would have felt the same if the boot had been on the other foot.

He sighed. ‘OK. I just thought you might like a bit of dinner, that was all, love. How is it going, like? Any nearer to a collar?’ He laughed then. ‘That’s not a sentence I ever thought I would say.’

Kate laughed with him, and she realised she missed this, the chatting, the closeness. ‘It’s hard, Patrick, we have nothing, literally nothing.’

He sighed. He racked his brains for something interesting to say to her to take her mind off it for a few minutes. ‘Oh, Kate, I just remembered. Terry O’Leary came round the other day, and asked me if I could do him a favour. He wants you to tell that woman from Victim Support to stop coming round the houses. The girls love her, by all accounts, but I think he’s worried she might put off the customers. Or see too much of what’s going on. Either way, he wants her to meet the girls off the premises. Would you mind having a word with her for me? Apparently she’s talked a few of the younger ones into leaving the life but, as I said to Terrence, you can’t blame the girls for that. But he don’t like her there interfering and, reading between the lines, if she doesn’t take the hint, he’ll have her out by the scruff of her neck.’

There was a long silence and Patrick broke it by saying, ‘Are you still there, Kate?’

‘Do you know the names of the girls who left?’

Patrick was annoyed now, assuming she was being sarcastic. ‘Now, how the fuck would I know something like that, Kate? It’s not like I frequent them places, is it?’

Kate laughed good-naturedly. ‘I didn’t mean it like that, I just wondered if he had mentioned the girls’ names, that’s all.’

‘Well, he didn’t and, not to put too fine a point on it, why the fuck would Terry O’Leary know the names of two Toms in his employ?’

Kate heard the incredulity in Pat’s voice and decided that, as much as she loved him, he had a lot to learn about, not just basic manners, but also the safety of the people who earned you a good wedge. ‘Get off your high horse, Patrick. I like Terry, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is a fucking pimp and, just because he doesn’t mix with his girls, doesn’t spend time on the premises they all work out of, it doesn’t make him any less of a pimp in my eyes. He is a ponce, as the old Faces would put it and now, if you don’t mind, I need to go somewhere. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

Kate had already put the phone down before Pat had even had the chance to say goodbye.