Make Believe (12 page)

Butchers looked pigsick, Shap noticed.  His intended was strutting her stuff with her pals and some lads from uniform, Kim’s cleavage on full show.

‘
You want to nip that in the bud, sharpish,’ Shap said nodding at the woman.

Butchers
shrugged, ‘ Not bothered.’

‘
Not bothered?  Her flashing her heirlooms at all comers.’

Another shrug.

‘So why did you pop the question?’ Shap said, ‘Were you pissed?’

‘
I don’t remember.  It were news to me.  Bad news,’ Butchers said.

‘
You went ahead and stumped up for the ring, though,’ Shap said.

Butchers grimace
d.

‘
You tight git,’ Shap said.  ‘You made her buy her own ring?  You are kidding me.’

‘
Just till my salary comes through,’ Butchers said, then he added, ‘What’m I gonna do?’  He reddened, looked ever more awkward, scratched at the back of his neck.

‘
Leave it to me, mate.  I’ll have a word,’ Shap said.

‘
Tony,’ Butchers protested but it was half-hearted.

‘
It’s sorted.  Trust me,’ Shap said.

Kim
’s transformation was instantaneous.  From gaudy good-time girl to mouthy harridan as soon as she cottoned on to what Shap was saying, ‘Butchers – Ian – he’s made a bit of a mistake.  When he proposed, it was a bit of a joke, yeah, joke that got out of hand.  He wants out.  No point in ruining both your lives, eh?’

Eyes glinting, mouth set
, Kim cursed like a sailor and scanned the room.  Soon as she found Butchers she launched herself in his direction.  Her friends, confused but sensing some excitement, followed in her wake. 

Shap watched
as Kim laid into Butchers with her handbag, smacking him about the head and damning him to hell and back.  Assaulting a police officer was an offence under any other circumstances but given the situation who could blame her?  Shap didn’t reckon anyone was about to slap her in handcuffs.

Over by the bar th
e boss looked like she was still on a roll.  She had been flashing the cash and buying them all drinks and packing a fair few away herself.  Now she was flinging her arms around and Detective Superintendent Hogg was concentrating on her rather than the Butchers bust up.  Then at that precise moment Hogg looked over to the dance floor and an expression of disgust and resignation rolled across her face.  Lady Muck.  That’s how Shap thought of her and here she was seeing the plebs at play and not enjoying it one little bit.  Shap hadn’t liked the way Hogg dealt with the boss about the confusion in the identity of the dead child.  A genuine mistake that, they’d all expected it to be Sammy Wray, yet Lady Muck behaved as though the boss had done something really brainless.  Had given her a right bollocking.  Never raised her voice but you could tell from the body language. 

Kim had drawn blood, a cut visible on Butchers
’ face and her friends were getting nowhere fast trying to pull her off, so Shap reckoned he’d better lend a hand before anyone else got hurt. 

‘I never took you for a party animal,’ Louise Hogg said.

‘
Live it large, Louise, that’s what I say.  Show ‘em we’re human,’ Janine said.

‘
The team respect you.  That’s hard to win but easily lost.  You’re never really off duty.’  She got hold of Janine’s glass, edged it away. 

‘
That’s right,’ Janine said, ‘you can be all mates together, nice and chummy and next morning you’re in the office giving someone a bollocking.’ 
Like someone not a million miles away.
  Janine reached over for her drink and took a swig.  She’d just finish this one, wouldn’t do any harm.

‘
You have to set the tone, lead by example,’ Louise Hogg said carefully, ‘it can be tricky, knowing where to draw the line.  And a case like this – it’s hard for everyone involved.’

‘
You can say that again.  We’re all working our balls off and getting nowhere.  I’m telling the parents of a missing three-year-old that I’ve still no news and it makes me wonder if maybe I’m doing something wrong.  Maybe I can’t hack it anymore.  Am I just in the job because it’s all I’ve ever done?  And if I feel like this how am I going to keep up morale for that lot?’

Janine looked across to see the big lass in pink
flouncing off, Butchers mopping at his face with a handkerchief.  Didn’t look like a match made in heaven.  Her thoughts lit on Clive and Claire then Clive and Felicity, the way their marriage had soured and died, then on Pete.  No, she admonished herself, I’m here for a good time and a good time is damn well what I’m going to have.

Janine woke with a crushing headache, roiling guts and an uncomfortable sense of unease.  She was too old, her liver too tired to cope with nights like that.

Charlotte was
burbling in her cot.  It was six am.  Janine left her to burble and went to shower.  Her mortification grew as snatches from the evening came back to haunt her, her ill-fated attempts to tease Richard and Millie that had quickly unravelled.  And Louise!
Oh, Lord.
Louise warning Janine and Janine playing dumb.  And then to crown it all she had confided in Louise, blurted out her doubts.  ‘Kids, promotion, a case like this.  Usually, usually,’ Janine had found it hard to pronounce the word right, ‘I can hack it, wing and a prayer, yeah?  Having it all, they call it having it all.  Well … it’s too bloody much, sometimes …’

‘Do you need time off?  It can be arranged.’

‘Nah!  Just having a moan, Louise, honestly, I can cope.  I will cope.  I want to get the bastard.  Bastards.  Plural.’

Shit!
  Had she offered to resign?  Janine tested the notion but could not recall actually saying that. 

Did she tell
Louise about Pete and Tina and the baby?  God, please, no.  There were some parts of her life she’d rather keep private.  Louise was OK but she didn’t have kids, didn’t have that extra load, day in and day out.  Janine didn’t know if that had been a conscious choice or whether it had just never happened or even whether it was something Louise had longed for that never came to pass.  They weren’t close enough for that sort of conversation.

Janine’s toes
curled and she felt heat on the nape of her neck as she imagined what she might have shared, blithely overstepping the boundaries under the influence. 

There
’d been some bother with Butchers too, not that she needed to feel any responsibility for Butchers’ behaviour.  She had enough on her own plate.  Butchers and the fiancée had left the party early on and never returned.  Maybe he’d gone after her to make up.

Janine wasn
’t sure she was right for him.  Butchers had been married once before, had a child as well, but that had all gone wrong and he didn’t see the child.  It hadn’t looked like there was much love lost last night.  Kim seemed to treat him as a joke.  Not a good way to start a marriage – no respect.  Butchers could be an idiot but he wasn’t a stupid man. Nor was he malicious.  He played the clown at times, his size and demeanour made him an easy target for people’s jokes but he was a diligent detective.

She thought of her own marriage.  Did she still respect Pete?  Not really.  Certainly not the way he was dealing with the whole baby situation.
  She rinsed the shampoo from her hair wincing as the movement of her head backwards made the pounding behind her eyes even more violent.

She
wouldn’t have been so peevish with Millie if she and Richard hadn’t been so condescending, as if suddenly instead of being Richard’s old mate, pals and colleagues, Janine had turned into some embarrassing maiden aunt or alcoholic neighbour to be tolerated and evaded as quickly as possible, passed on to someone else to deal with.

As
she turned off the shower, Charlotte cried for attention, a noise that pierced Janine’s skull and made her grit her teeth.  She needed coffee and painkillers.  Janine put on a bathrobe and went to pick her daughter up and wondered how soon she could rouse the nanny.

She wasn
’t the only one suffering judging by the state of the rest of them.  Apart from Detective Superintendent Hogg, of course, fresh as a daisy and looking critically at Janine as Janine got herself some water.  Janine smiled hello, determined to keep up a front of normality even while her mind was scrabbling around wondering what else she might have said or done in her drunken stupor.  Lesson one – do not get pissed in front of the boss.

Janine realized that she had left her laptop in the hall.  Pete had stayed the night, bunking in the spare room, not something he did regularly but it meant he hadn’t had to stay up late waiting for Janine to get home and as it was his day off today he could take Eleanor and Tom to school
, which they always liked.  She rang and got his voicemail and left a message asking him to drop her laptop off at the station once he’d done the school run.

Lisa and
Butchers hadn’t arrived as she began the briefing on the murder.  Not like either of them.  Butchers had never been late in all the years she’d worked with him, and Lisa keen and energetic, wouldn’t dare be late, too eager to make the grade. 

‘
News has come through from Interpol,’ she told the team,  ‘Dutch police have completed the comparison on the DNA profiles of missing Tomas Rink and our unknown victim.  No match.’  Janine knew it had been a long shot, though she’d held out a sliver of hope because if the child had come in from another country, it would account for why no-one here had reported him missing.

‘
Those we know with easy access to the crime scene are the Palfreys, the Staffords and the builders McEvoy and Breeley.  We now have detailed statements from them and we also have house-to-house for the whole of Kendal Avenue plus testimony from Royal Mail staff, window cleaners, meter readers, Avon lady, the works.  That little lot needs correlating and mapping out.’  The run of bad weather hadn’t done them any favours.  Fewer people had been out and about, and when they were they didn’t linger.  They were concerned with keeping dry, getting from A to B as quickly as possible.  The heavy rain made it harder to see too, especially if you were driving. They’d got absolutely nowhere finding a primary crime scene.  And without the identity of the child they had no idea where to look. ‘Someone put that child there.  They weren’t observed, so when did they get the chance?’ 

‘Paedos, boss.’ Shap began.

‘Sex offenders,’ she corrected him.

‘Them and all,’ he grinned.  ‘Known individuals on the sex offenders register in the neighbourhood have been visited and interviewed. 
No-one’s done a bunk or raised any alarm bells with their probation workers, apart from this one perv who admitted breaching his licence by being within a hundred yards of a school.’

‘He admitted it?’ Richard asked.  ‘Perhaps he owned up to that hoping to hide what he’d really been doing.’
 

Had this been the bearded weirdo by the gate? 

‘His story checked out,’ Shap said.  ‘He’d travelled across town to Altrincham and spent the days indulging his fetid little fantasies outside a high school there.  On the Saturday in question he did the same, loitering near the playing fields.  His record’s for raping twelve and thirteen-year-old girls.’

‘
A different profile from our victim,’ Janine said.  She was distracted by Lisa’s arrival.  ‘Late night, Lisa?’

‘I’ve been out with Sergeant Butchers, boss.  He’s brought in Luke Stafford and Phoebe Wray.’

What on earth!
  ‘Has he now?’  She felt a surge of irritation.  She couldn’t blame Lisa, Butchers was her senior in rank so if he said jump, Lisa or any other DC would have to, unquestioningly.

‘
Continue building a timeline for the crime scene and identify periods when the place was apparently deserted,’ Janine told the team, ‘there may have been opportunities for the killer to leave the body.  Anyone need further guidance on tasks in hand see Sergeant Shap,’ she wound up briskly.  She set off to see just what the hell Butchers was playing at.

Butchers looked shocking, unshaven with a gash under his eye where presumably the fiancée had left her feedback. 

‘
Why are they here?’ Janine demanded, ‘ I expressly told you yesterday that you were to do nothing without some solid grounds.’

‘
They were at Luke Stafford’s together on the Saturday afternoon,’ Butchers said quickly.  ‘I’ve just asked her.  That’s where she went after the hockey match.  Luke failed to mention it and her mother said she was at home, so she’s lying as well.  They could have gone to the park and taken Sammy back to Luke’s.  Stafford wouldn’t let us search.  If we can get a warrant—’

‘You’re clutching at straws,’ Janine said,  ‘it’s all supposition.’

‘
I know the lad’s involved,’ he insisted, ‘they’re alibi-ing each other.’