Murder Ring (A DI Geraldine Steel Mystery) (20 page)

Her mother lay in a hospital bed. Tubes attached to her arms connected her to complicated pieces of medical equipment, beeping, pulsing, dripping, keeping her hydrated, maintaining her blood sugar levels, and monitoring her progress. While all that equipment was keeping her physical shell alive, she appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Geraldine hovered near the bed, waiting to be overwhelmed by a wave of affection. When her mother had given her up, Geraldine had been a tiny baby, too young to have registered her mother’s face as anything but a blur. Seeing her in the flesh for the first time, she searched her face for any familiar feature. The photograph of her mother as a teenager looked uncannily like Geraldine herself. There was nothing of that girl in the pale shrunken cheeks and bony chin of the woman lying in the bed. Geraldine wondered if there had been a mistake.

‘You here to visit Milly?’ a passing nurse asked.

The name coursed through Geraldine like a bolt of electricity. She turned to the nurse. ‘She’s my – I’m her daughter.’

‘Of course you are. You look just like her.’

Geraldine tried to smile at the unlikely comment, which was meant kindly, but she felt tears in her eyes. She couldn’t help it.

‘Don’t fret,’ the nurse said, misunderstanding Geraldine’s distress, ‘she’s stable now. The doctor will be round later on. Why don’t you sit with your mother for a while?’

Geraldine nodded, unable to speak. Sitting by the bedside, she dabbed at her eyes and waited. After about twenty minutes, Milly’s lips twitched. She opened her eyes and turned her head slightly until she was looking straight at Geraldine who stared back into her own large dark eyes. For a moment they didn’t exchange a word, but Geraldine knew that her mother recognised her.

Milly smiled weakly and moved her lips. Geraldine leaned forward so she could hear her mother’s whisper.

‘Can’t talk. Such an effort. Sorry.’

It wasn’t clear if she was apologising for her feeble voice, or for having given Geraldine away.

‘That’s OK. All you need to think about is getting well.’

‘Someone you have to find. She’ll look after you.’

‘Go on.’

‘Her name’s Erin.’

Evidently, Milly was confused. Geraldine wasn’t sure whether to explain that Erin was the name on her own birth certificate.

‘I’m here,’ she faltered. ‘I’m Erin. The social worker contacted me about you. Erin’s the name on my birth certificate.’

Her mother frowned. ‘You’re Erin?’ Her eyes scanned Geraldine’s face as though she was trying to read words in a foreign language. ‘I never thought…’

‘Don’t try to speak any more for now. We can talk when you’re feeling better. Just rest. That’s all that matters for now.’

‘No, no,’ her mother shook her head. Her hoarse whisper grew louder and the heart monitor beeped. ‘Erin. Help me.’

A nurse came bustling up. ‘Come along, Milly, it’s time to rest.’ She fiddled with Milly’s drip, and jerked her head at Geraldine to indicate it was time to go.

‘Don’t worry,’ Geraldine repeated as she stood up to leave.

She hesitated to add the word ‘mum’. That would take some getting used to, just as Milly would have to learn to call her by her adopted name. Not knowing how to address one another was understandable, given that they didn’t know anything about each other. That first encounter had been a meeting of strangers. In Geraldine’s fantasy, she and her mother hugged. As she left the ward, she wished she had at least touched her mother’s hand, flesh on flesh. She walked away down a long corridor feeling somehow cheated. It didn’t help that Louise had warned her not to expect too much from a first meeting. When she reached the privacy of her car, she dropped her head in her hands and wept for her loss.

37

T
HE ATMOSPHERE IN
the major incident room on Thursday was tense as they waited for the detective chief inspector to arrive. A couple of young constables who fancied themselves as wits vied with one another to raise a laugh.

‘Anyone would think someone had died,’ one of them ventured.

‘Looks like you shot yourself in the foot with that one,’ the other one quipped when no one even smiled.

‘Oh well, it was just a shot in the dark.’

No one was amused by their clumsy routine. Several colleagues told them to shut up. Even Sam was morose. Geraldine was trying not to think about her sick mother and wondering how to lighten the depressed mood, when Adam strode in. Still energetic, he had lost his air of well-groomed elegance. His shoes gleamed, but his short hair was unkempt and his shirt was creased. His expression looked almost furtive as he glanced around the room.

‘You all know we’ve let Lenny go. He’ll be facing a charge of robbery. He admitted stealing property from David Lester’s corpse. But we can’t make the murder charge stick, not with what we’ve got. We need to move forward,’ he announced.

An impatient sigh rippled round the room at his words. Any hope that the detective chief inspector had summoned them there to tell them something new vanished. This was going to be a futile pep talk. Although they had no proof Lenny had shot David, they knew he had been at the scene. Having admitted as much, he was still the only lead they had. In the absence of any other information, Adam wanted to continue working on the theory that Lenny was implicated in the murder, even if he had not actually pulled the trigger.

He ordered another search of Lenny’s and Cynthia’s flats, and sent a team into the car repair yard where Lenny had been hiding.

‘If the bins have been emptied since Saturday night, we need to search the dump,’ he added. ‘And what about his mother or his girlfriend? Could they have hidden the gun, or passed it on to someone else?’

Various officers scurried off to carry out the detective chief inspector’s instructions with a new sense of purpose, now they had a focus for their efforts. Geraldine hid her dismay that Adam had no news for them. After he left, she waited a few minutes before following him to his office. Not knowing Adam very well, she wasn’t sure it would be wise to criticise him, but she had to voice her opinion. Resolutely, she knocked on his door, determined to be as tactful as she could.

‘Come in. Oh, it’s you, Geraldine. What is it?’

‘I just wanted to discuss something with you.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Lenny was in custody on Saturday evening,’ she began, and hesitated.

‘Yes. We know that. What’s your point?’

‘So the second shooting can’t have had anything to do with Lenny, or with Gina or Cynthia, unless one of them went up to London on Saturday evening, taking the gun with them. And that means we’re going after the wrong man. I just think we’ve wasted enough time on this suspect.’

Geraldine took a deep breath, aware that her concerns had tumbled out in a rush. So much for her decision to be diplomatic.

Adam frowned. ‘And enough money,’ he added sharply.

Geraldine carried on. ‘I think we’re looking in all the wrong places.’

‘Look, Geraldine, if we knew where the right places were, that’s where we’d be looking. We haven’t got a bloody clue where to look or what to do. You’ve seen what it’s like out there. They’re all convinced we’re never going to crack this one. We can’t just sit around doing nothing. Granted it could be a coincidence that Lenny turned up when he did, just after David was shot. But it seems odd that the killer didn’t steal the ring from David himself. We need to rule out the possibility that Lenny was working with this unknown killer. There’s still a chance Lenny could be our lead to whoever shot David and Luke. And at least it’s a possibility. We can’t do nothing.’

Geraldine understood his concern. It never helped when morale among colleagues deteriorated. For that reason she thought it would only hinder the investigation if they expended valuable time and effort in short-term exercises that would ultimately result in a deeper sense of failure. Despite her frustration, she held back from suggesting that Adam’s judgement was influenced by his desperation to prove himself in his first case as a detective chief inspector. Instead, she made a positive suggestion.

‘Perhaps we should be looking for a link between David and Luke.’

‘Other than that they were both shot with the same weapon, you mean?’ He didn’t add that at any moment they might hear of a third victim, shot by the same gun, and they had no idea where to begin looking. ‘Once we give up the search, we might as well write the case off. I’m not going to let that happen.’

‘But we’re not going to find the gun in Lenny’s flat, are we?’ Geraldine insisted. ‘Even if he did use it to kill David, we know he didn’t kill Luke, so if there were two people involved he must have got rid of the gun, passed it on to someone else, or sold it, or chucked it away for the second killer to find. I just think it’s unlikely that two different killers would shoot two people with the same gun within five days of each other. So if we think there’s one killer, and we know Lenny couldn’t have killed Luke, we ought to be focussing on looking for whoever did.’

The discussion ended unsatisfactorily. When Geraldine returned to the incident room she found the rest of the team similarly divided. Some officers thought they should be looking for two people, Lenny and a second killer. The others thought that Lenny had robbed David but not shot him, and they should be looking for just one unknown killer. Geraldine glanced around the room with a sinking feeling. In some ways she could see the sense in Adam’s orders. As matters stood, the other members of the team were all over the place. Without firm direction, they might lose their drive. Nevertheless she wasn’t happy organising the search teams, which she was convinced were a waste of time. She suspected Adam did too.

Once the work was under way, Sam drove Geraldine to the car repair yard. Neither of them could face listening to another tirade of abuse from Lenny or his mother.

‘If he’s got nothing to do with the murders, I can understand his feeling aggrieved,’ Geraldine said.

‘He’s admitted to robbing a dead man. David might still have been alive when Lenny found him, unconscious and bleeding to death. It’s possible he would have survived if that piece of scum had called for an ambulance straight away. We’ll never know. That pariah deserves no more consideration than he gives to others. He’s as guilty as if he’d pulled the trigger himself,’ Sam said. ‘The investigation’s a complete bloody mess. We don’t know anything. Do you think the DCI has a grip on it?’

‘I don’t think it’s his fault. It’s just really complicated.’

What with distress over her mother, and anxiety about the investigation, Geraldine felt drained. She thought she had managed to keep her feelings hidden, but Sam stopped the car suddenly and turned to her, asking if she was all right. Geraldine nodded. She hadn’t told anyone about meeting her mother. The disappointment of that first encounter was too raw. For all her brash impatience, Sam was sensitive enough to know when Geraldine was upset.

‘Are you sure? You know you can always talk to me, in confidence, if anything’s bothering you. We are friends, aren’t we?’

‘I’m fine,’ Geraldine fibbed. ‘I’m just fed up. We’re getting nowhere and this case is going to drag on interminably.’

‘OK. But you know I’m here if you ever need to talk, about anything. We should go out and have a few beers, and forget about all this for an evening.’

‘I don’t see how that would help.’

‘Well, it might not do much to help the investigation, but it would certainly cheer us up.’

Geraldine smiled. Sometimes Sam made her feel old.

‘Why don’t you go out with your mates later?’ she said. ‘You’re right. It’ll do you good. But I think I’ll be more than ready to call it a day after we’ve been to Alfie’s place. I could do with an early night. I didn’t sleep too well last night.’

Sam looked at her closely and Geraldine turned away.

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

‘You just asked me that. I told you, I’m fine.’

She hoped Sam wouldn’t see through her lies and take offence, but she couldn’t talk about her mother. Not yet.

‘Come on now, let’s see if they’ve found anything at the lock-ups.’

‘Do you buy Alfie’s story that he knew nothing about Lenny hiding out there?’ Sam asked as she pulled out into the traffic.

Geraldine sighed, relieved that Sam was talking about the case again. It didn’t say much for Geraldine’s state of mind that she felt safer discussing a double murder than the circumstances of her own life.

38

T
HEY GATHERED IN
the playground at dusk, just as they did every day. Designed for children, the fenced-off area had a row of tiny box-like swings that even a skinny butt wouldn’t fit inside, a seesaw, and a metal slide. The young kids it was intended for never hung out there, because the playground belonged to the gang. That was what TeeJay decreed, and his word was law on the estate. If a mother complained that the gang scared her children away, TeeJay sent a few brothers to put her straight. No one challenged TeeJay for long.

The legend of TeeJay grew out of countless stories of his prowess with a blade, although he boasted that he never carried one.

‘No need, innit. No blad’s jarring TeeJay.’

Old people on the estate scurried out of their way, eyes averted. Young people were beaten and kicked into submission. If other gangs strayed on to their turf, they were soon chased off, bruised and bloodied. They rarely returned. That was the way of things. No one knew how old TeeJay was, or even where he lived. He was only ever seen hanging out by the playground, whatever the weather.