No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (47 page)

The headline read: ‘The Lion, The Bitch and The Fraud Probe’.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Day Twelve

Three Days Later

‘What
on earth do you think you’re doing?’ he asked the girl and she visibly jumped. ‘Don’t you know there’s a killer out there? Don’t your parents read the newspapers?’

The girl was frightened to death of him, he could see that. She had already started edging forwards out of the bus shelter in case she had to run for it or shout for help. Instead of answering him, her eyes were darting around looking for someone to help her in case he was a crazy man.

‘It’s all right, love,’ he told her wearily and he reached into his inside jacket pocket, brought out the warrant card and showed it to her. ‘I’m a copper.’ Then he said, ‘It’s okay, you are not in any trouble. What’s your name, eh?’ and he smiled at her in what he hoped was a reassuring manner.

‘Kimberley Russell.’

‘And how old are you?’

‘Eleven,’ she looked a bit older but it was so hard to tell these days.

‘Well, Kimberley, you shouldn’t be out this late, not on a school night, not on any night at the moment. Should you?’

‘No,
Sir,’ she automatically afforded him the courtesy she was used to giving her school teachers, ‘I had Guides.’

‘Girl Guides?’

She nodded.

‘That explains it,’ he put on his most kindly face. ‘Used to be in the Boy Scouts myself. Be prepared eh?’ And she smiled nervously at that.

‘Live near here, do you?’

‘Church Street.’

‘Climb in the back and I’ll drive you home. Save your parents worrying about you.’

She hesitated then. He could tell it was against her better instincts. She was wavering, they always did for a moment, and a little flash of panic ran through him. He was about to start the car and drive off before she could clock the registration then he composed himself and went for the tactic that always worked; the voice of authority, for she was used to obeying her elders and betters. ‘Don’t mess about, Kimberley,’ he barked, ‘get in the car,’ and he frowned at her like the important man he was. ‘I haven’t got all night.’ She hesitated for just a moment longer then relented, eager to avoid his disapproval. She walked to the door behind him. He heard it open and the swish of her skirt as she slid onto the seat behind him then the soft click as she closed the door.

‘I don’t think you shut it properly, Kimberley,’ he told her, his heart pounding like it was about to burst, ‘try it again, love.’

Silence. Should he not have used the word love? Could she actually hear the nervousness in his voice? Was she going to make a break for it? He heard the door swing open once more and for a moment he was convinced she
was going to run off, then it slammed back hard and she gasped a little, as if she had put all of her strength into it.

‘There’s a good girl,’ he told her.

He had another look round to make sure no one had seen her get in. Not a soul nearby. He put the car into gear and moved away. He knew a quiet spot nearby where he could quickly drag her from the back seat and throw her into the boot then he could take his time, transporting her to the place he had chosen: the old quarry. No one would be able to see or hear her there.

Soon he would save another one.

Suffer the little children to come unto me.

Three days after Tom’s front-page story, Helen finally gave up waiting for him to call her and walked into the Greyhound.

‘He’s gone back to London, pet,’ Colin told her from the other side of the bar.

‘Is he coming back?’ she asked, ignoring the scrutiny of the Greyhound’s curious regulars.

‘Don’t know,’ he said, ‘but he took all of his stuff with him. He said something about a job down there,’ and he must have seen the disappointment in her face because he added, ‘I expect he’ll let you know.’

‘Thanks,’ Helen said, feeling a lot less sure about that than he seemed to be.

‘I’ll tell you what this is, shall I?’ offered DC Trevor Wilson, as he scrunched up the packet of chips and threw the empty newspaper and its greasy wrapper out of the car window into the nearest bush.

‘If
you like,’ answered Bradshaw, knowing that he would anyway, whatever his reply.

‘A waste of my time,’ and he exhaled loudly, ‘and yours,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

‘Not a lot of choice in the matter though, is there?’ Bradshaw told his new partner. Vincent Addison was still on the sick so the two DCs had been on nights together for three consecutive days now, flagging down passing motorists at random to see if they knew anything about the disappearance of the missing girls. There had been a justification of sorts from their DI but they both knew it was little more than a box-ticking exercise, so that DCI Kane could say he’d come up with some new tactics to apprehend the Kiddy-Catcher, now that he was officially in charge. Detective Superintendent Trelawe was gone and he wasn’t coming back. The shit had really hit the fan following that newspaper piece on the fake professor and now everyone reckoned Trelawe was for the guillotine.

The Michelle Summers case had been solved and public interest in the body-in-the-field had begun to wane, so DI Peacock had taken Wilson and Bradshaw off the dead-wood squad and reassigned them, along with some of the less indispensable members of the larger squad. Six detectives were now working in pairs on roads connecting key spots in the Kiddy-Catcher investigation, backed up by uniformed officers who patrolled these ‘arteries’ as the routes were known in the incident room.

The two men were on the Durham Road, a few miles outside Great Middleton, and so far, in three nights, they had pulled over eighty-six motorists. Aside from a few drivers that were over the limit and a couple of
common-or-garden perverts who had no good explanation for why they were out after dark, all they had uncovered of a criminal nature was one man with a boot full of lead he had just swiped from a church roof.

Now they sat in Bradshaw’s car with two uniformed officers backing them up in a marked police car, waiting for their next flag-down.

‘How many we got so far then?’

Bradshaw checked his records, ‘Eighteen tonight,’ just as a car’s headlights came into view at the opposite end of the long straight road they were blocking.

‘Your turn,’ said Wilson smugly because the rain was lashing down now.

‘Bloody hell,’ moaned Bradshaw but he climbed from the car anyway.

Bradshaw watched as the car’s headlights came into view. It was moving pretty briskly so he bent low enough to speak to the officers in the squad car, who turned on the flashing lights. PC Harrison got out of the driver’s side. The advancing motorist saw the lights and began to slow before he reached the cones and the warning sign with ‘Police – Stop’ written on it. Another sign with an arrow guided him to the side of the road where Bradshaw was waiting to begin the usual round of questions. Harrison stood nearby, holding a torch.

The car was a boxy old Volvo, about as boring as you could get. When Bradshaw approached it, the driver’s side window wound down with a squeak then an arm came out. The hand attached to it was clutching a warrant card. Normally Bradshaw would have relaxed at that point but he had been in the room when they first discussed the
possibility that the Kiddy-Catcher could be impersonating a police officer, so he had to be sure. He bent to look into the car and a familiar face blinked back at him.

‘Bloody hell, Vincent,’ smiled Bradshaw, ‘what you doing out here? You come to take over? We could do with a break.’

‘Sorry, mate,’ came the soft reply, ‘still on the sick, just out for a drive. I find it helps when I’m feeling bad.’

‘At this hour?’ asked Bradshaw and he immediately regretted it. He knew that, like himself, Vincent had his problems and probably dealt with them in much the same way as he did. In Bradshaw’s case, his demons sometimes left him with little or no energy to do anything but there were other occasions when he would suddenly feel a manic vitality that could only be calmed by a blaze of activity, when a week’s chores could be completed in an evening. That mania sometimes culminated in a long, fast drive down empty motorways or silent country roads in the middle of the night. Maybe Vincent needed similar therapy. ‘Sorry for flagging you down. We’ve been pulling over everyone; Chief’s orders.’

‘No problem.’

But Bradshaw didn’t wave Vincent through because he knew he was just about the only one in CID who bothered to speak to him these days and he felt guilty for judging him so harshly when he first went on the sick.

‘Dreadful bloody night eh? I’d be tucked up at home with some hot chocolate if I were you, or maybe something stronger.’

‘Insomnia,’ said Vincent, ‘I get it terrible. I’ve tried sleeping on the couch, watching TV, reading books. Only
thing that works sometimes is if I go for a drive, until I start to feel tired.’

‘I get that sometimes,’ said Bradshaw. ‘I wake up at four in the morning and can’t get back to sleep, my mind’s racing so much, know what I mean?’

‘Yeah.’

The windscreen wipers on Vincent’s car were still going full pelt and one of them stuck on something but kept going. It made a squeaking sound that was jarring and both men were momentarily distracted. Each time they swept back and forth the rubber from the nearest wiper caught on some invisible obstacle and shuddered then squealed in protest before continuing its task. ‘Kill that for a sec, will you,’ winced Bradshaw, ‘it’s like nails scraping a blackboard.’

Vincent complied with the request, killing the windscreen wipers but not the engine. The squealing ceased and now the only sound was raindrops hitting the car and the low murmur of its engine. Then Bradshaw heard a door open and he turned to see Trevor Wilson leaving the car, which surprised him because Wilson had been moaning incessantly about the rain. His colleague marched towards the bushes, presumably to empty his bladder.

Bradshaw was about to share a joke with Vincent about what a nightmare Wilson was to work with but he was distracted again, this time by a noise.

‘What was that?’

‘What?’ asked Vincent.

‘That sound?’

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Shhh!’ hissed Bradshaw and he strained to hear it.

There
was silence, apart from the staccato pat-pat of dozens of rain drops on the roof and bonnet.

‘What are we listening for?’ asked Vincent.

Bradshaw held up a hand to silence him and they both froze for a moment while Bradshaw listened. Then it happened.

A thump.

The hollow sound of something hitting metal.

‘That,’ said Bradshaw, but he was still unsure of the source.

‘What?’ asked Vincent stupidly, but he must have heard it, thought Bradshaw.

‘That,’ said Bradshaw when the thumping happened again, twice more.

‘Oh,’ replied Vincent, ‘that,’ but he offered no further explanation.

‘Is that coming from …’ this time the thump was louder and there were three beats, not one.

Bradshaw turned towards the noise and tried to comprehend its source. The sound came again: thump-thump-thump.

‘Have you got something in your boot, Vince?’ Bradshaw looked at his colleague again. ‘Have you got a dog in there or … something?’ And Bradshaw realised how absurd that notion was.

‘No,’ answered Vince but that was all he said.

Thump-thump-thump.

Bradshaw couldn’t think of a good reason for the sounds emanating from Vincent’s vehicle and his colleague didn’t seem to be about to offer one. Vincent wasn’t looking at Bradshaw any more. Instead he was staring
straight ahead, both hands gripping the steering wheel. At that moment the words of his DCI came back to Bradshaw: ‘Look out for fake IDs and warrant cards.’

Bradshaw stared at the blank expression on Vincent’s face, heard the thump-thump-thump one last time and said quietly, ‘Could you get out of the car please, Vincent?’

Vincent didn’t move.

‘I’d like you to get out of the car and open the boot for me, Vincent,’ Bradshaw said, still clinging to the hope that this was just some strange misunderstanding that could all be resolved if only Vincent would cooperate and open the boot of his car.

But Vincent didn’t get out of the car. Instead, in a fluid and determined movement he reached sideways and thumped the door lock down

‘Vincent!’ called Bradshaw and he leaned through the open window to try and grab at the keys and wrench them from the ignition but before he could accomplish that, the car shot forward, straight through the sign and cones. Bradshaw was knocked to the wet ground but, as Vincent sped away, he shouted at the uniformed officer. ‘Get in!’ yelled Bradshaw, ‘start the car!’

Bradshaw was back in his own car before Harrison reached his. A quick glance at Trevor Wilson revealed his colleague way back by the bushes with his back turned to them, calmly doing up his fly, completely unaware of what was going on. Bradshaw couldn’t wait, so he sped off without him.

Behind Bradshaw, the uniformed boys attempted a swift three-point turn. They slammed their car into reverse
but when they hit the ground behind them it was slick with mud and the rear wheel slid backwards. Harrison had to slam on the brakes to prevent the car from falling into a ditch. As he tried to get the car back on the road, the wheels span. He tried twice more without success until PC Lumley jumped from the car and gave it a shove while he drove it out. Lumley jumped back in the car, while Wilson looked on. ‘What the hell’s this?’ he asked but he did not try to join them and, seconds later, he watched as the rear of their vehicle disappeared from view as it shot down the road.