The Dying Place (15 page)

‘Yeah, sorry, I’m Detective Sergeant Laura Rossi. We’re investigating the death of Dean Hughes …’

‘Terrible news that was. I was tellin’ our Angela – that’s my sister, she sometimes helps out here – about it before. Dead shocking it was.’

Rossi tried keeping her voice at an inside level, but it was difficult when matched up against this woman’s boom.

‘And you are …’

‘Sorry,’ the woman said, wiping a hand down her front and offering it up. ‘I’m Margie. I kinda do all the hard work while himself sits in the back, working out how to pay for it all.’

‘Nice to meet you. Tell me about the place.’

So Margie did. In great detail, much to Rossi’s misplaced delight. After a few minutes non-stop talking, Rossi thought Margie was about to run out of things to say, as she told her about the experience days, the efforts going into keeping everything fresh and exciting for the regular kids who came in.

Who was copping off with whom was probably information Rossi didn’t need, but she didn’t mind listening.

‘They’re good kids,’ Margie said. ‘Just need a bit of guidance, that’s all. Not getting it at home, so we’re the next best thing. We’ve had loads of kids come here, been in trouble with the bizzies and that. Give them a bit of attention, a bit of support, and things change. Always my favourite part of the job when they come in and tell me they’ve got a job or something.’

‘What’s the worst part?’ Rossi said, looking over at a couple of shaven-headed lads in tracksuit bottoms and hoodies laughing with an older women whilst playing pool.

‘Everyone always imagines it’s when one of them goes off their heads or something. You know,’ Margie leant towards Rossi, the smell of cigarette smoke coming off her in a wave. ‘When they get a bit violent and that. With us or each other. But it’s not that at all …’

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s when they don’t come back. When they disappear. That’s what gets me every time. Because I never know if they’re safe … like if they’ve gone down the wrong path or something. It’s the worry that I’ve failed.’

13

Thornhill showed them back to the entrance to the youth club, Murphy and Brannon emerging into the sunshine to find Rossi leaning on the car, frowning at her phone. She looked up and threw away a cigarette as she spotted them.

‘Smoking, Laura?’ Murphy said, shaking his head.

‘Just every now and again. I swear I’m not back on them full-time.’

‘Not me you have to worry about. Your ma will kill you if she finds out.’

‘Well she won’t, will she?’ Rossi had started smoking regularly following the events of the previous year, a small tic she’d picked up, as all those involved had done. Murphy’s crutch had been food, putting on the two stone he’d worked hard to shed, quicker than it had taken him to lose it. He was just getting over that. The takeaway on Friday night had been his only slip … apart from that morning’s bacon sarnie, but that hadn’t been his fault really. Rossi had foregone food or a drinking problem and gone for smoking. Something small to take the edge off. You deal with something as big as the first serial killer in your city for almost a hundred years, you’re going to need something.

‘Learn anything?’ Murphy said, opening the passenger side door and getting into the car.

‘Not much,’ Rossi said, sitting in the back, the middle this time. She looked around her for a seatbelt but gave up quickly, leaning forward between Murphy and Brannon. ‘Spoke to Margie. She’s the brains of the operation by the sounds of it. Good woman, you know. Also spoke to a couple of the kids in there. They liked Dean, looked up to him.’

‘Did they mention anyone coming looking for him?’

Rossi shook her head. ‘No. Nothing like that. Just that they’d asked about him at the youthy and no one knew where he’d gone.’

Murphy pointed right, back to the station, as Brannon reached the end of the street and threw his palms up. ‘Kevin Thornhill reckons someone came to see Dean a week after he went missing, trying to find him. Owed him money, threatening.’

‘Really? No one mentioned that to me,’ Rossi replied.

‘Showed him a picture of Paul Cooper and he was almost sure it was him. But as we know, he wasn’t around that night. Plus I’m not sure he’s got it in him to keep this sort of thing quiet. Something doesn’t make sense. Could be there was someone else he’d pissed off. Unless he’d annoyed the wrong person and gone into hiding, where would he have been for that week? Something isn’t right.’

‘Could be he was found,’ Brannon said, one hand resting on the steering wheel as he fiddled with the electric window. ‘Let’s say for instance he owed someone money. Forget Cooper for now, he’s too low-scale. Maybe a proper dealer or something. Dean knows he’s in trouble, so gets his head down. Moves away, something like that. Thinks enough time has passed, so he comes back to Liverpool. Only, as we know, these types of people have long memories. He’s found pretty quickly and ends up outside the church, dead.’

Murphy scratched at his beard, weighing it up. It made a weird kind of sense. ‘Only one thing with that … the letter that was sent to his mum. Where does that come into it?’

‘Unless Dean really did send it?’ Rossi said from the back.

‘Good thinking,’ Murphy replied, now thinking about the whole. ‘So let’s run this whole thing out. Dean Hughes goes out with his mates, cops off with some girl, but before that has run up debts with a dealer or something similar. No history of drug abuse, but we know he could have owed a whole lot of money just by doing coke at the weekends – weed in the week. He’s late paying back. What happens after he takes the girl home? He’s walking back to his own house and is jumped? Threatened? So he just takes off without a word … doesn’t even go home to pack a bag or anything? Something is missing here.’

Rossi sat back in the seat in the rear of the car. Brannon drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, after finally getting his window to the correct opening. Otherwise, there was silence as they all tried to fill in the blanks.

It was a quiet trip back to the station.

The sun was shining through the windows into the main office space, bathing the incident room in golden light, with people shielding their eyes, complaining about the non-effectiveness of the blinds. Detective constables shuffling back and forth between desks, tapping away at keyboards and sometimes sharing a joke. The odd couple of people leaving or returning. Studying whiteboards and updating them.

The space around Dean Hughes’s own murder board was bare. The details on there still sparse and untouched from that morning. Murphy considered it while standing a few feet away, still trying to make his mind up about how to approach it now. Fewer resources had that effect. He couldn’t afford to take a multi-pronged approach, and given the little information they had, there was only really one way to tackle it.

‘Laura,’ Murphy called, spotting her return from the vending machine. ‘Over here.’

Rossi sauntered over, ripping open a chocolate bar she’d plundered from the machine. ‘Yeah?’

‘We’re going to have to concentrate on the money angle. It’s the best guess we have right now. So I want every available effort we have going into finding out who he owed money to, I want that lad we spoke to Saturday morning …’

‘Paul Cooper.’

‘Yeah, him. He’ll know more. Just have to ask the right questions. Get him picked up. He’ll be on bail, I imagine.’

Rossi nodded. ‘Anything else?’

‘Every one of his mates. I want them all pulled in.’

Rossi blew out a long breath. ‘That’s a few cells being taken up.’

‘Not in the cells. Interview rooms. I don’t want them thinking they’re in trouble or anything like that. I just don’t want them interviewed in the comfort of their own homes. Let them know it’s serious by bringing them down here.’

‘Okay then.’

‘Someone will have a name. Once we have that, everything will be much easier.’

Rossi nodded, turning away and calling DCs by name to follow her. Murphy watched her leave, safe in the knowledge that she’d dole out the tasks properly. He turned back to the murder board, staring at the two photographs of Dean Hughes tacked onto it. One was a school photo from around four years ago, according to his mum. The other photo showed little change. Taken from one of the times he’d been picked up by police, the comedown apparently. A hardening look around the eyes, perhaps. Dark circles underneath, which spoke of late nights wearing him down little by little. The hair was now shaved close to the scalp, rather than the short tousled look he’d sported a few years previously. He still looked like a child though. A man-child, eighteen, but not the same eighteen as previous generations, leaving school at fifteen and going straight off to work. Now Merseyside boasted one of the highest levels of youth unemployment and an increasingly disenfranchised section of society. Murphy had been there at the beginnings of it, during the nineties, when dock changes took away the jobs there. The factories and warehouses emptying. He’d seen the increase in youth crime – always there, but not to the significant level it now was. A combination of no prospects and bad education perpetuating through the generations.

Brannon appeared beside Murphy, slipping into his peripheral vision and following his stare towards the board. ‘Going for the drugs angle then?’ Brannon said.

‘Looks like our best bet at the moment,’ Murphy replied, finally turning away from the board. ‘Something along those lines anyway.’

‘Always is with this lot.’

‘What lot?’

Brannon sniffed, a sneer growing across his face. ‘These kids today. If they’re not robbing people’s houses, they’re killing each other over a few quid or some stupid
turf
war. Honestly, I don’t know why we waste our time with these scrotes. What’s the point? They’re just nasty little shits who sit on their arses all day and do nothing but cause us all trouble.’

Murphy breathed in deeply. ‘Where you from, Tony?’

‘What’s that matter?’

‘Humour me.’

‘Heswall,’ Brannon replied, his voice now quieter. ‘Over the water.’

Murphy sighed.
Over the water
meaning across the River Mersey, on the Wirral. ‘Nice place, that. Ever lived on an estate in Liverpool, Tony? Or even just over the water … Leasowe, Seacombe?’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Let’s just say you’ve got no idea what their lives are like really.’ Murphy turned towards Brannon, looking down at him and fixing him with a stare. Leant in towards him and said in a whisper, ‘And if I hear you say anything like that again during this investigation, I’ll throw you through the fucking window … metaphorically speaking, of course.’

Murphy walked away before Brannon had a chance to respond, catching up to Rossi as she finished speaking to a couple of detective constables. He motioned towards their office with his head. The noise dissipated as they closed the door behind them.

‘We’ve got uniforms going around to all the names and picking them up. Monday afternoon, so hopefully most of them will be at home.’

‘Good. Make sure there’s somewhere to put them when they arrive. I want a statement from each, so divvy them up between whichever DCs we have.’

‘No problem.’

Murphy looked at his watch. ‘I’m going in to see the boss, see if we can get an appeal out for
North West Tonight
later.’

‘Press officer been briefed?’

‘Not yet. We’ll do that at the same time. Too late for the print edition of the
Echo
, but we’ll get something in there for tomorrow. Someone must have seen Dean Hughes. He can’t have been underground for seven months.’

Rossi nodded and began walking towards the office. ‘Everything good between you and Sarah?’

Murphy smirked. ‘Well, it was. Now we’re in a bit of a stalemate.’

‘Really?’ Rossi replied, her voice rising with surprise.

‘Yeah. Everything’s good, don’t get me wrong. It’s just we’re having the kid conversation again.’

Rossi nodded. ‘I get you. You’re still digging your heels in, I assume?’

‘It’s just not the right time. Especially with this kind of thing going on.’

‘You know what they say … it’s never the right time. Any sane person would never have kids if they waited for the exact right time.’

‘I know.’

‘You sure it’s not something else? It’s only been a couple of years, you know. No time really.’

Murphy looked away. Almost two years exactly since his parents had been murdered; the bastard who killed them an ex-boyfriend of Sarah’s who hadn’t been able to let her move on. Sarah and he had broken up – well, Murphy had left and largely ignored her for almost a year. They were back together now, but Murphy continued to feel that it was still under the surface, the fragility of their relationship known to both of them.

‘We’ll see. First let’s get this cleared so I can at least go home at a reasonable hour.’

Murphy left Rossi to get on with organising the influx of teenagers that would be arriving shortly, and crossed the incident room to DCI Stephens’s office.

‘David, how’s it going?’

Murphy sat down opposite her. ‘New line of enquiry.’ He brought her up to date with what they’d learnt that day.

‘Sounds promising. We find where he’s been, who he’s owing money to, we find our suspect. I like it.’

‘I still want to know where he’s been the past seven months though. Reckon we can get an appeal on TV later?’

DCI Stephens nodded. ‘We’ve got to give them an update anyway. I’ll sort that out with the press officer and release a statement. We have a good picture of the victim don’t we?’

‘Yes. He wasn’t exactly a stranger. Should be on HOLMES.’

‘Good.’

The Youth Club

Kevin Thornhill picked up the phone, dialling the number from memory. Hands still shaking from the meeting with the police. He hated speaking to people in power like that. Constantly worried that he’d be arrested and thrown in jail. Even the knowledge he’d never done anything wrong wasn’t enough to calm him. It was his number one fear. Being locked up inside. Part of the reason he did the youth club thing was because he was sure he wasn’t alone in that feeling.