The Shadows in the Street (12 page)

‘The Magdalene Group.’

‘I certainly can. And judging by the radio just now it’s very timely. That girl who was reported missing – apparently she was working as a prostitute, and they’ve found her.’

Ruth took a glass of hot lemon and honey upstairs. ‘I’ve had an idea.’

Stephen Webber’s head ached and his throat was sore, his breathing came as if through lungs full of rusty nails.

‘The charismatic conference in eighteen months’ time …’

‘Some way off.’

‘I think we should offer to host it here. It would be great for the cathedral, bring a new lot of people in, and it would be a real focal point for the students – there’s been hardly any missionary outreach from here to the college, so no wonder there are almost no young people in the congregation. If we could target the students at the same time as the charismatic conference the place would be shaken to the rafters. Don’t you agree?’

Stephen Webber sipped the hot lemon slowly. If he had felt better, he might have agreed, or disagreed, or told Ruth to leave things alone, that it was not up to them to offer to host the conference, that …

As it was, he swallowed the two paracetamol tablets she held out to him and then lay back gratefully on the pillow, feeling unable to say anything at all.

Eighteen

‘Is there only you I can talk to?’

Abi Righton stood at the counter in front of the duty officer, an impressively tall and broad man known to every criminal within a wide radius of Lafferton as a right bastard and to old ladies with lost purses as ‘that nice sergeant’. To Abi he was an unknown quantity, and a male.

‘I don’t bite. Who else did you have in mind, love?’ Sergeant Rayner was also a year off retirement and scathing about political correctness that forbade him to use endearments.

‘Can I talk to a woman?’

‘Not sure who’s available – might be a female CID officer upstairs. Can you give me a clue as to the nature of your problem, Miss? Might help to get someone down here.’

Abi hesitated, glancing down at the pushchair. Mia was chewing an iced bun.

‘But if you’d rather not tell me I’ll get someone, don’t worry.’

She looked bothered about something and she wasn’t happy being in a police station. She kept glancing round at the doors behind her, as if half thinking of changing her mind and getting out. He had a hunch. The sergeant’s hunches were well known and he had been ribbed about them for twenty-seven years in the force, but he trusted them and they didn’t often let him down. He thought the girl in front of him deserved treating gently.

Abi decided. ‘It’s not a woman to talk to so much, it’s being private.’

‘Ah, now I’m with you. Right, private we can do. If you’d like to take a seat over there.’ He smiled.

Abi hesitated again. You couldn’t always trust a smile on a man. But she sat down. The bench covering was split and there were crumbs and bits of paper pushed into the crease at the back.

Mia had finished the iced bun and was drinking out of her plastic cup, her eyes over the top of it half closed, uninterested in her surroundings which Abi thought was the right attitude. With any luck, she’d nod off.

Someone had left a newspaper on the bench. There was a photo of the girl in the green jacket.
Missing Prostitute Chantelle Buckley, 17
.

Abi looked away. Why did they have to do that? She wasn’t a prostitute first, she was a girl, just a girl, no need to label her. Would they do that to her? Abi Righton, 23, prostitute. She shook her head to clear the words out of it. That wasn’t her, she was Abi Righton, mother of two, Abi Righton any bloody thing, and the same with this Chantelle, same with Hayles, same with Marie. Just people. Besides, she was giving up. This time next year …

‘Abi Righton?’

Young. Frizzy hair. Big necklace, blues and greens and soft browns. She liked the necklace.

‘We’ll go in here. Can I get you a coffee or anything?’

‘We’re all right, thanks.’

‘It’s OK, bring the baby in. Hello?’

Mia turned her plastic cup upside-down.

The room was better than Abi had expected, sofa and two chairs, table, plants, picture of the sea on the wall.

‘We had a makeover,’ the policewoman said. ‘Interview room was like a cell before.’

She didn’t go round the other side of a desk, she sat on the sofa and beckoned Abi to the chair. She might not be much older than her. The beads of the necklace had a rough surface, like stone.

‘I’m DC Mead, Steph Mead.’ She had a notebook but she didn’t open it, just looked at Abi, smiling. ‘So?’

She seemed encouraging. It was like some sort of job interview, not like being with the police at all.

‘Look, this is probably nothing, well, part of it is probably, I just got worked up, only the first thing, that’s not nothing, I mean. It’s that girl, the one that went missing, Chantelle.’

‘Chantelle Buckley. Do you know her? Are you a friend?’

‘Not … no, not a friend, like, only I met her. That’s it. I just met her. Last week. And I was going to come when I read about her missing but I … well, I didn’t.’

‘Did you know that we found Chantelle? That we found her body?’ She spoke quite kindly, quite gently, as if she was breaking bad news to a relative and didn’t want to upset her.

‘I heard,’ Abi said. ‘Just on Radio Bev, this morning. I knew I should have come.’

‘Right. Well, you’re here now, that’s the main thing. Have you got something to tell me about Chantelle?’

‘No. I don’t know. I shouldn’t think I have, no. Only now it isn’t just Chantelle, is it?’

The policewoman looked at her. Then she said, ‘Abi, are you sure about that coffee? Only maybe you could do with it. It sounds as if you might have quite a bit to tell me.’

In the end, she was there for an hour and had two coffees. Mia slept without stirring the whole time.

It wasn’t difficult, nothing like as much as she’d expected, talking about herself, what she did, all of it, and then about Chantelle. Not that anything she had to say about her was really much use, she knew that, and Chantelle took less time than the rest. It was Marie. When she got to Marie, DC Mead asked her to wait, went out for a bit, and when she came back, had someone else with her, another detective, a man.

‘This is my colleague, DC Garnet, he’s working on the Chantelle Buckley case, so if you don’t mind, I’d like him to hear anything else you’ve got to tell us.’

He looked all right. A bit small. She didn’t think policemen were ever small but maybe it was different with plain clothes.

‘Abi, I hear you met Chantelle and there are a couple of things I’d like to ask you. But first, do you want to tell us about Marie O’Dowd?’

‘Yeah, right. Listen, I was a bit bothered, only not … not like I am now. Now there’s Chantelle. That makes it …’

They waited. What? She tried to find the right way to explain but her thoughts and feelings were in a mess and they’d got worse since she came here. Only she wasn’t backing out now. She owed Marie that much.

‘Different,’ she said at last. ‘It’s not a joke, is it, it’s not “Oh, that Marie, she’s done it before, gone off. Not my problem. She’ll be back.” OK, well, maybe she has and she will be, only now you’ve found that Chantelle dead, you ask me, it’s different.’

Nineteen

Ben Vanek laid out three ties on the bed – the plain blue, the navy with white spots and the maroon. He discarded the maroon – boring – then the blue – colour good but fabric cheap and shiny. But though the navy with white spots was smart, pretty new and given him by a girlfriend of whom he had quite fond memories, maybe it wasn’t right because it was a bit too smart. Maybe none of them wore ties at all.

Serrailler would wear a tie. Definitely.

Ben thought back to his old CID team. Ties? From time to time, but more often open-necked shirts, or T-shirts. Leather jackets.

He took off the navy tie with white spots. Opened his shirt collar. No, too casual, at least to start.

In the end, he put on the boring maroon, left the others on the bed. It was either the bed or the back of the one chair as they were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The rest of the house was not much better equipped. He went down the narrow staircase. The hall was empty. The front room had an old trunk, the back room, an armchair, a card table, a television. The kitchen had a cooker, a formica-topped table, two chairs, a fridge. And that was pretty much that. 27 St Mark’s Street. He had moved in three days ago.

But 27 St Mark’s Street was his, all his, bought without so much as a mortgage with everything his mother had left him when she had died the year before. She had known she was dying, after three bouts of cancer, three lots of appalling treatment, three remissions. And she had insisted on talking about everything with his father, and with Ben, including how much money she was leaving him.

‘Buy a house,’ she had said several times. ‘Have a holiday on it if you want to, enjoy it – but buy a house. You’ll never regret it.’

She had died before he had got the Lafferton job, but she would have approved of 27 St Mark’s Street, he knew that much. Victorian terraced cottages, preferably with original fireplaces intact, were right up her street. There were fireplaces in the front room, the back room and one of the bedrooms, though that was blocked and he would never use it. He’d have a fire in the front room, though. There was money left over, he could buy more than the bits of old furniture he had brought with him from the flat he had shared with two other plain clothes in Telford, he just hadn’t had a chance, didn’t know what would suit the house, what choice there was. He’d find his feet on the job first then ask around. Ikea? Auction rooms? There were curtains in the front room and the bedroom, which the previous owner had left, hideous curtains but they served, like the stair carpet and the lino in the kitchen. He could live with any of it because he had the house. His house.

He took his jacket off the nail behind the door. His stomach was doing what stomachs do the first morning of anything – first day at Big School, at uni, at Hendon – the combo of excitement, anticipation and dread, but this time, excitement was right up there because it was different. It was new and it was the pick, the job he’d wanted and never expected to get. The dream job.

The DC waiting in the station lobby wore pale pink cord jeans, a checked scarf fashionably tied and an anxious expression. Ben decided she missed being pretty but not by much.

‘DS Vanek?’ She made it sound like Varn-ek.

‘That’s right … but, er, do you mind, it’s pronounced Van-yek. Sorry.’

‘Oh God, another weird name. That’ll be fun, Vanek and Serrailler – nobody can ever say that either. I’m Steph Mead.’

‘Nice and normal then.’

He didn’t mind people getting his name wrong, it happened every day, and usually they didn’t mind him helping them get it right. He marked pink-cords down as prickly.

‘I’m your welcoming party.’ She punched in the security number to the door beside the duty desk. ‘There you go, one-five-six-four.’

‘It changes, presumably.’

‘You’ll get a text. It happens at random.’ They went up the regulation issue concrete stairs. ‘Where’d you come from?’

‘Shropshire.’

‘What, country parish?’

‘Telford.’

‘Right. Well, you’ll find Lafferton much like anywhere, I guess. Only things are a bit hot this morning, we’re just going into a case conf … Do you know DI Franks?’

‘He was on my interview panel.’

‘He’s taking it.’

She banged through two sets of swing doors and along to the end of a corridor. The conference room was filling up. He could hear the usual hubbub. It was like school playgrounds, Ben Vanek thought. The noise of children out at playtime was the same wherever you were.

‘Hi, morning, DS Vanek.’

He couldn’t get used to it. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to it. Detective Sergeant, no longer just DC. And heading upwards, only it didn’t do to make ambition too public, he’d learned that early on.

‘Morning, sir.’

‘Welcome on board. Interesting case today, listen and learn.’

‘Sir.’

He wondered where the Super was. It was Simon Serrailler he had come here to work with, Serrailler whose career path he wanted to emulate.

‘Is the DCS in?’

Steph Mead was finding them chairs. There were nine people in the room, and a couple more uniform coming in.

‘Serrailler? He’s on leave. He headed up the Falmer gang case for SIFT – earned himself a nice holiday.’

‘Oh.’

She gave him a look.

‘He’s a legend,’ Ben said, ‘that’s all.’

‘Apparently. I’ve only been here a month myself. I’ve never even met the guy. Head up, here we go.’

DI Franks hit the ground running, talking as he walked towards the white board at the end of the room.

‘Chantelle Buckley, seventeen, lived in Bevham, had worked there and in Lafferton as a prostitute.’ He took them through the photographs – Chantelle alive, wearing the vile green nylon jacket, Chantelle caught on CCTV at the bus station and again in Lafferton Market Square. Chantelle dead, body floating Ophelia-like in the water, caught up among the roots of the pollarded willows. Chantelle on the mortuary slab. Close-ups. Injuries. Franks went on. Last known movements, witnesses, family, acquaintances.

‘Motive?’ someone asked.

‘Good question. None, so far as we know. No enemies, no big debts, no current boyfriend. Bit of rivalry between the toms, always is, you know, “she took my punter”, “geroff my patch”, all the usual stuff, nothing important. Though there are a lot of new pimps, running very young girls. According to a local prostitute, Abi Righton, Chantelle had come to try her luck over here because there were too many foreign girls in Bevham.’

‘Family?’

‘Mother, two stepbrothers. Chantelle lived at home and her mother reported her missing. If they knew she was working as a tom they didn’t own to it. No family tensions, mother married the stepfather when Chantelle was eight, but he died last year. Gets on OK with the stepbrothers, both married and live elsewhere. Don’t think there’s anything there.’