Where are you?
The text was signed: Priya.
Lucy marvelled. Was she finally on first-name terms with the DSU? But then she remembered that she’d been undercover today, and just in case, if for any reason at all her mobile phone had finished up in the wrong hands, it wouldn’t have looked good if it was found to be carrying messages bearing police insignia.
She keyed in a quick reply:
Metrolink. Heading back to city centre.
Available?
Yes.
Pick you up at Victoria end of Deansgate. 15 mins.
Lucy made it to the rendezvous point on time without difficulty, though it was now five o’clock in the afternoon and central Manchester was embroiled in its daily rush-hour chaos. The pavements thronged with fast-moving pedestrians; the roads were log-jammed with cars, each one of which, thanks to the rapidly falling temperature, belched thick swirls of exhaust into the headlight glare from the vehicle behind. It was dark already of course, and the occasional staccato flashes in the sky, usually followed by distant, booming detonations, reminded her that November 5th was only three days away.
Once she was there, Priya Nehwal pulled up alongside her in a metallic-beige Lexus RX.
Lucy clambered into the front passenger seat, halting only as Nehwal threw an old parka coat into the back. They quickly pulled away from the kerb.
The Lexus was luxuriously warm inside, though as usual, DSU Nehwal was well wrapped in jeans and a tatty, baggy sweatshirt that looked way too large for her.
‘At least you’re in one piece,’ she remarked, not glancing at Lucy as she drove.
‘Certainly am, ma’am,’ Lucy replied. ‘Relatively painless, to be honest.’
‘How did it go?’
‘Pretty well. I start tomorrow … on the coat-check desk.’
Now Nehwal did look round, arching a single eyebrow.
‘I’d imagine Jayne McIvar’s testing my credentials first,’ Lucy added. ‘If she finds anything she doesn’t like tonight … well, I suppose tomorrow’ll be a very interesting day.’
Nehwal drove on. ‘What do you make of her? McIvar?’
‘She’s no pushover, that’s for sure.’
‘You got that right …’ Fleetingly, Nehwal almost sounded impressed. ‘She’s her own woman, and always has been. Typical of a certain type of criminal, though. I mean she’s got the intellect and the drive to turn her hand to anything she wants and make a success of it, but somehow or other she’s stuck in this life.’
‘I don’t get the impression she tolerates fools lightly,’ Lucy said.
‘No. But to be fair, she’s not alone in that.’
There was a brief heavy silence as they headed out of the centre, following Great Ducie Street until it became Bury New Road, and then driving north through Higher Broughton.
‘Thanks for picking me up, by the way,’ Lucy said.
Nehwal shrugged. ‘No big deal. I happened to be in town. Listen …’ Her tone changed slightly; softening, though not by a great deal. ‘It’s been intimated to me by a certain party that I was perhaps a little abrupt with you when you first brought this new information to us. A little on the dubious side, perhaps.’
Her tone might have softened, but her words implied that she herself wasn’t entirely convinced.
‘And would that certain party be DI Slater?’ Lucy wondered.
Nehwal ignored the question. ‘I don’t want you to think it’s anything personal, PC Clayburn. I value any colleague who generates good work. So far, we don’t know whether this lead will pan out, but it’s interesting and it feels like progress in some shape or form. It was also … well, it was also intimated to me that I should be more grateful than I have been for your volunteering to go into the lions’ den, so to speak, to see this thing through.’
Lucy was amused, but didn’t let it show.
Priya Nehwal had earned her reputation by doing the hard yards; she was certainly the toughest, most hard-bitten policewoman Lucy had ever met. All this soft-soaping – if that was what it was supposed to be – must have been quite a wrench for her.
‘I imagine you’ve done plenty of covert enquiries during your own service, ma’am.’
‘I have indeed,’ Nehwal admitted. ‘And it’s rarely a cakewalk. I’m not going to go over it all again about how risky this could potentially be for you, PC Clayburn, because that stuff’s getting boring now, and it’s the last thing you need to hear the night before it all kicks off … but don’t think I’m dismissive of this work you’re doing for us just because I don’t slap you on the back now and then.’
‘Not a problem, ma’am.’
‘Good. So … you ready to go home now? I can drop you off.’
Lucy was additionally amused. It sounded as if her boss had actually stage-managed this meeting just to apologise. Either that or to give her a pep talk, though there hadn’t been much of that so far. Priya Nehwal might be the ace thief-taker, but she was a bit of a numbskull when it came to close-in man management.
‘I should probably go back to the nick,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ve barely put in a full shift today.’
‘You will tomorrow,’ Nehwal replied. ‘It’s going to be quite a learning curve for you. I’ll take you home, and sign you off myself later.’
They were now in Prestwich, and the quickest route from here to Saltbridge lay along the M62 motorway and then down the M60, both of which were still chocka with early-evening traffic. It was almost six o’clock when they finally reached the Crowley West turn-off.
‘What about Tammy Nethercot?’ Nehwal wondered as they headed into Saltbridge through its outlying housing estates. The traffic here was much thinner. ‘Is she a total crackpot, or can we trust her to keep her mouth shut from this point?’
‘Well, like I say, she doesn’t really know anything. I’m just a mate she did a favour for.’
Nehwal pondered that. ‘You know, if this covert op goes west … our mate Tammy could end up in a spot of bother.’
‘I know that, ma’am.’ Lucy was discomforted by the thought of this. ‘Whatever happens at SugaBabes, I’m going to have to do my best to emerge at the other side of it with my cover intact. Though I don’t suppose there’s any guarantee that’ll happen.’
‘There are no guarantees in this line of work.’
‘I took Tammy to a bar afterwards and bought her a drink to thank her. Well, several drinks in her case.’
Nehwal glanced at her again, as if genuinely bemused by such generosity. ‘You sure she believes you’re a tom? There’s no doubt you’re a good actor. You’ve made it this far. But …’ She appraised Lucy’s hair, her flawless make-up, her shapely legs in dark nylon. ‘You don’t look the part today.’
Lucy shrugged. ‘Gone out on a limb today to look good, ma’am. She commented on it, but positively. Overall, I think I’m fulfilling some kind of wish she’s got. She’s only young, but she’s been through the mill, I can tell that. Sounds like her mum was a right old cow, and she never talks about any siblings. Maybe I’m just the big sister she wishes she’s always had.’
‘Is she a bit dim then?’
It sounded like an unkind question, but Lucy knew it wasn’t intended that way. Priya Nehwal was a straight-to-the-point kind of copper, and it was perfectly reasonable for her to enquire into the dependability of a potentially damaged source.
‘I think so, yes. But I trust her on this …’
At which point a figure darted out in front of the car, seemingly from nowhere.
Nehwal shouted a warning as she threw the wheel right, veering the Lexus sharply and dangerously into the opposite carriageway, where it slid to the far kerb, slamming it with its tyres and coming abruptly to a halt. They hadn’t struck the figure, but it tottered and fell as they screeched past, falling onto its face in the middle of the tarmac.
Lucy and Nehwal glanced at each other, stunned – and then clambered hurriedly out.
As they did, the figure struggled back to its feet.
It was a bloke, youngish and well built.
‘You alright, mate?’ Lucy called, rounding the Lexus, but as she encroached on him she saw that he was younger than she’d first thought, no more than nineteen. He was wearing standard outdoor clothing for the time of year: dark canvas trousers, a dark zip-up anorak over a hoodie-top, and black woollen gloves, all set off by an incongruous pair of bright-orange trainers. His hair was a mop of sweaty rat-tails, his face wet, pale and slug-like, though the eyes in the centre of it bulged like duck eggs.
He said nothing, merely backed away towards the opposite pavement.
‘We’re police officers, sir,’ Nehwal called, showing her warrant card. ‘You hurt?’
He shook his head; a slight, tight movement.
‘What’s happened?’ Lucy asked him.
He mouthed something inaudible, and then pointed past them, his finger quivering.
They turned to look. Nothing especially stood out. This was Tubbs Road, one of Saltbridge’s lesser-used outer thoroughfares. Along this stretch of it there was a row of dingy shops: bicycle repairs, a tanning salon, a pawnbroker’s, second-hand odds and sods, all currently closed; and a disused industrial unit, a towering façade of grotty red brick and heavy corrugated iron, scraps of wastepaper dangling from the rusted grille over its front door. No one was there, but between the shops and the factory, a narrow cobbled street led off into icy blackness, and it was towards this that the young bloke had pointed.
Lucy turned back to face him. ‘What’s going on, mate …?’
But he was running again. He reached a corner some thirty yards off, and without a backwards glance, hared around it and was gone.
‘Incidents like this happen in Crowley all the time?’ Nehwal wondered, perplexed.
‘Perhaps a bit more regularly than they did before Jill the Ripper, ma’am.’ Lucy’s unease grew as she assessed the entrance to the narrow street. ‘That’s Dedman Lane. It leads down to Dedman Delph … which is well known round here as a dogging spot.’
‘Dogging? This early in the evening?’
‘It’s already dark, ma’am. What else do they need?’
Nehwal ruminated on this as she trudged back to the Lexus, moving ever more quickly until they were both of them rushing.
‘Can we get a car down there?’ Nehwal asked, switching the engine on.
‘Yes, ma’am. They don’t just go there on foot, they park up.’
‘This can’t be,’ the DSU muttered, as she swung the heavy vehicle into the narrow street. ‘It just cannot … not two miles from the fucking Incident Room!’
The narrow lane dipped quickly downhill, its uneven cobbles providing a bumpy ride, their headlights initially picking out nothing along either verge except fallen leaves and scattered rubbish.
Dedman Delph wasn’t a real valley, but man-made. Like everything else on the outskirts of Manchester, it had served industrial purposes sometime in the past. Lucy didn’t have a clue what, though the empty, boarded-up ruin at the valley’s far end had once been a pump-house of some sort. Most of the Delph’s sides, which were steep and crumbly, were clad with weeds and scraggy thorn bushes, while its floor was made from impacted red clay and in some sections flat concrete. Much of that had rotted and split, but it was still excellent for parking.
And for dogging of course. Primarily because at night, as now, it lay in pitch darkness.
They wallowed down onto level ground again, leaving the cobblestones behind, the Lexus tyres sliding on a broken, gluey surface. Nehwal hit ‘full-beam’, the twin lights spearing out through a black void, finding nothing but rolling, arid emptiness.
‘Not much activity tonight,’ she commented, driving slowly forward.
‘It’s not a particularly welcoming place even when there isn’t a killer on the prowl,’ Lucy responded. ‘Wait, ma’am … there!’
At the far end of the valley floor, maybe a hundred yards away, quite close to where the pump-house stood, they spotted what looked like the interior light of a stationary vehicle. Nehwal slowed them to a halt.
‘What’s the normal form down here?’ she asked.
Lucy shrugged. ‘It varies, but generally the doggers wait at the south end of the valley … that’s behind us, where there’s a barbed wire fence. The couples tend to park up at the north end, which is where that one is … and turn their internal lights on when they’re ready for some action. That’s the signal for the doggers to come over.’
‘That organised, is it?’ Nehwal sounded fascinated. ‘Who knew?’
‘They like to play it reasonably safe. If a car’s doors and windows remain closed, it supposedly means the couples are only interested in putting on a show. But if the windows are open, it’s an invitation for the blokes outside to reach in with various of their body-parts. If the doors are open too, it’s anything goes.’
Nehwal continued to watch the parked vehicle. It remained motionless, and though it was difficult to be sure from this distance, both their eyes were now adjusting sufficiently to the darkness to distinguish what looked like a single figure in its front passenger seat.
‘You seem to know an awful lot about it, PC Clayburn …?’
‘I’ve policed this town for the last …’
‘Ten years, yes.’ Nehwal put the Lexus in gear and eased it forward again. Lucy powered her window down. Icy air wafted in, but there was nothing to hear aside from the smoothly purring engine and occasional crackle of distant fireworks.
They stopped again some ten yards short of the motionless vehicle. It was a car, a cream-coloured Ford Fiesta, and it had been parked about five yards to the left of the derelict pump-house, which in the glow of Nehwal’s headlights was a scabrous, skullish ruin, the rotted boards having fallen away from its front entrance and the two windows above it.
As they’d already seen, a person occupied the Fiesta’s front passenger seat, though the windscreen was so smeary that it was difficult establishing whether it was male or female, or whether it had moved at all since they had first started their approach. Lucy didn’t think it had. Nor did she expect that the preponderance of redness she could see all over it could have any kind of benign explanation.
‘This isn’t good,’ she said quietly.
‘Agreed.’ Nehwal turned her engine off. ‘Even so, you have to stay in here.’
Lucy glanced round at her. ‘Ma’am?’
‘Use your loaf, PC Clayburn. If this is our girl and she’s still in the area, we don’t want her seeing you the night before you go undercover in a brothel where she might work, do we?’
‘If this is our girl you’re going to need all the help you can get. She’s butchered six men.’
Nehwal grabbed a torch from her glovebox and opened the driver’s door. ‘I’ll call you if I need you.’
Lucy offered her the radio from the dash. ‘Take this at least.’
‘I checked that out at five this morning. Battery’s been dead for the last hour and a half.’
‘In that case …’ Lucy reached behind her. ‘Sorry for the disobedience …’
Nehwal said nothing but waited outside the Lexus, while Lucy stripped off her raincoat and then wrestled her way into the much heavier parka. Once it was on, she zipped it and then tugged up its stovepipe hood, so that her head and face were almost completely covered.
She jumped out and they approached the Fiesta side-by-side, though Lucy’s stilettos were hardly the ideal footwear on the softish clay surface, which broke and shifted under their pinpoint heels. They halted by the vehicle’s front-offside corner. In the weak, brownish glow of the interior light, the figure in the front passenger seat was covered by a sheet.
That sheet was dingy and blotched with crimson.
Nehwal dug a pair of disposable latex gloves from her back pocket, and pulled them on. Then she moved forward to the open passenger window, and reached through, catching the edge of the sheet between two fingertips and trying to pull it. Initially, the sheet resisted but then, slowly, it began to slide free, rancid fold after rancid fold passing down over the inert shape beneath, until it dropped into the footwell.
Involuntarily, despite their near half-century of combined experience, the two policewomen grunted with shock.
It was an elderly man – quite elderly in fact, maybe somewhere in his seventies – though actual identification would not be easy. His face hadn’t exactly been obliterated, but it was so puffed and bruised and cut, and so much blood had streaked down over it from his dented cranium, that it would have been difficult even for a relative to recognise him. Whoever he was, his trousers had been pushed down to his ankles and his grimy shirt torn open into two flaps; the women didn’t need to look too hard at the gory mess exposed between his thighs to guess at the cause of death.
‘God almighty,’ Lucy breathed.
‘There’s a spool of crime-scene tape in the boot of my car,’ Nehwal said dispassionately, taking her phone from the frontal pouch of her sweat-shirt. ‘We want a perimeter ASAP.’
Lucy made to move but then stopped. ‘Ma’am … what about that idiot we saw running?’
‘He’s well gone by now, but we need to trace him.’ Nehwal tapped in a number.
‘A male suspect after all, ma’am?’
‘Unlikely. Unless he had his own clever reasons for pointing us in the right direction.’
‘A dogger then? Looking for some fun.’
‘Probably. Doesn’t know how lucky he is he didn’t get it, does he? But he’s a witness … so we need him. Blast it … can’t get a signal.’
‘Lowest part of town. Reception’s always poor down here. Ma’am … this body looks very fresh.’ Though it broke all the rules, Lucy couldn’t resist placing a knuckle against the corpse’s neck. The banging of her heart steadily increased. ‘He’s still warm.’
Before Nehwal could respond, there was a clatter of woodwork from inside the pump-house. They swung around together, gazing at the gloomy structure.
Instinctively, Nehwal pocketed the phone so that both her hands were free.
They waited, their smoky breath furling around them.
Aside from a renewed popping and fizzing of distant fireworks, there was silence. Nehwal switched her torch on, its cone of light embossing the mossy, red-brick exterior of the old industrial outbuilding, yet intensifying the blackness behind its apertures. Lucy couldn’t help glancing back at the mutilated form slumped in the car. An OAP yes, but the seventh in line, and the others hadn’t been even close to that age. One of them had weighed twenty-five stone, for God’s sake! Two of them got chopped together at the same time!
Just how physically powerful was this killer? What kind of chance would they realistically stand in a full-on confrontation, even the pair of them together?
‘Go round the back,’ Nehwal said quietly. ‘Cover the rear exit.’ Lucy nodded and made to move, only for Nehwal to grip her wrist. ‘Go armed.’
‘Ma’am, I’ve been plain clothes all day, I’ve got no …’
‘Find something.’
Lucy was initially bewildered by this, but then spotted the way Nehwal was wielding the torch – now like a baton rather than a flashlight. She leaned down and picked up a broken half-brick, before proceeding warily around the exterior, stepping with difficulty through clumps of desiccated weeds and thorns. At the rear, she halted in front of a single narrow doorway, the door itself broken off and lying to one side.
Various stagnant odours leaked through the gap: oil, mildew, rotted rags.
She listened again. Something creaked inside, very faintly – but that could have been Nehwal progressing in from the front.
Unable to believe she was doing this while wearing a skirt, heels and a heavy old coat that wasn’t hers, and with a jagged lump of brick in her hand, Lucy edged forward into the darkness – and almost immediately came to another bare brick wall.
From here, she could go either left or right. Theoretically she should have held this point, to ensure no one slipped past. But there was no conceivable way she could allow her boss, who was no more than five-five and in her early fifties, to enter the building alone.
Heart thumping, Lucy went left, turning a corner into open space. Nothing stirred in the inky blackness in front of her. Instinctively, she reached for the phone in her pocket, to switch its light on, only to remember that it was in the pocket of the other coat. Not that she was completely blinded; after so long at the bottom of Dedman Delph, her eyes were readjusting quickly. She spied a row of broken windows further to her left, all covered in wire netting. It gave sufficient illumination to show a floor strewn with boxes and piles of old newspapers, and what looked like masses of wood and timber piled against the walls.
Still there was no movement, neither from Nehwal nor anyone hiding out in here. Even so, Lucy only shuffled forward with caution. ‘Ma’am?’
There was no reply. Until a fierce red light seared through the windows, a loud series of rat-a-tat bangs accompanying it.
More fireworks … but even so Lucy froze.
In that fleeting instant, she’d seen a figure standing in a corner.
Indistinct but tall – taller than she was – and wearing dark clothing, including some kind of hat pulled partly down over its face. It stood very still between an old wardrobe and an upright roll of carpet.
Lucy pivoted slowly towards it. As the firework flashes diminished again, only its outline remained visible – its outline and its face, which, though it was partially concealed, glinted palely, and, she now saw, was garish in the extreme; grotesquely made-up with bright slashes of what in proper lighting would no doubt be lurid colour.
An icy barb went through her as she realised that the figure was wearing a mask.
It could even be a clown mask.
And yet still it didn’t move. Its build was difficult to distinguish, but there was something slightly “off” about it, she now thought: it seemed to sag a little.
Injured maybe? Tired? Or playacting?
Lucy hadn’t glimpsed any kind of weapon, neither a blunt instrument nor a blade, but the hunk of brick in her hand suddenly felt ungainly and inadequate.
She faced the figure full on. There was about six yards between them. At any second, she expected it to lurch forward in a blur of speed, maybe silently, maybe screaming.
She lofted the brick as though to throw it.
‘Listen …’ She spoke quietly, calmly. ‘I am a police officer, and I am armed … and you are going to have to show me both your hands.’
The figure made no move to comply.
‘I will tell you one more time …’
‘Relax,’ a voice interrupted.
Lucy jumped as the room filled with brilliant white torchlight.
Nehwal stepped in through a connecting door, which in the dimness Lucy hadn’t previously noticed. The DSU’s beam focused itself on the shape in the corner.
It wasn’t a living person at all, but a mannequin, an effigy suspended between two corroded bolts in the wall by loops of string tied under its armpits, which explained the odd posture. It was made from an old dark suit and a tatty brown sweater. Its head was a crumpled football, with a plastic mask attached to the front, the latter not depicting the face of a clown but the face of a grinning male with a sharp moustache and pointed beard. The broad-brimmed Guy Fawkes hat looked like a fancy dress shop reject.
Nehwal glanced around. ‘Lots more firewood in the room next door. Plus several cans of petrol. Someone was planning a big party for Thursday.’
Lucy walked over to the figure anyway, just to be sure. Up close, it smelled like a pile of unwashed laundry. When she pressed the ragged jersey, it yielded, newspaper crackling underneath. She turned back. ‘Ma’am … we both heard something.’
Nehwal pointed upward. When Lucy looked, she saw a mass of crisscrossing pipework dangling with cobwebs and crammed with birds’ nests. Disturbed by the torchlight, pigeons fluttered back and forth among it.
‘There’re more of them next door,’ Nehwal said. ‘Roosting in the firewood, which is all loose. A few bits shifted even while I was poking around.’
Lucy glanced again at the Guy. It sagged on the two bolts, its head cocked to one side as it regarded her with the empty holes of its eyes.
‘Ma’am, if you tell anyone about this, well … let’s just say I’ll never live it down …’
‘PC Clayburn, we’ve just walked together into what we thought was a murderer’s den.’ Nehwal scanned the rest of the room. ‘We’ve got a bloke outside who looks more like a pile of dog-meat than a human being. Trust me, I’m not in the mood to be telling funny stories.’
They searched the rest of the place together, but it wasn’t large and there was nobody else concealed in there. Eventually, they went outside, where a faint scent of cordite was noticeable, along with traces of smoke settling in the valley from high overhead.
‘Going to have to call this in one way or the other.’ Nehwal fiddled irritably with her phone. ‘And the only way to do that is by finding higher ground. In the meantime … I need that perimeter.’
Lucy followed her to the Lexus, though they steered clear of the Fiesta to avoid compromising any telltale footprints or tyre-tracks. Nehwal opened her boot, and handed Lucy a roll of incident tape and several plastic pegs, along with the torch.
‘You going to be all right?’ she asked. Fleetingly, she looked to be having second thoughts about leaving Lucy here alone. ‘I’ll be ten minutes max.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Lucy replied, though in truth she didn’t know which to be more unnerved by: the prospect of waiting down here in the blackness of Dedman Delph for ten minutes (or, more likely, half an hour), with a mangled corpse not five or six yards away, or the thought of that eerie, grinning figure inside the pump-house.
Nehwal nodded, and opened the driver’s door. ‘Whoever our girl is, I’d imagine she’s far from here by now.’
Lucy shrugged. ‘If she isn’t, ma’am … well, I can always arrest her.’