Lucy rode ahead of Des’s juddery old Beetle, crossing the benighted centre of Crowley, which, with rush hour behind them, was rapidly emptying of traffic and pedestrians.
St Clement’s Avenue was towards the eastern end of the borough, on one of its old industrial parks. They reached it by taking Adolphus Road, which dipped down under a couple of railway bridges and then passed through several hundred acres of derelict land. Once there’d been lines of terraced streets here and, no doubt, sometime in the future, car showrooms and warehouse DIY stores would spring up to replace them, but at present it was disused. Beyond it stood Penrose Mill, a square-shouldered Victorian colossus whose chimneys hadn’t smoked in decades and whose parallel rows of oblong windows looked in on dust-filled emptiness.
Lucy circled around the Gothic structure via a series of cobbled side-streets, eventually swerving into St Clement’s Avenue and proceeding along it at pace. The phone-box from which the call had been made sat in the glow of a single streetlight at the junction with Sawberry Lane, another identically bleak and underused thoroughfare.
Lucy parked up some twenty yards away, Des slowing to a halt behind her. She took her helmet off and walked warily forward. The box was empty, but already she could see a white envelope lying on top of the telephone. She glanced around before entering. The crossroads was hemmed in by tall fences of corrugated metal, but no one else was in sight.
There wasn’t a sound, until Des slammed the door to his Beetle, the impact of which echoed across the decrepit neighbourhood.
Glaring back at him, to which he mouthed a bewildered ‘What?’, Lucy dug a pair of disposable gloves from her pocket and snapped them in place before entering the phone-box.
The envelope, which had been neatly sealed, was typewritten:
PC CLAYBURN
Holding it by its corner, she took it outside, where she opened it, going in from the bottom end rather than the top so as not to disturb any DNA-loaded saliva. She extricated a single typewritten sheet:
YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE
MEET ME AT 8
THE PLAYGROUND, MULBERRY CRES
COME ALONE
NOBODY ELSE OR WE DON’T TALK
‘What do you think this is?’ Lucy wondered, slipping the note into a sterile evidence sack.
‘A bollocking,’ Des replied. ‘If you don’t take it straight to the boss.’
‘Yeah, but it’s addressed to me.’
‘And who are you? No disrespect, Lucy … but you’re no one.’ He set off back to his car. ‘That makes this a bit too weird.’
‘Whoa … Des, we have to go over there now. We’ve got twenty minutes or this deal’s off.’
He glanced back, clearly unhappy. ‘At the very least we should call it in.’
‘He said I have to go alone. The fact he’s taking me across town means he’s probably going to be watching me. If the whole taskforce turns up, we’ll not see him for dust.’
‘He’s typewritten this note, chuck. You know what that means? This is pre-planned.’
‘Yeah, I get that, but like I say … we do nothing and we lose it all. We’ve now got less than twenty minutes.’
Des dallied by his car. ‘You seriously want to go over there?’
‘What choice have we got?’
‘But if I follow you … which someone has to, he might leg it then too.’
‘Not if you stay back a little and try to keep out of sight.’
‘You’d better not be glory-hunting here, Lucy.’
‘Des, I didn’t ask for this.’
‘Look …’ He tried to sound sympathetic. ‘I don’t know why you’re not part of the team anymore. You say you’re the one who got rumbled. But it was always likely to happen, you being an old hand – there was always more chance you’d get clocked than most of the other girls. But whatever it was, even if it was your fault, this is not going to make up for it.’
‘Des …’ Lucy held her ground. ‘We need to check this lead before it fizzles out. So are you coming or not? We haven’t got time for you to think about it, to go asking for permission, to hang fire till we get some back-up … we’ve got to act on it now!’
He glanced again at the plastic-wrapped note. ‘You know there’ll probably be another one of these when we get there, sending you somewhere else. It’s the oldest trick in the book.’
‘All the more reason for us to play it canny.’ She stowed the evidence in the inside pocket of her combat jacket, boarded her bike and hefted her helmet. ‘So don’t crowd me.’
‘And I really wanted to get home for tea tonight.’
She pulled her helmet on and lifted its visor. ‘Do you want to get your tea, or do you want to be the guy who turns in a photograph of Jill the Ripper?’
‘Just get going!’ Des opened his car. ‘And don’t hit the gas. I know I’m supposed to be hanging back, but in this donkey-wagon that won’t be a problem at all.’
The second location was somewhat less intimidating than the first: a middle-class housing estate on the edge of Crowley Golf Course. Though it was only mid-evening, plunging temperatures and November damp was keeping the locals indoors. Light still showed through most downstairs windows, but only via drawn curtains. All was quiet.
Mulberry Crescent was in the very centre, and near enough identical to all the other roads on the estate, distinctive only for the fenced-off kiddies’ sandpit and playground at the south end of it. Lucy and Des had agreed beforehand that he wouldn’t actually follow her there, but would park in Dunwood Avenue, which stood adjacent, and sit with his headlights turned off but his engine running. As they were both officially off-duty and not equipped with radios, they’d agreed to maintain an open line to each other via their mobiles. Des had expressed dissatisfaction with the idea when he’d realised it meant she’d be out of his sight. That seemed to defeat the point of the whole exercise, but as Lucy argued, it was surely a mistake to risk calling this guy’s bluff when they hadn’t gleaned anything useful from him yet.
Subsequently, Lucy cruised down Mulberry Crescent alone. She constantly checked over her shoulder. No one was ever in sight, but there were countless parked cars, low walls and shadowy places concealed amid suburban shrubbery, where someone could hide while they watched her. And given the quirkiness of this whole situation it seemed highly likely that someone would be.
She drew to a halt at the kerb beside the gate to the playground. Beyond its waist-high mesh fence lay the sandpit, and beyond that a row of benches facing the swings. Though obscured by dimness, a lone figure looked to be seated on one of those benches.
Whoever it was, his back was towards Lucy, and he was hunched forward so that she couldn’t determine any distinguishing features.
She dismounted, removed her helmet and tucked it under her arm, and quietly explained the situation to Des as she approached the playground gate. His tinny response, which she could barely hear because she couldn’t risk taking the phone from her pocket, went something like: ‘Take it slow and easy.’
Lucy did so, opting to cross the sandpit rather than follow the flagged path around it, as that would hush her footsteps – though of course, on reflection it felt like a pointless safeguard. Whoever this guy was, he’d know that a motorbike had pulled up behind him.
Lucy halted when she reached the grass again. The slumped figure was ten yards in front.
‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Can I ask what you’re doing here?’
The figure didn’t move, let alone reply.
Lucy advanced, warily. ‘I should advise you I’m a police officer.’
Still no response.
‘Careful chuck!’ came Des’s tinny voice.
‘I’m actually the police officer,’ Lucy said. ‘The one you’ve been wanting to speak to.’
The figure was now only five yards away, yet in the absence of light he was still only vaguely discernible. She recalled that disguised voice on the phone. Was it possible … was it conceivable that he was actually a she?
Wild thoughts flashed through her mind: crime scene photos of mutilated male faces; healthy skulls hammered out of shape; hair matted with blood and bone fragments.
‘I don’t appreciate the way you’ve gone about this,’ she said, every muscle tightening. ‘But given that this is a serious issue I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt …’
She was three yards short of him when a motion-sensitive arc-light at the top of a pole in the middle of the playground exploded to life. Lucy jumped, and spun halfway around.
Belatedly, she glanced back to the bench.
What she’d thought had been someone sitting there was nothing more than a bin-liner tied at the neck with twine and, by the looks of it, packed with rubbish.
‘Shit!’ she said under her breath.
‘What’s happening?’ Des asked from her pocket.
‘Nothing.’ Inadvertently, she spoke aloud. ‘Misidentification.’
‘Where are you, chuck?’
She lowered her voice again. ‘Where I’m supposed to be. On the playground.’
‘I’m coming round there.’
‘Negative, Des. Stand by … he may not be done with me yet.’
She pivoted three hundred and sixty degrees, but thanks to the safety light saw nobody else there. However, as she walked back towards the gate, her eyes fell on the pillar box across the road – and the white envelope lying on top of it.
She hurried over there.
As before, the front of the envelope was inscribed:
PC CLAYBURN
When she opened it, it contained a single sheet, printed:
8.30
EMPORIA SUBWAYS
COME ALONE OR NO DICE
Again, this gave her approximately twenty minutes to get back to the town centre. She could only imagine what Des’s view would be, and she received it with both barrels when they next had a conflab, though as before they had to do this under a pretence of not knowing each other, Lucy sitting astride her bike alongside his open driver’s window while they waited at a red light.
‘So it’s back across the borough again,’ he said in a tone of deep dissatisfaction.
‘He obviously wants to make certain I’m coming alone,’ she replied.
‘Lucy … he’s a witness who doesn’t want his name in the papers. This is a hell of a lot of trouble to go to for that.’
‘Well, what do you think he’s up to?’
‘Either he’s got a bit more in mind than giving you a statement. Or …’
‘Or what?’
‘Or it’s someone ripping the piss.’
She almost glanced round. ‘Why would someone do that?’
‘You tell me … you’re the one who’s made enemies in CID in the past.’
She was stunned. ‘You don’t mean one of our lot?’
‘Who else knows you’re on the taskforce?’
‘Someone would send me all the way round town to even a score for something that happened four years ago?’ she said. ‘Seriously?’
‘More likely to have a laugh,’ he replied.
‘I thought Operation Clearway was strictly for grown-ups.’
‘Tell that to the guy who christened you “the Ripper Chicks”. I know plenty fellas in this job who’ve never grown up, and so do you.’
‘So what do you propose?’
‘Bag that letter along with the other one, take them both back and log them into evidence. If it is someone fucking about, let them shit themselves, wondering whether forensics’ll turn up their dabs.’
‘Can I make an alternative suggestion?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Go on.’
‘That we proceed to the Subways, check out this one last lead, and if that’s a load of cobblers too, we do exactly what you’ve just said. Des … suspicious though this is, we can’t not try to see what’s going on here? How would we sleep tonight?’
The light changed and they proceeded side-by-side to the next intersection, where another red brought them to a temporary halt. Lucy wasn’t actually convinced that this was cover enough. If someone was watching, he’d see that she was interacting with the car next to her. But in all honesty, if this guy was for real and a genuine witness, it shouldn’t really matter to him if more than one police officer showed up. Okay, he might be a nervous sort who’d gone to inordinate lengths to avoid a complex police entanglement, but ultimately he couldn’t seriously have expected an officer to fly solo on this given the potential risks.
‘How do you want to play this?’ Des asked. ‘There’s a lot of subway space under the precinct and he didn’t give you a specific spot … which is another thing I don’t like about it.’
‘Been thinking about that,’ she said. ‘I can leave my bike anywhere, but I’m gonna park at the south end, near the bus station, and walk through from that side.’
‘And what about me?’
‘Perhaps you can park on the taxi rank at the north end and walk through from that side? Meet me in the middle. That way, if he realises I’m not alone and legs it, you’ll be in a good position to head him off. And if he attacks me … well, you’ll be there in a minute or two, won’t you?’
They drove on together through the intersection, Des still far from happy.