Carson drove quickly away from the station.
‘Do you think he’ll be expecting us?’ Laura said.
‘Murderers are always expecting us, because they know we don’t give up. He’ll have his story worked out. I just don’t want him getting rid of any evidence before we get there.’
Laura looked out of the window, her jaw set, her mind working its way through the different stages of guilt. She should have got a better view of him. And just a couple of hours earlier, could she have done more? She should have rushed him, but she hesitated and let him get away.
They had to cross town to get to where Williams lived, along terraced strips and up a long climb away from the town centre that took them towards the town’s hospital, which overlooked the green roll of the moors, an antidote to the glass and steel of the hospital building.
Laura’s phone rang. It was Archie, one of the detectives from the squad. ‘I’ve just spoken to the agency that recruits the drivers for us,’ he said. ‘He joined us six years ago. He said that he had been working as a motor cycle courier in London, and then a delivery driver, but both companies have since gone bust. His national insurance number was checked out, and he had no convictions, and so all the tests were passed.’
‘What about his personal history?’ Laura said.
‘That’s where it gets interesting,’ Archie said. ‘They’ve pulled his application form, and he said that he went to school in Stoke, but I’ve just tried to find it on the internet and it doesn’t seem to exist.’
‘So he’s got a made-up past,’ Laura said, catching Carson’s gaze as he drove.
‘At least some of it,’ Archie said. ‘He does have a clean driving licence, and so he is official.’
‘Except that if he is Shane Grix, he was supposed to have been murdered in a London alleyway,’ Laura said, and then she paused as she thought of something. ‘I’ll call you back, Archie. I’ll just give Sandy a ring.’
She went through her contacts list to find the number of her old London colleague. The phone rang out until she heard the London chirp. ‘I need another favour,’ she said.
‘Make it quick, darlin’,’ he replied. ‘I love a friendly voice, but it’s Saturday night and I’m in the boozer.’
‘Which one? The Green Man?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Because you’re only across the road from the station. Could you go across and look in the Shane Grix murder file?’
There was a sigh. ‘Laura, the night’s just getting going. I’ve had too many drinks. Don’t make me do this.’
‘You’ll get the credit for solving that murder if you do,’ she said. ‘See if there is a list of Shane’s associates in the file.’
‘There is,’ he said. ‘I was looking at the file the other day, remember. We couldn’t track down most of them, because they were like him, homeless and drifting, keeping away from people like me.’
‘Look for a Peter Williams,’ she said.
Laura could hear his deliberations, but she knew that he would do what she asked, because for all the city boy charm he thought he had, he was a good copper at heart.
She smiled as he said, ‘Give me a few minutes, the file is still out. I’ll call you back.’
Carson glanced at Laura. ‘Are you thinking that the young man killed in the alleyway is really Peter Williams?’ he said.
‘We can guess that it probably isn’t Shane Grix,’ she said. ‘And so if it isn’t him, who else can it be? He must have stolen his identity when he killed him and started again.’
Carson frowned and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Perhaps it’s even simpler than that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Maybe Williams was killed because of his identity, so that Grix could come back up here and do this.’
‘What, targeted murder?’
Carson nodded. ‘Why not? Perhaps Williams was his route back up north, where he could return and be anonymous, because Williams looked like him and so might pass for Shane once he was set on fire.’
Laura looked down when she felt her phone buzz in her hand. It was Sandy from London. She could feel the tension in the car as she listened to what Sandy had to say. When he’d finished, Laura thanked him and then turned to Carson. ‘It all fits,’ she said. ‘Peter Williams was one of the people on the list. They were seen together a few times before the body was found, sleeping in the same shelters. He was a couple of years older and had been in London a year longer. But he was invisible. Grew up in care, no family to speak of, and so he just headed south.’
‘And no one to look for him when he didn’t go home,’ Carson said.
‘That’s right,’ Laura said, nodding. ‘He wasn’t a suspect, just one of Shane’s friends, and so the police in London weren’t hunting him down. And like Sandy said, Shane was just another London homeless. They die all the time.’
‘So he came back north and ended up in Blackley.’
‘In the same town as Shane’s real mother,’ Laura said. ‘Now that is too much of a coincidence. So if Peter Williams really is Shane Grix, we know why he is here, to be near his real mother.’
‘Hopefully he can tell us all about it in a minute,’ Carson said, as he turned onto a long straight road of terraced houses lined by old Fords and souped-up small cars, all smoothed out rear ends and tin-can exhausts. Carson scraped his wheels along the kerb outside an end-terrace. Laura jumped out and ran for the door, dirty white PVC. She heard Carson behind her.
‘Just go in,’ he said, puffing as he ran. ‘We’re not waiting for an invite.’
Laura reached for the handle, expecting it to be locked, but instead it swung open in front of her. There was no hallway, so that the door opened straight into a small square living room. She could see the kitchen behind, a square room of the same size.
‘Peter Williams?’ she shouted, but there was no response. She saw that the back door was closed, and so she guessed that he hadn’t run out through the yard.
The room in front of her was unremarkable. There was a flat screen television and cheap leather furniture, with a coffee table in the middle of the room, covered in old cups and flakes of rolling tobacco. There were no photographs on the wall, nothing to make it homely, just woodchip painted in cream.
The stairs ran out of the corner of the room, and she was about to head for them when she noticed a small cupboard built into the space under the stairs. She used her toe to open the door, and as it swung open she was surprised. She had expected old coats and a vacuum cleaner, but there was a computer on a small desk, along with a small blue chair, crammed into the space. There was no light.
Carson appeared on her shoulder. ‘It must get cosy in there,’ he said. ‘It must help him with the fantasy, to shut himself away, just the colours on the screen bouncing around the walls. We’ll get the computer unit to have a look, see if we can find his emails.’
‘Let’s try upstairs,’ she said.
Carson trailed her again, and as she climbed the stairs, she thought the house smelled musty and stale. It was the smell of beds that didn’t get changed too often, or carpets that had never felt the hum of a vacuum cleaner.
There were two bedrooms upstairs, one on either side of the stairs, along with a bathroom. Laura got a glimpse as she went past. It was old fashioned, with an avocado-coloured sink splashed by toothpaste and soap scum. There was only one toothbrush on the sill.
The rear bedroom was just a dumping ground, with bin liners filled with old clothes, some books piled up in one corner.
Laura backed out of the room. She wanted to see what was in the main bedroom. She stood in front of the door and gave it a push, letting the view inside slowly reveal itself. The curtains were open and the street light outside made the room bright.
The bedroom was like the nest of the house, simple and cheap, no frills, with old white bedding and chipped brown cupboards. There was an old coffee cup next to the bed.
‘No woman’s touch?’ Laura said.
Carson brushed past her and flicked the light switch as Laura went to a wardrobe opposite the bed and opened the doors. When she saw what was inside, she whistled.
‘What is it?’ Carson said.
‘Police uniforms,’ she said. ‘Yellow jackets, caps, full tunics, equipment belts.’
‘It would explain how he is able to convince them to talk to him,’ Carson said, coming up behind her. ‘That’s Abbott’s number,’ he pointed to the collar number on the jacket. ‘Abbott will get it for losing a uniform, but where is Williams?’
Then Laura’s phone rang.