Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lucy found herself busy in the nick until quite late that Monday night. One day in, and the workload was mountainous.
In addition to Tessa Payne, she had three other officers working with her: DC Tim Lawless from Serious Crimes (who wasn’t impressed to be under the tactical command of a divisional detective); DC Judy Stryker, who was on loan from Crowley Robbery (and who also didn’t want to be there); and PC Malcolm Peabody, who was quite a bit happier with the gig, no doubt seeing it as his first real taste of CID, though his inspector had only agreed to see him put into plain clothes for one week, at which point they would review it.
‘One week,’ Lucy chuckled, as she drove. ‘Hope it’s bloody sorted by then.’
But it didn’t feel as if it would be. Already they were pulled out. Payne had spent most of that day flogging through endless reams of CCTV footage, not just from the Hollinbrook area but from the various housing estates along the canal. Peabody, meanwhile, had been an actual presence in Hollinbrook, going door-to-door, after which his brief was to prowl the town’s homeless shelters, making enquiries about other potential missing persons. Lawless was midway through chasing all known black or blue transit vans sold in the Greater Manchester area in the last ten years, while Stryker, having interviewed Alex Calderwood at length to see if Lorna Cunningham had made any noteworthy comments recently, perhaps regarding a suspicion that she was being watched or followed, or maybe having trouble with someone, would tomorrow move on to ask similar questions of Cunningham’s other friends and associates (and in their case, to also ask about Calderwood himself).
Later on in the week, Lucy would do the same with the friends and relatives of Harry Hopkins, but that was after she’d personally perused Lorna Cunningham’s phone records, examined the crime scene on the canal bank and liaised with DI Beardmore and the N Division’s official press officer about how the public could best be brought in to assist.
But her last port of call today, now that she’d finally managed to get outside, was to speak again with Sister Cassie, and obtain an actual statement regarding the van she’d seen and the alleged abduction of Fred Holborn. She’d already double-checked the partial VRM written on the condom wrapper, and it had come up again as non-existent. This meant that number-plate recognition software would be next to useless, as the perp would likely have more than one such fake plate and would change them regularly.
As she slowed down to accommodate the late evening traffic on Adolphus Road, Lucy pondered the weirdness of a kidnapper who would start out by snatching vagrants off the streets, then would move on to an OAP outside his home, and finally would pick on a much younger person, an athlete no less. It was weirder still if you considered that this might be the same person, or persons, who’d begun their reign of terror by snatching dogs.
When you voiced it in those terms, it was too nutty for words. But so often with unusual cases, when you finally uncovered a viable explanation it left you kicking yourself at how obvious it had been, at how it had been right under your nose and you’d never once spotted it.
As she pulled off onto Greenway Lane, however, Lucy became distracted. She wondered if she was being tailed. It was a metallic blue Subaru Legacy, and she’d first noticed it about a mile back along Adolphus Road, never more than a couple of cars behind. When she turned into St Clement’s Avenue, a much lesser used route, it copied the manoeuvre. She cut a sharp left onto Woodland Way, which, now that she was on the edge of the warehouse district, led only to a minor lorry park and a scrapyard. The Subaru also turned left.
Lucy wasn’t particularly concerned. He was making no effort to conceal himself, so his intentions were unlikely to be totally villainous. When she pulled into a layby, the sole other occupant of which was a hotdog vendor now packing in for the day, the Subaru slid smoothly in behind her, braked and switched its interior light on. She glanced into her rear-view mirror and recognised the hulking form of Mick Shallicker behind the Subaru’s wheel.
She climbed out and strolled back, more than a little irritated.
He remained in his seat but powered down his driver’s window. He was wearing his usual outfit of specially made black suit and black turtleneck sweater.
‘You followed me all the way from Robber’s Row?’ Lucy said.
‘Seemed the best way to get you on your own,’ he replied. ‘Frank can see you now if you’re free.’
‘I’m not free.’
‘It’s up to you. But you’re the one who asked for the meet.’
Twisted with frustration, Lucy hovered alongside his car. ‘I’d rather you’d just texted.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t get to call the shots.’
‘No, but I have to put up with your ugly face.’ She backed towards her Jimny. ‘Next time, text me.’
Lucy followed Shallicker’s Subaru along Tarwood Lane and into Salford, but first of all had to pass Robber’s Row, which was no fun. She doubted that anyone in the divisional HQ would notice her, much less notice that she was being guided to whatever destination she was bound for by a vehicle traceable to a man with a serious criminal record.
But it was the guilt factor.
Ever since two years ago, when Lucy had first discovered that her estranged father was a senior lieutenant in the Crew, and especially since she’d made a deal with him that for both their sakes they would keep it secret, she’d been tormented by the idea that she now had one foot in the other camp. Throughout her ten years of committed policework prior to that, she’d prided herself on being an honest cop, on obeying the rules and doing the job to the best of her ability. But from the moment Frank McCracken had returned to her and her mother’s lives, she’d found herself withholding information from colleagues, getting into clandestine meetings and even turning a blind eye to certain criminal activities.
McCracken had told her that she should treat her fight against crime not as a job but as a war, in which all measures were acceptable. This was the way other, more senior and successful police officers had always behaved, he’d said … so why hesitate?
But that was her father all over: an amoral scoundrel.
Lucy had a different take on life.
Or at least she’d once had.
She tried to shut such ruminations out of her mind as she focused on the business at hand, following Shallicker along the A6 through Salford until it became Chapel Street and led into central Manchester. Five minutes later, just off Corporation Street, they came to the foot of a multi-storey car park, where, rather to Lucy’s surprise, Shallicker swung in. She followed him, collected a ticket and sat a few yards behind him as they ascended ramp after ramp, passing one largely empty level after another, until they were on the last floor before the top. Here, the upward ramp had been bollarded off with orange traffic cones. Shallicker’s Subaru slowed to a halt, and almost from nowhere, a car park attendant appeared. Without looking at the waiting vehicles, he moved several of the cones aside. The Subaru passed through. The attendant waited expectantly. Lucy eased her Jimny forward, also passing through. As she ascended the last ramp, she glanced into her rear-view mirror and saw that the line of cones had already been replaced. She shook her head, amazed by the sheer gall of the high-level underworld. Even as a serving police officer investigating serious crime, she couldn’t call on privileges like this.
The top deck of the car park, which was open to the night sky, was completely empty apart from a gleaming black vehicle at its farthest corner. Lucy recognised it as her father’s Bentley Continental. The man himself was standing alongside it, gazing over the top of the concrete barrier at the flat neon pattern of the city.
A few yards from the ramp, Shallicker pulled to a halt and braked. Lucy drew up alongside him. He pointed the way she needed to go. She drove the remaining sixty yards to the car park’s far end, veering into one of the empty bays on the Bentley’s nearside.
McCracken turned as she climbed out and approached.
As always, he wore a tailored suit, a pristine shirt and tie and what looked like a Rolex watch. It was now past nine o’clock on a September evening, and the temperature was falling fast, but he looked unaffected by the chill.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I didn’t think it would be long before you wanted to hook up again.’
‘Oh, really …?’
‘Sure.’ He cracked a half-smile. ‘You talk like you hate me, Lucy, but last time we were in league, I seem to remember you were the main beneficiary.’
‘We weren’t in league,’ she retorted. ‘We just had a mutual enemy. And I’d say the benefits were about equally shared. But that case is closed and is now irrelevant.’
‘Okay … so to what do I owe this pleasure?’
‘What do you think?’ She folded her arms. ‘Last week you sent Mum a mountain of flowers and a lovey-dovey birthday card.’
McCracken furrowed his brow. ‘You’ve called this meeting about that?’
‘I consider it a serious breach of our truce.’
‘Our truce … as far as I’m aware, does not extend to you telling me who I may and may not send birthday greetings to.’
‘Except when it’s Mum, I reckon.’
‘I don’t reckon.’ There was a sudden snap to his voice. ‘If she was eighty-five, maybe. But she’s fifty-five, and she doesn’t need your permission to get on with her life.’
‘It’s this “getting on with life” thing that worries me.’ Lucy couldn’t contain a mild concern that he wasn’t responding to this in his usual airy, casual way. ‘I mean, what’s your game? She may think she’s a toughie, she may act like one. But she’s actually quite vulnerable. She lives on her own, and she earns just about enough to get by.’
McCracken shrugged. ‘I can help her out there—’
‘No, you can’t,’ Lucy interrupted. ‘That would send exactly the wrong message. Look … Mum’s lonely. She’s got a couple of mates, but no one she really cares about and no one who cares about her … apart from me. There’s been no bloke in her life since she moved to Crowley.’ She registered his surprise. ‘Yeah, that’s right. A belter like Mum, and she’s been a singleton her whole life. She threw her best years away on raising her only child.’
McCracken contemplated this. ‘Or alternatively … it’s just that I’m a tough act to follow.’
‘Hey, maybe,’ Lucy said with sarcasm. ‘Look – perhaps it genuinely wasn’t your fault that you totally screwed her up the first time. But it is going to be your fault if you do it again. I might as well be honest … these flowers, this birthday card. She thinks you want a reconciliation.’
McCracken didn’t respond but appeared to give it more and even deeper thought.
‘I must admit,’ Lucy said, ‘I wondered it myself. What happened to Goldilocks?’
He glanced up. ‘Charlie? She’s still around.’
‘Does she know you’ve been sending presents to other women?’
‘Probably.’
‘And she accepts it?’
He shrugged. ‘Me and Charlie have frank discussions about these things.’
‘This is bollocks. I want to know what you’re up to and I want it to stop.’
‘What I’m up to is showing affection to one of the most important women in my life. Come your birthday, maybe you’ll get a card and kisses too.’
In your dreams, pal, she told herself, but his attitude was deeply disconcerting.
‘Whatever the truth is,’ Lucy said, ‘you’re out of line pulling stunts like this!’
McCracken looked disappointed. ‘Sorry you think so.’
It was the first time she’d ever seen him vague or distracted. Could it actually be that he’d acted this way towards her mother from some minor but genuine affection, which perhaps was confusing even to him?
‘Can I at least get a promise that you won’t do it again?’ Lucy said.
‘No, you can’t.’
‘For Christ’s sake! Look, I came here intending to tell you not just to back off, but to call her up and let her know there’s been a misunderstanding. To tell her that it’s best if you guys keep going your separate ways. Now all I want is that you don’t send her any more presents. Surely that’s not too much to ask?’
But it was as though he hadn’t been listening. ‘Does your mother want this reconciliation she thinks I’m looking for?’
‘Of course she doesn’t!’
‘You sure, Lucy? You speaking for Cora now, or just yourself?’
‘Look, I’ve asked you nicely. But I’ll play hardball if I have to.’
McCracken looked amused. ‘Really?’
‘I’ve been toying with this idea anyway. Next time I’m in the office, I might just go and see my DI … and tell him exactly what my and your relationship is.’
‘What … just like that?’
‘I’ll tell him I only found out recently. That I didn’t believe it at first, but that once it was obviously kosher, I decided to come clean. And I’ll take whatever shitstorm results from it.’
McCracken appraised her, perhaps wondering whether she was deadly serious or simply a good actress. ‘You sure you want to do that, Lucy? You’re a hero at the moment. Why throw it away?’
‘I’m a divisional detective constable. We don’t have heroes at my level.’
‘And this’ll keep you down there for ever.’
‘And how will that stack against the outcome you’ll face? Because the moment my lot learn the truth, your lot will too. You think Wild Bill will settle for denying you promotion?’
‘It’ll be bad, there’s no question,’ he agreed. ‘It won’t be pleasurable for either of us … but I think I’ll be able to handle things at my end.’
‘You don’t sound too certain.’
‘We’ll only know when it happens, won’t we? But I’m not just going to run.’
Fleetingly, that statement sobered her. The man in front of her had exerted life-and-death power many times. He was respected and feared across the underworld of the Northwest. Even the cops considered him untouchable because he had so many attack-dog lawyers at his beck and call, so many judges and jurors on his payroll, and so many fall-guys around him to take the rap, that he was almost impossible to prosecute. While if his reputation alone wasn’t enough to protect him from gangland rivals, his army of enforcers and gunmen would. And yet here she was – ‘a slip of a tart,’ as Les Mahoney had called her – an everyday detective constable with a blemished record, and yet she was so positioned that with a single sentence she could place him in serious jeopardy. She literally had him on a cliff edge. It almost made her queasy. And not in a good way.
‘Why don’t you make it easy on both of us?’ she said. ‘Promise not to contact Mum again.’
His expression hardened. ‘And I don’t respond well to threats.’
She shook her head. ‘This has got to be a wind-up.’
‘Why? Because I’ve found something in life I actually value? You think there’s no heart at all beneath this steely exterior?’
She backed away but pointed a finger. ‘This is the last warning. You are not inveigling your way back into our lives. You’d better believe that’s more important to me even than my job.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Don’t test me, Dad.’
He leaned against his Bentley, nonchalant again, the casual, confident achiever.
She turned and stumbled back to her Jimny, fiddling clumsily with the keys, numbed at how badly that had gone and how little she’d obtained from him.
‘Rarefied atmosphere up on that moral high ground?’ he called after her.
She didn’t look back, just hit the fob and opened her car.
‘Just remember, Lucy,’ he said, ‘when you tell them all about us … quite a few things have happened in your investigations of late which, shall we say, don’t exactly figure in the Greater Manchester Police rulebook. And they’ll come up too. Inevitably they will. But hey … if you don’t mind that, if you’re quite happy that you can just bullshit all that controversy away, in a career that’s hardly been controversy-free as it is, then good on you. I was only thinking yesterday … you get more like me than your mum every time I meet you.’
She still didn’t look back. Just got into the Jimny and drove.
Good God. She thought she’d had him on a cliff edge.