Next to Die Read online

  Sam turned to the nearest person, Ged, the detective from the day before who had taunted him with the coffee. ‘What’s going on?’ Sam said. ‘Has a body turned up?’

  ‘No. Just missing, but we’re thinking the worst.’

  ‘Connected?’

  Ged looked like he wasn’t going to answer, still bristling at the way Sam had stood up to him, but after a few seconds he said, ‘Yes. She’s called Julie McGovern. Her father is a local councillor, and he was one of the magistrates who first remanded Ben Grant in custody. And it looks like someone has tipped off the press, because they’re gathering outside.’ He shook his head. ‘We’ve lost control now.’

  The detective went back to his computer screen and Sam stood and looked over his shoulder. He recognised the blue banner of Facebook. The profile picture was of an attractive brunette, her wide smile showing teeth that were bright and even, with thick lustrous hair that swept down over her shoulders. As he looked down the page, there were photographs showing groups of girls with their arms around each other and comments posted underneath.

  ‘Pretty girl,’ Sam said.

  ‘I’m watching her profile page,’ Ged said, ‘just to see if anyone posts something we don’t know about.’ He looked up at Sam. ‘About yesterday. I was only joshing, you know how it is.’

  ‘It isn’t about us, it’s about them, but thanks.’ Before the detective could answer, Sam walked over to Evans, who was organising some paperwork. There was a map, and it looked like she was sorting the search teams or door-to-doors.

  She glanced up as he got closer, but then held up her hand. Sam stopped. She was busy and wouldn’t welcome the intrusion. He turned and went back to his desk. He remembered what Evans had said the day before, that he had to know everything about the case, so he went looking for the logs from the night before. He paused when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned round. It was Evans.

  ‘You’ll need to know about Julie,’ Evans said. ‘We’ve been on to the prison again this morning. We can’t wait around for Grant now. Julie McGovern going missing has made it more urgent.’

  ‘So what happened with Julie?’

  ‘She went to meet a friend, but that was a lie. We spoke to the friend and there was no arrangement to meet.’

  ‘Has she got a boyfriend?’ Sam said.

  ‘No, nothing steady. She’s a good student, nice kid, if her profile is any guide. Works hard, listens to music, all the usual stuff.’

  Sam looked at the pictures around the room of all the young women who had gone missing. Nice girls from good families.

  ‘It could just be some mistake, like she has a boyfriend no one knows about, and so used a friend as an alibi,’ Sam said. ‘Families are complicated. Did things get out of hand and she stayed out later than she promised? Now she daren’t come home because her father is a bigwig, and right now she’s with her boyfriend, wondering what to do.’

  DI Evans frowned. ‘That’s one scenario we’ve already thought of, and I hope you’re right, but something tells me you’re not. The connection with Ben Grant’s case is too strong.’ She cast her arm towards the search teams, dark blue boiler suits crowding the room. ‘This might be all premature, but they’ll slam me if I do nothing and turn out to be wrong.’ She looked Sam up and down. ‘Your inspector knows you’re with us for the day, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He does, ma’am.’

  ‘Good. Stay here then. We could do with the manpower.’

  ‘Thank you. I’d like to help.’

  ‘You’re on the phones to start off with. I want you with Ben Grant today, so you’ve got to know everything about the case. We’re just waiting for the nod from the prison.’

  She walked off quickly to speak to the groups of boiler suits. Sam allowed himself a small smile. It might be just answering the phones, but it was much better than a slow slog through financial statements.

  The morning had arrived brightly, the sun rising just after four, and had moved on slowly towards rush hour, the city beyond the walls gradually coming to life. His chest was pumping deep breaths, the hours before long and exciting, except that now he was in the climb-down and so had to fight back the shame, try to hang onto what happened at the height of the thrills.

  She was on the floor, her body twisted, her white blouse dirty and torn, blood on the elbows and front. Her jeans were wet where she had pissed herself, her hair matted with sweat and dust from running around, being taunted, chased. She was still now, lifeless, her hair scruffy, all of its shine gone, bedraggled and lying across her face. She had been so different not long before, when she had been trying to cling onto the last shreds of life.

  He reached down to move her hair from her face. His touch was tender as he lifted it from a wound, where it had stuck to a deep gash where she had run into an old pipe, the end jagged and broken. That had sent her to the floor, gasping, squirming in pain. The blood was drying now, no longer pumping. He moved her hair so that he was tidying her up. Her body should have some dignity in death.

  He took a deep breath and sat back on the floor. He ran his hands over his face and wiped away the sweat. The start of the day made it seem so different. It became too stark, too real.

  ‘You’re being too soft.’

  He looked up, shielding his eyes against the sun. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said, taking in the dead girl’s swollen ankle from where she fell from one of the raised platforms, tumbling four feet to the ground. The cut on her forehead where she had run into a pillar. Her hands scrubbed red, cuts on her palm from scrambling across glass.

  His eyes caught the pale skin of her breast, visible through a rip in her blouse. He looked away. It wasn’t about that. It hadn’t been about that for any of them.

  ‘Come on, we need to get rid of her.’

  He scrambled to his feet. He reached for her hair again and this time pulled it into a ponytail, tying a knot in it to keep it neat. He reached into his pocket and took out a pair of scissors. They were small and sharp, and as he cut across the ponytail he smiled as the long pieces of hair came away in his hand. It felt silky in his fist.

  ‘Get her in the ground.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, and he grabbed her hand and dragged her to a hole he had dug further along. Next to the others. He pulled her body so that she slithered into the ground and then dragged the dirt over her with the spade. He pressed it down with his foot and stepped back. The weeds would reclaim her soon. Nature did that. It cleansed, started again.

  ‘I wanted to get away from all of this,’ he said.

  ‘Tonight again.’

  ‘It was supposed to stop, you know that.’

  ‘It was never going to stop.’

  He clenched his jaw. He knew that was right.

  ‘You can make it your choice, if you want.’

  His eyes widened at that. ‘Can I?’

  ‘Yes. Tonight is for you.’

  That pleased him. ‘Good, thank you.’

  ‘Do you know who it’s going to be?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ There was tightness in his chest. And excitement. ‘I definitely do.’

  Twenty-Six

  Joe drove to the street where Ronnie Bagley had lived, to what the prosecution called the murder scene. It was a long street of Victorian bay windows, cobbled, the stones worn and shiny, with a busy road at one end and a dead end at the other, where a steep grassy bank fell away to a factory in the valley, the ridges of the corrugated roof a grey stain between the green hills. The morning peace was broken by the backwards and forwards of a forklift truck.

  It struck him as it always did when he visited a murder scene. It was so ordinary, yet he expected some kind of sign, like a shadow over the building, the source of so much anguish, with a life rubbed away behind one of those windows. Every time he went past the path where Ellie was killed, it seemed darker down there, even though he knew it was his imagination. Ronnie Bagley’s street was just another normal street in a quiet northern town.

  Joe had skipped
the professional etiquette of calling the prosecution first. It wasn’t a hard rule, and he wanted the reaction of the witness, not the prepared answers he would get from an arranged visit. Joe didn’t seek out a bad reputation, but he wasn’t bothered if he ended up with one. There was a risk that the witness might tell lies about him, accuse him of making threats, but it would be one word against another, and unlikely to go anywhere. Reputations were built on results. Anything less wasn’t looking after your clients.

  The house Ronnie had lived in with Carrie was three storeys of blackened stone with large bay windows, the frames painted white and covered by dirt and cobwebs, the net curtains yellowed.

  He strode up to the large wooden door, the paint faded blue, and was about to knock when he saw three doorbells. The bottom two buzzers had no names on them, but the top one read: Terry Day.

  Joe pressed and waited and then turned to look at the street. It was quiet. There were cars parked in the road but there was no activity. It wasn’t an affluent area, but it was no inner city blight either. The cars were family cars, nearly-new Fiestas and Nissans, and there were flowers in some of the windows.

  Joe turned around as the door creaked open behind him, and he was met by a tall man with a stoop, thin grey hair combed over a bony skull and small wire-framed glasses. He looked surprised at Joe and started to close the door. Joe put his hand out.

  ‘Terry Day?’

  He faltered and looked along the street. ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name is Joe Parker. I want to speak to you about Ronnie Bagley. I’m his lawyer.’

  A blink, and then, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can I come in, so we can talk?’

  The man didn’t answer.

  Joe had expected the door to be closed on him, but this was even more frustrating. He clicked on the dictation machine he had put into his pocket earlier. If there was to be a complaint about his visit, he wanted to be able to produce evidence of the real conversation.

  ‘Is it Terry Day?’ Joe handed over a business card. It was taken from him without being looked at.

  The man pursed his lips and then glanced down the street. ‘Yes, I’m Terry Day. What do you want?’ His voice was quiet but precise, as if he wanted to enunciate every consonant.

  ‘To speak to you.’

  ‘Do the police know you’re here?’

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  ‘Can I refuse to speak to you?’

  Joe paused. He had been talking with Terry Day for just a few seconds, and already he knew that it was all coming to an end.

  ‘Of course you can,’ Joe said, and he smiled, trying to put the man at ease. ‘I’m not here to cause you any problems. I just want to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘And if I refuse?’

  ‘I will call the police and ask for permission to come back.’ Joe stepped forward. ‘So we might as well get it out of the way. Do you want the police involved again?’

  Terry Day stared at Joe, and then said, ‘I’ll wait,’ before slamming the door.

  Joe considered the door for a moment, just inches from his face. Terry Day’s evidence might look good on paper, but Joe didn’t think he would be as convincing in the witness stand. He needed to exploit that.

  He turned and walked down the stone steps to take him back to the street, clicking off the dictation machine.

  A young mother was struggling with a toddler as Joe walked back to his car, trying to get him into a small buggy. She glanced up as Joe got closer and then looked back at Terry Day’s house. ‘Are you from the council?’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Joe said, and clicked his key to unlock his car door. Then something struck him, like a sense that her question was more than idle curiosity. ‘Why do you ask?’

  She looked back to the house again. ‘Are you a friend of Mr Day?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  She looked Joe up and down. ‘No, you don’t look like it.’

  ‘What do his friends look like?’

  ‘He doesn’t have many, from what I can see,’ she said, scowling.

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘What is there to say? No one likes him.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because of the way he behaves.’

  Joe followed her look back towards the house. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ask anyone round here, they’ll tell you. It’s like he’s put himself in charge of the street, telling people what to do, what they can’t do, and if you stand up to him he makes a nuisance of himself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Just stupid stuff. Stands outside his house taking notes on what we do, as if he wants to report us for something, but if you don’t know what he’s writing, then you can’t do anything about it. But it’s creepy.’ She tilted her head. ‘So who are you?’

  ‘I’m the lawyer for Ronnie Bagley, the man who used to live in the bottom flat.’

  The woman’s face turned red and she started to walk down the street quickly, the buggy’s wheels making loud clacks on the uneven pavement.

  ‘I shouldn’t be speaking to you,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You should have said who you are.’

  ‘Why?’

  She didn’t say anything else. She just walked away, and as Joe watched her go, he realised that there were things going on in Ronnie’s street that needed further investigation.

  He turned to look back at the house and glanced up towards the top floor. He could see Terry Day in his window, staring down at him.

  A jolt of unease made Joe shudder. Something wasn’t right.

  Twenty-Seven

  Sam looked down at the growing press pack spreading along the street outside the station. The story was getting bigger, and the chance to print a picture of another missing pretty girl was too good to turn down. One of the photographers looked up and Sam turned away, his eyes scanning the room instead. There had been some joking the day before, but that had now stopped. People concentrated on their screens or telephones, some trying to contact the people on Julie McGovern’s Facebook profile, most of whom had added their phone numbers.

  He opened a notepad he had found on a nearby desk. He numbered the first page and underlined the date with a ruler, before going to the police logs of when the calls first came in. DI Evans wanted him to answer the phones, but the calls weren’t coming in too quickly. Sam went to the first log. The police had been contacted at 11.30 the night before, when Julie’s parents had called round all her friends and found out that she wasn’t anywhere they knew about. The other missing girls had made enough headlines to ensure that Julie’s parents feared the worst. She had left the house at 8.30, so there were three hours unaccounted for.

  It wasn’t a high priority at the time, but it had been circulated so the police had been looking out for her. The description had been too vague, though. Five foot seven, green eyes, long brown hair, wearing a white shirt and jeans. As Sam considered a mental map of Manchester, with all the public transport and motorways, Julie could be anywhere. The search teams were cosmetic. They might turn up something, but it was more about reassuring the family they were doing something.

  He was distracted by the buzz of his phone in his pocket. He looked at the screen. It was Alice.

  ‘Hi, I’m busy,’ he whispered. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Yes, sorry, but I’ve had your mother on the phone. Can you call round tonight? She’s heard about the girl on the news, the one who’s gone missing. It’s reminded her of Ellie and she’s feeling low. She wants Joe to go too.’

  ‘Yeah, no problem. I’ll call him soon.’ A pause. ‘You don’t mind? I thought you were going out tonight.’

  ‘I was, but you go see her.’

  ‘All right, thanks.’

  There she was again, Ellie, always with him. The press would move on to a new story and people would forget, but for the people left behind, it never ended.

  The phone on the desk flashed red, a number displayed.

  ‘Sam P
arker, Major Incident Team,’ he said, his pen poised.

  There was some rustling and giggling on the other end of the phone, and then a teenage voice said in a whisper, ‘I’ve got her all wrapped up here, nice and warm,’ before there were more giggles and the phone clicked off.

  He made a note of the caller’s number that had flashed up on the screen. Most appeals brought out the idiots. They didn’t realise that if the police got the number, they would get a visit, under the pretence of pursuing the lead but really intending to frighten. Most often they found people who suddenly understood why it had never been funny in the first place.

  He looked up as Evans shouted his name. She tilted her head as an indication that he should join her. The other detectives tried to pretend that they weren’t watching as he walked over, but he could feel their gaze on him as he went.

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  He went to put his hands in his pockets but then took them out again and clasped them together in front of him.

  She stepped closer, checking around, and then said quietly, ‘Remember what I said, that if Ben Grant agrees to speak, you’ll need to go down straight away. So I want you with me today. Come on, let’s go.’

  Sam was surprised, but there was only one answer if he was going to stay on the team. ‘I understand.’

  Evans turned to walk out of the squad room and Sam followed her. As he got to the door, he glanced back into the room. A few people were watching, and Ged, the detective with the muscles, glowered at him. Sam thought they had cleared the air, but for Ged it seemed like it was a short truce. Sam gave him a small nod. He wasn’t going to be bullied off the team.

  As they walked along the corridor Sam asked whether there had been a press conference yet.