A Velvet Scream (4 page)

Joanna's mind was already asking questions. What then, she wondered? Had the shooting in the New York Patches been connected with a protection racket? Bribery? Drugs? What? Joanna looked at Mike and shrugged. She didn't know. Neither did she have any idea whether it had any bearing on the assault on Kayleigh Harrison.

‘Quite, Mr Westheisen,' she said briskly. ‘At least it's a place where the youngsters can come without getting into trouble or heading into the city.' Kindly she didn't mention the couple of drugs raids they'd had at Patches in the last six months or the death of a young woman who had ‘chilled out' on Dexedrine. They had tracked down the suppliers but catching a drugs supplier could be likened to cutting off the head of the Hydra. Two more appeared in its place. Then four. Then eight. “And then so”.

Westheisen had escaped without a conviction. The truth was that the local force found it easier to keep an eye on one nightclub than all the street corners, gyms or pubs – of which there were many – where transactions could be exchanged. But now Westheisen had a rape case to contend with, and that would be more tricky. All three of them knew that clubs had been closed down for less. This could easily be the end of his club. What responsible parent would want a daughter to come here now? And females are essential to attract the males. The club would gain a bad reputation – and slide slowly down the sinkhole. Maybe that was Westheisen's “and then so”. Even though, after an event a club was probably at its safest – with everyone, including the police, on high alert.

OK. It was shutting the stable door but this is a fact of life. It's what we all do.

Joanna stole a swift glance at Chawncy Westheisen. He was a wise and canny New Yorker. He would have worked all this out for himself by now. ‘Did you bring your family over here, Mr Westheisen?'

‘My partner,' he corrected her. ‘We worked together in New York. His name's Marvin Solfa.'

‘And was Marvin here last night?'

‘No. It's often kind of quiet here on a Tuesday. Usually just one of us comes. Last night I drew the short straw.' He seemed to think he needed to add something. ‘Marvin would have come in if I'd have asked him to, if it had gotten busy.'

‘Right. Did you see a young girl wearing a very short silver skirt last night? She had long, straight brown hair, silver shoes and a black boob tube?'

Chawncy was instantly wary. ‘How young?'

‘She's actually fourteen.'

‘Certainly not,' he said. ‘At fourteen she would have been way too young for Patches.'

‘Girls can look years older than they are,' Joanna commented.

‘I've owned a club for a long time,' Westheisen said. ‘I know the score. I'd lose my license both here and in the States if I violate a law. She wouldn't have got past me.'

‘Well, it looks as though she got past whoever was on the door last night,' Joanna said waspishly. ‘She wasn't wearing her school uniform, you know.'

‘I'd have asked for ID.'

‘Who was on the door last night?'

‘A guy called Andrew Crispin. And he'll lose his job if he let in a fourteen-year-old.' He thought for a moment. ‘You don't know that she was actually in the club, do you?' It was a very optimistic attempt at clearing Patches of any involvement.

Nice try
, Joanna thought. Aloud, she said, ‘Dressed like that she wasn't out of doors all night.'

‘Was she wearing a coat?'

Joanna shook her head. ‘Not that we've found. I'll need to talk to Marvin too at some point,' she said.

‘Why? He wasn't even here last night.'

‘We just do,' Korpanski said and, looking at the meaty sergeant, well over six foot tall, Chawncy Westheisen didn't demur. He satisfied himself with a mutinous look Joanna completely ignored.

‘Was it busy here last night?'

‘Yeah. More than usual. I guess it's because it's December. Christmas and all that. The kids – they want their seasonal romance.'

‘Right. I'll need the name of everyone who worked here last night: the bouncer, the person on the door, bar attendants.'

Westheisen frowned. ‘I'll need to take a look at the rota to see who was behind the bar.' He chewed his lip. ‘We do run a membership system here,' he said. ‘It's possible she pinched another girl's card and got in on that and Andrew simply glanced at it without checking properly.'

Joanna was anxious not to deflect the course of this investigation. Right now her priority was not to fall foul of Westheisen but keep him sweet and cooperative and dangling on the hook of losing his license. This should keep his memory alert so it retained any evidence. He might have useful information and she might need to go through his membership list. But to find the person who assaulted Kayleigh Harrison there were certain questions she must ask sooner or later.

‘Do you check ID when people become members?'

Westheisen nodded. ‘More than our license is worth if we get it wrong,' he said, agitated now. ‘We have an obligation to check ID.'

‘Indeed you do. Do you mind if we take a look around?'

‘Not at all. I'll be delighted to show you.'

He led them through the main dance hall with its long bar to the ‘quiet' room and upstairs through the offices. Joanna noticed four CCTV cameras strategically placed. Patches was as good as it got for a small-town club in rural Staffordshire. ‘In summer we get the kids coming out from Stoke and round about too,' Chawncy said proudly, over his shoulder. ‘Even Manchester once or twice.'

‘London?'

‘Hey.' Westheisen laughed. ‘We're getting a reputation but not that far afield.'

When they'd finished the tour Joanna asked for both the internal and external CCTV videotapes from the night before. Westheisen didn't argue but made a showy gesture of handing them over. Joanna bagged them up. Some of the junior officers would love to sit and watch the skimpily clad girls strut their stuff.

They returned to the station and dropped them on Timmis' and McBrine's desks. It would make a change from their normal duties: moorland patrol, finding sheep that had strayed, rescuing over ambitious climbers, finding lost children, protecting the sparrow hawks, making sure campers' fires didn't spark off a major alert and even a spot of cattle-rustling. ‘Take a look at these,' she said, ‘and see if you can pick Kayleigh Harrison out. She's the one in a tiny silver skirt and black boob tube. See who she's with, will you?'

The two officers looked at each other. ‘My dream job,' Saul McBrine said with a grin. ‘Just don't let my girlfriend know I've spent hours ogling girls in silver miniskirts and boob tubes. She'll kill me.'

‘You'll survive,' Korpanski said, joining in the laughter with the two officers.

‘Come on, Mike,' Joanna said. ‘Let's get a couple of sandwiches from the cake shop and take a quick look at the tape from the outside camera trained on the car park. Then we must go down to the hospital and speak to our girl.'

THREE

S
he didn't even look fourteen,
was Joanna's first thought. More like twelve. Lying with a white, terrified face; big eyes peering over the sheet. Her face was thin, drawn. Whatever she had looked like last night, in her silver skirt, tall heels, boob tube, et cetera, she was just a child, a frightened little girl. WPC Dawn Critchlow was sitting at the side of her bed, watching her but not speaking. She gave a terse nod as Joanna and Mike entered. Kayleigh opened her eyes even wider. ‘Hello, Kayleigh,' Joanna said softly. She sat down in the armchair and faced the child.

‘I'm Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy,' she said, ‘from the Leek Police. I want you to tell me what happened last night. As much as you remember.'

Tears ran down Kayleigh's face. She put her hands up to hide them but it did nothing. The girl scooped in a couple of deep, noisy breaths.

‘Please,' Joanna said, ‘tell me what happened.'

The hands moved a centimetre down the face so the eyes met hers. But Kayleigh pressed her lips together – if anything more firmly.

‘If you were assaulted,' Joanna said, ‘what happened to you could happen to another girl – maybe even worse. You were left to freeze. You could have died, Kayleigh.'

Slowly the girl slid her hands back to her side. Her eyes looked into Joanna's with a trusting look that was painful. But Joanna did not shy away.

‘Would you like your mother or a social worker with you?'

It provoked a quick response. ‘No fear.'

Joanna gave Mike a quick glance before continuing. ‘Right. So. Tell me what happened, in your own words. Did you meet someone inside the club?'

Kayleigh shook her head and Joanna twigged. ‘He got you in, didn't he?'

Kayleigh bit her lip and nodded. ‘He put 'is arm round me and sort of hid me from the bouncer. Inside he bought me a drink.'

‘What did he look like?'

She looked panicked by the question, then blurted out: ‘He were tall and skinny.'

‘What was his hair like?'

‘Sort of spiky. It felt a bit sticky.' She frowned. ‘I think it had gel on.'

‘What colour was it?'

‘Brownish, I think.' She frowned in concentration.

‘What was he wearing?'

‘A sort of leather bomber jacket and jeans. They allow them on weeknights,' she defended.

‘How old?'

‘About thirty or so. It's hard to tell, really.'

‘Was he local – someone you knew?'

Kayleigh shook her head. ‘He had a London accent,' she said. ‘And the way he talked, the things he said.' She smiled and changed her voice. ‘“Oh dear, oh dear. Look what you've made me do – spill me drink”. ' She met Joanna's eyes. ‘That's how he talked, Inspector.'

‘Do you remember anything else about him? Anything that might help us find him?'

‘He had big teeth,' she said. ‘Big and yellow. Like a wolf's, they were.'

Joanna looked at her closely. Kayleigh had very pale skin, devoid now of make-up, brown eyes, long, straight hair brushed away from her face. Dressed in a hospital nightdress she looked far too young to be having this conversation.

‘Can I have a word?' She spoke to Dawn Critchlow and they went outside the door. ‘You have all the swabs and samples?'

Dawn nodded. ‘Poor kid,' she said, eyes drifting towards the porthole in the door. ‘It was pretty ghastly. I thought she'd have wanted her mum there at least – but no.'

Joanna then went to speak to the doctor in charge of Kayleigh's case, who turned out to be an elegant Indian lady in a dark red sari by the name of Dr Rani Bopari.

‘She is lucky to be alive,' the doctor said. ‘Her temperature on admission was twenty-nine degrees. Below twenty-five and she would probably have died. We would not have been able to save her.'

‘Does she have any other injuries?'

‘Internal bruising, a labial tear, some bleeding too.'

‘So, rape?'

She gave a wise smile. ‘You cannot draw me on that, Inspector. Rough sex but I don't know whether it was rape or consensual.'

‘Was she a virgin before this?'

‘I cannot say.'

‘Was she drugged?'

‘I believe your police surgeon has taken some samples for toxicology,' Dr Bopari said. ‘You need to wait for those results. I could not say for sure with exposure to such cold and the alcohol.'

Joanna's ears pricked up. ‘How much alcohol?'

‘The equivalent of a bottle and a half of wine,' Dr Bopari said without smiling. ‘She still had a high level of alcohol in her blood this morning. We've had to work it out backwards using a graph. It's not completely reliable – you know that we all metabolize alcohol differently – but it's as close as we can get. She's fourteen years old. My guess is that last night she was pretty drunk. And again,' she said, the smile returning, ‘you will need to wait for the results of the blood tests. The swabs and things will take a bit longer.'

‘Swabs and things?'

‘There was no semen,' Dr Bopari said, frowning now, ‘he probably used a condom, but we might still be able to get DNA and we must obviously test for STDs.

These are what we are looking for,' she enlarged. ‘Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Trichomonas, Herpes. HIV.'

Joanna flinched. It was a grim picture, this bald truth about the reality of rape. ‘I see. Well, thank you.' Joanna handed the doctor a card with her telephone number on it. ‘If you have any more information that will help us, please don't hesitate to pick up the phone.'

‘I won't,' the doctor said.

Joanna returned to the room. This was the difficult bit. ‘Kayleigh,' she said. ‘In your own words I want you to tell me exactly what happened to you last night. Everything.'

The girl blinked, wiped her hair away from her face and looked at Joanna. ‘You know what happened,' she said.

‘No, we don't, Kayleigh.'

The girl stared up at the ceiling and made no response until Joanna prompted her. ‘When did you first notice him?'

‘Outside. It were really cold and I were shiverin'.'

Joanna wasn't even going to ask about a coat. She let the girl continue, halting here and there. ‘He was sort of lookin' at all the girls in the queue and that's when I noticed him. He seemed to pick me out.' A note of pride had entered her voice. ‘He started speakin' to me, friendly, like, and he said he'd see me inside.'

‘Right. Good. You're doing well so far.'

Kayleigh paused.

‘Did he tell you his name?'

She shook her head.

‘Did he ask your name?'

‘Yeah.'

‘And you told him?'

She nodded. ‘He said it were a nice name.'

‘Was he with anyone?'

‘Not as I saw. He were on his own.'