Behind Closed Doors (37 page)

Scarlett said, ‘I don’t know who they are. They kept away, used runners to collect the money.’

‘Okay. Who are the runners?’

Scarlett watched her for a moment. ‘Look, I don’t know their real names. Nobody uses their real names, do they? I didn’t. I was called Katie.’

‘You said something about a Reg to me, on Friday. You said something like, you had friends, you could have been sitting on Reg’s sofa watching Sky TV. So who’s Reg?’

‘Are you interrogating me now?’ Scarlett said, smiling.

‘You said you wanted to be honest with me, Scarlett. Stop playing games.’

‘I said I had something to tell you, and I’ve said it. I’m not playing games. Much as I like playing games with you.’

Sam decided she was going to ignore that last bit. ‘Why didn’t you tell us before that you were there willingly?’

‘Because I thought if I told you I was just working there, you’d arrest me for something. Or else you’d realise I wasn’t of any use to you and I’d be out on the streets with nowhere to go.’

‘Why not go back to your family? Why have you been here in Briarstone and not gone to see them, to tell them you were alive and well?’

Scarlett looked away, as if considering her response. ‘I’m not exactly their idea of a model child, am I?’

‘Whatever you think you are, you’re still their daughter…’ Sam stopped, realising that Scarlett was now on the verge of being an orphan.

‘It’s been a long time,’ Scarlett said. ‘I needed time to get my act together, think about what I was going to do with my life. I’ve had… I’ve had some pretty rough days. I don’t sleep well. As you’ve seen, my family was never what you’d call loving, and it doesn’t look to me as though they’ve changed much.’

‘Scarlett,’ Sam said, ‘what do you think happened to them last night?’

Scarlett hesitated. ‘No idea. You said it was a robbery, didn’t you?’

Sam said nothing.

‘Well, maybe it was linked to that burglary. Maybe whoever it was wanted something, and they came back and got disturbed. I don’t know. I know you think I should be sorry, that I should care more about it, but these people are like strangers to me, Sam. It’s Juliette I’m worried about. She can’t cope with things like this.’

Sam took a deep breath in, trying to give nothing away. ‘Juliette seems to be doing all right so far. Do you want another drink?’

‘Yes, please. Another pint.’

Sam still had half of her lemonade to drink, but she got up and called through the back of the bar to the reception desk.

‘I really need to go home.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Scarlett was finishing her second pint. ‘Thanks for staying.’

‘Juliette will be here any minute, I bet. Caro’s bringing her.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll come and get you tomorrow morning,’ Sam said. ‘I need to get a proper statement out of you.’

‘What sort of statement?’

‘It’s fine,’ Sam said. ‘It won’t take long. It’s just the same thing Juliette’s been doing with Caro and the family liaison officer.’

Sam pulled her jacket on and Scarlett, arms crossed, walked with her to the porch.

‘Don’t stay out here getting cold,’ Sam said. Scarlett was following her out to the car.

‘I’m not cold,’ she said in reply. ‘Sam…’ Without warning, Scarlett moved closer, put her hand on Sam’s cheek. Sam pulled back immediately.

‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ Scarlett whispered. ‘Come back inside with me.’

They were standing just outside the hotel entrance. It was dark out here, cold.

‘Scarlett, this isn’t going to happen.’ Sam said.

‘I feel safe with you,’ Scarlett replied. ‘Please, Sam. You make me feel safe for the first time in my life.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Sam said. ‘I really can’t.’

She took another step back, turning back towards her car to see with a sudden shock that Caro was there, with Juliette following behind her.

‘That wasn’t what it looked like,’ Sam said.

Caro smiled at her. ‘None of my business,’ she said cheerfully.

Sam was walking her back to her car. Juliette had been checked in to Scarlett’s room and they had gone off together, peacefully enough. The hotel receptionist had knocked off early and been replaced by a security guard who was former Job. Caro recognised him and there had been a bit of banter about who had retired and what they’d ended up doing.

While all this hilarity had been going on, Sam had been standing awkwardly behind Caro wondering if Caro had any idea what had just happened.

Caro had ended the trip down Memory Lane with Steve by asking him to keep an eye on the women in Room 116 and to call her immediately if anything untoward happened.

‘Right you are,’ he’d said, pocketing her card.

It was cold and dark outside and everything felt ominous to Sam. ‘Seriously, Caro. I know I should report it – but she’s just confused. Her emotions are all over the place.’

Caro stopped and turned to face her. ‘You know what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘I won’t say anything. Lord knows I’ve been in awkward situations.’

Sam said nothing.

‘Oh, you daft mare! Come here.’ Caro pulled her into a big, comforting hug. ‘Don’t worry. It’ll all be all right in the morning. And we have work to do, don’t we?’

‘Thank you,’ Sam said.

‘You want me to pick her up tomorrow, along with Juliette?’

‘That would be great, thanks. I’ll see you down the nick after?’

‘I’ll ring you when I’ve got them there.’

When Sam got back to her own car she sat in silence for a moment, watching Caro’s car turning, the headlights swinging round across the front of the hotel, then her tail-lights as she drove out of the car park. She looked across to the hotel entrance, as if she expected to see Scarlett running out of it, but the hotel was quiet and still.

Sam turned on the ignition and drove slowly out of the car park towards home.

She was just turning on to her driveway when her phone bleeped. The message was from a number she didn’t recognise – 07101 405441. And yet it looked familiar…

She stared at the message for a long time. There was nothing she could reply. Eventually she hit ‘save to contacts’ and in the box for First Name typed ‘Spare phone’.

After an hour of lying awake, Lou got up and went back downstairs to the kitchen. Cocoa had never helped her sleep before but it was worth a try, and besides, she’d forgotten to eat anything so her stomach was rumbling.

There was a danger in going to bed with an investigation churning around in your head like this, Lou thought as she waited for the milk in the pan to heat through. When it got late and you’d been busy all day without a break, there was a point when the logic became malleable and you could end up coming to all sorts of conclusions. And, in the cold light of day, things that had seemed not only probable but even incontrovertible fact suddenly looked rather foolish.

Usually Lou was quite good at switching off. Even though she didn’t come home to a family every evening, it felt natural to leave work behind at her front door and she never found it hard to forget about it all, even for a few hours. But this felt different. There was something she was missing, she thought, rhythmically stirring a spoon of cocoa together with a little milk and some sugar, something that was
right there
– and she couldn’t grasp it. Tomorrow she would meet with Rob Jefferson, review all the intelligence and see what they could come up with together. And then she would get Zoe Adams or someone else to do her a proper network chart for the Cunningham OCG and see if that sparked anything.

If Jason had gone to hockey practice, he would be home by now. In fact he would more than likely be in bed.

The milk surged up in the saucepan and Lou caught it in time, pouring it into the mug. It didn’t look particularly appetising but it would have to do. She took the cocoa back into the living room, curling up into the corner of her sofa and cupping her fingers around the mug. When she checked her phone, she saw that she had a text message from Jason, sent just six minutes ago.

Without thinking any further, she dialled his number.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You still up?’

‘I can’t sleep,’ she said. ‘How was your practice?’

‘It was okay. I’m sorry about earlier.’

‘I’ve forgotten about that. In fact, I think you might well have helped clarify things.’

‘That sounds ominous.’

Lou smiled. ‘I didn’t mean us. I meant the investigation.’

‘Oh – hey, well that’s good news.’

There was a little pause. Lou was waiting for him to ask if he could come over. She suspected he might also be waiting for her to ask him the same thing. In the end, he gave up first.

‘So, are you doing anything tomorrow night?’

‘I’ve got no plans,’ she said. ‘Just, you know, the usual…’

‘I know. I could make you dinner. The offer’s there, you know, if you feel like it.’

‘Thanks, Jason,’ Lou said. ‘Might see you tomorrow, then.’

‘Goodnight, beautiful.’

The cocoa had cooled now so Lou drank it in one go. It was so sweet it made her teeth ache, but at least her stomach had something in there to quieten it. Better still, her thoughts had crystallised following that conversation, and as she cleaned her teeth for the second time she knew what it was that had been troubling her.

Reggie Stark.

First thing in the morning, she would look him up.

The MIR was quiet and in darkness when Lou got to work. It had been a long time since she’d been the first one in, but, having slept – eventually – she had been wide awake again at five.

She turned on the workstation in her office and went to get a coffee from the vending machine. Headquarters was stretching itself into life: corridors humming with vacuum cleaners, fluorescent lights blinking on from the offices across the other side of the smaller car park. Lou could hear a conversation going on from the stairwell – something about a ‘top result’ and a ‘nice way to go out’ – from which, taking into account the laughter that accompanied the exchange, she deduced a good arrest – or a judge’s commendation – ahead of an imminent retirement.

The computer was patiently awaiting her log-in details, and a minute later she was into the intelligence database, putting in a search for Paul Stark, known as Reggie.

Seeing the name had reminded her of previous encounters with him, years ago, when she was working in CID. Back then Paul Stark had just graduated from nicking cars for fun and a little profit, and had moved on to metal theft, stealing cables from building sites and even, in the end, fully installed ones: down a manhole at one end of a rural road, cutting a cable, then down the manhole again at the other end with a cable drum ready to wind it all up and transport it away, leaving whole villages without landlines or internet. Paul Stark had had a brother, Ronnie Stark – hence Paul’s nickname, the matching ‘Reggie’ – who had been electrocuted while trying to cut live cable. Of course, it was too much to hope for that Reggie would take his brother’s gruesome and tragic death as a sign that he should earn a living by safer, more legal means.

There were pages and pages of intelligence on him. Everything from what car he was driving to what the last argument with his girlfriend had been about. Most of it was about other people, with Reggie getting an honourable mention for being there during a stopcheck, for appearing on various nominals’ phone records, for nicking a bottle of white rum from a corner shop, for shouting abuse at a kebab shop owner, for being a general pain in the backside.

This was where she needed an analyst.

‘Sam? I’m glad you’re here. Come and have a look at this.’

Sam had only been in the MIR a minute, hadn’t taken off her jacket.

This morning there had been a series of texts from ‘Spare phone’, most of them sent overnight.

Sam had tried calling when she’d woken up just before six, but there had been no reply. Scarlett must have fallen asleep at last.

Lou was in her office. When Sam came in, Lou was tapping her computer screen with the end of her pen. ‘Look! What do you think?’

It didn’t look much. Lou had copied the text of a number of intel reports, most of them about Paul Stark.

‘What about him?’ Sam asked. ‘He’s one of the Cunningham lot, isn’t he? Ali and I saw him in the hospital; he’d been visiting Ian Palmer. Valerie said he’d been visiting him every day.’

‘Was he now? That’s interesting too. Just confirms it, confirms he’s with the Cunninghams. But look, Sam, look who he was mates with before that.’

‘The McDonnells?’

‘And?’

‘It’s this bit that’s interesting me. Look.’

Lou scrolled down the text until she got to one of the reports. ‘This one was misfiled. Some numpty spelled “Cunningham” wrongly and they created a new nominal record for him, and didn’t bother to link it to Stark’s record either. Jason found it last night. Listen to this bit: “There is a feud developing between Darren Cummingham and the McDonnell group. This started because one of Cummingham’s runners was warned off for dealing in one of the pubs controlled by the McDonnells. Cummingham is not happy and is getting Paul Stark to sort it out for him.” What do you make of that?’

‘Ian Palmer was the runner?’

‘Of course he was.’

‘Well, that would make sense.’

‘There’s more, Sam. This is where it gets really intriguing. Look at the other intel on Cunningham.’

Lou clicked on another document. Over Lou’s shoulder, Sam saw the words ‘Jason Mercer’ and recognised it as a subject profile. The subject in question was Darren Cunningham.

Something about a drugs delivery.

‘This one. Look at the date!’ Lou said.

‘The nineteenth and twentieth of September?’ Sam said.

‘Palmer was assaulted in the early hours of the twentieth of September. I think that’s connected with what went wrong with Cunningham’s delivery. Maybe Palmer was in charge of it.’

Sam raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s a pretty big leap. Even if Palmer was Cunningham’s runner, would he be trusted with something that big?’

‘I know, I know. But it’s not just that. I’ve made another massive assumption. Hear me out. Look at this intel on Paul Stark. He keeps a baseball bat at home.’

Lou was counting it off on her fingers. Sam watched, remembering Lou banging on about Sam losing her objectivity yesterday.

‘What if Cunningham loses his shipment that night, when he’s put one of his dealers in charge of it? And that same person has pissed McVey off more than once. And something happens as a result of him being in that pub, and he’s beaten into a coma in the process. Who’s Cunningham going to suspect is the culprit? McVey – who happens to be associated with the McDonnells. Are you with me?’

‘Okay… and so Cunningham has McVey bumped off in revenge?’

‘More than revenge. He wants his drugs back. And who is he going to give that job to? The new boy, who’s just transferred allegiance from McDonnell’s camp to his. The new boy who keeps a baseball bat at home for protection. What a test of loyalty.’

‘Paul Stark,’ Sam said.

Lou nodded. ‘And McVey’s found nine days later with serious head injuries caused by being beaten with a blunt instrument. Like a baseball bat.’

‘Have you spoken to Rob Jefferson yet?’

‘Not yet – he’s not come in. I need to catch him before the briefing. Can you start putting a search warrant together for me? We need his shoes and his bat before he gets rid of them. And I want Stark brought in for questioning. There’s enough here.’

‘Sure. I’ll do it now.’

‘Sam?’

Sam had turned to go, stopped in the doorway.

‘How’s everything going with Scarlett? Is she still in the hotel?’

‘I dropped her off last night. Caro is going to bring her in with Juliette this morning. They’re not booked in again for tonight, so we might need to find somewhere else for them, unless they can go back to the house. Though they might not want to, I guess.’

‘Great. We’ll sort something out if we need to. You know… what I said yesterday…’

‘It’s fine,’ Sam said, taking a deep breath. ‘I know what I’m doing. Jo made the mistake of getting too involved. I’m not about to fall down that particular hole.’