Blood of the Innocents (20 page)

‘Sure,’ Mariner said, absently, his mind not really on it. He knew he should be focusing on Yasmin but now all he could think about was Colleen waiting at home in hopeful ignorance. He didn’t want to leave all that to Charlie Glover.

Tony Knox was hovering. ‘Shall we bring in Pryce?’

‘Who?’ Glover’s ears pricked up.

‘A guy called Shaun Pryce turned up while we were here yesterday, back in the clearing, but claims that he doesn’t come on to the reservoir itself.’ Mariner filled Glover in on the main points of the conversation with Pryce.

‘But I think he’s a more regular visitor there than he told us. That flattened area of grass looks tailor-made for him. He wasn’t telling us the truth about that, and he doesn’t come here alone, either.’

‘Judging everyone by your own standards, Tony?’ said Glover.

Mariner cringed on Knox’s behalf at the reference to his colourful past, but he took it well enough. Would have been something of a double standard not to. ‘There were a hell of a lot of fresh dog-ends for one person,’ he said.

‘The weather’s been dry for weeks. They could have built up over a period of time. And if he’s down here screwing some girl, why didn’t he just say so? It’s no big deal. In fact I’d have thought it was something he’d want to brag about.’

‘She’ll be married, won’t she? Didn’t you ever see
Confessions of an Electrician
? He’ll be having it away with someone else’s missus.’ There was a bitter edge to Knox’s voice. ‘Maybe Ricky saw Pryce knocking off some woman and threatened to let it out, so Pryce had to shut him up.’

‘How would Ricky know that what he saw was illicit? For all Ricky knew it could have been Pryce and his wife having a bit of open-air fun.’

‘Maybe Pryce didn’t like having an audience.’

Mariner shook his head. ‘Oh no, Shaun Pryce would love it. He’s an actor,’ he added, for Glover’s benefit.

‘He might not be so keen on being watched if things aren’t going his way,’ Glover said.

‘Can’t imagine that,’ said Knox, sourly.

‘Perhaps Ricky was a regular visitor down here, too. Had seen what Pryce was up to and been blackmailing him?’

‘Well, right now Pryce is the only other person we can place down here, so we at least need to talk to him.’

‘Yes, we do,’ Mariner agreed. ‘We need to know
exactly
what he did down here, when he was here and for how long - going back for the last couple of months. But I don’t think there’s any urgency. I get the feeling that Shaun Pryce might be in a more talkative mood once news leaks out about where we’ve found Yasmin’s phone.’

‘You’re sure he won’t disappear?’

‘Oh no, judging by yesterday’s performance, if he is involved, he’ll want to be around for his bit of the limelight. ’

‘I’d better go and tell Ricky’s mother. Do you want to come?’

Mariner winced. Running the scene in his head, he could hear Colleen’s screaming and sobbing as if it was real, and see her beating her fists against Glover. ‘Not yet. She needs to know that you’re in charge. And we’ve got things to do.’ Or was he taking the coward’s way out, unable to face Colleen after letting her down so badly, afraid of the hysteria that would ensue? Later, Charlie told him it hadn’t run like that at all. She’d taken the news in a stunned silence. Somehow that had been even worse.

 

As they left the site, a low loader bearing a Portakabin was driving on. The incident room would be set up here to maximise the use of local intelligence and deepen the search. One of the first tasks would be a door to door to try and establish when and where Ricky was last seen. The Murder Investigation Unit would support Charlie Glover’s OCU investigation and a team would be put on to searching the reservoir area for the murder weapon. The diving team would have to be contracted in from a neighbouring force, since their own divers had gone the way of the mounted division and fallen victim to budget cuts. Trawling the reservoir would be a mammoth task in all that thick black mud. Close behind the truck was a couple of unmarked vehicles, one of them a grey Transit.

‘The vultures moving in,’ observed Knox. Inevitably, the press would have picked up news of the discovery from the morning’s activities over the air waves. ‘Want me to get rid of them, boss?’

‘Be as unpleasant as you like,’ said Mariner.

What Mariner was less prepared for was the mob of reporters already assembled outside the entrance to Granville Lane. News had travelled fast and they were not a happy throng. Knox and Mariner got out of the car just as Fiske appeared at the main doors to read a prepared statement. ‘We will do everything within our power to bring the killer of Ricky Skeet to justice,’ he concluded.

‘Is that the same kind of everything you did to find him when he went missing?’ someone called out.

‘We followed all possible lines of enquiry. I have no doubt that my officers did all they possibly could to prevent this situation from occurring.’

‘Mrs Skeet doesn’t seem to agree with you on that.’

Fiske was getting hot under the collar. ‘Any complaints about the way this enquiry has been handled will be dealt with through the usual channels.’

‘Whitewashed, you mean.’

Mariner signalled to Knox and they slipped round the building and into a side door. Along the corridor they ran into Fiske, making his escape. ‘Bloody press,’ he grumbled.

‘Perhaps they’ve got a point this time,’ said Mariner.

‘And what the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

‘We didn’t exactly pull out all the stops for Ricky, did we?’ Mariner reminded him.

‘Given his profile we followed the correct procedures.’

‘I’ll tell his mum that. I’m sure she’ll feel greatly reassured. “Your son’s dead, but given his profile, we did everything by the book, Colleen.”’ Deep down, Mariner recognised that he was more angry with himself than he was with Fiske. If he’d made more of a stand against the arrogant bastard instead of caving in at the beginning this might not have happened. ‘We’ve got a kid we hardly looked for dead and another we’ve wasted energy on looking for who might have eloped with her lover.’

‘We got it wrong. Sometimes it happens.’

‘You can say that again.’

Millie was up in the office. ‘You heard?’ Mariner asked.

Her face said it. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah. But we have to turn our attention back to Yasmin. There’s always the chance that the two cases aren’t linked. I know the probability has slumped a bit, but still the only two people we can definitely place down at the reservoir at any time are Shaun Pryce and Ricky Skeet. Yasmin’s phone was there but that’s all. We still don’t know for sure that she was too: let’s deal with the reality first, before we go off speculating about other things.’ She’d been gone more than a week now and their one breakthrough had led them nowhere.

‘Let’s see the CCTV footage again. We might be able to establish if Yasmin dropped her phone, and I want to be absolutely sure that it’s her getting on that train.’

‘But we’ve been over that, boss,’ Knox groused.

Brushing aside his complaints they played the tape yet again. They watched as Yasmin boarded the train and the door closed behind her, as on every previous occasion. As the train began to draw away, Knox switched the tape off.

‘That’s definitely Yasmin,’ said Millie, swivelling on her chair to face Mariner. ‘She looks right into the camera.’

‘And no sign of her dropping her phone,’ said Mariner.

‘But she started running from the top of the road. She could have dropped it anywhere before she comes into view.’ Her disappointment was tangible.

‘Well, we may soon find out about that, anyway. Her phone should be back from—’

‘Look, boss.’ Tony Knox had suddenly become animated. While Mariner and Millie were talking he’d turned the tape on again, watching it with half an eye.

Mariner turned his attention back to the screen as Knox wound back the film at speed. ‘But we’ve already seen—’

‘Look, for Christ sake!’ At the point at which Yasmin boarded the train, Knox pressed the play button again. The train began to move off, and as it did so, a door further down the carriage reopened, a figure appeared and after a second’s hesitation, leaped from the moving train on to the platform. It stumbled and almost fell before regaining its feet and, when it straightened, was unmistakable.

‘She got off the train,’ said Knox, with a degree of satisfaction.

‘Nearly killing herself in the process,’ observed Mariner. ‘Christ. Why didn’t we think of that?’

‘Think of what?’ They were so caught up in their find that Fiske’s voice startled them. Sneaking up on them was becoming a speciality.

‘Yasmin Akram had us all fooled,’ said Mariner. ‘Play it back, Tony.’

‘What ag—?’ Mariner glared at him and dutifully Knox reran the tape yet again. As they watched, Mariner provided the commentary. ‘She runs for the train, giving her friends - and us - the impression that she was going as usual, but gets off again before the train pulls out. He looked up at Fiske, calculating how far he could go. ‘She never even got as far as the university.’

A muscle bulged in Fiske’s jaw. ‘Are you trying to make some kind of point, Mariner?’

‘Only that perhaps we could have saved ourselves considerable time and resources if we’d been a bit less hasty with the search, sir,’ said Mariner calmly.

But Fiske wasn’t so easily beaten. ‘We did the right thing based on the information available at the time,’ he replied, icily. ‘Not forgetting that in the course of those actions, we’ve exposed a sex attacker operating in that area.’

‘Oh, very good, sir.’ Knox grinned inanely, before realising, along with everyone else, that the pun had been unintentional.

‘Given that new information has come to light, I’d have thought your time would more usefully be spent following it up rather than playing games of “I told you so”.’ And with that, Fiske turned and walked out.

‘Fucking moron,’ muttered Knox. Mariner should really have reminded him about respect for senior officers, but it was good to have Tony Knox back on the planet again, however fleetingly. Instead, he brought them back to task. ‘So why does Yasmin get off the train?’

‘Because she has other plans?’

Having recovered from her leap from the moving train, they watched as Yasmin walked along the platfrom, towards the footbridge and off the screen. ‘What it doesn’t tell us is where she went next.’

‘Except that there’s a camera positioned at the back of the station too,’ Knox remembered. ‘It would be worth checking out the tape from that now. She’s going towards the footbridge. She could be crossing the line.’

‘In more ways than one.’

‘Yasmin’s just full of surprises, isn’t she?’

‘Let’s get the tape.’

 

Yasmin did indeed appear on the footage from the back of the station, descending the pedestrian bridge and moving across the screen towards the station car park, but that was the extent of the camera’s coverage.

‘So where’s she off to?’

‘Suddenly, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Yasmin dropped her phone at the reservoir.’

But as Knox went to switch off the TV, Mariner spotted something else on the screen. ‘Look at that; bottom right-hand corner.’ Next to the kerb was the offside wing and part of the bonnet of a dark vehicle.

‘A Merc,’ said Knox. ‘You can tell from that radiator grille.’

‘Is there anyone in it?’ asked Millie, as they all squinted at the screen.

‘Hard to see; it’s from the wrong angle. Can we home in on that licence plate?’

They could, but it was still too blurry to be of any use.

‘Mohammed Akram drives a black Mercedes,’ Mariner reminded them.

‘That’s neat. Maybe Yasmin got off the train again because she saw someone she knew.’

The time on the corner of the screen said: 16.29. ‘How accurate is that?’

‘According to Akram, he’d been to the printer and by half past four was on the motorway on his way up to Bradford by that time,’ said Mariner.

‘Is the printer in the city?’ asked Knox.

‘I assumed it was in Sparkhill, near the school. TMR Printers, it’s called. It was on the prospectus Hasan Sheron showed us.’

Knox reached for the
Yellow Pages
and flicked through until he found ‘printers’.

‘Here we are: TMR Reprographics. Two branches, one in the city and another—’ He looked up for dramatic effect. ‘On Birch Close.’

‘Shit,’ said Millie.

‘Thanks for that valuable contribution,’ Knox said. But he did seem to be joking.

‘And from there it’s just a short drive up to the station where the CCTV picks up his car,’ said Mariner. ‘If it is his car.’

‘And it would be no problem to get on to the motorway from here. There’s nothing stopping him from going back out through the city centre and up to Spaghetti Junction, or even up the Wolverhampton Road to the M5, then M6. The fact that Yasmin stayed for the art club and left school late would have helped him out. He’d also probably have known that she was on her own so it would have been the ideal place if he didn’t want to confront Yasmin in front of her friends, or back at home.’

‘So he could easily have picked her up from the station and taken her with him.’

‘What time did he check in with the family in Bradford?’ Knox wanted to know.

‘Not until nearly eight. But he says he stopped off at Sandbach Services for something to eat on his way and that there were roadworks on the M62, which there are.’

‘It doesn’t rule him out, though. It’s still a bloody big coincidence if he was in the area at all at around that time.’

‘An appeal for the driver on local news can rule out anyone else.’

‘When did he say he’d confronted Yasmin about the pills?’ Millie asked.

‘On Friday. He said they’d sorted it out. But there might have been unfinished business.’