Blood of the Innocents (21 page)

‘What if Akram had talked Yasmin into going up to Bradford with him?’

Mariner was dubious. ‘Without telling her mother what was going on?’

‘They probably wouldn’t have wanted her to know about the contraception.’

‘But that doesn’t tie in with Akram forbidding Yasmin to go to Suzanne’s. He couldn’t have known that his wife would give in and let her go.’

‘He might know his wife better than she thinks.’

‘The receipt from the service station only indicates a meal for one.’

Mariner sighed. ‘OK, folks, we’re wandering into the realms of speculation again. Let’s get back to the facts.’
Just the facts, Jack
.

‘We have Ricky, Yasmin and Akram all in the same area at the same time,’ said Knox. ‘That’s fact.’

‘Only if it is Akram’s car.’

‘And I still don’t get where Ricky comes into this,’ Millie said.

‘He might not,’ said Mariner. ‘We could still be looking at two entirely unconnected events. Maybe all Ricky did was to find Yasmin’s phone at the station and take it with him to the reservoir, where he was attacked and he dropped it, simple as that. Meanwhile, Yasmin, unaware that she’s even lost her phone, meets her dad at the station.’

‘Are we absolutely certain that Yasmin and Ricky didn’t know each other?’ Knox asked.

‘I just don’t see how they would,’ said Millie.

‘But we don’t know for sure that they didn’t,’ Knox insisted, the tension in the room thickening.

‘They don’t need to have done. If Ricky was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Akram could have just jumped to the wrong conclusion.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Maybe the phone does provide the link. How about if Ricky found the phone, as we thought. Yasmin’s home number must be on it. Ricky phones that number to establish its owner, gets Akram who arranges to meet him to collect it. Akram’s at the printer, Ricky knows the reservoir, so they arrange to meet at a mutually convenient spot. Akram is still wound up about Yasmin being on the pill, jumps to the wrong conclusion about Ricky having her phone and loses it.’

Knox’s facial expression fell just short of contempt. ‘That’s a hell of a conclusion to jump to. A kid finds his daughter’s phone so he assumes he’s having sex with her?’

‘We don’t know what’s on that phone.’ Millie stood her ground. ‘There might be some interesting messages. Could be that Ricky tried blackmailing Akram: perhaps he demanded money before giving it up. Akram’s already pissed off about all the hassle he’s been getting. This could’ve been the final straw.’

Seeing Knox’s colour rising, Mariner spoke up. ‘It’s an interesting idea, but knowing Ricky, I’m not sure that he’d have done that kind of thing,’ he said, calmly.

Millie shrugged. ‘He’d run away from home. I didn’t think that was his kind of thing, either. And if he wasn’t planning on going back he was going to need more money.’

‘So why did Paul Hewitt find the phone still lying there?’ Knox almost sneered. ‘Akram would have taken it with him.’

‘Ricky was in a bad way, wasn’t he? The attack must have been violent, impulsive even. Maybe he just lost it and in the heat of the moment he dropped the phone and it got forgotten. He’d have been pretty caught up in what he was doing. Or somebody disturbed him.’

‘Down there?’

‘OK. He looked up and saw Lily watching him.’

‘I doubt that he’d see her from that distance,’ said Mariner. ‘And even so, if the phone was what this was all about, he’d hardly leave it behind, would he?’

‘Or go in bloodstained clothing back to the station to meet his daughter.’

‘He was going away overnight. He would have had a change of clothing in the car.’

‘That’s crazy. If that
is
what happened, Ricky would have had hardly any time to find the phone, alert Akram and arrange to meet him. I’d say it was virtually impossible. ’ Knox glared at Millie, who refused to be intimidated. It was a stand-off.

‘And I think we’re getting a bit carried away here, folks,’ Mariner intervened, quietly. ‘We need to look at it from every angle, but this isn’t getting us any nearer to knowing where Yasmin’s gone.’

‘I think we need to check her dad’s movements up in Bradford,’ Millie insisted. ‘If she has simply been spirited away, it would explain why he didn’t seem so anxious at the start.’

‘Look into that, will you?’ said Mariner. ‘It remains a possibility, but one of many. At the moment all we have is Yasmin’s phone, Ricky dead and Yasmin vanished.’

‘Like one of those lateral thinking problems,’ said Knox.

Millie pulled a face. ‘I was always rubbish at them.’

‘I need some fresh air,’ said Knox.

When he’d left the room, Millie asked the question Mariner had been dreading. ‘Are you sure it’s not me?’

‘Tony just takes the job seriously,’ said Mariner, brushing it off.

‘Implying that we don’t?’ She had a point.

Mariner was saved from making any further crass remarks by the news that Charlie Glover was back from the Pathologist’s office with the preliminary findings.

Glover cut to the chase. ‘Everything so far says the blood on the grass is definitely Ricky’s,’ he said. ‘It was a frenzied attack involving repeated blows to the skull with a blunt instrument. It would have been messy.’

‘So the clothing the killer was wearing—’

‘—would be pretty well covered in blood.’

‘According to Lily, it was some kind of brown suit.’

‘Yeah, I’ve spoken to her. Her eyesight seems pretty sharp and what she’s told us seems accurate so I think we can go with that. So the brown suit would have needed to go to the cleaner’s or even more likely to have been destroyed. Hard to explain to Sketchley’s why your suit is covered in someone else’s blood.’

‘Have we got a time of death?’

‘Thanks to the weather the body was pretty ripe, as you saw. But they’re saying it’s been there about seven days. That would put it at sometime late on Tuesday afternoon.’

Lining it up nicely with the last time that Yasmin was seen alive. ‘Anything else?’

‘Only what Lily’s already said: she’s pretty certain that the man she saw had dark hair.’ Like Mohammed Akram, thought Mariner. Did he own a brown suit? ‘It could, of course, depend on the angle of the sun at that time,’ Glover went on. ‘If the sun was behind or overhead it could be the one detail that she’s mistaken on.’

‘It’s possible,’ agreed Mariner. ‘What about Colleen’s boyfriend, Steve?’

‘We’re checking him out, but so far his alibi looks sound. He was still at work.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘Yeah, isn’t it? And so that you know, Ronnie Skeet was in Wolverhampton.’

‘Any thoughts on how it played out?’ Mariner asked.

‘Well, we’ve got blood on the grass by the bridge, but around that, nothing, and no sign of disturbance. However, working back from where the body was found is a kind of tunnel through the grass, leading almost back to the bridge, and also smeared with blood. It makes it look as if Ricky was killed at the bridge, then his killer, probably thinking he was dead, carried him into the long grass and dumped him, coming back to the path to cover his tracks. It looks as if Ricky could have dragged himself further through the grass, creating a kind of tunnel, to the point where we found him.’

‘Christ, so he wasn’t dead.’

‘And crawling even further from the path did his killer a favour by delaying the discovery of his body. We’re continuing the search in the direction he was going: to see if he was making for anything in particular. But he may just have been trying to get away. And you were right about the reason for Ricky being there,’ Glover added. ‘I asked Colleen. His dad did used to take him fishing on the reservoir, but not for years. We still haven’t found his bike, but did they tell you about the Anderson?’

‘I didn’t get time to check in yesterday.’

‘Further round still from where Ricky’s body was found we came across an old Anderson shelter. From all the empty cans and crisp packets it looks as if Ricky had been there before.’

‘He used to go off for the day at weekends,’ Mariner said, recalling the conversation with Colleen. ‘Is this all going to the press?’

‘It might have to. Fiske is desperate to get them off his back. How does a berk like him get to be in his position?’

‘Gift of the gab,’ said Mariner. ‘Did you ask Colleen about Yasmin?’

‘Yeah, and nearly got a black eye for it.’ Glover recounted the conversation conducted under the beady gaze of Steven Marsh. ‘He didn’t seem to appreciate the timing.’

Mariner grimaced.

‘And Colleen, of course, took it as further proof that we were more concerned with Yasmin than with Ricky, but basically the answer was no. She couldn’t see how Ricky would have known that “posh little Asian kid”, even when I told her about the phone.’ Glover paused. ‘Question is, though: would Colleen have even known?’

 

Mariner reported back on what Glover had said as he and Knox drove over to Allah T’ala. For once, Knox seemed unnaturally chipper, his jaws working hard on a gobbet of chewing gum, which he’d lately taken to chewing almost constantly. They were shown up to the same office where Mariner and Millie had first gone, and where Mohammed Akram, in shirtsleeves, his tie hanging loose, was poring over some architect’s drawings. He jumped up as they went in, his face a turmoil of emotions. ‘You’ve found something? ’

‘Nothing more. I’m sorry,’ said Mariner, wishing that he could read that face. ‘PC Khatoon has kept you up to date?’

‘She told us about the boy, and that Yasmin’s phone was nearby. Do you think—?’

‘We’re trying to establish the facts,’ said Mariner,

‘which is why we need to clarify a couple of things with you.’

‘My wife is teaching a class.’

‘That’s fine, I think you should be able to help us. The printer you were at in Kingsmead on Tuesday afternoon,’ said Mariner. ‘It’s some distance from your school. Why there?’

‘My last supplier closed about a year ago. I happened to mention this to Yasmin’s teacher one parents’ evening. Yasmin had been awarded a certificate and I asked where they had got it printed. She recommended the place. I decided to try them.’

‘And tell me again, what time were you there on that Tuesday afternoon?’

‘Around four o’clock. I left twenty or thirty minutes later. The meeting didn’t take long. I just needed to look at some proofs. But you know all this. I already told you.’

‘Will the printer be able to confirm that timing?’

‘I’m sure that he will.’

‘And from there you drove up to Bradford.’

‘As I’ve already told you,’ said Akram, irritably.

‘Did you go anywhere near Kingsmead Station?’

‘No. I had no reason to do that.’

‘Yasmin would have just been leaving school at that time.’

‘I suppose she was. I didn’t really think about it.’

‘You weren’t tempted to meet her to discuss your recent disagreement?’

‘As I said before, that matter had been resolved.’

‘Mr Akram, do you own a brown suit?’

A slight pause. Surprised about the question or thinking about an answer? ‘Yes, I do. As a matter of fact I have it here. It’s due to be dry-cleaned.’

That was a piece of luck. ‘Could we see it?’

‘Er, yes.’ Akram left the room and after several minutes returned with the suit, protected in a plastic cover. It was a shade of mid-brown. For a suit that was going to the cleaner’s it seemed spotlessly clean.

‘Mr Akram, I’m going to ask you again. Do you have any idea about the whereabouts of your daughter?’

Akram looked him straight in the eye. ‘And I will tell you again, Inspector. No, I have not.’

‘That suit looked OK to me,’ said Knox as they cooked again in the car.

‘We didn’t ask him if he owns more than one.’

Knox gave him a sidelong look. ‘Just because all your suits are exactly the same colour—’

‘Two colours, actually,’ Mariner corrected him.

‘All I’m saying is: most of us have a bit more imagination. ’

‘Thanks.’

‘Any time.’

‘Akram is consistent about the timing, though,’ conceded Mariner. ‘Did the printer verify it?’

‘Over the phone, yes.’

Mariner sighed. ‘Even with the techies’ enhancements on the CCTV footage, I’m not sure that we’ll be able to determine the licence plates or the driver of that car.’

‘And if he’s telling the truth, he’d have left the city before that was filmed.’

‘Did you believe him, that he didn’t realise that Yasmin would be at the station at that time?’

‘Yeah.’ Knox nodded. ‘You’re not thinking about your kids all day long, especially when they get to that age. You’re starting to lead separate lives.’

‘Some more than others,’ said Mariner. ‘It just would be nice to know for sure.’