Bones in the Nest (18 page)

‘Does she have a name?’ Lizzie said.

‘Chloe isn’t speaking and Coldacre says he can’t remember if he was told, but he thinks it was a foreign name.’

‘Handy,’ Lizzie shook her head.

She looked again at the mark on the victim’s arm and held her own hand above it, trying to match the bruising with the spaces between her own fingers. ‘Let’s see if Chloe Toms has got bigger hands than me.’

The tent opened and Janet stuck her head in.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ Janet said, ‘but Dr Huggins is keen to get her bagged up, says the heat’s going to make his job harder when he gets her on the slab. And Lizzie, we’ve found two pink sequins in the grass mowings.’

‘Damn.’

Khan looked up, frowning.

‘Well, it means she walked across that bit before it was mown,’ Lizzie said, ‘making footprints or any other DNA
much harder to find. Janet, bag up all the grass cuttings, just in case.’

‘A handy way to cover one’s traces,’ Khan said. ‘Use an industrial lawnmower to obliterate your footprints.’

Khan stood up, as much as the low tent would allow, and offered her a hand. She pretended not to notice and sprung up from her squat with a quick abdominal contraction.

‘She’s all yours, detective.’

The air outside was warm and dry, but degrees cooler than the tent. She felt her blouse unstick from her back as she stretched. On a branch of the rhododendron, which had been pushed aside to fit the tent over the body, something caught her eye: a long black hair, hooked to the broken stem of a leaf. She reached up for it and held it for a moment, before tucking it away in an evidence bag.

Chloe Toms was sitting in the back seat of the police car. Lizzie needed the young woman’s clothes, but there was nowhere obvious for her to change. Lizzie spotted a low brick shed.

‘What’s in there?’ she asked a female officer.

‘Potting shed, ma’am. Where the gardening team has its base.’

‘Can you ask the girl to come with me?’

The officer opened the car door. She reached to her belt for her handcuffs, but Lizzie stopped her.

‘It’s not my decision, of course, but do you think that’s really necessary? She’s not under arrest yet, as far as I know.’

The girl didn’t look like she had the strength to run. She got out of the car and stood still, waiting to be told what to do. Her face was pale and drawn, her limp, blonde hair
pulled back in a ponytail. A patch of sweat had made a map of Africa through her olive green vest. Her limbs were spindly, shoulders pressing through the skin, but Lizzie could see she had strong, tight muscles roping up and down her arms. She clutched a baseball cap in her hands and as they started to walk towards the potting shed, she put it on, tugging the brim low.

In the cool, earthy stillness of the shed it took Lizzie a moment to become accustomed to the lack of light. The girl stared at the floor.

‘I’m a forensic specialist, Chloe. I’m not a police officer; I’m a scientist. I need to check your clothes for evidence, to see who’s been near the victim.’

The bony shoulders gave a barely perceptible shrug.

‘I need you to get undressed and put this plastic suit on. We’ll need your shoes too.’

She wished she didn’t have to put this young woman through the indignity of taking off her bra, but she’d learnt that the cleavage was a surprisingly useful place for catching particles. The girl didn’t care, she pulled off her vest top and held it out for Lizzie to catch in an evidence bag, unsnapped her bra and did likewise. Then she kicked off her shoes, peeled off her socks and let Lizzie pick them up while she dropped her trousers and offered them up for bagging. She stood naked except for her knickers. Lizzie was reminded of the pictures of liberated concentration camp victims. This girl might be muscular, but she didn’t look like she’d had a proper meal for weeks.

‘I’m sorry, but I need your knickers too.’

The female officer was watching and not watching at the
same time, struggling to show Chloe Toms some dignity. She need not have bothered. Lizzie thought about what Khan had said. If she’d already served a sentence, she must have undressed in front of people in uniform many times over.

Lizzie handed her the forensic suit.

‘I’m going to swab your mouth and your fingers. And then the skin around your neck and chest.’

Lizzie couldn’t see any blood on Chloe’s clothes or skin. If she’d killed the victim as soon as she arrived at Halsworth Grange that morning, she would have needed access to a shower and a full change of clothes. Close up, Lizzie could smell she hadn’t been near a shower for a while.

When she was done, she sent Chloe Toms back to the car with the police officer. She hesitated in the cool quiet of the potting shed. Coldacre kept the place very neat and tidy. Brooms and rakes hung from wooden racks in the ceiling. A drawer in an old dresser revealed pairs of stiffened gardening gloves in large, medium and small sizes. Lizzie bagged them up. A cupboard was labelled ‘Hand Tools’. She pulled open the double doors and was confronted with an Aladdin’s Cave of axes, secateurs, trowels and saws, all dangling from leather loops on their handles from rows of horizontal pegs driven into the back of the cupboard. Her eyes scanned the gently swinging objects until they came to rest on a wooden-handled blade, which scooped round and ended in a sharp point.

‘That could do it,’ she said aloud in the silent, dusty shed and reached for it, barely noticing as the metal sliced across the fingertip of her latex glove.

Sean wandered slowly up towards the Eagle Mount flats. His dad would surely be awake by now, and, if he’d remembered anything at all about Sean staying there, he might be wondering where he was. Sean couldn’t face the stinking lift and took the stairs instead, his footsteps echoing off the concrete. He reached the first floor and heard the clunk of the lift arriving at the same level. He opened the door to the landing slowly, waiting to see who would step out of the lift. The metal doors jerked apart, but whoever was in there was moving with an equal degree of caution. Sean stayed on the stairs, letting the door close on the tip of his shoe, and levelled his eye up to the open crack as the slight figure of Saleem Asaf stepped out. The boy stood for a moment, listening, then approached Jack Denton’s door. He put his ear to the door and listened again. Saleem obviously didn’t like what he heard and pulled back.

Sean opened the door from the staircase and they looked at each other, frozen. Sean was about to say something when
Saleem put his finger to his lips. Sean shrugged and held the door wide open for the boy, who slipped through and took off up the stairs, his footsteps so light he made no sound. Sean followed him.

They kept going up and up, until Saleem pointed to the roof and Sean felt an old chill of fear.
Don’t go up on the roof, some kid got shoved off.
But that was another time and another tower, and anyway, the killer had served her sentence. He put his hand on his back pocket to feel for the folded-up newspaper he’d been carrying that morning, but it wasn’t there. He must have dropped it on the way up.

The metal door to the service ladder had a broken lock and they were up and through the hatch in moments.

‘So?’ Sean said, taking in the view, breathless from climbing up ten floors. ‘What’s so important that we have to meet up here? Were you looking for me or do you often pay my dad a visit?’

‘Didn’t even know you had a dad, till someone told me.’

‘Who told you?’

Saleem shook his head. ‘I said to that other copper at the police station that I wanted to speak to you, that I would only speak to you. He just ignored me.’

‘Saleem, I’m not …’

‘On the case … yeah, he said that. But you’re safe, man. You’re the only one that is.’

‘You got into the back of the Health Centre right under my nose. Were you trying to get caught?’

Saleem grinned at him. ‘That’s what I mean: you’re the only one with any brains.’

Sean sighed. He wished he had Saleem’s faith in his
abilities because none of this was making any sense at all. He walked across the roof and sat on a low wall that surrounded a large air extraction unit.

‘Can’t talk there,’ Saleem jerked his thumb at the white, slatted construction. ‘All the kitchen fans come out here. They might hear us.’ He walked towards the opposite corner of the tower, which looked across the ring road to the woods and the quarry beyond. ‘I heard about you. You’re the one that cracked that caravan case. You were famous, man. I wanted to be a copper for time after that, you know?’

‘You still could.’

Saleem barked out a laugh that had no humour in it. ‘Nah, I’m never going be like you. You’re the real thing, CID, plain clothes now and all that.’

‘Thank for your high opinion of me, Saleem, but I was only seconded, a temporary thing, and right now I don’t know what’s going to happen. I may be done with the police anyway; I’ve been suspended.’

‘Seriously?’

Sean nodded, wondering why he was telling him all his secrets.

‘Whose voice did you hear, Saleem? Downstairs?’

‘If I tell you stuff, you never heard any of it from me, OK? I don’t want anything to do with it. I get stuck in the middle and this happens.’

He lifted his sweatshirt and showed Sean the large gauze bandage over his stomach wound.

‘So why do you trust me?’

‘I want you to make sure Ghazala is looked after.’

‘What makes you think I can help?’

‘You know people: housing, social and that.’ Saleem shrugged like it was obvious. ‘Sooner or later, my luck’s going to run out, man. I’ll end up dead or inside.’

‘I won’t be able to stop that from happening. You need to make changes in your own life, Saleem.’

‘Whatever. Look, what I’m trying to say is, I’m worried about Ghazala. The shop’s gone, everything in the flat is ruined; she can’t live there. But if I’m not there, she’s got no one. People will push her around.’

‘What about your auntie?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Your dad?’

‘Worse, don’t ask.’

‘Saleem, how old is Ghazala? She must be able to make up her own mind.’

‘She’s twenty-two. My dad wanted her to go with him to Pakistan, to help look after my granddad, but she was scared to go. She didn’t want to come back with an old man for a husband, or not come back at all.’ Saleem seemed suddenly older than his years; his fidgety, streetwise energy had all but fizzled out. ‘She had some trouble with a boy, years ago. It messed up her marriage chances. Like I said, it’s complicated, but trust me, I don’t want her to be on her own.’

‘I’ll do what I can to help your sister,’ Sean stood up, moving closer to the boy, uneasy now he was standing so near the edge. The rail was only waist-height and flimsy. ‘But in return, I want you to tell me what you know about Terry Starkey.’

Saleem froze, the muscle in his cheek pulsing.

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s sitting in your dad’s flat.’

‘That’s whose voice you heard?’

Saleem nodded. ‘That’s him. He mustn’t know I’m here and he can’t see me talking to you.’

‘Does he know I’m a police officer?’

The boy shrugged. ‘Don’t know. I ain’t said anything. Does it matter?’

‘God knows what my dad’s told him, but I think Starkey might have got the idea I’ve been in jail.’

Saleem’s laugh sounded more natural now and he was smiling when he turned round. ‘Who’s going to believe that?’

‘Where were you when your cousin Mohammad was killed?’

Saleem’s face dropped. ‘I just got told the game was on, some sort of shakedown. I was hanging around the rec and some white guys I knew said I could earn a bit of cash, if I wanted to help. They sent me down Attlee Avenue. I had to keep a lookout and make sure no one got out down there. I didn’t even know who they were chasing. I walked down to the bottom corner, then I walked back up, didn’t see nothing.’

‘Who were they?’

‘Just some lads. There was some money in it. Seemed like easy money.’

‘Who stabbed him?’

‘Don’t know. I stopped to roll a ciggy. Honest, I didn’t even know who the target was until …’ His voice caught in his throat and he turned back to the view of the ring road, hiding his face from Sean. ‘I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Mo. He was my cousin. He stuck up for Ghazala.’ Saleem sucked his teeth and spat over the wall of the block. ‘They must be laughing at me now, those boys.
Same ones who came to burn down the shop, I reckon.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Because they’re racists, of course. You want a name? There’s an older guy called Gary MacDonald, fat and bald. You can see videos of him on the internet doing all the Nazi salutes at a football match.’

‘So that’s what this is about, is it? Far-right extremists? What about the drugs?’

‘What about them?’

‘Terry Starkey reckons drugs are coming in to the estate from the Asian community.’

‘Of course he’d say that. Come on, you’re supposed to be the clever one. You work it out. I’ve got to go. We’re staying at my auntie’s and I’m supposed to be tucked up on the settee, letting my stitches heal. My sister will kill me if she knows I’ve been here.’

Despite his wound, Saleem moved quickly and reached the exit door in three strides. He swung himself round onto the ladder, wincing only slightly from the injury. Sean thought how in another world, the boy could have been a gymnast.

‘Wait! You can call me if you think of anything else,’ Sean said. But Saleem had gone and the metal door clanged shut at the foot of the ladder.

Sean made his way back down the stairs. When he reached the first floor, it was as if the boy had never been there. He pushed open the door to the landing and stopped dead. Terry Starkey was standing by the lift with Sean’s copy of
The Doncaster Free Press
in his hand.

‘Did you drop this?’ Terry said.

Sean nodded. ‘Must have done.’ He tried to think quickly,
thoughts scrambling round his brain. ‘Look, um, I’m sorry for your loss. Must be hard to know she’s out. The one who did it.’

Starkey’s face was expressionless, the bright blue eyes fixed on Sean’s. ‘Yeah, thanks, it is. I was looking for you as it goes. The old man didn’t know when you would be back.’

‘Just got in. Been for a wander round.’ He watched for a reaction but got nothing back. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I thought we should get to know each other a bit, we’ve got a lot in common.’

‘Really?’

‘More than you’d imagine,’ Starkey’s laugh hit the metal door of the lift and bounced back off the concrete wall behind them. ‘Jack said you might be able to help me.’

Sean’s mouth was so dry he thought his tongue would stick to the roof.

‘I’ve got myself one of these new smartphones,’ Terry continued. ‘Your dad was trying to help me set something up, but he hadn’t got a clue. No offence, mate. Me mam’s the same, out of the bloody ark, technophobic. We’re two of a kind, aren’t we?’

Sean forced a smile; it felt like a snake slithering across his face where his mouth used to be.

‘I can have a go,’ he said.

‘It’s that Twitter I want to get on to, for the CUC campaign.’

‘Oh. There’s always the library.’

‘No, don’t fancy that, too public. See what you can do with this. No idea how to do half the stuff on it beyond phoning and texting.’

He held out a phone. Sean took it. It was a very recent model. He turned it over in his hand and noticed a set of tiny lines scored into the gloss black. Not brand new, then.

‘Nice phone. Shall we go back in? We might as will sit down while we’re sorting it out.’ Sean knocked and his father opened the door immediately, as if he’d been listening.

He had an idea that he might be able do something clever with Starkey’s phone while he was installing Twitter, but he didn’t really know what he should be looking for. The recent calls list might give him some names or numbers, but probably nothing that would mean anything. Added to which, Starkey was watching him with those blue eyes, hungry to learn how the phone worked.

‘You miss a lot inside, don’t you?’ Terry Starkey said. ‘There’s always something new.’

Sean nodded and looked up to see his father winking at him. He’d like to know how long he was supposed to have been away for and what the charges were. Jack’s mad grin suggested he’d been embellishing a story while Starkey had been in the flat.

‘It’s loading now. Do you want a beer or something while we’re waiting?’

Starkey’s eyes lit up. ‘Sweet, mate.’

‘Nowt in the place, lad. I told you,’ Jack said. ‘I’m on the Twelve Steps.’

‘You don’t mind if Terry gets a couple in for me and him?’ He risked the first name. They were mates now, weren’t they? He pulled a twenty-pound note out of his wallet. ‘Have you got wheels? I’d go but I’d have to walk, and it’s a fair hike to Tesco, now the shop’s out of action.’

There was a moment in the stifling, musty air of Jack Denton’s flat when Sean thought Terry Starkey had rumbled him. His blue eyes flickered and settled on the phone.

‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘But don’t put anything out on that Twitter until I get back. The first message from the CUC is coming from my mouth.’

‘Of course. I’ll have it all set up. No worries.’

Sean saw him out and positioned himself by the kitchen window. A few moments later, Terry came out of the flats and turned into the entry road which ran down the side of Eagle Mount One. If he’d been parked at the front Sean would have missed him, but now he had a full view of Starkey’s vehicle. He pulled out his own phone, held it up to the window and snapped. The dark blue BMW started moving. He snapped again, hoping it wouldn’t be a blur, as the car turned onto the ring road and out of sight.

The toilet flushed and his father came into the kitchen.

‘You and him are getting on all right, son.’

Sean wondered which version of the truth his father could handle and decided to keep the white lies to a minimum.

‘I didn’t realise that was his brother, the one who got pushed off.’

‘Oh, aye, terrible business. And they’ve let her out already.’

‘Looks like it.’

Jack shuffled into the living room. Sean followed him and leant against the door frame, Starkey’s smartphone in his hand. He checked that the Twitter app was loading and wondered what information he should be looking for on the phone. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew
the answer was none. He was a suspended constable with absolutely no powers to go nosing around a citizen’s phone.

He weighed the phone in his hand and the faint scratch lines caught his eye. He crossed to the living room window and pulled back the curtain to let the light in. The scratches were faintly tinged with fuchsia pink, like nail varnish. He slid the cover off his own phone. There were similar scratch marks, only on his phone they were white. Same as his cover. It looked like the scratches on Starkey’s phone could have been caused by a pink plastic cover sliding on and off. He didn’t think it was infringing anyone’s human rights if he noticed something that was in plain view and it was plain to see that pink wasn’t Terry Starkey’s colour. It wasn’t rocket science to assume it was stolen.

Sean looked up to see that his dad had fallen asleep, his jaw slack and a line of dribble running into the stubble on his chin. With nobody watching, Sean clicked ‘Contacts’, but it was empty. There were no missed or recently received calls either. It obviously had a clean SIM card.

Sean realised he needed to hurry up. He checked and saw the app had loaded, then started to set up the account. It was requesting an email address. He’d have to wait for Starkey to get that. He went into messages and sent a text to his own number labelled ‘test’. He could say he needed to know Starkey’s number as part of the account set-up, which turned out to be true. He went back to the home screen. Behind the date and time there was a photo. He didn’t think it had the quality of a standard issue screensaver, more like a photo someone had taken. A tree full of pink blossom curved round the screen in a garden somewhere, and to the left of
the picture he could make out the side of a house, a brick wall and white window frames.