Everyone Lies (26 page)

Simms watched him make his flat-footed way to the stairwell. As soon as he was out of sight she went to her office, closed the door and picked up the phone.

Fennimore was already up.

‘Well, don’t you sound annoyingly fresh and bright,’ she said.

‘Amazing the effect of a good night’s sleep,’ he said. ‘How did the search go?’

He listened without interrupting while she summarized the main points, including her conversation with Spry.

‘All of which sounds like good news,’ Fennimore said. ‘So why am I sensing doom?’

She raised her shoulders and let them fall. ‘I dunno, Nick – every time I find another kink in the course of the investigation, something pops up to whack it back into shape for me again. I hassle the dealers on the street and someone steps up and admits to tainting the deals. I rattle the sauna operators and suddenly Howard drops into my lap – courtesy of Crimestoppers, mind you, so I can’t check the source. I ask for additional tests on the swabs, and
hey presto
the victim’s belongings turn up in Howard’s flat, along with a nice little stash of heroin.’

‘Everyone makes mistakes, and criminals do sometimes get cocky,’ Fennimore said.

‘But it doesn’t make sense!’

‘Hey, I’m on your side,’ he said. ‘I’m just doing that thing I do.’

‘What,’ she said, ‘stating the bloody obvious?’

‘It’s sometimes the best way to reveal the obscure.’

‘Very gnomic,’ she said, knowing she sounded childish and sulky. He was playing devil’s advocate, she knew that. But she was hot and prickly and in need of a shower and breakfast and a few hours’ sleep. She closed her eyes, trying to find a point of equilibrium, but the room began to spin and she saw a vivid image of the murder victim, her face pulped to blood and raw flesh. Her eyes flew open again and she took a few breaths.

‘Okay.’ She tried to put her thoughts in order. ‘I checked with the FIDO for Cheetham Hill.’ Field intelligence development officers, or FIDOs, gathered basic intelligence on criminal activities in their local neighbourhood.

‘There hasn’t been so much as a
whisper
of George Howard being involved in drugs. Yet Howard – ex-government auditor, a man who pays his taxes
because it’s the law
– is now in the frame for possession with intent to supply a class A drug.’

‘He also runs a massage parlour, Kate – that’s not what you’d call a legitimate business.’ She heard the quizzical humour in his voice.

‘Sure,’ she admitted. ‘But Howard is too careful to make a basic error like this. He stays just within the boundaries that would make prosecution economically unviable for the CPS and he runs the business like it’s a bloody insurance office. He’s got his events schedule planned for the year, his pre-tax results all worked out – he’s even set up an online savings account labelled “tax fund”. Keeping a hundred grams of heroin on the premises isn’t cocky or careless, it’s stupid and lax, and in Howard’s book that would be
really
criminal.’

Fennimore was silent for a few moments. ‘Well, if
he
didn’t put it there … then someone else did.’

‘Well, duh!’ It was one of her teenage daughter’s phrases of the moment, and Simms instantly regretted it, but Fennimore went on as if he hadn’t heard:

‘They’re Howard’s drugs, or they aren’t his drugs – it’s as simple as that. The question is how to establish which is the correct proposition.’ He sounded intrigued, relishing the challenge.

‘How do we do that?’ she said.

‘We’ll need a detailed analysis of the heroin, obviously. DNA trace on the threads of the nipple stud bar. Since he unscrewed it, rather than ripping it out, we won’t have blood all over the stud, so there might well be some good clean epithelia from his tongue or buccal cells from his lips in the screw threads.’

She took notes, grimacing slightly at the grosser details, but inwardly smiling. One of Fennimore’s best qualities was that he took every hypothesis seriously. He might tear it to shreds in the discussion that followed, but only in the interests of good forensic science.

‘The photo you found in the victim’s purse – is it professional, or a photo booth?’

The question stumped her for a moment. ‘I don’t know, let me think.’ She knew there had to be a good reason why he was asking, and she rubbed her forehead, trying to stimulate the brain cells into some kind of activity. It came to her slowly, out of a fog of tiredness. ‘Photo booth,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Photo booth pics are still tacky when they come out of the machine. If we’re lucky, the brown-haired beauty in the picture touched the edge of the print before it was dry, and you’ll get a nice partial at the very least.’

Simms emailed the lab to make the additional request, still cradling the phone between her shoulder and her ear.

‘Anything else I can help with?’ Fennimore asked.

‘You couldn’t rustle up a few students to augment my team, could you?’

‘If you’re serious, Josh Brown has been agitating for more to do. I keep telling him he has a PhD thesis to work on, but I think he’s been bitten by the investigative bug.’

‘I’ll keep him in mind,’ she said. It wasn’t that she distrusted the student exactly, but he made her uneasy. He was hiding something, and until she knew what that was, she would never feel entirely comfortable with him.

She looked at her notes, and couldn’t bring herself to make the next call.

‘Problem?’ Fennimore said.

‘I’m a bit nervous about requesting the DNA trace on the nipple stud,’ she said. ‘Spry was very specific about not spending more money on lab analysis, so …’ She stuttered to a halt and hoped he would jump in and rescue her.

He exhaled into the mouthpiece. ‘All right … I do happen to know someone at the DNA lab at Wetherby. I can get it done fast, under the radar. If or when you get something useful, you can enter it in the books.’

27

‘If you must play, decide upon three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.’

C
HINESE
P
ROVERB

Fennimore was watching the TV in his room with Joe – José González – the hotel concierge. Joe was off duty until the evening shift; Fennimore had struck up a conversation with Joe on his first visit to Manchester, when he’d asked if there was a betting shop nearby. They had discussed their mutual interest in turf accountancy and Fennimore discovered that González studied form, betting on the outsiders with a sporting chance. Fennimore, on the other hand, studied the odds and bet on the best statistical chances. Complementary skills, so far as he was concerned. Today, they were up eight-hundred-and-twenty on an initial stake of fifty pounds each. Taking the advice of the Chinese proverb, they had agreed the stakes and the quitting time, which guaranteed neither one of them would walk away out of pocket, and engendered a warm glow that Fennimore refused to acknowledge as smugness.

He and Joe had a hundred riding on a four-to-one shot in the three o’clock chase at Sedgefield. His mobile rang as the horses rounded the bend and entered the back straight for the last time. He checked the caller ID and answered.

‘Kate,’ he said, one eye on the screen. ‘How’re you holding up?’

‘Right now, I’d give a week’s salary for a good night’s sleep,’ she said.

The horses were out in the country on the far side of the course, beginning to spread out as the leaders pushed on for home.

‘Got a minute?’ She did sound tired, but he heard a tremor of excitement in her voice.

Soon the riders would be rounding the final bend, disappearing from view in the dip as they turned into the straight until the leaders reappeared, jumping over the last fence. Fennimore always thought that sudden reappearance was the most exciting sight on any racecourse in the UK, but the slight quaver of eagerness in Simms’s tone had him hooked, and he motioned Joe to turn the sound down.

‘A minute, an hour, a lifetime for you, Kate.’

‘Bollocks,’ she said, then, ‘Sorry – tiredness brings out the Tourette’s in me. Nick, we got two partial fingerprints from the edge of the photograph.’

‘And …’ He kept his eye on the screen as the horses took the last few fences, their horse still on the bridle in fourth place, Joe urging it on, but Fennimore was listening, knowing there was more – she wouldn’t have phoned him unless there was more.

‘We got a link to a tenprint from one of the excess ODs – a genuine overdose that is – not one of the penicillin victims.’

He felt a happy surge of adrenaline. ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘Rika.’

‘The very same. I asked a forensic anthropologist to do a comparison of the photo booth image with Rika’s PM photo – it’s her, Nick. Our murder victim was carrying Rika’s photo around in her purse.’

Fennimore turned away from the TV. ‘Even your superintendent couldn’t dismiss that as a coincidence.’

She gave a short, coughing laugh. ‘He pointed out that since we don’t know who Rika is, it hasn’t “progressed the investigation in any measurable way”.’

‘He really is a pillock, isn’t he?’ Fennimore said.

‘Well he’s right, I suppose – it doesn’t give us her real identity,’ Simms said. ‘We know from the coroner’s inquest that she had no ID on her at all, not even a bus pass.’

‘Trafficked?’ Fennimore asked.

‘Maybe, but I’m going to play that possibility down for a bit, until I’ve got something more definite.’

She was hedging. He didn’t blame her – any hint of gangland connections or an international dimension would almost certainly lose her the case – the Intelligence and Security Bureau would swoop in and snatch the investigation from under her nose. Fennimore knew Simms well enough to be sure she would
not
want that. He was surprised to realize that neither would he.

‘Anything new on Rika?’ he asked.

He heard her puff air into the receiver. ‘Only that the state paid for her burial.’ Renwick had turned that one up.

Behind him Joe roared in Spanish at the TV, leaping to his feet in an unconscious effort to be the first over the last fence.

Fennimore stuck a finger in one ear and pressed the phone to the other, raising his voice over Joe’s yelling. ‘So, what will you do?’

‘Work the case until they shut it down around me.’ He could practically see the stubborn jut of her chin.

‘I’ve had a team out for two hours, doing the rounds of the massage parlours with Rika’s photo booth picture,’ she went on. ‘Either they’re stonewalling us, or they really don’t know her.’

‘Rika did die almost a year ago,’ Fennimore said. ‘And massage parlours have a rapid turnover – nobody stays long. Some of the girls give up, quit the life.’

‘Not Rika,’ Simms said. ‘She had a serious drugs habit – she couldn’t afford to quit. And if her habit got to be a nuisance to the management, they’d’ve kicked her out onto the street without a second thought—’ She stopped suddenly.

‘What?’ he asked.

She laughed. ‘You’ve just given me the angle I need. Fennimore,’ she said, ‘I think I love you.’ A silence followed, heavy with meaning. She hung up before he could think of something to say.

Fennimore turned to face the room again. The TV was still on, though the volume was off. Their horse was making a steaming circuit of the winners’ enclosure, and Joe had left a note on the coffee table: ‘I’ll pick up the winnings and drop your share in this evening,
Brujo
.’

Another win. He should be pleased. He
was
pleased. But a share of easy money suddenly seemed dull set against the possibility of closing the case. With Kate.

Simms walked fast to the Major Incident Room, trying not to think about what she’d just said to Fennimore.

Some of the team were out canvassing. Of the ten remaining, three were HOLMES operatives. She had already delivered the bad news about staffing cuts at the morning briefing; there was a reek of defeat in the place. She had a quiet word with Ella Moran, asked her to run off a bundle of colour copies of Rika’s post-mortem photo on the office printer, and called the rest to order.

Simms held up a spare copy of Rika’s smiling image from the photo booth, and looked around the room. ‘Rika didn’t look anything like this when she died,’ she said. ‘She was a drugs-wasted mess.’ She held a copy of the post-mortem photograph next to it. ‘
This
is what she looked like when she died.’

Moran started handing out the PM photographs and they began to sit up and pay attention. ‘We’re moving the search to the streets. Go to the corners; talk to the sex workers and addicts who might have known her. Show them the PM photo side by side with the photo booth image. Ask if they knew her. If they did, we need to know where she came from, if she ever told anyone her family name, or the name of a friend from home who was here in the city. A good-looking girl like Rika probably started out working in the saunas. Find out which.

‘Our murder victim was carrying Rika’s picture around in her purse. We don’t have a clear picture of what
she
looked like – she was too badly beaten. We
do
know she was probably working as a prostitute. She wasn’t a regular drug user, so she was healthy. And she’d never been subjected to whipping before the night she died. She was a natural blonde. Ask them to look at Rika and try to picture her with a slim blonde woman: long legs, short, straight hair, early twenties.’ They were making notes, eager, heads up, ready to get to work.

‘Now, I know a lot of you will be back on normal duties tomorrow. You’ll want to clear your desks, get reports written up.’ She gave them a deadpan look. ‘Fill in your expense sheets.’

She got a ripple of laughter.

‘So. I’m not going to force anyone – I’m asking for volunteers.’

Four or five hands went up immediately; Ella Moran’s was one of them, standing at the printer with a handful of post-mortem pictures in her hand. ‘I worked that beat in uniform, Boss,’ she said. ‘I know some of the girls. If you want, I could—’

‘Go ahead, Ella. Call me direct if you find anything – anything at all.’