Scarred for Life (18 page)

‘You’ve what? Last week it was trying to catch a pickpocket but I don’t have a name for that. A knife robber is on the loose because you or one of your team let him go. His head is covered in tattoos – why’s it so hard to find him? You had a student dumped in a bin but you’ve not been able to pin that on anyone either. Now there are two dead girls and the best you’ve got is something to do with taxis. What exactly is it you’re doing down here?’

Jessica had two words for him but narrowly managed to bite her tongue. ‘You’re forgetting everything else that we have sorted out.’

Cole removed his hand from his hip, so he looked a little less like a teapot and more like the dumpy man he had become. He ran a hand through what was left of his hair. ‘There’s no use living off past glories – you know there’s a big report into the effectiveness of this force coming at the start of next year. What we don’t want is a host of unsolved cases.’

‘Isn’t trying to rush things what got us into this mess in the first place? Well, that and fabricating evidence but we’re definitely
not
trying to fit up Holden Wyatt, are we?’

Jessica glared defiantly at the DCI but knew she’d gone too far.

Cole’s lips were pursed, eyes fixed: ‘What exactly are you trying to say?’

‘Nothing,
Sir
.’

‘Good – then do your job and let’s start moving some of these unsolved cases into the non-incompetence pile, shall we?’

‘Yes,
Sir
.’

Cole gave Jessica one final hand-on-hip stare and then he was gone, back into the corridor to act like a dick in front of someone else.

Jessica sat for a few moments, running through everything he’d said to her. What. An. Arse. She picked up some of the items that had clattered to the floor and then headed through the station to the main floor, where she found Rowlands frantically bashing away at his keyboard.

‘Is this another letter to the problem pages?’ Jessica teased, nudging him in the shoulder as she perched on the desk in front of him. ‘“Dear agony aunt, my right wrist is so completely swollen compared to the left one that my entire body leans to one side. If that’s not enough, then I smell a bit like a bin . . .”’

‘Haven’t you got better things to do than hang around here trying to be funny?’

‘I never
try
to be funny – I
am
funny. Anyway, let’s go for a walk. You can practise trying not to lean to one side.’

Jessica led him through the corridors until they were back at her office. Once inside, she locked the door. Dave spun round at the sound of the click.

‘All right, calm down,’ Jessica said, pressing herself against the door. ‘Go to my desk and open the top drawer. Inside the top envelope is another one.’

Rowlands shrugged but crossed the room and opened the drawer, pulling out a blank white envelope and reaching in to take out the one inside with her name written on it. He held it up. ‘Where did this come from?’

‘Someone put it through my door at home yesterday. Look inside.’

Rowlands read the card. ‘Who’s the wrong man?’

‘I presume Holden Wyatt – I don’t know who else it could be talking about.’

‘Who sent it?’

‘No idea.’

After reading the card again, then turning it over to check the back and returning it to the envelope, Rowlands noticed the sketch in the top-right corner. ‘What’s this?’

‘I was hoping you might be able to look into it. I would . . . but things are awkward around here and I’ve got people on my shoulder the whole time.’

Jessica was about to add something else when there was a large bang from the other side of the door, followed by a female-sounding ‘Ow’. Jessica unlocked the door and opened it to find Izzy rubbing the side of her face and blinking rapidly.

‘Your door was locked,’ she said, pointing out the obvious.

‘I know; people usually knock.’

Izzy continued rubbing her head and looked a little woozy, glancing conspiratorially between Jessica and Dave. ‘Sorry – I was in a rush and thought you might want to come along. We’ve had a sighting of Bones.’

20

Jessica watched from the passenger seat of an unmarked car as either end of the road was blocked off by officers as conspicuous as someone wearing a fluorescent top at a funeral.

‘I don’t remember your operations being this chaotic,’ Izzy said from the driver’s seat, anxiously. Jessica should really have been doing the heavy lifting but it had been Izzy’s case throughout and the sergeant was more than capable. Jessica was only there to take the flak if things went badly. She was in enough people’s bad books as it was, so one more balls-up wouldn’t make much difference.

Jessica nodded towards an officer at the far end of the street arguing with a driver who was trying to make their way along the road. ‘Where did we hire this new lot from? He looks like a duck that’s been sniffing glue.’

The officer started whirring his hand in the air, the universal sign for ‘turn the car around, love’, and then reached for his pocket when the driver began arguing.

‘He’s not going for the pepper spray, is he?’ Izzy said, one hand on the radio.

Luckily it was just his identification which, in fairness to the driver, Jessica would’ve been asking for if she’d been asked to turn around by someone who looked like they belonged on a farm.

With the obvious escape routes blocked, the tactical entry team scurried into place around the rundown semi. The Eccles estate wasn’t the prettiest at the best of times. If tourists had been taken around the area and told it had been deliberately left as it was to provide a snapshot of war-torn, bombed-out 1940s Britain, then their cameras would’ve had plenty to snap at. There were the once red-brick houses now stained with black soot, even though Jessica doubted there was a coal fire anywhere nearby. There were the inexplicable mud piles in front gardens, the pot holes in the road, the random heaps of scrap dotted around, the upturned sofa on the side of the road with yellow foam spilling out, the smashed-up bus stop with the words ‘arse on toast’ graffitied onto it. What was it with spray-painters and the word ‘arse’? Not to mention the fact that Jessica had no idea what the toast reference was about. Perhaps it was some gang thing? Bloody hell, she was getting old.

Even among all that, the house Bones was apparently hiding in stood out as being a dump. The windows and doors across the lower floor were boarded up, with yet more graffiti shining out like a beacon. If your name was Sharon and you lived on this estate, then you certainly seemed to have a varied sexual appetite. Upstairs, the windows were just about in place – well, the frames were. Some of the single-glazed panes had been smashed, with all manner of stone-shaped holes adorning those that were left. Even for an estate agent, this would be a hard sell: ‘The downstairs can be a little dark, while you get the odd draught upstairs. Overall, though, it’s still a bargain . . .’

Luckily for them, a little old lady across the road had spotted someone with a tattooed head sneaking inside earlier. Most people on this estate wouldn’t bat an eyelid but thank goodness for little old ladies.

Behind the tactical entry squad, armed officers primed themselves, looking like a pack of beetles with their rounded black armour and shiny helmets. Across their fronts, their MP5s hung.

‘Christ, I hope they don’t shoot anyone,’ Izzy said.

‘They’re more likely to shoot each other than they are Bones,’ Dave chipped in from the back seat, unhelpfully.

‘If you count the officers with guns,’ Jessica added, ‘we’ve probably doubled the number of automatic weapons on this estate, at least temporarily.’

‘Will the pair of you shut up,’ Izzy snipped, not taking her eyes from the house.

Jessica and Dave exchanged chastened looks like a pair of naughty schoolchildren, but they did at least pipe down. Jessica peered around the rest of the area. There were a few faces in windows and the inevitable camera phones taking pictures to try to sell to the news channels. From where they were parked, they had a clear view of the front and side doors of the rundown house, plus a hint of the overgrown rear garden. Jessica wondered what the people who lived next door must think. That house was admittedly in a little better state, with a frail-looking once-red wooden front door and cracked window frames that hadn’t seen paint in the last decade or three, but the windows were at least intact.

Confirmation came over the radio that everyone was in place and Jessica turned to Izzy for the passing of the baton. ‘Go on then,’ she said.

Izzy looked at both officers, then the house, and then she gave the order: ‘Go, go, go.’ It might be a cliché – but it was a bloody cool one.

Thunk, crash, fwoosh: the boarded-up door splintered in an instant as the tactical entry team jumped to one side and allowed the tactical firearm squad to thunder into the building. Jessica wondered if her department could be rechristened the ‘tactical figuring-stuff-out crew’. Adding ‘tactical’ to the front of anything instantly made them sound better.

‘Please don’t shoot anyone,’ Izzy whispered to herself.

All they could hear over the radio was the doof-doof-doof as boots clattered around the property. Jessica was about to suggest they have a word with the little old lady when her eye was caught by the house next door. The front door was now open a fraction, with the unmistakeable tattooed head of Bones peering out. He took one look at the back of the tactical entry team, now standing around awkwardly, and then tiptoed out like a cartoon baddie who had just been discovered. Before Jessica could say anything, he was running away from their roadblocks towards a patch of grass.

‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite,’ Jessica shouted, opening the car door. It might not have been the most informative of instructions but Dave took the hint, half-leaping, half-falling out of the back seat and following her as she set off after their suspect.

The first few metres were definitely the worst. Jessica felt something tighten in her stomach and then the cold air hit her lungs. Was it always this hard to breathe? Her only consolation was that Bones was clearly suffering too. He had at least a hundred metres on her but glanced over his shoulder and stumbled as his hand shot up to his chest. He was wearing jeans, heavy work boots and a thick coat, which must be even worse for running in than her suit was. As he reached the green, Jessica could see Bones was heading for a dingy-looking alley. When they’d rolled in to block the ways off the estate, the overgrown hedges shielding the cut-through had looked like someone’s garden gone out of control; now there was clearly a pathway. Jessica peered over her shoulder and held an arm out, pointing Dave towards the nearby cul de sac and hoping he got the message that there was hopefully a cut-through there too. Meanwhile, she put her head down and ran.

She was definitely faster than Bones but had no idea what type of shape he was in – short bursts of speed she could just about handle; endurance, she didn’t really want to find out . . .

The grass was muddy and Jessica slid for the final metre before regaining her footing on the cracked concrete of the alley. She ducked under the overgrown hedge, batted away a dangling branch and then kicked on again, trying to ignore the building pain in her thighs, stomach, calves and back.

The alley curved right around someone’s back garden and then left again. If Bones had gone over the top of one of the fences, he’d be out of sight already but Jessica stuck to the path until she reached another small grassy area. Large heavy footprints were embedded in the muddy sludge and Jessica followed the long stride pattern into another ginnel.

Run, run, run.

As she rounded another corner, she finally saw a glimpse of Bones. He was leaning against a gatepost, puffing even more heavily than she was. At the sound of her footsteps, he glanced over his shoulder and then set off again, barrelling straight ahead without looking and sprawling over the bottom half of an overturned wheelie bin.

Dave Rowlands emerged from around the corner, looking more surprised than Jessica was. ‘It was all I could find,’ he said apologetically, kneeling and telling Bones to hold his wrists behind his back.

Jessica felt light-headed and leant against the closest fence, hands on her knees, wanting someone to take her home and put her to bed.

‘What is it with you and bloody bins?’ she gasped.

‘He’s twice the size of me! It was outside someone’s back gate and I thought it could be some sort of obstacle if he came this way.’

The only way Bones was twice the size of Rowlands was if you took his padded coat into account but Jessica had neither the breath, strength nor willpower to point it out.

Slowly, she made her way over to the crossroads where Bones was sitting on the ground, hands cuffed behind his back, blood streaming from his bottom lip. ‘Morning, Dougie,’ Jessica said, trying her best not to sound as if she felt close to a premature death.

When he realised she was the same officer he had run from previously, his eyes widened in recognition. ‘You do deals, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘I’ve seen it on telly – they have all these lawyer blokes who get people off if they know something about something else.’

Jessica rolled her eyes. ‘You’re thinking of the Yanks. We don’t do deals here.’

‘I know something about your case.’

‘Cassie Edmonds?’

Bones licked away the blood from his lip and shook his head. ‘That Potter kid.’

21

Bones spent the best part of an hour in the basement room of Longsight Police Station with the duty solicitor, presumably being told that British police forces do not do deals. Jessica sat in her office with Izzy, trying to pretend that she wasn’t aching in places she’d forgotten existed, feeling particularly smug that this was one investigation that could be crossed off DCI Cole’s list of things that hadn’t yet been solved. The series of pickpocketings was always going to remain unsolved – from the moment the teenager had entered the cafe, Jessica had known she was never going to turn Bex in.

After an interminable wait, there was a delicate knock on Jessica’s office door and the rather defeated figure of the duty solicitor stood in the doorway. He was a familiar face around the station, often dealing with the Friday- and Saturday-night drunks who refused to believe they’d done anything wrong by puking in the street and starting a fight with a stranger. ‘It’s just a bit of bants, innit,’ was the motto of half the morons they booted out the morning after with a slap on the wrist and directions to the nearest bus stop.