Strangers (44 page)

Relieved, Lucy went into the main office. But she’d no sooner reached her desk than one of the civilian researchers from downstairs entered the room behind her.

‘Sorry … can you help me?’

Lucy glanced back awkwardly. ‘Erm, yeah … if I can.’

The girl was young and rather gawky, wearing ill-fitting jeans and an open-collared shirt, with unruly orange locks and large-framed glasses. Her staff-badge indicated that her name was Tara Rutherford. ‘I’m looking for a DC Barton. I was told he works on this floor, but all these offices are empty.’

‘Des is off sick,’ Lucy said. ‘He won’t be in for a few weeks, at least.’

‘Ah … right. He requested this lot, you see.’ Tara presented a thin sheaf of printouts, which she clearly hoped Lucy was going to take off her hands.

Lucy didn’t, but glanced down. It looked like a bunch of intelligence sheets.

‘Apparently, DC Barton requested some info concerning the owners of several cars he’d developed suspicions about?’ Tara said.

‘Oh yeah, that,’ Lucy replied. ‘Red cars going through the Rake and Harrow roundabout near Abram, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right, but there were over three hundred, which he’d kind of expected … so he asked me to refine it further.’ Tara now all but shoved the sheaf into Lucy’s grasp. ‘These are the ones whose owners have got criminals records. There are ten in total.’

Lucy’s interest was only half-pricked. In the light of recent calamitous events, this minor lead she’d generated over three weeks ago seemed completely unimportant. It had been the longest of long shots anyway, according to Des, and he was probably right. However, if all she had to do was check out ten names, it could hardly hurt.

She flipped quickly through them, immediately seeing that the vast majority were unrelated to the case: drugs offences; TWOC; assault; drunk and disorderly.

And then prostitution.

This one was right at the end, and it stopped Lucy in her tracks. Not just because of the nature of the offence, but because it was the only female rap sheet in the pile.

Her interest somewhat more kindled, she read the accompanying notes.

The name of the offender was Darla Maycroft. She’d been born in Kersal, Salford, on June 23
^rd
1980, which made her thirty-five years old. She had five convictions for soliciting in public places – all between 2006 and 2012. She’d been in her late twenties and early thirties at the time, so it wasn’t just a bad patch she’d gone through when she was a kid. However, no offences of any sort had been recorded since then. The last known address for Darla Maycroft was 16 Moorhill Close, Lostock, Bolton – a fairly well-heeled district, if Lucy remembered correctly, and only five or six miles from the border with Crowley.

A grainy black and white image depicted a young, blonde-haired woman, though it wasn’t great quality. But again …
blonde
hair.

Lucy lowered the notes in order to think.

‘Will you make sure DC Barton gets this stuff when he’s next in?’ Tara Rutherford asked, clearly impatient to be dismissed.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’

Tara nodded and left the room. Lucy barely noticed as she flipped more pages concerning Darla Maycroft, her attention now caught by a biro notation in the margin, which indicated that she was the owner of a red Volkswagen CC. Lucy was familiar with the CC; it was famous among motoring buffs as the family sedan that resembled a sports car. Which would explain both the chippie man’s mistake and the reason why it hadn’t been flagged up during the first search.

Again Lucy pondered.

Was it possible?

Was this Darla Maycroft, a known former prostitute, the same woman who’d made a quick recce of the fatal woodland only a few days before Ronald Ford died there?

She knew that she ought to go straight down to the MIR and hand this lot over. If not to Priya Nehwal herself, to DI Dawson, who was Action Manager for the taskforce.

But again, on the surface it still seemed unlikely. By the chippie man’s own admission, hundreds of people came and went in that place. It proved nothing.

Okay, it was probably worth looking into … but it could hardly be a priority.

And yet Lucy was even more agonised by that, wondering if all she was doing now was trying to find reasons for
not
pushing this intel up the chain, if deep down what she really wanted to do was to check the lead herself.

There was no doubt that after the trauma of Tammy’s death, or maybe
because
of it – the kid had died as a direct result of Lucy’s enquiries – she still felt attached to this case. And with that awful new truth currently wrecking her life at home, she had nothing else anyway. That alone had to be sufficient motivation for cranking out some kind of result here.

Her own mother and father, for Christ’s sake!

If those lowlife bastards thought they were going to take her down with them, they had another thing coming. Lucy Clayburn wasn’t just a cop, she was one of the best cops going. And she’d damn well prove it. Whatever it took.
Sodding bastards …

Priya Nehwal would understand. Not that she wouldn’t still go ballistic of course. She might now have decided that Lucy was her kind of copper, but she’d still be absolutely furious. And she’d have every reason to be.

Or then again she might not.

On reflection, it couldn’t really hurt if Lucy made a few discreet enquiries before sharing this lead. If she mooched around first and it led to nothing, fine … it wouldn’t matter; no one would be any the wiser. While on the other hand, if it
did
lead to something – like Jill the Ripper! – Nehwal would hardly be in a position to complain.

But really, seriously … Darla Maycroft, who drove a pricey motor and now lived in the middle-class suburb of Lostock, was the Lay-by Murderer?

Lucy had to be kidding herself. These psychopathic freaks usually demonstrated a pattern of antisocial behaviour and violent offending long before they switched to killing. Plus they tended to come from the most abusive backgrounds. All that said, just because there was no such detail on Darla’s sheet, that didn’t mean she hadn’t had issues.

The printout was frustratingly sketchy, but Lucy scanned it again for anything that might help persuade her she wasn’t barking up the wrong tree. Her eyes finally fell on a physical description of the subject. This had been taken at the time of her last arrest, which was in 2012, when she’d been thirty-two years old.

One passage in particular caught Lucy’s attention:

Blue eyes. Natural blonde hair. Sturdy, athletic build.

And more important still:

5ft11ins tall.

Chapter 33

Grantwood Gardens in Lostock wasn’t the epitome of middle-class Greater Manchester, but it was a good approximation for that. A grid-work of orderly, tree-lined suburban streets, it boasted detached and semi-detached houses, front lawns with pruned shrubbery, and drives with more than one car on them. It was neither as grand nor as showy as the swanky corner of Didsbury where Frank McCracken lived, but it was prosperous all the same in a quieter, more down-to-earth fashion.

No cop would ever argue that prosperity was a reason for crime not to happen, though most would agree that in suburbia it tended to lie behind closed doors. Not that such knowledge made this place seem any the less sinister to Lucy as she rode slowly along its affluent avenues. It was now 4.30 in the afternoon, so though occasional clusters of school kids were still sauntering home, their mothers and fathers mostly hadn’t returned yet. House lights were coming on as dusk deepened, but only here and there. At least the rain had eased off, but it was a typical late afternoon in November: very cold, very damp, very misty.

As a rule, Lucy enjoyed plain-clothes work. That was one of the things that attracted her to CID. She understood the power and authority of the police uniform, and she appreciated the reassurance it gave to those in need. But if what you really wanted to do as a copper was snag criminals, you couldn’t beat a pair of jeans and a scruffy old anorak. That enabled you to get right into their faces before they even knew you were there. But on this occasion, especially as she banked left onto Moorhill Close, she felt more than a little bit self-conscious. The combination of scruffs
and
motorbike would undoubtedly make her stand out here.

Moorhill Close was a cul-de-sac, so when she coasted to a halt a couple of houses down from number 16, she wasn’t far from the turning-zone at its far end. She switched her engine off, lowered her kickstand and sat astride the Ducati for several seconds, flexing her left hand. The plaster cast only encased her up to the knuckles, allowing sufficient dexterity in her fingers to manipulate the bike’s clutch, but it hadn’t been easy – there’d been a lot of stiffness there, and while the whole of her lower arm, the hand included, had previously felt numb, the sheer effort of handling the powerful machine, even at relatively low speeds, had created a throbbing ache just below her elbow.

But there was no point dwelling on this when she had other stuff to attend to.

She removed her helmet and regarded the house in question.

It was pretty well identical to all those around it, with a front wall that came to about waist-height, a small front lawn, and slatted fencing separating it from the neighbours on either side. The house wasn’t exactly a new-build, but it wasn’t far off, constructed in the attractive cottage style from off-brown brick, with diamond-paned front windows and a bright yellow front door with a black, wrought iron knocker and hanging plants on either side. Again, Lucy found it difficult to imagine that this could really be the place where a degenerate killer lived. So often those creatures had been dragged up in vileness and hate, and knew no emotion other than the joy they derived from inflicting on others the same misery they themselves had suffered. It was the ever-downward spiral of violence, dirt and degradation. But of course there had been other culprits too, who, as part of their darker purpose, had managed to overcome this, at least superficially; who had affected a front of wholesome normality in order to hunt more effectively.

So thinking, Lucy dismounted and walked towards the foot of the drive to no. 16, which currently was empty. No car was present on it, nor under the lean-to carport on the left side of the house. However, a red Volkswagen CC was parked on the road at the front.

This still didn’t mean anything. She already knew that the owner of this property possessed a Volkswagen CC; it was a hardly a smoking gun. She threw another glance up the drive. Despite the presence of the vehicle, all the lights inside the house were switched off, its windows like blank eyes in the evening gloom.

She looked back towards the cul-de-sac entrance. No one was in sight, either out on the street or standing at an open door. The issue now was whether anything she did from this point on could be construed an illegal search. She certainly couldn’t justify a warrant as yet. It was all too circumstantial. Even to sniff around the exterior of the house might be deemed questionable, and anything she uncovered inadmissible.

But the CC was on the road – and that was a public place.

As casually as she could, she circled the car. Nothing noteworthy caught her eye inside it: a dog-eared map-book jammed beside the driver’s seat; a tin of cola in the circular drinks-holder attached to the dash. But then on the back seat – a black beret. A black knitted beret, very similar to the type the chief suspect had been wearing when filmed climbing into Ronnie Ford’s car near the petrol station in Atherton.

It was several seconds before Lucy realised that the heavy breathing she could hear was her own. She leaned as close as she could to the window, dug out her mobile, activated its light and shone it through the glass.

There was no question about what she was seeing.

She backed away, glancing along the cul-de-sac again and then at the house. Its windows remained dark – which was good. It meant she could poke around a little more. She knew that she shouldn’t, of course. Possibly she could justify a warrant now, but the way the brass would respond if they learned that she was still on the case, she needed to be one hundred per cent sure of her facts.

She walked up the drive, the silent façade of the property looming towards her. From what she could see, there was plenty of access to its rear. On the right side, a narrow passage, only barred by a wooden gate with a latch, led round to the back, while the carport on the left was wide open at the front, empty inside, and then opened again at the other end via a normal-sized doorway. She opted for the carport.

Once under its slanted roof, she halted, activating her phone light again to scan the darkened interior, though there wasn’t much to see: a floor of oily concrete, a few scruffy boxes in the corners. The left-hand wall was lined with shelves bearing cobweb-covered tools, bottles of weed-killer and such, while overhead the ceiling was underhung by a few rotted rafters laden with planks, fence-posts and the like. It was all very mundane.

She prowled on, passing through the open door at the back and into the rear garden, where, as before, nothing untoward met her eyes.

It was encircled by clipped hedges, and consisted of a patio, a lawn, a rockery and a flowerbed, all of it littered with autumn leaves. A few non-seasonal bits and pieces were also scattered around: a hosepipe on a reel, a couple of sun-loungers. Four colour-coded wheelie bins were lined neatly under the kitchen window.

Lucy ventured past these to the larger French window. When she shone her light through it, it revealed a tidy little lounge containing armchairs, a settee, a flat-screen TV and ornaments on the mantel. Absolutely nothing in any way mysterious. When she glanced up, she saw two bedroom windows, a satellite dish and a burglar alarm box.

Standard suburbia. It could not have been less suspicious.

But the trail of clues that had led her here was not fanciful, with the beret in the car the strongest evidence yet – though even that was to change half a second later, when Lucy spotted something else.