[Alicia Friend 01.0] His First His Second Page 26

  Roberta, laughing with the girls, all fourteen, fifteen years of age. So different from Alicia’s time at school. There were no mobiles, and your tie had to be knotted in a specific way. They skipped ropes and played netball during break times back then. Now they texted boys and each other, discussed sexual techniques and contraception.

  Roberta once came home and opened a bottle of wine, he shoulders unusually low and refusing to chat. Eventually, after Alicia challenged her to an impromptu game of Twister and drinking half the wine, she talked. A thirteen-year-old girl had been found crying in the locker room. Roberta comforted her, said all the usual things, asked her what’s wrong, got her to open up. Her boyfriend had dumped her by text. The reason? Because she gave rubbish blow jobs. The girl begged Roberta to teach her how to do them right, so she could win him back.

  Nothing in the world worked as it should.

  Thirteen-year-olds were expected to give good blow jobs, pop stars’ lives were worth more than everyday folk, and innocent men got accused of murder.

  Would Alicia’s daughter have fretted about blow job technique? Would her son have been the sort to pressure a girl into improving?

  Her phone beeped to announce a message. This time she answered it, listened. It was Murphy. She needed to get back to Sheerton and fast. Fine. It might be good news for once.

  She put the car in gear, and drove carefully through the thickening snow.

  “My name is Hillary Carmichael. About an hour ago, I was assaulted, and mine and my friend’s lives were threatened.” The woman was in her twenties, but dressed elegantly, like a middle-aged rich woman.

  “Hillary,” Alicia said. “Why ask for me specifically?”

  “That man you sent to ask me about Tanya—the sergeant—he gave me your card.”

  “And you can’t speak to anyone else?”

  “No.”

  In Sheerton’s reception, a cleaner was already mopping up melted snow, bright yellow “Wet Floor” signs stationed on every corner. Alicia invited Hillary to follow her to a family room, with soft chairs and cuddly toys. She thought about taking her pigtails out, but she’d promised to leave them all day, to be herself again. All day. It was what she needed to stay ahead of everyone. To keep sharp.

  Hillary looked at the sofa as if it were coated with snot. Alicia almost laughed at the image. Almost.

  Murphy joined her as requested, Alicia explaining to Hillary that she wanted “her boss” in on this. In truth, Alicia didn’t trust herself. She wouldn’t be much use until this prank or mistake, or whatever it was, got cleared up.

  “My friend, a male friend, came round to update me on a few things,” Hillary said. “My husband was at work, but he knows of the friendship.”

  I’ll bet, Alicia thought.

  “The bell rang, and my friend answered the door for me. Then this man came in, assaulted John, and threatened me.”

  “Did you know this man?” Murphy said.

  “No. And neither did John. But he knew who John was. He wanted information.”

  “What sort of information?”

  Hillary adjusted herself on the couch, uncrossed and re-crossed her legs. “Should you be offering me tea or something? I mean isn’t that procedure? I pay a lot of taxes. I don’t think a cup of tea would be too much to ask.”

  Alicia stared, her mouth open slightly. Murphy followed her lead.

  “Fine,” Hillary said, standing stiffly. “You’re obviously not interested. I’ll be in the reception waiting for whoever runs this place.”

  Good, Alicia thought. Time to get back to work.

  “The man was quite mad,” she said as a parting shot. “Seemed to think John knew where his missing daughter was hiding. Crazy fellow. Him and his friends.”

  Alicia sprang to her feet, Murphy standing in her way. They called Hillary Carmichael back.

  “What friends?” Murphy said.

  “Milk, two sugars please.”

  Murphy reluctantly used the phone to call in the order, and Hillary refused to speak until they met her hospitality expectations.

  This woman might have seen Richard.

  Alicia hoped Hillary was wrong. She hoped what she heard so far was about someone else, some guy who thought his runaway girl was hiding with “John.” Was that Wellington? Had to be. But Hillary was tight-lipped.

  Alicia was bored of this. A first year psychology student would have pegged Hillary as an attention-seeker and power-monger. She needed control. Delaying the conversation was a common way of achieving this.

  PC Ndlove delivered the drink in a polystyrene cup, which Hillary handled with revulsion. She drank from it. Her face said it wasn’t particularly good.

  “Mrs. Carmichael?” Murphy said. “Perhaps we can continue?”

  She placed the cup on the coffee table. “John refused to talk. Until he took me hostage, and then he couldn’t stop talking.”

  “This is John Wellington, yes?” Alicia said.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Well, John said he’d talk, but only out of earshot of me. So the man ties me up in the kitchen and goes back to see John.”

  “Did you hear what they talked about?”

  “No. But it must have been satisfactory because the man left soon after.”

  Alicia dreaded asking the next question. But it needed asking. “Can you describe him for us?”

  “Yes.” And the man she relayed was Richard to a tee.

  Alicia iced over. Doyle in the tattoo parlour was not a drugs slaying or a little-Windsor covering his tracks, the bodies in the well were the work of the man she slept with last night, and she was certain that Richard Hague was in possession of information they needed.

  “Ms. Friend, are you alright?” Hillary said. “You’re ever so grey.”

  “Alicia?” Murphy said.

  “I’m fine,” Alicia said. “Continue. You said this man had friends.”

  “They came to meet him. John got free straight away—he wasn’t any good at knots, so you can cross ‘sailor’ and ‘boy scout’ off your list of suspects. John freed me and we both went to the window. They were all arm in arm, like best friends. The man who assaulted me got in the back with a Chinaman, and the other drove away.”

  Chinaman? Seriously?

  “Can you describe the van?” Murphy asked.

  “Hmm. A big one. Blue, I think. Or maybe grey.”

  Alicia stopped herself from rolling her eyes.

  Then Hillary said, “Would the registration number help?”

  Alicia held her sweary tongue as Hillary Carmichael fished about in her bag. They needed this, but Alicia needed none of it. The van, when they found it, may be burned to a crisp, with a dead kidnapper inside, Katie mysteriously released unharmed. The plates would be fake, but a panda car might spot it.

  “Here it is.” Hillary presented a folded Post-It note.

  Alicia reached for it, but Hillary snatched it back.

  “What do you say?” she said.

  “Please, just give me the number,” Alicia said.

  “Not until you ask nicely. Manners never cost anything.”

  Alicia considered her next action. It went into the little computer, ticked around, spat out the answer: No, don’t do it, but she did it anyway. She took the edge of the coffee table and with one furious sweep, heaved it over, sending tea and magazines flying, clattering. Murphy leapt back, out of his seat, and Hillary cowered.

  Alicia snatched the Post-it. “Mrs. Carmichael, thank you, you’ve been very helpful. Now get out.”

  Then Alicia raced from the room to find someone to do her a PNC check.

  “Ronnie ‘Red’ McCall,” Alicia announced to the dozen-or-so coppers in the operations room. “He knows the location of one Richard Hague. Hague, we believe, has important information pertaining to this case. Bulletins are out to everyone on the street. McCall is a known lowlife. A dumb lowlife, but still a lowlife. Seems he didn’t see fit to change
the number on his van before barging into our investigation. So if he’s around, we should pick him up.”

  A private investigator and security expert, apparently. Had Richard hired a PI to supplement the police investigation?

  Alicia said, “Sergeant Cleaver is picking up John Wellington again. I realise some of you may have known him as a police officer, but we have reason to believe he has been obstructing justice for some time, but that’s not our concern here. This is bigger than old loyalties, folks. He knows where Siobhan and Katie are.”

  The room buzzed, voices grew, some reluctant but all positive, all on board, every single comment regarding the case. Often, it was about drinks, clocking off. But not this time. The people recruited thanks to a famous girl losing her freedom all hit the streets.

  And moments later, Alicia found herself alone in the clean, white room. She was blocking and doing it well. She should be happy about the snow outside, falling much earlier than usual.

  “You slept with him, didn’t you,” Murphy said from the door.

  Until now, she’d tried to imagine another Richard, someone they’d mixed up with the one she’d spent last night with. Murphy’s direct question shattered the wall she’d erected. She leaned forward on a desk, arms extended, head bowed. She nodded.

  Murphy sat beside her. “We make mistakes, Alicia. We have to live with them. If it’s true what he did, then you know this isn’t everything.”

  “It’s not true,” she said.

  A long silence. Alicia sat up on the desk next to Murphy, laid her head on his shoulder, her mouth glum as glum could be. She watched the snow settling thick on the ground. Murphy sat up straight, made his arm comfier, watching the Christmas card scene evolve outside.

  “She was assaulted while I was working,” he said. “Working hard on a graffiti artist of all things. Some obscene stuff had gone up near schools in the area and there was pressure from an MP whose kid had repeated some swearing. One night I decided I knew where the guy was going to strike next, one of my famous hunches, so Susan was home alone.”

  Alicia tried to make out shapes in the snow, like you can with clouds, but nothing stayed the same long enough for her to sculpt a definite form.

  “A burglar broke in. She disturbed him. He beat her up. Not badly, but bad enough. After, she was too scared to go home. I promised to sell the house, but she wanted me to quit the force too. I said I’d think about it.

  “Some of the guys, uniforms I worked with a few times, they found this smack-head with a bunch of my stuff, flogging it around bars—jewellery, a watch I got off my mum, that sort of thing. But they didn’t bring him in. I went to them.

  “While I was beating the shit out of him, he said how sorry he was. He didn’t mean to hurt her. I told him that punching women in the face always hurts, and I was going to do a lot worse to him. He said that if Susan had done as he asked she wouldn’t have been hurt, that it had been so long since he was with anyone. He got out of jail a week earlier. He was so sorry.

  “I didn’t want to believe it, that he’d done more than knock her around, but he said all this unprompted. He needed hospital treatment for weeks after, but it got him off the smack. I heard he eventually got a job with the council. But when I asked Susan if all he did was hit her, I saw something in her eyes. A complete violation. Like I was responsible. Like it was me who did that to her. That seeing me brought it all back. She cried a while, then the next day she headed to her mother’s. Used to write to me but that’s all stopped. Last I heard she was living in Worthing.”

  Alicia snuggled closer, her face nuzzling his soft muscle.

  “So now we both know a dirty little secret about one another,” he said. “I suppose we have to keep it that way.”

  He put an arm fully around her and she hugged him about his doughy middle. It felt good. It felt safe.

  It was a lie.

  Cleaver had been angry at Wellington’s release, after all the hard work he put in. And he didn’t even get a date with Murphy’s niece. But this would make up for it. Not that it was over. He still had to thank Darla, and since she didn’t appreciate flowers, maybe she’d prefer wine. Or some sort of gift experience.

  Murphy had pulled him to one side when no one else was looking and told him that Darla was hurt pretty badly before. Her kid’s father, her fiancé at the time, ran off with a stripper he met on his stag night. So Cleaver better tread carefully.

  Not a threat; advice.

  He was a little overweight these days, but that hadn’t seemed to be an issue for the woman. She hadn’t even glanced that way at all. Perhaps she didn’t need to.

  “Nice house,” PC Ndlove said as they pulled up outside.

  A decent girl, Ndlove was. Cleaver and Ball had teased her a little, but then she was a junior member of the team. Not a probie anymore, but still fair game. And she reacted in the way you should act when your superiors are ribbing on you: you do a damn good job and make sure folk know it.

  Cleaver got out, closed the door. The snow blew right at him. It wasn’t quite a blizzard, but visibility was getting worse, and he’d left his coat back at the station.

  Ndlove followed him up the short driveway to a neat, detached house with no garden at the front but a path leading around the back.

  At the door, Cleaver said, “You want to put the cuffs on him?”

  “Only if he knocks you out first,” Ndlove replied.

  Cleaver smiled. Rang the bell. No answer. He rang the bell again. For longer this time.

  “Maybe you didn’t press it hard enough,” Ndlove said.

  “Maybe you’d like to go across my knee.”

  “I’ll settle for going around back.”

  She left Cleaver alone at the front and opened the back gate. Cleaver pressed the bell again, peeked through the letterbox. He called, “Hello? Mr. Wellington? Are you home?”

  Ndlove made her way back to Cleaver. She was not grey, exactly, but she was a funny colour, whatever colour black people go when they lose blood from their face. She shook her head slightly, and Cleaver closed his eyes, a sense of anti-climax surging through him. He knew straight away what this meant. He had to see it, though. She pointed into the garden, a good ten metres of snow-covered grass, to the far end next to the fence.

  Swaying slowly and gathering snow on his shoulders and on his up-curled feet, John Wellington’s body hung from a tree via a noose around his neck. A chair lay kicked aside. Flakes landed on his blueing face, not melting.

  “You cowardly bastard,” Cleaver said. He turned his back on the corpse, opened his phone, and prepared to deliver the bad news.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Alicia relayed Cleaver’s report to Murphy and sent a text out to those task force members whose numbers she’d stored: Welly dead. Hague + mccall now priority.

  Lazy but effective.

  “What’s the time?” Alicia asked.

  “Three. Why?”

  “Lunchtime. I need brain fuel.”

  On the way to the canteen, Alicia’s phone went again. It was Ball.

  “You still want me out here? It’s snowing so bad I can’t see a thing.”

  In all the rush she’d forgotten about him.

  “I need someone there,” Alicia said. “Keep an eye on the driveway. If anyone leaves, let me know.”

  She hung up, grabbed a sandwich and a fresh orange. Murphy took a muffin. Then the control room called her. “Two officers have detained a suspect they believe you may be interested in.”

  “Why do they think that?” Alicia asked.

  “Their equipment flashed a number plate and it showed no registered insurance. It’s a car, not a van though. In the name of Tina McCall, but it’s a guy driving.”

  McCall? Some luck at last? “And they’ve detained him?”

  “No choice. They recognised the name McCall from the bulletin you issued, and followed at a distance. He went into a B&Q in Pudsey. Manager’s annoyed at the police presence, but they’re holding him
until further instructions.”

  “Think the manager will mind hanging onto him a while?”

  “Can’t comment, but the guy is the one you’re looking for. Ronald McCall, also known as ‘Red’.”

  Alicia gripped the phone harder. She said thank you before hanging up.

  Looks like the extra bodies paid off.

  She told Murphy and they ate their lunches on the move.

  The journey out to the Pudsey area of Leeds took an hour. Rather than waiting for the officers to bring him in, Alicia figured it would be better to interrogate him on-site; Pudsey might be where Richard was now hiding.

  The roads were unprepared, traffic gearing up for the school run. The time she shaved off the Glenpark to Sheerton race was doubled, then tripled. The case was moving faster than them.

  The Owlcotes Centre is an open mall with an Asda, Marks and Spencer, and a few smaller retailers. There is also a B & Q from which, it since emerged, Red McCall was banned for life. Here, the manager, Pete, greeted them and led them through the warehouse section. Pete wasn’t aware of the ban, but he was new, and one of the longer-serving staff had raised the point.

  Red McCall stood, remonstrating with two uniformed officers. “I got banned cos of my wife. She doesn’t work here anymore. You can’t arrest me.”

  “Sir, if you were under arrest I would have cuffed you,” the taller of the two said.

  “Red!” Alicia said. “How the hell are you?” She was forcing this self, her true self, out into the open, walking with a determined bounce that made her pigtails bob, pushing her cuteness factor to the max. If this associate, this friend, of Richard’s knew where he was, and it was likely, then she’d need her wits about her. She needed to be Alicia, the best Alicia. Happy Alicia. “You are looking good today.”

  “Hey, thanks, darling,” he said. “You in charge around here?”

  She showed him her ID.

  “Nuther copper, huh. You arresting me or letting me go?”

  “Well, I’ve had a good think about that, Red, and I’m going for option…” She produced a drum roll with her tongue, hand actions going in time. “Option number … one!”